Does Love Lead to Happiness, or Does Happiness Lead to Love?
What is more important, to love or to feel loved? What can we learn from a mother’s love for our own relationships? Does love hold the secret to happiness?
Love is the pleasure we experience from connecting with something we deeply desire. As young children, we feel love for our mother because from her we receive security, vitality, life, and tranquility. Throughout childhood, all kinds of desires, needs, fears, and anxieties arise within us. We need our mother and father and naturally feel dependence and love toward them. Later, this love is replaced by another kind of love. Suddenly, I begin to feel that a certain girl attracts me more than others. I long to see her, to be near her all the time. I fall in love.
Many things in life give us satisfaction, but love is something truly unique. Without love, we would remain little more than animals. The whole of human culture has been built around love, theater, music, and all the other branches of art. We need to be loved, but the need to love is also embedded within us. We feel a lack of love to give. There is a yearning within us, a kind of inner deficiency, an inner emptiness that can be filled only through an attitude of love.
If we delve more deeply into the concept of love and develop it, we will discover within it a source of unlimited pleasure. When I love someone, I enjoy giving to them. I bring flowers and gifts, and I myself enjoy doing so. All the other sources of pleasure in our lives are limited. How much can I eat, rest, or travel? Everything I do for myself is limited; everything eventually comes to an end. Only love, if we learn how to build it correctly, can break through the boundaries of this gray world, where everything we attain for ourselves eventually becomes boring and satisfaction constantly seems to slip through our fingers.
Proper love transfers the place of deficiency and fulfillment from myself to another person. Love is based on becoming included in the other. I receive their desires and their fulfillments as though they were my own. When I know that they love something, I will make every effort to bring it to them. When I aspire to fulfill another person’s desire and give them everything good, I myself become filled with happiness. It is similar to a mother who fulfills the needs of her beloved baby and experiences sublime pleasure from doing so. In this kind of love, I am never satiated, overwhelmed, or closed off. I am always hungry to give, always aspiring to bestow, always open to the flow of happiness through me toward others.
Love will enable us to continually renew ourselves. We will absorb desires from others and try to fulfill them. And when they are filled with pleasure from our loving attitude toward them, we will enjoy it even more. This is how we build between us a foundation for eternal happiness, for pleasure that does not fade, for an ever-increasing sense of vitality. Our pleasure will no longer be personal, limited, and narrow. Instead, it will result from the love we have for others, from our desire to fulfill them and to experience pleasure from knowing that they feel good. Each person will enjoy wanting the other to enjoy, wanting to do good to the other. Our very desire to love and benefit one another will generate unlimited happiness between us.
We do not need many things or resources. When there is love, even something small that we give to the person we love, even nothing more than our attention, can be enough to fill them with happiness and fill us as well. What matters is the loving attitude, not the things we bring as expressions of that love. This is how love can open the door to a new world in which we fulfill one another not with material things, but with a positive attitude. We can build relationships that are independent of material things. This is what we truly long for deep inside, because through such love we can build for ourselves a source of unlimited pleasure and happiness.
And one final tip on the way toward great love: constantly look for ways to bring pleasure to the other person, for how you can do good to them. Develop within yourselves a concern that the love might stop growing and developing, that it might fade. Because the moment love stops growing, it immediately begins to decline.
Imagine that your love is something the two of you have given birth to together. It is something third, existing neither within one person nor the other, but only between you, in what you share with one another. Imagine it as a kind of sphere between you, filled with love and mutual care. You want to keep this sphere in the air at all times, because your happiness exists only within it.
Based on "New Life 223 – Romantic Love – The Perfect Pleasure" with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.