What Does Kabbalah Say About Love On Earth?

Question: What does a Kabbalist think about love?

Answer: Kabbalists constantly think about love. The question is what exactly does he think about it? Does he wonder whether it exists or not? Does he ask himself what love itself means, what is its definition, what are the boundaries of its existence, what is the level of its manifestation, and what are the conditions under which it manifests and exists?

Can an eternal type of love be reached?

The kind of love that passes is not love. It cannot be anything other than eternal.

Once I gave a lecture to a large audience in Tel-Aviv and I immediately told them that there is no love. At first there was silence but gradually everyone agreed with me.

There is a constant, native, natural love, which is only for the dear and unforgettable me. Within the material framework, this is the only kind of love that is real. It is born and dies together with me, with my “I.”

This is the egoism that exists within me, that develops all the time, and pushes my nose further into myself to see what else can I wish for, get, and bring closer to my dear self. It always asks: how I can love myself even more? This is our egoistic nature. Therefore, self-love is a natural quality of everything that exists.

All material nature in the universe consists of a huge type of egoism that divides into four levels: inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human. These types differ only by the degree of egoism that manifests as love for oneself.

Love on inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels is instinctive and not recognized by the object itself. It does not check how much it loves itself but just satisfies its love.

On the human level love is programmable. Although it remains a love for oneself and for oneself only; nevertheless, it undergoes various stages of development, such as in what way it can be expressed and which forms it can assume. Since a person depends on society, on the ones similar to him, and on the ones opposite to him, his idea of love or how to fulfill and satiate himself changes under the influence of society.

However, in principle this is the same self-love but in even more refined and constantly renewed forms. This is the love that exists in our world including such manifestations of it as a mother’s love for a child, a person’s love for their homeland, and so on. No matter what form of love we are talking about, all of them eventually reflect egoistic love for oneself.

Remark: You dispel all the romantic ideas people have about love.

My Comment: There is no romance here except for minor misconceptions. This is known to everyone including scientists, philosophers, physiologists, and psychologists. In our time, egoism has grown so much that we are especially, acutely aware that there is no love.

Even scientists say that people only get together for two to three years. The normal manifestation of mutuality cannot last between them for a long time since all of it quickly disappears. Our egoism is constantly renewed and it erases all of the past conditions that supported the manifestation of any kind of mutuality, even though it was egoistic or only for my beloved self. This, however, also changes.

Question: So, what is next? Habit? After all, many people live together for years.

Answer: If someone lives together for many years, they are just “dinosaurs.” In our time, no one voluntarily lives in the same family for a long time either because of children or because of the goods and everything else they acquired together.

The fact is that, previously, life expectancy did not exceed forty years and people died before their so-called love ended.
Besides, a man—while choosing a spouse—considered not love but whether the woman could be a housewife, making sure that she was healthy, capable, could cook, and could maintain a house. Therefore, there is no room to talk about love here either.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/6/17