From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 2/14/18
What do we love? We love what we enjoy.
In our world, we define love as a source of pleasure. We enjoy something, and love that same something that makes us feel good. Therefore, we love a juicy steak, a cold beer, a certain TV show, a person who makes us laugh, and so on.
This kind of love is purely egoistic. Likewise, we hate any source of pain in our lives. Nature works by moving toward pleasure and away from pain. We function in that same nature, as do animals, plants and even inanimate matter.
What, then, is true love?
There is no concept of true love anywhere but in the wisdom of Kabbalah. Why? It is because true love is a spiritual phenomenon born in us when we make ourselves of service to fulfill the desires of others. In other words, when we try to rise above our egoistic benefit, we become included in a desire that is not our own. Also, it doesn’t matter whether this desire is our partner’s, or a complete stranger’s.
We do not judge whether we think the desires, goals and passions of others are good or bad. If we love them, then we try to fulfill them as if they are our own. That is the essence of “love your friend as yourself.”
The effort to love others gradually detaches us from our inborn egoistic perception, granting us a new spiritual one: a new eternal and whole form of fulfillment opens up to us, unbounded by our world’s narrow egoistic limits. Immense spiritual pleasure stems from our merging with nature’s infinite source of pleasure, thereby accessing the knowledge of the perfection of the higher reality, which guides us toward increasing connection, harmony and perfection.
This is spiritual love. When we will feel such love, we will clearly understand that there is and never was any other kind of love.
So then, how can we come to feel spiritual love? Interestingly enough, feral children can help us understand…
Feral children grow up isolated from any human contact and raised in an environment of animals since they are very young. They have little to no experience with what is considered normal and acceptable human behavior in society, and thus their behavior is very similar to the animals they grew up around.
Our environment establishes our world, our thoughts and our behavior. Therefore, in order to achieve true, spiritual love, we need to participate in an environment of people who work on attaining spiritual love. This is the goal of a Kabbalistic environment. It provides the socio-educational conditions all its participants need, through study, discussions and exercises, in order to develop newly formed connections and sensations of spiritual love.
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