“Love is what makes the world go round”, said someone.
That is true to some extent.
Yes, love gives one a high, whether it is dopamine-and-oxytocin driven or whatever else.
Love also gives one a feeling of pleasure, well-being and security, at multiple levels, from the physical to the mental to the emotional to the social to the financial to the spiritual.
But, one has to wonder did the poets and the romantics get it wrong about love?
The way I like to define love is as follows:
“You know you are in love when the happiness of the other person starts to matter to you.”
Now, obviously going by that definition, we can be “in love” with many people at the same time simultaneously, and that would include and not exclude our romantic partners.
But, as you mature in life and grow in spiritual understanding and gain that “insight”, you realize that “sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
Why is that so?
In our attempts to tend to the others’ happiness, we will do so only to the extent of what we think will make them happy, assuming that one is so self-sacrificing as to put aside one’s own happiness, and assuming that one’s happiness is not always inextricably intertwined with the happiness of another whom one is trying to make happy.
But, when we are not in control of our own happiness, how can we be confident that we can take charge of the happiness of another.
Plus, what if in trying to make the other happy we ourselves become a tad unhappy, for reasons that I need not spell out as most of you have enough experience of life to understand what some of those reasons could be.
More troublingly, this business of making others happy or ourselves happy is an enterprise undertaken with “half knowledge” and as Alexander Pope reminded us “half knowledge is a dangerous thing”, and also fraught with grave problem because of that distinction made between Shreyas and Preays in the Kathopanishad, and most often all our happiness typically seems to stem from preyas, which in the long-term is inimical to our own welfare and the welfare of others whom we are trying to make happy by tending to their preyas.
Finally, what drives one’s happiness and that of others is our karma and their karma, so this business of trying to make oneself happy and others happy is bound to face obstacles along the way, more often than not, until we become wise and drop this pursuit of trying to make oneself and others happy by the various projects and pleasures that we pursue in life.
The only way we can drop pursuing this thing called “love” is when we realise “happiness is within”, and in doing so we come upon “true love”, one that benefits ourselves and others.
