Comment: Special studies show that people feel happy when a country has a high average income level, low unemployment, significant economic freedom, and a relatively open labor market.
At the same time, generous social welfare benefits and low inequality do not contribute to the sense of happiness. For example, Norway has one of the highest suicide rates. Happiness is determined by life expectancy, access to education, GDP per capita, and purchasing power, among other factors.
Scientists attempt to define happiness externally. Yet, a person is not happy.
My Response: Happiness is connection with eternity, with a purpose that one seeks to grasp. Yet, as one approaches it, it continuously recedes, and one keeps striving toward it. It is an infinite process.
The aspiration toward an eternal goal and its gradual attainment is called the sweet suffering of love. That is, the simultaneous feeling of suffering and love creates the sensation of happiness.
For example, people may have yearned for each other for many years—suffering, moving toward one another, dreaming—and now they have finally met. At that moment, all past sufferings, all impulses toward closeness and mutual perception merge with the feeling of actual unity in the meeting.
The more these two opposing forces continuously increase and sustain one another, the more they create a sense of happiness in a person.
There can be no happiness without suffering. And suffering must inevitably lead to happiness. This is why it is called the “suffering of love,” as the feeling of love cannot arise without the prior experience of longing, suffering, and lack.
These desires emerge precisely in the search, in the movement toward love, and form what is known as a vessel for the perception of happiness. And once I reach happiness and become fulfilled, this feeling quickly fades. Therefore, I must once again restore a sense of some distance.
Even if I physically remain with my beloved, I must immediately think about how to arm myself with even greater desires for them, greater aspirations despite their presence. And then, it will seem as though they are not so near, not so close anymore. And I will begin striving toward them once again.
We must understand that the feeling of happiness is possible only in the middle line, between the left and the right, where the left line is the constant revelation of striving, longing, and emptiness and the right line is connection, love, and fulfillment.
The middle line provides a strong link between the continuous growth of desire and its constant fulfillment. Then a person feels as if they exist in a state of eternity and perfection, not shifting from one state to another, not swinging between the left and right lines, but existing in both simultaneously.
We cannot give a person any other explanation, because developing such perceptual tools requires internal work that they do not yet possess. This is precisely the purpose of the science of Kabbalah, which in translation means “the science of reception.”
Comment: As far as I understand, happiness does not exist in this world, and there is nothing to search for.
My Response: In this world—that is, within a single egoistic desire—happiness cannot exist. And within a single altruistic desire, it cannot exist either. Only on the basis of both desires, if resistance is introduced between them—negative, positive, and in between them resistance (our effort)—only then, upon this resistance can we experience constant happiness, eternal and perfect life.
Comment: It seems that we have already mastered the egoistic desire and are beginning to understand what it is.
Answer: No, it has not yet been mastered. We will be able to master it only in accordance with the emergence of an altruistic desire within us. Then we will begin to perceive a completely different kind of egoism. Right now, we experience only a very limited, animate-level egoism.
We must begin to perceive egoism that desires to work together with the quality of bestowal and love, that understands it must act in harmony with it as one half of the whole system of the world.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 5/12/22
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