Why Is it That, at Least Sometimes, Happiness Seems to Come at Someone Else’s Expense?

Indeed, in today’s world it seems that we become happy by making others less happy. This is the nature of our ego, our desire to enjoy at the expense of others. It measures our happiness in comparison to others. We can look at someone who has less than us and feel superior, which can give us a sense of fulfillment. Moreover, we can see this tendency playing out on the global stage through wars, cutthroat competition, and social division.

Then the question arises: What if we created an illusion where everyone believed they were superior to others? If we had such “glasses” that made us feel like we live in a bubble of our personal superiority over others, we would all walk around looking down on others, smiling in satisfaction, oblivious to the fact that others feel the same way. It is how we want to feel in our egoistic nature, so it could indeed be an excellent patent for our world.

Such an egoistic sense of happiness, however, is far from giving us the ability to be truly happy. It is very narrow, transient, and limited in its scope. Contrary to this self-inflating view of happiness that resides rent-free in our egoistic nature, we can instead find genuine and lasting happiness by developing care for others. When we set our sights on making others happy, we then head on track to genuine and lasting fulfillment. If everyone sought to bring others’ happiness, then happiness would spread naturally, and we would each feel happy by uplifting those around us.

The problem is that our self-serving ego rejects this idea. We as a humanity are not yet moving toward the solution of aiming to make others happy. On the contrary, we are headed toward the recognition of evil while we each try to make ourselves happy. What is this “recognition of evil”? It is the realization of our current egoistic approach to life as broken and incomplete, that we live in a paradox where, on one hand, we wish to make ourselves happier, but on the other hand, we find ourselves dealing with increasing problems, crises, and suffering.

Kabbalists have known the solution to this specific problem for generations and they left us a method by which we can rise to another level of existence by developing an outward-aimed intention of bestowal and positive connection to others and nature, far beyond our narrow egoistic limitations.

There is a second nature of love, bestowal, and positive connection outside of our egoistic nature. When we discover it, we will see clearly that we need nothing else in life. With this new nature, we both build and reveal a completely different world, one that is not driven by competition and suffering but by mutual consideration, support, encouragement, and fulfillment. We will then discover true happiness in our lives together with total harmony and peace throughout the world. It is no utopian fantasy. It is the final state of human evolution, and we can facilitate our positive advancement to such a state by learning about how and why nature evolves everyone and everything toward that perfection, and how we can shift from our shattered current state to this desirable, harmonious, and peaceful final state.

Based on KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on July 18, 2022. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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