Why do we love others / Why should we love others?

Why do we love others / Why should we love others?

This may look like a strange question to many of them, but is a very pertinent one. The reason we have think about this topic is very important at this juncture of time in the world. It is a very important point that each and every one of us has to ponder upon to remove the hatred and aloofness that people are exhibiting now everywhere. If this goes unchecked the future looks bleak.

Now let us start analyzing why we love anyone or anything. We love anyone or anything for a sole reason that it gives us happiness. Just think about it, you love to talk and play with a child because you feel happy playing with the child. Will you play with anyone if you don’t like them? The answer would be no. Now understand this that we only love/like those people/things which makes us happy and we ignore or go away from people whom we don’t love or like.

So whatever we do in the above case is for our happiness (so that we are happy either by association or disassociation), we like to be with the person whom we love because it makes us happy and we leave the person whom we don’t like, as we want to be happy and that person/thing is obstructing the experience of that happiness.

Above situation is very apt in the current scenario as most of us are isolating our-selves from others to avoid the pain caused by them and to be at peace. But this is leading to a bigger problem of loneliness and depression as we don’t know how to deal with our thoughts and emotions.

So coming to the point, now we know that we love because we are happy by loving, we would not have loved anyone if it does not make us feel happy. So now the question would be why should we Love others then? The answer is simple; if we hate others then we are not happy. When we are shouting at anyone or bear hatred in mind how can the mind be at peace? It is not possible. Hatred is against the very basic nature of our true self as it leads to mental trauma and ultimately it manifests into physical ailments (in short unhappiness).

Thinking from other perspective what is the use of hating someone? There is none actually as we are engrossed in an emotion which is counter active to our peace and happiness. It does not mean that we have to take all hatred that comes to us and do nothing. It is only that we can fight back and move on with our life by not carrying that emotion further as it is detrimental to our happiness. Just to take an example we can see that people are jealous of the other because the other person may be rich, healthy etc. But what would the person get from being jealous of the other when he can use that time to channelize his energy to become a better person, if he remains in the state of jealousy he is wasting his energy to be unhappy which is totally unnecessary. What is the point in hating when ultimately the same is the cause of our unhappiness?

So we have to be more practical in life and understand that love only increases your happiness, it does not mean that we should not fight back with others who are troubling us or to absorb all everything that is directed towards us and succumb to its negativity, but to simply defend ourselves and move along in your life so that we are free from these impressions and memories why will make us ever happy.

To look at this from Advaita Vedanta point of view, the entire world is view as Maya (illusion – as this relative world is just a projection of consciousness, alternatively the world and us are temporary in nature) and we are the Self covered by Maya. When everyone and everything around us is the manifestation of the same consciousness, how can the same consciousness hate each other? This would become illogical. The mind of each and every person is attached to the same consciousness and it is like saying I hate the other self and love my own self (which would be Ludacris). It is only the mind which differentiates each of us as separate to each other, but in reality we are just a projection of one infinite being. When we say that we hate the other person it would mean that we hate ourselves. So the point is self-evident that there is no reason for a person for hating each other, as all are one consciousness