Love and Pain

An Explanation to Our Lack of Love 

We love God because that gives us pleasure. We love music because it gives us pleasure. We even love our consorts or sons because of the pleasure that that gives us. Pleasure is a key mechanism of human behaviour and nature. We love pleasure, even if we sometimes deny it, or distrust it.

We love what gives us pleasure, and makes us happy...

And yet there is another, rather different side to the reality of love. Love can cause pain… And the reason is simple: pain, death, misfortune turn around our lives, and when they reach those we love, that touches. That demands sacrifices and pain. In contradiction, love isn’t only a cause of pleasure. Love may also be a reason of pain.

Accordingly, loving a lot, or loving many people, can be a source of pain, and not just a source of joy and pleasure. And that’s why not loving is a way of escaping pain. That’s what I-Hsuan, a radical Chinese Monk and Zen master states with his strange words:

Kill anything that you happen on. Kill the Buddha if you happen to meet him… Kill your parents or relatives if you happen to meet them. Only then can you be free, not bound my material things and absolutely free and at ease.
 

These words of I-Hsuan sound stupid. Or they are stupid. But still they portray some of our spontaneous refusal of loving, because of the pain it can bring – a refusal particularly visible in our lack of love to foreigners and to unknown people. In a world where misfortune and misery are so abundant, indifference is the easiest way of escaping pain.

In fact, loving vividly the poor people of the world would also be to suffer. To love the unlucky and the victims of the innumerable accidents and evils that surround mankind worldwide – a reality that is brought to us by television and other modern media – would be to suffer every hour of every day.

And that might indeed explain our tendency towards indifference and our lack of brotherly love.