The Pursuit of Joy and Love: Understanding the Different Types of Love in Life

In The Book of Joy, Dasmond Tutu and Daila Lama both said “the pursuit of Joy is the purpose of every human being.” They said, seeking joy and joyful experience is the biggest motivation for any human being and we are born with this drive.

I agree and disagree with this statement, partly depending on their definition of joy. I believe the greatest purpose of every human is to fully experience every sensation and then eventually understand the greatest love. And love is what drive and motivate us the most, even when we don’t understand it. To me, love is the greatest mystery in the universe but it is also everywhere, just like air and water. Love is why we exist and how this world exists. Love can only be understood through observation, actions, and failures. Love involves all emotions, hate, frustration, anger, bitter, envy… Love is the end product when we experienced all possibilities and learned from it.

I want to explain the love that I know and observe.

There are a few different kings of Love, and we learn and experience them through out the course of our lifetime. The first kind of love is love without choice. It’s a kind of love you have towards your parents. You cannot choose your parents, or their personalities, or their economy status, or their child rearing style. But you’re innate to love them, because that’s how we build as human beings. Human being are born to crave for love and to love. So any newborn baby without any choice, they are forced to love their parents even though that is not the type of person they might love when they grow up.

The second kind of love is the love of comraderate, the love of the peers. In this phase, we learn to love not in a romantic way, and we learn to pick and choose who are the crowd that we are going to hang out with, we are going to spend time with. And we learn how to sometimes give and never expect something in return. In this phase, we also learn how to put other people’s need first. I classify the love toward your siblings in this category. Your love to your siblings are by choice, not restrained by your blood or because you two shared DNAs. I’m sure every one knows some people who don’t get along with their siblings or even not talking to their siblings. Your love towards your siblings is a learned behavior and sometimes, two siblings don’t click.

In the process of learning loving others, we also learn how to love ourselves. When we passionately, unconditionally love other people or put their priorities first, we’d experience the feeling of our needs being neglected or overlook. This creates discomfort, and discomfort pushes us to learn how to find the balance between our and others needs. We begin to know that we must prioritize our needs first, then we have the energy and resource to love external world and other people.

Then we learn how to love passionately and compassionaly. We learn how to love another person as if our soul merge together. We learn how to sustain this passion out into a bigger love. We start to love and take others’ happiness as our responsibility. We learn love when we first heartbreak. We learn love when we experience jealous. We learn and observe love when we see that we are capable of in complete anger, furious and hate, yet still fully love the other person. Very often when we are still in the comradrate love, we misunderstood what’s just a fond feeling of the other individual as passion love. When the passion is gone, we are unable to love the other compassionately; we are unable to love another person fully while accepting their shorcomings.

Then, we experience our biggest love and fulfillment by choice. We choose to be parents of an unknown being. And we choose to love them unconditionally regardless what this little creature will turn into. We choose to take on this responsibility, knowing that this child might be a unkonwn bomb or a future serial killer, to invest everything we have, from physical and psychological resources on them, even when they will cost us so much than what we can afford. We learn to be selfless and truly just hoping the best for them. Then we learn how to let go — how to still love them unconditionally, while letting them decide and go on a rocky path. How to just listen, no judgement, and appreciate every moment we have with them.

Erik Erickson made a good comment on his thoery of developmental psychology. He emphasized that any unsuccessful development in each stage, might lead to a incomplete or scruitinized development of the next stage. If the individual does not recover from the next phase, they would eventually develop into a unsatisfied, bitter person (think about Grim). Same for love. If we fail to learn how to love in each stage, we will eventually fail to love in the next stage. If we fail to learn your peers and set up the right boundaries, we are not going to learn ho w to love ourselves. If we are not able to love ourselves, we would not be able to love a person passionately and compasisonately because we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves. If we don’t know how to love the other person with all our heart knowing their shortcomings, we will never be able to love unconditionally and fully for the other life that we don’t even know who they would turn into!

There is one more type of love that I haven’t been able to touch on. It is the love of appreciation of the beauty of the universe. It is similar to the agape love in Christinatiy, but the love I’m mentioning here is beyond just loving Christ. It’s the sudden appreciation coming from feeling the love from God when He creats the universe. It’s the sudden fullness feeling inside the heart when you look into the world, the tree, the sky, the bird, or anything in the world, and you lose yourself in awe of how beautiful and perfect of this world around you. It’s the aweness that make you lost in words and could only say “thank you God”. It’s a joyful feeling that you could not put into words but you know it is just too perfect and you can’t believe that. It’s the overwelming feeling that push you to realize that there must be a soul, a being, or anything, that create this beautiful world for you and everyone else to experiene and enjoy.

This is the love that put every Christian or any master in any religion or spiritual practice to hold the strong believes. This is a realization and a combination of all the positive emotions we could possibly experience. However, this last kind of love is extremely difficult to experience, and I believe a good porpotion of people never experience it until they die. Many people experience it throught psychodelic drugs, and I’d say this is one of the biggest reason why many people are using or addicting to psychodelics these days — this kind of love is too good and easily we all crave for the feelings.

If you experience it without any drug, then I congrats you, my friend, you are one among the small porportion of people that experience this amazing love organically. I believe most religious masters, if they are real, all experience this kind of love and that’s why they see things differently. They know that every moment is an enjoyment, a gift from God. They know being the present is more important than focusing on other untangible things, for example, our past, future, or even other people’s behavior.

Back to the point of “pursuing joy is the biggest motivation for human being.” I agree that it’s a huge drive, however, joy is a byproduct how we experience love. In the process to learning love, we experience joy or pleasure. Love is a much bigger topic than just joy. Love includes all human emotions and sentations. We could only comprehend love, when we equally experience the negative sensations in each type of love. Joy or other pleasure experience might push us to go for the shortcut and find easy solution to experience the level of love that we could not easily getting to.