Sanity Test

Test your version of sanity.

The Buddha says:

"Born of love is
grief and lamentation,
pain and misery,
and despair."

Are you saying to yourself:

"That is not true! All our joys are born of love!"

"So what? We have to take the bad with the good."

or are you saying:

That is the voice of sanity in a world gone blind and is, at the least, a truth by which I must try and direct my course.

'Love,' Pāḷi 'Piya', is not 'wishing you well' or 'regarding with a heart of friendliness,' Pāḷi 'metta', which is a fine thing; it is attachment to 'my affection for you'. Love is a need for the pleasure felt by the self when in contact with or pondering another. It is an intense form of immediate kammic feedback. One ponders the pleasant feature of another and liking is generated which produces a pleasant sensation and like the feedback that results from placing a microphone too close to the speaker it is connected to, an intense cycle of liking and pleasant sensations results. Alteration in the source of the pleasant sensation results in pain felt at the loss of the pleasure. Always — to the degree of the attachment. To say that indulging in this behavior with its transient pleasure and certain pain is anything less than insanity is insanity.

See especially MN 87. Queen Mallika convinces King Pasenadi of the truth in the Buddha's saying that grief and lamentation, pain and misery and despair are born of affection, originate in affection.