This is the next in the series on Four Dimensional Flourishing.
The components of the Emotional Dimension are positive emotions, specifically love and awe. The flourishing currency is happiness. The good habit we need to create is connection and the deterrent is ego.
Our Sages tell us that the key to enduring happiness is a feeling of completion or wholeness which can come from an appreciation of what we have, accomplishment, or building good relationships. We’re going to focus on happiness generated by good relationships.
Jewish mysticism teaches that our positive emotions are rooted in love and awe. Love is a connection to another person based on an identification with his positive qualities. Awe, along with its honor and fear components, is a connection based on a recognized hierarchy.
Relationships between man and God and between child and parent have strong components of both love and awe. The husband and wife relationship is built mainly on love with some mutual components of awe. The relationship between friends is built primarily on love.
To increase our happiness, we need to improve our connections to people. When meeting a person, ask yourself two questions: “How can I give to this person?” and “What can I learn from this person?”
Giving is not limited to physical things, it includes advice, showing you care by inquiring about the other’s welfare, and offering words of encouragement. Learning from others includes not just subject-matter information but appreciating insights offered from their unique vantage point.
The main deterrent to creating positive connections is our ego. As Dr. David Lieberman says “The body wants to feel good, the ego wants to look good and the soul wants to be good”. When we are driven by ego, we want to look and feel superior to others.The Mesillas Yesharim says this is an extremely difficult challenge to overcome. The desire to be on top leads to the negative traits of envy, pride, honor and anger, each of which builds barriers to connection.
The key to negating the ego is humility. In his famous letter, the Ramban prescribes that we should view every person as greater than ourselves. If the other person is wiser or wealthier, we must honor him for that. If he is neither wiser nor wealthier, we should realize that he is less guilty than we are, since we have fewer extraneous pressures to sin and we have greater knowledge of Torah. This approach will allow us to subvert our ego and develop better relationships.
Let’s take a look at a simple example of how a focus on subverting the ego and understanding hierarchy can produce flourishing:
A friend walked into a local store where a wealthy man was talking to a clerk. He wasn’t being nasty but he was clearly asserting his authority over the clerk within the discussion. The clerk was responding appropriately, although he didn’t seem happy about it. When it was our friend’s turn, the clerk, seeing that she was a young woman, started asserting his authority over her and was not being so nice about it. Our friend, who had recently learned these concepts, recognized the hierarchies at play, understood the workings of the ego and kept her emotions in check, allowing her to respond without anger.
In summary, the path to happiness in the Emotional Dimension is to increase our connection to people, primarily by giving to them and learning from them. The deterrent to these connections is our ego. We can overcome the need to feel superior by developing the trait of humility.
