“The Search for HAPPINESS” How to find your purpose in life?
Question by Pheuls: “The Search for HAPPINESS” How to find your purpose in life?
Sometimes in your search for happiness you think about the meaning of life. You look for an answers in you rmemories. You try to find direction for the future. But life can be overwhelming, and sometimes you get lost in things that are happening around you everyday.
Our life on this earth bringsd questions, opportunities, challenges, and temptations. We often let guilt, weakness, and sin control our lives. Bad events, selfish feelings, or a lock of moral actions can make us unhappy. and we often fall short of our potential.
Give your answer to this question below!
One Response to “The Search for HAPPINESS” How to find your purpose in life?
Leave a Reply
In life everyone ceaselessly acts pursuing various goals. In and through all such pursuits one is ultimately seeking nothing but happiness. But are we clear about what happiness is, where to seek it and how to achieve it?
Real happiness is an equanimous state of mind, when thoughts are at rest. It is a state of cessation of agitations, which are caused by unfulfilled desires of the mind. Desire is the thick stream of indiscriminate thought flow in you, drawn towards the world of objects and beings.
You entertain desires within to fill the void or overcome the sense of unfulfilment you feel within you. To quieten these agitations caused by unfulfilled desires, we go through a variety of experiences at the physical, mental and intellectual levels of our personality. We contact objects, beings, emotions and thoughts of the world and try to find fulfilment in them, e.g. a child with toys, youth with wealth and women, the elderly in a newspaper and old friends.
If our desires are fulfilled we are happy and if not we are in sorrow. But as George Bernard Shaw rightly said, “Man has to face two tragedies in life, one when his desire is fulfilled and the other when it is not”. In both cases he ultimately faces mental agitations, in one case it’s early and in the other it’s later on.
The world is in a constant flux of change. The experiences of this world are passing and fleeting. And the happiness derived from the world of objects, emotions and thoughts is thus also passing in nature. For example, joy derived from an ice cream lasts only for a while. An old man reads a book or newspaper, which absorbs him for a few hours only. So worldly happiness is not permanent.
Therefore, lacking the knowledge of true happiness and its source, one focuses on the world to provide us with true happiness. But that results in experiencing instant joys followed by emptiness, sorrow and suffering.
A young man plucked a beautiful rose to enjoy its fragrance. When he brought the rose in contact with his nose to enjoy its fragrance, a bee inside the rose suddenly stung him on the tip of his nose. The man cried in pain and the rose fell from his hand. In reality there is not a rose of ‘sensual pleasure’ that does not have the bee of ‘injury’ concealed in it.
Indiscriminate pursuit of pleasure objects invariably comes up against the law of neutralisation. It is the state where any further contact with the objects gives no more happiness, whereas its absence creates sorrow.
A person in the midst of riches and plenty may remain dull and bored, yet the absence of these would generate sorrow. A regular alcoholic in contact with alcohol gets no pleasure but abstinence from it brings him suffering.
True happiness, we should realise, does not belong to the realm of the physical, emotional or intellectual levels of our personality. It belongs to our true nature. Beyond the levels of our body, mind and intellect lies our Real Self, our supreme nature, the source of infinite happiness, the Godhead in us.
Christ said, “The kingdom of heaven lies within you. He who knoweth shall find it”. And Guru Nanak said the same thing: “If you want permanent happiness, seek the Ram within you”.
We don’t have access to the Godhead within because it is veiled by our desires. In order to unveil our Real Self, Vedanta says that one must raise oneself above the desires.
As long as one functions on desires, they multiply, which causes further mental agitations and stress. Instead, with the help of the intellect, one must channelise these desires to a higher ideal, towards an unselfish cause in life.
Desires must neither be suppressed nor indulged in. Through discriminative control and channelising, they get sublimated. As desires drop within us, there is increasing peace and happiness within our being.
Vedanta provides us with the knowledge of life and living, the mental equipment to tackle life’s problems, to always be happy and remain unaffected by sorrow. As one gets more and more subjective happiness, the less one is dependent on the external world for happiness. This everlasting happiness which lies right within the core of our heart, we search in vain in our outward experiences.
An old lady lost her needle in her cottage. It being dark inside she went out under the street lamp to search for it. So it is the case with most of us. We search externally while the kingdom of heaven lies right within us. Discover it. That is the secret of happiness.
HINDU
June 12, 2013 at 2:15 pm