Where is Happiness?

Throughout your life you have been superimposing the thought of happiness on a variety of sense objects. Where is happiness? Happiness is not to be found in sense objects. To clarify this statement, I will give you an example.

A child loves chocolate and he is very happy when you offer him some; but what will happen if instead of only one bar of chocolate you give him two bars of chocolate? If you give him one, he is happy; if you give him two bars of chocolate he is even happier. But what will happen if you give him three or four bars of chocolate?

With three or four bars of chocolate his happiness and longing will start decreasing and, after the fifth, he may just throw it away, totally disinterested. If happiness were inherent in chocolate, the child would have accepted more and more chocolate, but just as in economics there is the law of diminishing marginal utility, so it is with chocolate or any other sense object.

If the same child receives some sad news, will the chocolate give him his happiness back? No. Sense objects cannot give lasting happiness. Lasting happiness is only to be found within.

In certain periods of your life some objects have particularly attracted your attention and fascinated your mind, inducing you to consider these items as quite pleasant and important for you. However, analyze how many times, with the passage of time, you changed these preferences, you out grew certain pleasures, and the same object became less and less attractive, less and less important.

Scrutinize how many times you have shifted your preferences since you were a child. When you were a baby you may have had a teddy bear or doll, you gave it a name, kissed it, hugged it while you slept—you might even have considered it as your best friend. This toy was very dear to you.

But once you grew up, that same toy was no longer so important, because you could not derive the same joy from it. You substituted the teddy bear or doll with a bicycle. However, when you became a teenager, your preferences once again changed. You were no longer interested in the bicycle but instead were attracted to other types of entertainment, like reading books, computers, or socializing with friends.

If you analyze your life, you will notice that as time went by your preferences have gradually changed and all the sense objects that used to give you some pleasure in the past are now no longer so important to you. Why? Because you have grown up, you have matured.

If the mind’s maturity does not follow the growth of the body, one is in trouble. What if a young man of eighteen got on a train hugging a teddy bear? Would people say he has normally matured? People would think he is not growing up properly, that he may be physically mature, but mentally immature, as he still behaves like a baby.

Mere physical maturity is not enough, we need mental maturity. An immature mind is guided by likes and dislikes and these attractions and repulsions are the cause of all our daily troubles.

Everyday many couples experience contrasting preferences that constantly create friction. There may be times when the husband wants to read, but his wife is tired and wants to sleep. They may even have conflicting ideas about the proper way to squeeze a tube of toothpaste. She may like it neatly pressed and rolled up from the bottom, while he adopts the more nonchalant approach of squeezing it in the middle.

This constant conflict between likes and dislikes creates irritation and is the very resentment that is the root cause of misery. Why do these likes and dislikes surface from within? How did we inherit preferences? How did we happen to have these attractions or repulsions? It is due to our associations and the environment.

The first cause is the environment where we grew up. We were surrounded by family members and friends who gave excessive importance to possessing a certain type of car or a pleasant, comfortable house with all the electrical gadgets and modern conveniences that make one’s life easier.

Most probably, we even started thinking that, to be happy, we really needed all those things. This led us to become concerned about what others think of us if we do not own all those items that they give so much importance to.

The second cause of likes and dislikes depends upon our associations and relative consequential experiences. We tasted something and derived some pleasure, and, as a result, we derived a liking for it.

This process is not limited to material things. Some people prefer winter and do not like summer, while others prefer a hot climate to a cold one.

When one lives in the world, one should accept with equanimity all the natural opposites like winter and summer, heat and cold, joy and sorrow, comfort and discomfort, as one only will live in perfect contentment, when one is free from preferences or likes and dislikes.

Text: Paramahamsa Prajnanananda, from the book Yoga: Pathway to the Divine.