Mind & Happiness 60

Shiva, the Absolute

All our efforts to attain Happiness will continue until our all-consuming desire for perfect Happiness is permanently satisfied.  We know from experience that this fundamental desire of ours is never completely satisfied in spite of all our efforts to obtain Happiness from external objects & circumstances.  Nothing & no person in this material World can ever make us perfectly happy. However happy we may sometimes feel our self to be, our Happiness is nevertheless imperfect & short-lived, & hence we continue to search restlessly for more Happiness.

Every effort that we make through our Mind, speech & Body – every thought, word & deed of ours – is impelled only by our desire for Happiness & our fear of un-happiness.  Because of our mistaken conviction that Happiness & un-happiness both come from external objects & circumstances – a conviction that is so strong & deep-rooted that it persists in spite of all our intellectual understanding that Happiness actually comes only from within us, & that un-happiness is caused only by the agitated activity of our Mind – we unceasingly direct our attention & efforts towards those external objects & circumstances.

Whenever we experience something that we desire, the agitation of our Mind caused by that desire subsides temporarily, allowing us to experience for a short while the Happiness that always exists within us.  However, because we fail to recognize that the Happiness that we thus experience already exists within us, we always wrongly associate it with the objects of our desire, & thus we have developed a strong & deeply rooted conviction that we obtain Happiness from people, objects & circumstances outside our self.

Because of this strong conviction, we continue to desire those things that we believe to be potential sources of Happiness for us.  Our desires can therefore never be satisfied fully, because whenever we experience a little Happiness from the satisfaction of one of our desires, our fundamental desire for complete & perfect Happiness impels us to seek greater Happiness by attempting to satisfy more of our desires.

Therefore, the Happiness that we experience when one of our desires is fulfilled is very short-lived, because some other desire immediately arises in our Mind.  That is, we experience such Happiness only in the temporary period of calm that results from the satisfaction of one of our desires, & such a period of calm creates an opportunity for some other desire to arise. Innumerable desires exist in our Mind in a dormant or latent form, & each one of them is awaiting a suitable opportunity to rise to the surface of our Mind.

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"There is no Creation, no Destruction, no Bondage, no longing to be freed from Bondage, no striving for Liberation, nor anyone who has attained Liberation. Know that this to be Ultimate Truth."

–  the "no creation" school of Gaudapada, Shankara, Ramana, Nome – Ajata Vada

 for very succinct summary of the teaching & practice, see:  www.ajatavada.com/