How do people, who have all the things that are ordinarily envied, act when they get a few days free from their work? They go on a trip to the mountains or to the national parks or perhaps to Hawaii. Though they own everything usually conceived of as sources of happiness, yet when they are given a little freedom, they in fact try to get away from what they already have. Who ponders over the significance of these things? Who sees their implication? To the thoughtful person, it is clearly revealed that objects of the universe do not have the subtle power to give man the experience of happiness. The thoughtful person sees that happiness is not the getting of anything. What then is the special significance of the expression “The quest for happiness” or “The search for happiness”? Why do we use the words quest and search? Seeking or searching implies that something has been lost. If a thing was, and then is not, we may immediately go in search of it. When the lost thing is found, we have simply recovered it. Life, therefore, is not so much a struggle to discover the source of happiness as an effort to recover lost happiness. In its aspect as a quest, life is an attempt to recover that which has been lost.

This brings us to a more subtle point and a higher implication. If happiness is a state which you once had and now have lost, then by regaining the missing factor, you could recover that state for your experience of happiness. Wherein does this factor lie? The very clear and definite answer is: this factor lies within you. It does not lie outside of you. Then, in what relationship does it stand? Is it a part of you or is it close to you? Or is it in the relationship of identity with you? You yourself are that happiness. Happiness is your essential nature. Happiness is your innermost nature. You can never actually lose it, because it is identical with you.

The present temporary state of absence of happiness and a search therefore is a state of forgetfulness, a state not of actual loss. This has been explained in various ways in philosophy. When I was a youngster, in the Third Grade I think, we had in our English textbook a very humorous little lesson called “Grandpa’s Spectacles”. We are introduced to a tumult in the drawing room of a house in which Grandpa has lost his spectacles and has set a whole brood of grandchildren on the search for it. Jean and Peter and Joe and John...and the hunt is on. They look underneath the sofa and lift up the rug and climb up to the mantelpiece and peer behind Grandpa’s pillows. After the search has gone on for some time and Grandpa is getting more and more impatient, little Tommy, who has been searching everywhere and is in despair of finding them, cries out suddenly, “Please, Grandpa, remember where you put them before you went to sleep?” And then, when he looks up at Grandpa, behold! there they are right up on Grandpa’s forehead. There they have been all along. They were never lost. There seemed to have been a loss, because Grandpa was unaware of the spectacles on his own forehead pushed up absent-mindedly after finishing his newspaper.

In your quest for happiness, your position is precisely the same. The very nature of your being is indescribable, perennial, unalloyed happiness. The absence of happiness is not so much the loss of the thing as such, but the loss of your awareness of its presence within. The source of true happiness lies right within you. The source of true happiness is your Self. Until man realizes his own true nature and taps it at its very source, is he to be totally deprived of happiness? By no means! Just as you are, you may avail yourself of any number of means of getting some experience of happiness. What are these means? There is a very simple way. You may get rid of all those factors that rob you of your happiness. This effort is largely negative, because you do not do anything positive to obtain happiness. You assume that happiness is there, but is not being experienced. Then you wonder what is preventing that experience and proceed to remove the obstructions—and there it is! If a light is there and somehow has been covered over, then you have to uncover it and let it shine. If a quantity of gold is buried at a spot, to obtain that gold you have only to remove the intervening earth and stones and pebbles. Then you find the gold and get it. What are those factors that all too effectively rob us of our happiness? They are of our own making. They are due to the original error of man which lies in the thought that happiness is to be found in objects, and out of this deluded thought has arisen all those factors out of which man has created his own fallacies.

Desire and want, which arise from this prime delusion, destroy all peace of mind. In a mind devoid of peace, how can there be happiness? Happiness depends upon peace of mind. It is in that calm tranquil state of mind that happiness arises, for essentially true happiness is your inward spiritual state. Fortunately or unfortunately, the only media through which it can be expressed are the intellect and the mind. If these two media are thrown into such a state of agitation that they cannot serve as proper channels for the welling up of this inner happiness, then their condition becomes unfit and unfavourable. It is only when there is peace and serenity in the mind and intellect that the inner happiness makes itself felt. The robber of your peace and serenity is the sense of want and desire which arises out of your prime error that happiness depends upon objects. That is the error in which you start your life. In childhood one is taught that to have a good time means going places, or doing things, or getting objects, and so children grow up in this delusion. The adult that is produced is at the mercy of things which are outside of himself. Even a grain of proper understanding of this world, as it really is, instilled into young people would grant a rich harvest in terms of happiness and joy.