Sourcing Happiness

Sourcing happiness…..The nature of human beings is to source happiness from many source points. Some have a diversified portfolio of sourcing happiness, some have a narrow portfolio. Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu in his sikshashtaka classifies 4 prominent sources of happiness common to most people in this world – Dhanam ‘wealth’ Janam ‘popularity, fame, following’ Sundarim ‘beautiful women/Handsome wealthy men’ Kavitam ‘Fame as scholar’. Some acaryas summarise as Wine, Woman and Wealth as the most common source points of happiness. But the Vedas give a clue about another inexhaustible source of pure sweet happiness and they recommend all living beings to strive for contact with this inexhaustible source of infinite happiness. This is the ‘real Self’ or ‘Soul’ which is repository of Pure existence (Sat), Accurate knowledge(Cit) and unbridled ecstacy (Ananda). Spending time on fallible sources of happiness leaves us with no time and energy to access the inexhaustible source ‘The Soul’. Sri Prahlada Maharaj call this as ‘Ayur Vyaya’ or waste of human energy if not directed towards the real self. So how to carve out our exploration to get in touch and access the Real self which is the real source of inexhaustible happiness. It’s a journey and we need a guide on this journey. Quite often in exploratory journeys people return back because of losing hope and not having patience. A proper guide wil motivate and show hope to persist towards the destination. In this soul journey, our travel guides are the Gurus and Sadhus. Harikatha is the motivating talks to propel our journey to continue forward.

               Mahaprabhu says one has to stop sourcing happiness from the fallible domains ‘Wealth, Fame, Women, Scholarly fame’. One has to focus on the tendency of the real soul which is ‘Pure Love’ or ‘aatma dharma’. The material body and mind is the vehicle in this soul journey. When material body and mind are regulated by principles of Bhakti yoga, we start going near the soul. The evidence that you are reaching near the destination is ‘Are you becoming content and happy with out reason or even without any of the aspired material possessions?” if not they you are still far off.