While pursuing ultimate reality is happiness the purpose or a byproduct?

Transcript

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the mind.
Thank you. Okay, good question. Very nice question.
So is happiness, is the attainment of happiness the reason why we pursue the ultimate reality? Or is it that we pursue the ultimate reality and happiness comes as a by-product? It works both ways. The two are not necessarily separated. If we consider love, we all are social creatures.
We want to love and be loved. At one level, when we want to love, why do we want to love and be loved? We want to be happy about it. But when we love someone truly, selflessly, at that time, sometimes for the sake of someone whom we love, we may do something which may not be what we like also.
So there is, we may seek love as a means to happiness. But when there is love, we may even be willing to do something that doesn’t really make us happy at the level of sensations immediately. But as the relationship deepens, that brings us happiness.
So we can say happiness is the purpose why we pursue loving relationships. But if there is a loving relationship, happiness comes as a by-product. We just act in a loving way and we feel that connection, we feel that satisfaction.
So similarly, for us, the search for ultimate reality is triggered by a search for deeper happiness. We can’t divorce the two. We are all happiness-seeking creatures.
And whatever we seek for, at one level or another, we are seeking happiness through it. Even if I do some hard work, which does not make me happy, but that hard work gives me money, which I hope will make me happy. So we are ultimately looking for happiness.
So it’s not that the search for happiness itself is something which is contrary to the search for ultimate reality. But sometimes the search for happiness can take us away from reality. Not to speak of ultimate reality, even material reality.
Sometimes some people may just start taking drugs or drinking too much. Then they are going into an illusory world where the search for happiness takes them away even from material reality, not to speak of ultimate reality. So if we understand that the search for reality and the search for happiness, they are ultimately the same search.
The yoga texts explain that we are spiritual beings, that we are souls, and one of the defining characteristics of the soul is ananda. The soul is joyful by nature. Sat, chit, ananda.
Ananda means happiness. The soul is by nature joyful, but to the extent the soul identifies with things outside of itself, to that extent its joyfulness gets covered. Just like a child may be sitting comfortably at home, but if the child is watching a horror movie, then as long as the child’s consciousness is caught in the horror movie, the child is horrified, cannot be happy, even when his comfortable mother is close by.
So as long as our consciousness is captivated by things outside of ourselves, to that extent, especially if those are material, sensual things, then we become alienated from our own nature. So the search for ultimate reality is what helps us to understand our own nature. So there is a whole and we are parts of that whole.
Just as we are joyful, but we are finite units, so our capacity to seek happiness on our own is finite, but we are parts of infinite consciousness, and that infinite consciousness is the source of infinite happiness. So we are sparks of spirit, and there is a whole spirit. So as sparks of spirit, we are finitely joyful, as the whole spirit is infinitely joyful.
So the search for ultimate reality is essentially the search where the finitely joyful soul links with the infinitely joyful supreme soul. And when this link happens, then there is joy as a natural result. So rather than seeing the two as separate, the search for pleasure and the search for ultimate reality, if we ensure that the search for joy doesn’t take us away from the ultimate reality, rather, we use our longing for happiness to pursue the path to ultimate reality.
And we accept whatever inconveniences or austerities are required for pursuing that ultimate reality. Because as I said, even in a loving relationship, sometimes we have to do something that you don’t like to do to deepen that relationship to please the other person. So similarly, for pursuing ultimate reality, if we are ready to do some things which don’t seem pleasant to us, that’s discipline, that’s austerity.
Then ultimately, as we become spiritually aware in the search for reality, and the search for happiness will culminate in the same destination, where we will be in the highest reality,