Everyone desires happiness — even those who seek pain do so to achieve satisfaction and fulfill a need. Happiness represents our fundamental yearning for fulfillment through pleasure or pain avoidance. We often believe fulfillment comes from earning money, gaining fame, building businesses, developing relationships, starting families, acquiring knowledge, traveling, or maintaining health. However, these achievements rarely produce lasting happiness. Their rewards prove temporary, and they frequently generate additional desires, leading us back to emptiness.
Pursuing happiness this way carries a cost. In our dualistic world — where both subject and object exist — sorrow inevitably accompanies happiness. Nature and creation balance themselves through their opposite. The physical world operates through Newton’s law of motion: every action produces an equal reaction. Each favorable moment must be balanced by eventual sorrow.
Physical reality requires opposites to exist. The yin-yang symbol illustrates this principle: within darkness exists light, and within light exists darkness. These opposing forces are actually complementary — neither could exist alone. Without sadness, how would happiness be recognizable? Without “down,” how would “up” have meaning? Opposites are essential for creating physical reality.
However, Buddha and other spiritual masters described personal reality as illusion. They taught that truth resides in the present moment of direct experience. Once that moment passes, it becomes memory, conversation, comparison, diagnosis, and judgment — all based on standards we establish. Remaining outside the present keeps us trapped in duality’s cycle of happiness, sadness, birth, and death.
Ancient and contemporary spiritual teachers describe a state transcending physical duality’s dual nature — a place of authentic joy unencumbered by sorrow. The Eastern concept of Advaita (non-duality) was taught centuries ago and remains central to modern philosophers like Rupert Spira and Francis Lucille. Vedic texts, the Bhagavad Gita, and Jesus’s mystical teachings all describe reaching non-duality’s ultimate state of genuine bliss.
Note: Bliss describes internal joy free from additional desires and, ultimately, from sorrow — the ultimate consciousness state all humans consciously or unconsciously seek.
Have we pursued happiness in the wrong places? Paramahansa Yogananda, an enlightened spiritual master who introduced Eastern teachings to the West in 1926, addressed this in The Science of Religion. He explained that our sensory self — perceiving external influences and material processes — drives us to seek tangible outcomes like success, possessions, or financial gain for happiness. Yet our happy moments inevitably encounter sadness or depression. However, controlling outer senses and turning inward reveals internal silence containing our deepest self-knowledge and true nature. Through pranayama (yogic breath control) and complete Kriya yoga methods learned from realized teachers, we can transcend duality and attain non-duality’s state of eternal joy. Kriya yoga instruction is available at www.yogananda-srf.org or www.ananda.org.
We may continue pursuing dreams through sensory stimulation or explore our true nature through practices taught by realized souls. These lessons demand effort — nothing great comes without it. Through this work, eternal joy awaits.