What do people want, really want? They want to be happy. Everyone loves their life. They want to find happiness, find expression, find love, find joy. This desire for happiness is universal.

The desire to live and the fear of death are something that is shared by all human beings and most living beings. This very survival instinct is inherent in your physical body and it drives certain actions. The desire for happiness is also inherent, the striving to find joy in life, to find meaning in life; and many people seek happiness in different objects, in different types of experiences. The mind imagines what will make you happy and then you begin to seek whatever it is, whatever images are in the mind of what happiness means.

And they may be material objects; they may be friendships; they may be accomplishments in the world. They may be appreciated and admired by others. Many different things bring the images that happiness contains for people.

And within each person there is a certain restlessness that keeps you moving in life, keeps you engaged in life. You don’t want to remain stagnant; you want to find this happiness, whatever it is. And so you come up with various ideas of what happiness means to you and how you are going to find it.

And you spend a great deal of time and energy trying to fulfill this desire, trying to meet these goals or acquire these objects or situations which you feel will make you happy. Maybe it’s security that makes you happy; maybe it’s accomplishment that makes you happy. Maybe it’s intellectual striving that makes you happy, and acknowledgment. Happiness comes in many forms.

In many people it comes in forms that can end up taking something from someone else—if your happiness is dependent on material objects or your happiness is dependent on achievements that take something from someone else for you to climb the ladder of success, or for you to have the wealth which leaves others impoverished—then those goals of happiness, though they may be personally fulfilling, become destructive to other people.

How to find happiness in compassionate ways, that feed life, that improve life for living beings, that don’t take away something from someone else? Material success, material abundance, great wealth, and hoarding of wealth take something that is limited away from someone else. The same is true for accomplishment when it is at the price of other people’s happiness.

Happiness in the physical realm when achieved is there for a time. You love your new car, you love your house, you love whatever material objects that you have, but after a time the joy of having them does not fulfill that restlessness inside of you. It doesn’t end that restlessness.

And the same if your happiness comes from some achievement in life or something that you’ve achieved…may be meaningful, you may hold to it, but soon you find that that same restlessness, that same need to strive, to find something more, something greater to fulfill your needs rises again, continually, rising again, rising again, no matter how many objects or how much material success you have, no matter how much success in the world in the eyes of other people, how much you’re admired or how accomplished you are, no matter what, you find that same restlessness arises.

Ultimately, with deep self-reflection can be seen that that restlessness that continually arises, no matter what you achieve or accomplish to secure your happiness, is an inherent need, an inherent longing that was deep in your psyche, deep in the psyche of every human being. Deep in the psyche of many, many beings is this inherent draw to return to your natural state of being, to return to your state of complete fulfillment, the real state of happiness where this restlessness is no longer there, where it is not going to rise from within you and drive you again to seek something else. This happiness comes from the spirit; it comes from your connection to wholeness.

When the love of the human heart is fulfilled, when being is united in wholeness, then the need to grasp dissolves. When your striving moves from the physical and the mental realms into the spiritual realms, you are relieved of your burden of continual striving. When in the spiritual realm you find the deep peace that comes in knowing, in being, in love that is undefined and unconfined, there you find the wholeness of your deeper existence. There you begin to merge with your Self, the larger Self, the Self of your self, the divine essence of all being.

In that truth, in that wholeness, where the duplicity and the multi-forms of creations meld into one, your awareness, your being, your soul, your Atman, returns to its natural state of being, absorbed in the greater whole of being. You become one, indistinguishable from the vast ocean of infinity; as the drop of water dropped out of the glass container into the sea, it ceases to be isolated. The sense of separation that creates that isolation is broken, dissolved, and you become whole.

When you become whole, that inherent restlessness is no more. That is true happiness. Happiness that does not change with form, does not dissipate with the sands of time. Happiness that is eternal, pure, and a return to wholeness.

Fundamentally the cause, the deep cause of pain in every human being is the separation between yourself and the wholeness of being. The pain of separateness causes an inherent restlessness, an inherent desire to seek that wholeness, and the mind forms many images to attempt to define that wholeness. That wholeness is not definable by the mind because it lies in something deeper than the mind. It lies in your soul, in your Atman. It lies in your natural state of being, which is wholeness.

Only through the embodiment in a body-mind and the formation of the ego, of the “I am separate from all that is”—the senses reinforce this, the sense of “I” and “thou”—and in the pain of this separation you find your dissolution. In the wholeness of being there is true happiness.