Joy - absolute happiness- is possible || Acharya Prashant (2014)

Question: Sir, what is happiness? And what is the relation between happiness and Joy?

Speaker: Whatever pleases the mind, whatever the mind likes, is called happiness for the mind. Simple, whatever pleases the mind is happiness. Whatever means whatever, could be anything. There are no complexities in this. Whatever the mind likes, is its happiness.

Obviously the question of liking something, being attracted towards something, arises only when there is a feeling of incompletion. The greater is the feeling of incompletion the stronger is the like. The stronger is the like, the more happy we are. That is the entire game of liking and disliking. The more is your suffering, the deeper is your incompletion and the greater is the intensity of your likes. You will be a very passionate man. Eager to achieve happiness. Let us just call that as the ‘plane of duality’ in which the mind usually operates.

See, this plane, let say the X-Y plane,(Indicating the XY plane with a sweep of his hand parallel to the floor) is the plane of duality. Let the X axis represent happiness. Let the Y axis represent suffering or incompletion and there is the clear linear relationship between the two. Something like Y is equal to mX (y = mx). One can increase only with a proportionate increase in the other. You cannot have happiness without incompletion.

The stronger is the pull that an object causes in you, the more certain it is that you have been missing that object. Is it not so? The more you have been missing something, the greater is the pleasure in achieving it. So, to have the pleasure of achieving, you must first greatly miss it. No missing, no pleasure. That’s that XY plane.