Towards happiness

The various shades of these diametrically opposite actions and reactions have really fractured life into endless segments. This type of life has often been termed as hollow and the hollow men and women constitute a collection of human beings in a market, where they have nothing common to share except profit. But profit is strictly a personalised entity. That is why the ‘advaidian’ preaches that life is an indivisible unit. Hence, humans at every moment have to do the practise of conquering and controlling the mind and sense organs. That is why it is said that there is no holiday for a moral man. The next question that arises is what should be the driving force behind the person who practises ‘sama’ and ‘dama’. That driving force has been technically called as ‘mumukshvitviam’ (the unending urge to attain nothing other than constant happiness). The aim of every human being, as it already has been explained in the previous chapters, every human being aims at enjoyment of happiness. How such a state of happiness can be enjoyed and how such a state of happiness can be maintained constantly without any distractions are the two important questions that are to be encountered by one and all. There is no royal path to success and salvation. A person who wants to attain ‘mumukshvitviam’ has to be careful about the context in which lives and the demands made by such a context. Man as a contextual entity should be the concern and the criterion of every discipline that aims at ‘mumukshvitviam’. A person who aims at ‘mumukshvitviam’ is not expected to get satisfied by anything other than constant peace, harmony and happiness. The human being who has been located in the context of a market economy always thinks that he or she should be able to get happiness, peace and harmony through the commodities available in the market. Market cannot survive without having consumers; a flourishing market always depends on greedy consumers. Greed is a state of experience in which one never gets satisfaction through accumulation of goods. That is why man as a market being always tries to skip from one brand to another on the presumption that changing of brands can give him/her more and more of happiness. But unfortunately, if one brand is incapable to ensure peace, happiness and satisfaction then the other brand also will never be able to ensure the same. That is why the corporate in the market engage in introducing and changing new brands with slight modifications of the old one. A person who dedicates oneself for uncompromising happiness, harmony and satisfaction has to realise a simple fact that no brands available in the market are capable of ensuring harmony, peace or happiness. It is because of the fact that no brand available in the market by itself is capable to ensure the same. If the multiplicity of brands can provide happiness then its basic unit must also be able to provide happiness. This fact has often been concealed by the market to project a false claim that market is enough to provide happiness. A person who aims at ‘mumukshvitviam’ has to realise that market is unable to provide happiness because market is only ‘maya’ condensed. Maya and happiness has been brilliantly explained by Rishis in the ‘Upanishads’ with an appealing simile that one cannot put out fire supplying dry wood to it. That is, the unending desire cannot be satisfied providing goods to get the desires satisfied. Hence, the Rishis have got the opinion that the best way to conquer the market is to control the desires. Market falsely believes that the universe is capable of providing goods in abundance to satisfy the greed of one and all. So the economics of the market depends on a false notion of abundance of natural resources. They believe in enlargement of the area of the market to satisfy the unending desires of the human beings.