The Secret of Being Happy - 6.

(Spoken on October 19, 1972)

6.

If we have a quality in us, we will not ask for quantities. We will not want riches, buildings, lands and properties. We run after properties and quantitative possessions because quality is missing. When quality has been lost, we want to possess quantity; but unfortunately, quantity is a perishable entity. It comes and goes.

It never stays with a person. We cannot possess a building for all time. We cannot be rich or be a landholder for all time, nor even will we be able to possess this body for all time. So all quantitative associations of our personality are doomed to ultimate failure, and yet, unfortunately for us all, there is nothing in this world but a quantity.


The world is a huge body of mass which is a quantity. When we look at the stellar system, the solar system, we see a quantity. When we see earth and air and fire and ether, we see a quantity. When we see a human being, we see a quantitative body.

Everything is a quantity. But quantity, being external, material and physical, has a beginning and an end, and therefore, those who depend on these quantitative values for their happiness suffer in life. An unhappy person is that person who hangs his happiness on a quantity of the world.

It may be money, it may be a person, it may be an office, it may be land or a building; all these are perishable things which will desert us today or tomorrow. Ultimately, we cannot even have a friend in this world because friends, again, are quantitative relationships. It is one body connecting itself with another body. It will not last long.

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  ..