An Equation for Happiness

The materialists believe that by fanning up their desires and satisfying as many of them as possible, one is helped to live a life of joy and happiness.Modern civilisation, based upon industrialisation and large-scale production, is attempting to step up desires, and this attempt has now succeeded to such an extent that the average man has a million times more desires today than his forefathers had ever entertained a century ago.On the other hand, the great thinkers of the past in India, through their experience, and careful and exhaustive thinking, discovered that the joy created through satisfaction of desires could never be complete. According to them:Happiness = (number of desires fulfilled) / (total number of desires entertained)In the modern world, the attempt is to increase the numerator. The scriptural masters of India were also living in a world populated by a society of men. Their aim too, was to bring about more happiness in their society. But unlike the present ‘prophets of profit’, the saints and sages did not conceive that an attempt to increase the numerator without a corresponding attention upon the rate of increase of the denominator, could produce any palpable increase of joy. On the other hand, today we are struggling hard to increase ‘the number of desires fulfilled’, without at the same time trying to control the ‘number of desires entertained’. That this state of affairs cannot produce any increase in the quotient of happiness is an easily understandable scientific truth.The 'desirer of desires' can never achieve perfect peace. Only he, who has in a spirit of detachment gained complete control over his mind, so that the sense objects of the outer world cannot create in him an infinite number of yearnings or desires, is the man of peace and joy.Desire for the possession of anything becomes an obsession when it grows out of proportion.

An Equation for Happiness

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