Conditional Happiness

Swami Sarvapriyananda, my favorite teacher of philosophy, talks about why happiness conditioned on worldly events, possessions or people, is inherently sorrowful and not true happiness.

The full talk is about 3 mantras in the Katha Upanishad, where Nachiketa, a little boy given by his annoyed father to the Lord of Death, Yamaraja visits him. Yamaraja is not home when Nachiketa visits, so he grants three boons to make up for his lapse. Nachiketa asks for knowledge of the self - but Yamaraja offers him all the wealth and pleasures that he can imagine instead. Nachiketa refuses.

Swami Sarvapriyananda tells us why:

He also wants happiness, but he is deep enough, profound enough to see that true happiness is not conditional. What do I mean by conditional?

I want happiness, you want happiness, we all want happiness. But the moment you say “I want happiness from this person - from husband, wife, children”, then you have made your happiness conditional. What has happened is, you don’t want happiness - you want husband, wife, children. If you make it conditional, then happiness has to come through there. You have this feeling, “it is there”, and it has to come through there.

The moment you say happiness is there, with this person, then you have tied yourself with that person. You have invested your happiness with that person. It is no longer free, it’s not Jeevanmukti. It has become conditional on that person.

“Happiness must come through money. Yes I want happiness, but through money, I have to be rich to be happy” - you have made happiness conditional on wealth. You want wealth, not happiness.

Somewhere, there is a deep psychological mistake we are making. We are limiting our happiness, making it conditional on wealth, on pleasure, on persons - no matter who. The moment you’ve made your happiness conditional, it is no longer free.

That thing now has power over you.

You feel “with more wealth I will be more happy " - you never will. There is no happiness there. There is no happiness in wealth, in husband, in wife, in children, in friends. No happiness. But we have made the deep mistake of thinking that happiness is there. Now we have tied ourselves to those things, and we have given them power over our happiness.

And, that will make you unhappy.

This is the nature of bondage, where you have given up your happiness to things in the world.

When I (do not) free my happiness from things in the world - it could be persons, places, money, jobs, praise, fame, likes on facebook - if I have sold my happiness to them, if I have kept my happiness in their power, they are going to make me unhappy.

And it’s so unnecessary. Because the happiness is not theirs. It’s MY happiness, it comes from the self, it comes from the Atman.

Nachiketa rejects all this because Yamaraja is making happiness conditional.

(Edited for readability)