The Secret of Being Happy : 4.

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.
So what is our fate, ultimately? To suffer, it looks like that. From birth to death there is a tension and agony and vexation in the mind. We do not know how to make a complaint and about what to make a complaint. It is all mystery and agony and sorrow from creation onwards. Why? Because the very conception of creation of the world is a quantitative concept. Even if we think of the whole universe at one stroke, it is a quantity that we are thinking in our mind, and therefore, even our logic of the cosmos is only a transference of these quantitative values which we attribute to the ordinary objects of the world.

The mind has four defects, on account of which it reads only defects in things. One is, first of all, that the item of quantity which presents itself before the mind is a source of unhappiness for the mind, as I have explained to you. Quantity – everything is a quantity, a mass, and a physical body. This is a source of trouble for us because we cannot possess them always, nor can we establish a relationship with them.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ....