QUICKEST WAY TO PERMANENT HAPPINESS
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“You’re always doing something but why are you doing these things? Why does a thief become a thief? Why does a person rob a bank? … The answer of course is everyone is looking for happiness. Everyone wants happiness and this is their way of showing they want happiness. A thief believes if he steals something from you this will make him happy because he’ll have something he never had before. Everything you do in life is to achieve happiness. Ponder this. In retrospect go over your life and see if I’m not saying the truth.

Whatever you’re doing in life you’re doing it because you want some happiness. Even though you think you’re helping somebody else or you’re helping somebody, deep down inside of yourself you really want to be happy. So whatever you’re doing you’re doing it for your own happiness. But what if I told you that real happiness is within yourself? Unalloyed happiness is within you. Pure happiness, eternal happiness, forever happiness, is within you. It is your true nature, it is your real nature. If you can just touch this happiness you will never depend on the world again for anything.

For this happiness I’m referring to is sat-chit-nanda [existence-consciousness-bliss], the absolute reality, the pure awareness. This happiness is so beautiful, so blissful that you will never react to person place or thing again for any reason whatsoever. For you will be fulfilled. Filled with joy, harmony, love. When a person discovers this, this person is very fortunate. To discover they have within themselves the storehouse of happiness. To discover there is eternal happiness within. Even if you discover it intellectually at first by reading about it, listening to me talk about it. For when you know [this], you have a mission—a search—to unfold this happiness within you and become free.

Now how do you do this? The truth about this is you just discover that you are happiness. You may hear my words or read a book or read it somewhere else and you’ll awaken to it. You’ll awaken to it by making the mind still and quiet. By not having any conflict with your mental thoughts. You then discover a great peace, a fountain of joy inside of you that you never really knew existed before. This is the beginning of wisdom. When you begin to feel and think [that] person, place and thing in this world can never bring me true happiness.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)