Should happiness be the goal of living if happiness is often fleeting? If not, what do you think should replace it as the goal of living?

It’s considered to be a good development when one realizes that in this world, happiness is fleeting. Nevertheless, happiness indeed is and should be the ultimate goal of every living being. But what kind of happiness should that be? Should it be a temporary or permanent happiness? Obviously, permanent! So, our goal of living should be to seek permanent happiness.

Life after life, happiness is what every living being in this Universe is hunting for. And the Enlightened One explains how this is the very purpose of reincarnation. One takes life after life in order to experience the fact and conclude that the happiness in worldly things is indeed temporary, not often, but always!

The Enlightened One explains:

“We get the experience of worldly things that these are all temporary and it doesn’t give any permanent happiness; that experience we are getting after each and every life.
Worldly things can never give any permanent happiness, and that we are experiencing. And when we take a decision that, ‘This is not giving permanent happiness, I want to realize something permanent’, that will give you permanent happiness. This process is going on in every life.
At every point, we have to get experience that there is no permanent happiness; only Soul, when we realize our Soul, who am I, Self-Realization, that will give you permanent happiness.

So this is the developing stage (until when the fleeting happiness is the goal of our life).
We don’t know our Self - who am I. And whatever body, whatever relation comes, we are believing that, ‘I am this, I am this name, I am this body, I am this relation.’ Due to that ignorance, we are charging karma. And later, we have to suffer that discharge karma. But once we know ‘who am I’, that is more important because the ultimate goal of the life is to, ‘Realize yourself - who am I’ That is the ultimate goal!

And without knowing this, we keep believing that, ‘I am so and so, I am husband, I am wife, I am engineer, I am Doctor.’ We do experience, ‘Oh this is not my real being. I should be beyond this. What is my real being? What is my real existence? Who am I?’ We are searching from life to life, since infinite lives, we are searching this. And ultimately, when we realize that, ‘Oh! I am a pure Soul. And all these relations are temporary adjustments, it is not with me. I am permanently as a pure Soul’, once we realize that thing, then that is the end of this worldly life (taking birth after birth forever). And slowly, slowly, within one or two or 3 lifetimes, we get liberation. That is the goal.

We want to experience where is the permanent happiness; ‘from where will I get permanent happiness, what is my true being, what is my true Self - I want to know’, that is the goal of life. If that is not realized, then again and again, we’ll have to take birth and rebirth, and search what is permanent happiness, what is my real being, what is my existence, and why am I existing, who am I – that you have to search again and again.”

Eternal happiness i.e. bliss is within you. Your real Self, i.e. the Soul is an abode of infinite bliss and yet you are looking for happiness in temporary things!

Soul is endowed with resultant bliss! One himself is Soul, no one else can take its happiness away from him. One (as Soul), by nature, is free of all pain and suffering. He has tremendous (powerful) grandeur (splendor)! How can any misery affect him?
~ Param Pujya Dada Bhagwan