Swami Vivekananda on Happiness

It’s not the purpose of life…

In one of his essays on karma yoga, Swami Vivekananda admonishes us that the purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge. That may not be too surprising coming from a spiritual teacher, but it moves the goal post in terms of what we are trying to accomplish in this life — even for those of us who aren’t particularly spiritually advanced.

For most of Western society, the “pursuit of happiness” along with life and liberty (from the U.S. Declaration of Independence) is paramount. Folks are trying to be happy, although given the amount of airtime dedicated to medication for depression, it doesn’t seem like we’re too successful at it.

Yet it’s not just the abundance of people with clinical depression, however over-diagnosed that may be. A general melancholy and malaise often turns up in casual conversations, even in simple little complaints like “it’s always something” or “I can never catch a break.” We’re trying to be happy, with mediocre results, and even the best of times often seems fleeting.

That’s one of the pillars of Eastern thought, particularly in Buddhism and Vedantic Hinduism: life is suffering, and even good times eventually pass away and leave suffering in their wake. From the Eastern perspective, the pursuit of happiness is pretty much a fool’s errand.

Swami Vivekananda delivers this truth to Westerners with a little bit of spice. We’re going about it all wrong, he says. Rather than pursuing the ephemera of transient happiness, we should be focused on uncovering the truth, the foundation of reality itself. On the other side of that discovery we find not passing happiness, but eternal bliss.

There’s nothing new to this, of course. Spiritual teachers East and West have delivered some form of this message for millennia. It sounds simple enough, but I wonder how much we actually incorporate it into our worldviews — even those of us who consider ourselves to be ‘on a spiritual path.’ For myself, I can say that I value spiritual knowledge as the true goal of life, but I don’t mind just a little bit more happiness when I can snag it.

To the extent that we can really make the shift from happiness to knowledge, some interesting vistas open up. Negative experiences (or I should say, those that we judge as negative) become learning experiences that teach us about our attachments and aversions. More difficult, but perhaps more valuable, those experiences that we find pleasurable at some level and which bring us happiness can also teach us about our attachments and aversions (like the aversion to losing the feeling of happiness).

But maybe the greatest advantage in making the shift from being happiness-centric to knowledge-focused is that it takes the pressure off. People that count themselves as unhappy don’t need to feel like failures, because ‘happiness’ isn’t the goal. There’s no need to compare oneself to the images of happiness that are presented to us in the media and via social media.

Even in more secular, psychological, circles, it’s been pointed out that happiness is not an end in itself so much as a bi-product of meaningful work, healthy relationships, and service to a goal. If that goal is spiritual knowledge, so much the better.