“At certain moments, when alone, we feel a great lack deep within ourselves. This lack is the central one giving rise to all the others. The need to fill this lack, quench this thirst, urges us to think and act. Without even questioning it, we run away from this insufficiency. We try to fill it first with one object then with another, then, disappointed, we go from one compensation to another, from failure to failure, from one source of suffering to another, from one war to another. This is the destiny to which a large part of humanity devotes itself. Some resign themselves to this state of being which they judge to be inevitable. Others at first deluded by the satisfaction brought about by these objects come to realize that they give rise to a surfeit and even to indifference. Some are brought to take a closer look. The object fully satisfies us for a short time during which we are back in our intrinsic nature, fulfillment.

At the moment of fullness there is no awareness of an object. Thus the object cannot be the cause of our experience. It is essential to come to know these moments of joy without object. We habitually attribute a cause to joy, we turn joy into an object because memory links the two together, but in reality they are of two entirely different natures. Thus we realize that the object is consumed in the joy of our being.”
– Jean Klein

“The memory of freedom lives in us all. This wound of separation, this longing for freedom, for peace, for happiness, that each of us feel, is in fact the echo in each of our finite minds, of the true freedom of infinite consciousness. There is no other freedom other than the freedom of infinite consciousness. Infinite consciousness is freedom, peace, happiness itself. The deisre each of us feels, for that freedom, for that peace, that happiness, is the pull that infinite consciousness exerts on the finite mind. The finite mind feels that pull in the form of suffering — ‘I long for happiness’.

The separate self feels as if IT is doing the longing. It is not. It is infinite consciousness that is exerting a force on the finite mind – drawing it back into itself. It is in fact the pull FROM infinite consciousness on the finite mind, that is what the finite mind calls the desire for happiness.

When consciousness overlooks the nature of it’s own being, it gives birth to the universe from within itself, and then it finds itself located AS a self in that universe. Having done so, it has had to forget it’s innate nature of peace and freedom. That is why the self in the world longs for one thing alone – peace and freedom. The only thing the separate self is really engaged in, is the discovery of peace, freedom, and happiness.

It first tries to do this by uniting with objects, substances, states, and relationships. At some point it gets to the end of that adventure, it realizes it could never be satisfied by objective experience. That is when the real journey back home begins. What is the nature of my mind? One realizes nothing in life truly satisfies. That takes the mind on a journey backwards toward its source. In this return journey, the mind is progressively divested of its limitations. THAT is the experience of happiness.”
– Rupert Spira