Everybody is looking for happiness. If you ask a person what will make him happy, he will tell you about his wants and what will make him be happy. He may define happiness as having lots of money, owning a car, or owning a house. But are these really a pathway to happiness and fulfillment. These are but objects which you think will make you happy. But the more you start owning these things the list does not end here, it keeps on growing.

If somebody asks us who we are, what answer do we give them? We generally identify ourselves with our body and tell them our name, profession, where we are working etc. etc. But is this the true self. Our ancestors for thousands of years tried to answer this question and came to the conclusion that we have a body made of flesh, bones and excreta. We also have awareness inside us.

Our identifying ourselves with the body is only our EGO. EGO is nothing but identifying ourselves with a wrong thing. It is this EGO that gets attracted to worldly things thinking that we will find happiness in it. Little do we know that worldly things keep on changing causing us a lot of pain. What a child wants varies with what an elderly person wants.

All these things are being observed with something inside us which we may classify as our awareness, soul, and consciousness.

The general property of our soul is Purity, Peace, Love, Joy, Bliss, Powers, and Knowledge.

In our journey of life after a time period on this earth, we are forced to shed our body (on our death). Then only the soul remains together with the habits we have acquired in this life to occupy another body and continue its life. The soul is always indestructible and it keeps on collecting habits from each life it has passed through. That is why we find people with different habits good or bad. No one has to teach them these habits. They have an affinity towards it.

When we intermingle with other people we have to accept them with a person having a soul and not by their profession nor status of the jobs they do.

This makes us look upon them as having a soul who like us have collected their own habits in this passage or travel of the soul from one life to another.

This is the first step of change we must bring in our life which is the awareness that everyone has a soul and whatever suffering or happiness he is going through is because of the habit he has collected in his previous life.

The same applies to you too.

When we go to meet the chairman of a company as part of our work we first pass the security at the gate whom we hardly notice. Then we come to the reception and we greet the lady there with a smile.

When we reach the Manager of the company our way of talking and our body language has changed considerably.

When we finally meet the Chairman of the company we will be talking to him about a lot of things. But our mind is not thinking about these things. They may be thinking of other things while your tongue speaks a lot of things your mind is not thinking about.

Hence in about 10 minutes, you have changed yourself about 4 times.

All this while you are conscious of the different roles you are playing. This is the main difference between consciousness and consciousness.

If we had accepted all 4 people we met as having a soul we would have treated them equally.

This is the first change we must make in our lives to lead a peaceful and happy life. This is what accepting and not expecting is about.