What is the real aim of life?

His Divine Holiness Bhagavan Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam has delivered almost 20,000 hours of recorded talks till date. As part of the talks, He shares simple small stories that give powerful cognitive shifts to the listener. Following is one such story:

Ninety-nine percent of us are not even aware that bliss is our true goal! Because

we are unaware, we search outside ourselves for this bliss. We search everywhere in the outside world for something which is there within us, just waiting to be discovered.

A small story:

One evening, a man was searching hard for something in the courtyard in his house. His wife asked him what it was. He replied that he had dropped a gold coin. His wife also joined in the search.

Soon, others gathered and practically the whole neighborhood was searching for the lost coin. Suddenly one neighbor asked the man, 'Where exactly did you drop the coin? How come we still haven't found it?'

The man replied, 'Oh, I lost the coin inside the house.'

Everybody searching became angry and asked him, 'Then why are we searching here?'

The man replied, 'The problem is I have no lights inside my house. So I started

searching by the light of this streetlamp here!'

This is exactly what we do in our own lives. We are all experts in searching for answers in the wrong places. We search for bliss everywhere, in money, power, relationships, ideologies, but we don't move in the one obvious direction – inwards.