The attainment of true happiness tells us where to place our focus...
Here is a nice verse and commentary spoken by Narada Muni to Gopa Kumar in Vaikuntha. He is describing the "quality of life" that will become available to us when we actually attain real devotion...
Here we see Gopa Kumar when he finally meets Krishna
personally for the first time.
Brhad Bhagavatamrita Chapter four text192
Because the Lord's pure devotees are absorbed in their true identity of eternity, knowledge, and bliss, they do not accept inferior happiness as great. Nor do they get involved with the petty pleasures of the materialists nor of sanyasis with impersonalist views.
COMMENTARY
"Ordinary people may by ignorance consider meagre pleasure to be great, but the Vaisnavas are not fooled. Because materialists entrapped in the cycle of birth and death are motivated by urges for sense gratification, such materialists consider the stimulation of sensory contact to be real happiness.
Similarly, impersonal renunciants cultivating knowledge of their spiritual identity, hope to find real happiness in liberation. In most cases, however, the impersonalist sanyasis do not even reach the petty happiness for which they aspire.
The cause of frustration for both the materialists and the impersonalists is their failure to realise their own true nature as spiritual souls.
A person who actually realises himself as pure spirit can never consider material happiness complete, nor can he be enticed by trivial sense gratification, nor by the meagre happiness of impersonal liberation, because he's immersed in the most intense ecstasy."
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While, like myself, you too might be so are far away from such an elevated realization, it is valuable to hear that such a quality experience is guaranteed for everyone who seriously takes up the path of pure devotional service.
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