a computer geek's analogy.

What is happiness, the word being one of the basic building blocks of the vocabulary/dictionary is a little difficult to explain/define. Lemme assume the foll meaning:

Happiness: State of Non-Conflict.

Left side of the equation: Mind in view of Buddhist/EasternPhil Ideas and the concept of Closure.
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Meditation: Nothingness(Hindu School), Mindfullness(Buddhist School), supposedly is a state of immense calm and peace.
Closure is a term in psychology which means broadly coming to terms emotionally with tragedy, or rapidly ending the misery caused by grievous loss. People recovering from love affairs also sometimes yearn for closure. If we generalise this, we can say that any incomplete thing in ur life demands closure, its like "completing" an incomplete circle, and this drives human nature(on of the many drivers). So every human seeks closure, and until he finds that he knows no peace.
]

Right side of the equation: Operating System(Linux/Windows) Processes.
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At any given time in the runtime of a operating-system(Computer) there are numerous processes, some active, some sleeping/waiting, some dead, some runaway(out of control). They do the computation and other work on the user's behalf, for eg: play a movie, retrieve data from archives, chat etc. Processes can spawn other child-processes and so on.
Abbr: OS = Operating System
]
Analogy(the equation):

Our Mind can be compared to a computer, an OS, managing innumerable activities and thoughts. A normal meditative state is one where no active computation is taking place. One can say all the processes are in inactive or sleeping state. The buddhist medidative mindfullness can be compared to a super-active *ps*(a command that lists all active processes) process that watches all the active processes without interfering. The human mind knows no rest and is continuously spawning new processes, each process contributing something to the mental patterns(RAM or hard-disk memory) and to the very thing it is part of. This thing(OS) keeps changing its form unlike the non-changing OS kernel that runs in a computer. New processes are spawned from the interaction of user and computer, that is the interaction between the environment/surroundings and the mind. The environment need not be external, it may also be internal(memory/RAM/hard-disk). Now normally in a computer OS there is a distinct link between the parent process and the child process, and hence its easier to control and make sense of conventional processes than the mental processes which seem intractable. In an OS, a runaway process is one which has gone awry and out-of-control, whose parent has lost it. An active runaway process, will eat away at ur computation cycles(ur mental cycles) and you wont even know it. Now lets go back to the definition of happiness and to the concept of closure. Lets say all ur active and sleeping processes are not malicious and in control, so it is the runaway processes that contribute to the state of mental conflict, bcos the concept of closure dictates that the runaway processes(incomplete) terminate(complete) normally, but u have no way to control them or you are ignorant of their existence. So a happy computer;) wud be one which has no runaway processes - state of non-conflict. Now how to close these processes?
Btw the very awareness or knowledge that there are runaway processes eating away at ur mental peace will pave the way, without which you will never get out of the conflict state.
There are two ways to obtain closure:
1. Hook into the runaway process and allow it to complete/terminate normally. Normal Closure.
2. *kill -9* (an OS command that forcefully terminates processes). Forced Closure.
Both are difficult.

Note: Incomplete, will close the blog some other day, until that day I will know no complete peace;) [EDIT: Actually thats not true, the blog post is of course still incomplete, just like most (non-mathematical) theories are.]