BLISS:

BLISS:

There was one other crucial thing I realized, shortly after the museum. I had promised one of my teachers that I would be happy. Not that I would get good grades in college, get good pay at work, nor meet all the criteria that might qualify me for some materialistic standard of success. She only made me promise to be HAPPY. An other teacher that I had had once insisted that it was not happiness but Meaning that truly mattered. Yet she was even more severe in rejecting all of the materialistic values that consumer society is heir to. And this imbibed within me the suspicion that women, instinctively, do not TRULY care about your status in society. They are DRAWN to that happiness that comes FROM living meaningfully. Hence so many of them take up yogic practices rather early in life. And I thought of my family, and how I still wanted, in spite of everything, to be my parents’ child. I wanted them to prioritize me and my sister over everyone else, save for my dog. I wanted them to rejoice at my successes and to aid me in my times of struggle. I wanted unconditional love. And oddly enough I felt like, at long last, I had it.

And this dawned upon me: that all my feelings came from an Intelligent Source. My passions were neither good nor bad, but they were rights. Any thing that could be expressed beautifully, as in those paintings that I saw, was an end in and of itself, to be defended against the naysaying society. Society was an illusion; Art was Real. My family would protect that, now. So would friends.

Evil does not want me to be Happy. Evil cannot be happy FOR me, hence it must all ways express its interests in opposition to mine. What is convenient to me is all ways suspect; even if I had to crawl out of depraving depression and madness, only to save some one I loved from the same fate (or worse), evil would knock me down moments from fulfillment. That is why it pretends that my own convenience is not one of its priorities, by which my human fellows might measure their virtue, but rather the very incriminating factor against me. Evil would abuse that strain of martyrdom that wound me up down there in the first place, directing my self-sacrifice in its own favour. But why should I be happy for someone who can’t be happy for me? Once I’ve seen evidence for this, I do not need to lead evil by a good example; I know it will not follow. It is not the desire to be Happy, even when Happiness Matters, that is Evil, but rather the desire to seek a meaningless “happiness” at the expense of one’s fellows. Yet if others cannot be happy for me, and my joy must all ways by definition serve their sorrow, it is not my evil, but theirs.

So I rest assured that with all the Good Things that lie ahead, Joy and Bliss will be there, too. And Evil will not reach me. Rather than serving its crusade of misery I will allow my fellow empaths to feed off of my Plentiful Joy.

Dm.A.A.