Final blessedness (ICA)

This is the awareness that one's life has eternal worth, which becomes synonymous with the word happy – happiness that has nothing whatever to do with external causes or rational achievement. If a person must find something to become happy about he will never grasp the reality of happiness. This is Camus' story "A Happy Death". It may be compared to Mrs. Gandhi's statement a few days before her death, when she said that if death were to come to her now she knew that her life and death would help to create a new India.

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe, that is fear and fascination. There is awareness of the incongruities of life (but this is in the background) and a sadness when the individual senses that some will never consciously know a moment like this. He finds he asks "What if no-one shares the fruit of this time ?"; but there is fascination with the sense of having "arrived", and satisfaction with living the life he has been given. He takes the stance of "you may kill me but you cannot destroy me", fascinated with the feeling that he has done it all and that there is no need for more. He decides that the struggle is stopped, suspended and that even death is full of meaning. What remains is a knowledge that his life is great just as it is and a sense of "now understand what this game of life is all about".

This state is number 60 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.