One of our main characteristics is that we try to conceive all that we live, that is we tend to build always a representation, a meaning about that what we experience. We do not have simple feelings, but conceived feelings, not direct moods, but mediated ones, namely mediated by our thought. It was said that human being is a rational animal.
When we think about something, there is also a weird tendency to relate that thought process to some valuing, to discovering what is the value of that what we think about. Usually, it is a moral value that we seek. For example, when we try to be happy, there is, on the one hand, the question what is happiness , and, on the other hand, in the background also the question do I deserve to be happy. This latter question concerns the moral aspect.
Religion always related happiness with moral and it is still a question if one can be happy without being virtuous. Happiness is not an individual issue, we cannot be happy by living alone. Our happiness depends on the way we interact with others. Due to this interaction what we do to others reverberates on us, offering us a pleasant feeling or inducing in us a negative mood. Or conversely, it is possible that somebody harmed us, and the wounds never healed.
Those who imagine that they can be happy harming others deceive themselves, because even if, by doing that, they can get some momentary advantage, their conscience preserves unwillingly the unpleasant feeling of that harming and it cannot forget. An evil man is inevitably a man withdrawn into himself and therefore in fact an empty person.
That is the reason why the path toward happiness is not always a simple path: there are so many obstacles inside of us that hinder us to become happy. The most of them are subconscious so that we do not even know them. We cannot think how we would look like if there would be no such obstacles in us if there would be no negative feelings in us. Rooted in our subconscious, such negativity does not show us its causes. Therefore man must somehow go beyond himself, finding a point that allows him to forgive himself. By forgiving himself he surpasses his negativity, revalues his person and his existence, and gives himself a real chance of happiness. Oddly enough this capacity of the human being to go beyond himself is exactly his rationality.

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