In pursuing happiness I seek also its opposite. Like white from black and life from death, happiness is implied by its opposite, was simultaneously born with it, and now codepends with it.

In pursuing satiation I seek also hunger. In wishing for pleasure I wish also for pain. I think we associate happiness with satisfaction of first plane desires on the “good” ends of these balances. The “good” ends are those that our conditioning prefers: satiation, rest, sex.

However my second plane mind tells me of gluttony, sloth and lust. And that there is too much of a good thing, not because I have read so in religious dogma, but because I have personally experienced the extremism of eating constantly without allowing for hunger, rest without intermittent work, and sex without intermittent chastity.

Because the “goods” imply their opposites. True virtue lies in the balance, and a greater virtue comes from extending the heights of the one and the depths of its opposite, to undulate with a wider amplitude. And there is a balance between itself and unbalance in order to allow these amplitudes to increase, to allow for extremism on one end in order to return higher (or deeper) to the other end.

On the first plane I pursue the “good” for which I am conditioned. On the second plane I pursue also the “bad” because it amplifies the “good.” On the third plane, however, I begin to rise up and out of “good” and “bad” and into wonder and awe and gratitude for all experience.

On the first plane I take hot showers. On the second plane I take cold showers to amplify my hot showers. And on the third plane the shower is neither hot nor cold but only water, for which I am thankful.