There exists no hell outside of your own mind, and you are responsible for your own misery. While this may not seem like a happy prospect to someone stuck within suffering, taking responsibility is also what gives you the power to change your life. Even if you can point to a hundred things in your life that you believe are "good reasons" for your suffering, the suffering itself is still just a reaction to those things. You don't need to suffer because of them, and the suffering just makes them worse. It saps your energy, and robs you of the will to make the needed changes.
You could say Humanity's current motto is "misery loves company" and this has gone to the point where taking on another's suffering is deemed an "act of kindness". If someone else is unhappy, you're supposed to be unhappy too, and people believe this to be "compassion". The Highest Compassion is seeing someone in suffering, and sharing your Joy with them. Reacting to suffering with suffering just creates more suffering, and in this way one diseased thought can infect millions of people.
Joy is more than avoiding suffering, there's a whole Universe of difference there. Avoidance of suffering leads people to distractions, where the suffering is simply ignored. It's still there, sitting in the unconscious mind and just waiting for a trigger. The distractions are almost worse than the suffering itself, because they're what holds the suffering in place and keeps it from being resolved. When the being becomes aware of their unhappiness, they immediately look for a distraction. The distractions Humanity uses are too numerous to list, though the socially-unacceptable ones are known as addictions.
True Joy is for those willing to confront their suffering head on. To look at it directly, see it for what it really is, and finally bring Resolution to all the pain in one's life. No backing down, no shying away, no running for distractions, just directly looking at all of one's unresolved emotions and saying "I AM". I Am The Being Creating All Of This And I Choose Something New. I Bring Change Into My Life, And Let Go Of The remnants of the past that never really served Who I Am. I am not a weak suffering being, I AM A STRONG, AND JOYOUS ONE!
I, Will, the author of this piece, release it into Public Domain. You are free to share it, and even modify it, without any conditions.
