=1 "Delight Index"
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Delight Index
The regular board meeting of the bio-engineering angels takes place in metaspace every megayear, and though each planet has its own meeting there are always delegates from other planets listening in.
The final discussion about planetary progress was on the subject of live weight produced in various species. Let us say you have, at five o'clock in the morning, fifty kilos of goldfinches saluting the rising sun, and you compare that with fifty kilos of human being getting out of bed, for the amount of joy manifest at that particular moment. The angel of the finches showed, with his charts of ananda-ipsometric measurements, that the intensity index was far beyond 5,000 per kilo. The guardian angel of man had to admit that in his case it was 0.005, and that also not in every case but only here and there, perhaps in a poet, a naturalist or a lover.
After this admission a lively discussion ensued. Most of the bio-engineering angels urged the scrapping of the human experiment in favour of fish or butterflies. Man, after all, though only a few mega-years old, had brought down the delight index of the whole planet.
Finally the archangel of life himself stood up and said, “This is not the whole picture. In man there is a curious capacity that is yet very seldom manifested. When he really becomes himself his delight index, his capacity for participating in the bliss of being, the ecstasy of beauty, far exceeds our measuring ability. It goes even beyond the beatitude of the angels. As a matter of fact,” he added, almost in awe, “I believe it to be equal only to the absolute felicity of God.”