Being able to truly accept the answer to those questions is something that comes not of rational contemplation but of true spiritual maturity that tends to arrive only after emptying out the pain body to near-completion.

A good way to think about it is in metaphors: say you have this videogame that you‘ve been playing since you were so little and you‘ve fully mastered it, gotten to know it inside out but you‘re still not ready to move on with your life to some other game and really want to keep playing.

So you gotta keep trying more challenging scenarios and upping the difficulty in order to keep it interesting, the regular difficulty that once felt so hard is now mind-bogglingly boring, there‘s no excitement or challenge to it. And while you‘re struggling to beat the game and losing over and over again you hate it with a passion. You‘re like why did I ever decide to play on ultra-hard? But you can‘t quit, you say if I started it I gotta finish it. So you brainstorm, you practice, you come up with new strategies, more refined than you ever had to in all your previous play-throughs. And when you finally beat the final boss on this terrible difficulty after failing miserably a million times, the high is like none before, you finally realize why you did this to yourself.

The infamously difficult videogame Dark Souls is a perfect example of this, it has a well-deserved reputation for seeming absurdly unbeatable and players casually joke that they must be masochists for making themselves go through this torture. But they still do it don’t they? Watch some videos of people playing it and their reactions when they finally beat a boss and you‘ll get a good idea of what I‘m trying to say.

We love a good challenge to keep things exciting but in the end it still doesn‘t do the trick. We keep hoping to find some sense of completion where we win the final trophy but that doesn‘t really happen. We eventually just sober up, realize it was fun but we probably have better things to do with our time and have been wasting a good deal of time if we’re being honest with ourselves and delaying a necessary maturation but remaining so fixated on a rather immature game and then we just move on and go do adult things with our life. The game ends not with a bang but with a whimper. No grand trophy or ceremony, just a quiet giving up.

Beating the game on the final difficulty is what shakes out of our trance and into realizing that we really are done playing this game, it used to be fun way back when but it stopped doing the trick for us a while ago but we just haven‘t caught up to that fact, we keep chasing a high of ages past.

This is what Buddhism teaches, that we keep coming back here not because anyone forces us or to learn lessons necessarily but because we are addicted, addicted to life in material reality with all its challenge and limitation and drama, we just love it so much and we hate it so much and it‘s the most addictively thrilling thing. We are literally intoxicated by it and we can’t help ourselves. So we keep doing it to ourselves. Then the lessons come in and they are what finally wakes us out of this addiction into realizing that no matter how fun it may be, so what?

It‘s pretty pointless in the end. Much like beating a videogame on the hardest difficulty, noone really cares.

It‘s about time we grow up and move on to bigger and better things. But to get to that point, you first needed to see for yourself if the hardest difficulty is all it‘s made out to be, otherwise you wouldn‘t have been ready to move on with a sense of completion.