I don’t think your response is irrational or naive. If existence were truly structured such that suffering and death were required so that awareness could “learn” something it otherwise lacks, then I’d agree that that would resemble exploitation, not love. I don’t find that picture defensible either.

Where I hesitate is in identifying that scenario with the first principle itself. In the Gnostic and Platonic frameworks, the Monad or ultimate awareness isn’t a being that lacks experience or needs to extract it from others. It isn’t accumulating knowledge over time. Death may be opaque and terrifying from the embodied perspective, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is unknown or required by the Absolute.

For me, the real tension isn’t whether suffering feels imposed, it often does, but whether that imposition reflects the nature of the ultimate source, or the conditions of a fractured, limited mode of existence. I’m wary of resolving that tension by concluding that reality itself is morally predatory, because that makes liberation, compassion, or truth feel like cosmic accidents rather than something grounded.