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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
The story in the Nidana Katha is symbolic and has universal impact, because unawakened men and women all try to deny the suffering of life and pretend that it has nothing to do with them. Such denial is not only futile (because nobody is immune to pain and these facts of life will always break in), but also dangerous, because it imprisons people in a delusion that precludes spiritual development.
Gotama's pleasure-palace is a striking image of a mind in denial. As long as we persist in closing our minds and hearts to the universal pain, which surrounds us on all sides, we remain locked in an undeveloped version of ourselves, incapable of growth and spiritual insight.
It is always tempting to try to shut out the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human condition, but once it has broken through the cautionary barricades we have erected against it, we can never see the world in the same way again.
… pain can never be conquered by force.
"Pain, grief and despair are dukkha," he would explain later, "being forced into proximity with what we hate is suffering, being separated from what we love is suffering, not getting what we want is suffering."
On the one hand, desire makes us "grab" or "cling" to things that can never give lasting satisfaction. On the other, it makes us constantly discontented with our present circumstances.
Only when we learn to live from the heart and to feel the suffering of others as if it were our own do we become truly human.
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