At the same time, pain is so often replaced as an end, rather than a means, that one can rightly question how well it has been used in most religions for most of history.
Everything useful can be made harmful. All good ideas can be perverted by applying them too much or too little.
Let me frame this in 21st Century terms: all of us must come to terms with all traumas, large and small, in our past, and we must learn the skill of emotional processing, even of difficult information. This is the task both of individual and social maturity.
Once this is done, expanded perceptions become possible, and those, in turn, facilitate further growth.
This is the model I am convinced is “correct”, to the extent one can apply a word like that to abstractions.
I will add as well, that this model precludes the Sybaritic path of assuming life is meant to be easy, and that only circumstances prevent us from being happy.
That last sentence is a paraphrase from a book I found immensely useful at a certain point in my life, Garth Woods “The Myth of Neurosis”. Easily one of the five most useful self help books I have ever read, with others being “Learned Optimism”, “Trauma and Recovery”, and “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” I’d have to think about number 5.