Begin as a flower in your mind, let it bloom.
A sunflower. It stands tall, twisting to face where the sun most ekes out the leaves above. There's a strange signal coming from the nearby plants, they seem distressed. You exist in a binary of light and dark, and yet you know when the light has left those around you. The light ekes out more than ever before, the signals have gone. It could be a sign that you're next, or it could be that you're last. The sun is funny like that.
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Heaven. Just the thought of it involves some kind of suffering. You have to die first before you get there, unless you're a rare exception. Hell on the other hand, you suffer until you suffer more. Imagine a Protestant Christian serial killer, killing every good person he can find before they get a chance to be bad. He's already made his peace with going to Hell, he sees himself as a Jesus figure who's self sacrificing for a greater good.
He goes around, finding innocent children at playgrounds, kidnapping and killing left and right. Ruthlessly efficient, leaving zero traces. Forensic techniques that would spawn a decade after him dying of old age could pin him, but by then it's a long shot. He kills them as quickly, as painlessly as possible. The final sting of death before the Heaven he supposed would barely hit any of these children. He takes great pride in this.
When he was their age he was well behaved. It was a time before he was certain that he was going to Hell. He could have confessed, begged for forgiveness, but he knows in his heart that he'll have to die immediately after forgiveness. If he kills himself he's certain he'll go to Hell, and asking the pastor to kill him would only be suicide with extra steps. He's determined to die by God's hand, by whatever means necessary.
That means he can't set up an accident, it's oxymoronic. By this point he hopes to find a pastor by his deathbed. It's looking unlikely, but he thinks that maybe with enough happy children in Heaven he could have his perfect scenario. An accident that mortally wounds him but keeps his mind intact, putting him in a death bed with enough time to see a pastor and confess to every murder in graphic detail. Forgiveness just before the cutoff.
It could be the case that he gets his perfect scenario, that everything happens exactly the way he hopes up until - nothing. Not a good nothing, or a bad nothing. No endorsement from God, no words for him, just space to guess as to why it happened that way. Coincidence? At least incidence. He could be in a void with zero answers, no way to know if he'd still be there if he lived or died any other way. It's hard to say if he can even think.
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Picture a child, looking at the world before it's been explained to them. It's wonderful. Smiling happy faces, a spoon full of pudding. The airplane tastes sweet instead of savory today... curious. Only a very small collection of memories, with most of them being food and toys. Mom smiling, about to give you something. The warmth inside her shirt, the warm food as her hand steadies your head. There's not much reason to open your eyes.
Always keen to close your eyes, to think of her food every time you'd see your eyelids. It made your dreams taste like breast milk; a simply pleasant fact of life. Over time you grow older, waking up just so you can fall asleep again. No more waking up to breast milk, that time has passed. You wake up to the prospect of sleep on the horizon, where you get to relax and close your eyes again... Meanwhile there's games to play.
There's an adult you don't recognize at the park. He has an airplane so he must be alright with Mom. It tastes sweet but a little funny. You hope Mom won't mind if you take a little nap, you're starting to feel very tired. It's such a great feeling to see your eyelids again. You feel like you'll never go hungry, like you could taste dreams forever. It's such a nice feeling to smell the park and see your eyelids. It's such a beautiful day.
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For all the new things adults can do, aren't they all just trying to recreate a feeling they already had? It's difficult to point out anything over the top better FEELING about being an adult. There's better MEANING stuff, for sure, but that's all tied up in stuff that's better than ourselves. Society, the world at large, nature, and all kinds of stuff that's not in any way synonymous with feeling. What is the root of all suffering?
What is the root of all suffering?
A jelly bean jar, it's just sitting there. You might think it's for guessing the number of jelly beans, and you could if you want. But there's no instructions.
What comes next? What came just prior to that jelly bean jar being there?
Sometimes they tell you to focus on asking 'what' over 'why' when it comes to these things, but this question's just as fruitless as any 'why' I can come up with. I'd need to find someone omniscient to answer that, and not just someone that believes they know someone omniscient. The more I look at this jelly bean jar without instructions, the less I think it's for guessing the number... and the more I think it's for enjoying.
Maybe they'll pipe up if I unscrew the lid and I get ready to eat one... Maybe they won't? There's nothing stopping me from testing a hypothesis. Come to think, I could count the jelly beans now that the jar's open. What if I count them wrong? I might eat a bunch after that and I'd never get to double check. What if I spend so much time counting that I get so attached that I can't eat them? To Hell with it, every option sucks.
I'm gonna eat the whole jar. I'm gonna eat it right in front of you. I have free will. If something's good then that's circumstance. If I do something good then I'm neither good or bad. Made in God's image damn it. Before everything you don't do something because it's good, you INVENT good. You INVENT evil. For zero reason other than you just did it to do it. Autotelic, full of love from beginning to end.