Prematurely portraying and holding ourselves to some idealized endpoint, like enlightenment or happiness, can cause us to risk embracing a “premature transcendence,” as Welwood calls it, where we try to rise above the raw and messy side of our human life before we have fully faced and made peace with it. In the context of the pain box, this would be like jumping over a wall instead of doing the difficult, and necessary, work of moving through it.
