Blundering about in the darkness of ignorance, the unenlightened being fails to recognize how their own craving gives rise to suffering. Delighting in conceptual activities and shunning peace, they form kamma – now good, now bad – through body, speech, and mind. This creates a force which propels consciousness – ever hungry for more experiences – onward after death into a new body. Like the thumb which grips in opposition to the four fingers, consciousness establishes its identity in a new existence supported by a complex of mentality and physical form. As this sentient organism matures, the six senses develop, through which contact between consciousness and its objects stimulates feelings of pleasure, pain or indifference. Craving grows; for more pleasure in this life or the next, or else bored, cynical, and despairing, one looks forward to one’s own annihilation. Grasping at sensual pleasure and nurturing ideas revolving around a ‘self’ as the essence of being, one’s thoughts and intentions conceive the embryo of continued existence in a future life. But that seed, sprouting in the springtime of birth, must fade in the autumn of aging, and fall in the winter of death. This betrayal of life’s promise is the essence of suffering.