THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS REWRITTEN
UNDERSTAND THE "PROBLEM", IN ORDER TO ARRIVE AT THE SOLUTION
[The Four Noble Truths were the first teaching of Gautama Buddha after attaining Nirvana (release from the unnecessary false understandings about life – it’s more a liberation than something mysterious and it doesn’t imply some heavenly state! They are sometimes considered as containing the essence of the Buddha's teachings and are presented in the manner of a medical diagnosis and remedial prescription – a style common at that time. The "prescription" is The Eightfold Path.]
Here, I’ve taken the liberty of converting these truths into what I believe are more understandable to my ordinary mind. Really, life is quite simple, but only if you understand the following and give up the needless struggle! How foolish we are to continue it! (The parenthetical numbers inserted are to indicate the number of the footnote explaining or supporting that statement.)
1. All things in life are temporary, limited, and imperfect(1) – that is just a part of life, part of the deal, and it is simply reality. By resisting, wishing otherwise and not accepting reality, we experience, needlessly, disquietude(2) (anxiety, agitation). However, it works best to simply accept reality, as resisting it will not change it!
2. Suffering(3) is caused by our (naïve) belief/perception that we are losing or have lost what we feel we “need” or “should” have in order to be happy or survive better. However, we misperceive happiness and other positive emotions as coming from outside events and we make ourselves the victims of the circumstances not turning out as we wish or demand. We fail to realize that we cannot control outcomes and that our only job is to take what has happened and create a path that will be more like the one we want (but one which accepts the inevitable bumps (4) in the road) – and to enjoy the journey regardless. We delude ourselves to think happiness comes from someone, some event, or some thing outside us.
3. Suffering ends when we free ourselves from wishing things were otherwise (i.e. fully accept reality) and simply learn what we can learn and enjoy what we can enjoy.
4. It is our primary job in life to learn what will “liberate” us from the suffering that we cause ourselves and following the path laid out here(5) will achieve this. The “Noble Eightfold Path” is the way to do this.
Footnotes 1-5:
1. Called “dukkha”, which when related to this impermanence in life and how we view it results in disquietude, often mistranslated into suffering about it. It is a neutral term (impermanence), yet people make it into something the equivalent of “don’t step in the dukkha!” But dukkha includes anything beautiful, such as a new Porsche which will eventually turn into a rust heap at some point.
2. The mistranslation into “suffering” is not accurate, as it is too narrow a definition.
3. Here we are picking out the “bad” side of the experience of dukkha, so we can include all of the “negative emotions” under the broad umbrella of “suffering”, such as anxiety, fear,
4. For instance, we will make mistakes because we do not yet know how not to make the mistake. Regretting or making oneself wrong for not knowing better (not having a different reality) and for having made a mistake (when in reality had to happen because one did not know better yet) is useless – yet we persist in this, in a grand flail against life, much as a child would want everything to be his/her own way. Like the magical, yet unreasoned, thinking of a child, we believe that this non-acceptance will cause reality to be different than it actually is.
5. In Buddhism.
COMMENTS
Thinking/believing the same old way and avoiding confronting what is so and distracting ourselves does not work. It is not the way out, as it fails to deal with the flaws in how we think and how we run our lives. Unhappiness, weight gain and ill health, using mind altering substances (alcohol, drugs, etc.), and any suffering are all results of faulty thinking, which can be corrected. The end objective is to have “right thinking,” which is realistic and which has great results in terms of happiness and not being unhappy.
1. All things in life are temporary, limited, and imperfect(6) – that is just a part of life, part of the deal, and it is simply reality. However, we humans resist, wish otherwise, and do not accept that reality. As a result, we experience, needlessly, disquietude(7) (anxiety, agitation). We delude ourselves into the thinking that somehow we will change reality, which is impossible, as it simply is (already exists).
Life includes impermanence, which is simply part of the package. We get life AND it has impermanence and imperfections, but we see these as “not so good” (or “bad”). When we do not accept those parts, i.e. when we resist or wish otherwise, we experience suffering about the “dukkha”(8) (“stuff”) in life. If we do not accept this, and resist this, then we suffer.
2. Suffering(9) is caused by our (naïve) belief/perception that we are losing or have lost what we feel we “need” or “should” have in order to be happy or survive better. However, we misperceive happiness and other positive emotions as coming from outside events and we make ourselves the victims of the circumstances not turning out as we wish or demand. We fail to realize that we cannot control outcomes and that our only job is to take what has happened and create a path that will be more like the one we want (but one which accepts the inevitable bumps(10) in the road) – and to enjoy the journey regardless. We delude ourselves to think happiness comes from someone, some event, or some thing outside us.
Suffering is also a result of operating from an exaggerated threat basis and believing the warnings and talk of Dumb and Dumber.(11) It is wanting what you can't have and throwing the equivalent of a temper tantrum.
However, “suffering” is too narrow a translation with "negative emotional connotations" (Jeffrey Po) , which can give the impression that the Buddhist view is one of pessimism, but Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but realistic. More appropriate is the word “disquietude" as in the condition of being disturbed.
We resist reality by wanting things to be permanent and/or not imperfect and then we base our happiness on it being permanent and/or perfect. When it changes, then we are unhappy. Clearly, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
(If you read the Happiness section on the site(12), you’ll see that we are constantly misestimating what will make us happy, basically chasing the wrong thing, going down a path with nothing good at the end, going down a tunnel with no cheese.)
If we include suffering in dukkha, then this is how we experience dukkha:
We suffer physically, emotionally, and mentally, though the latter two are definitely mostly self created.
Anything that is not permanent, that is subject to change, is dukkha. Thus, happiness is dukkha, because it is not permanent. Great success, which fades with the passing of time, is dukkha. Even the purest state of bliss experienced in spiritual practice is dukkha.
This doesn't mean that happiness, success and bliss are bad, or that it's wrong to enjoy them. If you feel happy, then enjoy feeling happy. Just don't cling to it, for when it changes, you will create unhappiness from it changing!
The term “conditioned” is used as a source of dukkha. It means we are conditioned to depend on something in order to get a particular security or happiness, so that we must have it or we are unhappy. Basically we are allowing ourselves to be affected by something outside of us, so we are dependent on it to sustain an imagined effect. When that thing changes, we are unhappy because of the change of something outside of our control, which violates the principle that happiness is created inside, not outside.
The duh principle: Don’t base your happiness on things that are impermanent, as they will change!
3. Suffering ends when we free ourselves from wishing things were otherwise (i.e. fully accept reality) and simply learn what we can learn and enjoy what we can enjoy.
Again, wishing things were otherwise than they are has exactly no effect. What is so is what is so. What happened is simply what happened. We surely cannot change the past. We surely cannot change the fact that we as human beings make mistakes. We surely cannot change that we cannot control all outcomes. So it is fruitless to use our energy against them, since there is no effect and we just are wasting energy.
4. It is our primary job in life to learn what will “liberate” us from the suffering that we cause ourselves and following the path laid out (in Buddhism) will achieve this. The “Noble Eightfold Path” is the way to do this. We practice that path and we get to liberation from the suffering.
__________________________________________________
Footnotes 6-10:
6. Called “dukkha”, which when related to this impermanence in life and how we view it results in disquietude, often is loosely translated into suffering about it. It is a neutral term (impermanence), yet people make it into something the equivalent of “don’t step in the dukkha!” But dukkha includes anything beautiful, such as a new Porsche which will eventually turn into a rust heap at some point. It also includes happiness, because that is subject to change also.
7. The mistranslation into “suffering” is not accurate, as it is too narrow a definition.
8. The term has often been expanded to include the “suffering” that is related to the dukkha, which is simply things that are impermanent and/or imperfect in life.
9. Here we are picking out the “bad” side of the experience of dukkha, so we can include all of the “negative emotions” under the broad umbrella of “suffering”, such as anxiety, fear,
10. For instance, we will make mistakes because we do not yet know how not to make the mistake. Regretting or making oneself wrong for not knowing better (not having a different reality) and for having made a mistake (when in reality had to happen because one did not know better yet) is useless – yet we persist in this, in a grand flail against life, much as a child would want everything to be his/her own way. Like the magical, yet unreasoned, thinking of a child, we believe that this non-acceptance will cause reality to be different than it actually is.
11. The two brains that operate on automatic and in a simpler manner are magnificent in what they do. However, they are evolved because of their effectiveness in watching out for dangers and motivating ourselves to protect against those. However, they are primitive detectors and not great understanders of the difference between a threat and something we interpret as a possible threat which needs to be screened out by the brain that we have evolved to do our reasoning (the frontal lobe, the higher brain). The lizard brain, with the amygdala warning system that gets overstimulated in this fast world and hyperreacts, and the monkey mind, the more sophisticated but still primitive mind that verbalizes thoughts and interprets things in a bit of a more sophisticated (but still very primitive manner). I call these Dumb and Dumber. And, yes, we can choose to let Dumb and Dumber run our lives by default – but the results will not be pretty, for it is the higher brain (like the adult) that should run the show and govern “the kids” (D & D).
__________________________________________________
SUPER-QUICK SUMMARY OF FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
Accept that reality includes imperfections, things that don’t last, and limitations – and you’ll stop suffering. You’ll simply be happy with whatever comes up and just do whatever is next for you toward what truly makes you happy. You’ll choose to be happy NO MATTER WHAT.
WHAT TO DO NEXT
Go to the path that we must go along to get rid of those ridiculous ways we make ourselves suffer: The Noble Eightfold Path.
