Buddhist teachings begin with the Four Noble Truths:
- There is suffering
- There is a cause of suffering
- There is a cure for suffering
- There is a method to that cure
Suffering here isn’t just any suffering. It is more like the general suffering we endure as a part of being human. It is like the suffering of loneliness or boredom, where the world seems tedious or oppressive. It is the discomfort that comes up in an awkward conversation or the nagging thought that you are not good enough. That is the kind of routine suffering that the Buddha wanted to help people cure with his method.
Some versions of the Four Noble Truths state more explicitly that the cause of suffering is desire. That makes good sense because we can all imagine how we would be perfectly happy if we didn’t want anything. The problem is that we all want things. Some of those wants bring us pleasure and some bring us pain. Generally, what we want is to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Unfortunately, in our efforts to experience pleasure and avoid pain, there is suffering. There is past suffering, present suffering and future suffering. They all influence each other. Of course we desire to get out of this cycle of suffering, so it doesn’t seem fair that the cure to the suffering would involve not wanting to get out of it.
The cure is more complicated than that. The Buddha described the Eightfold Path, which is eight qualities of mind and lifestyle that we cultivate to try to uproot our habits of wanting things. The fact that there is a cure however, is a wonderful bit of news. It is amazing enough that it has the power to make us curious about the connection between our suffering and desires.
Intuitively, we know that some desires are good for us. The desire to end suffering helps us be compassionate. It can help when focused on our own suffering, and it can help even more when it is focused on our shared suffering.
The primary desire that causes suffering is the desire for things to be other than they are. Mostly, we want them to be better than they are. We know though, that things can be only as they are. Things have been different, and things will be different, but right now, they can only be exactly as they are. The big kicker is that how we think they are right now is not how they are. The cure to suffering, the eye-opening experience of enlightenment is seeing things just as they are, without any of the filters of past experience, future expectations, or desires for things to be otherwise.
Although how things are may seem pretty awful from our present point of view, how they actually are, when not obscured by the filter of our regular, suffering perception, is amazing.
Desires know no bounds. They are endless. Anything we can think of we can want. If we can stop thinking for a moment, stop wanting anything to be other than it is, accept our entire situation just as it is, then we can feel what it feels like to have no desire. In this moment, all suffering is extinguished.
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