The Four Noble Truths
I remember when I first read those words. I came across them as I was purging beliefs associated with Christianity and the Bible that conflicted with my deepening discovery of God. The Four Noble Truths, collectively, is a tenet of Buddhism. I’m not a Buddhist but I have learned to find solace and strength in some of the teachings I’ve explored and incorporated into my life. Buddhism is a not a deity religion. Practitioners do not pray to Buddha; the Buddha was a teacher. The teachings he left were intended to encourage students towards inner enlightenment and evolution. The highest expression or experience of that being a state called bliss or Nirvana. The same idea is communicated when people speak of awakening, achieving their highest self, or self-actualizing.
The Four Noble Truths are deceptively simple. So simple that upon my initial reading I nearly dismissed them. Summarized, they are: (1) Suffering exists, (2) suffering has a beginning, (3) suffering has an end, and (4) there is a way to bring about the end of suffering. During the time of my depression, I was keenly aware of the existence of suffering. What was less clear was when it began, when it would end, or if it even could. I remember thinking at a point, “That’s just how I am, I guess,” resigned to accept joy as a thing to be observed from the outside, or a potential byproduct of having done something to make other people happy.
Suffering exists. “Damn, like that, Buddha?” was my first thought. It came across so matter-of-factly, like a point that was to be accepted and not argued against, like the existence of gravity. One might disagree in theory, but active disagreement holds all the potential for harm. Initially, it only seemed to reinforce the idea that the suffering in my life was a thing over which I had no choice or influence; a thing with which I had to learn to live and not expel from my life. After sitting with it and gaining understanding, it slowly brought relief. How was this achieved? First, by defining and understanding what the Teacher meant by suffering.
If you ever watched a court drama or news story for which a participant was issued a monetary award for damages, you may remember hearing the phrase “pain and suffering.” If “pain” is what we experience at the moment of physical injury, then suffering is the continuation or prolonging of that experience. For example, a person receives a traumatic injury to their physical body, like a stubbed toe-- that’s painful. The subsequent cursing and soreness would be suffering. Similarly, when we encounter events that are emotionally traumatizing: a betrayal of trust, a personal loss, disappointment, or anger we experience emotional pain in the moment of that event. While the ache of a stubbed toe will lessen over time, I’ve noticed when I retell such a thing, I find myself very near the emotion of it. I’m angry at the piece of furniture or myself. Almost as if it were happening again. Similarly, when we retell or continue to rehearse in our minds and conversations painful emotional events it reminds us of the pain we experience and, so, we suffer.
How we identify suffering has everything to do with our ability to identify pain because when we misidentify pain, we misidentify suffering. What is pain? I could give a definition from the dictionary but rather I’ll ask this: what is not pain? This is not meant to introduce an idea that the bowl of life is only full of misery, maybe it is. But the duality that exists in all things supports the idea that the bowl of life is also full of joy; so, we must also ask, what is joy?” There’s likely to be little disagreement about what’s painful: getting hit by a bus, car breaking down, someone letting us down, or us letting someone else down. There also probably wouldn’t be much disagreement about what’s joyful: celebrations with loved ones and friends, hearing a baby laugh, winning a game. Where disagreements often happen is when consensus needs to be reached with a smaller group. What works for society-at-large plays different at the family and individual level. Likewise, individual definitions of pain and joy don’t scale up well or transfer, either. Well, Marquita, you’ve said a lot without saying much. What’s pain and what is joy? The inference I hoped the reader would make upon reading this is that the definitions for pain and joy are subjective. We each make our own personal definitions for pain and joy, and thus, suffering.
Suffering has a beginning. Imagine you’re born into a family of jugglers. Not just any jugglers. It’s the family that made juggling a thing. Before your family, people were just throwing shit in the air. But your family changed the game, and now it’s what your family is known for. It’s not just your family’s job, it’s their culture. They love it! At birthday parties you can’t have a piece of cake unless it’s been tossed into the air and caught on a plate before it’s served. And then there’s you. You’re the three-horned goat of the family. You hate juggling. If you’re this person, you may feel as though you’ve suffered your whole life by pressure to choose or do what seems to make other people happy but doesn’t move the needle on your happy-o-meter, at all. Maybe you’re worried that difference affects your relationships. I don’t know, and don’t mean to hint that I do.
There are times when the beginning of suffering may be unknowable. I don’t believe we need to know the exact moment it began; we only need to notice it’s happening. It’s a true statement that suffering has a beginning, but it’s also true that every beginning can’t be observed or known. How we encounter most things is while they’re in various stages of process, whatever that happens to mean. Consider a tree during different stages of its lifespan and appearances through seasons. There are some parts of that tree that started with it at the very beginning, but many other parts that arrived and departed at different times. While we may really want to know the specific point of impact where our emotions were injured or traumatized, which person failed us or incident poisoned our personal well of courage, we only need to notice suffering in order to give it attention. Noticing is a beginning.
Suffering has an end. Oh, this one was lovely to digest. I hope you read the sarcasm. Lovely to digest like red sauce, at my age (NOYB), after 5pm. This jawn had me looking and searching the stars for alignments of constellations and calendars to mark the date for the end of my suffering. I never found one. Also, now, I don’t think I can point to a specific day as the one where everything shifted and got better. Just as the tree grew and lost parts in its seasons, so have I. Some things that have fallen off did so naturally due to growth. Because I’m not a tree, I had to do my own pruning. This process did not feel like the end of suffering. But the ache of healing is different than the pain of suffering, at least in my experience. Noticing that difference was the beginning of the end of suffering for me.
Endings, like beginnings, can be things that one notices has happened. There was a time in my life when I drank a couple 2-liter sodas a day. That idea makes me gag now. I remember making a conscious decision and effort to discontinue that practice, but I don’t know when I actually no longer desired it anymore. The practice of consumption was established over time and ended over time. The things that contribute to our suffering establish places in our lives over time and with conscious decision and effort can decrease over time as well.
There is a way to bring about the end of suffering. When I first read this, I really hoped (but knew better than to expect) that the words that followed would detail the necessary things to end my suffering… change the dynamics of the relationships and interactions I had with people. How to not feel like I was being both suffocated and ignored by the important things in my life. But alas, Buddha did not provide. Neither did he mean to imply that he could. What he did was offer this fourth truth, also known as the 8-Fold path: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.
The 8-Fold Path turned out to be the string that tied so many things together for me. What was a confusing tangle of different sufferings was much less intimidating once the common thread was revealed: me. My view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration in each area were a blur because I was not aware of them. Any picture that lacks focus will be blurry. Learning to bring my mind into awareness helped me examine, without judgment, my contributions to my life: the things that helped and the things that didn’t make sense to keep doing. This was both difficult and liberating. The difficulty, for me, came in the form of confrontation with things I didn’t know – more like, shit I thought I knew about the world, how things work, even myself – that just wasn’t true. Talk about scary, sheesh. Liberation came with deepening understandings of ideas like presence, permanence, attachment, and desire.
In the video linked here, it’s said that the only rule about the 8-Fold Path is that once one starts, one must continue. I don’t know if you ever really get off it. Life has so many facets that we can’t view or be present in them all at once. We can’t hold space within ourselves for everything at once. In my humblest of opinions, it’s more like you take a couple steps on the path in one area. Maybe one or two more in a couple others and juggle until the first one comes back around again, and you keep going. Incorporating practices of gratitude and mindful meditation allows us, once in a while, to be happily surprised at moments of Nirvana along the way. I don’t know. I said I’m not a Buddhist.
