• In the Buddhist tradition, the four noble truths explain what suffering is, its cause, and how to deal with it. The first truth is that suffering exists and is unavoidable, and the second is that the cause of suffering is our desire, craving or attachment. The third is that suffering can be released if we renounce this attachment, and the fourth truth is that we practice this way of being by following the eight-fold path.

• When we are attached to one outcome or another, the Buddhists claim we cause suffering. It is our perspective, preference, narrative, and expectation about what should be that causes our unhappiness. In life, everything is transient, though, and always changing.

• In the parable of the two monks, we see that resistance is also a form of grasping, and allows us to “carry” suffering with us long after the initial moment has passed.

• In this philosophy, we cannot achieve happiness by trying to remove suffering from life, but rather by changing our attitude to it.

• We can use the four noble truths as a starting point for reducing suffering in our own lives, or rather, learn to suffer better. To do so, we have to understand our own tendency to identify with, cling, resist or tell stories about reality and learn to simply appreciate reality for what it is: neutral and impermanent.

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Peter Hollins is a bestselling author, human psychology researcher, and a dedicated student of the human condition.

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Though the Buddhists had a lot to say about suffering, and though we’ll return to their conception of the problem again and again, in truth, their perspective is not especially unique. What is great about the Buddhist approach is that it has a clear and defined explanation for why we suffer, i.e. where it comes from. It’s a little like understanding the etiology of a disease, in this case, the disease broadly being the “human condition.” We start here because once we know why we suffer, we’re arguably better prepared to do something smart about it.

The Buddha put forward his four noble truths, which go like this:

1. Dukkha – suffering exists and is an unavoidable fact of life (at least, in this realm of existence!)

2. Samudaya – there is a cause for this suffering, which is desire, craving or attachment

3. Nirodha – we can let go of suffering by renouncing our attachment

4. Marga – we can do this by following the Buddhist “eight-fold path”

Though we will not dwell on the philosophical details too much, it’s enough for now to understand the noble truths in this way: suffering happens, and it happens because we are attached to what is transient. Though, there is a solution: we can let go of suffering if we relinquish this attachment.

So, it is the nature of reality to change. When we cling and form attachments, we are in opposition to this natural order, and this causes us to suffer. To be released from this suffering is not to eradicate the change inherent in reality, but to cease our attachment to it.

An example will explain. Imagine you are out walking in the woods one day, and it’s beautiful. It’s warm and bright, the birds are singing, and you’re having an amazing chat with your walking companion. It’s like paradise. But it doesn’t’ stay paradise. Life always changes, and so too does this day. Maybe clouds roll in, and it starts to drizzle. The bird song stops, and your walking companion suddenly becomes grumpy and uninteresting. Suddenly, there’s an annoying car alarm in the distance that goes on and on and on. Just like that, your lovely walk is not so lovely anymore.

But if we are attached to one expression of reality over another, we might tell a story that goes, “this is a problem now. It’s supposed to be sunny and nice, and it’s not.” The truth is, rain and shine both belong to the natural order. Sometimes birds sing, sometimes they don’t. The people we love today may be annoying and difficult tomorrow. So, we have the first noble truth – there is dukkha, or suffering. And the second noble truth is that the cause of this is you – or more accurately, it’s your clinging and attachment.

For the Buddhists, nothing is permanent. Everything living will die, clouds come and go, things shift and change and evolve. Everything is always moving. However, if we cling and form attachments, we grasp hold of something and behave as though this weren’t the case. We say, “I wish this day would last forever.” It won’t last forever, and expecting and wanting it to is what causes the pain, not the fact that it changes.

The four noble truth says that suffering is reduced when we let go of attachment. For example, you look up and see the drizzle and accept it. You see that your companion is grumpy, and you hear the car alarm and realize that there’s nothing innately better or worse in it when compared to bird song. You don’t push against it, and you don’t grab hold of it, you simply say “ok” and accept the fact that, well, it is. And just like that, you are not suffering anymore.

When we hear the term “desire” or “attachment”, we need to remember that this actually covers every instance of us wanting reality to be something that it isn’t. Every time we have an expectation for what should be, or a demand on reality, that is a desire. That is a wanting inside us. Whether that takes the form of greed, lust, avoidance, fascination, hope, despair or anything else, it is essentially us wanting to control reality, and make it behave in the way we think it ought to. It is this orientation to reality that causes suffering, rather than reality itself.

It’s as though the eternally changing nature of life is a flowing river, and we are fallen tree branches in that river. When we align ourselves with the flow and position lengthwise, the river flows easily past us, and there is no issue. But when we position ourselves against that flow, and when we lay at right angles and resist it, there is suddenly friction. This friction is akin to suffering.

Imagine a person who stands outside in the rain and shakes their fist at the sky, yelling, “This is wrong! It’s not supposed to be like this!” You’d probably find such a person faintly ridiculous, but in truth, we do the same thing all the time in life. We are always attached to what we think should be the case, which brings us into friction with what is the case. We have expectations, as though life should arrange itself according to the whims and preferences of our ego.

Why do we have expectations of life? Well, because we tell ourselves stories about the way things are. We say, “I can only be happy if things are such and so.” Take a look at each of the following examples and see how the cause of suffering is not the event or situation itself, but rather the expectation that reality should have been something else:

• Someone disagrees with you on an important topic, and you’re outraged by their stupidity.

• You get treated rudely by a colleague at work and feel really upset and hurt.

• The old lady in front of you in the supermarket is walking really, really slowly, and you want to pull your hair out in frustration.

Let’s look closely at why you feel this way:

• You have the expectation that there is no disagreement or conflict in the world, and that others should agree with the wisdom of your opinion, or at least come around after you explain things so clearly to them!

• You hold the belief that everyone deserves respect, and that you don’t deserve to be treated poorly.

• You expect everyone else to be like you, and if you are walking at a certain pace, they should walk at that pace too, and not get in your way.

Can you see how this is not all that different from standing out in the rain and yelling, “this isn’t right!”?

The suffering lies in the gap between what you demand, expect or desire, and what actually is. The easiest way to see this is to imagine things from someone else’s view – someone who doesn’t have the same expectations as you do. Imagine that the person you’re arguing with is exasperated with you and cannot imagine why you’re so stupid. Imagine that the person criticizing you sincerely believes that you should not be doing what you’re doing, and that they have to fix the situation by pointing out why you’re wrong. Or picture that the old lady looks at you, shakes her head and thinks, “these people who rush around supermarkets make me want to pull my hair out in frustration!”

The fact of reality sits there, as it is. But it is us, and our ego and expectations, that makes up stories about what that reality is, what it should be, and what we think about it. Arguably, this is precisely why there is conflict in the world – our expectations not only fail to align with reality, but they also fail to align with other people’s expectations.

We suffer because we are like little children who pout and cry because we cannot have ice cream for dinner. We fail to see the bigger picture, and we only look at events according to our own very narrow, very uninformed vision of the world. We sit and sulk, and declare that broccoli is disgusting, and that we shouldn’t have to eat it. But even as adults, we can continue to do this – rating and judging reality according to the whims of our ego in the moment.

But do we really know what’s best? Do we honestly have enough knowledge and understanding of the universal mechanisms we live within to proudly say what should and shouldn’t be? It’s as though we have unconsciously declared ourselves the CEOs of the universe, and are incensed when life happens without our permission, and in ways that we don’t approve of.

What we have in life is a series of unfolding moments. A never-ending, ever-unfolding now. It’s always changing. Sunshine turns to rain… turns to sunshine again. In the middle of that is us, and what we want. If we had planned a day at the beach, we would say that sunshine is good, and rain is bad. If we are gardeners or farmers, we say that rain is good and sunshine is bad. These perspectives on reality, however, are not reality itself. Rain is not good or bad, sunshine is not good or bad. It is us and our ego, our expectation and our desire to control that assigns labels to neutral reality, which is always just being what it is.

So, let’s cut to the chase: what’s the cause of suffering? We are.

But here, we are faced with something quite tricky. The fact is, we are individual people with unique interests and goals. We only have our own limited perspective, and of course we have a preference for all those things that favor us. This is, after all, what it means to be alive. We are not enlightened, egoless beings. We are not angels or abstract entities. We are imperfect people, living in an imperfect world.

Importantly, the Buddhists (and generally, those who teach mindfulness and awareness) don’t want us to abandon all expectations. It’s not possible. The idea is not to become completely apathetic, shrugging your shoulders and having no opinion about the outcome of events. It is not possible to avoid having a point of view, a judgment, or a goal. It is not possible to avoid being impacted by events around us. In other words, there will always be people we disagree with, insults, and things that get in our way.

But, we can have awareness and acceptance. We will explore the way out of suffering in more detail in the following chapter. But for now, it’s important to note that we are not asked to pretend that nothing bothers us, or that we don’t care what happens, either way. This is just more clinging, more ego and more expectation (“I should be more accepting” or “a truly enlightened person does such-and-such, so I must do that too…”).

For now, let’s acknowledge and understand the cause of suffering – that’s half the problem.

Suffering does happen, and it happens because of our attachment.

We can call this attachment many different things: desire, craving, clinging to, positioning, searching, wanting, seeking, needing, thirsting or hungering for, resisting, obsessing about, being addicted to, grasping, identifying with, needing… Whether big or small, or profound or trivial, and whatever the object, this attachment is our active relationship to neutral reality. According to our identities, it is the personal narrative we tell about impersonal events. It is like a contraction – we interpret events, which requires a certain narrowing of perception.

But this is not the full story. We can also attach to and identify with neutral, fleeting events when we push against reality. It seems counterintuitive, but resistance is also a way of holding onto things, and failing to appreciate their transience and impermanence. For example, we can tell ourselves a complex story about our enemies or adversaries, and how much we hate them. We can get carried away with anger and blame for something that happened to us. Or, we can constantly position ourselves in opposition to something else, either because we see ourselves as victims, or perhaps as rebels, who gain our identity from what we aren’t. Or consider the person who cannot even acknowledge the deep, unconscious beliefs that nevertheless control their every move. They resist these ideas to such an extent that they don’t even know they’re there, but their resistance and avoidance nevertheless colors everything in their life.

A Buddhist parable tells of a young monk and his wise older teacher on a journey. The pair arrive at a river and encounter a young woman having trouble crossing. The teacher thinks nothing of inviting the woman to jump on his back so he can help her cross over. The young monk, seeing this, is disturbed. He knows that in their religious tradition, touching a woman is forbidden. They continue on the journey for some time before the young monk, unable to remain silent, speaks up.

“Master, I am deeply troubled. You carried that woman across the river, but you know that this is completely against our faith.”

The master smiled and simply said, “Well, I carried that woman across the river, but then I set her down again. Why have you been carrying her for the last three hours?”

This story shows us how clinging to and resisting are really two sides of the same coin. The young monk is both resisting reality (his master should not have carried the woman) but he is also clinging (it should be this way, not that way). Here, clinging and resisting are really different manifestations of identifying with something, to such an extent that we keep “carrying” it with us long after the fleeting event has passed.

Existence is impermanent. But when we cling or attach, we hold onto things long after they fade away. It is our stories about things that keep them alive. The master in the story above is in the moment and can let the past go. It is the young monk who suffers, because he clings and resists – he is privileging his expectation about reality above what is actually happening. The master might pause and draw the young monk’s attention to the moment they are actually in. Where is the problem? Nowhere. It is only in the mind of the young monk.

We don’t need to beat ourselves up about any of this. Human beings have evolved brains that seek out patterns, and try to make theories and models of the world to control whatever emerges in the present moment. Your brain evolved to help you survive – not to make you happy. Its job is to look for problems – which is not necessarily a problem in itself. However, it would help to notice how seldom this need for control actually succeeds in getting reality to behave as we wish (here’s a clue: it never does). This is because life is changeable and ungraspable. Like water, in the very same instant we reach out to try and grab it, it has already flowed past. Even if we could grab hold of a moment right now, there is another one immediately on its tail, and the previous one whizzes by, never to be seen again.

Our perception, it would seem, is always colored by our interpretation and judgment. We cannot hear a sound or see a sight without deciding whether we find it pleasant or unpleasant. We cannot help but insist that if something good is happening, that it should stay that way forever, and never change. So, we build up our egos and stories and routines and rituals. Then when life smashes them to bits, we suffer.

There is a more practical way to look at the first noble truth, and that is the profound fact of, well, “shit happens.” We will all die. Many, if not most of us, will experience injury and illness. If we are in a relationship, one of two things will happen: we will either break up, or one of us will die. You will sometimes have an accident. You will hurt yourself or hurt others. You will have something that you love and cherish, that you will nevertheless lose. If you are lucky, you will grow old and experience the indignities of an ageing body. There will be storms and unexpected bills and arguments and nasty surprises...

Seeing as these things will happen… what is the use in arguing with them?

On the other hand, even the best experiences in life are transient. No matter what peaks of pleasure you attain, they eventually stop, right? Even that delicious cookie you’re eating right now will, in a minute, be no more. Then what?

The good comes and goes, and the bad comes and goes. Everything is transient.

But the idea is that suffering enters the picture when we strenuously try to hold onto the good, and run away from the bad. There are different types of craving and attachment. We might crave pleasure (for example, we have a food addiction), or we might cling to an ego-driven idea of our own identity (for example, we become self-obsessed and seek fame or to dominate others), or we could work hard to avoid experiencing things we don’t want to experience (for example avoiding conflict, being in denial or indulging in escapism). They all amount to the same thing, though: a faulty relationship with reality. Tough, because it’s hard to swallow, even the suffering attached to life’s greatest losses (death, divorce etc.) are a result of our failure to accept the impermanence of everything.

Our clinging and craving are endless, and never satisfied. Unlike reality which shifts and changes, our attachment can keep going forever, going round in circles. Our seeking could turn into greed and materialism, and we find that no matter how much we have, we want more. Or our vanity causes us to build a bigger and bigger ego for ourselves. We can even find that our spiritual seeking becomes a kind of bottomless ambition, and we end up craving endless enlightenment experiences…

Summary:

• In the Buddhist tradition, the four noble truths explain what suffering is, its cause, and how to deal with it. The first truth is that suffering exists and is unavoidable, and the second is that the cause of suffering is our desire, craving or attachment. The third is that suffering can be released if we renounce this attachment, and the fourth truth is that we practice this way of being by following the eight-fold path.

• When we are attached to one outcome or another, the Buddhists claim we cause suffering. It is our perspective, preference, narrative, and expectation about what should be that causes our unhappiness. In life, everything is transient, though, and always changing.

• In the parable of the two monks, we see that resistance is also a form of grasping, and allows us to “carry” suffering with us long after the initial moment has passed.

• In this philosophy, we cannot achieve happiness by trying to remove suffering from life, but rather by changing our attitude to it.

• We can use the four noble truths as a starting point for reducing suffering in our own lives, or rather, learn to suffer better. To do so, we have to understand our own tendency to identify with, cling, resist or tell stories about reality and learn to simply appreciate reality for what it is: neutral and impermanent.