1 To live is to struggle. Many translations of this are “life is suffering”. I like the word struggle in place of suffering, I think it gives a clearer picture without the connotations of ‘suffering’. We all struggle, we struggle to attain wealth, success, education, honors, to win wars, to beat out the other guy, these are all ways we struggle, Buddha talked about a world without struggle, a world built on equanimity. We may hear these words but they seem too far away to attain. The four noble truths give us a path to equanimity that we, as human beings, can follow.
2 Desire is the root of our struggle. We desire things, material things, spiritual things, emotional things…the list is endless. We desire, it seems a part of human nature to desire. Can we learn to live without desire? To stop desiring?
3 It is possible to stop our struggling!
4 The way to stop our struggling is to follow the middle path. The middle path that Buddha taught has 8 stepping stones. I think of them as instruction on how to place our feet in order to stay on the path.
In nutshell the fourth truth says that our actions have meaning and that we can learn to control our human activities by study of our thinking, our doing and our states of being (you may notice the 8 steps fall into these 3 categories quite neatly).
Right Understanding
Right Thought
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration
We start by being aware of what we know, then expand that awareness to how we act, and lastly to how we think. When we gain a deeper understanding of the human condition our thinking, actions and states of being align with our true nature. Aligning with our true nature stops the struggle. When we cease our struggle and learn to flow with life our world becomes a better place to live for us andn everyone else.
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