is life really suffering, as the buddha said?

Vic Shayne
author
The Enduring Myth of the Buddha: a hero’s journey into enlightenment

Arising out of the experience of Siddhartha Gautama, the man who became the Buddha, was something he called the First Noble Truth: Life is suffering. So now we ask whether this is true for us instead of just taking the Buddha’s word for it. After all, this is your life, so why should you live it only according to the statements of other people and not your own observations?

Is life really suffering?

we are representatives of what we believe we are
When we are discussing suffering we’re referring to the psychological sense of suffering and not physical pain — although the latter can also lead to the former. In observing life, we can readily see that there is tremendous suffering due to the way the sense of self is formed out of psychological conditioning. We take the opinions, beliefs, and secondhand information of others and make them our own without questioning them. The result is that we are representatives of what we believe we are.

By the time we are small children we already have a belief system, including the belief of who we are, who others are, what the world is, our relationship to the planet and nature, and so on. This system, borne of conditioning, shapes the way we behave, think, and plan.

inhumanity and destruction is driven by selfishness
The world revolves around the me, as the self that puts itself first and foremost in terms of importance. Of course, there is the rare instance when a group of strangers make a human chain to save a puppy caught in a river, for example. Such situations offer a glimpse into what life could be like when the self takes a back seat to consciousness on the whole.

The self-centeredness of the self leads to its own suffering, the suffering of other people and animals, and the suffering of the planet. We have seen the great destruction that results when many selfs have formed groups and carry out destructive acts that lead to war, racism, murder, disenfranchisement, and suffering en masse.

life is a bundle of good, bad, indifference, and the middle way
Is life really suffering? Is this the way you see it, if you were to do so objectively, without the image-making self? Beauty is all around us. We find a respite from suffering in happy faces, brilliant flowers, silent snowfall drifting to earth, gentle creeks, friends hugging, brightly colored birds, joyful reunions, and laughter. Are these experiences no more than interruptions in a never-ending flow of suffering, so that suffering is the natural, default, state of our lives?

Suffering arises out of many manifestations — frustration, anger, fear, poverty, war, strife, hunger, pestilence, hatred, racism, bullying, dread, anxiety, heartache, longing, depression, anticipation, nervousness, and desire. The last of these — desire — seems to be the catalyst for suffering. Can you see this in your own life?

desire leads to suffering
Desire is wanting. Because the self believes itself to be the center of its own world, it also believes it should have what it wants, and it suffers when it cannot get it.

Desire is a product of the self, because it has fragmented itself away from the totality of consciousness. It sees its own version of the world. Beneath the belief of a self is consciousness as the whole movement of life; but being a fragment, the self does not recognize its own birthright of wholeness. As a result, it believes that it must obtain and attain things. It’s like an ocean wave that desires to be the ocean; it doesn’t realize that it already is the ocean.

No doubt, for those who are looking for the ultimate truth in life will find that suffering is the great catalyst. After all, when all is going easily there is no desire to discover what we are beyond the limited, petty, problematic self.

The desire to be fulfilled, sated, complete, whole, and great causes suffering. However powerful the Buddha’s statement that life is suffering, it’s much too easy to ignore all of that which is not suffering in our lives. This is not a matter of trying to make ourselves happier or to force the attention to the more pleasurable things in life, but rather a matter of observing the good as well as the bad.

where does the middle way fit in?
It is curious that the Buddha declared that life is suffering, because he also declared that it does not have to be if you can find the Middle Way — beyond the self that is forever buffeted between the banks of pain and pleasure. The self can never find the Middle Way because it cannot divorce itself from what it is — a belief system, image-maker, and fragmented illusion. The Middle Way is the way that comes from identifying yourself with consciousness instead of the body. But can you find this out for yourself without taking the Buddha’s word for it?