Deciphering the Four Noble Truths
The four noble truths: suffering, the curse of suffering, the end of suffering, the path. Simply put, pain, the origin of pain, healing, and living ethically. Life is good, and it brings along with it learnings that can be painful. How we choose to interpret those moments in our lives and the stories we tell ourselves determine the amount of suffering we choose to inflict on ourselves.
Buddha said, 'Be wary of the second arrow.' The first arrow represents the pain, the actual physical pain, and the second arrow represents what you call suffering—the story we make up, the 'why.' Instead of focusing on the why, we need to see the world as facts now. An arrow hit me, it hurts. That is all. The stories we tell ourselves are made-up logic to give us peace of mind. But, in actuality, those stories can become debilitating, scare us, and stop us from moving forward towards forgiveness and understanding.
The majority thinks that the wrongdoer should pay—an eye for an eye. Gandhi said, 'An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.' If we can experience pain for what it is—pain, and nothing more—then we can move on and no longer suffer. We can forget what caused the pain or forgive who or what caused the pain. Anything more than this prolongs our suffering.
Which leads us to the end of suffering. All this comes about by just not telling ourselves false stories, accusations, or speculation. We can live and focus on an ethical life. We can't control what happens to us or what has happened to us, but what we can do is decide how to move forward. What to do after the fact. Do we dwell in pity and fallacies, or do we accept that we were given a challenging hand and move on?
The one definite truth is that we will all die someday. The noble thing to do is, instead of fixating on that fact, instead, despite it, live now. Be here, in the moment, and live with the contentment that you are alive right now, that you can feel all the human emotions of joy, pain, love, to name a few. Because now is real, whereas speculation is fantasy, stories are just that—stories we tell ourselves for comfort. Facts are real, and your choices decide how to act on those facts.
Life is pain, as the Four Noble Truths say. But because of that pain, we can grow, learn, accept, and become better for it. And enjoy what little time we have here. The question we must constantly ask ourselves is how long we will choose to endure that second arrow or just let it fall to the ground because it wasn't real to begin with.
