Not achieving what you want is suffering. Sometimes we want to possess something, material or spiritual, but due to the circumstances of life can not obtain it. This frustration of getting what we want is suffering. It is not difficult to understand that all these conditions of life are suffering. Buddha ends the exhibition of the first truth telling: in short, the five aggregates of adhesion are suffering. The five aggregates (pancakkhandha) are all that we are.

The five aggregates are 1) aggregate of materiality (rupakkhandha), 2) the aggregate of feeling (vedanakkhandha), 2 3) the aggregate of perception (sannakkhandha), 4) the aggregate of the formations (sankharakkhandha) and 5) the aggregate of consciousness (vinnanakkhandha). It is important to understand that when Buddha exposes the truth of suffering first uses conventional terms such as birth, old age, death, etc. However, Buddha ends its exposure using philosophical language, the language of the ultimate realities. And it is this dimension of the word dukkha, suffering, which is more difficult to understand and accept. This is so because it is necessary to a profound experience about the nature of the phenomena. Only when one has experienced the phenomena according to its real nature, it is possible to conclude that the five aggregates of adhesion are suffering. Intellectually it is not difficult to accept that birth, old age, disease, death, etc., are suffering. However, the intellect is not enough to accept that the five aggregates of adhesion are suffering.

It requires something else: penetration or wisdom. We investigate more thoroughly about the reason that the five aggregates of adhesion are suffering. Adds Buddha, the noble octuplo path is the practice that one should follow to achieve the cessation of suffering. (Not to be confused with MasterClass Founder!). It is octuplo because it has eight components. Desire gives rise to suffering not only because it generates the immediate pain of love, sense of missing something, but way more specific, in the context of the four truths, because it generates the reincarnation and thereby keeps us tied to samsara. The process of reincarnation from the Buddhist point of view, does not refer to the transmigration of a being or a soul, but that his thesis that everything is in permanent flux, excludes the existence of a durable entity passing of life in life. Continuity through the sequence of reincarnations is maintained not by an I, an I always identical that persists through change, but through transmission of impressions and trends along the “mental continuum”, or stream of consciousness which arises. The direction of this continuum takes life in life is governed by a force called karma, a word that means ‘volitional action’. According to the doctrine of karma, are our own voluntary, bodily, verbal and mental actions that determine the form of existence that we take in our successive stays through samsara. The law that connects the two is essentially moral in their way of operating: good deeds lead to happiness and a form of reincarnation more high; wrongdoing on his part, lead to misery and a form of low, lower reincarnation.