COMMON DENOMINATOR

Life is not all suffering, but largely it is.  According to Buddhist psychology, every moment of life when happiness and inner peace are absent in us is a moment of suffering.  When we are rushing, impatient, irritated, frustrated, anxious, angry, fearful, bored, sad, or jealous, when we are filled with desire for something we want that we do not have, or feel aversion for something we do have that we do not want, we are suffering.  When we are reliving a painful experience from our past or imagining a future one, we are suffering.

Nothing on this planet is free of it.  Even long-time Buddhists who endeavor to not suffer still do so, as a person cannot eliminate all of his sources of suffering.

To ease our pain we seek out what pleasures we can find, food, sex, alcohol, adventure.  The trouble is, we adapt to them, to where we need more and more of them to get the same effect.  The same effect, however, is not the same effect, we discover.  So, we suffer some more.

The Buddha was well aware of this common denominator, his solution The Noble Eightfold Path.