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This phrase represents the four noble truths outlined by Gautama Buddha in his first talks after his own enlightenment experience. The usual understanding is that the first truth is that all life suffers. Gautama Buddha actually used the word dukkha, a word in the Pali language meaning something more like “unsatisfactory experience.” The second noble truth is traditionally interpreted as saying that the origination of suffering is desire. The third truth is usually understood to say that stopping desire leads to the stopping of suffering. The fourth is the truth of the Right Way, usually given in the form of the noble eightfold path, which leads to the stopping of desire. The eight “folds” are these: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

Lemme give you my takes on these truths.

The first noble truth, suffering, represents idealism. When you look at things from an idealistic viewpoint everything sucks, as The Descendents said in the song called “Everything Sucks” (from the album Everything Sucks). Nothing can possibly live up to the ideals and fantasies you’ve created. So we suffer because things are not the way we think they ought to be. Rather than face what really is, we prefer to retreat and compare what we’re living through with the way we think it oughta be. Suffering comes from the comparison between the two.

Even physical suffering works like this. I saw this fact clearly for myself about a year ago when I passed a kidney stone, allegedly the most painful experience a person can actually survive. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that the pain was astoundingly bad. And yet when I stopped comparing what I thought I ought to feel like (namely, free from pain) to what I actually felt like (namely, in enormous pain), things became far better. It still hurt like hell, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re not trying to run away from the unavoidable hell of suffering, if you just let it be, your whole experience is transformed utterly. The Buddhist author and nun Pema Chödron calls this transformation “the wisdom of no escape.”

This leads to the second noble truth, the origination of suffering: our wish that things be different from what they are when they cannot possibly be. Things can never be other than they are. This moment can never be other than it is. So the “desire” often spoken of by Buddhist teachers isn’t just the fact that we desire that big car or that busty redhead with the nose-ring or that hunky guy who delivers for Domino’s®. Everyone has desires. We can’t live without them. Nor should we. The problem isn’t that we have natural desires and needs. It’s that we have a compulsive (and ultimately stupid!) desire for our lives to be something other than what they actually are. We have a world in our minds that we call “perfect” and a world in front of us (and within us) that can’t possibly match that image. The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.

Is this confusing? The world within can be quite distinct from what out brain wants it to be. The brain is often in conflict with itself. You’re depressed but you want to be happy. You’re horny but you want to have self-control. You’re scatterbrained but you want to be focused.

The second noble truth was never supposed to be taken to mean our natural desires are evil and should be eliminated. Gautama had already tried that path as a ascetic yogi. After trying to abstain from all of his desires (including the desire to eat), he found himself thin and weak and miserable—and no closer to enlightenment than he had been when he started out (although he was way closer to Corpseville). He broke his fast by accepting a bowl of rice from a milkmaid who was taking it to a temple as an offering to one of the gods. Only after acknowledging and accepting his natural human desire for food and regaining his natural strength was he able to embark upon the practice that culminated in his enlightenment. Such