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The third noble truth, stopping suffering, represents action in the present moment. It’s not that we force ourselves to stop having desires. That wouldn’t solve anything and it’s impossible anyhow. Trying to force yourself not to desire just brings up more desires (not the least of which is the desire not to desire). You’ll often hear religious-type people saying, “The only thing that I desire is desirelessness.” Sinead O’Connor has an album called I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. The only state in which you don’t want what you don’t have is death. Maybe Sinead was trying to start a “Sinead is dead” rumor….

You desire a Jaguar XKR but you’ve got a Chevy Shitbox (this is a car Chevy made awhile ago—it wasn’t very popular at the time, but a lot of people drive them now). When you want to go to the supermarket, what makes more sense: sitting there and wishing you had that Jag or getting in your Shitbox and actually driving? If you have desires, leave them as they are and do what needs to be done. Maybe you wish you’d bought that new Ken Wilber book instead of this one. Well, there’s no accounting for taste, but this is what you spent your money on so you may as well finish it.

Ultimately, the noble eightfold path is reality itself. To act according to the noble eightfold path is to act in accordance with reality. And that’s all.

The Three Worlds

The three worlds are the past, present, and future.2 This is a common Buddhist expression that seems to throw a lot of people. They think it’s some kind of reference to Other Realms or higher states of consciousness or some such crap.

The past and the future—even the present—are just inventions by the conscious mind for dealing with reality in an organized way. They’re symbolic representations. And representations aren’t reality.

We’ll never find the past and future no matter where we look. Nor will we find the present—but let’s put that one aside for a couple of minutes. On my desk is a picture of my nephew when he was five dressed up as Gammera, the famous Japanese fire-breathing giant turtle. He’s twelve now and no longer dresses up as Gammera. That five-year-old in the picture can never be found. In one sense the past exists since the state of our own bodies and minds is the accumulation of past actions. But even this past exists only now.

We usually believe that the past creates memory. Real events occurred in the real past and we remember them—but in fact that’s only half the truth. The other half, every bit as important, is that memory creates the past. We are actively constructing our own past right now every bit as much as we create our own future. We can look at dramatic examples, but it’s true in mundane ways as well.

Was Thomas Jefferson a brave champion of human freedom or an exploitative slave-owner who enjoyed a bit on the side with his female property? History is rewritten constantly—and the “past” changes. Stalin reshaped the past by erasing his enemies from official photographs and we are constantly revising our own pasts in more subtle, but ultimately quite similar, ways.

Furthermore, our perceptions of events at the time they are happening is always flawed and incomplete and then we reshape those flawed perceptions every time we revisit those memories. The past exists only in our minds and our minds are easily changeable and so the past itself becomes malleable as well.

There’s another Buddhist sutra called the Diamond Sutra—diamond because its wisdom cuts through anything. The Diamond Sutra says, “The mind of the past is unknowable, the mind of the future is unknowable, the mind of the present is unknowable.” The mind of the past is unknowable because the past is not where you are. Ever. You cannot find your past no matter where you search. Ultimately that concept we call “the past” is little more than a clever fiction to explain how things got the way they are now—and sometimes this fiction doesn’t even explain things all that well.

We may long to revisit