.
The obvious aspect of suffering is immediate pain or difficulty in the moment. Subtle suffering is more difficult to understand because it begins with happiness. But by its very nature this happiness must change because it cannot go on forever.
("The Very Venerable").
As previously stated, the first Truth is that one must be aware of suffering. After a person has created a comprehensible image or idea of the nature of suffering, they can then truly begin to avoid suffering ("The Very Venerable"). .
The second Noble Truth is that suffering itself has a cause. "At the simplest level, this may be said to be desire; but the theory was fully worked out in the complex doctrine of "dependent origination," or pratityasamutpada, which explains the interrelationship of all reality in terms of an unbroken chain of causation" (Conze 48). When we look at psychological suffering, it is easy to see how craving causes it. When we want something but are unable to get it, we feel frustrated. When we expect someone to live up to our expectation and he or she do not, we feel let down and disappointed. When we want others to like us and they don't, we feel hurt. Even when we want something and are able to get it, this does not often lead to happiness either because it is not long before we feel bored with that thing, lose interest in it and commence to want something else. Put simply, the Second Noble Truth says that getting what you want does not guarantee happiness. Rather than constantly struggling to get what you want, try to modify your wanting. Wanting deprives us of contentment and happiness. A lifetime wanting and craving for this and that and especially the craving to continue to exist creates a powerful energy that causes the individual to be reborn. When we are reborn, we have a body and, as stated above, the body is susceptible to injury and disease; it can be exhausted by work; it ages and eventually dies.
