The Lexicon
Shadow and obstacles
Suffering
Suffering is dukkha, the First Noble Truth, the pervasive unsatisfactoriness the Buddha placed at the very threshold of his teaching. It is not only pain but the subtle friction of a life lived against the grain of impermanence, the ache of clinging to what cannot stay. To begin the path, the traditions hold, one must first turn and look at suffering honestly, neither denying it nor drowning in it, but understanding it as a truth to be known.
What makes the diagnosis a gospel is its second clause: suffering has a cause, and what is caused can cease. Tolle distinguishes the unavoidable pain of life from the self-made suffering of resistance and the accumulated pain-body that feeds on it. The teachings do not promise a life without loss, but they hold that anguish is optional where pain is not, and that the same suffering, fully met, becomes the doorway. Out of suffering, the wisdom literature insists, the strongest souls emerge.
In their words
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
We are not troubled by things, but by the opinions we have about things.