On suffering

The first of Buddha's four noble truths says that 'there is suffering (dukkha)'. It seems however to be too compact for our understanding, almost an attempt to evade the questioner. The first question that arises in my mind is: "is there more to this sentence?" That is, could we meditate on this 'noble truth' so that in the end it gives up and reveals its profound depths? The truth might be somewhat 'compressed' in language, but it seems to say, at first sight, that suffering should not be denied.

Can a suffering individual deny that she is suffering?  When we suffer, it is felt personally: the distance between the self and an unhappy notion has collapsed. But most of the time, when only others are suffering, or when the self that has suffered is felt as a ghost of some departed quantity, we can distance ourselves from suffering and even construe every unhappy circumstance as illusion, as fancy. 'It is all over now whatever that was' seems to be the attitude of the non-suffering individual taken towards most suffering, and she hopes that it will not repeat itself. She does not try and penetrate suffering, if we approach it dynamically, as a process through time. We could say that she overlooks the causes and conditions of suffering. Following this argument further would bring us closer to the second noble truth: 'there is origin of suffering', or we could perhaps reformulate this as: 'there are causes and conditions which lead to suffering'. 

People have slightly different translations of these noble truths and tend to interpret them from different points of view, because the word dukkha can be translated differently. One translation of dukkha that seems to shed more light on the situation from a rational point of view is the word unsatisfactoriness. There is a certain sense of unsatisfactoriness in whatever we do because our experiences are incomplete. 

In an analytical attempt to the combine the two truths into an even more abstract statement, like the attempts to merge Maxwell's equations in mathematically more concise notation, we are led to the previous observation: our experiences are not complete. Is it possible to formulate this mathematically? What is the topological space underlying our experiences?

Mathematically, incompleteness means that Cauchy sequences do not all converge. That is, in the experiential realm, the space where our thought processes and complex of emotions act out their part, a sense of endlessness pervades. Lacking a sense of modesty, the individual has lost his spirit and is wandering. The desire to pursue materialistic goals or idealistic conceptions can easily leave one unsatisfied.