The three Universal Laws: Impermanence, Interconnectivity, and no abiding self/soul are principles garnered from six years of Shakyamuni Buddha wonderment. Recall when Siddhartha saw the human conditions of aging, sickness, and death he must have wondered, why?

So his quest/immersion into this one issue began: what is Dukkha and how can it be diminished and/or eliminated? This condition, Dukkha, is traditionally difficult to define. We can begin on one end of the spectrum being mildly uneasy on the other severe suffering. These two ends suggest a wide-range of feeling/experience. The sensation is part of all of us given various conditions and variables!

Dukkha occurs through the process of attaching to something, not wanting change, craving, fixation on an end to something, wanting A over B, and/or feeling less than. The Buddha taught there is ignorance of the way to reduce the impact of these feeling and we must wake-up and see clearly what is happening. In these conditions we may be consumed with a sense of lacking, a kind of out of touch-ness. It is here that Shakyamuni Buddha prescribed four steps to lead us from the ignorance that we are incapable of doing anything, to taking actions that enable us to live fully in the changing patterns of existence.

He taught we can address our ignorance through steps that enable us to see deeply into Dukkha and Self. Here the teaching mirrors the quest undertaken by Shakyamuni Buddha, and what he taught for next 45 years: The Four Noble Truths leading to The Noble Eight-Fold Path of liberation from Dukkha.