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The teaching of The Four Noble Truths is common to all schools of Buddhism and it looks directly at the way things are.
From edited talks given by Venerable Sumedho Bhikku (Ajahn Sumedo)
THE THIRD NOBLE TRUTH
The Third Noble Truth is the truth of cessation. When we have knowledge of cessation, we begin to endure through some of these different desires, rather than just reacting habitually to them or impulsively following them. We are less attached to the desires, less invested in satisfying them. We let them cease naturally. We endure through boredom or pain, through doubt and despair, knowing they will end. It sounds pretty gloomy if you take it too literally. But looking at it another way, understanding cessation is part of maturing emotionally.
A common idea is that everything is going to get better and better. We're going to be happier and happier, and the more money we have and the more vacations we have, the better things will become. We'll have constant forward progress. When we're young and naive, that's the way we think life should be; we worship youth and the arising, developing, and progressing it suggests. Yet many people get weary of it all, bored with it. It's seen as a kind of emotional childishness; and to a Buddhist, that kind of weariness signifies maturity rather than neurosis. It's a sign that you are beginning to look more closely at and gain understanding into the way things are. And when you observe cessation, when you begin to note and understand it, wisdom arises. When we fully comprehend cessation, we become very peaceful because, if we allow anything to cease naturally without annihilating it, it will take us to peacefulness and calm.
When you try to get rid of fear and anger, what happens? You just get restless or discouraged and have to go eat something or smoke or drink or do something else. But if you wait and endure restlessness, greed, hatred, doubt, despair, and sleepiness, if you observe these conditions as they cease and end, you will attain a kind of calm and mental clarity, which you never achieve if you're always going after something else.
This is the virtue of meditation. If you sit and patiently endure, you find your mind going into a state of calm. That calm occurs because there's no more trying to become something or trying to get rid of something. There's a kind of inner peace or relaxation of the mind in which you stop following the struggle to become, or to have sensory pleasure, or to get rid of some unpleasant conditions tht you're experiencing. So you are at ease with those conditions. You begin to learn to be at ease with pain, with restlessness, with mental anguish, and so forth. And then you find that the mind will be very clear, very bright, very calm.
The conditions that arise and pass away are not the self. These conditions include all the physical world; for example, all that we see through the eye, the eye itself, and the consciousness that arises on contact between the eye and objects. Similarly, they include the ear and sound, the nose and smell, the tongue and taste, the body and tactile sensations. The conditions also include the mind, with its thoughts and memories, perceptions and conceptions. All of these are what are called anatta in Pali, meaning "not self." These conditions are not me, they are not mine, they are not my eternal self, they are not the ultimate reality. These are conditions that change. Right now, you can be fully aware of feeling, or thought, or any kind of impulses in your body - these are what are observable. And what do we observe about them? We observe that they arise and pass away and that they are not self.
Rather than say that you have to believe in the Uncreated or in Ultimate Truth or in God, the Buddha pointed to what is created, born, originated. He taught that we should look at these created conditions, because that is what we can see directly and learn from. He taught that the act of being mindful and awake to the created takes us to the Uncreated, because we experience the created arising out of the Uncreated and going back into the Uncreated.
This experience of the Uncreated, the Buddha called Nibbana (Nirvana), which means a calm or coolness. It can sound almost like annihilation - no soul, no self no God. It can sound really dreary, but that's not what the Buddha meant. He was pointing to the fact that these very unsatisfactory conditions, which are ever-changing, are not self. He was not making a doctrinal statement that there is no self, but he was pointing to the way whereby one can see the truth. As you watch the conditions of the body and the mind, you realise that they come and go; they change. There is no substance to them that you can extract and say, "This is mine." When some loud, unpleasant noises come, if you think, "I hate that noise. The world shouldn't have any noises like that. I'm going to report this to the district council," then of course you think the noise is yours. But when you recognise the fact that noises come and go and change, and if you are patient in observing this, then even the most unpleasant conditions take you to peace and calm. If you can co-exist with the material world and all that you think, feel and experience through your senses and mind in a peaceful way, that's the Ineffable, the Uncreated, the experience of nibbana (nirvana).
So we meditate. Meditation is a direct looking at the way things are. We observe the pattern that is common to all conditioned phenomena: they arise and pass away (anicca); there is suffering (dukkha), which has a beginning and a cessation; and conditions are not self (anatta).