  In espousing the doctrine of not-self with its aggregated view of  persons, the Buddha claims to be offering a solution to the problem  of human suffering. Not only is the idea of a permanent self a  conceptual fiction, but adopting such a view leads to grasping after  notions such as ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and  ‘mine’ with deleterious effects for our psychological  well being: attachment to such a fictional ‘I’ is the  root cause of a range of negative emotions, including selfishness,  craving, hatred, conceit, and ill-will. These negative emotions, in  turn, fuel the general feeling of unsatisfactoriness that pervades  the unenlightened human condition, and ultimately are responsible for all the troubles that ordinarily afflict our world. The not-self  doctrine offers not merely an enlightened metaphysical perspective on the ultimate nature of things, but also an effective remedy for  eradicating ignorance and achieving nirvāṇa, the  summum bonum of the Buddhist path and the antithesis of  cyclical existence (with the caveat that Mahāyāna Buddhist  traditions generally place less emphasis on  nirvāṇa, focusing instead on the enlightened and  compassionate attitude of the Buddhist saint or  ‘bodhisattva’).