Quotes from Peter Ralston

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you do is for yourself—and there isn't one. —Wei Wu Wei

Whatever we think of as "self" we will protect and maintain. If it's a conceptual self, and likely it is, then we end up with mind protecting mind. This produces a rather "introverted" self-mind creating thoughts and perceptions in its own image. When self becomes confused with mind, and mind becomes seen as the self, the mind's self-serving activities end up creating an experience of reality that is entirely self-referential.

Knowing" can be useful, but learning not to know creates a powerful openness that is inconceivable until it is experienced.

If you're serious about obtaining an effortless power, you must learn to take the principle of relaxing to what your brain will consider a ridiculous degree. No matter how relaxed you are, you can always relax more.

We confuse being some thing with Being.

Only when we realize that beliefs are not the truth will the door of possibility open so that we can experience what "is" true.

Always be suspicious of the news you want to hear. —Francis Everitt, physicist

Once a conceptual identity occupies the place of "self," this is what we think we are "being.

Being driven by your beliefs is a very different matter than consciously understanding how it is your beliefs are created and what purpose they serve.

We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish. —John Culkin

We delude ourselves that we want to implant honesty in our children: what we really want is to imbue them with our particular kind of dishonesty, with our culture's dishonesty. —Sidney Harris

Enlightenment: Some Nothing from Which to Come

Our core beliefs simply appear to us as reality.

So when searching for the "absolute existence," we need to acknowledge that our relationship to "reality" is to consider our perception of physical conditions as objective and real, and our perception of the mind's activities as subjective and just made up.

An inner dialogue runs pretty much unceasingly though our minds. Sometimes we listen; sometimes we barely notice. The commands and assessments of this story line are there all the same, even if the depth of their influence goes unnoticed. But the most dangerous fictions aren't those we recognize as stories. Of more concern to us here are the ones we assume to be real.

The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, "I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it." —Thomas Powers

You don't get your self mixed up with any other self. Of course, the mind must also protect, maintain, and perpetuate itself—if it gets lost or damaged, it can't do its job. The mind unceasingly promotes the interests of the one who "possesses" it, and all its mental/emotional activity is calculated to get this one body-mind through every moment of life in the most secure manner it can conceive.

it seems that the conceptual activity that is created to serve the self has become the self.

I'm inviting you to realize that we're not talking about changing from an apple to an orange, which is too easy and still in the domain of familiar things, as is simply imagining a "better self". The demand here is more like transforming from being an apple to being the color blue, or infinite space.

Self-survival is the cause of all suffering.

Again, I invite you to consider that if you can identify with character traits, qualities, thinking, or experiences other than what you identify with now, then you must not actually be any of these elements. If this is so, who are you? What are you? If you try to pin down who you really are, you will search your mind and attempt to grab onto an idea, or feeling, or sense. Yet that very idea, feeling, or sense itself can be let go, and so it can't be you either. See how this works?

and we can be the players only when we understand loneliness and go beyond it. … because beyond it lies the real treasure. —J. Krishnamurti

The mind's goal is not to get at the truth but to fulfill our needs, and like a computer with very specific programming, the mind's interpretations are based on what's already known or believed.

And, if the "programming" (our beliefs) is flawed or the data is incorrect, then false conclusions will show up in place of what's true. Perceptions will be biased, but will appear to simply reflect reality.