Quotes from Peter Ralston

separating the truth from what's believed. This action allows you to let go of your own knowledge and open up to freshly experience this moment without presumption.

Focus on is for a moment. The nature of is still "is" even if nothing exists. If everything is destroyed, is remains. How can is go anywhere? There is nowhere to go. The nature of is is Nothing. The nature of is is absolute. If you identify with is then nothing can come or go. There is nothing that needs to be or not be.

We discover that the richness of life isn't all created by people, events, and acquisitions, but by our ability to open up and fully be with whatever is occurring—present in heart, body, mind, and connecting fully with others and with life.

We become attached to our beliefs, to our roles and traits, and also to the strategies needed for maintaining all this. We rarely acknowledge that all our mental, emotional, and perceptual activities are processes, and that they're there to serve a specific purpose. We're so busy identifying with mind's conceptual mechanisms that we lose touch with what's real. It is not hard to see, then, how self becomes confused with the mind.

when the mind serves "the self" it is actually serving something of its own making—a conceptual self.

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.

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.

Remember, mind has no interest in what's true—its job is to keep you alive while maintaining an identifiable sense of self. To do this, it not only creates and identifies with physical and mental-emotional activities, it also builds on past experience and any previously established conceptual identity. You're still alive and you're still you, so mind will naturally protect and promote all the beliefs behind the activities that keep you that way.

The original function of mind is to do a job, the essence of which is to keep you alive and successfully being you.

Paradoxically, the more I learned to let go of my own wishes and desires (in this case, the desire not to be hit), the more they became possible.