Rodney Smith > Quotes

“The cause of our suffering is not what we do, but the way we perceive.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“Life responds when we risk”
― Rodney Smith, Lessons from the Dying

“The more we try to avoid an experience, the more we ensure its return.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“The fundamental principal when traversing a spiritual path is that we do not have a mind. The mind has created the sense of you and me from the way it perceives reality. The truth is, the mind holds us within it. We are not the possessor of a mind and the mind is not something happening to us as if we were outside looking in. We are a part of the mental processing of the mind. The thoughts of the mind and the sense of 'I' are not two separate events. We exist only because the mind thinks us into creation.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“Mindful walking reinforces the sense of "me" walking "with" awareness. An exercise more aligned with wise view would be to walk within awareness, allowing awareness the full and true embrace of the person, with the person no longer in control of awareness.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“Most of us do not know how to die. It is not something we have rehearsed or practiced. We have a mind full of ideas about what will happen but little if any actual experience with the process. We need to have someone who knows, guides, teaches and reassures us, someone we can trust, someone who will stand naked with us, who will not be overwhelmed. The dying need much more than pat answers or good feelings. Their hearts call for someone who can open into the unknown, someone who will travel the road of fear with them. To find such a companion is a very rare and precious occurrence.”
― Rodney Smith

“Most religions exist to create meaning out of the senselessness of death.”
― Rodney Smith

“Since spirituality must be the noblest undertaking of all, we force it to be the most difficult challenge imaginable, when actually it is extraordinarily simple.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“Physical death is a metaphor for the death of all experience. It encompasses the ending not only of the body but of all life experience. Small deaths occur to us throughout the day. Each time we attempt to freeze a moment in time we are faced with the limits of our control and the death of our influence. Whenever we hold on to any aspect of life and it evolves into something else, we are left with our despair. Since many of our psychological difficulties come from how we handle transitions, death provides understanding into how and why we suffer. A deep and penetrating awareness of death gives direct insight into most of our problems. To investigate death, then, is to comprehend our confusion and ignorance of life”
― rodney smith

“When we believe we are not where we need to be for spiritual growth, we relegate our daily life to a secondary tier. We energetically pull out of our spiritual life and wait for the appropriate secluded moment in order to fully engage.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“When I was younger, I followed the example of an experiment, once performed by Krishnamurti and placed a rock that held no special significance on my mantel and bowed to it each day. I did this deliberately to see whether I could infuse a unique quality into something completely ordinary, simply by incorporating the rock within a morning ritual. At the end of a month, the rock held a special, holy place in my perception.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“Death will come in with a force equal to the resistance we have to it. The reaction we feel when confronting death is death confronting us. Our resistance comes from the tenacious hold we have on personal safety in the face of an event that represents the complete elimination of security. We are never on psychologically safe ground when we deal with death and dying. Our need for self-preservation can force us away from creative responses. We find ourselves responding with a cliché or saying something completely inappropriate.”
― Rodney Smith