Reflections Of

“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.”
― Peter Ralston, The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness

“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.”
― Peter Ralston, The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness

“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.”
― Peter Ralston, The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness

“Since being without a self is inconceivable and very hard to realize, such freedom remains unknown to virtually everyone. Yet without a self designed for and committed to survival, there is no suffering. To get a handle on this, recall any form of suffering, any distress, worry, upset, fear, misery, stress, longing, or anything else that you suffer, and consider long and hard: if you didn’t care about you persisting in any way, if it didn’t matter to you if you existed or not, got your way or not, or that things turned out in a way consistent with your desires and needs, if you let go of attachment to your self and the survival of your self, would you suffer any of these things? The answer is no. You cannot suffer when there is no self trying to survive. You cannot suffer when you have no drive to persist. The desire to survive, to persist as the self that you are, is the cause of suffering.”
― Peter Ralston, The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness