• Provides contemplative practices and exercises to help you recognize how you cause your own suffering
• Explores the dynamics of the mind and how it sets the stage for distress
• Explains how mental states of suffering are created and how to control your mind to stop those thought patterns and assumptions
Most of us believe that suffering is inevitable. Stress, shame, depression, grief, loneliness, disappointment, the feeling that life is incomplete-every negative experience contributes to the emotional and psychological pain that impedes our ability to live happy, fulfilling lives. But what if most suffering could be avoided? Is there an antidote to inner turmoil that can be learned and applied to everyday life?
In this groundbreaking work, Peter Ralston reveals how to free yourself from mentally created suffering. He explains how most creatures don't experience suffering the way we do. They don't worry or fret, fear the future, or imagine they are somehow flawed or less than they should be. Exploring the dynamics of the mind that set the stage for distress and that get us into trouble, he explains how mental states of suffering are created, how to recognize when you cause them, and how to stop suffering-inducing thought patterns and beliefs.
Sharing contemplative practices and exercises to help you end your inner turmoil and foster growth, awareness, and freedom, Ralston provides an empowering way to create a more complete, powerful, and peaceful life experience. Peter Ralston is a founder of the consciousness movement that began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s. He has spent thousands of hours in contemplation and has had several powerful enlightenment experiences. In 1978 he became the first non-Asian ever to win the World Championship full-contact martial arts tournament held in the Republic of China. The author of several books, including The Book of Not Knowing and The Art of Mastery, he currently lives outside of San Antonio, Texas. CHAPTER ONE
CONCEPTS HELD AS IF THEY ARE OBJECTIVE REALITY
When something is held to be true or real-existing outside of our imagination-we hold it in a different category than something that's known to be just a concept. In the hierarchy of perceptions, we relegate abstract ideas to a lower rung of importance than objective reality. We may not like what the bus driver thinks about us, but we'll be sure to get out of the way of the bus.
Experience tells us we need to take that solid objectivity seriously. Even if we had the belief or fantasy that we could fly, when the bus bears down and flying isn't an option, we will jump aside instead. We respect the uncompromising aspects of objective reality, yet often blur the line of distinction between it and our mental activities. In so doing, each of us frequently perceives an idea as if it were a self-evident truth.
For example, someone might imagine that sex is somehow evil, or that his political party embodies the only correct view of human relations, or that her religion defines the nature of reality, or that some belief system has the only real description of the universe, or any number of notions, many of which are far too subtle or ingrained to easily recognize. But all of these are simply concepts that are believed to be representative of what's objectively true. And they aren't.
We stand just as firmly on many assumptions about ourselves. When someone says that he is worthless, we may know clearly that he is not, but for him, this self-description is a fact of his existence. The assumptions surrounding this "truth" are so ingrained in him that he can't see it as merely a powerful concept that influences his every thought and action. This trap makes what is only imagined in our minds seem like something objectively so.
Such a distinction is significant because what we can and can't do in relation to objects is different from what we can and can't do in relation to conce
