A guide to freeing yourself from self-induced suffering

• 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 like 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 get us into trouble, he explains how mental states of suffering are created, how to recognize when you cause them, and how to control your mind in order 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.

PREAMBLE Stop Putting Your Hand in Boiling Water

PART I
Foundations of Our Experience

CHAPTER ONE Concept versus Experience

What Is a Concept?
Exercise for Identifying Concepts

What Is an Experience?

Incorporating an Assertion

How Does Concept Dominate Your Experience?
Suggestions for Contemplation:
Recognizing Your Beliefs

Interpretation and Meaning

Concepts Held As If They Are Objective Reality
Suggestions for Contemplation:
Objectification of Concepts

Overlooked Conceptual Influences on Experience
Image Exercise

Suggestions for Contemplation:
Overlooked Conceptual Influence

Being Incomplete

CHAPTER TWO Awakening Overlooked Consciousness

You versus Your Self-Experience

Ignorance

Inventions versus Direct Encounter

The Inner-Self Is an Invention

The Nature of Mind

Distinctions within the Self

PART I I
Getting Free from Unnecessary Suffering

CHAPTER THREE Conceptualizing versus Being

CHAPTER FOUR Mental Activities behind Most
Forms of Suffering

Dissatisfaction

Depression

Stress

Worthlessness

Loneliness

Disappointment

Flawed

Vulnerable

Alienation

Inner Turmoil

Shame

Grief

Bringing It Home
Mind Exercise

CHAPTER FIVE Transforming the Mind to
End Suffering

Conceptual-Action versus Conceptual-Activity

Aligning What Isn’t with What Is

Choosing a Path Forward

Our Fear of the Mundane

The Search for Meaning

Being Complete

No Perspective Is True

Suffering and Consciousness

PART I I I
Investigating Our Experience

CHAPTER SIX About Mind

Thinking

Existential Thinking

Emotion

Rethinking Emotion
Mastering Emotions Exercise

CHAPTER SEVEN Beneath the Surface

Clarifying Existential Assumptions
and Bottom Lines

Transcending Your Self-Agenda

Suffering Causation “Religion”
Suggestions for Contemplation:
Cause of Suffering

More on Impulses and Drives

PART I V
New Perspectives and Powerful Distinctions
That Change Experience

CHAPTER EIGHT Creating New Experiential Abilities

Investigating Existentially

Completion

Turning-Into

Communication

Purpose
Creating a Purpose Exercise

Staying on Point

Increasing Awareness

Creativity and Change

CHAPTER NINE Powerful Life-Enhancing Principles

Practice, Principle, Being

Excellence and Mastery

Responsibility

Intention and Commitment

Honesty, Honor, Integrity

Correction

Empowerment

PART V
Practice

CHAPTER TEN Doing the Work

Life Practices
Center Breathing

Mastery and the “Effortless” Component

Unusual Interactive Perspectives

Necessary Suffering?

ADDENDUM A Principle That Could Change
Humanity

Index

About the Author