Stepping Out of Self-Deception 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

“We are never further from the truth than when we are certain.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“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

“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

“Within the horizontal, we like to imagine we are somewhere we are not. We go on excursions in time, and through our imagination create a better place than the here and now. Desire and fear operate by convincing us that the future is a concrete fact, and the present is malleable and can be shaped through our expectations.”
― Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self

“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

“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

“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