Byron Katie

[Guest guest]

Sacred America By Roger Housden

 

Excerpts from Chapter 18 (about Byron Katie)

 

On through the dry country I go, through Prescott, past Salome, past

dozens of trailer parks with folks out to pasture, on over the border

to Desert Center (a gas station and a grocery store) to the hot and

dusty backwater of Barstow, California. I am here, en route to LA, to

meet Byron Katie, one of those rare individuals who, struck once by

the spiritual equivalent of lightning, has never been the same since.

She hardly seemed a likely candidate for the visitation of grace. She

had lived for decades in the

thrall of money and power, had made and lost fortunes in real estate

deals, let her kids wither in drugs and alcohol, had sunk into fits

of uncontrollable rage. An obsession with food brought her to a

weight of more than 200 pounds, and then to a half way house for

women with eating disorders in LA.

Early one morning she was lying on the floor of her room when a

cockroach crawled over her foot. She stared. She saw the cockroach as

part of herself. She saw her foot move in reaction, her hand move,

her body rise. In that instant she was animation observing itself.

She saw the bed, and, as if she were watching an ancient dream,

became aware of the belief she held that she was not worthy of a bed.

In that moment, through her perception of it, the belief dissolved

and she knew it was alright to lie on the bed. She had no way of

distinguishing between where she ended and something else began. She

was the All, and the All was her. It was 1986, and Katie was 43.

When her family came, she could see straight through their names and

labels to who they were. Her hands, her husband, children - suddenly

everything was one body, adored and loved in this present moment

without any reference to either past or future. Her entire structure

for perceiving reality as she had known it had gone. For three years

Katie was in a state of continual revelation. Yet she was " a woman

from Barstow," as she is fond of saying. " Women from Barstow don't

know about spirituality and religious traditions." She had never

studied religion or done any form of spiritual practice in her

life. " We would only read about gurus and such things in the funny

papers," she says. Yet what she did say, spontaneous and simple as it

was, could have come from any of the great mystical teachings.

"To act without thought is divine," she would murmur, "unknowing is

everything, there is no time or space, only Love, and I am Love.

Attachment and the perception of loss is the only death. Life springs

forth as we let go of attachment. What I am is a complete and total

love that has never left this One". The virtually cellular change she

went through on that floor in her room left her radiant, and stayed.

>From then on, even in the half way house, people started dissolving

in tears in her presence. Yet she felt she had nothing to teach or

even say. Word got round, and back home in Barstow people started

turning up at the door for what they called healing, though Katie

would not have said she was doing anything. People would ask what she

did, and she'd say she didn't know. She didn't know why these people

came, but they came, so it must be good. From that first moment in

the half way house, she has recognized that what is - whatever It is -

can be nothing less than the highest order of good and truth.

One regular visitor to her house in those early days was the wife of

an LA policeman. She came just to be in Katie's presence, without

knowing why. Her husband eventually tried to forbid her to go, he was

so afraid of losing her, but she came anyway. One day he followed

her, burst into the house and ordered his wife to leave. He

threatened to burn Katie's house down. Katie listened to him quietly,

and asked," How can you hurt me? You can wreck my house. It isn't my

house. Take my house. It's yours." The policeman burst into tears and

she held him in her arms. He had heard the truth.

And now here am I, another stranger turning up at her door. Several

houses are on the lot, perhaps a dozen people living here now to

administer the organization that has grown up around her in the last

several years. I have arranged to spend 24 hours with the community.

When I arrive I see two women in the hall leaning over a stack of

audio cassettes.

"Just let's change it to say there is no copyright and people can

duplicate them or use the tapes for whatever purpose they like,"

Katie is saying. A woman in her fifties, she wears a flowing dress

and has her hair pinned back in a clip. She looks up, her face

utterly open,as if she were saying, I am here to serve you. Or not

even that, just, Here I am. I tell her who I am, and it does not

appear to register; I imagine she doesn't remember speaking to me on

the phone. Yet without a second's hesitation she stops what she is

doing and leads me through to a conservatory that gives onto the

garden. There is an immediacy about this woman, an utter simplicity

and directness of movement, that leaves the air clean of any trace of

motive. What I feel in those first few seconds is the presence of a

being who isn't being anyone - not a teacher, a wise person, or

anyone with anything particular to tell. It feels both a relief and

strange at the same time.

We sit down, and she asks me if I would like to do The Work. I

falter, having thought I was the one who was going to ask the

questions. She explains that almost twelve years earlier, not long

after people started seeking her out, she began to see how the

projections people placed upon her could only serve to promote her as

some kind of spiritual celebrity - yet she knew that she as a person

could never help anybody. All she could offer people was a radical

perception, an entirely new way of seeing, one that she had come to

in her own experience. So she honed her own realization down to a

process of four questions that challenged people's perception of

reality. These questions she calls The Work, and she began inviting

people to use The Work to heal themselves. Their healing, she smiled,

was not her business. It was theirs.

What Katie saw on the floor of the half way house was that we create

our reality with our own beliefs, and that the most tenacious belief

we have is that we are a separate entity in a world of separate

entities. Our personal stories of hope and fear keep the illusion of

separateness intact, and we genuinely believe that who we are is the

drama of that story, its ups and downs, successes and failures, its

search for God, truth, happiness, the perfect partner - at the same

time believing other people's stories. Just like a Buddhist would say

it, I thought, listening to her. Except Katie has no knowledge of

Buddhism, or any other ism.

She created The Work by retracing her own thought processes during

her time of revelation. She

would be abiding in the absolute awareness of The One Life that lives

us all, and a thought would come in from her past beliefs to suggest

the contrary. One day she was in a mall. A 90 year old woman walked

in and Katie became her, took on her smell, became aware of her own

skin falling from the bone. She could see herself through the old

woman's eyes, and knew there was no difference between them. The

thought came in, I can't live this way, followed by the realization

that I am living this way.

Her awareness would become the rocks, the sky, other people; she

traveled through everything,

became everything. Once her awareness went into a bird, and the

thought came, but I don't know how to fly. The question followed

immediately, can I really know that? And she flew on as that bird.

For Katie, there is no story that we are not, even the story of a

bird flying. There is only one life living us all, and only our

limiting beliefs prevent us from seeing that truth.

A radical teaching, the kind you find in ancient yogic texts. Nothing

less than the undoing of everything we think we are, we think the

world is, life is; the return to what is there before thought,

belief, and language divide up the world. Not a return to the

unconscious merging of the infant, but to a condition of awareness

which knows existentially the one life living us all. Yet Katie says

none of this, teaches nothing, as such. She gives you The Work and

invites you to perform the operation on yourself.

She asks me to think of someone I am having difficulty with in my

life, to make a statement about something that irritates or saddens

me, and to ask myself if it is really true. How can it be true that

my partner and I are going our own ways? I ask. It certainly feels

that way. We have sold our house, said our good-byes; I have come to

America, she is in England. Yet our love continues as ever. It is as

if the force of destiny has pulled us apart to follow our own myths.

She looks at me, and smiles from somewhere far, far down. Then she

says, "Hopeless," and smiles again. " Is it true that there is

someone else who is or ever was your partner? How can you really know

that is true? It is your belief that she was your partner. Without

that belief, you might realize there can be no arriving or leaving."

I sit for a moment opposite this woman who seems literally to ripple

with joy, so much she can barely contain it. She is totally there,

utterly without effort, pouring a love from her eyes not for me alone

but for everything.

She asks me a third question. " What do you gain by holding the

belief that she was your partner?" And then a fourth: " Who or what

would you be without that belief?"

"Free", I laugh, "I would be free, free of an object by which I try

to identify myself, give myself firm ground to stand on. I would be

free to let life move through me without trying to hold on to it or

push it away. And I would be closer to that same person than I could

have ever dreamed of."

"No-one has ever done anything to you, honey," she says, gazing upon

me with an infinite tenderness. "We all do everything to ourselves,

and we do it with our beliefs. They are your beliefs, no-one else's.

I am not saying you haven't parted from each other. What is, Is. I am

saying it isn't what you think it is, and nobody is ever creating the

story except you. The Work helps you see through the fabric of your

own beliefs, through the layers you put onto reality, onto what Is.

It allows you to lose control and that is the doorway to revelation.

Can you even say it's a beautiful day and really know it's true?

Without those conditions, we can know ultimate intimacy. The

judgment, the construct that we put on reality sticks to it like

velcro and dampens the very intimacy we are seeking through our

descriptions and theories."

There she goes again, I thought, paraphrasing the essence of Buddhist

teachings without knowing it. Non-attachment is the deepest form of

intimacy, they say. Except she talks about velcro, uses the language

of everyday America. She was moving on already, saying that until we

drop our story we don't even breathe without a motive, every breath

coming from fear. When we drop our story there is no longer a world,

no existence - who is there to exist? - no other worlds, no angels or

devils. The Work, she says, is trickery, a trick to enable you to

experience your own awareness of self beyond the story.

"Without The Work," says Katie, shaking with laughter, "I'd have

nothing to say. The point is that through The Work, you say it. I

don't have a message; for me, even to say the sky is blue is to speak

dishonestly. I ask what your message is. "Who is this woman before

me?" I find myself wondering. In her presence, it is true, I can feel

my own story slipping away - not for anything she says, not even

primarily because of her Work - but because she seems to be a sheer

reflection of the innocence that is prior to word and concept. Katie

is childlike, but with a fiery knowing that pares away my postures,

both subtle and obvious, of who I like to think I am and what it is I

think I am doing. I can feel that she simply doesn't connect to any

aspect of my identity; yet she is wholly there with me, her attention

pouring over me undiluted. In this gaze which

sees me through and through, I am aware of feeling returned to a deep

restedness, the peace that

comes from knowing there is no-one to be, nothing to hold up any

more, at least, not in this moment.

We walk out to the garden, and she shows me the buildings, five of

them, that house the offices, the people who live with her, a

meditation and meeting hall. Back in her paranoid days, she used to

own eleven houses on the block, part of a desperate attempt to

control the neighborhood. It didn't work, of course, she laughed, she

got more out of control than ever. For hours we talked, Katie a

fountain of energy, unaware of time, food, or schedule.

People would come up to her as we spoke to ask about some

administrative detail, to know what to say to someone on the phone,

to arrange a meeting. Whoever it was, whatever they needed, she would

turn the full beam of her attention on them until they had what they

wanted. I was amazed to hear that she was expecting two hundred

people the next day for a weekend retreat, this woman who was

strolling around with me like she had all the time in the world.

Which she did.

People came to live with her not because they were chosen, but as

they turned up, and according to availability of space. Years ago, in

the beginning, people would ask what she did. She didn't know, she

said. Come live with me, do what I do. People would always think it

was some kind of doing, so she told them to come and see for

themselves. The people with her now manage her schedule, run the

office, dispense her tapes, and seem to 'get' that Katie doesn't

actually 'do' anything at-all to be who she is. Maybe that's why they

laugh a lot.

Katie's life is dedicated to going wherever she is asked, providing

there is space in the diary, which is rare these days since she has

invitations from all over the world. She never charges, but offers

The Work on a donation basis. What I notice as we stroll around is

that she seems to say yes to everything and everyone. Isn't there

ever a place for no, I wonder.

"Yes, no, same thing," she says. " What we are looking for is

integrity, the truth of the simple heart. That's what I'm married to.

I go and do The Work wherever I am asked because people suffer. If

you suffer, I have an interest. That's it. If you care about it, I

do, because I know it is an illusion. I lived that illusion for 43

years, and I found a way through it. Someone who is tired of

suffering can hear what I am saying and will do The Work for the love

of truth."

We would have turned to the matter of love anyway, though with my own

story so close to the surface, it was bound to emerge sooner rather

than later. Katie is unequivocal. There is only one way you can ever

join anyone, she asserts, and that is in awareness.

"You experience what is usually called love with someone who is a

reflection of your own

wonderfulness." She seems to smile with her whole body. "Someone who

is agreeing with you. As soon as they stray from that role, then love

goes and we try everything we can to fit them back into the place

that we like. What you love, then, is your own story of the other.

Connection, joining, marriage, all those things are about your own

nature, nothing else. If you were clear you would be happy living

with Frankenstein.

"I can hear the truth of it, clear as a knife slicing through an

apple. Yet I feel a tension, too, between the truth and the wish to

hold on to my own story anyway, some mad attachment to the drama of

my own suffering. If there is only one awareness, I say, that must

mean the end of sexual desire, which needs a sense of other to

arise."

"When my husband, Paul, would ask me if I wanted to make love", Katie

responds, not even a hint of self consciousness, "I would say, I

don't know, touch me and we'll find out, every moment is a deep

surprise. My own experience is that I have no interest, but if I say

that, people can make a dogma out of it. So I say, inquire, ask the

question: is it true you have no sexual interest? What do you get for

holding that belief? There's no formula, no better or worse. It's

none of my business whether I have a sexual desire or not. It just

is, or it isn't. But I don't, that's my experience."

We have been talking for hours, the sun has gone down, and I realize

I am hungry, not having eaten since early morning. Katie would have

gone on all through the night, oblivious of food, sleep, or any other

natural calls. Yet when I ask if there might be some food in the

house she stops, totally giving herself to that, handing me things

out of the fridge, warming soup. Everything is organic now, her old

junk food days long gone.

Over dinner I ask her about evolution. The whole story of Western

civilization is founded on the idea of progress, the gradual

development of our knowledge and intelligence to the point of having

a society founded on wisdom, moral intelligence, and the power of

justice. The ideal of America is wholly founded upon this view, as is

the dream of an evolving spiritual democracy. Yet Katie has more of

an Eastern eye, one that sees existence to be cyclical and

repetitive.

"No, nothing is going anywhere, that's my experience," she says when

I ask. "Nor do we go anywhere; we are already. You know, I work with

a toxic waste corporation with branches in Dallas and Chicago.

I ask them how they think they can clean up the planet if they don't

clean up their own minds.

Everything begins and ends with us, and the bottom line is, What Is,

Is. Everything else is a story

about what is. Your life is a story about what is. All the issues we

get excited about are stories we lay over What Is. The highest truth,

if you can bear it, is that God is What Is, and I mean all of it. I

see no darkness anywhere, and I know people find that hard. At the

same time, it doesn't mean you don't care, that you don't respond to

suffering. I am moved to respond to suffering at the root. That's all

I know. That's why I go where I am asked."

I am astonished to learn that Katie is invited into large

corporations, yet people in the most unlikely of settings seem ready

for what she has to say. She tells me she has just been invited to

speak to 5,000 United Steel workers, an endangered species now, who

fear for their jobs. These kind of men are the backbone of America,

they support home, church, and country, they are the original good

guys. All they have done is work, play their expected part, and now

they don't feel heard; they are confused about their place in this

changing world. Katie will do with them what she always does, use The

Work to stop the mind, investigate, and try to cut through that

confusion. I am beginning to wilt now, with so much to absorb from

our hours together, but she jolts my attention when she goes on to

say that just the previous week she went to a prison in Texas, where

there was only one white prisoner among 300 inmates. The prison

psychotherapist had invited her to come and do The Work. When she

started, she could get no eye contact with any of them. An hour later

it was different. "I'd ask them what was not okay in their world."

They'd tell me about their wife cheating on them. I'd say, "Your wife

is meant to be loyal, is it true?" We'd go through the inquiry, and

they would start to see the death of a sacred belief, one they would

have killed for without a second thought. The reality, I'd say, is

that it happens. "How can it not be true? As long as you fight with

Reality, you are going to lose."

"Another thing. When I went in there, they were all innocent. When I

left, some of them were guilty - they were acknowledging that they

were the ones who had got themselves into prison, not society, not

mom or dad, not the system. We are the ones doing it to ourselves. We

are always going to have a story, that's what our life is. If you

have a good story, I say keep it, just be a witness to it and let it

roll on without a motive. If you are in a nightmare, then better to

wake up, since you are the only one hurting."

As we close up the dining room and bring an end to the night, she

adds one more thing. The prison pastor came up to her as she was

leaving, said how inspired he was by what happened. But was there a

place for Jesus in this, he asked, with more than a trace of concern.

She looked at him and said yes, there was a place for everyone. He

was visibly relieved.

The next morning I join Katie and the community for a couple of hours

in the meditation hall for their daily session with The Work. This, I

realize, is where the glitches of community as well as personal life

get ironed out. The sound technician can't find the usual music, and

when he apologizes, Katie says it is good we don't have it.

Everything is good for Katie if it is happening. She speaks with

people one after the other, facing with them their projections onto

others, their avoidance of their own stories and their creation of

them.

After the session she asks me if I would like to meet her husband.

She and Paul have their own house on the property. She explains how

difficult her sudden change had been for him, how he would wail that

he had lost his wife, that he had been abandoned. All these years he

had held on to that story, she says, though now he has acclimatized

to it. She hasn't tried to affect his story through The Work, because

it is all he has, he loves it, and he wants to keep it.

It might sound as if she were unfeeling, speaking of her husband this

way; yet I sensed it to be

compassionate wisdom. She could not leave the place she had fallen

into by some mysterious act of grace (or misfortune, depending on

your point of view). She could not do other than be truthful to it.

At the same time, she could not change anyone else, nor could she

have any wish to. She has 'gone, gone far beyond,' as the Heart Sutra

says. You may fall suddenly and without apparent reason through the

net of time and space to the condition she lives in, but you cannot

evolve to it. You are there or you are not there. So however much she

may or may not want her husband to join her - and from where she is,

it wouldn't matter either way, except to relieve his suffering - she

would be crying in the wind upon deaf ears.

She assures me Paul is always happy to tell his story, so I follow

her into their house to find him sitting in a chair reading the

paper. He is a large man with a large belly held in with a big belt,

soft eyes in a ruddy face. The kind of man you might expect to find

in a no-frills town like Barstow. He is 70, Katie had told me, some

fifteen years older than her. After she has introduced us I ask him

what it is like to live with this extraordinary woman. He exhales,

half laugh and half sigh, and says it was like getting a divorce and

then living with the same person.

"Everything we used to do and enjoy together has gone," he says,

sighing again. She was the love of my life. I thought I had found

what I wanted, and now she is gone. I used to have a drinking,

smoking, fishing, hunting buddy, and I've lost them all. She would

wonder why I didn't do The Work - what do you expect, I was pissed

off with The Work, it took everything away from me. It even took away

my chance to care for her. Now she is self sufficient, and others

look after her needs. But you know, I put up with it now because I

watch all the people and see the difference in them in the time they

stay here. She does a great deal to help people, and I'd be selfish

to feel any other way. But it's a weird thing, having to stand in

line now to hug your wife. Really, that's what I have to do."

I'd find that difficult, I tell him. I am amazed he is still there

with her. Nowhere else to go, he says, and anyway, he loves her. She

loves him, he thinks, but just like she loves everyone else, which

isn't quite the same. Still, you just have to accept life as it is.

They have a funny relationship, for sure, he says.

He will drive her to LA, some three or four hours away, and say two

words. The car is her quiet time, almost the only time she isn't with

a crowd. If he dwells on it all too much, he gets depressed and

scared. Then, he says, looking at me with a gentleness you would

never imagine coming from a bulk like his, he will go fishing. He'll

sit there all day and watch that pole and suddenly it's dusk.

What a fine man he is, I think, moved and grateful to hear his story.

It all sounds so unfair, but who is to say it should be any other

way. It can't be any other way, since this is how it is, at least

until it changes. His sadness stirs my sadness, even so.

As we leave Paul to his paper, Katie says it might be fun to take a

walk in the desert for a while,

continue talking there. I don't believe her, it is mid- morning and

her group will be arriving in the next hour or two. I can't stay

myself, since I have an appointment in Studio City. As I am about to

leave this secular American equivalent of a great Indian or Buddhist

sage, she sends me off with one last shot from the hip.

"You know, I don't pray because I already have everything," she says,

looking at me again with those fathomless eyes. " But if I did, it

would be, God spare me from the desire to be loved and

appreciated."

Wham! If anything is the teaching, it is that. Byron Katie is so

undeniably what she talks about. If she were in India, she would be

hailed as one of the masters of non-dualism, in the lineage of Ramana

Maharshi, the great sage who died in the 1950's. (He also woke up

spontaneously while lying on the floor, though under much more normal

circumstances.) But she isn't in any lineage. She just happened, out

here in the desert. No accident, either, that she is a woman. In

America, it often seems to be women who are cutting through

established forms and making new tracks of their own. And these women

seem more naturally free of the need to be teachers, to establish a

hierarchy in which some know and others don't.

Katie's everyday language, her lack of any religious baggage, her

utterly individual experience of

awakening, exemplify an emerging form of quintessentially American

spirituality: one founded not, like so much of the New Age phenomena,

on a new and more exciting set of beliefs, or on wishful thinking,

but on the radical experience of Being. There can be no better

antidote than this to the American obsession with Doing.

 

1999 by Roger Housden

also http://www.realization.org/page/doc1/doc107a.htm

Katie's site: http://www.thework.com/intro.html