A Mind at Home with Itself by Byron Katie

Author:Byron Katie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

This chapter contains a variation on the truth that the Buddha stated in chapter 10: “A bodhisattva should develop a mind that abides nowhere.” Here he says, “The mind should be kept independent of any thoughts that arise within it. If the mind depends upon anything, it has no sure refuge.” To see things just as they are, you would need to think only in what I call “first-generation thoughts”: single nouns, with no other words attached to them—for example, “tree,” “sky,” “table,” “chair.” But even tree, sky, table, and chair have to be questioned, since any point of reference is pure imagination. So it’s not a table, though you call it a table; it’s not a tree, though you call it a tree. Calling it something doesn’t make it the something you call it.

Nothing is ultimately true; there’s nothing that can’t be questioned. The last reality is “There is no reality,” and I invite you to go beyond even that. You can find no anchor, no identity, no self. And that’s the safe place. That’s the sure refuge.

If the mind depends upon anything, it becomes the I-know mind, an ego flailing around in apparent space and time, always trying to define itself, always trying to prove that its judgments are real, that its whole world is real. The mind’s only way out is in: the mind inside itself, Buddha-mind, responding to the illusion of a self. Once the illusion is questioned, it can no longer exist. It appears as inconsequential, funny, and completely insane.

In the story that the Buddha tells in this chapter, about when he was being tortured, he was awake to the fact that the hands, feet, ears, and nose that were being chopped off weren’t his. The body wasn’t his body. It was no one’s body. He realized that it was all imagined, so no thought could arise that would cause anger or hatred in him.

I haven’t been tortured, but a number of times I have been threatened by violent people, and I know that it’s possible to stay rooted in the real even when you’re in apparent danger. To my mind, this isn’t a matter of patience; it’s a matter of noticing, witnessing, and staying connected to reality.

For example, sometime early on, in 1986 or ’87, I was doing The Work with a woman from Kansas City who had come to stay with me for a few days. She said she suffered from chronic pain. One day, as she was leaving, I put my arms around her. According to her, a shock went through her, and she said, “Oh my God, the pain is gone!” She burst into tears and said I was a great healer. I told her that whatever had happened resulted from her projecting this role onto me so powerfully, but it was all her; she was the one who had healed herself. After this, she kept flying back to Barstow and spent as much time as she could hanging out with me, living in my house.

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