Loving What Is

Author: Byron Katie

The world we see is a reflection of who we are.

If you’re at a place in life where you want to learn to love others as they are, yourself as you are, and life as it is — instead of how you wish these things were — the method and insights in Byron Katie’s book can be a light along that initially dark path.

“Every painful story [that we tell ourselves] is a variation on a single theme: I shouldn’t be experiencing this, God is unjust, life is unfair.”

Summary

The author holds all the world as innocent and all suffering as the result of confusion. Finding no fault in reality or in people, she singles out thoughts as the source of all our problems. Although she never puts it in these words, she’s built an entire worldview out of the concept “Nothing is bad or good but thinking makes it so.”

In Katie’s view, our nature is truth, and when we believe a lie — or try to believe a lie — it creates a feeling of uneasiness. If we don’t respond to this feeling by identifying the lie, it’ll develop into a more pronounced version of uneasiness, such as stress or fear.

We then explain the feeling to ourselves by equating the strength of the feeling to the evil of what we’re experiencing. This is how we go from entertaining a false belief to embracing it, proving it to ourselves with some version of, “I know it’s true because of the pain it’s causing me. If it weren’t true, how could it make me feel so bad?” Case closed.

Once we’ve convinced ourselves, we no longer examine the belief, but instead, we direct our energies at changing the world while leaving the pain-producing belief intact.

It’s like having a thorn in your hand, and noticing that the pain around the thorn spikes whenever something touches it, and then concluding that the solution is not to remove the thorn, but to organize your life around ensuring that nothing touches the thorn — with the result that you become obsessed with protecting the very thing that is causing you pain.

Click here for our podcast discussing the book

Beware of Tears

I cried a lot while working through this book. The book is filled with personal accounts that are equally heart-wrenching and inspiring: accounts of people learning to see through lifelong lies so that they can practice compassion instead of self-protecting accusation and condemnation.

I think part of the reason for my tears was a deep sense of sadness over having clogged with judgements the channels of my soul that are meant to carry life: patience, honor for others, forgiveness. But they were also tears of hope — hope that I could now begin to be free to set aside my judgmental mind and let the better things take their natural place. I also cried for joy that those I love would see this, too.

We tend to think that hate is the opposite of love, and in thinking this we grant our judgements impunity because compared to hatred, they seem neutral. It’s only when we compare our judgments to full-blooded goodwill toward others that we see how miserly they really are.

The Method

Katie refers to her method simply as “The Work” which she expresses in this memorable little rhyme: “Judge your neighbor, write it down, ask four questions, turn it around.”

The work, also referred to as Inquiry, is a series of questions that help us find freedom through new ways of thinking — rather than by trying to alter the world around us, because often the world around us will not bend to our wishes, i.e., sickness, death, divorce, etc.

In the first two steps of The Work, Judge your neighbor, Write it down, we write about someone who upsets us. The more petty and frank, the better. Then we ask the following questions of each judgmental statement we made about our neighbor. We need to be ruthlessly honest in how we answer these questions, as we’re predisposed to believe our own interpretation of motives and events.

The Four Questions

“These four questions take us into a world of such beauty that it can’t be told. Some of us haven’t even begun to explore it yet, even though it’s the only world that exists.”

1. Is that true?

2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

3. How do you react when you think that thought?

• Can you find a reason to drop the thought?
• Can you find a stress-free reason to keep the thought?
• How do you treat so-and-so when you think that thought?

4. Who/what would you be without that thought/story?

The Four Turn-Arounds

Once you have closely examined your judgments using the above questions, use the following techniques to turn your judgements around — applying each one to yourself. As you do, ask yourself if the turn-around feels as true or more true than than your original judgement of the other person.

1. Switch roles. Instead of “He did…” say “ I did…”

2. Negation. Instead of “She did…” say “She did not do…”

3. Substitution. Ask yourself, “Is there something I do or use that is analogous to what I judged the other person for?

4. Willingness. Say “I’m willing to have the other person treat me that way again. I look forward to the other person treating me that way again.

This last one helps us to see if our minds have changed toward the situation and the other person.

Three Kinds of Business

According to Katie, there are only three kinds of business in life:

1. God’s business.

2. Other people’s business.

3. My business.

“Every time in my life when I’d felt hurt or lonely, I’d been living in someone else’s business.”

“The next time you are feeling stressed, ask yourself whose business you’re in mentally. That question can bring you back to yourself, and you may come to see that you’ve been living in other people’s business all your life.”

“To think that I know what’s best for anyone else is to be out of my own business. Even in the name of love, it is pure arrogance, and the result is tension, anxiety, and fear.”

Extended Observations & Personal Notes

“It’s terrifying to think that you could lose control, even though the truth is that you never had it in first place. That’s the death of fantasy and the birth of reality.”

One thing the work does is to show us where we’re super-imposing our “shoulds” on what actually is. Everyone does this, but religious people may feel especially justified in it because we tend to believe we have God in our pocket, lending His authority to our determination about how things “should be.”

Longtime practitioners of the work find that as their argument with reality abates, what remains is love: Love for others and love for themselves.

For theists, the work nudges us to let God be God. For atheists, the work nudges them to let reality be God. It urges both to stop trying to be God ourselves.

“Do I know what’s right for me? That is my only business. Let me work with that before I try to solve your problems for you.”

• This reminds me of Jesus saying “Don’t say to your brother, let me take that speck out of your eye…” Also, it reminds me of Jordan Peterson advising us to set our own house in order before trying to fix the world.

“Wanting reality to be different than it is is hopeless.”

• In my view, one of the major sticking points for many of us is the fact that reality changes, and we can become fixated on the hope that it’ll change into just what we want it to be.

“No one can control their thoughts, even though they may say they can. I don’t let go of my thoughts. I meet them with understanding and they let go of me… Once you see the truth, the lie lets go of you —not the other way around.”

• Using truth to make thoughts let go of us reminds me of two passages of scripture: one where Jesus says “then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free” and another where Paul admonishes believers not to “give the devil a foothold.” In other words, the lies will let go of you once you stop giving them a place to hold onto you.

“Suffering is an alarm that we are attaching to a thought. When we don’t heed this warning, we come to expect the suffering as an inevitable part of life. We’re either attaching to our thoughts or inquiring. There’s no middle ground.”

“Spouses, parents, and children are the best teachers.”

“Practicing inquiry makes us students of ourselves and friends who can be trusted not to criticize, resent, or hold a grudge.”

Katie says one of the biggest stumbling blocks for those new to the work is the fear of not being fearful. “If I just accept what is, what reason will I have to work against the evil in the world?” Her answer is, because that’s what love does. The truth sets us free, and free people act.

Fascinating take on free will. “There’s nothing we can do to keep ourselves from coming or going. We just tell the story about how we have something to do with it.”

Epistemology. “We can’t ever really know anything.” This statement speaks to the same issue as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden.

“The world you experience is your projection of it. Instead of trying to change the image, focus on changing the projector. When I decide to be happy and free right where I am, I become attractive to those around me. When I am clear, I project love onto others and that love is reflected back to me. In this way, from my perspective, others have no choice but to love me.”

We experience mental combat fatigue from arguing with our inner voice when it tells us to do simple things we don’t want to do.

The worst thing that can happen to you is to live under the control of unexamined thoughts. Worse than rape, murder, and betrayal. This has overtones of Socrates’ famous line, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Katie points out that even the man who molests a child is simply looking for love, only hurting people as a byproduct of his confusion about where to find that love.

Defensiveness keeps us from fully realizing who we are.

Katie refers to an internal peace that is unchanging, immovable, and ever-present. It reminds me of Paul’s reference to the “peace that passes understanding.”

“The more you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.” Baruch Spinoza

“We are disturbed not by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens to us.” Epictetus

“When we stop opposing reality, action becomes simple, fluid, kind, and fearless.”

If I had a prayer, it would be this: “God, spare me of the desire for love, approval, or appreciation. Amen.”

“People seem not to notice that their opinions about the world around them are really a confession of character.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Unconditional love is a totally selfish act. It’s truth owning itself in the recognition that we like ourselves more when we love others. Once this is experienced, self-love becomes so greedy that there’s no limit to the number of people it can serve.”

Modern neuroscience refers to one of the functions of the left brain as The Interpreter. Its job is to formulate the internal narrative that gives us our sense of self. In the interest of preserving that sense of self, the narrative often parts ways with reality, teaching us to lie to ourselves and training us to believe our own lies. Thus, when we think we’re being rational, we’re often just being spun by our own Interpreter.

• For related thoughts, see the “Stories & Evidence” section of The More Beautiful World, and the discussion of confirmation bias in Loserthink and Mistakes Were Made.

We would more readily set people free if we didn’t believe that they need to be a certain way in order for us to be okay.

We try so hard to get others to love us to make up for not loving ourselves. But the one cannot compensate for the other, so the madness goes on indefinitely.

Without ever saying it, our message to many of those closest to us is, “I want you to be a lie, for my sake.”

We want to change the world around us so that we ourselves can stay as we are. So we undertake the impossible, endeavoring to change what we cannot and refusing to change the only thing we can.