Tuesday, April 24, 2012

A Thousand Names for Joy, by Byron Katie #69



69
When two great forces oppose each other,
the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield. 

It's not possible for something to be against you. There's no such thing as an enemy; no person, no belief, not even the ego is an enemy. It's just a misunderstanding: we perceive something as an enemy, when all we need to do is be present with it. It's just love arising in a form that we haven't understood yet. And questioning the mind allows beliefs to simply arise. The quiet mind realizes that no belief is true, it is immovable in that, so there's no belief it can attach to. It's comfortable with them all.


Your enemy is the teacher who shows you what you haven't healed yet. Any place you defend is where you're still suffering. There's nothing out there that can oppose you. There is just fluid motion, like the wind. You attach a story to what you perceive, and that story is your suffering. I am everything that I have ever called other people; they were me all along. Everything I ever called my enemy was me. Projection would have us see reality as a them and a me, but reality is much kinder. All enemies are your kind teachers, just waiting for you to realize it. (And that doesn't mean you have to invite them to dinner.) No one can be my enemy until I perceive him as threatening what I believe. If there's anything I'm afraid of losing, I have created a world where enemies are possible, and in such a world there's no way to understand that whatever I lose I am better off without.

I return home after a trip, I open the door, and the house has been cleaned out. The burglars have taken my money, my jewelry, the television, the stereo, my CD collection, appliances, computers; they've left just the furniture and some clothing. The house has a clean Zen look. I go through the rooms and see that this possession is gone, that one is gone. There's no sense of loss or violation. On the contrary, I picture the recipients and feel what joy these items will bring them. Maybe they'll give the jewelry to their wives or lovers, maybe they'll sell it at a pawn shop and feed their kids with the proceeds. I am filled with gratitude. My gratitude comes from the obvious lack of need for each item. How do I know I don't need it? It's gone. Why is my life better without it? That's easy: my life is simpler now. The items now belong to the burglars, they obviously needed the items more than I did; that's how the universe works. I feel such joy for them, even as I fill out the police report. I find it odd that the way of the world is to try to retrieve what is no longer ours, and yet I understand it. Filling out the police report is also the way of it. If the items are found, I'm ready to welcome them back. And because they are never found, I understand that the shift in ownership is the best thing for the world, for me, and for the burglars. I need only what I have at any given time, never more, and never less. We can never have a problem with possessions; the only problem is our thoughts about what we do or don't possess. What other suffering is possible?

The simple truth of it is that what happens is the best thing that can happen. People who can't see this are simply believing their own thoughts, and have to stay stuck in the illusion of a limited world, lost in the war with what is. It's a war they'll always lose, because it argues with reality, and reality is always benevolent. What actually happens is the best that can happen, whether you understand it or not. And until you understand it, there is no peace. 

Reality is always kinder than the story we tell ourselves about it. If I were to tell the story of reality, it would have to be a love story. The story would be told as life lives itself out, always kinder and kinder, with twists and turns that cannot be projected into the distance. For example, if my daughter dies, I realize that there is no self to be affected. It's not about me. This is about her life, my child's life, and I celebrate her freedom, because I know the freedom of unidentified mind-the unceasing bodiless mind that is finally awake to itself, the mind that never existed as a her, and the her that can never die. In this we are never separated. And that's just a beginning; it gets even kinder. I get to see what my child's children grow into because she was not there to teach them differently. Whenever I lose something, I've been spared. Every loss has to be a gain, unless the loss is being judged by a confused mind. I come to see what fills that space in my life because she isn't there. And because she lives in my heart, the kindness in my world cannot decrease, because something else enters the space that I held her in. Just when you think that life is so good that it can't get any better, it has to. That's a law.

I look at the leaf that has withered and gone crisp in its apparent lifelessness. The tree has had to let go of it as if it were nothing. It falls to the ground and begins to do its job, a different job now. It naturally does it, becomes mulch, becomes water and air. Eventually it becomes every element, it nourishes and becomes part of what makes the mother tree strong, substance and water and air and fire, everything doing its job in the moment it appears to be that. And again and again it lives the story of mind, the evolution of mind and what it projects as disservice in absolute service.

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