A Mind at Home with Itself: How Asking Four Questions Can Free Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Turn Your World Around

by Byron Katie

Time and space don’t really exist. Unknowing is everything. There’s only love.

Every no I say is a yes to myself. It feels right to me. People don’t have to guess what I want or don’t want, and I don’t need to pretend. When you’re honest about your yeses and noes, it’s easy to live a kind life. People come and go in my life when I tell the truth, and they would come and go if I didn’t tell the truth. I have nothing to gain one way, and everything to gain the other way. I don’t leave myself guessing or guilty.

I tested what happened when I didn’t respond to the thoughts of “I want,” “I need,” “I shouldn’t,” “I should.”

Eventually, you find yourself ending every thought with a question mark, not with a period. You’re able to rest in the never-ending enlightenment of the don’t-know mind.

Everyone in my family became my teacher, deleting me from the process.

But the mind can never be controlled; it can only be questioned, loved, and met with understanding.

Suffering appears when we try to control reality, when we think that we’re the source rather than the mirror image or that we’re more or less than anything else in the mirror. But everything in the world is equal. It’s all a reflection of mind. We can control the mind only to this extent: as a thought appears, we can simply notice it, without believing it. We can notice it with a questioning mind. The thought that asserts itself and wants to be believed comes from the I-know mind, the supposed teacher. The questioning comes purely from the student. In the questioning mind we experience a flow. There’s no interruption, no limitation. ”Control” is just a matter of noticing. It doesn’t mean imposing an order onto the mind. If you’re a true student, the thought will always end with a question mark.

Why would you, as you say, bow in reverence to a grain of sand? The grain of sand gives itself entirely. Even though I may be totally unaware of it, it waits for the opportunity to show me itself and how it exists through me. It’s patient, solid in its purpose, unchanging in its present identity; it doesn’t pretend; it doesn’t mind if I step on it, praise it, or belittle it; it remains what it is, without disguise or deceit; it is perfectly allowing, doesn’t resist the name I give it, lets itself be whatever I call it.

Who of right mind wouldn’t bow to such a consciousness? I honor it as a teacher, and I meet its nature in everything I witness. If you throw me away, step on me, judge me as useless, overlook me, do I remain with the same constant, generous nature as the grain of sand? This is the Buddha-mind.

what thoughts are standing between you and pure generosity? Whatever these thoughts are, write them down and question them.

And eventually, as love would have it, if their minds are open to inquiry, their problems begin to disappear. In the presence of someone who doesn’t see a problem, the problem falls away—which shows you that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.

If you drop your story, you’re open to learning. But as long as you believe your story, you’re just open to pain.

I believe this is the first time I’ve Realized that the work is about freeing your mind so you can understand what’s actually happening