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

You say that to you there are no students; there are only friends. Don’t you consider yourself a teacher? I am always the student. I love to be in that position, bowing, listening, at the feet of all that I see. This doesn’t require an open mind: it is the open mind. It never has to take responsibility for knowing or for not knowing. It receives everything without defense, without judgment, since judgment would cost it everything it is. The moment you think you’re someone or think you have something to teach, the inner world freezes and becomes the realm of illusion. That’s what it costs when you identify yourself as the person who knows. It’s a concoction of mind. You shrink down into the teacher: limited, separate, stuck.

What’s it like to live without a self? Nothing happens, not even life. Everything you see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and think is already over before the action begins. My foot just moved, and as I watched it, I was only watching the past. It appeared to be happening now, but the now was gone even as I watched it. This is the power and the goodness of mind realized. I can’t even swallow my tea; it’s gone before it happens, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

There’s a law in this world: when you think life is so good that it can’t get any better, it has to. 10 LIVING IN INQUIRY The Buddha said, “Tell me something, Subhuti.

Why do people think that becoming enlightened means attaining something? I don’t know. It actually means losing everything.

What could anyone say to me that I wouldn’t be able to acknowledge? If someone were to say, “You’re unkind,” I would become still, I would go inside, and in about three seconds I’d be able to find it—if not in the present situation, then at some time in the apparent past. If someone were to say, “You’re a liar,” I’d think, “Duh,” because I can easily join them there. Or I might say, “Where do you think I lied? I really want to know.” This is about self-realization, not about being right or wrong. Whatever someone might call me, I can go inside and find it. My job is to stay connected. The only thing that could cause me pain would be my defense or denial. “Oh, no, you can’t be talking about me—I’m not that!” Well, yes I am. I am that too. I am everything you can think of. Keep coming at me. Show me what I haven’t realized yet. When the mind begins inquiry as a practice, it learns as a student of itself that everything is for it. Everything adds to it, enlightens it, nourishes it, reveals it. Nothing is or ever was against it. This is a mind that has grown beyond opposites. It’s no longer split. It keeps opening, because it’s living out of a fearless, undefended state, and it’s eager for knowledge. It realizes that it’s everything, so it learns to exclude nothing, to welcome it all. There’s nothing gentler than open-mindedness. Because I don’t oppose, it’s not possible that someone will oppose me; people can’t oppose anything but their own thinking. When there’s no oppositio...

practice generosity for the benefit of all sentient beings, they should realize that generosity isn’t in fact generosity and that sentient beings aren’t sentient beings. When bodhisattvas realize this, they will be able to practice generosity for the benefit of all sentient beings.

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.

The Work is a practice. I suggest that people have it for breakfast every morning, and have a good day. Even if you’re graced with the deepest experience of enlightenment, you still need to practice awareness, because there are ancient thoughts that will keep arising in you, and if you don’t question them, they’ll take you over, however enlightened you are. For me, the major thought was “My mother doesn’t love me.” I worked on this one, and dozens of variations, every day for a whole year. I would write down the thoughts as they came to me, and I would meditate on each one, using the four questions and turnarounds of The Work, for hours, sometimes for days. I knew I wasn’t dealing with a person; I was dealing with concepts, and once I investigated the concepts about my mother, I had unraveled all my concepts about everyone and everything.

The ultimate clarity is to realize that there are no thoughts and you’re not the one thinking them.

It’s the ultimate self: the non-self. It’s self-consuming always, and always loving it. In the apparent world of duality, people are going to see a “you” and a “me,” but in reality there is only one. Everything is equal. There’s no “this” or “that.” And even to say “one” is delusional. It doesn’t matter how you attempt to be disconnected, that’s not a possibility. Any thought you believe is an attempt to break the connection. But it’s only an attempt. It can’t be done. That’s why it feels so uncomfortable.

The Golden Rule isn’t a should. It’s not a matter of ethics; it’s a matter of fact. I do unto others as I do unto myself, because I realize that others are myself.

was what I called “the cleanse,” the cleansing of itself. It purified itself from any teaching. The cleansing looked like tears and humility and death, the death of the personality, the death of any self that might remain. I could see that any time I spoke when someone hadn’t asked, I was met with confusion. People would look at me, and their eyes would reflect back a crazy woman. That was okay with me, but there was no value in speaking that way, except in learning to experience a truth from within and not speak it to myself outside.

In the months after my experience of waking up to reality, I cried many tears that came from losing everything in the world. There was no sorrow in these tears, just gratitude and the awareness that nothing in the world belongs to me. It wasn’t my body I was losing; I had already lost it from the first experience on the attic floor. It was like this. You see a chair, for example, and you realize that it’s not; you’ve lost even that. It leaves you with nowhere to walk, no one walking, no floor—nothing. Then someone comes in and says, “Hello, Katie,” and you’re talking, and you know you’re not talking to anyone but your own mind. There’s no one else talking. You know it. You can’t backtrack—there’s no going back, because you can’t create something to go back to. And it falls away to a deeper level. But there’s always something stable. And you can’t even cling to that, because you know that that’s not real either. You can’t have anything. You can’t have any truth. Inquiry takes all that away. The only thing that exists for me is the thought that just arose. Prior to that there was

Note that “I should waste my time” and “I should waste his time” are not valid turnarounds; they are turnarounds of turnarounds, rather than turnarounds of the original statement.