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

Again and again in this sutra, the Buddha points us to the world beyond names. When you were a child, before you had language, before words had any meaning for you, where was the world? There was none. You didn’t have a body, because you hadn’t yet believed yourself in one. You had no separate identity; you couldn’t separate reality into an “I” and a world. When your mother pointed to a tree and said, “That’s a tree,” you looked up at her and said, “Goo goo, ga ga.” Then, one day, she said, “That’s a tree,” and you believed her. Suddenly there was a tree and a mother and a “you.” You had a world. You had a body. And before long, your body was too short, too tall, too skinny, too fat, not good enough for this, not good enough for that. A whole world of suffering arose when you began to name things in a world separate from you. You think that you’re the image you see in the mirror, and you compare that image, which is now an image in your head, with your image of the people you consider beautiful. The unquestioned thoughts that attack your imagined body only support the imaginary self you believe you are. But you’ve never seen your own face. And you can believe that your body is too anything only if you believe the world of names that your own thinking has created.