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

Confusion is the only suffering in this world. And when we hear what you were believing and how it affected you in that situation, it’s easy to see the price of confusion.

The truth is that your partner is your mirror. He or she always reflects you back to yourself. If you think there’s a flaw in him, that flaw is in you. It has to be in you, because he’s nothing more than your story. You are always what you judge him to be in the moment. There’s no exception to this. You are your own suffering. You are your own happiness. People think that relationships will make them happy, but you can’t get happiness from another person; you can’t get it from anywhere outside you. What we usually think of as a relationship is two belief systems that come together to validate that there is something outside you that can bring you happiness. And when you believe that that’s true, growing beyond your common belief system means losing the other person, because that’s what you had together. So if you move forward, you leave this old belief system behind in what you call the other person, and then you feel it as separation and pain. The only relationship that is ever going to be meaningful is the relationship you have with yourself. When you love yourself, you love the person you’re always with. But unless you love yourself, you won’t be comfortable with someone else, because he or she is going to challenge your belief system, and until you question your beliefs, you’ve got to make war to defend them. So much for the relationship! People make these unspoken contracts with each other and promise that they won’t ever mess with the other person’s belief system, an...

Think of your feet. Did you have feet before I asked you to think about them? Did they exist in your awareness? Did you put them in the position they’re in right now? Something did. But until a few moments ago, you didn’t have feet. No story: no feet. It’s like that with everything.

Our natural state is happiness, but when we believe our thoughts, we feel the effect as stress.

People tell me they want a quiet mind; they think that freedom is the mind stopped. That’s not my experience. What I knew to do, since my mind wouldn’t shut up, was to meet my thoughts with understanding, through inquiry. And then I noticed that people were saying the same thoughts I had been thinking. So because I had met my thoughts with understanding, there was no one to meet; there were only concepts understood, which I called “people.”

Nothing exists but the concept in the moment. Let’s meet that now with understanding.

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.

Not at all. You can’t feel fear unless you believe a thought about a future. The thought you’re believing happens so fast that you have no way to track it; you’re aware only of the physical or emotional effects. For example, if you woke up experiencing fear, even though you may be unable to identify why you’re afraid, you’re simply reacting to the idea that something terrible has happened or is going to happen. Believing one or the other or both thoughts is the cause of your fear, not anything happening in reality. You just woke up with your head on your pillow and with all your needs met in the moment. This is also true of situations where you’re actually in what people call danger. When you see a bear, you can run in terror or you can just run. Except for the unquestioned thoughts you’re believing, life is always good.