A Thousand Names for Joy

thousandnamesforjoy

Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are by Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell

Three Rivers Press 2008

Learn more about Byron Katie at thework.com

In her first two books, Byron Katie demonstrated how suffering can be ended by questioning the stressful thoughts that create it. In this new book, she gives readers the powerful encouragement of seeing, in detail, the freedom that lives on the other side of inquiry

Stephen Mitchell–renowned translator of the Tao Te Ching–has used this influential text as a stimulus for Katie to talk about the most essential issues that face us: life, death, love, work, and fulfillment. A Thousand Names for Joy is a glimpse into the depths of being, and into the life of a woman who for twenty years has been living what Lao-tzu wrote. The profound, lighthearted wisdom that it embodies is not theoretical; it is absolutely authentic.  With its stories of total ease in all circumstances, it doesn’t merely describe the awakened mind; it lets you see it, feel it, in action. And it tells you the way to attain that freedom for yourself.

Excerpts

PREFACE

The Master travels all day
without leaving home.
However splendid the views,
she stays serenely in herself.

Peace is our natural condition. Only by believing an untrue thought is it possible to move from peace into emotions like sadness and anger. Without the pull of beliefs, the mind stays serenely in itself and is available for whatever comes along.
Who would you be in people’s presence without, for example, the story that anyone should care about you, ever? You would be love itself. When you believe the myth that people should care, you’re too needy to care about people or about yourself.

The experience of love can’t come from anyone else; it can come only from inside you. I was once walking in the desert with a man who began to have a stroke. We sat down, and he said, “Oh my God, I’m dying. Do something!” He was talking through one side of his mouth because the other side had become paralyzed. What I did was just sit there beside him, loving him, looking into his eyes, knowing that we were miles from a phone or car. He said, “You don’t even care, do you?” I said, “No.” And through his tears, he started to laugh, and I did too. And eventually his faculties returned; the stroke had come to pass, not to stay. This is the power of love. I wouldn’t leave him for a caring.

If someone were knifed in front of me, what would compassion look like? I would do everything within my power to help, of course, but to think that this shouldn’t be happening would be to argue with reality. That’s not efficient. If I cared, I couldn’t be the intimacy that I am. A caring would move me away from the real, would separate me from the one who is stabbed and from the one with the knife, and I am everything. To exclude anything that appears in your universe is not love. Love joins with everything. It doesn’t exclude the monster. It doesn’t avoid the nightmare—it looks forward to it, because, like it or not, it may happen, if only in your mind. There’s no way that I would let caring interfere with what I experience as my very own self. It has to include every cell, every atom. It is every cell and every atom. There is no “also.”

When something feels right I do it; I live my life out of that. That’s how I contribute to life: by picking up the trash on the sidewalk, by recycling, sitting with the homeless, sitting with the wealthy, helping people who are deeply confused question their thinking. I love what is and how it changes through my hands and yours. It’s wonderful to be so available to change what I can, and for it to be effortless, always.

Some people think that compassion means feeling another person’s pain. That’s nonsense. It’s not possible to feel another person’s pain. You imagine what you’d feel if you were in that person’s shoes, and you feel your own projection. Who would you be without your story? Pain-free, happy, and totally available if someone needs you—a listener, a teacher in the house, a Buddha in the house, the one who lives it. As long as you think there’s a you and a me, let’s get the bodies straight. What I love about separate bodies is that when you hurt, I don’t—it’s not my turn. And when I hurt, you don’t. Can you be there for me without putting your own suffering between us? Your suffering can’t show me the way. Suffering can only teach suffering.

The Buddhists say that it’s important to recognize the suffering in the world, and that’s true, of course. But if you look more deeply, even that is a story. It’s a story to say that there is any suffering in the world. Suffering is imagined, because we haven’t adequately questioned our thoughts. I am able to be present with people in extreme states of torment without seeing their suffering as real. I’m in the position of being totally available to help them see what I see, if that’s what they want. They’re the only ones who can change, but I can be present, with kind words and the power of inquiry.

It’s amazing how many people believe that suffering is a proof of love. If I don’t suffer when you suffer, they think, it means that I don’t love you. How can that possibly be true? Love is serene; it’s fearless. If you’re busy projecting what someone’s pain must feel like, how can you be fully present with her? How can you hold her hand and love her with all your heart as she moves through her experience of pain? Why would she want you to be in pain, too? Wouldn’t she rather have you present and available? You can’t be present for people if you believe that you’re feeling their pain. If a car runs over someone and you project what that must feel like, you’re paralyzed. But sometimes in a crisis like that, the mind loses its reference, it can’t project anymore, you don’t think, you just act, you run over and pick up the car before you have time to think This isn’t possible. It happens in a split second. Who would you be without your story? The car is up in the air.

Sadness is always a sign that you’re believing a stressful thought that isn’t true for you. It’s a constriction, and it feels bad. Conventional wisdom says differently, but the truth is that sadness isn’t rational, it isn’t a natural response, and it can’t ever help you. It just indicates the loss of reality, the loss of the awareness of love. Sadness is the war with what is. It’s a tantrum. You can experience it only when you’re arguing with God. When the mind is clear, there isn’t any sadness. There can’t be.

If you move into situations of loss in a spirit of surrender to what is, all you experience is a profound sweetness and an excitement about what can come out of the apparent loss. And once you question the mind, once the stressful story is seen for what it is, there’s nothing you can do to make it hurt. You see that the worst loss you’ve experienced is the greatest gift you can have. When the story arises again—“She shouldn’t have died” or “He shouldn’t have left”—it’s experienced with a little humor, a little joy. Life is joy, and if you understand the illusion arising, you understand that it’s you arising, as joy.

What does compassion look like? At a funeral, just eat the cake. You don’t have to know what to do. It’s revealed to you. Someone comes into your arms, and the kind words speak themselves; you’re not doing it. Compassion isn’t a doing. Whether or not you’re suffering over their suffering, you’re standing or you’re sitting. But one way you’re comfortable, the other way you’re not.

You don’t have to feel bad to act kindly. On the contrary: the less you suffer, the kinder you naturally become. And if compassion means wanting others to be free of suffering, how can you want for others what you won’t give to yourself?

I read an interview with a well-known Buddhist teacher in which he described how appalled and devastated he felt while watching the planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. While this reaction is very popular, it is not the reaction of an open mind and heart. It has nothing to do with compassion. It comes from believing unquestioned thoughts. He believed, for example, “This shouldn’t be happening” or “This is a terrible thing.” It was thoughts like these that were making him suffer, not the event itself. He was devastating himself with his unquestioned thoughts. His suffering had nothing to do with the terrorists or the people who died. Can you take this in? Here was a man dedicated to the Buddha’s way—the end of suffering—who in that moment was terrorizing his own mind, causing his own grief. I felt compassion for people who projected fearful meanings onto that picture of a plane hitting a building, who killed themselves with their unquestioned thoughts and took away their own state of grace.

The end of suffering happens in this very moment, whether you’re watching a terrorist attack or doing the dishes. And compassion begins at home. Because I don’t believe my thoughts, sadness can’t exist. That’s how I can go to the depths of anyone’s suffering, if they invite me, and take them by the hand and walk them out of it into the sunlight of reality. I’ve taken the walk myself.

I’ve heard people say that they cling to their painful thoughts because they’re afraid that without them they wouldn’t be activists for peace. “If I felt completely peaceful,” they say, “why would I bother taking action at all?” My answer is “Because that’s what love does.” To think that we need sadness or outrage to motivate us to do what’s right is insane. As if the clearer and happier you get, the less kind you become. As if when someone finds freedom, she just sits around all day with drool running down her chin. My experience is the opposite. Love is action. It’s clear, it’s kind, it’s effortless, and it’s irresistible.

Reviews

“A genuine and fresh spiritual manifesto.” –Publishers Weekly

“A thought-provoking commentary on the Tao Te Ching. Katie mirrors the openness that is characteristic of Lao-tzu’s vision of reality.” –Spirituality and Health

“Byron Katie’s teachings and everyday life are pure wisdom.  A Thousand Names for Joy shows us the way to inner peace, and she directs us there fearlessly, relentlessly, and with utmost generosity. I have rarely seen anyone—spiritual teachers included—embody wisdom as powerfully as Katie in her passionate embrace of each and every moment.”
–Rōshi Bernie Glassman, author of Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life that Matters

“A tribute to the awakened mind in action.” –Sonoma Index-Tribune

“A Thousand Names for Joy offers idiosyncratic and thought-provoking commentary on the chapters of the Tao Te Ching and its wonderful blend of practical tips and paradoxes.” – Spirituality & Practice

“Byron Katie is one of the truly great and inspiring teachers of our time. She has been enormously helpful to me personally. I love this very wise woman, and I encourage everyone to immerse themselves in this phenomenal book.”
–Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, author of Inspiration

“Expect to have cherished beliefs—perhaps the ones that are blocking happiness—challenged in a unique, honest way. And expect radically different perspectives on life and death, good and evil.” – Common Ground Magazine

“For those looking for daily inspiration, this is a book to keep by the bedside.” – SRQ Magazine

“Byron Katie’s world is both amazing and curiously familiar. Her new book reveals what we have known all along—how large, spacious and happy life can be. As you read A Thousand Names for Joy, you are immersed in that world, and pretty soon you are swimming—seeing the radiance that Katie sees.”
–John Tarrant, author of Bring Me the Rhinoceros and Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy

“Such joys as these may be hard to swallow at times, which is exactly why entering into Katie’s process of inquiry may turn your life around. Her “Way” of experiencing directly how we persist in imprisoning and harming ourselves by believing our mostly unexamined thoughts may be the deepest and most loving cognitive therapy of all.”
–Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

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