Byron Katie

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

She calls reality as it is God, because it is reality that rules

An impersonal AbsoluteInferred from their doctrine

Byron Katie does not develop a theology. In Loving What Is she uses the word God in a deliberately bare way: she calls reality, what is, God, for the simple reason that it always prevails. Hence her maxim that arguing with reality is a battle lost one hundred per cent of the time. Her work contains no God who listens or intervenes, nor any doctrine of a hidden principle: the ultimate is the present fact, and what separates us from it are the thoughts we believe about it. In A Thousand Names for Joy, built on the Tao Te Ching, she describes that living in accord with what is as her experience, not as a thesis.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The self is a story believed; without it, someone remains who cannot be described

The ego is a construction of thoughtStated explicitly

Byron Katie's question is the fourth in her method: who would you be without that thought. Her whole work applies it to identity. What we call self, in her account, is made of stories we believe about ourselves and about others: I am someone who was abandoned, someone who needs approval, someone who ought to be different. Who Would You Be Without Your Story?, a collection of dialogues with participants, shows how those identities loosen when examined. Katie proposes no alternative true self and no doctrine about one; she describes what remains when thought is no longer believed as something free, open and hard to name. In the account of her 1986 experience she puts it this way: it was as if something else had woken up.

Why do we suffer?

We suffer not from what happens but from believing what we think about it

Thought and psychological timeStated explicitly

Byron Katie's diagnosis comes from her 1986 experience, which she sums up as follows: she discovered that when she believed her thoughts she suffered, and that when she did not believe them she did not suffer. Suffering is caused not by events but by the stressful thoughts we believe about them, especially those that argue with reality: he should not have left, I should be different. Since what has already happened cannot not have happened, that argument is always lost. In Loving What Is she adds that much anguish comes from mentally minding other people's business, or reality's, instead of one's own. The remedy is not positive thinking but examining each thought with the four questions until it loses its power.

What happens after death?

No speculation about the hereafter: she examines the thoughts that make death fearsome

Silence or reserveInferred from their doctrine

Byron Katie offers no doctrine about what happens after death. What she does is apply her method to death as to any other stressful situation: fear, in her account, comes not from death, which no one has experienced, but from the thoughts one has about it. In Who Would You Be Without Your Story? she collects dialogues with people facing the death of a child or a serious illness, and shows how beliefs such as «he shouldn't have died» or «I won't be able to bear it» produce the suffering attributed to the event. In A Thousand Names for Joy she describes her own serenity before death as the result of not arguing with what is. What matters is how one looks at what is happening now.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Four questions and a turnaround: inquiry undoes what was believed

Through direct knowledgeStated explicitly

What Byron Katie offers is neither years of practice nor a grace, but a method of inquiry anyone can apply with pen and paper. One writes down the stressful thought and asks it four questions: is it true?, can you absolutely know that it's true?, how do you react when you believe that thought?, who would you be without that thought? Then the statement is turned around, to oneself, to the other or to its opposite, and one looks for examples of how the turnaround is as true or truer. The aim is not to replace negative thoughts with positive ones but to understand them until they lose their power. Freedom, in Loving What Is, is that clarity: seeing what is without the story that covered it.

Is a teacher necessary?

The answers lie with the one asking; the method needs no teacher

The teacher is withinInferred from their doctrine

Byron Katie does not present herself as a guru or ask for adherence. Her method was designed so that anyone could practise it alone, with pen and paper, without believing anything or depending on anyone: one asks the questions oneself, and the answers can come only from the one who answers them. In her public sessions, collected in Loving What Is and in Who Would You Be Without Your Story?, she simply asks the questions and waits; she describes her role in a terse sentence: she clears people's minds. At the same time she suggests that those who irritate us can act as teachers, because they show the judgements we still believe. Authority lies in one's own inquiry, not in her.

Is the world real?

The world we suffer is the story we tell; what is, is kind

Appearance over the one realityInferred from their doctrine

Byron Katie distinguishes two things we usually confuse: what is and the story we tell about it. The first is not to be argued with; the second is projection. Much of what we call the world, the hostility of others, the injustice of what happens to us, is for her the image of our own thoughts projected outwards, which is why turning judgements around returns to the one judging what was attributed to the world. In A Mind at Home with Itself, her commentary on Stephen Mitchell's version of the Diamond Sutra, she relates this experience to the Buddhist teaching that things are not what the mind fixes in them. Without the story, what is always seems to her kinder than what was imagined.

What is love?

Seeking love and approval drives it away; without the search, love is already there

What appears when the self ceasesStated explicitly

Byron Katie devoted a book to the question, I Need Your Love: Is That True?, written with Michael Katz. Her thesis is that the search for love, approval and recognition arises from thoughts we believe without examining them: I need her to love me, I cannot be happy without him. Those thoughts produce dependence, manipulation and fear, and drive away precisely what they seek. When they are examined and no longer believed, what remains is not a lack but a way of loving that needs nothing in return. In her account love is neither obtained from others nor cultivated as a technique: it is what appears when one is not busy defending one's own story.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

Things do themselves; the problem is believing they should be otherwise

There is no doerInferred from their doctrine

Byron Katie does not frame the problem philosophically, but her descriptions come close to the idea that there is no separate doer. In A Thousand Names for Joy, commenting on the Tao Te Ching, she describes her own life as something that happens, rather than as a series of decisions taken by someone in control of it. Hence her maxim that arguing with what is is always lost: what happened could not have been otherwise, because it is what happened. This does not lead to passivity; she holds that without the argument with reality action is clearer and kinder. The responsibility she proposes is to mind one's own business.

Why meditate or pray?

Inquiry is her meditation: questioning until the thought lets go

Returning to the source of the IStated explicitly

Byron Katie teaches no techniques of concentration or prayer. What she proposes instead is inquiry, which she describes as a form of meditation: after writing down a stressful thought, one asks it the four questions and waits in silence for the answer to arise, instead of reasoning it out. The decisive question is the fourth, who would you be without that thought?, which leads one to observe what the present moment would be like without the story that covers it. The aim is not to reach a special state, but to see clearly what the mind believed, until it lets go of itself. In A Mind at Home with Itself she alternates this work with commentary on the Diamond Sutra.

Can reason know the ultimate?

You cannot absolutely know that a thought is true

Thought is limitedInferred from their doctrine

The second of Byron Katie's four questions, can you absolutely know that it's true?, contains her epistemology. The thoughts that cause suffering present themselves as facts, but when examined turn out to be interpretations that cannot be proved. Katie does not despise the mind; in A Mind at Home with Itself she speaks of a mind that, by questioning itself, stops fighting with itself. But thought gives no access to an ultimate truth: the only incontestable thing is what is, before the story. Her method uses questions that look like reasoning, but the answers it seeks are not arguments but what is seen in silence while contemplating the question.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

Question your thinking, change the world

The revolution is innerStated explicitly

The title of the anthology Stephen Mitchell compiled from her sayings sums up Byron Katie's position: Question Your Thinking, Change the World. She proposes neither withdrawal nor activism, but examining the thoughts through which one looks at what happens. She holds that action born of anger or fear, of the belief that the world should not be as it is, tends to reproduce what it fights, while action born of clarity is more effective and kinder. Loving what is, she insists, does not mean resignation or approving of injustice: it is seeing clearly before acting. Changing the world passes through changing the one who looks at it, one person at a time.