Selected Quotes From
WHO WOULD YOU BE WITHOUT YOUR STORY?
By Byron Katie
Thoughts aren.t personal. I noticed that one morning. My self-esteem was so low I used to sleep on the floor, and thought that.s what I deserved, I didn.t think I deserved to sleep in a bed, I was so full of self-hatred. And one morning I woke up, and was lying on the floor, and just for no reason, I noticed that I was being breathed. And the way that it felt was it was being breathed. It wasn.t even me, the body wasn.t even mine. I got a glimpse of. nothing personal. And then I noticed that I was being thought.
I invite you to experience this for yourself. When you.re asleep at night, when you.re not dreaming, where is the world? It doesn.t begin until the I begins. .I.. .I am.. .I.m late for work.. .I need to go to the bathroom.. .I, I, I, I, I, me, me, me.. And then it starts to really think you.re a this. Or a that. An .I..
So we begin to question our thoughts, and we find something new happening. We come to see that thoughts aren.t personal. And when we see that, miracles take place. It.s unconditional love. The next time you see this man, and he.s being irresponsible.to everyone else.you may wonder why you are not seeing it that way. You.re seeing someone just doing the best he can. It.s a radical shift.this glimpsing into oneself.
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If I see someone as irresponsible, in that moment I am irresponsible. If I see someone as uncaring, in that moment I am uncaring. Look at the thoughts that you.re thinking in the moment you see someone as uncaring. Who is being uncaring? And you know why I care about loving someone? It hurts until I do. I am someone who knows the difference between what hurts and what doesn.t. I discovered what masochism really is. And that discovery left me as someone who loves you. I walk into a space like this, with hundreds of people, and I know that everyone here loves me. I just don.t expect them to realize it yet. But if you hate me, you hate you. If you love me, you love you. And every time you question what you believe, you become a kinder human being.
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Attaching to an untrue story causes a lot of stress. And stress is a gift. It lets us know that our thinking is out of balance in the moment. Every uncomfortable feeling is a gift. We.ve been trying for centuries to change the feeling by changing the world, and that just doesn.t work. But when we investigate the thought that causes the stress, the feeling changes by itself. It has to. We change the projector.mind.and the world it projects has to change. We can.t feel stress unless we are believing a story that isn.t true for us.
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Do you know how I know that our nature is good? Every thought that would oppose that or attack it feels like stress. I use the term God.and for me, reality is God, because it rules.but I sometimes say, .God is everything, God is good.. People who truly live that don.t need The Work. It.s over, because out of that comes peace.
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We.re using mind to enlighten mind, because there isn.t anything else. But what we.re taking here is just baby steps.and at the same time, huge. When we realize that it.s our own mind that is causing our suffering, then The Work begins, then the fun begins. It.s living in a whole other polarity, a whole other realm. And what I love about it is we no longer believe that the world is causing our suffering, that it can cause our suffering. It can.t, not ever.no chance of it.
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You do inquiry for a while, and no human can compete with what you.ve got going inside you. They.re just a bonus, because they bring you back again. There.s no separation, it.s all inside you, awake.
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For me, what.s true is whatever is really happening, whether you like it or not. In reality, there is no such thing as a should or a shouldn.t. These are only thoughts that we superimpose onto reality. Without the shoulds and shouldn.ts, we can see reality as it is, and this leaves us free to act efficiently, clearly, and sanely.
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My name is .Yes.. I love living that way. I say yes to everything. For example, if you ask me to do something for you, and I want to, I say yes. If you ask me to do something and I don.t want to, I say no. And that no is a yes to me. I live as an internal yes, because I am honoring something inside me that has nothing to do with you. It.s so exciting to see what the answer is to that question that he.s asking! I don.t think, .Will it hurt his feelings? What will he give me? Will he think I.m nice? Will he be disappointed?. Instead I think, what is my answer to that question?
It.s very exciting. You never know what answer.s going to be there! So you just walk through life waiting for people to ask for anything, so that you can hear the language of your own heart, your own intelligence.