This woman is amazing.  She is a true silver fox possessed of a rapt attention and a penetrating clarity of wisdom.  Byron Katie is a glamorous witch of Awareness.

I was led to her teaching-stories naturally as a result of my life-long obsession with articulating a basic algorithm of instructions for generating self-understanding.  Her elucidation of primal “conscious process” is summarized in the following fine steps:

1.Judge others 2. Is your judgement true? 3. How does it make you feel? 4. Who would you be if you could not have every made that judgement?  5. Affirm the opposite judgement.

This procedure of assisted self-inquiry is combined with the personal story and charismatic presence of this bright woman.  The results vary, of course, but in many cases she produces a considerable transformation of life-patterns and feelings.  At the heart of this psychic revolution is a fusion of “should” with “is.”  The world and ourselves must be the way that they are – a familiar refrain to anyone who has loved the bizarre and beautiful fatalism of Advaita Vedanta Hindooism (sic).

Both the ancient non-dualist philosopher-sages and Ms. Byron Katie are concerned to dissolve the dissonance between the commanding inner imperatives and the real situation of our lives.

This attempt is fascinating when viewed through the lens of the primitive Freudian model of the psyche.  In classical-superficial psychoanalysis we are told that the “I” is penned in by the lower vital impulses of blind, libidinous biology lurking below and the authoritarian hyperbole of an abstract parental judge who hovers above us shouting frantic orders that our “willpower” is supposed to obey...  the Id, Ego and Super-ego.  Or the It, I and Over I -- if we deign to translate the terms into our own language. 

 
Byron Katie once found she was far too depressed and miserable to get out of bed, care for herself or her family – utterly incapable of life, relationships and self-validation of any kind.  Dark days and darker nights that present an exaggerated vision of the usual problem surrounding the activity of the super-ego.  It gives conflicting and irrational orders which have no ultimate foundation other than its own assertion and claims of authority.  We can either attempt to obey or attempt to dismiss these life-directive but there is generally little enough success in either direction.  The crazed dictator rants alone in his tower, shouting orders to the guards, while the population curls up in their homes and seeks distraction in private pleasures.  Most people find that their navigation through life is compromised by undue self-criticism AND a tendency to relapse into blind indulgence of instincts.  The Super-ego is dysfunctional and the Id is not progressive.
 
So we find ourselves standing before the classical Freudian field in which we are all trying but usually failing to make the developmental leap from the infantile Pleasure Principle to the wise Reality Principle.  Is our failure a function of a faulty Super-ego?  What would a good Super-ego look like anyway?
 
Well, for starters, it would have to acknowledge the reality of our own perceptions.  We certainly cannot expect sane directives to emerge from a structure that is not coherently resonant with actual existence.  Byron Katie essays this possibility by producing an emotionally charged imperative and contrasting it with the existential facts – comparing them to each other and then cancelling a false beliefs with the presence of an opposed conclusion.  It is feasible that this might convert the Super-ego into a force that is concomitant with Reality and therefore well-placed to initiate successful behavioural ventures according to our own standards.  A silent, efficacious poise would replace the emotionally agitated and increasingly self-conflicted mass of schemes for attaining virtue, power and pleasure under all conditions.
 
Perhaps the tremendous shift that Byron Katie experienced, from depressed, depleted and dysfunctional parent to acclaimed international author and popular agent of human betterment.  Success!  This is indeed the kind of thing we might expect from a Super-ego that had been tamed and transmuted entirely to the Reality Principle.

 And who is to say that Freud was not moved in the heart by Nietzsche’s rule that creative empowerment is preceded by an amor fati – a shift that “changes every ‘it was’ into an ‘I willed it thus’.

Amen.

PS - On this same topic check out the metaphysics of Russia's Vadim Zeland who calls his system "transurfing."

 

my other blogs:

www.cultural-aquarium.blogspot.com

www.planetarycathedral.blogspot.com

www.worldsgreatestblowjob.com

www.jamesbay.org/index.php/secretworlds

www.buffstriding.blogspot.com

 

Once upon a time there was a baby named Franklin Jones and another baby named Rajneesh Mohan.  These two babies had something in common.

Can you guess the common trait?

 
One baby grew up and changed his name very many times.  He finally settled on “Adi Da.”  The other baby eventually settled upon “Osho.”  So that wasn’t what they had in common!

 
One was an American who went to India to get enlightened.  He tried to revive the ancient guru system in the West.  The other man was an Indian who brought his guru system to the West years after he got enlightened.  So that's not what they had in common either!

 
Was it their inclusive philosophy that promoted both sex and Surrender to the Divine?  Their network of small communities devoted to the reception of their radiance and the transmission of their teachings?  What about their vast and good-humoured knowledge of spiritual techniques, religious history and the subtle mechanism of energy transmission?  Their strange intimacy with trance and self-release?  Their socially incongruous behaviour?  Their voluminous writings?

 
Their elaborate and uniquely styled ‘priest costumes’? 

 Accusations of polygamy?  Unorthodox educational procedures?  Incomprehensible artwork?  The rampant mixing of jokes with sacred teachings?  The waves of spin-off gurus they spawned?  Their ambivalence or delight towards public controversy? 

 Their commitment to speaking in an inflated, surrealistic, psycho-energetic style punctuated with wildly appropriate jokes and casual remarks? No.  It couldn't have been that.  Osho's weird speech was full of silent pauses and Da's weird speech used elaborate capitalization and the grammar of "God in the First Person."

So it wasn’t that.

What could they have had in common?

 
Was it their humorous and unnecessary denouncing of other teachers? 

Their appointment of dubious individuals to key social positions within their communities? 

Their seemingly irrational use of finances to make large purchases of utterly inappropriate luxury items?  No.  Osho bought Rolls Royces and Da bought collector-dildos.

Maybe it was the fact that their basic approach to all other human beings was “Notice that I’m God or Fuck Off”? 

 Maybe it was their widespread eliciting of apparently spontaneous psychic, visionary and apparently bio-energetic effects in others at a distance?

 Or the fact that they are, seemingly, both reviled as manipulative or emotional-broken con men by some and still, currently, worshipped as the avataric incarnation of God by others – in about the same degree and amount? 

 Bodyguards? 

Experimental rules of diet and exercises? 

Crazy hats? 

Use of profanities during religous lectures?

 
What could it have been?  What one thing did they have in common?

 
I think it was just this one thing:
 

They both become ‘enlightened’ during a moment of self-inspection that revealed the limiting quality of the ego as a subliminal activity for which individuals are constantly responsible.

It is two days ago.  I am walking in the park along a soft, wood-chip trail between the Hemlock trees.  My mind turns to the problem of preserving our natural environment.  Suddenly the "serve" in "pre-SERV-ation" leaps out. 

At this moment I feel that I truly understand the word "preservation."  I have SEEN the meaning that was laying there, waiting for my inner eye to chance upon it.

That's very odd. 

Didn't I learn this word when I was 5 years old? 

People often tell me that a child's capacity for absorbing vocabulary is amazing.  I believe them.  They tell me that if we could keep learning words at the rate a child does then we would all be grand geniuses.  I also believe that.  

Perhaps I am too gullible.

I have had this experience many times -- suddenly understanding what a word 'really means.'  As a matter of fact this has often happened multiple times on the same words.  So I am forced to wonder if, as a child, I learned these words at all.  I have been using them all my life.  My interlocutors seem to understand me. 

Have I just been faking it?

Or... does "learning a word" progress in developmental stages?  Is the "line" of each word growing taller on these occasions of insight?  I imagine pouring layer after layer of understanding onto each word-heap. 

Ordinarily we assume that Life-long Learning consists of learning new things.  We must remember that we are also learning the significance of what we already assume is well-known.

 

"A dog's bark is the shame of all Nature."
- Gilles Deleuze.

Despite my deep affection for the canines, I am forced to agree with the French philosopher.  Most of the barking that we hear in our lives is sharp, crude, and utterly needless.  Our dogs often sound desperately, even pitifully, un-intelligent... 

Or do I mean that barking dog -- within?

We have quasi-domesticated the canine, bred it for obedience, for sympathy and for ornamentation.  Dogs are toys and dolls and servants.  Symbols of the mammal-pack motives that we so compulsively indulge.  The project of 'breeding' animals for our whims is already on the borderline of cruelty and every day we just heap more and more disrespect upon these poor creatures.  We tell them to wait outside.  Eat at my discretion.  Walk when I am ready.  Wear whatever restraining device I think will make you more compliant.  

Tragic domination?  Perhaps.  Yet not so tragic as all those dogs whose owners cannot quite make up their mind about ‘discipline.'  I can respect the man who lets his dog go wild, returning to its ancient instincts.  I can respect the woman who has taken the time to adequately "break" the beast with caring but dominating moral force. 

But now I'll have to say who I do not have any respect for...

It is the man who -- knowing that others may be able to hear him -- tells his barking dog to be quiet... the first three or four times.  It is the woman whose neighbours hear calling out the dog's name, over and over, day after day, night after night, seemingly undaunted by the beast's utter lack of compliance.  For whose sake is she calling the same idiotic name endlessly into the night?  It does not seem to influence her dog.  Perhaps she is so submerged in herself that she does not realize... she imagines that her plaintive cries are only heard inside her head.  Or does she do this pitiful performance for us - so that we "know" she is a good citizen.  After all, she is "at least trying" to exert some control over the animals in her care. 

These dog-owners are... poorly trained.    Popular television programs that show competent dog training are entertaining because they demonstrate such a rare circumstance.  

Like an untrained beast, we are all too ready to alternate between "over- tolerance" and "irrational outburst."  We bridge these two extremes with the power of half-assed attempt and care and discipline which repeatedly fail because we are not committed to them, because we do not empathize with animals AS animals, or because we simply refuse to love with enough vigour to control the "dog" that lives between our solar plexus and genitalia. 

Woof,
Pascal di Solquientez