Byron Katie on Native Indian culture and the present moment--an excerpt from an early book

Fear brought me to Byron Katie in the first place. It brings many. I know that now. Fear once brought Katie, herself, into a prison of greed and rage and numbing drugs and foods. I still feel pain when I tell the story of her fear and the death she died because of it. Then, because of my pain, I know that my mind continues to seduce me into fears of my own. "Do The Work," Byron would say. "Uncover the lie and live in what is Real."

Fear is the belief that what is Real will harm us. It is the suspicion, often even the conviction, that the universe is not progressing as it should, that God made a mistake or wasn't wise enough to get things right. It's the impulse to take control, myself, of destiny, of the future—as if I can. I know I can't, so then I fall into panic. If God is not wise enough and the universe is swinging out of control and I can't fix it, then my thinking says it's bound to harm me. Fear keeps me trying to be God. Fear ensures my failure. There's no Truth in it. I'm not God. And the One who is makes no mistakes.

In fear we create dramas of our own lives. We divide ourselves into parts, make roles, make voices in our minds, and scare ourselves to death. In fear we make ourselves sick. "The sick body is the voice of fearful mind," Byron says. Fear becomes an ulcer. It speaks through cancer. It is high blood pressure. It is arthritis. It is a tightening up, an anger with Truth, a resistance to Reality, an insistence on my own way, my ego's way, my little vision.

Fear is until it's not. A peculiar trap devised by the mind is our attempt to talk ourselves out of fear. Thinking about my fear digs a deeper pit for it. Mental struggle tangles the mind. Byron's idea of "drama happening" or "efforting" tangles one in the fear.
She knows. Efforting was her life for forty years. She created a drama to rid herself of her fear of rejection, of being no one, and it reduced her to nothing. She lay under her bed, in rage, in terror, completely afraid—and then she lay there in wonder over a cockroach and there was no fear anywhere.

When she speaks to me of dramas, dreams, mythologies, I know immediately what she means. I thought the efforting was a responsibility, something I was bound to do, a way of caring for myself. I clung to this belief despite my experience that it never worked; it always made my life miserable and increased my fear. I figured I had failed at thinking my way out of a problem. I tried harder.

I called it being ready. I called it planning. If my husband was late arriving home, for example, I felt attacked by the fear of loss. "What if there was an accident?" said my mind. "What if he died?" So there was the drama, the scene set. What effort did I need to make? My stomach churned. Images filled my mind. The crash scene. My arrival. Or the hospital. Walking into ICU. "Could I make it on my own?" continued my mind. "Could I even drive/" Who might I call, what friend would take the time to help me? And then the funeral, what about that? How could I endure it? How would he like it to be? I'd have to call his family. How would I survive without him?

By the time my husband walked in the door, thirty minutes late, I'd exhausted myself with this drama of fear. I'd wasted precious energy on illusions. I'd made myself a little or a lot, sick.
"Why do you do that to you?" Byron asked

About eight months after Byron first told me I was using my mind to scare myself, and six months after I began doing The Work, I was again waiting for my husband to come home. He and his brother and nephew had taken our new Explorer truck out into the desert for a morning of target practice and experimenting with the four wheel drive. They planned to be home around noon. When one o'clock came I felt a jolt of fear. Where were they?
I remembered Byron's admonition that we not hold on to such "contractions" for more then a few seconds.
"What's real?" I asked myself.

I felt the sun through the window. I heard a bird sing. I smelled the aroma from my cup of Harvest Spice tea. My little notebook computer hummed, and words I'd just finished writing shone back at me from the back lit screen. He was late. That was all. Why he was late was something I couldn't know and no amount of thinking would be able to provide me with the knowledge. What was real was the thing right in front of me. I let it be. The reality in front of me contained no harm. I continued to write for three more hours. At four o'clock they still weren't home. The thought drifted through my mind that if they hadn't arrived by supper time I would contact the Highway Patrol. Just as that happened, I heard the Explorer pull into the drive.

They came in laughing. Dirty, filthy, in fact, they had been playing in the desert. What could that Explorer do? How good was the four wheel drive? Drive down this hill. Drive along that dried up riverbed. And they got stuck, really hung up. It took four hours to dig out, get enough wood under the tires for traction. They rationed their water, the temperature was over a 100 degrees. But they did it. Was there ever a doubt? What an adventure! What fun!
No harm. No fear.

But what, the old voices ask, what if they'd died, then what? And I respond: Would fearing it have helped? It would have depleted me. We have all we need to meet each moment with whatever it contains. The moment we call "death" is no different from the others. Each moment passes to leave space for the higher good.
"The highest good will comes when you wait and let that highest good come forth in peace. Because when we let go, it leaves a vacuum that the universe has to fill. It has to. It is a law.

"So as long as you are in contraction, in fear, it cannot move in, but through the letting go, something higher comes in, and that will be perfect. At that moment we can know it, but the minute we move away from that peace into the fear state, it is the mind saying the universe was made wrong, and that we know better then that. We are judging it. We move away and it is not ever going to work, never has worked. So we move into the surrender place and it all becomes available to us again. And we have absolute control over that, moving back into perfection.

"What I am saying is that things are as they are supposed to be. There is only peace and perfection, only good. We have been taught otherwise, but it is just simply not so. If I think something is not good, then I need to work on my mind until I can see the Truth of it. And that is The Work."

"David thinks he is lost." Byron's voice, deep, husky.
"What do you mean? What happened?"
I had just told her I'd be calling him. I was about to write this chapter. On the phone three months ago, maybe four, he had agreed to talk further with me.
"From home," He had said, "I'll feel more comfortable talking about this when I'm at home."

David called me, that first time, from Byron Katie's house. He visited her often to bolster his hope. She told me that he had cried after he hung up the phone. She had held him.

"He's so beautiful. He's love. But sometimes he forgets. He loses what he knows and he comes back here to remember. Call him at home. Ask him to talk. His heart is open." Byron had called me when he left her house. She also told me that the doctors said David had cancer. He hadn't mentioned it to me. "It's there and it isn't. It can appear that when he does The Work the cancer leaves. When he forgets who he is, it seems the cancer's back. It would be interesting to see the doctor's documentations."

He wasn't home later that week when I called. Then other chapters intervened. I had told him I might not call for months. What does Byron mean that he thinks he's lost?
"He's on chemotherapy, honey. So many drugs. He's not himself. He's like a wall. It's difficult to get through. It's fear. The fear. And he doesn't have cancer. Even the doctors said there was no cancer but they wanted to do this anyway and David was afraid."

Lost. The lost boy. Very like Peter Pan book some years ago that chronicled the pain of so many men in our culture. Like the Puer Aclernum, the eternal child of the Jungian theorists; the one who would rather die then release the fantasy of youth. They say that such a one usually does die some time before fifty. David is forty seven.

I tell her I will need to write this chapter from the David in my heart. I don't want to omit him. His testimony is vital. I remember telling him on the day he first called that his story had national implications, national or otherwise. What makes me loyal to his story, though, has nothing to do with implications, national or otherwise. My loyalty is to something in his voice, a quality of wistfulness, a boyish tone like an eleven -year -old who knows the ten speed bike underneath the Christmas tree must be for him but still can't bring himself to believe it's true.

Byron asked me to hold the line for a moment. Someone on her call waiting. She returns to say that she needs to take the call. I hag up the phone and dig through my tapes to find David's; I slip it into my recorder. His voice. Hesitant. Soft with a core of pleading. The voice of an adolescent boy.

He grew up poor, a Native American boy in the high desert of the American West. There's nothing romantic about his life, nothing that smacks of Hollywood. He doesn't even mention his tribe. Is he Apache? Navaho? I'll never know because I didn't ask. His dad drank too much, died of alcoholism. His uncles drank. Probably his grandfather too. Probably generations of Alcholics. He's pretty sure. Its how everybody was, he says. It was expected.

David took his first drink in the locker room in junior high school. He played basketball. He was skilled enough to get a scholarship, one he after lost because of something in his mind that said no. The alcohol felt good, felt powerful, gave him confidence. He thought he would play better basketball with drinks before and after. When he was high nothing could defeat him.

"My self esteem came back. I didn't feel like just this poor Indian barely surviving with his family."
Everybody did it. All the boys. All the men. He hung around the bar. He and his friends rode dirt bikes through the desert. They yelled. They strode up to girls. They showed how strong they were. Alcohol and sex. David says they can't be separated... There's o love in a mind flooded with alcohol, no respect, no morality. And there was no way out. It was how they demonstrated solidarity.

"In high School every weekend was a beer party. I went to school high. Drank during lunch time—after school. It got progressively worse. I got kicked out of school for drinking. I got kicked out of athletics. I went to Junior college and I drank. I played athletics and I still drank. I didn't know it, but my drinking was getting more and more. All my friends, all my relationships were centered on drinking. I picked them out or they picked me. Then I started taking drugs—weed, cocaine. That was when I got into major college—a full scholarship to a private school. I didn't complete it because of drugs and alcohol. I'd just get myself in trouble all the time.

"And sex. It was a problem. I'd try to screw any girl that walked in front of me. That was when I was on alcohol and drugs. When you're drunk you look for women. All of us did it. I have no morals when I'm drunk. Yourwhole body changes. You're not really you. You feel like an illusion, a powerful being who can get any woman you want. And in reality it's a big fuckig lie.
"Kids don't believe this. I have sons. It's like that for them too. It just keeps going for people until it clicks. It's a lie. I can't clean my sons up; they have to clean themselves up.
"I try to talk about the sex and alcohol problem at Twelve Steps meetings. People side step this issue. They don't want it mentioned. maybe because both men and women attend the meetings. it makes it real hard. They're afraid. You have to watch what you say. people do't keep secrets. the sickest of the sickest are sitting in that room. Big time fear. That's probably why we drank in the first place. fear of succeeding.
"Will all my friends hate me if I succeed' Peer pressure is strong. If I straighten up and live right, like you're supposed to live life, will I lose all my friends? I didn't want to do it. not when I was growing up. There's a lot of conflict there. Especially living in a low financial envoirement."
A terrifying logic.He is telling me that this is done in his culture. He talked himself into believing it---Indians drink, carouse, drive fast through the desert, pick up girls. Indians don't need the white men's way. Indians scorn white man's success. Who needs education? Who needs a career/ who needs anything of this U.S. culture that destroyed the Native American People?

If he lifts himself up from that environment, he thinks he betrays his people, as though succeeding is to fail. He seems to believe it's a failure for a Native America in his environment to fit in to the common American culture. I suggest this to him.

"That's true," he tells me. There's an edge of surprise to his voice. "I never thought of it like that before. It's true. I used to believe that the white man wanted this: to keep us in poverty. In a round-about way I still believe this. The prejudiced thoughts are still around. It might be 1994 but the thinking is still the same. We still put up with it. I am not saying everybody does, but a lot of people with power have those ideas, and they go to church on Sunday."

David tells me that in one afternoon Byron changed his life around.

"She saved my life."

He heard about her from mutual friends. He had no other hope and so he called her up. She told him to come over to her home and he went. She taught him to do The Work.

"She made me write it all out on paper so I could look at it. I found out it was all a lie. My thoughts were lying to me. I was living a lie."
Our conversation circles around again to alcoholism. "It's a major problem in the Indian population—the mission Indians, the reservation Indians. You go back and its there; the alcohol keeps Indians from succeeding, from keeping jobs. The kids just grow up watching the adults being dishonest, immoral. Katie gave me what I need to break the chain."

Now David might be dying on the shadow side of his fear. Or maybe he is breaking the chain—learning how to live without failure.

None of the stories here is finished.


David is on my mind. I think I know the place he inhabits. I think I've been there. I've lightened up, grabbed hold of the smallest reed rather than allow myself to be carried by the current, borne up by the flood of life itself.

"Fear of success," I reflect while Byron Katie listens, "must be the fear of living."
"Yes."

I want to know more. I think how easy it is to limit myself, set boundaries on life, make it small. The smaller life is, the less likely I will fail. That's the lie I tell myself. The lie is the failure.
"There is no failure," Byron smiles. "There's only the mind that tells me I have failed."

Success and failure, bound together, flip sides of a single fear.
"Tell me what you know about the fear of living,"
I ask her.

"The fear of living is the fear resulting from the thought that I am a body. Protection of body becomes the only goal. But I am not a body. Every effort goes to protect what is not. There is not one thought that is not about preserving the body. And I am not this body. When thought dominates, the true 'I' sleeps."

Only rarely do I understand what Byron says about not being a body, and when I do, it is not conceptual understanding. When my mind is eclipsed, then I understand. It is always an experience in which what I think of as my body simply does not exist in any way that separates me out. One is. One without limit. I am not cancelled but eclipsed. Body is fluid; it is air; it is shimmering in the light of the One. Then nothing that could be called success or failure can be said to have any meaning. They simply are not anything at all. Life is ALL.
But my mind exerts itself. I pull back. My body is solid. I am separate. Limited. I am as small as I think I need to be in order to keep my fears at bay.

"With David, in the Native American culture, to hold on to the past is to disregard evolution," Byron reflects. "When we say that the white man brought modernization that took us from the real earth and that, that is not okay, we are saying that we know ore then God. For us to say that evolution and modernization is not okay is hopeless. We begin here. Now.

"To hold on is painful, hopeless. It can't be done in the physical. We call it the past. But holding on is what people try to do and it's called old age, high blood pressure, disease and it's called death. It all stops when I stop. That's what the pollution of the earth is for; we can know it now or we can know it when the air and water are too polluted to sustain. I am the cause; any one of these ills is the effect. It is our choice. That is what everything is for—time, evolution, even our planet. All, the same. The earth is your body, a perfect reflection of mind. Pollution is the voice that says: 'My darling, take a look at your mind. It is choking you to death."
I am seeing what holds me back. I am realizing why I don't hold the awareness of life in its fullness. I ask,
"If I fear success and believe in failure, is that to say I resist evolution?"

"Yes, it says that the past exists and it says that the future exists. And to step into the future, which is what you have created as the result of how you misinterpreted the past, is terror."
"And if we believe in time, we're in bondage to it."
"Yes. You are in the bondage of a past, seen, but never having existed except through your interpretation of what you think happened—not what really happened.

That is the dilemma. And the result is all the pain and suffering we see in people's dying. The last word is always, 'it's not fair!' That response is never going to work because everything is good. Everything is already fair. It's just the eyes that can't see it, that suffer—the eyes that can't see what is. On this planet there is always abundance, the Garden of Eden, heaven also. Above as below – the same. Heaven is the higher thought.

"Fear is all about the future. The past doesn't exist anyway, except as jaded reflection. We let go of interpretations and see literally or we die because living in the past, as we have come to interpret it, is just a big ball of guilt and shame. To see and hear literally, without interpretation, is to remain ageless – infinitely.

"Particularly, with regard to this thing that holds many cultures in its grasp. If only we could see this. It's not just a Native American thing. All of us hold something back in our culture. We preserve language. We preserve traditions. What for? So we can stop change that can't be stopped. So we can be separate. So I can be different from you. So I can know more. So of course it hurts when we try to live and be something that isn't, that doesn't exist.
"We need to move into the present. That's what evolution means. It's just seeing What Is—really. It's the act of living fully in the present, fully evolved to what is our Ultimate Home—as it really is—now."


For two days I wonder about the connections between preserving bodies and traditions, striving toward success, worrying about failure and, by living in the fear this causes, missing y life altogether and turning evolution back on itself. The second night I go to sleep with the word form on my mind. "Don't cling to forms," something in me says. "Forms change. Being is eternal."

When I awake in the morning, the sun shines into my room through the gold and russet leaves of my Sweet Gum tree. It's the last day of November; in another week the branches will be bare. Birds sing. A dog barks. A truck rumbles down the street. My empty stomach rumbles to be fed. A kaleidoscope of forms.

Suddenly I grasp what seems to be a contradiction in Byron's talk about the body. On the one hand she tells me I am not the body. On the other hand, I interpret that she emphasizes treating our bodies well—feeding them with living foods, giving them pure fluids, exercising, enjoying everything the body can do.

There is no dichotomy. This whole world, including my body, is form – multicolored, varied, dancing, changing form. Clinging stops the dance. The dance is the fullness of life at every moment. To focus on the form, to stop it because of fear, because I need to be in control of what I can never understand, is what we call disease, pollution, cultural decline. The forms unfold, spiral out, a flurry of leaves on a whirlwind.

Byron tells me, "Yes. This mind is the form body takes as me. This body, personal or cultural, is my teacher. Body follows and reflects mind." Body tells me where I'm holding on, stopping the flow of life. It tightens up, resists. My work in this world is to untie knots my small mind has made in the mistaken effort to keep me safe. My work is to honor this beautiful body, allowing it to unfold according to a Higher Mind than the mind I've created within myself. My work is to give this bodily form what it needs, a sane mind. Then body must unfold at the speed that being moves. This unfolding is to be what is living, active, joyous. To be Love. As everything is lived, let it go. Move on to the next step in the dance. Whirl the leaves. Spin with the planets. Shine. We are the stars.

I remember, suddenly, what Byron Katie once said: "You have the choice to see the Reality of the moment or the choice to project onto it the perceived past or future. It appears the past has happened in its own moments of time and is unchangeable, but to see it again as it really happened is to change it – therefore it is changeable. The future is determined as you interpret the past. We are only this moment in Reality. Everyone can learn to live as the moment, to catch everything as the moment, to catch everything as the moment, to love what is in front of you as you. The miracle of love, of What Is, comes to you in the presence of the uninterrupted moment. If you are out of the Reality of the moment, you miss real life. Be the moment and experience the Joy and Love that you are. If you are in the uninterrupted moment, your body is always available as the purpose it needs to serve. Now is the result of the miracle that happens. This is all there is and all there ever be. This is beyond imagination. This is simply the obvious.


--Taken from "A cry in the desert"--the awakening of Byron Katie by Christin Lore Weber