"If you overesteem great men, you can’t recognize the greatness within yourself. Any quality that you esteem in others is what you see, after all, and what you see comes from you. You undervalue yourself when you displace it and separate it from its origin. Admire Jesus’ compassion or the Buddha’s wisdom all you want, but what good can their qualities do you until you find them in yourself?
The mind is always looking for value. When it projects qualities away from itself, it robs itself of its own value. It starts traveling out of itself to find what it thinks it lacks, and its travels are endless, and it can never find its home.
The Master leads simply by being. “Being” looks like doing the dishes, answering the phone and the e-mail, shopping, going to work, driving the kids to school, feeding the dog, doing one thing at a time, without a past or future. She doesn’t empty people’s minds. She doesn’t have to (even if that were possible). The way she helps people is by living out of don’t-know, can’t-know, no-need-to-know, not-possible-to-know, nothing-to-know. People are attracted to a life lived with such weightlessness, such lightness of heart. They begin to notice where they are, who they are, looking into the living mirror without their stressful thoughts.
I’m preparing a salad. I see flashes of colors. My hands begin to reach for what calls out to me. Red! and I reach for the beets. Orange! and I reach for the carrots. Green! and my hands move to the spinach. I feel the textures, I feel the dirt. Purple! and I move to the cabbage. All of life is in my hands. There’s nothing lovelier than preparing a salad, its greens, reds, oranges, purples, crisp and juicy, rich as blood and fragrant as the earth. I move to the countertop. I begin to slice.
Just when I think that life is so good that it can’t get any better, the phone rings and life gets better. I love that music. As I walk toward the phone, there’s a knock at the door. Who could it be? I walk toward the door, filled with the given, the fragrance of the vegetables, the sound of the phone, and I have done nothing for any of it. I trip and fall. The floor is so unfailingly there. I experience its texture, its security, its lack of complaint. In fact, the opposite: it gives its entire self to me. I feel its coolness as I lie on it. Obviously it was time for a little rest. The floor accepts me unconditionally and holds me without impatience. As I get up, it doesn’t say, “Come back, come back, you’re deserting me, you owe me, you didn’t thank me, you’re ungrateful.” No, it’s just like me. It does its job. It is what it is. The fist knocks, the phone rings, the salad waits, the floor lets go of me—life is good.
Reality unfolds without desire, bringing with it more beauty, more luxury, more exquisite surprises than the imagination could ever devise. The mind, as it lives through its desires, demands that the body follow after it. How else can it mirror back original cause? Anger, sadness, or frustration lets us know that we’re at war with the way of it. Even when we get what we wanted, we want it to last, and it doesn’t, it can’t. And because life is projected and mind is so full of confusion, there is no peace. But when you allow life to flow like water, you become that water. And you watch life lived to the ultimate, always giving you more than you need."
-- Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell, A Thousand Names for Joy
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