Lit Lady

“I always worked. I was always self-employed. I always knew how to make money. I was good at that. I was really good at that. Then after my divorce I started becoming just very depressed and…well, long before my divorce actually. And pretty soon I couldn’t leave my house. It was very difficult. And then pretty soon I couldn’t leave my bedroom. I did that for like 8 to 10 years: the depression… the work I did was over the phone. And I could send other people to do what I couldn’t do.

My story is what people have told me, really, and so good you keep asking. [Long pause.] Anyway, long story short, I ended up in a halfway house…
I was very suicidal, very depressed. Agoraphobic. Paranoid. Really pretty hopeless. Just obsessing the suicide. Many years. So I went to this halfway house and…the women were so afraid of me that I was put in an attic — that was the only way I could stay. They put me in an attic up above. And I slept on the floor in there. And one morning I was asleep on the floor and I felt this thing crawl over my foot and I looked down and it was a cockroach.

I opened my eyes and… [pause] what was born was not me…and, the way I tell it is…she rose, she walked, she apparently talked. She was delighted. It is so ecstatic to be born and not born. It sees, and sees everything, without a concept. It’s amazing. I don’t really call it anything… It transcended itself and itself was everything. It totally transcended that. It’s like this. Every moment’s like this. It’s like if you… [lifts hand in front of face] is to be amazed. Just to see this hand, is amazing! I mean, I eat that food [points to the food], I am eating myself. It is so good! I mean, every moment, It is Itself now. But to see this, you get still with that. Or this. And you die. You dissolve into it. Anyone would. Just to get still. And I call it, who we are without a story. But it’s…I call it love, because I don’t have another word. But just to see my hand in front of my face, or my foot, or the table, or anything, it’s to see it for the first time. Here are the words that I would use: ‘It’s a privilege beyond what can be told.’ It’s self experiencing the mere image of itself…born [inaudible — in love?].

They said this is your husband. I said, good. These are your children. I said, good. Your name is Katie. Okie dokey. (My behaviour) took a 180-degree shift. Totally. Total shift... No one told me what was going on. The people in Barstow, they don’t have the concepts like maybe the people in this group tonight would.
What was typical for me was to hit the streets. Open my eyes, and just hit the streets. Maybe encounter someone, this would not be unusual, and just walk up and just naturally put my arms around them…or walk beside them and take their hand and walk. And maybe they would move away…frightened. And I would say something like, ‘why are you pretending not to know me, why are you pretending not to care about me, why are you pretending not to love me? Why are you pretending not to recognise me?’ And so, I could see the fear in their eyes, because It starts to shift from there, because it’s me. So for you to be uncomfortable is my discomfort. I mean literally. And so I would go by the eyes and moving back and so It learned how the look is.

They used to call me ‘the lit lady’, and ‘the woman who walks by’ and I’d go out in the desert and just never come back cuz there’s no such thing as lost. I learned that the light, the litness, would apparently decrease and get less and less until it looked like yours. No happier, no sadder. The appearance isn’t quality, and that’s where it’s comfortable. But the litness doesn’t change levels. It just apparently does. It’s like a chameleon. I call it ‘love meets itself’. It doesn’t care where, it doesn’t care what. It just does. So that’s how I met people.
I [had not been] a lover of people or anything else that is… Just total love. Just absolutely… I used to ask my children to just look at these hands and fingers…how the light hit it and touched it and just…maybe I would just ask them to come look at my foot or something and just marvel. It didn’t matter whether it was their foot or my foot it was…new. New. New. Took about three years for it to even begin to balance...

Uhhhh. [Sighs.] First time we made love it was just amaaazing. It was radical! Cuz it was God with God. And it was the receiving of it and the giving ah, it was just amazing!

In Texas they call me La Cucaracha. You know people are not ‘not kind’, they’re honest instead… It was pretty scary. They were! It was more them getting rid of me I think. (I was on) Premarin for 13 years… when I went to the halfway house I just can’t remember them medicating me at all. At all.

If I say, if I talk about, ‘I want to be enlightened…’ it implies a future. And there isn’t any. And then we attach to…one by one, by one, by one… I call it ‘they get married and have babies.’ It’s reincarnation. You start with the…the I arises, and if you don’t notice, then it has a baby and a baby and a baby and it splits, it’s a cellular… [laughs] thing… it’s like the atoms splitting… I call it instantaneous unenlightenment. But if you’ll notice, then it ends. There’s no more reincarnation. So if you don’t notice, it continues. And that’s time and space and place. It’s an illusion. Like an internal optical illusion.

So there’s only transcendence in the moment. Nobody can be transcended forever. That’s why I say, ‘who cares if you’re enlightened forever? Can you just get it in this moment, now?’ And that’s what the investigation’s about. I mean, that’s all there is. I mean we’re so attached to the concept we’re in, that we really…it’s such a vivid movie that it would imply a past and future with it all in it. It’s just a concept now. So it is just in the moment now. There’s no division point in it. There’s nowhere where you know where it differentiates. It is so good. It, this transcendence thing is just a beginning. Until it comes back for itself and claims it, transcendence is just a beginning. It’s just a concept. And that’s what you were saying. It’s a concept that people aspire to and they don’t re-enter. And I don’t know why people don’t speak of it. But transcendence, there’s nothing in it. When It comes back for Itself, the mere image of Itself… It’s intoxicated. Couldn’t have anything else. It’s a matter of total greed...

No story, no suffering. No attachment to story, no suffering. I don’t even know what a sustained transcendent experience is. I only know that I have not seen a problem in 13 years that is real. And I have not met anyone or anything that I would change. Everything brings me such joy. I am everything. If that’s what a sustained transcendent experience is, no wonder people seek it; even though it is always, always apparent...

Suzanne Segal was a friend of mine and I couldn’t relate to anything she said... Like U.G. (Krishnamurti) I totally relate (fear for 10 years, first). He’s as close to my experience…he’s the only one I’ve met that I relate to. Where U.G. and I tend to have a different experience. I didn’t experience a calamity. I experience the opposite. The thought that I existed at all was a calamity. And the opposite of that is really delightful from here. I see everyone as awake, whatever that is. I see everyone as clear. The mere fact that they suffer from (their story) tells me that they know better. I used to ask people, why are you pretending not to know?

(If I were to one day wake up and be having some kind of transcendent experience, how would I know?) You don’t. You don’t even care. There’s no one to care. I can’t even put it into words… self-love? [That would] be a guess. Words are always going to fall short, which is a sweet thing… When I’m driving in a car, everything’s coming into me. It ends there. I am the beginning and the end of all of it… They had to teach me not to drive on sidewalks cuz it was logical that if the traffic stopped you’d just go over here. So you have to learn everything all over again.

I just have to honestly say people had to tell me that something was going on at all. And I saw it was their story. It didn’t change anything from here. I could just see that in their opinion, there was something different. And that still holds true these 13 years later. That I see absolutely no difference between you and I, except you, whoever you are, humans…insist that there’s something true… Where would you be without your story?

Radical physical shifts. I went from over 200 pounds down to just, where my husband was just fearful, I was so thin, and it was just…an amazing phenomenon. And my tongue, if I ate any kind of animal product at all, my tongue would bleed. And that’s how I knew to eat vegetarian and not even dairy. And that’s shifted now and it doesn’t happen anymore. But it would just bleed and I would just have to hold a handkerchief on it. But then it would just move through.

I don’t know, if my joy were told, in a physical realm, it would blow the ceiling off of this place. So it just appears like this. But it’s always manic, yet joy filled. So, the phenomenon stopped at about three years and about seven it began to mature. It was pretty much maturing. And then that was a beginning. Just a beginning. What it felt like was…the density was so great, that it couldn’t contain that lightness. That’s why I say, at no point can you say it’s done. And I haven’t even started. I mean I am a puppy. It’s infinite…

Happiness. Doing whatever it is that’s good. This is its own happiness. And it knows how to live that way because that is what it is. And it spills over… I am devoted to total world peace. I am the world. Of course I would have all the parts of me showing in that place within me for the party. I supply a way, a path home and they follow it or not. As it should be. If I were to ask anything, I would ask that you wrote nothing and that would be truer. And if you think it would serve, you could just write whatever you want.”

~ Byron Kathleen Mitchell, better known as Byron Katie (born 1942) is an American speaker and author who teaches a method of self-inquiry known as "The Work of Byron Katie" or simply as "The Work". She is married to the writer and translator Stephen Mitchell. She is the founder of Byron Katie International (BKI), an organization that includes The School for the Work and Turnaround House in Ojai, California. TIME Magazine called her "a spiritual innovator for the 21st century."