Katie on critism and more- enjoy!! I’ve come to see that there is no such thing as criticism, there are only observations. And there is no observation that does not enlighten me, if my mind is opened to it. What could anyone say to me that I couldn’t honestly agree with? If someone tells me I’m a terrible person, I am kind enough to silently ask myself, “Are they right, could they possibly be right?” and in two seconds - I have practice - I can find where, in that moment or somewhere in my life, I’ve been a terrible person in my own opinion; it doesn’t take much searching to see in the moment how someone might see me that way through their minds as well as my own mind’s reference. And if someone says I’m a wonderful person, I can easily find that too. “Could they be right?” This is about self-realization, not about someone else being right or wrong. It’s about my freedom, and it is the truth that sets me free from doing war with a friend, and all humans are my friend (and I don’t expect them to know that they are). Being my friend is not a condition that I must deal with. “Am I your friend?” - that is what my life is about. When someone tells me that I lied, for example, the place to look for the truth is inside me, so I just go inside to see where they’re right. If I can’t find it in the situation they’ve mentioned, I can find it in some other situation, maybe decades ago I lied to them, maybe yesterday, and we can discuss it. I am a seeker and I seek the truth, not just their truth, but my own. I’m not compelled to say such things out loud, but inside me, I can join, not become separate from a friend who would tell me the truth that I ultimately must hear to be free. I’m not separating from anyone holding an accusation apparently aimed at “me.” I can say to myself, and if it is true I can admit to them, “I did lie. I see where you’re right about me.” Now we both agree on something that is true. It is my job, as a peace-loving human being, to admit my lie, find my motive and admit it (my favorite death of identification as a me) as soon as I realize it, and it could even be days later that I realize that I did, in fact, lie. If I, in my own experience, see that my lie has caused harm in any way, I ask my friend, “How I can make it right?” and step into the joy (joy may come later) of doing that. This is how to start life over without a fearful past. How can guilt live if your life is always uncreating it? It can’t! Realization, until it is lived, holds no power. That person, if I am not in fact lying to them about the moment they speak of, is realizing now, in the moment they perceive me as a liar, who I used to be, the very thing that I began realizing twenty years ago. This makes us the same, and nothing has changed except that time has ceased to be an element. This is how the ability to love people who are angry at me was created and allowed to recreate in every moment. People who defend and justify what isn’t true are like people suffering with cancer, diabetes, arthritis, people suffering as though on their deathbeds: we don’t kick them and say, “Get up, stop that, stupid!” It’s the same when someone is angry and attacking you. This is a confused mind, a confused human being. And if I’m clear, where is it that I couldn’t meet him or her with the understanding that heals both of us and changes and delightfully shifts the world of pain, heartache, and the need to be right? That’s when we are our most genuine, when we’re giving our honest selves without defense, justification, or condition to the other. I have a good deal of practice at this. Paul, my ex-husband, comes to mind. He used to yell at me a lot, and after I had developed a little clarity, he wasn’t happy with the change that took place, it frightened him. He would cry and wail through the house, yelling, “Who are you, God damn it? What did you do with her? Where’s Katie? You’re not the woman I married! What’s going on here? What did you do with her? You’re not her, you don’t love me. You say you love me but don’t you love everybody else as much as you love me? Who are you?” And of course he was right, from his point of view. He equated my loving him with doing what he wanted me to do, saying what he wanted me to say, and believing what he wanted me to believe, and this is not possible for any human being, and his story overrode reality every time. When he yelled at me, his chest and face would expand, he’d blow up, get very large, get very red, and very loud and volatile. There was nothing I could do but love him, listen very closely, honor what he was saying, truly, and when he asked a question to tell him the truth, and that is that I loved him, and also I would offer to help him in any way that I could, and he was very sad and lonely. The ways that he gave me to help him were not something that I could give because they required me to playact who he wanted me to be and I wasn’t, and he perceived my inability to pretend to be who I am not as “not love.” All I could see was a dear man who was frightened of losing the me he wanted, which no longer existed, and really never did other than as a pretend human being Katie prior to clarity. Paul was doing the best he could do, living with the woman in his house who wasn’t matching his thoughts and beliefs of who she was supposed to be and how she was supposed to see him and life. He was hurting himself, thinking it was me hurting him, when it was the me who loved him and was no longer pretending. My job was, is, and always will be to love him and appreciate him and listen to the music of his reality as his reality. We each have our own. As his imagination moved farther and farther away from the reality of who I am, he continued to create the wife who didn’t love him, didn’t care, and didn’t exist. The one he created had traveled so far that the distance seemed unbridgeable. Finally, in his hurt and anger, he began to turn away from me as if I (the unacceptable one to his mind) didn’t exist. The one I saw him to be was frightened, confused, lovable, loving, dear, rejecting, and unreachable, and I saw myself through him, yet again, and again, and again. If a criticism hurts you, that means that you are defending against what you believe to be true and are in denial about. It doesn’t mean that you have to realize they are right yet, it just means that you will argue with them, justify, defend, and sometimes even see your friends and family as an enemy, until you do realize that they could be right. Your body will let you know very clearly, through feelings, when you are defending against your own truth coming at you from someone else’s mouth and your own mind. If you don’t pay attention, the mind that created the feelings through its defenses and/or justifications must continue to do so through mental and eventually physical attack, isolation, self-hatred, depression. It’s not right or wrong; it just is how the unenlightened mind and body works until it doesn’t and it isn’t intelligent. War with the self or anyone else is not intelligent. It doesn’t work. If you’re really interested in your own peace of mind, you’ll become more and more aware of that sense of wanting to defend yourself against a criticism, you’ll simply observe it. And eventually you’ll be fascinated to find the missing pieces of yourself that your critic is helpfully pointing out, and you’ll ask him to tell you more, so that you can be enlightened even further. That critic is always a friend if you’re looking for an honest one. There is an exercise in the nine-day School that is helpful. If someone tells you that you are stupid, for example, are they right? Can you find three things in life that you are pretty stupid about? Now, can you complete the opposite list, the one that admits where you are pretty smart about some matters? The list has to be genuine or it doesn’t count. It has to be genuine or the mind cannot rest in it, and when the mind rests in it, it is forever. It is only the truth that mind seeks, truth is the nature of mind, the kindness of its nature that sets it free to stop seeking. Criticism is an immense gift for those who are interested in self-realization. For those who aren’t, welcome to the hell of war, welcome to hating (or in its milder form, resenting) your neighbors, your partner, your children, your boss, yourself, your life, and the job of the relentless I-know mind. When you open your arms to criticism, you can become your own direct path to freedom, because you can’t change us or what we think about you. You are your only way to stand with a friend as a friend, even when she perceives you as an enemy. And until you can be intimate with us, whatever we think of you, your Work isn’t done, and you must continue in your life to resist what is true. After you’ve done inquiry for a while, you can listen delightedly, openly, to any criticism, without defense or justification. It’s the end of trying to control what can’t ever be controlled: another person’s thoughts and perception. The mind rests, and life becomes kinder, and then totally kind, even in the midst of apparent turmoil. When you’re aware of being a student, everyone in the world becomes your teacher, including you. In the absence of defensiveness, gratitude is all that’s left. If someone says that I lied and I didn’t, I wait. I watch my mind and eventually it will think, “They lied about my lying.” If someone says that I am cruel and I am not, I watch my mind and smile as it thinks something cruel, like, “How cruel of them to see me as cruel.” If I wait and watch after any “untrue” accusation, I can find easily, in time, in the moment, where they are right, and I can smile. I love the mind and how it is always mirrored out of original mind: mine. I am always what I see you to be in the moment that I see you as that. That is mental, and the mental is what life is created and reflected out of and mirrored back to the creator of all of life, and that would be you. Who created life? You did! And I love that uncreating it is much easier than creating it. After uncreating life, mind begins to live as part creation itself, and in that becomes the constant celebration of what it sees, and what it sees is absolutely good. I never have the sense that anything I haven’t done is undone. I see the things that don’t get done as things that need a different timing; I and the world are better off without them, for now. I have hundreds of e-mails waiting for me on my computer, some of them from people who are desperately asking for my response, but I never feel frustrated that I don’t have time to answer them. I do the best I can, I even hire people to help me help, and I’m clear that people believing that they desperately need me don’t need me if I cannot respond, that they can give themselves what they need as we all come from the same wisdom. I love realizing in every moment that if I’m not available, what really matters is always available to everyone. Nothing comes ahead of its time, and nothing has ever happened that didn’t need to happen. Bringing the four questions and the three “as true or truer” ways of the turnaround to people is my job. After that, there’s nothing to offer. I know that people don’t need my help, that their help is where the questions take them, and the questions are free on my Web site. I go through the world helping people through my own experience, it appears, and I’m only selfishly helping myself each time you ask and I’m a yes. When you say, “Help me,” I understand that. I’ve been lost, I have fallen to my hands and knees, screaming, begging, pleading, and often even cursing the help that didn’t come in the disappointment of unfathomable hopelessness and the attempt at controlling the universe, through my endless pain. I have been there. But even if I could give you freedom, it would be watered down to the second generation, you are the first and I am a generation later in your world, and this is so for a while. So, I couldn’t do it if I wanted to in one sense. I love what is true too deeply to pretend that I am the “one” in your world. I will mirror your kind mind, however, and I will hold you when we meet. I’ll stroke you, I’ll coo to you and sing you lullabies from the bottom of the vast unlimited heart, and I leave your freedom to the power within you to realize that for yourself. That’s the gift that cannot be given by anyone other than yourself. All that you ask of God, turn it around and ask it also of yourself and do what you want God to do. See what is possible. Turn to the love of your life, turn into you. My job is to delete myself. If there were a bumper sticker representing my life, it would say CTRL-ALT-DELETE: WWW.THEWORK.COM. That’s where I invite everyone to come join me. Join me and delete your own unreal, imagined self. That is the only place where we can meet. I call it love.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 12:02:49 +0000
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