A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are($9.72Value)

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“Byron Katie is one of the truly great and inspiring teachers of our time. I encourage everyone to immerse themselves in this phenomenal book.” –Dr. Wayne W. Dyer In her first two books, Loving What Is and I Need Your Love–Is That True? Byron Katie showed how suffering can be ended by questioning the stressful thoughts that create it. Now, in A Thousand Names for Joy , she encourages us to discover the freedom that lives on the other side of inquiry. Stephen Mitchell–the renowned translator of the Tao Te Ching–selected provocative excerpts from that ancient text as a stimulus for Katie to talk about the most essential issues that face us all: life and death, good and evil, love, work, and fulfillment. With her stories of total ease in all circumstances, Katie does more than describe the awakened mind; she lets you see it, feel it, in action. “Byron Katie is one of the truly great and inspiring teachers of our time. She has been enormously helpful to me personally. I love this very wise woman, and I encourage everyone to immerse themselves in this phenomenal book.” —Dr. Wayne W. Dyer “ A Thousand Names for Joy is a vivid and powerful portrait of the awakened mind. I am captivated by Katie’s clear mind and loving heart, which offer the world a simple process to find joy. Who knew? Katie did, and what a blessing she offers to us all.” —Iyanla Vanzant, founder, Inner Visions Institute “Katie’s teachings and everyday life are pure wisdom. A Thousand Names for Joy shows us the way to inner peace, and she directs us there fearlessly, relentlessly, and with utmost generosity. I have rarely seen anyone—spiritual teachers included—embody wisdom as powerfully as Katie in her passionate embrace of each and every moment.” —Roshi Bernie Glassman “Byron Katie’s Work . . . acts like a razor-sharp sword that cuts through illusion and enables you to know for yourself the timeless essence of your being.” —Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now BYRON KATIE has introduced her simple yet powerful method of self-inquiry to millions of people throughout the world. Her website is www.TheWork.com. STEPHEN MITCHELL’s website is www.StephenMitchellBooks.com. 1 The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. You can't express reality in words. You limit it that way. You squeeze it into nouns and verbs and adjectives, and the instant-by-instant Xow is cut oV. The tao that can be told isn't the eternal Tao, because trying to tell it brings it into time. It's stopped in time by the very attempt to name it. Once anything is named, it's no longer eternal. "Eternal" means free, without limit, without a position in time or space, lived without obstacle. There's no name for what's sitting in this chair right now. I am the experience of the eternal. Even with the thought "God," it all stops and manifests in time, and as I create "God," I have created "not-God." You can substitute anything here--with the thought "tree," I create "tree" and "not-tree"; the mechanism is the same. Before you name anything, the world has no things in it, no meaning. There's nothing but peace in a wordless, questionless world. It's the space where everything is already answered, in joyful silence. In this world before words, there is only the real--undivided, ungraspable, already present. Any apparently separate thing can't be real, since the mind has created it with its names. When we understand this, the unreal becomes beautiful, because there's nothing that can threaten the real. I don't ever see anything separate called "tree" or "you" or "I." These things are only imagination, believed or unbelieved. Naming is the origin of all the particular things that make up the world of illusion, the dream world. To break oV part of the everything and name it "tree" is the Wrst dream. I call it "Wrst-generation thinking." Then thought begets thought, and we have "tall tree, beautiful tree, tree that I want to sit under, tree that would make good furniture, tree that I need to save," and the dream goes on and on. It takes a child just a moment to fall into the dream world, the dream of a world, when she Wrst connects word with thing. And it takes you just a moment to question it, to break the spell and be grateful for the Tao of everything--tree, no tree; world, no world. When the mind believes what it thinks, it names what cannot be named and tries to make it real through a name. It believes that its names are real, that there's a world out there separate from itself. That's an illusion. The whole world is projected. When you're shut down and frightened, the world seems hostile; when you love what is, everything in the world becomes the beloved. Inside and outside always match--they're reXections of each other. The world is the mirror image of your mind. Not believing your own thoughts, you're free from the primal desire: the thought that reality should be diVerent than it is. You realize the wordless, the unthinkable. You understand that an