Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [87]
If you have a problem with people or with the state of the world, I invite you to put your stressful thoughts on paper and inquire, and to do it for the love of truth, not in order to save the world. Is your thought true? Can you absolutely know that it’s true? How do you react—what happens—when you believe that thought? Who would you be without it? Then turn the thought around: save your own world. Isn’t that why you want to save the world in the first place? So that you can be happy? Well, skip the middleman, and be happy from here! You’re it. You’re the one. In this turnaround you remain active, but there’s no fear in it, no internal war. So it ceases to be war trying to teach peace. War can’t teach peace. Only peace can.
I don’t try to change the world—not ever. The world changes by itself, and I’m a part of that change. The world changes through me, as the mind changes. I’m absolutely, totally, a lover of what is. When people ask me for help, I say yes, I teach them how to question their stressful thoughts, they begin to end their own suffering, and in that they begin to end the suffering of the world.
Violence teaches only violence. Stress teaches only stress. If you clean up your mental environment, we’ll clean up our physical one much more quickly. That’s how it works. And if you do that genuinely, without the violence of fear in your heart, without anger, without condemning corporations as the enemy, then people begin to notice. We begin to listen and notice that change through peace is possible. It has to begin with one person. If you’re not the one, who is?
I’m open to all that the mind brings, all that life brings. I have questioned my thinking, and I’ve discovered that ultimately it doesn’t mean a thing. I shine internally with the joy of understanding. I know about suffering, and I know about joy, and I know who I am. Who I am is who you are, even before you have realized it. When there’s no story, no past or future, nothing to worry about, nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be, it’s all good.
Byron Katie’s simple yet powerful method of inquiry into the cause of all suffering is called The Work. Since 1986, she has introduced The Work to millions of people throughout the world. Eckhart Tolle says that The Work is “a great blessing for our planet” and Time magazine named Katie a “spiritual innovator for the new millennium.” Her three bestselling books are Loving What Is, I Need Your Love—Is That True? and A Thousand Names for Joy; other books are Question Your Thinking—Change the World, Who Would You Be Without Your Story? and, for children, Tiger-Tiger, Is It True? Her Web site is www.thework.com.
What Keeps Me Alive: Making It Real
CHAIA HELLER
I’ve been teaching and engaging in activism on issues of feminism, ecology, food, and agriculture for well over twenty years. Once in a while, I run into a face I recognize from the “old days.” People hailing from the 1970s to the 1990s—times when there were feisty, in-your-face kind of grassroots activists working toward lofty goals, like ending patriarchy or stopping nuclear power. Sometimes folks ask me what I’m doing.
“I’m still teaching and writing about ecology and revolution, taking action when I can,” I’ll say, always slightly surprised to hear the words plop from my mouth like a series of plum stones. “You’re still at it?” My interlocutor will ask, his or her voice a cocktail of sympathy and disbelief.
Truthfully, the disbelief is mine. I find it hard to comprehend how folks in their middle years can drop the proverbial revolutionary ball. “How do you stay inspired or optimistic?” my young students ask each year, amazed to see a relic like me still maundering on about the wonders of a potentially utopian, ecological, and directly democratic society.
And then I tell them: I had good teachers.
When I was twenty, I stumbled