I remember when the book Loving What Is by Byron Katie came out. My coworker at the bookstore where I worked at the time, a fellow classics major, scoffed loudly at what he took to be its thesis — that if you didn’t like an unpleasant fact you could dispense with it by calling its truth into question. He had no patience for such nonsense. I thought it was a little subtler than that, and perhaps closer to the Eastern idea that we perceive the world through a veil of illusion, colored by our limited prejudices, but I kept my mouth shut. I believed he was smarter than I was.

It wasn’t until years later that, in the midst of deep personal suffering, I listened to the introductory CD a well-meaning friend of my former roommate had given me. Hearing a young man whose family disapproved of him (familiar territory, for me) going through Katie’s questions made me stop in my tracks. The next participant, who was ready to give her noncommittal boyfriend an ultimatum, had me weeping openly by the end of her inquiry. Somehow the shift in perception that Katie facilitated made everyone see their own folly as well as experience more directly the love that existed within themselves, both toward their own misguided, suffering selves, and toward the loved ones they had been blaming for their pain.

It was a revelation.

What Katie does is have you vent your grievances on paper: “I am saddened and angered by X because he or she does/is/thinks Y…” and then go on to say what you would like the other person (or in the case of self-criticism, yourself) to do/be/think differently. She then takes each statement’s underlying assumptions one by one and deconstructs them thus:

• Is it true?
• Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
• How do you feel when you think that thought?
• Who would you be without that thought?

Then she has you “turn it around,” which can mean either switching the pronouns, adding a negative or opposing term to negate the statement, or making the statement about oneself only (also, when criticizing oneself, substituting “my thoughts about” for “I” or “my”).

For example: I could say, “I am saddened and angered by my mother because she judges me and wants to control what I believe.”

The assumption is “my mother shouldn’t judge me.”

Is it true? Unquestionably true?

Maybe it would be nicer for me, but what’s actually happening? She’s a born-again Christian. And a parent. It’s practically her function to judge. (Actually, it’s an explicit part of the modern evangelical job description. Check the website.) She’s going to do it whether I want her to or not. As Katie says, “When you argue with reality, you lose — but only one hundred percent of the time.”

And how do I feel when I think “she shouldn’t judge me?”

Resentful, resistant, not wanting to have anything to do with her or the rest of my family. Bitter. Angry.

Who would I be without that thought?

It takes a minute to imagine, to pretend I’m constitutionally incapable of thinking “my mother shouldn’t judge me.” It brings me into the present, rather than into the disappointments of the past or anxieties about the future. It helps me see my mother as she is, without the filter of anger or aversion or fear. Suddenly I’m no longer trying to control her. She will do whatever she does; it’s not up to me. I can simply relax and stop obsessing about it. I’m free to be however I want to be. If I blurt out “holy shit!” in front of her for some reason, well, she may frown, but the world won’t come to an end.

Then comes the turnaround.

My mother should judge me.
I shouldn’t judge my mother.
I shouldn’t judge me.

The second speaks most powerfully to me at the moment, because as any good Freudian psychologist will point out, what bothers me most in you is usually something I’m unconsciously doing myself.

Now I can turn around my beginning statement to read “I am saddened and angered by me because I judge my mother and want to control what she believes.” In demanding that she not judge me, I’m doing just that to her! Bwahahaha!

It’s empowering to actually take responsibility for your own part in the difficulty.

(A note about the self-criticism turnaround and how it works: say your statement is “I hate my fat butt.” One turnaround would be “I hate my thoughts about my butt.” Or maybe even “I hate my fat thoughts about my butt!”)

Questions Katie often asks, in workshops, of parents who want their daughter to choose a different career, or spouses whose partner has strayed, or people who otherwise have some pain around the actions and choices of loved ones, are: Do you love them? Do you want them to be happy? Do you get to dictate what makes them happy? This often proves to be a radical reality check, and gets people back in touch with what it means to love.

Believing that Jesus is the One Way is what makes my mother happy. Would I really want to take that away from her? Can I honestly know what’s best for her?

As I may have mentioned last time, I spend a lot of time wishing things were different. Byron Katie’s method has helped me, many times, to shift, and to reconcile with the Way Things Are. So I feel a little less insane, and a lot more generous.

Now if I could just do something about my butt.

Am I insane? That’s a very good question. I ask myself that almost every day.

So much of what we call “reality” seems determined by group consensus (scientific or otherwise), and I spent an awful lot of time as a kid playing in the sandbox by myself. So that may contribute to why I might come across as demented.

Or maybe I really am from outer space.

…

Not long ago I read this in The Art of Possibility:

A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying,

SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES

The other writes back triumphantly,

GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES

To the marketing expert who sees no shoes, all the evidence points to hopelessness. To his colleague, the same conditions point to abundance and possibility. Each scout comes to the scene with his own perspective; each returns telling a different tale. Indeed, all of life comes to us in narrative form; it’s a story we tell.

This is the beginning of a chapter called “It’s All Invented.” The authors point out, among other things, how differently the world looks to a frog than to humans, and give an example of how extending the boundaries of a particular puzzle makes a solution appear. They talk about how Einstein changed our Newtonian view of physics, and how our scientific paradigm is constantly evolving. It’s all very exciting and suggestive of expansion and new possibilities.

But, now, wait a minute.

Since I got here — birthed, or landed — I feel like I’ve been challenging (or maybe just butting up against) the prevailing stories about what’s going on, what the hell this is, with regard to any number of existential questions. Since rejecting the reality story offered by the evangelical church, I’ve resisted conventional wisdom about life purpose, truth, value, relationships, you name it, and tried to invent a more AlienBaby-friendly universe out of my own intuition, intelligence, and experience. What I seem to have gotten is equal resistance from the “outside world,” which has yet to show me evidence that it doesn’t have a wholly independent existence that’s impervious to my intentions. It’s been like swimming upstream for the last twenty-five years. Adherents of new-consciousness thinking, who surround but have not managed to convince me, say that we create our own reality — which sounds real nice, but I ain’t seen it happen yet.

What I want to know is, say I do run with that — hey, I’ve tried! — what makes me different from the highly medicated or the incarcerated? What if I decide that shooting the president is totally the way to win over Jodie Foster? It wouldn’t have all that much bearing on “reality,” would it? Sometimes I think the difference between myself and a Hinckley is only one of degree.

…

I was a senior in high school when Terry Gilliam’s wild, visionary, dystopian film Brazil came out. I saw it multiple times over the course of a few months, completely transfixed. It was as if I knew it would prove to be in some ways a metaphor for how I would experience life. Even though the protagonist was male, I identified with Sam, played with deadpan looniness by the marvelous Jonathan Pryce.

Sam is a fairly insignificant cog in the massive impersonal machine of his Orwellian government’s bureauacracy, where a clerical error caused by an insect results in the torture and death of an innocent man. (Twenty years later, doesn’t this seem prescient, given what we’ve found out about extraordinary rendition and the murder of innocent people like Dilawar, the Afghan taxi driver beaten to death by U.S. troops at Bagram?) Billboards propagandizing The Good Life obstruct views of ruined wastelands and the decaying living quarters of the desperately poor. (And what distinguishes this imaginary metropolis from any city in America?) Public and private discourse is dominated by shallow slogans and misleading euphemisms that short-circuit any real communication or connection between human beings. (Do I need to add further comment?)

Into Sam’s bleak, gray world of meaningless jargon and ugly architecture intrude vivid dreams and fantasies that have a mythic, Hero’s-Journey quality to them. In these dreams he is a mighty winged warrior, striving to rescue the ethereal Woman in White from her floating cage. He battles numerous obstacles — towering, impenetrable monoliths, ghoulish hooded creatures with hideous baby-doll faces, and a giant metallic samurai among them — all of which correspond to intransigent obstacles in his waking life.

(I must mention that Sam is not alone in his craving for a better narrative, for a grand tale that has love and heroism and meaning in it; his coworkers at the dismal Records Pool spend their furtive, unsupervised moments comically trying to watch Casablanca.)

When Sam actually encounters his dream woman in the person of Jill Layton — his vision really exists! — his fevered pursuit and declarations of love come off as lunacy. His overwhelmingly felt connection to this woman is rooted in the Jungian realm of dreams, intuition, symbolism, and myth — things that seem patently ridiculous in these soulless, mechanized, Darwinian surroundings. Sam seems unhinged, delusional. (But then, even in the less extreme surroundings I have to navigate, he’d seem delusional. I’m pretty sure I do.) No one can be trusted in their world; why should she trust a raving madman?

**Spoiler alert** In the end, after his involvement with Jill and other so-called “terrorists” leads to his being classified an enemy of the state, Sam is captured and prepared for draconian interrogation tactics, with no escape route save his own fertile imagination. Contrary to the prescriptions of many a respectable guru I know, he doesn’t surrender to what’s happening and accept the present moment! In the final shot, he is left in the torture chair (a dentist’s chair, of course), eyes rolled toward heaven, a blissful smile on his face. Jill is most likely dead, but in his mind they are miles away, together.

And that’s kind of how I’ve gotten through life. Oh, nothing’s been that dire! Nobody’s going to come after me wielding sinister dental implements — at least not at this point, I hope. But there is many a dull moment when I fall out of my Walter Mitty reverie with a shock, to greet real circumstances as indifferent and unyielding as the granite facade of the Ministry of Information, and hard facts that fly in the face of my heroic Joseph Campbell-esque visions.

I think of Jill at one point in the film, saying “You have no sense of reality.”

At such moments, I believe it.

And then I wonder if the mothership is ever coming back to take me home to a planet where I can feel moderately normal.