Quote
The Anticult
Or maybe she is a psychopath? Psychopath's can cry crocodile tears to manipulate people and feel no sadness, even when their own mother dies.
Clearly even Oprah can see this woman is full of hot-gas, when she says she has NOT SUFFERED in 22 years.

I'd be willing to bet that she'll feel a twinge of 'suffering' when her million$ stop rolling in.

Quote:corboy
I want to meet that cockroach.

ON2LF wrote:

LOL! I second that..I'm beginning to think, maybe that bug is worth getting acquainted with!

Corboy again:

A one inch cockroach ran up into my pants leg twice, not once, twice.

And in the nastiest men's bathroom in town.

To think that I coulda used this as evidence of being enlightened and gotten rich and famous.

Well, its my responsiblity that this didnt happen.

Let the record reflect, that Corboy will take responsibility for not seizing fortune by the forelock.

In that moment, friends, I failed to make my own reality.

I had my chance. I blew it. Its all my fault.

I failed to nail down the intellectual property on that episode back in 1988 when that bug got into my pants, not once, but twice.

And why did I fail to see this as intellectual property? Why did I fail to understand that I needed to hire a lawyer and a press agent?

Intellectual property is not 'in the moment'. Intellectual property is
based on the future risk of someone stealing your artistic/intellectual
output unless you get it on legal record that you produced it first!

One needs to activate ego, discursive thinking to do that. To even think,
'I need a lawyer for this.'

In that moment you aint in the moment. Thinking 'How do I market
this' is mental activity incompatible with in the moment.

You're interested in hanging on to what is yours and getting MORE of it.

That means you're craving something. The Buddhist folks call that 'afflictive emotion', aka 'dukkha' aka SUFFERING.

You suffer when you have something and dont want to lose it, or you have something and you want more of it--as in more customers, more converts.

Because...to think of my Roach Encounter as a marketable, potentially lucrative story that someone else might want to replicate, I would have had to think about future possiblities, such as someone else, in the future, stealing that story from me.

But, I wasnt thinking about the future. I was there in the moment, shaking that bug out of my jeans, feeling disgusted and amused.

I didnt have room in that present moment to think, 'This is a good story. Lets market it. Gotta find a lawyer.'

To me, it was just a funny, disgusting story. And only that. Not intellectual property. Just a funny, disgusting moment, dancing on one foot, grabbing
my other thigh, violently shaking my roach inhabited pants leg, hoping
I'd not fall onto that filthy bathroom floor.

And I had to stay in the moment so I could finish mopping that floor on time.

Gotta go clean my toilet now. Nighty night.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/06/2008 05:26AM by corboy.

Quote
The Anticult
yes, Stories appear to be the foundation of the human psyche, and Byron Katie knows this of course. She even mentioned in some of her material how ancient the STORY of Gilgamesh was. (its more than 4000 years)

Byron Katie loves to say "Not possible!" and that is the answer to her oft-asked question, "Who would you be without your story?"

It is literally not possible to not have a story.
Having no story, is a story, just a different story.

All Byron Katie does is literally tell hypnotic stories with embedded metaphors. That's all she does.

So she must get enormous pleasure from telling everyone to step outside of their stories, to be without a story, when all she does is hypnotize them with her stories.
It must be an enormous thrill for her to do that stuff in plain sight, and have almost no one who she is doing it to, even notice it.

How many times have followers heard/read the Byron Katie cockroach story? 300x?
Byron Katie mainly does 2 things, tell hypnotic stories with embedded metaphors, and create confusion in people, to draw them deeper into her stories.

(notice its a similar racket about "stories" as Werner Erhard and Landmark)

Yes, it's been noted at least once before that Byron Katie may have done EST and/or Landmark, and used that to formulate her method.

I am still in the midst of reading Dr. David D. Burns' "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" and was struck by something recently because it sounded AN AWFUL LOT like something Byron Katie does.

It involves her "turnaround" technique.

If someone says a particular thing "shouldn't have happened", BK will have that turned around to say, "It should have happened." And she'll add, "How do I know that it should have happened? Because it did. That's reality."

I now wonder if BK pilfered this idea from David Burns' book. It was originally published in 1980. That's six years pre La Cucaracha. Ample time to have read it and stolen the idea from Burns. (I'm not saying it DID happen, just that it COULD have.)

Here's David Burns:

"Another anti-should method involves showing yourself that a should statement doesn't fit reality. For example, when you say, 'I shouldn't have done X,' you assume (1) it is a fact that you shouldn't have, and (2) it is going to help you to say this. The 'reality' method reveals -- to your surprise -- that the truth is usually just the opposite: (a) In point of fact, you should have done what you did; and (b) it is going to hurt you to say you shouldn't have.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/06/2008 08:34PM by helpme2times.

helpme2times - I am also reading this book and enjoying its sane, logical approach very much.

There are many things that my Guru said about trying to reduce negative emotions, or how to handle relationships for example that at the time I thought were divinely inspired ideas from God. He did have a lovely way of putting things sometimes.

But now when I read David Burns' book I see that a lot of the 'psychological' stuff he gave advice about wasn't particularly extraordinary, and in fact possibly harmful. I am beginning to understand why I was often depressed and lonely through the years, even though I was supposed to be a perfectly happy little robot-disciple, slaving away for God.

I am now pretty convinced that when a human being tries to suppress / ignore their 'story', to deny their history and try to cut themselves off from their real feelings and personal desires it does much more harm than good. As has been mentioned many times before, it all comes back at some point anyway.

All the things that I thought I had overcome, the problems in my family, my own difficulties adapting to life events, growing and accepting the inevitability of suffering as corboy so nicely described above ... it all comes back.

We were taught to to 'forget ourselves to help others' and that to cultivate the spiritual path we had to learn to be SILENT and ACCEPT EVERYTHING. (It sounded so true at the time. Now I see those words as part of the mechanism of control my Guru used.)

The psychological burden when it doesn't work is so immense. It leads people to believe that they are failures on the deepest spiritual level, and that their relationship with God and possibly the existence of their very soul is in danger.

It is hard for me to believe that Byron Katie and other so-called 'spiritual teachers' can do this so cynically and without remorse. Either there is some part of them that truly believes in what they are doing or else they are indeed competely without conscience.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/06/2008 10:51PM by solea13.

The Anticult,

How do you KNOW all this stuff or is it just your stories?? What is "a racket about stories"? They way I understand it is that stories is what tell other people about why and/or how we failed, and facts are just facts (i.e. not stories), but I could be mistaken?

As long as we're collecting names of people who are liberally spreading Byron Katie crapola around I'd like to throw this link out for addition to the long list previously posted.

[www.kimrosen.net]

I attended a weekend workshop she facilitated. Basically it was an LGAT type sampler with the usual hypnotic regression to childhood "splits" as the culmination of a long weekend of being prompted to dish out secrets. There was bioenergetic work, repackaged as coreeneregetic work, repackaged again as pathwork. There was a big chunk of Byron Katie turnaround bullshit.

One especially annoying portion of self disclosure: when prompted to share a difficult experience in recent past, the facilitator asserts that any reaction you may have to a toxic personality - fight, flight, freezing in place - is a sign of immaturity. Even asserting yourself is wrong. What works is some sort of BK like "surrender". Sheesh.

I hadn't been to a weekend like this in twenty-five years (a Lifespring event in the Bay Area) so I'd forgotten how much stuff they pack in to a weekend. Also, how similar the format is. If you had told me that I would be doing the whole Lifespring type thing, with a different label, I would have said, "no thanks".

It took me quite some time to "recover" from just this one weekend. Particularly the repeated assertion that our idiosyncratic selves, were primarily coping mechanisms for the split that occurs to all of us as we deal with a set of parents that we are still trying to please, blah, blah, blah. The regression itself was quite painful emotionally, and left me spent for a number of days. Frankly, if I hadn't worked with a competent licensed bioenergetic therapist in the past, I don't think I would have been able to keep my bearings.

Aside from all that, one of the things that bugged me most and left quite a bitter aftertaste was her assertion that all our worldly creative efforts were just "droppings" on the path, compared to our effort to work for god. Now, if I did subscribe to a personal deity, I would think that my worldly creative efforts would be an expression of my relationship to that deity. That aside, here was the big hypocritical elephant in the room. This woman was using her poems and the music composed to recite them as backdrops for the workshop. She even set aside time to enjoy reciting her poems before us. In other words, in my mind, she was leaving quite whopping "droppings" all over our path, while telling us
to devalue ours.

I can't tell you all how grateful I am to have this forum here. I don't post often, but I read many of your messages and derive a lot of support and strength from your contributions.

That's all for now.

Thanks,

JB

The stuff about "Shoulds" is usually credited as coming from Dr. Karen Horney, and The Tyranny Of The Shoulds. [www.ship.edu]
I think she figured that one out first, and then CBT tested and refined it.

It has been proven that when people berate themselves with SHOULDS, they make themselves miserable, and there is no escape. So that is now a part of CBT.

In REBT that is also called Musturbation...as in MUSTS. Too many MUSTS in your life, and you are miserable as hell.
(The Work of Byron Katie is full of Shoulds and Musts that will make people miserable)

Personally, I don't see the Turnaround as being the same as CBT in this method, as with CBT its about NOT having polarized thinking, but flexible thinking.
In CBT it would be more like...I would PREFER it didn't happen, but it did, and I can handle it, even though I may not like it. (something like that, to soften it)

Byron Katie is very extreme and even fanatical and absurd in her thinking methods.
She would say, it should have happened and its WONDERFUL it happened. This is how she then extrapolates to how the Nazi's killers were doing the work of the Byron Katie "God".

EMPATHY:
Also, for those of us who have worked inside LGAT's for a period of time, it becomes very clear after less that 1 year, that the people running the LGAT know what is up. They are utterly cynical. They know it doesn't work, they see the same "screwed-up people" with the same problems coming back over and over. They know who their target market is very well.
From studying Byron Katie, its very clear she knows EXACTLY what she is doing. But for a person with a normal conscience, we can't understand how they can do this stuff, but they do it.
for example, could anyone reading this go out and smash a car window and grab the contents of a car? Of course not. But thousands have no problem doing that at all.
Its the same mentality on the LGAT circuit, they get so deep into it, they start to believe its unethical to NOT take the suckers money. Like L Ron Hubbard of Scientology.
Byron Katie is in that category, even just by the overt falsehoods being told with a straight face constantly. She is way out there.

Quote
helpme2times
Yes, it's been noted at least once before that Byron Katie may have done EST and/or Landmark, and used that to formulate her method.

I am still in the midst of reading Dr. David D. Burns' "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" and was struck by something recently because it sounded AN AWFUL LOT like something Byron Katie does.

It involves her "turnaround" technique.

If someone says a particular thing "shouldn't have happened", BK will have that turned around to say, "It should have happened." And she'll add, "How do I know that it should have happened? Because it did. That's reality."

I now wonder if BK pilfered this idea from David Burns' book. It was originally published in 1980. That's six years pre La Cucaracha. Ample time to have read it and stolen the idea from Burns. (I'm not saying it DID happen, just that it COULD have.)

Here's David Burns:

"Another anti-should method involves showing yourself that a should statement doesn't fit reality. For example, when you say, 'I shouldn't have done X,' you assume (1) it is a fact that you shouldn't have, and (2) it is going to help you to say this. The 'reality' method reveals -- to your surprise -- that the truth is usually just the opposite: (a) In point of fact, you should have done what you did; and (b) it is going to hurt you to say you shouldn't have.

That has been covered earlier in this thread when discussing Epistemology.
Byron Katie is one the biggest bullshit Storytellers out there today.
She pretends her lies are true.

"racket about stories" is a reference to Werner Erhard, who taught the same BS as Byron Katie.

Quote
Remi
The Anticult,

How do you KNOW all this stuff or is it just your stories?? What is "a racket about stories"? They way I understand it is that stories is what tell other people about why and/or how we failed, and facts are just facts (i.e. not stories), but I could be mistaken?