Oprah Winfrey and Byron Katie have continued their talk.

Here is a partial transcription of part 2, "Learning The Work"...

BK: "It's just four questions and a turnaround. It's nothing without your answers."

Oprah: "The Work is merely four questions. It's not even a thing. It has no motives, no strings. It's nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program you've got and enhance it, any religion you have, they'll enhance it, if you have no religion, they will bring you joy, and they'll burn up anything that isn't true for you..."

Oprah asks Katie about her life following the cockroach epiphany. "Have you not suffered since that day?"

BK: "Not, not suffered since that day. But I have a head start on most people because I saw that nothing was true."

BK says it's been 22 years.

Oprah: "You have NOT suffered?!"

BK: "I haven't experienced that, but I'm very open to suffering, and I haven't experienced sadness but I'm very open to sadness and I'm very open to anger. But you have to believe your stressful thoughts before you can experience those emotions."

Oprah: "How do you define suffering?"

BK: "Sadness, resentment, anger... You know, I cry a lot, you know, I'm moved to tears."

Re her mother's death: "I'm so full of love, I have no room for it [suffering]..."

"It was all in my mind... I don't mind death. I see death as a wonderful thing. I see life as a wonderful thing."

"I don't feel badly."

Oprah: "You don't have bad days?"

BK: "No, not yet, and as I said, I am wide open."

Why she doesn't suffer?

BK: "I don't believe my stressful thoughts."

Oprah: "Why would I be happy my mother died?"

(I could barely follow what BK said next, it came out as "blah blah blah" to me.)

Oprah: "But I wanted it to be longer [a loved one's life]!"

BK: "And you lose."

I want to meet that cockroach.

Quote
corboy
I want to meet that cockroach.

Okey dokey!

[[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srNdTnOnLFk]Cockroach[/url]]

Byron Katie is a very slick operator.
Its all just word games.
So she can say...I can cry and have tears, but not feel sad.
Maybe that is just a silly word game.

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.
Its just a simple con-game.
Its a simple sales-game, Pain and Pleasure.
Byron Katie knows that humans want to escape the pain of the human condition, and she says she did it, and if you follow her and come to her seminars, you will ESCAPE PAIN and gain pleasure.
But its a fraud, life is not like that.

No healthy person would say you have to suffer ALL the time, but a part of life is feeling normal amounts of pain and pleasure, and all the other human emotions.

So Byron Katie is preying on people who want to escape their suffering.
And since The Work does NOT work over time, they just go deeper and deeper into it.

Byron Katie is a slick operator and manipulator of language, but even Oprah can see that she is playing games. Sadly, Oprah doesn't believe in checking people out anymore.
Why doesn't Oprah apply the same level of critical thought that she did to James Frey who also FABRICATED his life story in his book? Oprah hammered his ass to the floor for that on TV.

Then she goes and promotes Eckhart Tolle, who also fabricated his past history, and also Byron Katie. One can hope that one-day Oprah will strike back at these other folks who are feeding her BS too, like she did to James Frey.

Quote
The Anticult
Byron Katie is a very slick operator.
Its all just word games.
So she can say...I can cry and have tears, but not feel sad.
Maybe that is just a silly word game.

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.
Its just a simple con-game.

I too have wondered whether BK is a psychopath. Her own daughter said in that LA Times article that pre-cockroach, BK had been the angriest person she'd ever known.

Oprah did express disbelief to BK more than once and that was good. I hope that someday Oprah will realize that BK is teaching and perpetrating some horrific stuff.

The Roman satirical poet Persius put it this way:

'Anyone who wants to bowl me over will need to weep genuine tears,
not rehearsed the night before.'

(Persius Satire One line 90. Niall Rudd's translation)

Damn...years back in my student days, I worked in at the local homeless shelter.

One day, I was cleaning the men's room, and a one inch cockroach ran over--and run UP inside my pants leg.

I grabbed my thigh to keep the thing from getting into my privates, danced my other foot and shook it out.

Chased the thing around the bathroom---and the little bastard run up inside my pants leg, again.

Finally captured it, and after safely putting that roach in a Mason jar, one guy adopted it and made it his new best friend. (Crazy guy. He used to show off the bug, put his arm around my shoulders and said it was our love child.)

I didnt get enlightened and he didnt, either.

(All of this really did happen..swear to God)

Ye godz, Corboy, that is quite a story!

"Who would you be without your story?"

I dare to say that you wouldn't be you. Our stories (aka our histories) like it or not are a large part of who we are.

Travelling Jewish Theatre once did a show entitled Sometimes We Need a Story More than Food.

I have not yet looked it up, but there is a cookbook of recipes that were secured from a manuscript. Women who were imprisoned in, I think Terezin or one of the other concentration camps, told stories of the recipes they had used at home, wrote them down, keeping the image of home in thier minds, when not allowed to eat much of anything at all.

Sometimes we do need a story more than food. A recipe can include a story--and transmit culture.

If you dont hear your family stories, you are just a standardized product of whatever the local educational process is.

Ever notice that totalitarian movements, whether dictatorships or cults tend to re-write history. And...sometimes bump off or kick out people old enough to remember how things used to be--before the crew got in and decided to re-write history, eh?

Where would cultures be without stories?

The Mahabharata and Ramayana. The story of Panhu and Sassui. The Greek and Roman scriptures. The Talmud. The Koran and Hadith. The stories of courtly love that changed our ideas about human relationship. In the old days marriage was a property transfer contract. But the courtly love tradition began to change that.

Shakespeare.

Stories from history.

Hearing first hand from someone who lived through the Depression.

Family stories. That's something dangerous about modern life--not enough time to just hang out--because that is when family stories slip out.

A friend told me that when he was 19 he was in the car with his stepdad and suddenly, his stepdad began for the first time, to tell him about life on the Murmansk convoys during World War II. My pals stepdad had risked his life as an engineer on tankers carrying high octane airplane
fuel. One torpedo would've turned the ship into a bomb--and no chance of rescue. His stepfather's story just suddenly slid out.

And the guy died before his grandsons were born. When his youngest grandson had his bar mitzvah, I wrote the kid a letter and told him all about his grandfather, to make sure he knew his granddaddy had been a hero. The youngster is a timid boy with an aggressive older brother and I decided he needed to get that story so he could know who he had come from--and that he shared his grandfather's analytical mind.

Knowing certain stories can improve our quality of life.

Such as knowing to stay up to date with one's immunizations because you have a parent who remembered the days when people got sick and died from infectious disease that are preventable today.

Hearing stories about someone in the family who died young from heart disease or diabetes and deciding, 'Hey, maybe I can do things differently'
--and chaning your diet, getting more active and ending up better off than your ancestors were.

Hearing about the concentration camps and vowing, 'Never again!'

The civil rights movement.

Showing up for jury duty and casting your vote because you stayed awake in history class and know that people died so that we could have these today.

I used to listen to a guy who served in the Big Red One during World War II. He liberated concentration camps.

When he got back home to Pennsylvania, he found out his girl was no longer in the neighborhood. Her parents didnt think John was good enough for her and had taken her away and moved out of state to get her away from him.

John found out from the neighbors that the family had moved to Los Angeles.

He went there and discovered his lady had been waiting for him all those years.

They were both over 21, got married, lived happily ever after.

Am sure that the coefficient of John's love was he probably cried his eyes out and suffered if his wife died before he did--or she cried her eyes out and suffered if he died before she did.

If you adore your dog or cat, one day you have to have the grief of giving them back and that's when your heart just breaks when you
hold em in your arms while the veterinarian who has known you both, give them that final injection so that they can float away and die without further suffering.

You want to see a hero, go contemplate a veterinarian. They go from meeting and greeting your new puppy or kitten and giving the wee one a well baby exam, to having to assist you when your friend is old and suffering and dying and cant go potty unaided any more.

And witnesses the worst that humans do to their animals..amd who sees all that in one working day at the animal clinic.

You can bet that veterinarians and thier support staff suffer--and that is why they can give us a sense of accompanyment when we have to make the hard decisions for our furry friends.

If you are not capable of suffering, you've cut yourself off from your own humanity and will be unable to assist others. You'll be stuck living behind
armor plate in the emotional equivalent of body armor, driving a Humvee.

Might as well be in a coffin before youve died.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/05/2008 11:15PM by corboy.

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)
Guess who is involved with the Epic Gilgamesh Story?

Every "sacred book" on the planet is full of "stories". And those were just written down from oral stories before that. Myths, oral history. (hint, every religion is based on a set of "stories").

So Byron Katie knows that "your story" is the foundation of your psyche, so she wants to take control of that.
Then all she does 24/7 is preach her fake Stories about the cockroach motel, and the rest of it.
Its shocking how easy it appears to be to dupe large amounts of people, right in front of their noses.


Also, about SUFFERING.
Byron Katie says she has not suffered in 22 years, which is obviously bullshit.
But notice how what she is teaching is completely against actual Cognitive Therapy?
In cognitive therapy people need to learn to TOLERATE DISCOMFORT, not eliminate it. Its all explained very carefully. That is the foundation of dealing with anxiety and phobias, and many other things.
Trying to avoid and stop all suffering is profoundly incorrect, and will lead to very serious problems, like phobias and anxiety!!
To be healthy, you need to do basically the opposite of what Byron Katie says, and learn to TOLERATE DISCOMFORT and realize that emotional pain is tolerable. Its truly perverse what Byron Katie is trying to get people to do.

I guess this is why Byron Katie can get away with almost anything.
Most of her followers don't seem to notice the fraud of her harping about "Stories" when ALL Byron Katie does is teach her own Stories, and wants to change your Story to her Story. When she takes control of your "story" then guess what? She's the puppermaster, literally.

$$$$$$$$$$
Lastly, it seems that Byron Katie makes MOST of her money from direct "gifts" to her. Think about that for a minute, of all the possible millions going into her coffers in secret.
Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell are the New Age Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/06/2008 03:33AM by The Anticult.

Quote
corboy
I want to meet that cockroach.

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