Do you know what is even more insane than Byron Katie.

People who believe in free will and at the same time hold the Calvinist ie current born again doctrine of pre-destination. In other words, they believe that God has already determined the outcome of their life, but have free will to change it. Now that's insane.

Or how about the classic Campus Crusade for Christ line from the four spiritual laws, "God has a wonderful plan for your life" However, if you don't accept the infinite love of Jesus, you will burn in hell for eternity. Ahh, that's good logic.

Insane. All the Evangelicals who helped put George Bush into office. The most Pro war President in our history. Jesus did say, "blessed are the peacemakers", yet Christians voted for war and death.

Yeah, insane. Look up insanity in the dictionary and you will see a picture of the 21st century American Church.

golder6716:

It seems like your only purpose here is to defend Byron Katie and Tolle.

Do you know what is even more insane than Byron Katie.

People who believe in free will and at the same time hold the Calvinist ie current born again doctrine of pre-destination. In other words, they believe that God has already determined the outcome of their life, but have free will to change it. Now that's insane.

Or how about the classic Campus Crusade for Christ line from the four spiritual laws, "God has a wonderful plan for your life" However, if you don't accept the infinite love of Jesus, you will burn in hell for eternity. Ahh, that's good logic.

Insane. All the Evangelicals who helped put George Bush into office. The most Pro war President in our history. Jesus did say, "blessed are the peacemakers", yet Christians voted for war and death.

Yeah, insane. Look up insanity in the dictionary and you will see a picture of the 21st century American Church.


This may be true, Golfer, I'm not arguing with you here. But if you can recognize faulty logic in these examples, how come you can't see it in Byron Katie?

Whatever happened to her may have been real and valid for her. If she was really crazy and then had some kind of great shift in her being . . . okay. I don't know for sure. But what she is preaching now is a little bit of old truth wrapped up in a big old ham sandwich of madness, and for some reason people keep eating it.

Her reversal of reality can work, sometimes, within a very limited set of circumstances. When you realize you're telling yourself negative things for no real reason, and if you turn it around and tell yourself something positive you feel better and can function better. Okay.

But I think 90% of the time, reversing reality is just creating some bizarre illusion that doesn't work. The woman who was afraid of war had a damn good, logical, cogent reason for it. To reverse reality was meaningless and did nothing but cause the woman to blame herself for being "negative" -- thereby compiling guilt and confusion on top of her existing fears.

It made so little logical sense that Katie had to resort to telling the woman to be like a bunch of cut flowers! With no mind, no thoughts, no reality.

This isn't self-help. This is negation of self. It isn't possible, nor is it desirable.

To reverse reality and tell yourself that your father didn't abuse you, you abused your father, is far beyond sophistry, far beyond irresponsibility. It serves no purpose but to perplex people into a state of cognitive dissonance that temporarily overrides their original pain and suffering. Long enough for them to nod, bewildered, into the cameras while Katie smiles triumphantly and the audience claps.

It's amazing to me that people can fall for this.

I'm fascinated by some of the angry, ranting-type responses to the variety of teachers out there. Some of these teachers are extraordinary--Byron Katie for example--and I mean that in a positive way. I have tried several forms of therapy, including stuff focusing on PTSD--nothing comes close to Katie's work.


But what I really want to say is that those angry voices here are giving themselves away--they are clearly in a state of reaction, and that is not generally a useful or trustworthy place. A common thread in many of them is the reliance on 'i'm being logical and rational'. What form of logic and rationality are you using? Aristotelian logic? Socratic dialectics? Critical rationalism? Informal logic? Pragma-dialectics? Or are you just saying, whatever seems right to you, that's rational? Your own personal rationality. That should give you pause. How do you know you are being rational, and not just rationalizing? What happens when you encounter someone else who also thinks they are rational, but disagree with you? Turn up the volume? Sprinkle your posts with name-calling?

What I hear in these angry, reactive voices--and I feel empathy for them on this--is that they don't appear to have developed protective psychological boundaries--those healthy, but permeable, boundaries that we all need to be in the world populated by others--whether it's in interactions our wife, our family, our religious leaders, churches, politicians, or even the books we read. When we interact with others, with what's outside us, we need to be able to take some of it in, enough to make sense of it, to give it our attention. Not all of it at once. But also, in acting to protect ourselves by taking in a little at a time, we can't go overboard and completely block it off--that would be a dangerous wall we would hide behind, and never learn anything. Yet nor can we just drop the boundary and allow everything in. Both of these--being walled off, and being boundaryless--are what I hear in some of the above posts on BK.

A real sign of being boundaryless--having no permeable but protective boundary--is exaggerating what these teachers are saying. By the way, this is called a straw man fallacy--an informal logical fallacy, identified by Aristotle (or was he a flake too?). It means distorting people's ideas in order to make them easy to attack. When byron katie asks, 'are you an abuser--can you find it'? People without boundaries might say "Byron Katie says I'm an abuser, I caused the abuse." In fact, she didn't. She asked you if you were--she asked you to ask yourself. This is quite different--but without protective boundaries, you have to protect yourself from this whole discussion, because you can't handle the whole thing at once, and all its implications for who you are in the world. With a protective, permeable boundary, you could take in a little at a time. You could ask yourself her four questions, one a time. You could handle what comes up in you in response.

For example, someone, whether it's BK or my friend, suggests to me that despite abuse I suffered, I was also an abuser. If I have no boundaries, this will hurt, I will take it literally, I will get extremely angry, I will feel as if it is true and yet have no way to counter the bitterness of it. It's way too much at once. I will have no choice but to react against it.

If I have too strong a boundary, I am walled-off, and I will silently laugh at the person saying it, if I even bother to process the words. But chances are, I won't even bother to post on a site like this. Nothing really touches me, nothing can change me, it doesn't matter, I'm protected from you idiots.

If I modulate between both of these, I will go from being bitter and cold and bored to being angry and vengeful, and the swing between the two will hurt alot, adding it s unpredictability.

The only truly sane place to be is right in the middle, with a permeable boundary, under my control. Huh, I ask myself; In what way have I been an abuser? And I start to think of the ways. And I experience a different perspective, and I begin to realize--slowly--that a reliable way to explore and change is to ask myself, when am I doing what I accuse others of doing? How is the opposite of what I think just as true, or maybe truer?

Don't be boundaryless and freak out about this advice. Just put it on the table, and think about it, gently. As you build up your boundary, or create some airholes in the one you have built, you want to give yourself the benefit of the doubt. You do have something to say--but you need to acknowledge what's out there too as often reasonable, even if it's 'weird' You need to first of all, try to understand what others are saying, not what your reactions are making of it.

My understanding is that a board like this ought to help people negotiate the world, and in the world there are people who will abuse your trust. Focus there. It makes little sense to be attacking people and distorting their messages when these messages are simply asking you to try their ideas on for size. That's the mental immune system freaking out, creating an allergy to what it thinks is crazy. What's crazy are without the protective boundaries to make sense of things. Let's use this board to develop those. When we are in reaction, we won't be able to do the work, every little thing will seem like a threat. Acting that way is what's crazy.

ralpher:

First and last warning.

Remember, personal attacks are against the rules.

rr moderator:

Please explain the following:

A) your failure to admonish others, who are engaging in personal attacks;

B) what specifically you mean by 'personal attack' in relation to this message. Perhaps it's obvious to you (lots of things seem obvious to some of the posters on this board--perhaps it's your style?).

R

ralpher:

I will watch for others personally attacking you, but be honest, you are not here for a discussion, rather just to defend Katie.

FYI--Bashing people that feel they were damaged by Katie by offering your amateur psychoanalysis making them somehow responsible for their own injury is a type of personal attack.

BTW--Substituting Katie for legitimate professional counseling and therapy is your choice to make, but a more safe approach generally accepted approach for the treatment of personal psychological or emotional problems would be seeking help from a certified, credentialed therapist/doctor.

In most states such treatment from helping professionals is overseen by boards, professional licensing etc.

Katie has no similar accountability. So if her self-styled therapy flops and damage is done, the participant has no immediate recourse through such layers of accountability.

Ralpher:
You write:

For example, someone, whether it's BK or my friend, suggests to me that despite abuse I suffered, I was also an abuser. If I have no boundaries, this will hurt, I will take it literally, I will get extremely angry, I will feel as if it is true and yet have no way to counter the bitterness of it. It's way too much at once. I will have no choice but to react against it.


Why would you feel that this is true? Are you an abuser? My example was a person who was abused by their father. Are you guilty of child abuse? Have you molested a child or hit your wife? I am not an abuser, and if someone suggested it to me, I would not think it was true or get extremely angry. If you are an abuser, then yes, you would have reason to react to this question.


You write:
But what I really want to say is that those angry voices here are giving themselves away--they are clearly in a state of reaction, and that is not generally a useful or trustworthy place. A common thread in many of them is the reliance on 'i'm being logical and rational'. What form of logic and rationality are you using? Aristotelian logic? Socratic dialectics? Critical rationalism? Informal logic? Pragma-dialectics? Or are you just saying, whatever seems right to you, that's rational? Your own personal rationality. That should give you pause. How do you know you are being rational, and not just rationalizing? What happens when you encounter someone else who also thinks they are rational, but disagree with you? Turn up the volume? Sprinkle your posts with name-calling?

Let me ask you something. Did you watch the Israeli YouTube link I posted of Byron Katie? If so, did you notice when Bryon Katie told the Israeli woman the the vase of cut flowers on the table was not afraid of war?

Katie used this example to infer that the woman should in some way be like a vase of cut flowers, without thought, without rationality, without concept of past or future, without sense of danger. Then she wouldn't have to feel her fear.

Can you tell me what mode of logic I should use to inform myself whether this makes rational sense? Socratic dialectics? Critical rationalism? Informal logic? Pragma-dialectics?

The issue isn't whether we should ask ourselves questions, or question our own beliefs, motives, patterning, etc.

The problem with Byron Katie is that she supports the New Age perspective that people should live in some altered state of consciousness (called grace, I believe) that is without all of the "negative" states that Katie herself could not handle, and therefore ended up in a mental institution.

This is not a healthy perspective for the average person.

The woman in Israel was afraid of war for a very solid and logical reason. She also clearly wasn't being incapacitated by it, she was out and about, sitting up on this stage. What she needed was community based therapy, support, and maybe even to join a pro-peace organization and work to make change for the better within her own country. Perhaps she could volunteer at a hospital for wounded soldiers or children, to feel she was contributing positively during a dark time.

But Katie wanted to promote the delusion that this woman could exist in some disconnected perpetual NOW where she doesn't have to remember the fears of the past, or think logically or pro-actively about the future. This isn't possible. It IS NOT POSSIBLE. Some stress-reduction therapies and techniques could help this woman deal with the moments of fear that may overtake her. But beyond that, she's living in a war zone, and she's in danger, and she damn well knows it. And you know what? That's okay. It's reality.

Katie wants to show rapid "transformation" and "conversion" up on the stage. Just like Landmark she needs people to "get it" so the audience can cheer. I don't believe for a moment that the woman on stage, after being pressured to "get it" actually went home and felt she "got" a damn thing. Except manipulated so Katie could sell more books. And embarrassed for taking part in a New Age swindle.

Thanks for being open enough to ask a question--if you really mean it as a question. I'm going to treat it as one.

What kind of logic is necessary? Well, I think that the most important logical, rational tool is the one tries to find the meanings that are intended by the speaker. Perhaps the most important such tool is sometimes called the principle of charity: you attribute a meaning to the person you are arguing with that is the most reasonable possible, given the evidence. So to say what Katie wanted to do in terms of promoting the delusion, etc., is a non-starter; she obviously would never agree with that wording, so can it really be what she is saying?

Another important rational tool is a preference for evidence.

We don't know what she wanted to do in any literal sense--we can observe the experience as a conversation. Katie asked some questions, and the woman answered them.

(after having written this, I'm realizing there are a number of videos on you tube in Israel, and I may be writing about a different one than the one you saw?)

What I see on that video is a woman who is interested in exploring her thoughts about war. I see another woman who is interested in guiding her.

I see nothing to prevent the Israeli woman from getting up and leaving the stage. I think it's reasonable to assume she is staying there of her own free will.

So why don't we just assume that the woman--both women--want to be there? So far, are we on the same page?

What good does it do to guess that later the woman would be embarrassed? There's no evidence.

A phobia is an irrational fear. It is not rational to be phobic of buses in Israel. It is rational to be phobic of the streets of Baghdad, if you are a non-arab, because you will be abducted and killed. It is rational to be afraid of walking around Gaza if you are an Israeli. But in Israel, you are more likely to die crossing the street (these days, and that video was recent) than in an explosion on a bus.

Nonetheless, the woman is experiencing an irrational fear. Katie does with her what a trained psychotherapist would do, using slightly different techniques --she does mental desensitization. She asks the woman to ask herself if she is afraid of something real or not. She asks her to imagine life without her fear. She asks her to turn the fear around. In the end, the woman may be a step closer to a more rational relationship to buses. Theories of desensitization would support everything that she did.

That's what I saw. And I believe I'm being rational about it, partly because I'm being charitable to her views.

Katie did not, for example, recommend that the woman go to Gaza and play hopscotch while singing in Hebrew.