Vlinden posts: After reading about Byron Katie on this board, I was interested to see her in action. Here is a link showing a session with an Israeli woman who tells Katie that she’s afraid of war.
I’ve never seen anything so insane in my life, outside of a mental institution. I’ve watched other videos and read parts of her writing, and now I am just stunned, once again, at what people will pay money to believe.
Katie’s reasoning is more deranged than anything put forth by Landmark Education, though there are basic parallels. She incorporates Landmark’s extreme (to the point of completely irrationality) existential you-create-everything and blame-the-victim philosophy, but then she essentially attempts to turn reality completely on its head with her reversal questions. For example, “My father abused me” becomes “I abused my father.” This doesn’t even begin to make rational sense, it’s like insisting you can wear your hat on your feet and walk just as easily, if not better.
My friends and I have been watching these videos with our jaws on the floor.
In this one, Katie is dealing with an Israeli woman essentially suffering from PTSD, who needs some basic therapy and human support and understanding. She’s afraid of war. Of course she’s afraid of war. This is perfectly normal and sane, given where she lives. In fact, it’s healthy and important. Her fears of war could lead her to take every kind of appropriate action.
But according to the New Age Self-Help snake-oil soul “savers,” no one need or should ever be afraid, ever be upset, ever be angry or feel guilt or shame or anything “negative.” By promoting this patently ridiculous concept, they create the illusion that people actually could walk around in a state of bliss all the time — and this they call a state of “grace” — by simply disconnecting from their egos, their rational selves, and their critical minds.
If they just did back-room lobotomies it would be so much easier — but they’d sell less books.
Landmark and other LGATs of course trade in this counterfeit psycho-babble, at the expense of people’s lost minds and souls, but Byron Katie seems to take it to a new level perhaps because she was, for many years, actually barking mad.
So we have a barking mad woman now telling people to just “reverse” their thinking until they can convince themselves maybe nothing is what they believed, maybe everything is ass-backward, maybe everything is just FINE if they only stop thinking rationally . . . and people are calling her a guru and “the real deal.”
She actually tells this poor woman that she shouldn’t worry about war, because the FLOWERS ON THE TABLE are not worrying about war.
That’s right. The flowers. They’re not worried. They have no brain. Be like the flowers.
What a sick, sorry situation we’re finding ourselves in today, people. We are devolving. We need to be rational in order to survive. It’s our critical minds and rational thinking and respect for pain, fear and danger that allowed us to rise up out of the primordial swamps, harness fire, build cities, create laws, art and our greatest ideas. These New Age lunatics will have us drooling like the mental patients they once were, incapable of correct action because we no longer trust our most important faculties.
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.
Here is a review of her book from Amazon:
If no stars were available, I’d choose that. This self-help book is aimed primarily at helping the author. I found it preposterous, and downright dangerous. I don’t think this woman has any credentials; rather, she seems to tout her qualifying experience as the fact that she had a nervous breakdown when she was 43 years old. Katie’s “help” is presented as a series of questions that branch from her initial query of “Is it [the situation, feeling, etc.] true?” Nothing intended to help people break out of lifelong conditioning works as fast as Katie would have one believe. Especially annoying parts of the book are the intro by her husband (who has no more credentials than his wife) where he belabors Katie’s lecturing on the ideas in her book for free (the book certainly is not free; thank goodness I borrowed it from a library), the many times Katie showcases her approach in a cult-like way as “The Work,” Katie pretending to be an objective participant when she is clearly steering people toward her sometimes-dangerous ideas, and Katie using endearments that just seem patronizing with her interview subjects in the dialogue transcripts (e.g., “Nice Work, honey”). I was muddling through the book and wondering when I’d get to something helpful when I read her exchange with a woman who was repeatedly raped as a child (around age 8 or 9) by her stepfather. Then the author, through a series of questions, ended up turning the blame for the rapes around on the victim, culminating in the idea that rape was the woman’s way of receiving love. All this was done in front of an audience. Brainwashing and abuse in the guise of therapy. Ghastly.
