Human beings are no more important than grass. This is Byron Katie’s view, as expressed in her out-of-print book Losing the Moon. In what has become somewhat of a famous passage, at least on the internet, BK argues that a nazi throwing a baby into the fire is God and it’s not evil, because there is no evil, there’s only “unexamined concepts”. Later on in the conversation, her and her disciples are discussing some more about the baby-throwing Nazi who incidentally had a family. He’d come home after murdering the Jews, play with his child, and crank up the Beethoven. It’s in this context which Katie asks (My comments are in red)
BK: Do you step on the grass? You step on the grass, and you move around the flower not to disturb it. Same. (It’s the same as the Nazi caring about his family but killing the Jews.)
Friend: I don’t get it. Yet. (And you want to get it?! Might be time to have your head examined.)
BK: The (Nazi’s) family is the flower. The grass are the Jews. How many times a day have you done it? If you bend down and start getting intimate with the grass, like if you’re out for a couple of weeks — the grass becomes your whole reality, your family… the mind starts attaching the whole Nazi good guy/bad guy thing onto the grass. And it will start its whole world there again with an inanimate object. Because it’s only the concepts that appear to live… (In other words, human beings, “life”, the world, the holocaust, etc. are all concepts. There’s no reality to these other than thought.)
Friend: You take the Jews away from the Nazi, he’s going to start persecuting one of his family. (Hmmm, don’t know how many Nazis went home and started chucking their family members into a gas oven…)
BK: Exactly. There’s nothing sacred — only the concept arising in the moment. That’s what we hold sacred, that’s what we worship, until we don’t.
For Katie, everything and everyone are nothing more than concepts. This is her “freedom”.
There never has been evil and there never will be. Evil is simply a story about what is not… Evil is the story of what you think nature should be and what goes on in it, and it keeps you in the illusion of fear and separation… It’s got to be very dramatic to keep it going, otherwise there’s only peace. Like who would you be without it? Peace. And grace. (This is true, no thinking, no anxiety, fear, etc. None of those bad things we don’t like to experience. However, I wonder if those bad feelings arise for a reason? By following Katie’s teachings, we’ll deconstruct the reasons until the feelings don’t arise anymore. I wonder if this is a “good” thing?)
I see her reasoning. Arguing with reality, no matter how atrocious, leads to suffering. When you argue with what is, you lose. The only sane thing to do is to accept it. Acceptance doesn’t mean inaction. It means acknowledging what is the case and not fighting with it. However, this teaching is hardly new. The famous serenity prayer says it even better:
Lord, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
In my last post, I pondered the consequences of not seeing anything as good or evil. Likewise, I wonder about the devaluation of human beings. Since we’ve killed God, and I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, we’ve also destroyed our sense of being special and unique. We’re just another carbon-based species among a billion others on the planet. Philosophies which are found in Buddhism, New Age thought, post-modernism, and scientism all reinforce this idea. The destruction of millions of potential human beings every year because they may create some inconveniences for a mother is one symptom of this devaluation; so are the declining birthrates throughout the industrialized nations. Here in Korea it’s only 1.6 — far below the 2.1 requirement in order to keep society stable.
Our friends, the Muslims, don’t have a problem with this. Their birthrates are soaring. We can look forward to mosque in every neighborhood of Europe within our lifetimes if events and projections stay on course.
My point in this somewhat meandering entry is that valuing people as no more important than grass, or pigs, or monkeys will have and is having massive social consequences. If you think philosophy is insignificant, you’re highly mistaken. It’s our underlying worldview — philosophy — which determines the actions we take. Views which have become popular in the past century all devalue the human being and there is a significant price to be paid for such change of mind.
A spiritual teaching which advocates dismantling all of your concepts because they cause you discomfort is dubious at best. That discomfort might be there for a reason! Perhaps it means it’s time to step up and doing something about the problem — or give it up — give it to God, as they used to say in the Baptist bible camp.
“Lord, grant me the serenity…”