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…”
Man, that’s a difficult example to use, least of all for someone who hasn’t any teaching on that kind of arising. It’s also the kind of shocking example that would be good for that final leap from the flagpole.
I wouldn’t call the act of throwing the baby, ‘God’. Isn’t that an act of discriminating mind, of the very labelling that leads to good and evil?
That’s probably the shock that most people would find objectionable, and a very powerful ‘Katsu!’
The world, the holocaust, as concepts, doesn’t mean they aren’t/weren’t real. But it’s true that our conceiving of them gets in the way, and this instantly arising chain of discrimination and attachment is what we mistake as reality.
I recognize that I am not separate from the grass, but still, every step is suffering, and you can’t be attached to it.
Yes, a difficult example! Katie wasn’t thinking about teaching at that time, just talking from her experience. Definitely not a good way to teach the concept!
For her, and I’ve critiqued this in other posts, “God” is everything, including the discriminating mind — there’s nothing left out of the concept of God. This reduces “God” to a synonym for “reality” — atheism couched in theistic language to make it more palatable!
Joe,
I wrote my own long, meandering essay on this subject–several times. Well, nit this subject exactly.
I wrote a long essay about constructing a religion wherein we would worship the human being, because as I saw it, the Christain, Hebrew, and Muslim faiths all see humanity as sinful, thus devaluing human beings. I guess you will cite examples of how these faiths actually herlad humnity as the children of God, and teach compassio, love, and kindness. But I would add, ‘not until after saying we are born of original sin, are unworthy until we repent, and are good and bad.
Not to mention, these omnipotent-god-based faiths are founded on The Geroge Carlin Principle, which from our discussions at Sarbuck’s you know means, “There’s an INVISIBLE MAN…in the SKY! And he WATCHES EVERYthing you DO! And if you DON’T do what he SAYS, he’s got a SPECIAL place reserved for you with FIRE AND ANGUISH AND PAIN and SUFFERING where you’ll be TORTURED for ETRENITY…BUT HE LOVES YOU!” This sets up the “do what I want or I will kill you paradigm,” in human interactions, I believe. it is NOT compassionate. It is fear-based faith.
To me, the good and bad thing in these faiths which causes the divisivness of mind and society; the labeling of good people and bad, and the idea of sin. And this is why we have war. Violence, ofr bad people is in the Bible, The Quran, and The Talmud.
If human beings were seen as the divine consciousness and thus cradles of the universe (ince it all exists through our senses as percieved phenomena on which we alone can comment, reflect, and create and love from) people couldn’t kill, execute, wage war, etcetera.
A Religion of Humanism Divine would enshrine humanity, while storing–not killing–God, in the mind of man.
Sorry about all the retarded typing in the post I just left. It is late, and I am tired.
I see the point of your post in that by practicing non-attachment while others amplify US vs THEM and fornicate with abandon that eventually, and sooner rather than later the equanimity will be lost because of the restructuring of world societies based on an extrapolation of those parameters.
I think it would be very difficult to argue that human life has any special significance at all. It comes together and falls apart according to thermodynamic rules just like every single other particle in the universe. It is significant that a certain level of complexity was able to be achieved such that we have the ability to think about our place in the universe. however what is more important than that are the basic principles which bring those conditions together. Those conditions simply are and are not good or evil.
This view does us little good in the short term though. Emotions have been evolutionarily selected for and conserved and are therefore significant. A tribe (or animal pack or even plants…there is this amazing time-lapsed video showing a plant seek out and strangle a neighboring plant) that goes out of its way to protect its members (love) and is remorseless in the destruction of the neighboring tribes (hate) is going to have more offspring and therefore have more to say in future evolution. Nothing makes sense except in light of evolution.
But there is no goal to this. It arises simply because it can and only lasts as long as conditions let it. So I think sure go ahead and change the things you can because the sample-space you are dealing with is so narrow in time and place that it’s easy for things to appear linear (your conditions can go from bad to good, you can improve, get “better” etc)…and for all practical purposes in a human life they are. But in so doing don’t try to extrapolate out that very limited set and try to prove things on an absolute level.
This brings up another important question though. When are you and Insook going to have some kiddos?!
Back to cramming for biochemistry test Monday…ugg,
oshj
Hi Carl –
I think the original sin and other doctrines are meant to explain how ridiculously screwed-up we are as a species — the fact that we have a gaping existential hole in us which we spend our lives trying to fill and yet never succeed. In Buddhism this is explained via ignorance of what-is (see 4 Noble Truths) and the monotheistic religions of course explain it by claiming it’s our disobedience to God which creates all the problems.
“If human beings were seen as the divine consciousness and thus cradles of the universe (ince it all exists through our senses as percieved phenomena on which we alone can comment, reflect, and create and love from) people couldn’t kill, execute, wage war, etcetera.”
Sounds like Hinduism! But I think people will always find reasons to kill.
Thanks for commenting!
Hi Josh,
Thoughtful comment!
“I think it would be very difficult to argue that human life has any special significance at all. It comes together and falls apart according to thermodynamic rules just like every single other particle in the universe.”
Yes, this is the problem. By viewing ourselves as nothing special, we’re dooming ourselves, I think. There’s a definite evolutionary advantage to viewing ourselves as special and with meaning. This is why I believe Islam may triumph over our atheistic, humanist culture in the west.
The argument about human life having significance or not is packed with presuppositions either way. “It has no significance” — that information isn’t in the data — it’s extrapolated. There very well could be a God who made the universe with random particles coming together, but perhaps he put a little secret spice in the homo-sapiens? Science simply cannot get at this question, so it’s wise to be careful not to conclude too hastily.
“We have special meaning.” Well, it seems that way through our subjective experience.
Whatever conclusion is made is made on certain assumptions — IOW, faith is required to leap to either conclusion.
I’m concerned about a society without any absolute foundations for ethics and that views itself as essentially meaningless.
And yet, there’s no real good evidence for the alternative!
Nice to hear from you. Study hard.
Hey Joe,
I had to check back in today to see if you had read my comment! I think you are mixing two different things when you talk about underlying thermodynamic principles and the evolutionary advantage to feeling “special.”
I might argue that things are “special” simply because they feel that way. And that feeling, although clearly resultant of many conditions coming together and therefore nothing “essential” is itself is actually a “fact,” a true statement because it exists. So in this way everything simultaneously is “true” in that it exists and “not true” in that it is composite.
In a much subtler and nerdier way the same argument goes on between biologists and physicists. physicists argue that chemistry is a subset of physics and biochemistry a subset of chemistry and molecular biology a subset of biochemistry and genetics a subset of molecular biology therefore studying genetics is not really “science” but simply empirically watching things and making up stories which can’t ever be rigorously tested (yet). Where biologists will argue that they study life as we experience it and learn things about the nature of the universe through the complex networks that comprise individual organisms as well as communities of organisms that COULDN’T be learned or even anticipated studying individual atoms.
In the same way there is something true in ethics and philosophies that wouldn’t be anticipated just knowing thermodynamic principles. The fact of the matter is that we live our lives closer to philosophies and ethics than the logical constructs put forth by Katie. Maybe like a strong spice a little of her formalism is good to take the edge off attachment but too much not only makes us feel empty, it’s totally wrong because it ignores the “facts” that appear in our hearts. I guess Buddha got it right when he stressed the need for BOTH wisdom and compassion.
please e-mail me yr phone # again or call me! i am slowly recreating my contacts list after losing my phone.
bestios,
josh