Like I said the work can be extremely helpful in certain circumstances. But the credit is Ken Keyes’. He was the brilliant one who figured it out and she is violating his copywrites. She should cease immediately.

The work will not lead you to liberation/enlightenment. From some of the things she has done, it is clear Katie is not enlightened, and yes she gets angry…reportedly all the time.

Despite working her staff and facilatators to death with “the work” (I’m talking thousands and thousands of hours of doing the work) they are not like her, meaning, nobody has graduated. She is unique in her ability to put up a front. She makes her fascilitors do tons of work on themselves and go through a rigorous evaluation process where they are judged and criticised in public for wanting approval, for example. But she is never open for criticism. She says she is, but if you do you are shunned. And the facilitator’s license expires after only 3 years after which they have to go through the nightmare again. If she trusted her process, why would she require them to do so much work non-stop? But the very rich ones don’t have too. They are certified automatically according to reports.

She says she does all this stuff with the money, but a large percentage of all of that is run by volunteers. Nobody knows where the millions she takes in each year goes. No one knows. She refuses to dislose

For more info, google “Janaki Byron Katie”

That’s sometimes the case. However, if you take the claims of the monotheistic traditions seriously, then your comment is seen as belittling them. The perinneal philosophy that you and others see as the real truth is a dismissal of monotheistic religions. God is the Source and the Unknown… yes, right. But there is a personal God, and he came as Jesus.. or he sent the Quran… or whatever one believes.

I tend to believe that when people equate the end result of all spiritual paths, they don’t deeply understand the claims made by those paths and/pr they overestimate their ability to judge the final goals, i.e., union with God or nibbana, as being the same.

“Once a person has had a true nondual experience- differences in cultural expression become interesting, not threatening.” You have to know/assume you’ve had the epitome of nondual experiences and then you have to extrapolate that others have had the same experience.

IMO, this is not about being narrow-minded vs. being inclusive (which ends of being narrow-minded anyways) but rather about being humble when talking about states about which we know very little; it’s also about meeting the other side (Christian) where they are and taking their claims seriously, rather than dismissing them as cultural accretions.

I find the assertion of I AM and the concept of emptiness to be compatible and moreover, mutually reinforcing.

Emptiness means empty of intrinsic essence. The nondual sense of I AM is exactly that – it is the unmanifest Source.

Hmmmm – I am suspicious of anyone who states that the world’s great wisdom traditions are not compatible. They risk seeming to be defending their own “tribe” by belittling the insights of another.

Different perspectives and terminology- yes. But the same humainity stumbling across the same awesome mystery of our existence. Let’s look for the common wonder of the nondual experience, not the semantic differences as different cultures attempt to describe them.

Once a person has had a true nondual experience- differences in cultural expression become interesting, not threatening.

the only thing permanent is impermanence.

As for having it both ways, of course I can, and do, have it both ways, that is how reality functions. This is Mahayana Buddhism 101. The one and the many, emptiness and form, Time and No Time, ignorance and no end of ignorance. It is all right there in the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. Sink the gift of intellect into it for the next ten years, night and day, ask yourself, “what is This!?”

Go beyond thinking. There is a state beyond thinking. Taste it for yourself.

If you are looking for evidence, something you can cling to, you will miss it.

This moment is vast and limitless…

and one day, this particular form dies.

It is like a rabbit gnashing it’s teeth on a dragon’s scales.

The dragon is amused.

Does this moment include the State of Liberty in NY? If not, is it real? Or does it only arise and disappear depending on whether I observe it or not?

To answer your question: this moment excludes everything that my five senses cannot pick up. It excludes my mom shopping right now in Detroit and about a billion other happenings.

“One day, however, whether you choose to let go or not, this form is toast.”

According to your previous statement, there is no future, so there cannot be a future toasted form.

You can’t have it both ways — the Now is all there is, and then bring in the future and past when it’s convenient to make a point.

That’s why such notions as “There is nothing real other than this moment” are such sophmoric rubbish. Like the blind man saying “There is nothing but blackness.” It’s a completely unfounded statement, devoid of any evidence whatsoever. “This Now is all there is, there’s nothing outside of this experience” — of course not, that’s how our body-minds are designed.

There is nothing real other than this moment.

What does this moment include?

Can this moment possibly exclude anything? even your thoughts, arguments, feeling of superiority or inferiority, memories, views?

You can’t say anything about… and you can say as much as you desire.

When you know “It”, let “It” go. It is the only true path. Letting everything go.

Or not.

One day, however, whether you choose to let go or not, this form is toast.

“We’re dying of thirst, standing knee deep in water.”

or

“We spend the entire day searching for treasure, yet when we lay down to sleep, it’s just beneath our pillow.”

Also, let me add that everyone losing their sense of morality and thinking that Nazi’s throwing babies into burning fires is utter nonsense! Yes, people can get confused about things they learn and the essential message. The Bible is one such example — look how many twistings and turns there are from piece of writing!

You obviously don’t understand what Katie is trying to communicate. She is saying that all “good” and “bad” comes from one source – God. “Bad” things are going to happen, like all things are just going to happen. That is the nature of life. It is when we stay stuck on the evilness of Nazism that we are lost. When we focus on the burned babies and don’t move from these, are thoughts might as well burn too because they become useless. Katie advocates that when something is wrong you do take ACTION. She has never denounced action. She says that people have a choice to stay stuck in their “negative” thoughts, and that’s what causes us to lose life, this life, not just the “burned babies.”

If I stay stuck in the thought that my mom truly didn’t love me, then I fail to see anything that doesn’t support this. I’m also mired in this negative thinking so that I’m not truly present for other people in my life, and my own life. My mother may have neglected me, and not loved me in the way that I think someone should be loved. Katie points out that now it is MY job to love someone as I think it should be done and to stop living in a past that’s over. She advocates moving forward and being present. Even Wayne Dyer talks about being stuck in the past, like his analogy of when you drive a boat you don’t steer it or decide to go be focusing on the wake, the waves behind the boat.

In this moment it sounds like you just really don’t understand what Katie is saying. And that’s ok. We really don’t understand a lot of what other people say or what they are trying to express to us much of the time.

Katie has offered a gift, a way out of stuck and negative thinking. She also has a comparison of “The Work” to “The Secret”. The secret really is based in wishful thinking whileas the work is not. Katie IS compassionate. If you can’t see and hear the compassion in Katie you haven’t listened enough. I’m not advocating that you listen more. If you want to great, if you don’t want to, that’s great too. Some people get it and some don’t — and that’s ok.

If you expect a method to “cure” all your ills, then you are mistaken. You have to be the one to do the work, and different things work for different people at different times in their life.