just eat the cake

Byron Katie:  A Thousand Names for Joy

from chapter 26:

Who would you be in people’s presence without, for example, the story that anyone should care about you, ever?  You would be love itself.  When you believe the myth that people should care, you’re too needy to care about people or about yourself.  The experience of love can’t come from anyone else; it can come only from inside you.

I was once walking in the desert with a man who began to have a stroke.  We sat down, and he said, “Oh my God, I’m dying.  DO something!”  He was talking through one side of his mouth because the other side had become paralyzed.  What I did was just sit there beside him, loving him, looking into his eyes, knowing that we were miles from a phone or car.  He said, “You don’t even care, do you?”  I said, “No.”  And through his tears, he started to laugh, and I did, too.  And eventually his faculties returned; the stroke had come to pass, not to stay.  This is the power of love.  I wouldn’t leave him for a caring.[…]

If you move into situations of loss in a spirit of surrender to what is, all you experience is a profound sweetness and an excitement about what can come out of the apparent loss.  And once you question the mind, once the stressful story is seen for what it is, there’s nothing you can do to make it hurt.  You see the worst loss you’ve experienced is the greatest gift you can have.  When the story arises again – “She shouldn’t have died” or “He shouldn’t have left” – it’s experienced with a little humor, a little joy.  Life is joy, and if you understand the illusion arising, you understand that it’s you arising, as joy.

What does compassion look like?  At a funeral, just eat the cake!  You don’t have to know what to do.  It’s revealed to you. 

(the absurdity of the play of this life seems conveyed in this visual/time/music juxtaposition – expletive warning)

Tags: Attachment, Awakening, Blog, Byron Katie, detachment, identity, Living in the Moment, Spirituality, suffering