The world is your perception of it. Inside and outside always match—they are reflections of each other. The world is the mirror image of your mind. If you experience chaos and confusion inside, your external world has to reflect that. You have to see what you believe, because you are the confused thinker looking out and seeing yourself. You are the interpreter of everything, and if you’re chaotic, what you hear and see has to be chaos. Even if Jesus, even if the Buddha, were standing in front of you, you would hear confused words, because confusion would be the listener. You would hear only what you thought he was saying, and you’d start arguing with him the first time your story was threatened.
As for my being your projection, how else could I be here? It’s not as though I had a choice. I am the story of who you think I am, not who I really am. You see me as old, young, beautiful, ugly, honest, deceitful, caring, uncaring. I am, for you, your uninvestigated story, your own hidden secret, your myth. I am yourself.
I understand that who you think I am is true for you. I was innocent also, but only for forty-three years, until the moment when I woke up to the way things really are. “It’s a tree. It’s a table. It’s a chair.” Is it true? Have you stopped to ask yourself? Have you ever become still and listened as you asked you? Who told you it was a tree? Who was the original authority? How did they know? My entire life, my entire identity, had been built on the trust and uninquiring innocence of a child. Are you this kind of child? Through this Work, your toys and fairy tales are laid aside as you begin to read the book of true knowledge, the book of yourself.
People tell me, “But Katie, your happiness is all a projection,” and I say, “Yes, and isn’t it beautiful? I love living this happy dream. I’m having a wonderful time!” If you lived in heaven, would you want it to end? It doesn’t end. It can’t. That is what’s true for me, until it’s not. If it should change, I always have inquiry. I answer the questions, the truth is realized within me, and the doing meets the undone, the something meets the nothing. In the balance of the two halves, I am free.
(Byron Katie)
