If you want to know me, look inside your heart.

The mind open to being questioned is the only mind that can take this journey. The open mind is fearless in its quest to live without suffering. Eventually inquiry is easy to put into practice, because you learn to respect where your answers come from and the freedom they bring. And eventually the mind understands that it has found its desired path, the path leading home, back to its very own self, its ultimate resting place.

When the questions are asked and the answers are allowed to surface, the mind is often shocked at itself. It had no idea that such insights lived within it. And these answers allow deeper, more hidden answers to surface, to be seen and understood by the unknowing, inquiring polarity of mind. As mind comes to know its own nature, it begins to trust the wisdom that it is. This is its education, the end of all its suffering, delusion, fear, and mistaken identity. Inquiry changes the world faster than you can imagine. I was in a hurry. Now I walk as the questions, and I live as the answers. Because my intention was to be open, no matter what the consequences, I can’t help but live in the world I call heaven. I even love my dentist.

At first, inquiry may seem more than you can handle; you may feel as if it is cutting your heart open without anesthesia. Everything you wanted to keep hidden comes to the surface, you feel all the repercussions of it, and you keep undergoing the death of who you thought you were. This may double you up; you may vomit or have temporary paralysis, for hours even. You are still identifying as a you, and you begin to see that you yourself are all the people you found unkind, brutal, stupid, crazy, greedy, despicable, and this is so painful that sometimes you don’t think you can bear it. As it keeps inquiring, the mind continues to understand that it is its only enemy and that the world is entirely its projection, that it is alone, that there is no other, and that this is absolute. The turnarounds always keep it grounded with the invitation of being human. This balance sustains it between nothing and something, gives it the solid ground of a world, and allows trust to grow as you continue, sweetly and surely, to dissolve what is left.

At some point, because it has become completely rooted in itself, identity is lost as anything but mind. It cannot be anything other than that again. It is dead to anything else. There can be grief, the experience of terrible loss, and loneliness, when mind loses its identification as human, and at this point it may begin to find other identities, terrifying identities: a bird when you don’t know how to fly, a rock when you’re in a hurry, and you can only sit there forever, knowing that eventually you’ll turn to dust, and until then you’re there, with no arms, no legs, merely a rock. But with the power of inquiry, you love that you’re that, you don’t desire any other identity, and then you realize that you can’t have even that, there’s no identification that you can live as, only mind. And as mind, you discover that every thought is gone, and only a thought that says it existed is left as its proof, and that’s gone, too, and in this, all thought is gone, everything is already gone—everything.

Inquiry continues to kill what you think you are, until you discover something else. The questioned mind is pure wisdom, and it can heal the whole world. As it heals, the world heals. I came to see that I couldn’t live until I died. And what lives, thank God, is not the me I thought I was. There is nothing I am that is not beautiful. I appear as all things, the old and the new, the beginning and the end. I’m everything. I’m you.

You can go anywhere, and where you are in the moment shows this to be true. You are anywhere. What would this place be without a name? Magical, sacred, miraculous. How did you get here? Why would you need a destination? It only turns out to be this or that anyway, what you planned or what you didn’t plan. I understand that you love when your plan matches reality, and in all of that, here you are now, as the future you always wondered about, on the street, checking out the garbage bin for any delight, noticing that it’s all beyond what you really need, beyond what you already have in this moment, from your lavish home, as you sit at your dining room table, looking at the excess, everything that you don’t need, depriving yourself in your mind of what is already so full within you in this moment now. Without your story, aren’t you fine? Isn’t life’s own destination more wondrous than imagination could dictate?

What is adversity? It’s simply when your story doesn’t match reality. Suppose the story is “I am the man who will live out his life with two arms; the knife will be in my right hand and the fork in my left,” and in reality my right arm is gone. All of a sudden, I wake up, it’s gone, and I didn’t even get to say good-bye—it’s in a plastic bag in the trash bin in the backyard. Now I am the man with a fork in the right hand, and the right hand turns out to be my left. So reality isn’t being matched by my story, the identity I hold so dear. It has its own story to be lived out. I can be the man who loves learning what is new, the man who can’t cut the steak, and I can love the vegetarian I notice I’m becoming. I am always what I believe myself to be, until I question my thoughts and come to understand that reality is what I am, and that it is always kinder than the identity I’m trying to hold on to.

Grace means understanding that where you are is where you always wanted to be. It means losing that arm and noticing what remains, in full appreciation and gratitude, and seeing at the same time how much better off your life is without the arm, and all the benefits that this new way brings.

It’s the realization that where you are and what you are and what everything is and how it is, in every moment, is your heart’s desire, fulfilled beyond what you ever could have imagined.

This is an excerpt from the best selling book; “A Thousand Names For Joy: Living In Harmony with the Way Things Are”, by Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell