Four of Swords — Spiritual Message of the Day
When you’re asleep at night, when you’re not dreaming, where is the world?” – Byron Katie (Who Would You Be Without Your Story?)
First of all, let’s not get too existential here. What Katie means is “where is your world?”
Katie tells us that our world begins with our thoughts about ourselves. (All the “I, I, I” “Me, me, me.” that constantly goes through our heads.) Everyone we know and all that we experience, it’s all incorporated into “our world” through our thoughts about how it affects us, through our distorted prism of taking everything personally.
For example, we don’t really see other people as they are. Instead, in our world they are just the story we tell ourselves about them, and those stories are our own personal invention. One result of this is that our generosity is conditional, our friendship is conditional, and our love is conditional. It’s all conditional on how it affects us and how we judge it to be. Also, our “story world” is a constant source of conflict and sadness in our lives.
Today’s card, the Four of Swords, urges us to release those stories so that we may find new and better ones. I know (from personal experience!) that this can be so much harder to do than it sounds. Luckily, though, if you want help doing this, Byron Katie’s book Who Would You Be Without Your Story? is dedicated to exactly that work. In brief, though, one thing you can do today is this: Whenever your mind starts telling you its story about someone else (“He’s so thoughtless.” “She’s so mean.”) stop for a moment and question that story. Ask yourself how true is it? Is there another way of seeing this person or this situation? Then from there, try to change that story in your mind, and thereby change your world.
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