Thank you Ralph!
“I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in novels. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Byron Katie teaches that we do not love actual people, but rather the internal story, image, or projection we create about them. When we feel love, we are actually experiencing our own thoughts and projections, which often turn into suffering when the person behaves differently than our “story” of them.
Key aspects of this concept:
- Projection: We hold stories about people—how they should be, behave, or feel—and we love these mental projections, not the actual, changing person.
- The “Story” as Suffering: When reality deviates from our story, we suffer. If we love our partner, we are often just telling a story of how wonderful they are; if they behave differently, our story changes to “they are bad,” and we feel pain.
- It’s Not Personal: Someone else’s story about you has nothing to do with you, but with their own thoughts and projections.
Conclusion: We don’t love people, we love our story about them; we don’t not love people, we love our story about them, and in that “story,” we are in love with our own projections.
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