Judgments

Moralistic judgments are usually the result of some thwarted expectation or frustration we feel inside of ourselves. We have certain ideas we hold internally about how people should be or should act and when they do not do what we want or expect we judge them for it. Judgments, like rationalizations are centred on the intellectual level of awareness. To judge is to make a comparison. When we judge we are usually unconsciously putting people down so we ourselves begin to look a little better in our own eyes. Judgments that separate one being from another are one sided meaning one person gets put down but what is not consciously seen is that another gets put up. That is the nature of comparisons. We put things on a scale and one side goes up and the other down. You cannot do one without the other.

The world of judgment is full of blame, insults, generalizations, criticism, and in the world of medicine and psychology, diagnosis. A great part of the mindset of the ego is built around ideas of wrongness and rightness. When we judge another we are making ourselves right and they, of course, wrong. Other people put themselves down, making themselves wrong in front of other people, who they judge up onto high pedestals. Our world is so trapped on this level that people would hardly know what to do with themselves if they were not mentally busy with judging who is good, bad, enlightened, normal, abnormal, smart, stupid, slow etc.

And yet judgments do have another side. People throw around the word judgment as if it were a ‘bad’ thing thus judging judgments. The intellect, with its capacity to judge and weigh and analyse things can be and is used in ways that alienate people from each other. But it would be unreasonable to live without judging anything at all. We all make judgments every day, whether regarding small things, like when to change lanes on a highway, or judging whether you want to continue a relationship with someone. Our intellects, with their penetrating ability to see through inconsistencies, are essential organs of discrimination. Another word for judgment is perception, we need to perceive what to do, and discriminate between pure and impure, best and not so best. Good and bad get into moral judgment of the kind that are not usually productive. Same with general ideas of right and wrong. What is right for one person often is very wrong for another. What seems wrong are often right things in disguise.

Discrimination is a really necessary power of consciousness and with it we can look clearly into the mirror of life and see and hear what we need to. Many of our painful life situations are there for us to lean to discriminate what we  are doing wrong with our consciousness so we can learn to do things right. When we know what errors we made, we learn not to make the same ones over and over again. The heart will use the intellect with its penetrating discriminative powers but knows how to balance the intellect with the intuition and feeling centre of the heart. The heart remains anchored in the oneness. It feels with others as opposed to separating. Even when having to make judgments, a heart-centered person will seek to share these perceptions with humility and with empathy and feeling.

We said clearly that it is best not to judge anger. And we have also said that we judge and we judge and we never stop judging so it is best not to judge judgment either. But it is clearly necessary to learn humility before our judgments and realize what we are doing with our consciousness. When we make judgments in our relationships with others it is better to share them. It is much better to share our perceptions then to hide them. The problem with judgments are not the judgments themselves but in what we do with them. If we share them we make ourselves vulnerable and this draws us closer to the heart. If we share them we are moving against the grain of the intellectual mind, which is making divisions and separations. We are in fact moving into the heart’s sense of oneness and caring. We are also moving into the courage of the heart for it takes courage to share our judgments with humility, for we might get caught with our pants down. Our judgments can be just that, only judgments not true discrimination of reality. That’s why when we share them we will find out if they held truth or whether they were just a projection of our own frustrated needs and values.

If we need to communicate a judgment we make it clear that we have a problem also, our sharing will not come off as a moralistic put down that makes the listener cringe and separate. When we share our judgments it is safer and more life serving if we come from the “we” paradigm. Its ok for someone to be sick or to think someone is sick if we realize in thinking and saying that that we all have both sick and healthy selves. The key to sharing our judgments in a vulnerable way is to point the finger of perception also at us.