Judging and Judgments: It’s an Amazing World!
Judging is such a big part of our human experience. By making judgments - even ones as simple as “Isn’t this weather terrible?” - we have a style of communicating, even bonding, meaningfully with others. Also, in judging ourselves and others, we can feel like “regular folk,” “one of the crowd” of the human family. In short, we belong.
Yet, the great Sufi mystic Rumi gave us these words: “There’s a field beyond right and wrong. I’ll meet you there.” This wise insight shows us that judging can easily lock us into small perceptions, limitation, conflict and pain.
So, let’s look at life’s learned tendency to judge through the wise eyes of the soul. The soul gives us three wise insights about this phenomenon called judgment:
➢ There is no implicit judgment in our dualistic human experience
➢ It’s only our value judgments about this dualistic experience that make it look good or bad, right or wrong
➢ We have, built into our human nature, a remarkable capacity to remember how to be in our world without this learned value judgment.
These insights invite us to live soulfully, simply and peacefully, without judgment’s learned trappings and beyond our treasured values’ limitations. To help us, these thoughts are worth sitting with:
➢ A great place to start is at home—to stop judging ourselves
➢ Ask yourself how ready you are to take the leap beyond your own values and value system
➢ For ultimate freedom, you might want to consider letting go of positive judgments as well as negative ones.
We ended the talk with a fourfold personal experience:
➢ Open yourself, right now, to just being
➢ Watch … simply watch your old judgments fall away and dissolve
➢ Allow yourself simply to dissolve … to merge with bigger Life
➢ Turn everything over to Life … and just rest in the simplicity of being.
