Judging You, Judging Me is not the Best We can Do
Who hasn’t felt the sting of judgment? Even young school-children know how to express disdain. “The new kid over there talks funny and wears strange shoes. Let’s not play with that kid.” The television show, Hoarders, is in its 11th season. The format of the show is a home makeover, but instead of showcasing interior decorating or renovation, it highlights how a super-cluttered living space is converted into a more typical home. The fascination with the “before” is the way the home appears at the beginning and the person or people ‘who would live this way.’ The win of the “after” is almost a sigh of relief that now the home ‘is as it should be.’ Having met a great many people with hoarding disorder over more than 10 years of providing treatment for overcoming hoarding, I have seen up close the internal judgment that dogs so many of them about their relationship with their possessions and their home. One very concrete manifestation of this self-judgment is that the vast majority of people with hoarding disorder won’t let others into their home for years and even decades, not even close family members. That is how powerful judgment can be.
We are so good at judging others and ourselves that we might think that judgment, and not love, is our natural inheritance. It takes a different perspective to teach us that judging might be what we do, but judgment is not what we are. Judging is a habit. When directed outward, it is a way to feel better at the expense of another. This dark allure ensures that the judgment habit perpetuates itself. When directed inward, as we all explicitly or implicitly also tend to do, judgment “seals the deal” on our unworthiness. No matter in which direction judgment is aimed, it keeps us feeling separate, alone, unloved, and unlovable. By contrast, A Course in Miracles, like Hindu and Buddhist traditions, teaches the enormous value of non-judgment as a means to awaken spiritually. The sparkling beauty of non-judgment is that it breaks down the barriers to our awareness of being one Self, one Mind. Non-judgment diminishes investment in the belief in separateness, gradually dissolving the veil that obscures our identity with the Love that is our Source. The practice of non-judgment permits us to discern and gradually embrace the enormous union that is available in even the most momentary every-day interactions with another. This practice is nothing short of a path to enlightenment. That is how powerful non-judgment can be.
I was introduced to the practice of non-judgment long before I heard about A Course in Miracles. Although I don’t have a specific memory of where this took place, it was no doubt through one or another Buddhist dharma talk that I attended or at one or another training on mindfulness practice that I did for work. Since I was drawn to the wisdom and depth of Buddhist teachings, I decided to start practicing non-judgment by noticing my thoughts. To illustrate the process of this general practice, I will use my first reaction to strangers as an example. When I first tuned into these thoughts, I was truly appalled at what I noticed. This person was too tall, that person was too short; this person was too wide, that person was too thin; this person had terrible fashion sense, that person was trying too hard to impress, and on and on and on. As I became accustomed to these negative snap judgments, I began to laugh at myself and also to become more curious about them. What good came out of this type of thinking? How necessary was it to state some sort of reaction or opinion about another, even to myself? I don’t know how long into this practice it took for me to start to shift my process in reacting to strangers, but it was definitely many months, if not years. Eventually, I began to offer myself another perspective. For example, if someone was sporting an outfit that I found “appalling,” I entertained the idea that even though it was not to my taste, it was evidently something that the person liked. In other words, as the French say, “Vive la difference!”
Once I read Gary Renard’s book, The Disappearance of the Universe, which is an introduction to A Course in Miracles, I understood in a new way the pivotal importance of non-judgment to my spiritual path. Judgment is the crowning jewel of the ego thought system and quite literally the path into ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ To undo the small, illusory, ego self and experience enduring peace and love, judgment has to go. Inspired by Gary’s book, I bought a copy of A Course in Miracles and started reading the Text and doing the daily Workbook lessons. What I soon realized is that A Course in Miracles takes non-judgment to a whole new level and accelerates the learning of this practice. As the introduction to the Workbook explains,
The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world. The exercises are planned to help you generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is equally applicable to everyone and everything you see. (W-in.4:1-2)
True perception, which is what the Text and the Workbook seek to teach, is the perception of our Oneness, both with one another and with God. As I started to make my way through the Text and Workbook, I came to understand that letting go of judgment is something to practice moment to moment and not just here and there. No thought, emotion, person, or situation can be excluded from non-judgment. Everyone and everything is the same, either reflecting love or calling for love. Our appropriate response, in turn, is always the same, namely, loving. On this spiritual path, we are never asked to do this on our own. Instead, we can turn for help at any moment to the Teacher of Peace found in our quiet center, or as I think of this, the Holy Spirit.
The first three lessons of the Workbook focus on the physical things that we see as we look about ourselves. They are intended to loosen the hold on us of the meanings we give to the things we see. Lesson 1 offers the idea that what we see does not mean anything, Lesson 2 that we have given everything that we see the meaning it has for us, and Lesson 3 that we don’t understand anything we see. In Lesson 4, the focus shifts to thoughts, with the idea that our thoughts do not mean anything. I found all of these first lessons interesting rather than provocative having been introduced to the idea of an illusory world and to the practice of meditation a long time before. But I found Lesson 5 to be a real zinger:
I am never upset for the reason I think.
Well! The practice period for each lesson is a day, but this is one lesson that has stuck with me ever since that 5th day of doing the Workbook. It’s no exaggeration to say that over the intervening years, I have found myself working with the idea that I am never upset for the reason I think thousands of times. What I have learned is that if I am upset, I have gotten caught up in judgment of some kind. Someone has seemingly wronged me or some situation has seemingly been justification to get upset. This lesson reminds me that there is another way to look at anyone or anything that is upsetting. That realization alone is the beginning of the release of judgment. I have experienced again and again that all it takes is a little willingness to step back from the upset, no matter how justified it seems. The Holy Spirit does the rest and peace eventually returns.
In my first blog post, “All Minds are Joined,” (March 10th, 2020) I wrote about falling in love with the idea that we are all One, which I learned about in my first yoga class back in the 90s. Like the practice of yoga and the Hindu teachings that underpin it, A Course in Miracles fosters the experience of union. We each have dozens of opportunities every day to practice seeing ourselves and others as one, whether we are buying an ice cream at the corner store, interacting with someone at work, or talking with the person we are closest to. Non-judgment is a dynamic process, its practice almost a living thing. As we continually set aside our inevitable, split-second, ego-reactions and re-establish our view of the other person as one with us, we meet with them in love and peace at some level, whether or not we see the effect of this in the present moment. And as we do so, this affirms for us, whether consciously or unconsciously, that we are indeed, and in fact, One.
In many passages, A Course in Miracles describes the beautiful, flowing interplay of non-judgment, union, and the awareness of union as we interact with others. Here is an example that describes this interweaving process:
Child of Light, you know not that the light is in you. Yet you will find it through its witnesses, for having given light to them they will return it. Each one you see in light brings your light closer to your awareness. Love always leads to love. The sick, who ask for love, are grateful for it, and in their joy they shine with holy thanks. And this they offer you who gave them joy…You have established them as guides to peace, for you have made it manifest in them. And seeing it, its beauty calls you home. (T-13.VI.10:1-9)
All quotes are from A Course in Miracles, copyright ©1992, 1999, 2007 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, 448 Ignacio Blvd., #306, Novato, CA 94949, www.acim.org and info@acim.org, used with permission.