I’m reminded today of the phrase from the New Testament: Judge not, that ye be not judged. Many of you also have a very difficult time applying this to your lives. If you are willing to stay with me to the end, maybe we can together understand the depth of his teaching and learn to apply it to your life.
Let’s start with the question: What is judgment exactly? There’s two forms of it on the outset: one a comparison – I judge the distance between oncoming cars to take a left turn at a light – and two, I judge you to less worthy (less intelligent, less beautiful, etc). The first is objective, the second subjective.
Let’s focus on the second one because it’s more dangerous: I see myself as better because I am more beautiful than another, therefore I judge myself as inherently worth more than another that I perceive to be ugly. Beautiful exists in opposition to ugly; without ugly you cannot define beautiful, just as without cold you cannot define hot. There is no scientific basis here for what is beautiful or ugly. And herein lies the problem – it’s quite arbitrary. Egoic beliefs are based in nothing, zilch, zero.
Another key problem with this form of judgment is that once been made, it doesn’t go away. In fact, it needs to keep itself alive by self-perpetuating. If I judge myself as beautiful and now my sense of self is defined as better and superior then I need to continue judging another as ugly so I can continue feel superior to the ugly ones. The other is less worthy and inferior from the point of view of this relative standard.
Similarly, the more the Israeli judges the Palestinian as less worthy and inferior to itself – the more superior the he feels, the more he needs to continue judging the Palestinian as inferior – and, of course, vice-versa. The Christian feels superior to any other religion because she believes that she and her tribe are going to heaven, while all others are going to hell. And this type of subjective judgment, which is self-perpetuated, will – mark that – WILL lead to conflict and violence. I have two thousand years of human history to prove my point without a shadow of doubt. The Nazi SS officer must first feel that Jews are inferior and sub-human, only then can he herd them to the gas chambers. The policeman must dehumanize and animalize a black man in his mind first in order to treat him more viciously.
We can continue to extrapolate this same mechanism in the multifarious aspects of our lives and thus we arrive at a standard that delineates and judges that which is better and superior and that which is worse and inferior. After a while, as we can see in this world, this dualistic standard takes on a life of its own. The standards of beauty might change, but the underlying mechanism, the need to feel superior exists all the same. One polarity needs its opposite and needs to remain in conflict with it, in order to exist. Therefore, judgment creates and perpetuates conflict.
Any subjective judgment ALWAYS leads to more subjective judgment. It is a quagmire that sucks us down, and once we start, we cannot stop until either we destroy ourselves or we eventually begin questioning this arbitrary standard itself from which we are judging. Questioning our subjective judgment is particularly difficult to do in our world because, one, our sense of self depends on it, and two, it requires us to think critically about it, which is very difficult to do.
Subjective judgment in our society, is like water to a fish. Its in the air that we breathe, we are bombarded with it on TV, and it is largely unrecognized for the malignant cancer that it is. The very foundations of many institutions that we have today would crumble if the world truly started questioning these arbitrary standards upon which we are perpetually judging all around us. The black-and-white fundamentalist religions would collapse completely because a central tenet of the religion is we are better than every one else. The military industrial complex survives today because the citizens of one country have judged citizens of another countries’ as less worthy. In extreme forms, like genocide, the lives of human beings are dehumanized and looked upon as bearing no more importance than that of insects. This decision allows one nation to embark upon a war as an aggressor towards another. (Take note here, I used the word decision deliberately. We human beings are great at blaming something else for our own problems, i.e. Illegal immigrants are to blame for my lower standard of living, not my tacit acceptance of egregious levels of wealth inequality particularly exhibited by the top 1%.)
As a result of the human species’ propensity to divide itself into sections of better or worse, we are now living in a win-lose paradigm that is rife with struggle and constant conflict with another ideology or way of life. The very fact that so many people have idolized violence in our society indicates through the entertainment industry, belies the desperate need for the human species to undertake tremendous healing. We are a collectively sick society, and we are responsible for it. We can play victim, but the epidemic of subjective judgment run riot, is OUR FAULT.
When you see the wars on TV, the violence that is rampant on our planet, and you’re looking for someone to blame, I suggest pulling out a mirror. Do not think that you are an innocent bystander and have no hand or responsibility at all. As Krishna explains in the Gita, even non-action is a form of action; hence, all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men and women to stand idly by. If you have stood idly by, then at some level of your being, you have accepted that it is okay to judge another human being worthy of being killed. You have believed in the lie of your own powerlessness and are therefore an unconscious accomplice in such crimes against humanity.
That all said, if you are reading this article, then you have made the decision to raise yourself above the fear-based consciousness. Some of you are further along than others, but ultimately you must get to the point where you can speak out in whatever way that you can and call out the madness that you see all around you. If enough of us shed our Light upon the darkness, the mechanism of judgment can be revealed and cast aside.
To the agents of judgment all around you, who may volley anger and hatred, your responsibility is to be an agent of love, compassion, kindness, and empathy. Save for extreme cases (narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths), do not make the mistake of turning others into the enemy, into the “other”, because this is a trap. Instead, you must look upon all, even those who you think unworthy, those least-deserving, and somehow see the humanity in them. You have no other choice because you know that judgment leads to more of the same, and inevitably to violence.
Try, for example, to see the humanity in the criminal, in the prostitute, in the drug addict, in all those who you have deemed as less worthy. It may be difficult at the onset, but it can be done with practice. Don’t expect it to be easy though, because it isn’t. But we must try all the same, because what human beings have been doing for thousands of years isn’t working. We have to do something else, something new.
Judge not therefore as the Great Soul from Galilee said – let’s make a better world by leaving subjective judgment behind!