It would seem – given the speed and ease with which most of us judge others (including ourselves) – that there’s something natural, even good about it. After all, just about every time our eyes alight on someone or something, we judge it as good or bad, all based on how it stacks up against some inner ideal we have of how things should be.
Why is she wearing that? He’s so clueless. OMG: I look terrible today. The inner comments never stop, and often come out in complaints we express to others. But we don’t see them as complaints. To us they are nothing less than our intelligent observations of life around us.
We also don’t see how this endless stream of judgments hurts us. When we impose a negative view on things and people based on the past conditioning we bring to the moment, we can’t experience life directly, or see the good it may be offering. We can’t see the beauty in what we’ve summarily cast away.
Of course, the most painful form of judgment is self-judgment, when the critical eye is turned back on ourselves. Within our inner courtroom, we are defendant, prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and “executioner.” We hate ourselves for not living up to some image of how we should be, and then, to dampen this pain we turn it onto others by judging them.
End this cycle now! Here are 10 ways to see through the self-inflicted pain of judging.
Please note: our intention here must not be to escape or otherwise control this unconscious nature. Resisting our own dark thoughts and feelings does nothing to release us from the pain they produce in us. Spiritually speaking, the task is much simpler, and far more effective: we need only become aware of how we feel when we judge. Waking up in this way to what has been going on in the dark of us allows us to actually "taste" what judgmental thoughts do to us and others; and the more we can taste these negative states, the greater grows our natural distaste of them! Like unhealthy foods we finally see as such, so too do we lose the appetite for weighing and measuring others on our “scale.”
5 Liberating Truths About Judging Others
When we judge others, we don’t realize we’re really judging our own unconscious image of them. But when we become aware of others, we can’t judge them. We know their hidden inner state, can see its similarity to our own, and would not do anything to add to their pain. So, consider the following:
5 Liberating Truths About Judging Yourself
One of the great invisible impediments to realizing true self-perfection lies hidden in our tendency to judge ourselves any time an unwanted moment challenges some flattering self-image. This self-judgment is the dark effect of a divided mind that acts against itself as it first “creates” an inferior self through an imagined comparison to some ideal, and then sits in harsh judgment of that imagined self. Consider the following when caught in self-loathing:
See Through the Lie of Judgment
Judging yourself or another seems to prove the presence of an innocent “you” – someone who is superior to the inferior character now being condemned. But both the superior and inferior parts of the equation are really opposite aspects of the same lower level of consciousness – and neither is who you really are.
To discover, and then see through how you’ve been identified with these opposites is the same as freeing yourself from the painful world of ceaselessly comparing yourself to others, and vice-versa. Inviting the light of this kind of self-revelation is the same as rising above the world of painful self-judgment.
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