In this world, judgment is virtually simultaneous with perception: even as we perceive differences, we are already judging between them. As long as events, and people, seem to happen to us, we will judge them as better or worse. As long as we seem to pace out limited lives in a world of inexhaustible variety, we must make choices. So the power to discriminate is practical and helpful, if we will use it searchingly.
But the impulse to judge does not in itself arise from an honest seeking after truth. We judge so as to find someone else guilty, so that we can preserve a sense of separate self while blaming someone else for the pain this dislocation causes us. We make judgments to define what we are by attacking what we think we are not, and to sustain the hallucination that we are really walking about apart in a kaleidoscopic world of unrelated parts and particles; labelling these people or events as good and those bad, some more important or valuable or despicable than others. The mind judges so as not to know, in the Course sense of knowing; so as not to know itself one with everything, so as not to recognize itself in everything it thinks it sees.
The Course points out that you are in no position to judge at all: not that you should not, but that you cannot. You are never in possession of the full truth about anything. You do not know what you are or what is real, let alone what is in your own best interests or anyone else’s. But in this form that you think of as yourself, you can learn to use the faculty of judgment itself for a different purpose; not to further illusions, but to distinguish when the mind is deluding itself; to choose to forgive instead of condemn. You can learn to recognize when you are judging against another so as to buttress your little sense of self against the immensity of love, truth, peace; and judge when you have had enough of that sorry game.
The Course helps us to detect the many ways we mask the wish to attack by elaborately justifying it to ourselves:
Judgment is interpretation: Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appears as fact (M17 4).
Judgment is projection: Learn this, and learn it well, for it is here delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot realize. You never hate your brother for his sins, but only for your own (T31 III 1.4).
Judgment is self-importance: The strain of constant judgment is virtually intolerable. It is curious that an ability so debilitating would be so deeply cherished. Yet if you wish to be the author of reality, you will insist on holding on to judgment….you believe you are the author of yourself and project your delusion onto others.T3 VI 5
Judgement is meaningless: In the end it does not matter whether your judgment is right or wrong. Either way you are placing your belief in the unreal (T3 VI 3).
Judgment is a judgment on yourself: You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgment. You do not need judgment to organize your life, and you certainly do not need it to organize yourself. In the presence of knowledge all judgment is automatically suspended… (T3 VI 3).
You imagine that your thoughts are telling you something true, that they are reporting something real. You assume your observations and assessments of people and situations are valid because they seem to come from you, as if that is some guarantee of reliability. The early workbook lessons in the Course begin by freeing you from this personal attachment to the opinions, beliefs and perceptions that stream through ‘your’ mind. They are not true, and you are not their thinker. The same mind that is making up your version of events is also making you up. The same internal commentary that spins you stories and images of other people is as busily accusing you, labelling you, depreciating or exaggerating what you are. The only choice you have is whether to run with your judgments of what is real, or laugh them away and stay with what is real.
Prepare you now for the undoing of what never was…Fortunately for the continuation of this dreaming world, even when it is surprised into silence for a moment the voice for judgment soon rallies, strident and insistent. No happy freedom from judgment, wariness, accusations, expectations and conditions can be forced upon you. Love is the alternative to judging against, and it is an option you can accept or decline. It will never condemn you for preferring to condemn, or not forgive you for not forgiving. What you believe is right or wrong will make not the slightest difference to a reality in which there are no opposites or distinctions and nothing is rejected.
Will you meet yourself and every one, every thing, totally without judgment? What if – even for an instant – you lay down your arsenal of reservations, opinions, assessments, evaluations, recriminations for what is past, apprehensions for the future (that is, judging in advance)? What would be left to say to anyone? What would be left to read in the papers, or watch on the television or discuss on the internet? What left to think, how to relate? What blessed peace! How restful: a world too full to talk about. Here there are no differences to speak of; like the field in Rumi’s poem:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
And rightdoing there is a field.
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
The world is too full to talk about.
