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Judgment is one of the functions of the ego that can have a tendency to get out of hand.
When we are in balance, and are more identified with our higher self than with our animal nature, we have discernment, rather than judgment. Discernment is an invaluable tool. It is that which helps us to make choices, helps us to perceive with precision and acuity. The more discernment we have, the more fine-tuned will be our performance, the more specific our actions. Our taste and sense of style is formed from our discernment, then refined by it. In social terms, discernment can help us to mitigate and improve what might be our knee-jerk responses. If I continually am drawn to the unavailable mate, the disapproving boss or the unfriendly friend, and each time pay an emotional price for it, my discernment will be useful in helping me to distinguish a healthier choice.
Then something scares us and we're triggered into a version of the fight or flight response. Fear of losing our security - love, money, job, home - and the fine-tuned instrument of discernment becomes the bludgeon of judgment. On a psychological level we are circling the wagons to make ourselves safe, and we are judging those around us, sometimes harshly, choosing which to let in and which to judge as unworthy, i.e. unsafe.
Living in this modern world, we may find ourselves spending much if not all our time in low-grade fight or flight, or just on the verge of it and ready to be pushed over the edge with the slightest nudge. We can become inured to the feeling of fear and anxiety and begin to see it as what our life has become. When this is the case, we may find ourselves in judgment continually, a steady stream of negativity about those around us (and about ourself) running through our mind. It can feel like torture. It can make us behave like someone we don't want to be. It can have us rationalizing all sorts of behavior in ourselves that is not at all what we would want to find ourselves doing.
If we are not meditating, we're kind of stuck with the experience as it is. We can take a vacation or get a massage or have a drink to take the edge off for a moment, but next day we find ourselves right back in it. More often than not we don't feel we have the option of changing jobs or dropping out of society or making more money or getting a new spouse, any of which our mind may tell us we need to do to take the pressure off.
It is in this that meditation really shines as a tool. We sit, twice each day, in our simplest form of awareness, bathing in the cool waters of transcendence, coming out refreshed and rejuvenated and with the opportunity to see ourselves once again as something other than this fear, alienation and ball of judgment. And when the fear does come up and the judgment does once again occur in our mind, we can smile at ourselves and let it go, knowing that it is coming up because it is coming out, a stress release the release of which will allow me just this much more easily to see myself and those around me for what we truly are: children of God, worthy of love, capable of love, deserving of love, rather than of judgment.
Today I will make the effort to see myself as separate from the judgment that may run through my mind.
View from Fryman Canyon, Studio City
All material copyright Jeff Kober
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