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"Judgment" by Marie H. Beach and other articles

Visit this page often for new and interesting articles on a variety of topics, including judgment, stress, relaxation, weight loss, anger, quitting cigarettes and other issues that hypnosis can deal with.
 
 

Judgment

by Marie H. Beach, C.Ht., CI

Think back to when you first fell in love. How each and every atom and molecule in your body vibrated, every receptor heightened as the world was bathed in the most beautiful rosy lavender light. . Everything was possibility. The adored other could hang the moon.

Then the cold light of reality began to intrude. The other, who was so perfect… ohmigosh, wasn’t!  They slurped their soup, they started telling the same boring stories, their dental hygiene didn’t meet your Good Housekeeping Standard of Approval, they stayed glued to the TV, or were Republican or Democrat or worse.

Confronted with such humanness some stay, while others (less courageous or perhaps wise) walk away.

What happened?  Why did something that once glittered tarnish into dross? What happened to unconditional love and acceptance? What happened to the seamless fabric of love when those first nubs and irregularities appeared?

What happened is that your original feelings were hallucinations which faded when you saw in front of you an honest-to-god human being. The stars in your eyes dimmed because you did what humans do best – you judged, (of which we have logged in centuries of experience) leading to wars and pograms.

We’re not talking here about discernment that is required to make good decisions and choices. We mean the kind of judgment that usually occurs when we criticize the behavior and attitudes of people in situations which differ from our take on how things should be.

In judging, the first question to ask is, do you believe you have the right to judge? What gives you that right? Do you have all the information necessary to do so? Do you do it with a less-than-peaceful, calm feeling or a negative clutch in your gut? Have you “walked in the other’s shoes” as Native Americans have long urged?

It’s easier to hear judgment when we hear another person doing it. Haven’t you heard a friend retell an account of how s/he was attacked, or unfairly treated, and for the life of you you can’t figure out what the big deal was? I have, just last evening --from a person who has felt constantly offended over the many years I have known them. Their main object of complaint this time was a co-worker, whom they perceived as having a tone of voice that felt like attack. What the complainant was missing completely, is what Matthew calls in Verse 5, "the plank in their own eye" as they have for years used a tone of voice which very much feels like attack when you're on the other end.

Very disparate sources say that people are a part of a whole and that we are all therefore interconnected---The 3000 year old Tao, biblical Scripture, Alcoholics Anonymous, the school of Eastern thought regarding karma, and Hume’s cause and effect (which poses that for every action there is an equal and opposing reaction). Add to the mix, quantum physics (with claims that every part contains the whole and that all life has an underlying unity). They all agree to our interconnectness and therefore indirectly would render all judgment a kick in the pants to ourselves.

A very basic and simple example of interconnection is how often we bump into or receive a call from someone we’ve just been thinking about or we know who’s calling before we pick up the phone. How this interfaces with the premise we're connected and therefore silly to judge is stated by Matthew again when he reiterates, “That which you do to your brother, that you do to yourself.”

Furthermore, he says that we’re gonna get back as good as we get: “for what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” He calls those pointing out someone else’s deficiencies without first taking out the “plank” in their eyes, “hypocrites!” In Eastern religions cause and effect is referred to as “karma” - in which every thought acts as a cause. In effect, we create our own reality. The average person experiencing this universal law (reaping what they’ve sown) rarely is in touch with their thinking actually having any effect. But A Course in Miracles warns, “”there are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level.” The spiritual treatise goes further and declares that “thought and belief combine into a power surge that can literally move mountains.” Sound familiar?

Judgment is a major source fount of loneliness for it assumes a superiority, an infallibility, and arrogance that none of us has. None of us want to hang around such people. Often, judgment is practiced to a high art in people related by blood. Maybe the old cliche, "familiarity breeds contempt", is true. Even in cases where judgment seems perfectly acceptable, in viewing self-destructive behavior in another for instance, we are urged not to judge, as tempting as it is.for we are, after all, of finite intelligence, and have no clue as to what a soul needs to experience for their growth.

One might object to the idea that self-destructive behavior can be above judgment or have any good attached to it.  However, two examples of people who did live lives of self-destructiveness and literally “rose from the dead” and created magnificent legacies are Bill W. founder of Alcoholic Anonymous and Mike McClary, a one time heroin addict living on the street. Eighteen years ago, Mike created the Good Samaritan Ministries in Richmond, VA., as a place where addicts could “get a hand up – not a hand out.” Without one cent of government support, he and others have built apartments, a job program, two thrift shops, a car repair facility, a church and school and a day care center. Mike is successful because “he was there”, he addressed what those similarly afflicted needed and his view was that it was spiritually based.

AA preachesagainst judgment and claims that “if you spot it, you’ve got it.” Carl Jung said our pointing fingers usually reflected back our “shadow self,” a self containing denied fragments and characteristics that we feel impelled to get rid of and end up judging another as owning it.   In the world of duality in which we live where for every high there’s a low, for every up, a down good qualities like kindness or gentleness can reside in the same person along with unkindness, or even brutality, (even if it only remains at the thinking level.) We all read newspaper stories about someone thought highly of,  who one day shocks with egregious behavior. Psychotherapist Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who wrote seminal books on Death and Dying and Grief and Grieving was fond of saying that “there’s a little bit of Hitler in all of us.”

Judgment really finds its niche when we get to the welfare poor and disenfranchised in the ghettoes, who usually take the hit for everything that’s wrong with America. You’ve heard it: people point their fingers in their direction as if everything would be just fine if it weren’t for them. For a moment instead of judging, let’s take the advice of Native Americans to walk in our brother’s shoes. Put yourself for a moment in the ghetto where every night you hear gunshots and see the outlines of dead bodies drawn inside the circumference of yellow police tape. You’d turn to your father for answers, if you knew who he was, or if today was the day you visit him in prison. Your mother is a teenager, who dropped out of school so her resources are all taken up in survival and sitting for hours in the social services office or the city hospital emergency room. She’s scared so she yells and screams a lot and you have no clue what you’ve done wrong. Given such a negative scenario, who do you think you would be? Might you look for heroes or mentors or a connection to something bigger than you – like a gang? If you state no to that question, I am forwarding your name to the Vatican for canonization. Given that we get back in judgment what we mete out might we ask the question– “is the violence we feel toward the criminal, helping to foster more?”

How to get out of this vicious cycle of getting back what we have “meted” out in equal measure? Beautifully, there’s a universal law available. It’s called the Law of Attraction and it means, unless you’re a little thick in head (as my mother would say) you will notice a pattern of bumping into that same person or situation in various guises which can, with an open eye, provide us a mirror reflecting our denied warts and spots. Sometimes we fall in love with this person of our pattern, sometimes right off the bat we can’t stand their guts. No matter. What raises your hackles, rolls off someone else’s back. Why? Because they don’t have those same warts and spots or “shadows”. It’s simply not their bag to claim. In denial, and instead of doing the hard thing – running an “inner” check, “ we run or move away, avoid, find other people, other marriages, and other workplaces but until the inner work is done, and unconditional love replaces judgment, it’ll be the same old stuff. Sometimes the saddest part seems to be that some of us die with fingers pointing outward. It doesn’t have to be that way unless you refuse to do your work. Read the words of English metaphysical poet, John Donne as to how he described our oneness and connection, the last line of which became the title of one of Ernest Hemingway’s most acclaimed novels:

“Death, thy shall not Die,
Devotions upon emergent Occasions
No man is an island of itself
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in Mankind,
And therefore never send to know
For whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

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