VBT – Meditation 65.4
Non-Judgmental
Whether we like it or not, we do judge people, more often than not, in our lives. It is clear that our conditioning and our biased minds always impact our judgment. It then affects how we treat that person. Most of us would rather like to believe that we judge fairly. What is being fair? Fair or unfair, judgment is judgment. How will it be if we delete the very word ‘judgment’ from the dictionary of our minds?
If judgment disappears, you have become innocent. If you don’t divide things into good and bad, ugly and beautiful, acceptable and non-acceptable; if you don’t divide things, if you look at reality without any division, your eyes will come into existence for the first time. This is ‘Chakshusmati Vidya’, the sign of gaining eyes.
Existence is non-judgmental
Existence is non-judgmental. It gives life to the sinner, it gives life to the saint, without any discrimination. It gives love, showers silence over all, without any discrimination. “Any judgment is past-oriented, and existence is always here and now, life is always here and now. All judgments are coming from our past experiences, our education, our religion, our parents, who may not be alive but their judgments are being carried by our minds and they will be given as a heritage to our children. Generation after generation, every disease is being transferred as a heritage. Only a non-judgmental mind has intelligence, because it is spontaneously responding to reality.”
Everybody is so miserable that he wants to find some reason somewhere to explain to himself why he or she is miserable, and the society has given us a good strategy i.e. to judge.
No one is perfect; accepting our shortcomings helps others accept themselves
First, naturally, we judge ourselves in every way. No one is perfect; perfection does not exist, so judgment is very easy. When we find that imperfection in us, we become angry with ourselves and the whole world. This leaves us with only one idea and that is to find imperfection in everybody.
Don’t judge yourself. Accept humbly your imperfection, your failures, your mistakes, your frailties. There is no need to pretend otherwise. Just be yourself: This is how I am, full of fear. I cannot go into the dark night, I cannot go into the thick forest. What is wrong in it? It is just human.
Once you accept yourself, you will be able to accept others because you will have a clear insight that they are suffering from the same disease. And your accepting of them will help them to accept themselves. We can reverse the whole process: accept yourself. That makes you capable of accepting others. And because somebody accepts them, they learn the beauty of acceptance for the first time, how peaceful it feels and they start accepting others.
Do not judge the person, judge the act
Judging the act without judging the person is a totally different thing. For example, if somebody is a thief we can judge that stealing is not good but we do not judge the person, because the person is a vast phenomenon and the act is a small thing. The act is so small a piece and that small piece should not become a judgment about the whole person. A thief may have many beautiful values: he may be truthful, he may be sincere, he may be a very loving person. The moment we start thinking in terms of condemnation, then judgment enters.
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