The Bhagavad Gita’s Approach to Goal Setting

Judgements

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 signs of gaining eyes.

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.

Judge actions, and correct them, and don’t correct them according to tradition, convention, according to so-called morality, according to your prejudices. Whenever you are correcting somebody, be very meditative, be very silent; look at the whole thing from all perspectives. Perhaps they are doing the right thing, and your prevention will not be right at all.

No action gives you the right to condemn the person. If the action is not right, help the person – find out why the action is not right, but there is no question of judgment. Don’t take the person’s dignity, don’t humiliate him, don’t make him feel guilty.

Childlike Wonder

Why is childlikeness, innocence compared to meditation?

When a man is reborn, only then he understands the beauty and the grandeur of childhood. The child is ignorant; hence he is unable to understand the tremendous innocence that surrounds him. Once a child becomes aware of his own innocence, there is no difference between the child and the sage. The sage is not higher and the child is not lower. The only difference is, the child knows not what he is and the sage knows it.

I am reminded of Socrates. In his very last moments of life he said to his disciples, “When I was young, I used to think I knew much. As I became older, as I knew more, a strange thing started happening: an awareness that knowing more was bringing me to knowing less.”

And finally, when the Oracle of Delphi declared Socrates to be the wisest man in the world…the people of Athens were very happy and they went to Socrates, but Socrates said, “Go back and tell the Oracle that at least for once its prophecy has been wrong. Socrates knows nothing.”