Monday, August 4, 2014

Judge Not Lest You Stop Your Awareness

As I have been studying the brain and the mind, one book stands out as a wonderful treatment of awareness and how we often without knowing it, trap experiences within us, and literally trap ourselves within life experiences. There is a phenomenon that if we are paying attention, can be avoided by avoiding over use of a mechanism that helps us distinguish between events and things that we wish to duplicate and those that we do not.

It is called Judgment and a Bible verse lays it out in the book of Matthew this way, in chapter 7 verses 1 to 3
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

When Michael Singer was describing in his book, the Untethered Soul, the way that the awareness sometimes fails to let an experience pass through us and instead, fixes itself on some aspect of that event or object and holds on to it, and builds an emotional response around it, and then buries the encoded event, which he calls by the Sanskrit word, Samskara, I immediately realized he was talking about judgment. When we see something and decide to take offense, or to reject it as not worthy of us, or of our love or attention, we actually lend it more reason to burden us by trapping its energy within us instead of letting it pass through us and only momentarily noting its existence.

Certainly there are judgments which are just, and which are necessary for us to relate an event or thing to our core beliefs or understanding, but the more we pass negative judgments on other people, or things, the more we cloud our psyche with unnecessary baggage that gets dredged back up from time to time as similar events or things appear that trigger the encoded judgment we have buried within us and so with that same judgment are we judged and we end up carrying around a burden.

A story within the Buddhist tradition explains this effect well.  Two monks who had taken a vow to never be with a woman, were walking along a riverside path when they encountered a beautiful young woman trying to figure out how to cross the shallow river without soiling her silk robe. The elder of the two monks whisked her into his arms and carried her across the river safely setting her down on the other bank. For many minutes after that the younger monk remained silent but appeared troubled, until finally he could no longer contain his bewilderment. The elder monk finally asked, is something bothering you? to which the younger monk replied, "Master, we have sworn an oath to never be with a woman, and yet you thought nothing of picking up that young lady and carrying her across the river. Why?" The elder monk, smiled and replied, "Ah but I set her down at the rivers edge, yet it is you who still carries her."

It is my belief that this message tries to teach us that when we worry about things that we cannot control, we carry the greater burden, whether it be in judging another unfairly, or in deciding that someone else has not lived up to one of our own standards. It is not for us to judge others in this manner, for if we do, we literally carry the burden ourselves and they hardly feel the burden at all.