Judgment can be seen as the opposite of love. When judgment is present, it cuts us off from love, or at the very least it confines love so that it can’t fully reach us. Judgment is looking at the world in terms of “right” and “wrong;” it’s a habit of approaching people and things and seeing them as “good” or “bad.” Looking at this in terms of addiction, we can frame our judgmental habits of mind as an addiction to the need to be right. What’s wrong with wanting to be right? What’s wrong with judgment? We all do it, right? Usually, we don’t even think about it. If you’re like most people, you might not even recognize that you are judging.
In fact, most of us are constantly judging. We judge people and things, ideas and beliefs, situations, and experiences, as attractive or unattractive, as positive or negative. Brain scientists have studied how we react to things—all kinds of things: random objects, common phrases, faces of different races—and they’ve found that we humans make snap judgments about lots of things. Some would even argue that we judge everything we encounter and that we are in a constant state of reaction to our surroundings. Science has shown that for approximately 97% of our lives, we are simply reacting habitually to our environment.
People tend to automatically evaluate things as they perceive them. You might see a certain food and get hungry. You might see someone doing something and you experience an emotion—you make a judgment, you react. You might even judge yourself: You react to your own looks or behavior with dismay, criticism, or arrogance. These gut reactions are lightning-fast and are for the most part unconscious and unintentional. This behavior is part of your created self; it has helped you survive. Have you ever felt judged by someone? On what basis did they get their information? Is it possible the judgment was more about them than you? As the saying goes: “People will love you and people will hate you. And most of it will have very little to do with you.”
Again, the question is, does judgment really work? In my experience, judgment as a way of responding is a limited and limiting strategy when it’s unconscious, when we don’t see it for what it is. The problem is that our snap judgments create a predisposition for or against the thing or person perceived. They create bias. But because they are unconscious, we tend to trust these judgments like we trust our senses. They seem neutral or objective to us, when in fact they are not. Because our judgments are not neutral or objective, they are inherently limited; they are not the whole story. As such, they could be blinding us, keeping us from totally seeing the thing or person in front of us, from being fully present. And if our judgments are getting in the way of being wholly present, then they are also preventing us from experiencing love and connection.
Furthermore, when we’re judging unconsciously and habitually, we’re living and exemplifying duality. Those judgments and the decisions that come out of those judgments are based on a core belief that there truly is a right and a wrong, and so our feeling tone depends on where we fit into that scheme of things. In judging the world, we judge ourselves, trapping ourselves in this duality so that we must live either to be right or to be wrong. This keeps us feeling stuck in relative reality, rather than experiencing the oneness of ultimate reality. Fortunately, if we become conscious of our habits of judgment, we can change them. We do this first, by recognizing when we are judging; second, by evaluating the effect our judgment is having (does it work?); and third, by practicing nonjudgmental responses to our experience, ourselves, and the world. What happens when we do this? What happens when we shift from judgment to non-judgment?
Let’s look at the first step here: recognizing our propensity to judge. This requires us to utilize and practice nonresistance. By practicing and developing habits of nonresistance, we can identify and observe our judgments and then question whether they are working for us. As we saw a couple of sections ago, nonresistance is about becoming an observer instead of a reactor. It takes a lot of courage to remain nonresistant and thus to stay fully present. For most of us, this involves sitting and observing what our reactions are. This can be an external or an internal process, and it might be easier in some ways to start externally.
For instance, someone makes a remark to you. Practicing nonresistance, you can simply observe: How are you judging this situation? What is your judgment about this person? Then you can take that more deeply inward: You can observe what that statement activates or triggers internally. Maybe you feel a tightness in your throat or your chest or your stomach, maybe you experience the urge to react, to lash out, to judge. So you can observe your reaction, and recognize your desire to judge. And then you can go even deeper: What is your judgment about yourself in this moment? What are you saying about yourself when you judge this person or situation? What are you believing about yourself to be true?
Thus, we move to the second step, noticing the effect our judgment is having. What happens if you follow the path of judgment and criticize, or lash out, or move aggressively? Does your reaction or judgment work for you in this situation? What effect is your judgment having on your relationships, on your interactions, on your decisions? Does this move you closer to love and connection? As you question your own judgments and recognize their impact, you can move a step forward and come to a conscious decision for non-judgment. When you respond with non-judgment, you can take note of your response, and notice how its effect is different from that of a judgmental response. And on and on. The more you practice, the easier it gets.
What we discover as we go through this process is that judgment generally does not work. It confines our freedom. It stops us from remaining curious, from looking deeper, from appreciating what we’re judging. And that decreases our capacity for love and connection. You might find that the definitions of rightness and wrongness you’ve been working with limit your freedom. You might find that they keep you stuck and create barriers and separation. When we observe rather than react when we sit with our triggers and identify where we most desire to judge, we often find that judgment of others is judgment about ourselves, it’s a projection onto others of our shadow, our core beliefs about ourselves. That’s why we gossip: It’s a form of judgment that allows us to avoid what’s happening internally. It lets us divert our attention from ourselves to another. So, if you find that judgment is limiting for you, perhaps the next step is to wake up to the possibility of another way, a way that will lead you to your essential self. In this way, there is no judgment. There’s only curiosity, acceptance, and connection.
Fortunately, through the practices of nonresistance, observation, being present, and questioning, we can learn to give up our habits of judgment.
We can learn to allow our triggers to go through us instead of taking control of us. That’s how we come to the place in our essential self that’s neutral, that’s beyond judgment, beyond clinging to the fixed ideas and concepts we hold about ourselves and the world. As we integrate our own shadow, as we let go of our own addictions, as we make peace with ourselves and recognize the love that we truly are, then that love becomes more what we perceive in others. We no longer enjoy gossip because it no longer serves us; our tendency to judge becomes more conscious and easier to discontinue. Our spiritual influences become stronger and non-judgment becomes our habit. And thus, it’s possible within the practice of non-judgment that we can loosen the grip of our perspective and open to a greater way of being and seeing. Because the ultimate truth of who and what we are is free of judgment. It is one with the ultimate power of the universe, and in that space, there is no judgment.
