Take Away The Stone: Resurrecting the God Within — Judge Not
The introduction and Parts I, II, III, IV, and V of this series are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Matthew 7: 1–2
This is arguably the most widely quoted of Jesus’s teachings, yet as we know all too well it is easier said than done. Our conscious minds — in an effort to organize the avalanche of stimuli inundating us at any given moment — are wired to collect, categorize, and assess things quickly. This is amplified significantly in the technologically driven world of today, where information of all kinds is literally at our fingertips. It is easy to get pulled in by all manner of scandalous headlines, click bait articles, and social media stories, from which we form rash opinions on the state of the world, our friends, families, coworkers, etc.
But the reports of our senses, when weighed in the balances of reality, are often found wanting. If, for example, we were to take at face value their immediate impressions of the physical world, we would still believe that the Earth is flat and stationary, with the Sun revolving around it. Another instance is a stick or branch half submerged in water — at first sight it appears to be broken, but closer inspection reveals that it is intact, the play of the water affecting our eyes. As Obi — Wan Kenobi told Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, “Your eyes can deceive you: don’t trust them.”
When filtered through the perspective of our engrained biases, prejudices, and experiences, the evidence of our senses can lead us to paint incredibly distorted portraits of what we witness and the people we interact with. For instance, we may be driving through a shopping center parking lot to see a non-placard bearing car in a handicapped spot. Immediately we’ll begin to curse out the rotten scumbag who’d do such a selfish thing; perhaps we’ll even stop to take a photo to post to Facebook and “shame” the offender, only to see a wheelchair etched on the license plate, designating it as the vehicle of a handicapped driver or passenger.
Conversely, we may find ourselves on the receiving end of a random act of kindness. We enter the office to find that a coworker left a coffee on our desk, our partner offers to rub our shoulders or feet after a long stressful day unprompted, or we receive a call from an estranged friend asking to get together. In many instances it may be our first instinct to question the intentions behind these acts, attributing them to less than altruistic motives to earn some kind of return favor from us. The same could be true of our interactions with people who we deem to be overly nice, positive, or peppy: we immediately peg their politeness to be a shallow front, covering up an otherwise nasty or critical attitude.
The same applies when it comes to relative strangers. We could be in line at the coffee shop placing our order, to have the barista reply in a surly tone. Naturally we take this as a personal affront, prompting us to either be snarky in return or make internal judgment calls on their character, painting them with a broad brush based on that one interaction. This, of course, is where stereotypes both small and large have their origins. Such presumptions are incredibly subjective, based on misinterpreting the evidence of our senses and the behavior of others. In the case of the barista we could be totally off in our judgment of them. Perhaps they simply said a certain word or phrase that, in relation to an earlier negative experience of ours, triggered the feeling that we’re being belittled by them when we really weren’t.
If in fact they were being rude, we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that they’re simply a rotten person. They could be in a bad mood for any number of reasons. Maybe their car broke down on the way to work; maybe they had an argument with their partner, a family member, or coworker or any number of stress inducing possibilities. Just as we wouldn’t want someone to make that kind of snap judgment of us without knowing anything about our situation, we should extend the same courtesy to others. It is in essence practicing the Golden Rule or Law of Reciprocity, which has been reiterated in some form in all major religious and ethical systems:
“Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” Confucianism
“Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you.” Isocrates, Ancient Greek philosopher
“If the entire Dharma can be said in a few words, then it is — that which is unfavorable to us, do not do that to others.” Hinduism
“Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” Buddhism
“That which you want for yourself, seek for mankind.” Islam
“Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.” Leviticus 19:18
“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 7:12
It may be asked, “But what if the person is a certified a-hole? Shouldn’t we give them a dose of their own medicine?” Tempting though it maybe to want to dish back their nastiness to them (an eye for an eye) it would serve no positive purpose to do so. Any satisfaction we glean from our retort will be short lived and we’ll have only succeeded in sinking down to a level of petty immaturity. Additionally, as any observation of social media “troll” wars will evidence, such tit for tat nastiness more often leads to the offender digging their heals in and upping the ante of their attitude. And, though we can’t control the other’s actions, we can remain in control of ours by not reacting to their display in a negative way.
The pain inflicted by the words of another is commensurate with the power we grant them to affect us. There is more truth than we realize in the old rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Rather than continue the cycle of rudeness the best course of action is to, as the saying goes, kill them with kindness by brushing off their barbs and giving love for hate. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
Our inclination to take a negative view of situations and people’s intentions can also be symptomatic of psychological projection, wherein we attribute to others our own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. In the earlier case of a random act of kindness, we may be projecting suspicion onto the unselfish acts of others because in a similar situation we’d perform such an act with ulterior motives. And in the case of interacting with someone we judge to be artificially cheerful, it could very well be us who would put on such a hollow front.
This tendency to condemn others for perceived evil is personified throughout the Gospels in the form of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and teachers of the Mosaic Law, whom Jesus constantly rebuked for their condescending self — righteousness and hypocrisy:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” Matthew 23:27–28
“Woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” Luke 11:46
In prematurely judging others — whether from faulty sense evidence, emotional triggers, or casting the weight of our own faults upon them — do we not load them down with an unfair burden, under which we keep them pinned with continued criticism? By viewing another from such a confining state of consciousness we are robbing them of the ability to unfold their divine potential as a fellow child of the All. And with the knowledge that each of us are inlets and outlets to the One Universal Mind, comes the realization that what we think and feel about others will come back to us through the medium of the subconscious mind, as a boomerang does to the hand of the one who throws it. Hence we are told, “Let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against your neighbor”. Zechariah 8:17
This entails, as Jesus put it in striking metaphor, taking the plank out of our own eyes to salute the divinity in the other. Seeing them as brethren to be respected rather than opposition to be criticized we are no longer judging by mere appearances, according to our senses and prejudices, but rather stirring up the gift of the Father within them. Doing this in the spirit of love, we fulfill each of the two great commandments:
“The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:29–31
Contrary to the cynical assertion that this turns people into emotional doormats, requiring them to remain in relationships or environments that are destructive to their well-beings, this attitude of love dissipates the hold of anger, resentment, fear, and jealously upon our minds and hearts. As we will discuss in the next piece, loving your neighbor is not synonymous with liking them, but is rather an acknowledgement of the Divinity, however submerged, that lies in back of them; the centering Unity, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, behind the at times vexing variety of ideas, emotions, opinions, and thoughts which assail us with unfailing regularity. Love, in essence, is the practice of learning to tame the tempests of our psychic sea with the “peace that passes all understanding”.
“Be still and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10
