Why not to judge

When we fully understand that our lives are completely and utterly governed by the programs that run inside our heads*, we will start to see other people’s actions in a different light. This is because any action that is not in our repertoire of actions available to us, will be impossible to interpret correctly. Instead we will look for the closest label/stereotype we can think of and label that action with. To demonstrate this point, I will give a practical example, which I am pretty sure is familiar to everyone.

A few days ago, as I was walking in a parking lot, I saw three young men leaving their car, and as they were passing a garbage pin suddenly started kicking it mercilessly. In a normal day, the rational mind that governs my life will search all the command lines in its program to find an explanation for the action it just witnessed. To my rational mind, actions usually have a purpose, a motive and an aim. But my program will not find any matching desirable outcome that will result from the action “kick the garbage pin mercilessly”. So it will immediately jump into the cluster of actions labeled “senseless”, and label the action as such. If will then try to judge the people who performed that action; for my rational program which values “intelligent decisions” highly, it will rank the people who performed that action low on its scale and will easily and without qualm label them as “idiots”, and move on.

For another person who has witnessed the same action, she might label the kids as “high on drugs” or “coming from bad homes” or even, with some empathy, “kids who are venting out some frustration”. Someone will say that all these seem to be plausible explanations of what these kids have done, they might even all be true. But I believe that none of them come anywhere close to what the young men have experienced in their own lives.

You see, all the explanations that I have perceived from other people still fall within the range of explanations that are acceptable by my program, because my program cannot perceive anything that is beyond what is within its command lines. So I will never meet someone who will tell me that these young men have performed an extremely creative act, or an act of love beyond description, even if they, in their own views, did. This is because anything that is been told to me, is translated to the closest thing to it that I have in my program. Once I understood this, I looked at the kids, suspended judgment, and marveled on what on earth they have just done and I could not understand. I walked away feeling a sense of awe, instead of a sense of condemnation.

How many times before did you say “I cannot understand why anyone will do something like that”? Now you have a glimpse at why someone else will do something that is incomprehensible to you. So next time, you encounter a situation which defies logic (your logic), try to suspend judgment, and consider that this act was governed by a program that, at least in some part, is alien to you. And that what you have noticed is an interpretation, not absolute reality. The more you do that, the more your life will transform in front of you, because you will allow other programs to function beside yours, and you will see in no one else life, less validity than in yours. The negative energy of judgment will become the positive energy of awe.

* To learn more about this program and how to change your life using it visit I See Light.