To judge other people is not to condemn them. It is simply a choice, which of course always involves an evaluation, a weighting. However, such a judgment can go beyond mere preference by claiming to be universally valid. This is where it can clash with the evaluations of others.
However,
any claim to generality arises from a reference,
a perceived connection or identification with the other, and is therefore not
arbitrary. The question is rather what
kind of connection it is.
With a
mindful approach, we recognize the possibility of our own mistakes and respect
the freedom of others without being indifferent to their values. We are aware
of other persons as such,
"care" about their well-being, and know that it is part of our own. We are interested in them and therefore want to understand them.
If we
diminish other persons, we diminish ourselves because we now have less of them.
Even if we don't get anything from them in the usual sense, we diminish
ourselves because we can no longer identify with them without losing something
of ourselves.
If we had
felt even smaller without belittling
the other person, we have now also sold ourselves to an illusion of our own
greatness, which does not satisfy us for long and not really. In this way, we
prolong the suffering of our equally imagined inferiority.
This text is an excerpt from the book
Truthfulness. The Consciousness that Creates Reality
