Judgment

Judgment consists of two things - opinion, and rejection. When someone does something that we disapprove of, and we feel angry, we have an opinion about what they did, and what should have been done instead. However, the harm is not in the opinion - the harm is in the rejection. On some level, we, the ones who judge, create an imaginary separation between us and them. They should have done differently, we believe, and since we know that, we feel somehow superior to them.

Often we shun someone in obvious or subtle ways - we talk to them less, we decide we don't want them as a friend, we avoid them, we smile politely rather than being real, we talk about them behind their backs. All these acts are ways of causing separation, of denying the underlying commonality we all have as human beings.

Acceptance can be a difficult thing - it means the willingness not to push someone away, or to remove ourselves from them, simply because we don't like a characteristic. But the separation we create causes us to live in an increasingly narrow world, where only certain people meet our standards. The danger in narrowing our world down to only those people who are good enough, is that we might find we ourselves don't qualify. The horrible fear of everyone who lives in judgment is that they will ultimately be the ones who are judged and rejected, and their fear spurs them on to even greater efforts to be right, to be righteous, and to shun those who might taint them in some way.

It is when we let go of our fear, and accept who we are, that we discover we are in a world full of brothers.