Why judge others/situations?

Evolution

Its our evolution that has taught us to judge the situation as quickly as possible and it is a useful process when we are in wilderness and surrounded by lots of predators. We live in a society and deal with lot more people on daily basis than ever before — even more than our ancestors dealt with other animals or people. Its so hard wired into our system that it works almost instantly, even before any real experience of the person/situation begins, we pretty much articulate the whole experience beforehand. Of course its our subconscious mind at play here, we don’t notice this micro process. It’s a little monkey mind making that noise, if we let that noise calm down a bit, we can hear the real voice that guides us — and it only happens when we are fully present. We constantly bring the agenda forward in every new situation from the past moment, and we hardly treat present moment with our full attention. That prevents us differentiating these two noises in our mind.

Our direct past experiences

We sometimes do have bad experiences with people, and sometimes slightest fear of having a bad experience stays in our memory as a bad experience. If we don’t pay enough attention when going through these experiences we lack the proper information for future dealing.

Let’s say we have had a bad experience with Person X, and what we do? we make a lifelong decision to not deal with X ever again. As life moves on (and it does move fast in modern times) we are facing person Y that we think has similar traits and what we do? we quickly shut any connection with Y too. How many times in our lifetime we ignore people based on our initial judgement (no facts considered at all)? And we all know the answer. If the experience with X was dealt with rationally, we would have thought ‘ok, let’s not deal with this person until he shows real change of character’ and people do change — its just us refusing to believe that because we struggle to change ourselves. And also if that was rational decision it would definitely not stop us from connecting with Y.

Other influences

I call the modern life a ‘a tale telling’. We do too much talking, hearing, watching TV, reading, knowledge gathering, news or information collecting that we forget to have any real chance of processing any of this information rationally (so that it enhances our life experience) — Some of it forms judgements about people, ideals, beliefs, certain people doing/having certain things. Most of us don’t know how to use this information to enhance our life experience, so what we do is just tell others. I am not against any of the above as long as we fully understand the information that is coming into our being (rather than just our brain). We pass our judgments learnt from third parties to our close friends, relatives etc. And they sincerely take it in and are obliged (yes, obliged — socially, for the sake of being normal, in the name of the religion, belief, or just to keep belonging to same group of people) to act on it. And what it does in their life is shutting off few more possibilities of new experience. How many possibilities of life do we shut off in one life? no one keeps count.

But why not judge?

‘the elephant in the room’

Let’s examine our current lives, do we have any good things/experiences in our life, that we are proud of or feel great about or are grateful for (good vacation, nice talk with a stranger, good habits, our expertise in certain things, skills, good career etc.)? Great we all have many things that we learnt in the past and we feel good about them. Think, where did you learn those or how the whole experience started — think about the people from whom you learnt, heard about any of those things first time. And then you did it for yourself or learnt the whole thing from them? Now think about having had a judgment against the people with similar traits. Would you have had these things/experiences in your life? — no. Also wouldn’t you want to deepen those experiences further, and for that you never know what form the next opportunity will take — so be open to give fair consideration to people and situations moving forward.

The same goes for situations, they teach us lessons (all lessons are good, bad are the scars — scars are our OWN unresolved feeling from experience). Whatever qualities we have that we feel proud of ourselves, all came from real life situations. Even the ones that were taught to us by our parents or elders, teachers etc — we have tested them in practice in our real life situations and then only they grounded into our being. So, why stop now? are you too old? too old to live?

How do we feel when someone else judges us? Specially when we are dying to have some connection with that person (be it making new friends, doing business, hiring/applying for a job and much more). Even if the judgements dont come back and haunt you, think about how the person feels when being judged? That person would start judging others, and others to another. It spreads like a disease, how would our children feel growing up in this infested world?

It also has a reverse effect. If we were to be rejected for something for any reason, our initial thinking would be that other person has judged us. This judgment system becomes so powerful that it makes it harder to analyse any refusal rationally. Instead of getting to the bottom of the refusal (which is our real chance of meeting our true self, so that we can work on that issue) — we get stuck in thinking that we were judged by other and that damages our trust (unresolved feeling). Small damages together make a big hole and it becomes the reason of pain (pain of life not being fair to us) — sometimes we even forget where the pain is coming from.

Goodness on you if you never judge anyone, but don’t worry when someone does this to you. You are a shock absorber and there are only few in this modern world. So please carry on, don’t become like others who does this to you — you will lose your self in doing so.