Judgment Always Involves Rejection

Drawn from “Judgment and the Authority Problem”
(T-3.VI.2-5; Urtext Version)

I have recently found new meaning in several paragraphs on judgment found in “Judgment and the Authority Problem.” I will go through them a few sentences at a time:

Judgment always involves rejection. It is not an ability which emphasizes only the positive aspects of what is judged, whether it be in or out of the self.

What is judgment? We often equate it with condemnation, but the real meaning of the word is much broader. When we say, “In my judgment, I think we should turn right not left,” does “judgment” there mean “condemnation”? No, of course not. Judgment in its broadest sense means assessing or evaluating something by measuring it against a standard. This process is going on every second with us. Simply to interpret our visual field we must make very complex judgments about what we are looking at and whether or not we like it. These judgments are so complex that even the best computers can come nowhere near doing what we do as a matter of habit all day long.

However, there is a cost to all of this measurement against standards. Nothing ever fully measures up. No one ever fully measures up. Someone in class said that no one measures up ten minutes after you meet them. I added, “Or as soon as they speak.” And to the extent that someone doesn’t measure up, we reject them, maybe not outwardly, but certainly inwardly. The amount that they don’t measure up is the very same amount that we withdraw our love from them. And if judgment is happening every second, if judgment is the process whereby we interpret our visual world, then we are in a state of constant rejection.

However, what has been perceived and rejected, (or judged and found wanting) remains in the unconscious because it has been perceived….

It gets worse. When we judge someone, when we decide they don’t measure up, we are really saying, “You are real, but you are not good enough for me.” If the rejection is complete, we move on from that person, we cut them out of our lives. And we think that is the end of it. They are gone. Out of sight, out of mind. But that is not so, Jesus says here. Deciding that that person is real means that they stay in our mind. Deciding that they are not good enough for us means that they are relegated to our unconscious mind. From there, they (and the guilt attached to them) rise to haunt our mind like ghosts from the past, often in disguised form. One has to wonder: How many ghosts are lurking in our attic?

…It does not really matter, in the end, whether you judge right or wrong. Either way, you are placing your belief in the unreal. This cannot be avoided in any type of judgment, because it implies the belief that reality is yours to choose from.

How are we placing our belief in the unreal? The last sentence answers that question. By thinking that reality is ours to choose from. The Manual says the same thing: “To judge is to be dishonest, for to judge is to assume a position you do not have” (M-4.III.1:2). To judge is play God and thus, given that we are not God, tumble into the realm of fantasy.

Judgment, as I have said, is all about accepting and rejecting (based on measurement according to a standard). This is the process whereby we include things in our lives vs. exclude things from our lives. It is judgment that says that this thing goes on the mantel and this thing goes in the trash. Or more to the point, that this person goes in our bed and this person doesn’t get their phone calls returned. There is a profound hubris in this, for once we place that treasured person in the center of our lives and throw that unwanted person out on the periphery, we think that their status in reality is actually different. We think that one is actually at the center of the universe, and one is way out at the fringe. We unconsciously assume that our decision has actually changed their metaphysical status. But it hasn’t, of course. They are both equally real. They are both equally important in God’s eyes. Through judgment, we are just engaging in an elaborate fantasy of playing God.

Neither of you [referring to Helen and Bill] has any idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourselves and your brothers totally without judgment.

This line should be memorized by every student of the Course. I recently spent a day practicing it in this form: “I have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting myself and my brothers totally without judgment.” What a line! We have no idea of the toll that constant, ceaseless rejection takes on us, and no idea what will happen when we finally decide to lay it down.

If you will look back at the earlier notes about what you and your brothers are, you will realize that judging them in any way is really without meaning. In fact, their meaning is lost to you precisely because you are judging them.

What if something actually exceeds our standards? What happens to judgment then? What if someone’s reality is beyond our ability to evaluate? What if our brothers (and ourselves) are actually perfect, not in a limited human sense, but in the ultimate sense? At that point, judgment is entirely without meaning. If we insist on continuing to judge at that point, we are like a dog inspecting a great scripture with his nose and thinking, “This thing is worthless. Doesn’t smell like food at all.” Or we are like a six-year-old plinking out her first notes on a toy piano and saying about Mozart, “What a load of noise!”

As we stand before our brothers, we need to stand in humility. We need to realize that their reality is utterly and completely beyond our ability to judge, for it towers above our most sublime standards and far above our most intelligent powers of assessment. Their reality is perfect (not their personality, but the eternal reality behind it). Therefore, the only rational response is to accept, to take in, not to judge and reject. Anything other than this means not that we have figured out their meaning; it means that we have lost sight of their meaning.

All uncertainty comes from a totally fallacious belief that you are under the coercion of judgment. You do not need it to organize your life, and you certainly do not need it to organize yourselves.

Question: What does “under the coercion of judgment” mean?

It means that we think that we have to judge, that we have no choice. We need it to organize our lives, to decide what goes on the mantel and what goes in the trash. And we need it for an even more important task: to organize ourselves. If we can keep our minds in decent order, rather than letting in frightening impulses to do antisocial things; if we can keep our behavior in order, rather than doing those antisocial things; if we can keep our affairs in order, rather than looking to the world like a complete wreck, then we, it seems, have actually sculpted a worthy self. Don’t we believe that our judgment, carefully applied, can do this? Isn’t this what we tend to do all day long?

However, we are not under the coercion of judgment. We do have a choice. We don’t need judgment to organize our lives. The Holy Spirit can organize our lives for us and through us, if we will turn over the function of judgment to Him. And we certainly don’t need judgment to organize ourselves. God already did that when He created us. As the Course says, “Your worth is not established by teaching or learning. Your worth is established by God” (T-4.I.7:1-2).

When you look upon knowledge, all judgment is automatically suspended, and this is the process that enables recognition to replace perception….

Here, in this one sentence, we have a vision of a whole different relationship to life. Rather than perceiving, a state in which we strain everything through suspicious filters, we simply know, we recognize. Rather than standing back in myriad forms of rejection, we accept reality whole cloth, we take it all in. We love it all. This is what must happen if we stop playing God. If we let God decide what is real and what is important, then we must regard everyone He created as equally real and equally important. We must fully accept them all. They must all have the same place—the same total place—in our heart. Anything else is us playing God. If He created everyone as fully real, fully loved, and fully included, who am I to go in and try to change that? Who am I to try to turn His one inclusive circle into a series of concentric circles, going from the innermost in-crowd to the outermost outcasts?

These are the two states available to us. We can stand apart, subtly (or not so subtly) rejecting everything, inwardly withdrawing from everything. Or we can accept without reservation, we can be open-hearted to everything, we can refuse to stand apart, we can inwardly embrace all. Which relationship with reality do we want? This question will be answered by what we decide about judgment.

Two clarifications are in order here. One is that we only fully reach the latter state in Heaven. There, we have gone beyond all perception and all form, and we simply know reality, without interpretation, without filtering.

The other is that we are meant to have this innocently accepting relationship with true reality, not with form. We are not called to approve of everything in the world of form. We are not asked to naively say, “Ah, a rape, how lovely. It warms my heart. It’s perfect.” That would turn spirituality into idiocy. Judgment does apply to the world of form, for that world is inherently imperfect. It does not measure up to standards. We have to make judgments about the things in it—about turning right or left, about supporting this behavior or not, about accepting that idea or not. The Course simply wants us to turn those judgments over to the Holy Spirit, for only He can make them accurately, and only He can make them without condemnation.

You could say, indeed, that the Course has laid one massive judgment on the entire world. It has said, in essence, that this world so violates the perfection of true reality that it is outsidereality; it is not real. The Course speaks of this very judgment: “It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception: ‘It has no meaning, and does not exist'” (T-26.III.4:3). That is one hell of a sweeping judgment, but it is not a condemnation. You can’t condemn what isn’t there.

Once we lay this non-condemning judgment on the world, we can turn to true reality and merely know.

When you feel tired, it is merely because you have judged yourself as capable of being tired. When you laugh at someone it is because you have judged him as debased. When you laugh at yourself, you are singularly likely to laugh at others, if only because you cannot tolerate being more debased than others. All of this does make you tired, because it is essentially disheartening. You are not really capable of being tired, but you are very capable of wearying yourselves.

The strain of constant judgment is virtually intolerable. It is a curious thing that any ability which is so debilitating should be so deeply cherished. But there is a very good reason for this. (This, however, depends upon what you mean by good.)

Judgment makes us incredibly tired. We judge others as debased, as lower than our standards. We judge ourselves as debased, which then increases our need to denigrate others. We gaze out and everywhere we look we see imperfection. We see that which should be rejected. This “is essentially disheartening.” To dishearten is to cause someone to lose hope and enthusiasm, which is another way of saying to induce weariness. Isn’t that what constant judgment does to us?

This is why “the strain of constant judgment is virtually intolerable.” Which raises a natural question: Why are we so attached to something that is so debilitating? We need to ask ourselves this question. Jesus will give us the answer in the next paragraph.

If you wish to be the author of reality, which is totally impossible anyway, then you will insist on holding on to judgment. You will also use the term with considerable fear and believe that judgment will someday be used against you.

Here is why we cherish this debilitating ability. We are addicted to being the author of reality, or to wishing that we were. We are addicted to playing God. We have a cosmic authority problem. Judgment puts us on the throne, where, in our robes, we (seem to) have the power to say, “You get life. But you get death.” The Course puts it in vivid terms: “The dream of judgment is a children’s game, in which the child becomes the father, powerful, but with the little wisdom of a child. What hurts him is destroyed; what helps him, blessed” (T-29.IX.6:4-5). If this is the payoff of the game, we need to ask ourselves as honestly as we can: Is this worth it? Does the pleasure of playing God outweigh all the negatives—all the rejecting, all the lovelessness, all the withdrawal, all the disheartenment, all the weariness? Does it outweigh the debilitating effects of a relationship with reality in which we stand apart from all, in judgment of everything, unable to really love anything? Does it?

Exercise

Think of someone you have judged and found wanting, and have thereby rejected to some degree, even if it is only in your heart. Then repeat to yourself the following lines. Let each one sink and cause a shift before going on to the next:

The strain of constant judgment of [name] is virtually intolerable.
Judging [name] stems from my wish to be the author of reality, which is totally impossible anyway.
Judging [name] makes me fear that judgment will someday be used against me.
Because of what [name] is, judging him/her in any way is really without meaning.
In fact, [name’s] meaning is lost to me precisely because I am judging her/him.
In the knowledge of [name’s] true reality, all judgment is automatically suspended.
I have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that will come from meeting [name] totally without judgment.
And then I will meet myself totally without judgment.

 

[Please note: ACIM passages quoted in this article reference the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) Edition.]