Lesson 311

I judge all things as I would have them be.

Practice Instructions

See complete instructions in a separate document. A short summary:

Read the commentary paragraph slowly and personally.
Pray the prayer, perhaps several times.
Morning and evening: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open Mind Meditation.
Hourly remembrance: Repeat the idea and then spend time in Open Mind Meditation.
Frequent reminders: Repeat the idea and then spend a quiet moment in meditation.
Response to temptation: Repeat the idea whenever upset, to restore peace.
Read the “What Is” section slowly and thoughtfully once during the day.

Practice suggestion: Choose a person you are currently judging, and repeat the following lines:

I will accept Your judgment of [name].
I cannot understand [name] apart from his oneness with totality.
I do not know [name] and I cannot judge.
And so I let Your love decide who [name] is.

Commentary

The basic lesson of the Course about judgment is that we can’t really do it. We simply don’t have the equipment. We don’t know enough; as this lesson says, our judgment “cannot see totality, and therefore judges falsely” (1:4). What our judgment does, then, is to make things into what we want them to be, rather than what they really are. Unfortunately, it does so based upon “the agony of all the judgments you have made against yourself” (1:6). We project our self-condemnation onto the world, and what we see, as it said back in Lesson 304, is “my state of mind reflected outward” (W-304.1:3).

Instead of attempting to judge anything, we are asked to take judgment and “make a gift of it to Him Who has a different use for it” (1:5). In other words, we let the Holy Spirit judge for us. He always judges according to the truth, the reality of God’s creation. “We let Your love decide what he whom You created as Your Son must be” (2:3). He gives us “God’s judgment of His Son” (1:6).

Another way of looking at it is that we allow the Holy Spirit to tell us what we truly want: to see the perfection of God’s creation everywhere and in everyone. And then, because that is what we want to see, we “judge all things as [we] would have them be,” but now we judge differently because we want something different. Given to the ego, our minds always want to find fault because we are trying to deny and project what we think are our own faults; given to the Holy Spirit, our minds always find love or a call for love.

Today, then, Father, I would see Your Son as You created him. I would judge him truly. I would suspend my warped judgment and accept Yours in every way. Today I want to see the truth in everyone. Teach me to relinquish judgment on my own, and to accept the eternal judgment You have made: “You are still My holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless as your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure” (W-WI.10.5:1).