Judge Spyder Presiding: Please Remain Relaxed
This week’s prompt follows perfectly from the weekend prompt. Nowhere in our lives is it truer that our outer experiences are a reflection of our inner condition, than in the judgments we make in life. Let me be clear. I make judgements. You also make judgments. Everyone does and that is fine. The issue is how many judgments do we make consciously, and how many we make unconsciously?
Unconscious judgments are often made with our egos. Like many things based on our egos, they might not be the ones we are proud of. They might be judgments of attractiveness, intelligence, work ethic, profession, and appearance. Other negative issues many have with making judgments is based on a positive self-image. These types of judgments might then be about things like sexual orientation, nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, life-style, and the like.
Conscious judgments we make tend to be based on our sacred self. These types might be based on more general things like understanding, kindness, caring, humbleness, positive energy, empathy, generosity, and gentleness.
Let me try to explain what I mean in my first paragraph: Trust would be important to a person that is positive and it might be important to a person that is negative. The difference would be, a positive person would assume you are trustworthy up front. You would have to illustrate that you are not. The negative person would tell you that you need to prove to them that you are worthy of trust.
An honest person knows that not all people are honest. They generally go into a new situation, maybe cautiously, expecting honestly. A dishonest person projects dishonesty on all others and looks to take advantage of them before they themselves are taken advantage of.
A loving and caring individual looks to be a partner in all types of relationships, friendship or deeper. A self-centered person will look to see what advantage they can find in every relationship, again, friendship or deeper.
An important distinction to make about judgments is the good or bad. Others will never have the same judgment system that you have. That is fine. I am not a violent person. It would be my choice not to surround myself with violent people. I am a positive person. It would be my choice to surround myself with positive people. I wish to grow and I like to experience new things. It would be my choice to surround myself with people that have a similar lifestyle. Notice I did not say that people who like to participate in mixed martial arts are bad. I understand that many people see themselves as victims, they are making a choice and it is not one that I choose to do for myself.
The key to judgments is once again mindfulness. We need to be conscious of why we are judging, because we will judge. We need to need to admonish and dismiss judgments that do not relate to us. If someone finds us attractive it is a compliment. If does not matter if they are attractive to you, if they are gay, young, old, lesbian, bisexual, or countless other issues. We need to do that with other judgments that do not relate to us.
We do get to decide who fits into our life. We do get to decide what values and characteristics we look for in others. We can be different and get along fine. We can be different and love each other. We need to work on understanding and common ground. Just because someone chose something else. Voted for someone else or any other criteria doesn’t mean they can’t be a good person. Look for the deep important values to decide if you wish them to be in your life. If you don’t, then you still don’t need to think of them as bad.
They are different. Diversity is a wonderful thing.