Judgment Call

Hello beautiful people! (Yes, that means you.)


To anyone wondering where I've been for the last few days, I opted to go on a kind of "radio silence" on the interwebs for a period of time.  I called it "cocooning."  I needed to consider some things about what has been going on in my life.  I've received some relatively cruel, if not incredibly ambiguous, criticism from a few folks about the nature of my life as it stands.  I cocooned because I wanted to try to discern whether or not I was indeed taking improper action.

I'm not completely certain how to articulate what I discovered.  I can say this: I feel like pushing forward into this thing with greater force now than I ever did before.  And I feel compelled to rework some of the other "older" parts of my behavior and mode of living quickly because I have found more destruction and more ineffectiveness.  Life is nothing if not a process.

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I would like to just briefly extend myself out to anyone out there reading this, as always: I want to talk to you.  Directly.  In any way you would like.  About anything you would like.  I am available in these ways:

E-mail      Twitter      Facebook

I am also willing to give my digits to anyone out there who would want to have a phone conversation with me.  As mention in my previous blog, I have done this a couple of times so far and it has been REALLY rewarding.  :-)

One more thing on this: if you have contacted me and I haven't replied in a timely manner, contact me again more forcefully, please!  I get a little flighty and forgetful but I do not want to miss the opportunity to hear you and know you because of that.  Along the same lines: if you blog or create online, and you want me at your blog commenting and reading, please bring it to my attention and I will unequivocally do that.  Due to flightiness, again, I miss out on a lot of cool blog posts done by dear friends.  But if you bring something to my direct attention, I promise to give it my full attention at my earliest possible opportunity.

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Also, I started a new "blog."  It's a "micro-blog" (I guess).  It's a "Tumblr" to be exact.  You all should check it out.  It will be dedicated to more serene and poetic stuff and I will be posting there at least once daily.  The nature of a Tumblr is to kind of force the blogger into making shorter blog posts.  Which I am desperately in need of.  This may be right up your alley, if you find yourself struggling to get to the end of my torturously long blogs.  I call the new blog:

LoveSolution

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Anywho, this blog post is going to consist of a piece of writing I did recently.  I did it after having a long conversation with a friend of mine (a friend I met as a direct result of the goofy sunglasses).  I'm going to post the body of the text here, for your review.  Anyone willing to read the whole thing should.  I'm looking for logical or spiritual inconsistencies in my own reasoning first and foremost.  I am also interested in hearing people's personal experience on the subject matter, which I guess would be "harsh judgment."  I think that's a pretty common portion of the human experience... so don't leave me hanging.  Tell me what you think! Also, if there are typos, tell me about them too! 

I'm posting the file as PDF here as well.  So if you are a slow reader, like me, or want to read in bed or whatever, you can whip this bastard over to your phone or iPad or Kindle of other device quick, fast and in a hurry.  Also, it makes it easier for you to send it to friends *wink wink*.

Special thanks to John, Sarah and Jera (that shit rhymed well) for looking over this for me like they did on short notice.  

Okay... here we go.

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Thoughts on Judgment

I stand accused by some of being too “idealistic” of late.  I stand accused of being narrow minded, hateful, and just plain wrong in the ways that I have been thinking and in the ways in which I have been asserting myself of late.

            I have been searching out people on the internet and in real life to the greatest extent possible.  I have been searching for people relatively indiscriminately.  I have been looking for a human connection of sorts and I have not been able to fully articulate the nature of the connection I seek.  The connection, I suppose, is self-defining in the sense that it is indiscriminate.  I wish to connect with humans.  Period.  My newfound sense of love for humanity has translated into a seemingly insatiable longing to simply be near humans and to know them.  I care much less about imposing my own thoughts or ideas upon the humans I meet than having them impose themselves upon me.  I wish to have them graft new ideas onto my worldview.

All of what I write here is an appeal to you, the reader, for dialogue.  I state things as hard and true only as a linguistic mechanism, and want to convey to you one thing before anything else: I don’t know what I am talking about, and I have a profound respect for my own vast ignorance and capacity to misunderstand.  This and any writing I do is my appeal to be shown any error that may exist in my thought process.  Also, please keep in mind that I endorse no church or religion or particular philosophy or ideology.  This writing is simply a synopsis of my own experience to date.

            I had a lengthy discussion with a 19-year-old girl via text today about the nature of “judgment” in life.  The conversation was about the nature of “judgment” in a particular aspect of her life.  Also, on more than one occasion recently, I have had people explain to me why judgment is an effective tool in their lives.  When pressed for answers as to exactly how judging others benefitted them, they were unable to produce an answer.  I want to talk a little bit about how judgment has behaved and lived in my life and what I have learned about it. 

           

            The 19-year-old girl belongs to a church that she claims to “hate.”  I asked her why she hates her church.  I know many people that adore their faith and derive an awesome amount of utility from their religion.  It seems odd to me that people go to churches that they don’t get anything out of. 

When I asked her why she hated going to church, she indicated that the people at the church seem to be judging her very harshly for some of her real life behavior.  Knowing her a little bit, I knew that she was referring to the fact that the people at her church tend to look down upon certain things about the way that she dresses and carries herself, and that they look down upon her experimenting with things like alcohol and sex in her real life.

            I want to make it clear here that I do not feel a need to say one way or another whether I think there is some basic moral shade to the action of living a life of abstinence from pre-marital or recreational sex, nor do I think there is a definite moral quality to living a life of abstinence from alcohol or from certain styles of dress/piercings/makeup, etc.  These things seem to me simply to be “modes of living.”  An example from my own life is the fact that I do not drink.  I do not think there is a moral “goodness” to my not drinking.  I believe that I simply don’t drink for personal reasons.  The acting of imbibing is, in and of itself, innocuous to me.

            I asked her why she thought that the people at her church judged her harshly or treated her sub-optimally.  She responded that the people treating her badly are “self-righteous.”  I believe that “self-righteousness” is probably an innate human quality that we all have, though.  I don’t find “self-righteousness” to be “wrong.”  I have discussed in a few spots, here and there, that I believe that we all, every human, behave only in ways that we feel to be right, despite the real world efficacy of our actions.  I used to drink and drive because, at some level, I felt that it was “right.”  If I had thought it was definitively wrong, I would not have done it.  That is not to say that I couldn’t see that other people thought it was wrong, nor is it to say that I didn’t know that each and every time I did it that I was putting myself and others at a level of risk for catastrophe.  The truth is, though, that at the time, given my understanding of myself and the world around me, the “rightness” of drinking and driving somehow outweighed the “wrongness” of it, even if only marginally.

           

            I told her that I thought there might be a different way to look at the situation, and that people may only appear overly self-righteous through sub-optimal action.  I suggested that perhaps their “harsh judgment of her” was not motivated by their “self-righteousness.” 

I asked her, as a thought experiment, to fill in the blank: “I am going to behave judgmentally because _______”

           

            Her blank was filled with something to the effect of “…because I am better than others.  Because others sin more and worse than I do.  Because people know what is right and they do the wrong thing anyway.”

            I thought about it for a second.  My friend is an open minded person who enjoys good conversation, so I proposed my own “blank-filler.”  My blank-filler looked like this: “I should be harsh and judgmental with people about their life choices because I believe that there is a Hell, and I care so much about certain people that I am willing to, up to a certain point, be cruel to those people now in order to help them avoid the pain of Hell later,” or alternatively, and perhaps marginally more selfishly, “I should be harsh and judgmental with certain people in my church so that they may realize the error in their ways and hopefully not become so secularized by culture at large that they leave the church forever, which would leave me with fewer people with whom to share my beliefs and on whom I can depend on for support in my own time of need.”

            This was revelatory for me.  I grew up belonging to a church that I always felt judged me too harshly.  I recall feeling precisely how this girl feels.  Perhaps even to a greater extent.  I recall the dread of having to face the people who I thought hated me because I was not as devout as they were.  I recall the dread of being at church.

            I wish I had been able to see, as a child, what I tried to explain to my friend during our conversation: that the people I went to church with never had any personal vendetta against me.  Their motivation was never to harm me and was certainly not, at the basic level, to elevate themselves above me and to cause me to feel small.  I can see clearly now that their motivation was only ever to A) save me from damnation and B) have me by their side on their journey of life, because people enjoy being able to walk their path with others alongside them.

            These are the things I perceive about the motivation behind that kind of “judgment.”  My friend responded to me, and rightly so, that the people at her church were only pushing her away, and that, if I was correct about how they were motivated, then they were going about getting what they wanted all wrong.  I agreed with her that, from what I knew of the situation, it sounded as though their behavior was sub-optimal based on the outcome they wished to see.

            This seems to me to be a point of contention with some people.  I believe now that this “taking ineffective and harmful action for a good motivation” seems to be the very nature of human suffering in a nutshell.

            Some people (dare I say many people?) seem to disagree with me here. 

While I don’t have any way of telling absolute truth from any untruth, I will say that, looking back on all of my experience and knowledge, I now see this to be true: every time I took ineffective action or harmful action or even abhorrent action (all of which I have done many many times, sadly), I believe that at the core I had a correct motivation.  The disconnect, for me, was that I was mentally confused and spiritually bankrupt and was therefore unable to identify optimal actions, and even unable to listen to other humans when they offered me different ways of thinking and acting. 

I was offered optimal actions and ways of thinking since the day I was very young.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around them.  So I spent 26 years acting for the right reason (to sooth my suffering, to connect with people, and to increase my longevity and happiness) in the wrong way (drinking and driving, bad-drugging, stealing, imposing verbal violence and occasionally physical violence onto others, being generally hateful and reclusive, and a long list of other things.)

I believe that my friend’s church members act for the right reason, which I think can be somewhat subjective.  She explained again that their behavior was “wrong” to her and that they were hurting her and pushing her away.  While I don’t necessarily feel adequately equipped to weigh in on how “right” or “wrong” their actions may or may not be in a definitive universal sense, I told her that, certainly, she seemed to be correct.  I’ll reiterate: their behavior was sub-optimal when taking into account the outcome that they wished to see.  They seemed to be doing themselves wrong just as they did her wrong.

I indicated to her that her church fellows were very likely confused as to what action to take, in the same sense that I was confused when I thought that drinking copious amounts of alcohol was a way to fix my world and my life.

She asked me about the nature of their confusion.  I indicated to her that my best guess about their confusion was that it was based on this illusion that humans seem to have that other humans can be forced or coerced into changing.  The illusion, I told her, seems to be a global illusion under which most humans suffer.  The illusion that people can be willed to change by force of any kind seems to be at the root of her situation, at the root of the most painful circumstances in my own life, and at the root of war, bigotry, the prison-industrial-complex and most other terrible human experiences.  I told her that I don’t think guilt-tripping or judging or maiming or killing or incarcerating another human being was ever a reasonable way to change that person at a fundamental level.

Now, my friend stands at a precarious threshold.  She can move forward with this church the way she is and continue to feel abused.  She can conform to their wishes.  She can leave the church for another church.  She can let the experience sour her on religion all together and take up the cause of militant atheism.  She has many options. 

To me it does not seem right, necessarily, for her to just “conform” to the wishes of her church blindly.  I think that action into which one has been coerced through force (even if just by the force of harsh judgment) is false action and leads to feelings of guilt, self-hate, confusion, and eventually spiritual and mental shutdown.  I have seen this many times in my life and in others.

            It doesn’t seem right for her to continue on suffering as she suffers, either.  So I struggled to find a course of action that I myself would feel comfortable taking were I in her position.  I offered up my two best solutions, from a first person perspective, putting myself in her shoes.  Before either of the two solutions though, I (optimally) would take the following requisite action:

I ought to do some soul searching and find out how much I feel that I need the judgmental person in question in my life.  To be frank, there are some humans I can love from afar, and to whom I don’t require any particular proximity.  Conversely, there are some humans (good friends and family) which I feel much more compelled to have in my life.  Simply put: there are some humans for whom I am willing to go to great lengths to have in my life, and others whom I am only willing to exert a minimal amount of effort on.  I believe I would ascertain this inner-knowledge through quiet contemplation, mediation, talking to a trusted and unbiased friend about the situation, and perhaps prayer (although obviously I wouldn’t recommend that portion to people who dislike prayer or are atheist.)    

Solution 1:  If I find that the judgmental person in question is one of the group that I am willing to exert a lot of effort and emotion on, then the choice is clear: I must, through patience and understanding, deeply internalize what I have intellectually asserted: that the judging-human is not, by nature of her judgment, a malicious human.  To the contrary, the judging-human is a loving-human and is likely merely confused as to how to assert herself in my life.  Knowing this, I must then internally and fundamentally accept the judging-human exactly the way she is.  I must accept judgment and all else.  I must be willing to suffer their judgment indefinitely.  I have to relinquish my need or compulsion to coerce them into changing their behavior. 

           

            Having done this, I will find myself in an optimal place from which to love the individual in question.  Solution 1 is to count on the power of love, acceptance and compassion to make life bearable, if not enjoyable, for myself and others.  In Solution 1, once I have come to a quiet spot of inner-acceptance, I show the judging-human love and compassion by offering them all that I am willing to.  Primarily, and ideally, I would offer them my love (verbally and otherwise), my time, my space and my understanding.  Solution 1 is to make myself small in the presence of the judging-person and to simply love them because they are “that important to me.”

            Solution 2: If, after some soul searching, I find that the judging person is not a person for whom I am willing to exert a lot of spiritual or emotional energy, then I must simply extricate myself from their life as much as possible.  I cannot ever expect them to change.  To place expectations on another human being seems fundamentally wrong for me.  I cannot coerce them into changing, as I am frustrated with their very attempt to do the same to me.  If the spiritual-cost-benefit-analysis of the individual comes up heavy on the “cost” side, then I am obligated simply to move away and love that person without imposing my presence on them anymore. 

Solution 2 is simply to walk away, and to walk away in a loving manner.  It is to depart in a non-judgmental manner.  Simply: to understand that the judging-human is not a malicious one, and is likely confused.  It would be important for me to leave the situation with a kind word, or at least a neutral energy, if possible, as opposed to an angry or spiteful energy.

            So what’s the “take away?”  My friend found me to be too “idealistic.” Our conversation was via text, though, and my message may have been diluted.  She indicated to me that what I said logically made sense to her but that people are selfish and do not change.  That they will always fight.  I guess the problem I’ve had the hardest time getting over is wanting people to change too.  

            I understand the mentality that tells us that humans are of poor quality.  I understand the thinking that goes into a statement like “people suck and will never change and will always hurt one another.” 

            I thought that way for 26 years.  I still find those thought patterns creeping up occasionally.  I have recently acquired a huge stick with which to bludgeon those thoughts, though: love.  I don’t have to change people or convince people anymore.  Every single time I tried, I got hurt, and so did they.  I have seen that a humble, loving word, though, affects even the hardest spirit in ways I never thought possible.

            My life was simply of very, very low quality when I was walking around excluding people from my life because I thought that they were judging me.  My life was of poor quality when I was constantly judging others.  And I can see now that, really, if I wish to live a life in which I am not judged by other humans, I must first get clear within myself with the fact that I myself have no moral high ground from which to judge anyone.  Once all my desire and emotion and thought are boiled down to their purest form, I can see that my judgment of others has been one of the most destructive poisons in my life.  And the further I look at it, the more I can see that all of the times I was judging others, I was in “the wrong.” 

            For me, this lesson is not about whether or not there is an inherent nature of right or wrong to any particular action.  I find a few things to be basically morally wrong and will likely never be convinced otherwise.  Murder and rape, for example, are two things that are never right, I believe.  But my knowing that an action is wrong does not give me the right to “judge” the killer.  I have, again and again, taken actions myself that I now believe also fall under that “absolutely wrong” label.  I took those actions based on all of the best knowledge and training the world had afforded me to date, and based on my own insecurities and self-hateful hang-ups, which were, to a certain point, inescapable outside of certain experiences.  I took those actions because I was confused.  My friend’s church fellows take sub-optimal action, from what I can tell, out of confusion.  Not out of any malicious nature.  I take sub-optimal action out of confusion.  I judge others only as a result of my own ignorance and confusion.

            What do you think?  While you decide, I’ll recall some words on the matter that are not my own:

From The Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter 7 (a report of Jesus Christ’s much publicized “Sermon on the Mount”):

           

            “(1)Judge not, that you may not be judged.  (2)For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.  (3) And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is thy own eye?  (4) Or how sayest thou to thy brother: let me cast the mote out of thy eye; and behold, a beam is in thy own eye?  (5) Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

           

From the Qur’an, XXII, 17:

            “Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Sabeans and the Christians and the Magians and those who associate (others with Allah) – surely Allah will decide between them on the day of resurrection; surely Allah is a witness over all things.”

            (My understanding of this quote is to say that since no man is omnipotent and no man can know the inner workings of another’s heart, that judgment must be left for some other omnipotent power.)

In the words of Mother Theresa:

            “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”

Native American Proverb:

           

            “Don’t judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.”

Friedrich Nietzsche:

            “Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.”

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Okay.  That's it.  I get nervous posting this much writing in one shot.  I feel a little out of control doing it.  But, please, tell me what you think.  :-)

Love.