The Death of Judgment

There is a basic assumption underlying P-A which is pregnant with joy. No one is culpable or from the religious perspective—there are no sinners. Therefore, guilt and shame are inappropriate. So is judgment. Failure to grasp this key principle of the emerging paradigm robs us of a phenomenally liberating realization.

On the day following a discussion of judgment in my Thursday evening support group, I was walking down the 16^th Street Mall in Denver. Three people along the mall were handing out small flyers entitled “The World is About to Change…”  The flyer chronicled the abuses of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party) blaming it for the deaths of 65-80 million Chinese people from 1949 to the present. A web site was listed at the end of this tract suggesting that China was ripe for change.

In my group the night before it was suggested that a way to measure how well we as individuals were doing in transcending judgment was to measure whether we “react” when tempted with an opportunity to judge or “respond” with the feeling of compassion. I happily noted that after reading the listed abuses of the CCP, namely (1) 1950-1952 Land Reform-5 million villagers killed, (2) 1959-1961 The Great Leap Forward-40 million dead (3) 1966-1976 The Cultural Revolution-8 million dead (4) Tiananmen Square Massacre 3000 killed (5) 1999-present The “Eradication of Falun Gong Campaign 7000 estimated dead.

After reading of the horrific death tolls I noticed that I was not having any afflictive emotions, I was not reacting, I was not angry or sad about the history of China which I realized did not differ from the history of humanity as a whole in anything but the details. Instead I felt compassion for the CCP and the Chinese people.  There were no culpable people only unconscious suffering people.

From the point of view of the CCP, of course, the actions listed above were “justified” given the paradigm from which they viewed “reality.” The abuses of “western imperialism” and “capitalism” justified Communism. Today, the abuses of Communism were used to justify this flyer and the website. (The accuracy of the figures in the pamphlet is not relevant to my point in this essay.) I could condemn no one nor judge the CCP or the distributors of the flyers.

As an American I realized that my nation was involved in the similar ongoing shadow projections that characterize human interactions both as individuals and as collectives. In the current “war on terrorism” that characterized the post 9-11 world, Osama bin Laden judges George W. Bush and “W” judges bin Laden. Neither man is aware of what is really happening nor are they aware that they are enslaved to continuous and uncontrolled reactions and counter-reactions.

Most human intercourse is replete with judgment and counter-judgment because those behaviors fulfill the needs of the unconscious false-self. Until we wake up to the absurdity of believing in the evil “other,” we will experience a dark world filled with shadowy, costumed, super-natural inhuman beings that lurk menacingly in our tortured, judgmental minds. The only death that can ever be justified is the death of judgment itself.

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Much more in-depth discussion on Simple Reality can be found in the book  Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival.