Replace Judgment With Discernment

An ascension "hack"

Women in contemplationPhoto byPhoto by Anastasia Shuraeva from Pexels

If you’ve read “Growing Up Is Scary” or “Don’t Be Scared To Be Your Damn Real Self,” which were quite vulnerable; you might learn a lot of things from reading this piece, but it’s also a continuation to the previous ones.

I want to keep using the example I used in those last pieces. That of preferring discipline over laziness.

As I previously said, I love discipline, consistency, responsibility because over the years, those traits have proved to build solidity, thanks to which people could depend on, and have some peace of mind in a chaotic world.

But.

My love for discipline made me condemn laziness, hedonism, and complacency. That’s the problem with preferences.

When we prefer something over another — what we’re basically doing is denying one aspect of life in favor of another.

Life is infinitely huge. Laziness is as much of a part of life as discipline is. And so on.

If I condemn laziness, what I am basically doing is telling life that It’s imperfect, and my not accepting It in Its full manifestation makes me “blind.”

Therefore my perception of reality becomes corrupted — I see/process/interpret according to my biases, and slowly but surely, I “collect” and add so many different identifications to the “me” that I want “exclusion,” which brands know how to use to sell me stuff.

Exclusion means separation. My feeling special and superior disconnects me from others. I believe we’re separated from each other.

That’s the source of loneliness. Identification with different traits makes us attached to them. Which then makes us condemn other traits, and therefore we feel separated from life.

Now. Here’s the tricky part.

There’s a difference between judgment and discernment. Discernment is associated with the “third eye” in spiritual schools.

While judgement has a personal investment against laziness, discernment doesn’t — through discernment we perceive laziness for what it is, and it stops there.

Discernment — which embraces reality as it is and therefore perceives it without biases — has no emotional investment for laziness nor discipline.

When we’re not personally invested into opposing/being attached to a certain trait, there’s no reason for us to collide with other people who do the same.

Plus, we know it when someone judges us. And it’s never nice. No one likes to be judged.

As a side note, and for your personal experimentations: judgment drains us from our power. Wherever attention goes (judgment), energy flows.

Children, especially, sense judgments. And it’s a great part of their painful adult experiences.

To conclude this short piece of observation, judgment comes into being through attachment. We attach ourselves to those things that make us feel secure.

If mom and dad didn’t like us because we were lazy, and instead taught us discipline — craving their validation, we attached ourselves to their ideologies. And that attachment made us feel loved, and therefore secure.

But attachment in any shape and form always opens us to fear and insecurity.

And that’s why we continuously, throughout our lives, see people that are attached to different traits than ours, as threats to our wellbeing.

That’s why there’s so many conflicts in our lives. We love people, yet we can’t stand them sometimes, then we feel guilty for acting like whatever, then we’re happy for a few days, then the cycle repeats. And so on.

The only way to develop discernment and drop judgments is through responsibility.

We must become more responsible about our own stuff. People may have their parts in whatever challenging situation we’re going through, but, we also have one because it affected us in some way and therefore, we must look at the reason behind it.

Why did it hurt me? Why did it made me angry? Why did I feel so bad all of the sudden? People are people. But our role is also to investigate the source of our turmoil.

I will leave you with those ideas. Use them to gain some perspective, if you need to, in your healing journey.

As a final note.

If you’ve been meditating, using affirmations and thinking positively for a while now, without necessarily integrating spiritual truths at a soul level even though you understand them intellectually — I’ve written a book called Spiritual Transition to help you understand the main blocks to true spiritual growth, how to overcome them and how to heal yourself in an efficient way so that you realize for yourself how far you've come on your spiritual path. Check Spiritual Transition here.