Excerpt About Judgment

Believing in Your Ideas About How Things Should Be

You believe in your ideas about how things should be, for instance, what constitutes happiness and success. You are always trying to live your life according to these ideas. But this closes you off from that openness that will reveal what’s actually unfolding. You are rejecting reality and restricting the possibilities of what could happen. Now you are asking yourselves, “So what can we do?” But let’s look at that question—what is the motivation behind it? Isn’t the motivation that you want something, and want to know how to go about getting it? And isn’t that wanting determined by your usual beliefs and ideas? Aren’t you then engaged again in the same movement, continuing the same old reality? The alternative to this pattern will appear only if we completely understand what we are discussing. To seek an alternative is already a judgment that things need to be different. This judgment is based on certain basic beliefs—that you should be happy in your life, that you should live as long as possible, that it is better to be beautiful than not beautiful, better to be rich than a poor, better to be a success than failure. Every day you put the same patterns, same ideas, and same hopes in front of you. They may be modified here and there, but they are basically the same. We carry our past with us. If you look at your life, there is no present, no future; your mind is always in the past. You are furnishing your future, all the time, by continuing your past. Everyone wants to continue in the same way, yet you wonder why your life does not seem fresh or new, why instead, it feels like a swamp. You say you want newness, life, freshness, change, transformation. But this would mean that the past is left in the past. Is it possible for us to be here without the past? What I’m saying is not original. Every spiritual teacher says the same thing: the point is not success or happiness, the point is to be real. I’m saying this now so that you can understand the situation, not so that you do something about it.

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