TO JUDGE AS A SPIRITUAL EXERCISE

The word judge has a rough time in our world...we tend to automatically, immediately, color it ugly...not acceptable, to be avoided. 

Still more spiritual growth being our chosen way, the quiet word has become love. We have set a loose...very loose...course for ourself to seek peace in our mind...love or as close as we can get to it...for all we feel resistant toward. 

Lessons learned...and denied...and learned again as often as it takes: Judging spiritually is not sitting in judgment, which is not productive; judging spiritually is a necessary exercise in finding our own right or wrong.

It takes seriously spiritual discernment to get the gristle from the meat of this. 

Chatting with others, hearing their problems du jour, it is relatively easy to mentally "fix" each of them...not their problems, but them. There is the fork in our judgment road...do we choose to sit in judgment for our ego's sake or to judge for our enlightenment?

We remember, The battle is not yours, but God's which is somewhere in the Bible. As long as we are in the battle, as in trying to be right, we block God. Thus we begin the serious judging of the other for our own Self.  

Love being the spiritual end result, we are given permission to freely, harshly in fact, judge the other...always slapping our name on the other's harshly inventoried item. Spiritual judgment is a kind way to realize the truth of What you see is always yourself  (from "A Course in Miracles").

One reason why judging the other harshly works is that it gets our hackles up in our denial that it applies to us. Here we begin to seriously earn our wings...we hold our nose and take that storied leap of faith to learn our way of quick, fast and in a hurry is not God's will. 

We experience the value of working with our mentor or most trusted friend because this lesson in particular, but life in general, is so counterintuitive. Without God as the rutter, the listener can easily think less of us for being so "judgmental," and we can fall under ego's charge of "less than." 

Plain speak: This is not a choice we get to make. Shucked of all shields, we stand as our enemy in God...and we know love. 

Hard ain't it hard, this pearl beyond price, whose only cost is our gratitude for the enemy who has stripped self bare and set us free.

Thank you.