Ante Up At The Judge Everything Casino
Judge Not That Ye Be Not Judged
A poetic and round about way of saying
If You Stab Yourself With a Knife, You’ll Be Stabbed With a Knife
Those of us familiar with the Bible tend to interpret this phrase as some kind of retribution or punishment a soul will face in the final afterlife judgement of it all if you spend your life being judgey and critical of people. That’s a kind of fairy tale way to interpret it. Take note, I’m not implying that the Bible is a fairy tale.
I’m suggesting that our interpretations of this book, that has been translated, interpreted and reinterpreted, literally God knows how many times, through two millennia, tend to reflect our limited emotional intelligence as flawed beings more so than the probable intent of the authors. Translators sometimes choose words that don’t exactly convey the precise meaning of a passage and it becomes a different message than the original intent.
You could think of it as two thousand years of Whisper Down The Lane. You know that game we played in elementary school where one kid is given a phrase to whisper into the next kid’s ear and thirty kids later it’s some entirely different statement from the original words. Perhaps it’s not that extreme but it’s along those lines.
Consider this. When you judge a person you don’t know very well or don’t know at all, you picture your summation of them in your mind and decide that, that is who and what they are in reality. When in real reality, you’ve created a character in your head and judged that character as whatever it is you’ve decided they are, good or bad. By judging your own creation you’ve judged yourself. The separation between you and the object of your judgment that you are imagining isn’t there.
What the passage really means is, when we judge someone else, in truth, we judge ourselves.
We’ve all been surprised when someone we’ve judged to be an excellent human being exhibits their flaws to the world and proves our judgement of them to be somewhat mistaken. We resist changing our minds when someone we’ve judged as bad or evil shows they have a heart and might deserve some compassion. We need them to be permanently all good or all bad. When in reality everyone is somewhere on the dial in between the two polarities and we fluctuate by degrees from one side to the other on any given day.
How many times in a day are you consciously aware you are judging someone or something, if you realize you’re in the act of judging at all? It can be so reflexive. How many times in a day are you aware that you are judging yourself? All of these judgements. This or that is good or bad. I am this, which is good or bad. He or she is this or that, which is good or bad. It’s completely you and me judging ourselves. Judge not, that ye be not judged. If you stab yourself with a knife, you will be stabbed with a knife. You being the wielder of the knife/judgment and all.
Most of the time we don’t know these people well enough to judge them. Or we’ve closed our minds to the ones we think we do know well enough and won’t allow any more information in that doesn’t affirm what we’ve already decided about them.
Clearly common sense judgements are necessary for survival. I’m not talking about judging putting your hand in fire as a good thing to do. Or judgements of another’s character as good when it’s obvious that this person’s intentions are quite the opposite.
I’m talking about the myriad of armchair quarterback judgments we make based on superficial evidence, secondhand, third hand, or four to the 10th power hand, information about people and events that in truth changes nothing in our lives except the extent of our outrage, envy, feelings of hopelessness, attraction to or revulsion from whatever it was we intellectually ingested and the effect those emotions have on our point of attraction.
If you spend too much time immersed in social media most of the judgements or conclusions about yourself and others you may come to are probably very superficial and based purely on appearances, theatrics, fabrications, staged lifestyles that appear not to be staged, and a lot of just flat out lies.
It’s wonderful that social media has given us the opportunity to judge babies as adorable little love bombs, all cats, dogs and the animal kingdom in general as being worthy of tremendous love and admiration. Basking in those moments of beauty, appreciation, grace, and love are important for soul growth, which is why we live. If only we felt that way about ourselves and each other.
Those targeted ads. They want to know who you are, where you are, where you’ve been, what you’re doing, what you believe, whom or what you love, whom or what you hate, so they can categorize you and drive your thinking, your actions, and/or your money in one direction or another. Businesses, corporations, politicians, governments, and nere’do wells pay these platforms good money to fuck with our minds. But you knew that… Right?
Social media is influencing your judgements. Judgements about yourself. Judgements about the people around you. Judgments about the people nowhere near you. Judgements about your lifestyle, your value as a human being based on your buying power, politics, bust, waist and hip measurements, they are so in your shit, they may as well be literally checking your shit. That’ll happen when they break down medical privacy laws. But if you handle your medical history thru a browser, they’ll have an idea from the sites you visit.
I think we’ve learned by now that not all psychopaths are serial killers and murderers. There have been some very interesting studies on CEO’s and psychopathy. Psychopaths have no empathy, they don’t care who they hurt or how they hurt them. Some of these social media moguls appear to fall into a range of this category. I will not mention names, you know their names.
I used to work with a person who constantly bragged about his million dollar home. This was back when not so many homes were over a mil. One day I asked him if he were walking down the street and found a dime on the sidewalk and homeless person nearby, would he keep the dime or give it to the homeless person? His answer was: “I’d keep it. Finders keepers!” And this was a grown-ass man well into his 50’s. The way he said finders keepers was like a selfish, entitled and grasping, mean child. These are the types of people telling us how to feel about ourselves and the rest of the world.
We’ve all brought a hefty wad of our own personal judgments to the judge everything casino called social media. We judge ourselves and we judge others, winners or losers or somewhere in between based on this artificial, completely market manipulated, stream of quite conscious bullshit. And we consume it like digital crack addicts.
Every other post is somebody selling themselves, some product, course, or get rich quick method and it’s working. That’s why social media is so successful. It’s the virtual wild, wild west. Social media will have you thinking the world is in as much chaos as the internet is. Which it isn’t. Or at least it wasn’t….
Right now what we have is a significant part of humanity spiritually awakening, and another part fighting like hell to keep things the way they have always been and even roll spiritual evolution back a few centuries. Add to that the earth, Mother Gaia, bringing her reckoning to bear upon us in so many ways. We are in a time of deep spiritual and physical reckoning as a species right now.
So the judgments are flying in all directions. If we could lay our mental journey out on the table and see how our self judgements developed from influences from our parents, authority figures, our cultural influences, and life experiences, we would see very few moments if any at all when we weren’t judging ourselves, someone, or something.
The news has become all judgements, we’re being told how to judge the world. We’re allowing ourselves to be led into someone else’s judgment. And we get passionate about whatever judgement we’ve decided to opt in on.
Sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle. We are being told what and whom to think about. What to think and feel about it, and how to judge them. I’m not attacking journalism. True journalism refrains from judgement and delivers the facts allowing the reader or listener to decide for themselves one way or another. I’m talking about propaganda passing itself off as journalism.
But this blog post is about judgement. They judge and we judge with them. Whoever “they” may be. But really, we don’t know any of these people delivering the propaganda. Do we? We form an image or scenario in our minds, one’s they’ve marketed to us, and we judge based on that. Good person, bad person, trustworthy source, untrustworthy source. Based on what we’ve judged in our minds, we either embrace it or attack it. Indifference is an interesting gray area. Are you genuinely indifferent or is it passive aggressive indifference?
Anyway, all this is going on completely in our own individual minds, each in our own individual way. We are only judging ourselves. Never mind what you believe is going on, or don’t believe is going on in this world. The burden of your judgement is entirely on you. It’s a burden you have willingly taken on and accepted from these sources offering it to you.
How long do we have to be in a manipulative relationship before we snap out of it and get tired of being manipulated? Passing so many judgements on everyone and everything. We’re being conditioned to think a certain way, conditioned to believe particular things and conditioned about what to believe about things in general.
And we, the ravenous consumers, pile up the karma over shit that’s entirely in our minds, whether it’s based on the truth or an outright fabrication. I’ve watched people get rattled and disoriented when they don’t know how to judge something or someone. Everything in their lives has a judgement sitting right on top of it. When they can’t judge they don’t know where they imagine themselves to be positioned on the good to bad dial, because they’ve judged themselves at a particular point on it in relation to all the other things they’ve judged in this life.
A house of cards way to structure your self image. It’s a neurosis for sure. A very widespread and acceptable neurosis. It’s easier to go with the crowd. You don’t have to think, it’s all done for you. Just roll with the tide. Take it all in and let the screen tell you who to be, how to think, how to feel and what to judge a certain way.
It’s not good. I’ll say it again. You are only judging yourself.
You might not realize that you don’t fully know who you, as an individual, are, or you’re not paying attention to who you are and subsequently are easily misled. Especially when this trusted source is handing you someone to be. A cause. A shiny new you. You feel like you belong now, you have a bigger family of people who think the same way about the same things and there’s camaraderie and a sense of purpose in that. Security in numbers.
We openly judge ourselves, too fat, smarter than everyone or not smart enough, too one thing, not enough another, and we attach emotional meaning to these judgments which makes them even more pernicious.
We voluntarily depress ourselves with the negative judgments or we set ourselves artificially above everyone around us if we’ve judged ourselves superior to others for whatever reason. Either way a wall is put between your consciousness and the truth.
And the judgment is that wall. The mind closes at that point and nothing new comes through unless some cataclysmic, life altering awakening takes place. Which most of the time it doesn’t and even if something mind altering and cataclysmic does happen, sometimes even then, a person might plunge into self pity, and they shrink instead of growing spiritually.
As women, we’re constantly under a microscope of judgments no matter what we do. It’s a world wide cultural tradition to judge a woman for so many things and life events beyond her control, it’s ludicrous. But that’s a whole other series of articles.
Don’t just sit there with your brain turned off soaking up whatever the screen is presenting to you. Think. For. Your. Self. We’ve been lulled into such distraction and complacency. Granted, living in this society requires we follow certain social rules and laws and thats fine. But for crying out loud. Wake Up!
We’re being manipulated from all directions for a myriad of reasons that all point back to money and power. Each individual bears the burden of their own thoughts. Thoughts have power and intent, nothing in this universe has ever happened without the thought of it coming first. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that thoughts don’t have just as much power as deeds. Thoughts and deeds are the egg and the chicken. Both are tangible things in different stages of manifestation.
Just try to become more aware of the amount of judgment you pass on any given thing, person, and or event during your day. For whatever reason.
Don’t be afraid to question yourself. Why are you judging this? What relationship does this person or thing have with you? Who or what taught you to think like this? Why does it matter to you?
You don’t have to do it with the intent of finding things wrong with yourself. That would just be more judgement. I’m not encouraging you to doubt yourself. I’m not telling you to strive for indifference. The pathway to your conclusion actually could be sound and accurate and if it is truly sound and accurate it can withstand the questioning.
Be kind to yourself and and others. Use your common sense. Some basic judgements are necessary. If the milk is sour, it would be wise to judge it unfit to drink.
Be careful about who, what and how you judge. Don’t waste your life by allowing yourself to be manipulated into spiritual mistakes.
I know the people this article was meant for probably aren’t reading it, but I had to put the words out there anyway. I also started writing this before the invasion of the Ukraine. And I am quite aware that I’m using social media to point out the flaws in social media.
Thank you.
