Mindfulness Of Judgment

The idea called “mindfulness” has recent spin in this century and the last 25 years of the past century.  It is sourced from Eastern and particularly Buddhist origins.  The concept has been around in documented civilization for millennia and with humankind for a couple of million of years.  The idea of using awareness to ‘see’ in the Moment is indigenous to who we are at all times.  The other factor validating this experience is the non-judgmental quality of it all.  

Judgment or maybe “like vs. dislike”  or “I think this…” quality is interesting to observe and question.  Why would there be no judgment in the Eternal Now? The reality of Presence is strictly objective as far as the big picture is concerned.  There is no room for big egos.  Ego usually brings with it a demand and an associated unreality with it.  Ego thrives in judgement (criticism).  The time zones of unreality in the past and the unreality of the future are really the only effective places where it can deride and push itself.  For the ego to go into the Now is to go to an unstable environment. The ego is only a mind construct.  

Judgments that are separate and dualistic are not inclusive,  much like knowledge is not all inclusive.  The knowledge we are familiar with as civilians is deducted and distilled from the larger vehicle of experience.  Experience is all inclusive.  How we speak of our experience, can never cover the breadth nor depth of what really occurred.  It is deductive in only securing a selection of some of what had occurred.  One cannot really understand until one ‘experiences’ the moment.  And even that similar experience is mediated by the experiencer, making it unique.

Ergo, judgment is derivative, selective, and interpretive via the stability or instability of the experiencer.  In common worldly matters, reason and discrimination matter in order to traverse the worldly path.  This is where the mind comes in.   It is this logical reason and discrimination that it is necessary.  However, it is only a tool.  A tool, like a hammer, can be abusive or constructive.  Our use of this tool, even when constructive,  can be skillful or unskillful.  These distinctions are important because the tool itself is not automatically good or bad (a distinction).  It is a limited lever to transact actions on this plane of existence.  It is not a barrier to mindfulness, although it is often the barrier to mindfulness.

So the question comes in, when do we need this judgment and when is it a subtraction to Being?  It is not a zero sum game.  We can properly profit from driving a car and successfully complete a trip.  And we can maintain the state of Being awareness.  If this was not the case, we wouldn’t hear of  any enlightened beings in history or in our present times.

Mindfulness is essentially awareness by another name.  Awareness is the constant connection to Being in the Moment with awareness of the witness without attachment to the result.  Judgment can and does take place in the tool called the mind.  The mind is not the consciousness of Being. 

 The mind’s attachments to results complicate (to say it mildly)  judgment and life; judgment should not supplant consciousness when used within the tool called the mind.  Attachment brings the inappropriate selection of choosing the mind over the natural choice called consciousness.  We choose the mind and install it as our mainstay which causes distortion in our view. This is due to judgment inappropriately leeching into consciousness.  The ‘Being’ state then becomes unavailable.  

Case by case, a floodlight or a spotlight, which is more appropriate? Use the Moment, Be the consciousness effortlessly  and see the attachments in our judgements/mind.  Daddy’O