We Who Measure

Do you judge? Of course, you do. Judging is how we compare and contrast, how we choose between this and that. It’s a habit as automatic as breathing. Every action, thing, person and experience is measured against what was, wasn’t or might have been.

Consciously or not, we spend our waking hours measuring what enters our sensory world: the flower that is lovelier than the one beside it, the haircut that looks much better since it grew out, the athlete who should have retired at the top of his game, the mind that isn’t as facile as it once was.

The egoic self is host to an endless stream of thoughts, and each of them, to some degree, gets a thumbs up or down. Our attitude and outlook at any given time is largely a reflection of our conditioning, preferences, and wishes.

Why is it that we feel punished or deprived when something we want doesn’t come to us, or when something we prize is taken away? Isn’t freedom, as the song says, just another word for nothing left to lose? The key, as our gurus counsel, is to recognize that we are freer when finding less to judge, worry about or tether us to delusion.

How much do you possess? How much more do you want? The less the better. When we don’t have much, there is more of us for everything else: life, love, and the precious moment at hand.

But what if the moment at hand isn’t likeable? Many of those that come to us uninvited and unexpected are unwelcome. Yet, as devotees seeking the highest within us, we need to realize and appreciate that nothing is unlikeable except as we miss the point of it.

Spiritual growth is a measure too. It’s an overcoming of biases and desires that suppress the soul’s emergence, binding it to the vagaries of the world and its troublesome dual nature. Lao Tzu praised as noble in spirit the person of self-awareness who strives more each day to be free of impeding judgments, accepting things as they are and thus rising above the pull of attachments and their disappointments. Such is the process of inner renunciation that our gurus have urged us to adopt, for it is also the measure of our love of God more than His finite gifts.

There’s a lot working against us, to be sure. Society does not cheer us on as we turn away from its acquisitive urgings, seeking to meet our needs alone while rejecting its material emphasis and unfulfillable promises.

It is rightly said that everyone wants to be happy and avoid pain. We must only go about these objectives wisely, for there is nothing here to decipher that isn’t essentially simple. As we accept more, judging and measuring less, we discover the happier difference.