Understanding vs Judgment
Without compassionate understanding of ourselves, our behaviours, personality and past there is judgment. Judgment by its very nature gives birth to a need to forcibly change something.
Judgment and understanding are opposites and knowing what either is means we can understand the other.
Within understanding is to pay attention, to listen, to remain curious, to be open, to be willing to receive new information, to be willing to have our ideas changed. This facilitates true acceptance, the state of yielding to whatever may be.
On the contrary, Judgment is final, is unwilling to be changed, is to assume the knowledge is known and needs no further enquiry. To speak metaphorically, it puts hard straight lines around everything which then requires force or deletion to change into something else.
Rather than landing at truth, it actually blocks the prospect of truth. Truth is not fixed. The scientific enterprise of the last few hundred years is a clear example of this – landing on what we think of facts, only to see this constantly amended as we ‘progress’.
That is unless we try to understand instead. When we understand, the ‘truths’ which are really judgments manifesting as a personal agenda or biases, start to change.
There is no judgment in truth because truth does not depend on a system of value like judgment does. In truth there is nothing to like or dislike. It just is.
I used the term ‘compassionate understanding’ but to understand is by its nature to be compassionate. To understand is not to add up the facts and knowledge but to generate a sense of ongoing openness.
The emotional dimension
I used the term ‘self analysis’ but that term denotes exclusivity to facts and information and does not include the emotional dimension which is part of the picture. This emotional dimension is also what makes this work incredibly difficult.
The way something makes us feel can be the barrier to truly knowing, as in, if we have feelings of guilt, shame, discomfort, sadness, grief, anger or even disgust to name but a few during our process then it is only normal to want to turn away and not feel them. Basically anything we would class as pain.
Resistance or aversion to the emotions or pain however will be what hinders our desire to truly understand ourselves. You could even say that strong emotions like this are the pre-cursor to judgment. In my experience, self judgment and uncomfortable emotions go hand in hand. They are never apart from each other and there is a direct correlation between how difficult it is to address unhelpful behaviours and the intensity of emotion or pain I associate with them.
Basically, the behaviours I find hardest to investigate and amend are the ones I am unwilling or unable to truly understand due to how it would make me feel to see them. This registers as general unacceptance of self.
Put another way, the more I dislike those aspects of myself, the more it will be difficult to understand and therefore, the more difficult it will be to be free of those compulsions.
Let’s say I desire to be healthy but that is being sabotaged by my need for snacking in the evening, eating sweets, chocolate and whatever else. If I think to myself that this behaviour is bad, weak, or indeed that I am weak or less than, because I can’t stop (judgment), I will suffer on some level the pain of shame. I can beat myself up, try to force the change, tell myself ‘I need to stop’ or try to force with angry inner tones of willpower, both bypassing and increasing my sense of shame. This makes the change that much harder. That enhanced sense of shame will be difficult to visit in an understanding way. It will hurt to go there. I am likely to avert it and go round in circles trying to get healthy but unable to stop eating the junk.
What do you ‘do’ with emotions?
The fact there is an emotional dimension to this process means there is another element to the ‘work’ we are doing for it to be meaningful.
We can’t ‘know’ emotions intellectually. Emotions are things we feel and this is where analysis, that which uses the powers of intellect and working with concepts, has run its course. To understand emotions they have to be felt, not known, but how can we safely go through this process? Who wants to live out feelings of pain and discomfort?
I have to feel the emotions ‘properly’.
What does that mean?
To outwardly express them? To act on them? Do I channel my rage by hitting a pillow with a baseball bat?
No. This isn’t how I ‘feel’. To me, to feel is to be the receiver.
To be a witness to emotions, to let them be there. To quietly grieve losses, to experience the surging, intrusive power of rage, the sickness of dislike and disappointment, the heavy, deflating energy of apathy and disgust, the agonising discomfort of guilt or shame.
Emotions as energy
I see my emotions ultimately as forms of energy that require the same kind of willingness to be understood. When they are not felt or seen or experienced, they are like ice. They are there but as potential energy, frozen. Within this emotional ice are the judgments and thoughts. All of this together is preventing any meaningful change. Being willing to feel them allows that ice to melt, for things to move, to be dislodged, for truth to emerge and for change to occur.
David Hawkins in his book ‘Letting Go’ describes how this simple technique of feeling emotions in this way is the truest method he knows of attaining true enlightenment and becoming free of negativity. His accounts of this a truly inspirational.
But I don’t want to…
Without realising, I definitely resist my emotions. I don’t want to feel them and this is sort of semi conscious behaviour. Sometimes I consciously don’t want to do the investigation. I don’t want to ‘understand’. I know what’s lurking. This is of course ‘understandable’.
Incidentally this is also the dynamics behind procrastination; the feelings of angst, sickly awkward discomfort at the prospect of not knowing how you are going to find your way to the finish of a task and whether it will be any good.
The Dance
In terms of self enquiry, this is the continual back and forth of finding the truth. What doesn’t serve me – verified by how it makes me feel – all goes through this process of
resistance, investigation, resistance, investigation, understanding, feeling emotion, resistance, investigation, feeling emotion and letting go.
In this sense, it’s not a straightforward process at all. Things happen bits at a time, things soften and change but can harden and return later on. Some of the ‘ice’ has been there for years, is dense and requires much attention. It’s not always safe to jump in all at once, or to do the work alone. All of the outstanding, long-lasting methodologies of either behavioural change or ‘self’ transcendence are done with guides and other people. Experience, wisdom and support.
To re-state: I am powerless over the complexities of my behaviours, as in, I cannot force them to change or force them away. The tips, tricks, gimmicks and books about willpower and self improvement (forcibly changing the self) are not what I need. They aid the the negative aspects of self will. They contribute to self judgment and punishment, allow the voice of the Inner Judge to resonate and ultimately they keep the struggle going, spoken of at length in PART 1 & PART 2.
In this sense there is nothing to fix, there are just things to understand, to feel, and to let go or surrender, whenever it is appropriate for that to happen.
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