Comparisons are judgments

 

All comparisons are judgments.  “She is prettier than her sister.”  “You are a better worker than before.”  “My group is more intelligent than other groups.”  Consequently, do not respond to comparisons.  Deny the ego.

 

Adjectives are judgments

 

All adjectives are judgments: brown, small, complicated. Do not get attached to adjectives and the attributes they are the signposts for.  You spend your lives in pursuit of certain labels that you have attached value to:  educated, cool, fashionable, smart, sympathetic, has good taste, and so on.  But why have you attached value to any of them?  It can only be because you think they would make you better, because you presently are not perfect.

 

 

 

How much better it is to turn inward and know that what you desire to be, you already are. Then there is no striving.  Only peace.

 

 

 

You also get stuck like glue to adjectives whose meanings you don’t enjoy: stressed, nervous, unattractive, uninteresting, and then defend them.  How many times have you heard someone going to bat for negative traits of themselves?

“That’s just me.  That’s the way I am.”

 

I let go what does not serve

 

 

Has there ever been a negative aspect you have embraced in this way?  “I’m impatient with slow people. I’ve always been like this.  My mother was the same way…” and on and on, an endless spiral of justifications, rationalizations, hairsplitting details, minute comparisons, all the beloved domain of the ego.  There you go again, completely taken over by the surface personality that you think you are.

 

What if instead you looked at that root thought, whatever it might be, whether “I am fat”,  or “I can’t speak in public”, or “I have nothing to say.” Shine the light of your consciousness on it.  Focus close up on that thought. See that thought wriggle with discomfort in your attention.  Then ask that thought,  “Do you really even have to be here?”

 

 

Sometimes, a quick glimpse of illumination from the light of the inner being which asks this question, is enough to send the thought packing, like a thief who has been caught red-handed.

 

Let me have no other desire than to do good

 

Image by Janice De Santis