Operating in ‘autopilot judgment mode’ is the root of a lot of suffering
In my experience it certainly is possible to avoid cruising through life in autopilot judgment mode. It’s not easy, and it takes practice, but it’s something I’ve been working on for nearly four years now, and I’ve been becoming more skillful each year.
The biggest (and first) challenge I had when starting to practice letting go of obliviously judging others, was practicing on myself first. As I grew my capacity for attention through daily meditation I became increasingly aware of my own thoughts, and started to notice the big ‘Top 10' that would continuously echo through my mind. Thoughts criticizing, judging or blaming myself were overwhelming. It was like my default mode was to shit on whatever action I took, idea I had, or speech I uttered. There was this seemingly constant drone of commentary in my mind, being delivered by the meanest, most self-righteous, nitpicky narrator in the world–which of course was just me.
As I familiarized myself with recognizing that narrator during formal sitting, I slowly started to remember to look for it during my everyday life, in ‘real-time’. As I grew more aware of the innate habit of judging myself, and more skillful at just not entertaining such thoughts an more, I found my opinions of others became less polarized, and I found I was better able to connect with people at work who I’d previously written off. As I’ve continued this practice it’s also helped provide me with a more spacious outlook on life in general and more energy to do what I want to do, and be creative.
You might be surprised how much energy goes into fuelling that unconscious arbiter in our heads – I certainly was. I just never noticed it before because it was constantly there, it was normal, and I justified feeling drained all the time by generating more thoughts about it: “Well everybody judges everybody anyways, this is just normal, it’s impossible for things to be any otherwise…’. Which, ironically, only left me more alienated from others, more mentally drained and overall, more prone to reinforcing my existing biases and assumptions about other people and the world.
I didn’t get from Keri Smith’s original post that it’s wrong to use the words good/bad to label others. I also don’t see her making claims about the authority people have to use good/bad labels, or about people’s ability to make value judgments of others. Of course you’ve ‘got the right’ to think of certain folks in your life as good people. I think for me, the crux of the article was how people tend to operate in ‘autopilot judgment mode’ and that’s where a lot of trouble comes from.
Great discussion here, thanks for the post Kerri.
