Posts tagged Detachment

There are certain expressions that tend to be frowned on in some spiritual circles. You don’t say such things unless you want to raise eyebrows and perhaps even be looked down on as not very advanced spiritually.

One such term is the word judge.

There’s an incident in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s internationally famous story of The Little Prince that throws a different light on the word “judge.”

The pilot at the heart of the story has crash-landed in the Sahara Desert, a thousand miles from any human habitation. There he meets a curious little fellow from the skies who asks him to draw him a sheep. The pilot, only accustomed to drawing boa constrictors since society reined in his artistic ability at age six, promptly offers The Little Prince his classic well-practiced drawing of a boa. The Little Prince wants nothing to do with a boa. He insists on a sheep.

Sheep don’t manipulate, control, or otherwise try to make things happen a certain way. They exude a certain detachment, just peacefully going about the task of being what they are, not threatening anybody like a boa constrictor might. And sheep certainly don’t constrict themselves or restrict others.

After three failed attempts to draw a young healthy sheep, the pilot quips as The Little Prince responds to his successful fourth attempt, “I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge.”

Judge?

The Little Prince is symbolic of our true being, our authentic self, the essence of who we are that got constricted in childhood, of which we have mostly if not totally lost sight. When we are untrue to ourselves-when we fail to be authentic or in some way compromise ourselves-our essential being judges us.

That is, the conscious watcher behind our thoughts, words, and actions calls into question whatever it is we are thinking, saying, or doing that’s out of alignment with our center. Judging can be a very positive experience. The issue is whether the judging is coming from our ego-our false self which we adopted while growing up in a world that didn’t allow us to be who we really are-or from our true self.

When ego judges, it puts us down and makes us feel awful. It’s the voice of “You shouldn’t have done that!”

As a result of making us feel bad about ourselves our judging ego then puts others down. Feeling hurt, we hurt those around us in the illusion this will somehow lessen the pain we are feeling. Egoic judging is critical of people, finding fault with them, instead of constructive. It doesn’t seek to make people right but to make them wrong. But when our essential being judges that we are out of kilter with ourselves-that we have gotten off track in terms of being authentic, being real-the judging is corrective.

It never puts us down, only shows us where we are failing to be who we really are.

In other words it puts us up.

To experience being judged by our essence is constructive of our true self. It helps us become more authentic, more true to who we really are but haven’t been allowed to be or even known how to be.

The Greeks used the word krisis for judgment, from which we derive our modern word “crisis.” Think of it in terms of a healing crisis, when for instance a fever rises to the point it turns an illness around and we begin to get well.

We are really talking about self-inquiry, which is a practice encouraged in the Journey to Higher Consciousness, a free weekly course for people who are serious about becoming conscious in their everyday life, available on the home page of this website.

Our true being observes our egoic self and its flip side that Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body and Michael Brown in The Presence Process refers to as our emotional charge, enabling us to see where we are betraying ourselves.

There is nothing negative in this, nothing to make us feel like a failure or inferior.

On the contrary self-inquiry leads to a deeper awareness of how we aren’t the painful behavior that springs from ego and the pain-body, and how we are that which flows spontaneously and naturally from our center.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the concepts of “right” and “wrong.”