Shambhavi riffs on the distinction between judgment and discernment and between justice and the full expression of a kindness that supersedes the need for justice. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
Student: Will you talk about judgment?
Shambhavi: Hmmm! Judgment day’s a-comin’. (Laughter)
The most important thing is to be able to discriminate between judgment and discernment. Discernment—absolute clear seeing—is a quality of this alive aware reality that we've embodied, more or less. So we have more or less clarity, or more or less confusion or cloudiness in our discriminating between what’s helpful for us, and what’s not helpful for us. Who's helpful to hang out with, and who isn’t. What circumstances are helpful, and what aren't.
Those kinds of discriminations or discernments are all functional. They have absolutely no moral or ethical judgment attached to them whatsoever. That's if we’re talking about this tradition. Other traditions might be different.
Everything in this tradition is done from a functional perspective of what's going to help us relax, open our senses, and discover who we really are and what's going on here. So as practitioners every choice that we make is about that—making functional decisions. And to do that we need a lot of clear seeing.
What gets in the way of our clear seeing, of course, is compulsive patterns. Those patterns have energy. And that’s when we have a clear perception, and then we start second guessing ourselves and worrying about it. We get into a muddle.
Full transcript coming soon.
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