The act of judgment makes us dense, breakable. The soul can only sustain damage by hardening, by inventing good and bad, by separating what is seen and felt and done into the great lie of right and wrong. The act of judgment compresses love into a thin approval. Ready to be torn, taken. Ready to be withheld or returned again for a ransome.
Judgment collapses us with the weight of fragments, the breaking of experience into what is accepted or not accepted. Loved or thrown away. The walls of the self fall inward because judgment always descends there. Scavenging. Pressing. Digging into our last protected place.
So okay, I see how judgment makes us breakable. But if I avoid all judgment, I feel as formless as an amoeba. It feels like I lose identity, like I am no longer the sum of my choices. Seems like just being alive and surviving requires a constant stream of small value judgments. maybe i don't understand what you mean by the "soul" that is damaged by hardening. Not clear if soul and self are synonomous.
ReplyDeleteI think that "good--bad" judgments are what harden us and make us breakable. I suspect that moral judgments are toxic -- they corrode compassion and the essential linkage between human beings. There are non-damaging judgments that assess, for example, whether something is effective, whether it works. There are predictions about likely outcomes from a certain course of action. These types of judgments are a necessary part of living and learning from past experience.
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