Good Judgment

We often hear about the dangers of the judging mind. That’s because the judging mind hasn’t been trained.

We don’t try to do away with it. We realize that we do have to pass judgment, skillful judgment, in order to live our lives well. When we’re choosing our friends, we have to choose good people. If you find that someone is unreliable, you judge that you don’t want to hang around that person. And that’s as far as the judgment goes. You realize it’s not good for you to be with that person. But then you find people who really are good, who have the qualities of an admirable friend—conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment—then you try to spend more time with them.

As you get skillful at judging things outside, then you start getting more skillful at judging your own mind. The factors of right concentration include evaluation, as when you evaluate how well your mind is settling down with the object—is this the right object for you?

The breath is good because it can be so malleable. It can take on so many forms. There’s long breathing, short breathing, fast, slow. But sometimes even all those variations are not quite enough for the mind. You want to find something else? Well, there are other topics you can focus on. You can focus on the parts of the body. You can focus on getting a sense of inspiration from the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. You can focus on the fact that you could die at any time, so you’ve really got to get your act together. In other words, you do have to judge what’s working and what’s not.

If it’s not working, then you use your ingenuity to find something that does. When something does work, remember that. That’s what mindfulness is for, so that you learn lessons that you can apply.

Then there are the things that you should hold on to and should not hold on to. Some things you hold on to for the time being. Like the path: Think of the image of the raft. You hold on to the raft as you’re going across the river. You don’t let go. But there comes a point where you’ve reached the other side, and you have to judge whether you want to carry it on your head or you want to leave it right there.

So what you’re doing is training your powers of judgment, because so much of insight is making value judgments. You understand how things are fabricated and then you ask yourself: Are they worth fabricating? Are they worth the effort? As you get better and better at judging these things, then you find that the mind gets lighter and lighter.

So it’s not that judging is bad. It’s just that there’s such a thing as bad judgment and good judgment. You want to avoid being judgmental—in other words, jumping to snap judgments. You want to be more judicious, wise in how you pass judgment. That way, you learn how to depend on yourself—because so much of the meditation is going to be that: learning how to depend on yourself. The teacher can’t be here all the time. You can’t be with the teacher all the time. So you’ve got to learn how to internalize what’s good from the teacher and make that your internal teacher. In that way, you’re safe wherever you go.