Judging People

 

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Judging People

We need to understand why and how we judge people. It is impossible to judge people whom we really do not know, so we end up judging the behaviour and thus judge the person. Only the behaviour is available for judgement, the person is hiding behind, the person is a mystery. We can judge the act, but we cannot judge the being.

And the act is irrelevant. It will not be right to judge a being through the act. Sometimes it happens that a man is smiling. The act is there on the surface and deep inside he may be sad. In fact, he may be smiling because he is sad. He does not want to show his sadness to anybody – why bring one’s wounds to everybody? Why? That seems embarrassing. Maybe he is smiling just because he is crying deep down.

Just by seeing a smiling face we cannot judge what is happening inside. The inside is not available to us. The inside is private; it is not available to anybody. So, the first thing to understand is that we can look only at the behaviour and the behaviour does not mean much. All that is really significant is the person behind. And we do not know. Our judgements are going to be wrong. And we know it – because when people judge us by our acts, we always feel that they have judged us wrongly.

Every act of judgement is an act of ego – judging people shows a kind of arrogance – it is like saying we know everything; we are great, and the others are nothing. When we judge others, we are mostly criticising them with an air of superiority, our problem is that we constantly criticise others, that too without really knowing the person. We are no different from the people we are criticising.

Never judge anybody by their action – but that is the only thing available to us. So, what to do? Judge ye not. By and by become more and more aware of the privacy of being. Every being inside his/her own soul is so private there is no way to penetrate it. Even when we love, something at the deepest core remains private. That is man’s dignity. That is the meaning when we say man has a soul. Soul means that which can never become public.

If we tear a page from a novel and we read it and we judge the novel by it - it is not right; it is out of context. The whole novel may be a totally different thing. We may have taken a negative part, an ugly part. But we do not know anybody’s life in its totality. A man has lived for forty years before we come to meet him. Those forty years of context are there. The man is going to live forty years more when we have left him.

Those forty years of context are going to be there. And we saw the man, just a single instance of him, and we judged him. That is not right. That is just stupid. It will not have any relevance to the man himself. Our judgement will show something more about us than about the man. “Judge ye not so that ye may not be judged” – that’s what Jesus says.