Our Judging Mind And How To Work With It

The mind of right-and-wrong is a place we all dwell more often than we would like. The mind continually judges the self and others. As we approach gatherings of people where this kind of judging can run rampant, it can be helpful to remember how practice can be an aid in working with and easing the harshness of the judging mind.

Transcript

Tonight,

I'd like to talk about the judging mind.

It seems to me that as we go into this holiday season,

Whether we're about to gather with family and friends or not about to gather with family and friends,

That what we do with our judging minds might have some relevance.

And so we read tonight the first part of the Xin Xin Ming,

The Heart of True Entrusting.

And I'll just read it again for you.

And before I read it,

I want to say that this was a chant that I loved and looked forward to reading,

And then I came to strongly dislike and dreaded when we would read it.

And now I've come to a different place.

So,

The great way is not difficult for those unattached to preferences.

When love and hate are both seen through,

Everything is clear and undisguised.

But make the smallest distinction and heaven and earth are set far apart.

If you wish to see the truth attached to no opinions,

Pro or con,

Setting what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.

When the deep meaning of this is not understood,

The mind's essential piece is disturbed to no avail.

The way is perfect,

Like vast space where there's no lack and no excess.

Our choice to choose or to reject prevents our seeing this simple truth.

Don't dwell entangled in the world or stuck in emptiness.

Dwell equanimously in the oneness of all things and all erroneous views naturally cease to obstruct.

When you try to stop activity,

Your very effort fills you with activity and you will never know oneness.

Those who don't live in the single way miss in both activity and stillness,

Assertion and denial.

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality.

To assert their emptiness is also to miss their reality.

The more you talk and think about it,

The further you stray from the truth.

Stop the efforts of talking and thinking and there's nothing you will not know directly.

To return to the root is to find the meaning of all things.

To pursue appearances is to miss the source.

At the moment of awakening,

There is going beyond appearance and emptiness.

The changes that appear in this empty world we call real only because of ignorance.

I came to Zen so aware of the mind's disease.

What the Xin Xin Ming says is setting what you like against what you dislike.

I found myself doing it all day long and I knew that this was a source of suffering.

I was reading one of Norman Fisher's latest books in which he talks about this plethora of suffering.

For those of you who haven't read Norman Fisher,

I highly recommend him.

He's a Zen teacher on the West Coast and sort of like a kindly rabbi Zen teacher,

He writes in a very plain spoken way.

And he writes about suffering in a way that absolutely fit my experience as I brought my mind to Zen.

Perhaps it will resonate with you too.

He says there is more suffering than we can ever know.

Anxiety is suffering,

Isn't it?

There's a lot of anxiety.

Not getting what you want is suffering.

How many of us don't get what we want?

Irritation is suffering.

Anger is suffering.

Having to put up with things you don't like is suffering.

Knowing that you're going to have to die and you really don't want to,

That's suffering.

Sickness is suffering.

Old age is suffering.

Not having enough money is suffering.

Losing your job is suffering.

He goes on and on.

And my experience was that this was life.

And how do we take the suffering that we layer on to our experience and work with it?

Looking for relief,

I found the heart of true entrusting seemed like the right prescription.

It seemed like a user's manual for how to end suffering.

Just let those fond opinions go.

Don't dwell entangled in the world.

Our choice to choose or to reject prevents our seeing the simple truth.

So easy.

And so perhaps your experience was this as well.

That it seemed as though this was the path to ending my judging mind.

That I would no longer have preferences.

I would no longer discriminate between this and that.

And what a relief that would be.

And yet what I found was that as hard as I practiced,

My judging mind would come to visit every day,

Every hour,

Every zazen period.

In fact,

One exercise,

One meditation exercise that I was taught early on was to simply count the number of judgments that I made in any given 25 minute period of zazen.

And the count gets really large.

I found that the night before I ordained as a zen priest,

I became obsessed with whether I would get the one remaining brownie on a snack tray that was being circulated in the zendo.

This mind of right and wrong,

This mind of preferences.

The mind I thought I could do away with,

With enough practice,

Was not going away.

And so this became my sutra of shame.

Every time we would read it at sashin,

I would think,

Oh,

That's not me.

I'm not letting go of this.

I must not be practicing hard enough.

I must not be doing it right.

And the teaching that the way is perfect,

Like vast space,

I would hear this often,

This idea of perfection.

And my mind,

My judging mind,

Thought that perfection in this sense meant perfect,

No flaws.

Perfect as opposed to less than perfect.

Really good as opposed to kind of crummy.

I was hearing everything and experiencing everything through the mind of right and wrong.

Perhaps you have this experience as well,

This aspiration to let go of these judgments,

Many of which are of no consequence.

This person talks too loudly.

This person doesn't say enough.

I don't like this traffic jam.

We try to let go.

And of course,

When you try to stop activity,

Your very effort fills you with activity.

As the Xin Xin Ming tells us.

What then?

And of course,

The more I studied,

The more I read,

The more I talked to my spiritual friends.

My Dharma buddies at Hank in Boundless Way and elsewhere,

I learned that there was no person who I encountered,

Whoever fully let go of this judging mind,

Whoever was fully cured of the mind's disease of setting one thing against another.

What then?

Is this a false promise then of the Xin Xin Ming?

And if so,

Why is this such a powerful teaching?

Around since the seventh century in China and read over and over again by generations of Zen students.

But I began to look again.

I began to look more closely.

And this perhaps is something that has happened to you as well,

Where for the.

One hundredth time you read the same chant,

The same sutra,

And suddenly it looks different.

And this line jumped out at me.

At the moment of awakening,

There is going beyond appearance and emptiness.

At the moment of awakening.

And what I've come to understand is that these moments of awakening are not points where we arrive and stay there.

There is no arrival to the place where the judging mind no longer is our frequent companion.

But there are moments.

There are these moments when we see through.

Right and wrong,

Where we see beyond the judgments.

And so these moments of awakening occur over and over again,

And then we settle comfortably back into the deluded mind.

Of this and that.

Of right and wrong.

Good and bad.

But the memory of those moments of seeing beyond is what allows us to hold our judgments with more lightness over time.

To.

Come to accept that our judgments are simply,

As they say,

Flowers of air,

Often of no consequence.

And of course,

I'm not talking about the discernment that we do when we abide by the precepts,

When we refrain from taking life,

When we refrain from taking what is not freely given.

I'm referring to the judgments that are with us about things of no consequence.

But that feels so powerful and so important in the moment.

And so.

I've come to understand that this practice has to be lifelong,

That the judging mind will be there,

Will be our unwelcome,

Uninvited guest.

Probably at every Thanksgiving dinner,

Probably at every work meeting,

Probably at every encounter we have.

With the next person or the next pet in our lives.

Not a problem.

That it is this constant return to shining the light of awareness on the judging mind.

Knowing it as yet just one more manifestation of our wonderful functioning.

That that is the practice and that is a practice that never ends.

And so as we go into this holiday season with so much potential for judging,

Judging ourselves,

Judging the people in our lives,

Judging the doneness of the turkey.

All of this is there to be practiced with.

So that there are moments when we may be able to see through these powerful conditioned judgments and simply look at the miraculous,

Annoying being sitting across the table from us.

At the cranberry relish that we don't really like.

At whatever we take to be part of the world of good and bad.

And so I invite us all as we move toward this season of light to shed the light of awareness on all of our preferences,

Not with the idea of getting rid of them,

But with the idea of honoring them.

Holding them lightly when we can being amused by them and then going beyond the world of appearances and emptiness.

Thank you all.

So now.

Reviews

Thank you. Hearing that even a Zen priest still experiences judging mind helped me to understand how I can more gently work with my own judgements. Rather than being frustrated by their continued existence. Really, so many of them are just silly and arbitrary. 🙏🙏

Thought provoking and very interesting
Thank you 🙏

Thank you 🙏