“Judgment in the usual sense is impossible. This is not an opinion but a fact. In order to judge anything rightly, one would have to be fully aware of an inconceivable wide range of things, past, present, and to come. One would have to recognize in advance all the effects of his judgments on everyone and everything involved in them in any way. And, one would have to be certain there is no distortion in his perception so that his judgment would be wholly fair to everyone on whom it rests now and in the future. Who is in a position to do this? Who in grandiose fantasies would claim this for himself?
Remember how many times you thought you knew all the ‘facts’ you needed for judgment, and how wrong you were! Wisdom is not judgment; it is the relinquishment of judgment. Therefore lay judgment down, not with regret but with a sigh of gratitude. Now are you free of a burden so great that you could merely stagger and fall down beneath it.
It is not difficult to relinquish judgment. But it is difficult indeed to try to keep it. The teacher of God lays it down happily the instant he recognizes its cost. All of the ugliness he sees about him is its outcome. All of the pain he looks upon is its result. All of the loneliness and sense of loss; of passing time and growing hopelessness; of sickening despair and fear of death; all these have come of it. And now he knows that these things need not be. Not one is true. For he has given up their cause, and they, which never were but the effects of his mistaken choice, have fallen from him. Teacher of God, this step will bring you peace. Can it be difficult to want but this?”
A Course In Miracles – Manual For Teachers, Helen Schucman and William Thetford, pgs. 27 – 28, foundationforinnerpeace.org
