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I gave a talk recently on the idea of forgiveness. The key point was this: It’s not enough to say, “I forgive you for what you did to me.” I have to let go of the “me” that you did it to.

Now this is a very different thing than seeking to find within myself enough love and understanding to let you off the hook. This is our normal approach. Forgiveness is seen as a good deed, the Christian thing to do, and so it becomes a moral issue rather than spiritual issue. The difference here is that, in a very general sense, moral issues have to do with how we think and behave in light of a preset set of standards given to us by some external authority, religious or social. A standard of right and wrong has been set, and we are judged as either upstanding or not, depending on how closely we adhere to this standard.  

Spirituality is a very different thing, though it certainly spills into and raises our moral standard. Here we think more in terms of what helps or hinders the advancement of the soul. Ideally we love, for example, not because it’s scripturally mandated, but because love is an expression of our divine nature. We forgive, not because it is the Christian thing to do, but because we understand the freedom in soul advancement that forgiveness gives. We do good deeds, not because we have a religious obligation to do so, but because we are simply living out of our innate goodness.

When someone on the New Thought path says, “I’m not supposed to judge,” they are usually coming from the moral perspective. Judgment becomes a temptation, and when acted upon, a sin. You will often hear, “I know I’m not supposed to judge but . . .” and then they go on to pass their judgment. What authority has told them they are not supposed to judge? It’s a rule passed on rather than a principle perceived, so, as far as they are concerned, it’s still an issue that falls in the realm of moral behavior of thou shalts and thou shalt nots.

It’s when we begin to perceive our actions that either advance or hinder the soul that we enter the spiritual domain. You could say that this domain operates on a kind of honor system, in that there is no one around to catch us if we try to steal our way into the kingdom. We are, however, caught by the fact that we are either internally freed or incarcerated by our thoughts and actions. A thorn tree does not produce figs. Whether we’re caught or not, we grow weary of producing thorns. We accept the responsibility for producing them and so we begin the process of discovering how we are doing this and what we can do to root out the thorn tree and plant a fig.  

You can’t convince a hot air balloon that you have released ballast when you are, in fact, dumping it into an onboard trash can. This is equivalent to saying, “I know I shouldn’t judge but . . .” You either release the ballast or you don’t. The balloon responds accordingly. You may have a fellow passenger who understands the principles of ballast and they ask you, “Did you release the ballast?” and you say, “Yes,” and you show him the empty bags. You are an honest, upstanding person and you have successfully convinced your fellow passenger that you have released the ballast. You do not, however, convince the balloon, or more to the point, the law of gravity. You reach only that level dictated by how much ballast you carry.

And so it is on the spiritual journey. The quality of your life rises or falls, not according to how closely you abide by some external group of rules, but according to what you cling to or let go of.

Now one of the problems is that we are seeing the act of judgment as ballast to be ejected when it is, in fact, a spiritual faculty that we are to continue to use, not from a moral standard, but from a spiritual standard. Charles Fillmore considered the power of judgment and discernment as one of our fundamental powers essential in the process of consciousness evolution. We are, and will always be saying yes yes or no no to every given proposition that is brought to our attention.

The power of choice plays and will always play a major role in our evolutionary process. Jesus illustrated this in his parable of the dragnet. He explained that the kingdom of heaven was like casting a net into the sea, drawing out fish of every kind and then sorting out the keepers from the ones we consider unusable. Defining a good fish is a judgment call based on what you intend to do with it. If you own a restaurant, good will mean one thing. If you own a pet store, it will mean another.

If we want this balloon that is our life to rise higher, we have to make a determination as to what constitutes ballast, and then we are faced with the task of actually letting it go rather than continuing to dump it in our onboard trash can. 

I saw a home video the other day in which a balloonist was attempting to take off but the wind caught him and dragged him across the ground and bashed him into a couple of buildings. This would describe a lot of people’s lives. We’ve got the balloon, the capability to rise to great heights, but we’re being beat to death in the process of trying to get off the ground.

Most of us have come from traditional religious backgrounds and we left them because we were tired of banging into buildings and being rolled across the ground. We caught a glimpse of the possibilities of New Thought, how it could lift us up, and so we jumped in this new balloon with great anticipation.

The problem is we brought a lot of our old ballast with us. We changed its name but we still cling to the basic concepts. We eradicated evil as a stand-alone power and replaced it with a new term we call race consciousness. We dropped sin and replaced it with negative thinking and Hell has become the consequence of our negative thinking. We hold Jesus up as a Wayshower but continue to assign him a position that is humanly impossible to reach.

So we keep bumping the buildings and rolling through the cow pastures consoling ourselves with the idea that there are still lessons in this that we have yet to learn. Our prayers and affirmations and denials are the mental equivalents of helmets and shoulder pads designed to help us cope with this continued rough ride that we call life.

If we want to get our balloon off the ground, we have to take a genuinely new approach to concepts like forgiveness and judgment. These two words have been batted around in every religion, and for good reason. When taken from their moral context and viewed from a spiritual point of view, the principles provided in each of these ideas are keys to getting our balloon off the ground.

We get our idea that the exercise of judgment is a bad thing from the seventh chapter of Matthew, verses one and two. “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Matt.7:1-2). If the meaning here is not clear enough, just imagine that you are standing face-to-face with another person. You are angry with that person and you are calling them every name in the book, and a few more. Now imagine that someone slips a full-length mirror in front of you and you are suddenly directing your negative energy to your own image. When you consider the impact your state of mind has on the quality of life, it doesn’t really matter who is standing in front of you. The negative energy of your thoughts and words is reflected back to you. You get the full measure of what you are giving out. 

But before we brand all exercises of judgment as a completely destructive action to be eliminated from our consciousness at all costs, let’s turn to the Gospel of John where we find a very different approach to the idea of judgment. “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24). This saying is actually encouraging the listener/reader to judge, but to judge rightly.

So, what is right judgment?

To judge, according to the dictionary, is to form an opinion about something through careful weighing of evidence and testing of premises. Here Jesus is warning his listeners to not form their opinions based on what they see with their eyes and hear with their ears. Appearances can, as we all know, be deceptive. He was instructing them to base their opinions, not on what appears to be true, but on what is true. And what is true? For starters, it is not people and things that weigh down our balloon; it is our attitudes toward people and things. But it goes deeper than this and many never make this discovery. We view people and things the way we do because of the way we view ourselves. If our life isn’t flying, it is because we have encumbered ourselves with ideas about life and about ourselves that are untrue. These ideas are what forms the “log” so to speak, in our eye. Emerson said, “you can only see what you are.” You can only see life from the perspective at which you have defined yourself.

In other words, the exercise of judgment becomes spiritually productive when it is turned inward rather than outward. Regardless of how justified they appear to be, right judgment is the process of identifying and releasing ideas that weigh you down. It is the plucking of good fish from the net and throwing them into vessels while tossing the useless ones back into the sea.

As an example, let’s say someone insults you. Now look at your reaction to the insult. If you allow their words to hurt you, and this is a judgment call on your part, this hurt reaction is a bad fish. The wounded person you allow yourself to become is not the image and likeness of God to which you aspire. You have made the decision to react out of that fragile level of personality and to feel diminished by the insult. To pass right judgment, you ask yourself this question: “If I were acting out of the image and likeness of God that I am, what would I do with this insult?” You wouldn’t do anything with it. You would simply let it pass because you draw your feelings, your being, not from what this person said or did, but from your own central Source, that “fountain of living water” that Jesus spoke of. Can the eternal Source of your being be diminished by the words of another? Of course it cannot. Do their words have the power to hinder your progress or pull you off your spiritual path? Not if you continue to remain grounded in spiritual consciousness. Again, to paraphrase Emerson, the power people have to annoy me I give them by my own weak curiosity.

The choice to remain spiritually grounded is a judgment. You say to yourself, I have weighed the evidence and concluded that this person and their words are powerless to diminish my inner awareness and to pull me down from the upward path I am on. This is right, growth affirming judgment because you are acting from the truth of your spiritual nature rather than from your frail, transient personality. Reacting to them would be exactly like throwing them a line that keeps your balloon from rising. 

When you think of your soul’s journey, you can easily imagine that it stretches out a long way before you and behind you. How many such people have you encountered in the past? How many will you encounter in the future? The answer is that you will always encounter them. How long will they keep pulling down your balloon? As long as you are the person who can be affected by their type of behavior! That could be another five lifetimes, or it could be another five minutes. It depends on how you exercise your faculty of judgment.

Because certain people and circumstances make us uncomfortable by stirring up all our negative emotions, our ballast, we judge them as “undesirable” and do everything in our power to either change them or to get away from them. We can, of course, get away by moving our balloon into new territory. The trouble here is that we still carry the ballast, that bag full of negativity that we cling to like precious cargo. And because we cling to it, we continue to bang into buildings and get dragged across the countryside wondering what lessons there might be in all of it and wondering how long we have to do this before we get our balloon off the ground. This is a case where we are receiving the measure of what we are giving out, where we are seeing a speck in the eye of another while carrying the blinding weight of a log in our own. As long as we are doing this, it won’t matter where we travel on the face of this planet. We will still be at the same altitude in which buildings and violent tumbles through cow pastures are considered the norm.

So how do we rise above this level of life? How do we raise our altitude so we can actually enjoy observing the pastures and buildings without all the bumps and scrapes of a negative interaction? Obviously we have to let go of the ballast, and there is an entire movement devoted to this. It’s called the self-help, positive thinking movement. Its primary focus is on attitude, on taking an optimistic view of everything that happens in your life. I think most everyone would agree that a positive attitude is a lot better than a negative one, and a person that seeks the positive will, in all likelihood, gain a fair amount of altitude. Altitude through attitude; who hasn’t heard this cliché? But the gains here are usually temporary. Our balloon follows a kind of roller coaster pattern. Our positive attitude takes us to heights where we are on top of the world one day and then we plummet into a valley the next. We have to work really hard to keep our attitude positive, so hard, in fact that we often develop a kind of strained positivism. We’re back to being dragged through the pasture saying, “Isn’t this great!?” and doing our best to sincerely mean it. We bang into a few more barns and catch a few towers and say, “Doesn’t this feel good?” Observers think we must be delusional, and I have to agree. I think it was Lenin that said, “religion is the opiate of the masses,” an observation that may apply as well to this particular approach to life.

It is the spiritual path, that process of discovering and learning to live from the spiritual dimension radiating from the core of our being that will take us to the altitude we seek. You see, it’s not the ballast that is the problem; it’s the you that insists on clinging to the ballast. When you turn your faculty of judgment on this inner arena, you begin to exercise “right judgment,” or, judgment that actually produces the kinds of altitude gains you seek. Instead of saying to the world, “Why are you doing this to me?” you start asking, “Why am I reacting the way I am to what you are doing?” You begin to question why you are clinging to a self that feels the need to hang on to all this ballast. You discover that this identity you have taken on is frail and easily threatened and that you are clinging to your ballast as some kind of means of false protection. You’ve been deceived into believing that you are this limited identity when, in fact, you are so much more.

As your faculty of judgment is turned inward, you begin making choices supportive of your higher Self. You look at your reaction to people’s negative input, observe the garbage emotions, the “bad fish” that arise in you, and then you let go of this level of your false identity that clings to them. Any measure of this shift in self perception that you achieve will render powerless the negativity of another, for that negativity will find no home in you. You realize that moving to this higher place in yourself is the action required to lift your balloon—your life—to a new altitude. You remember that you are an eternal being on a continued path of unfolding beauty, and that your dallying around with these little self emotions has nothing to do with your bigger picture. Here you find the most productive, the most transformative exercise of judgment.

When I was a boy my parents sent me to a summer camp of some kind, probably church camp. There I befriended a blonde-headed boy named Eddie. Eddie had one of those victim mentalities which manifested as the whimpering type, and I remember that he cried the first day when his mom dropped him off. I was pretty scared myself and Eddie’s crying didn’t help matters, but I didn’t cry.

We had a counselor named Chuck, and he seemed to be a pretty good guy. His face was pocked by a former case of acme, and it gave him a rugged look. To me he didn’t seem like the type to hold a lot of sympathy for whining boys. He exuded an air of, “We won’t be missing our mothers this week, will we,” and it wasn’t a question.

Chuck pegged Eddie pretty fast and he kind of accepted this special mission of getting Eddie to shed the thumb and blanket and start him on his venture into manhood. One evening at supper we were all sitting at the long tables of the mess hall. They served milk in pitchers and there were several pitchers on the table. Some kid knocked one over, and the flood of milk headed straight for Eddie. You talk about the law of attraction! Victimization at its finest! Eddie didn’t have time to get out of the way. Maybe in his split-second victimization rationalization he welcomed the inundation as a kind of justification to continue his particular brand of self definition.

Eddie started crying with the first wave of that miniature tsunami, and the continued onslaught caused him to blurt out, “Chuck, milk is spilling on me!”

Chuck watched for a moment and then very calmly said, “Well Eddie, why don’t you move?”

Eddie stopped crying. He looked at Chuck like he’d just awakened from a bad dream, and then he got up. He was still sniveling—a mix of tears and milk—but I remember milk mostly. Everyone but Eddie was laughing. I think he was having some kind of epiphany. Eddie had moved more than his body in that moment. It was like something in that experience caught his attention; like he remembered some forgotten strength.

Eddie and I became good friends through the course of that week. I don’t remember him ever crying again. In fact, I remember him being sad when it came time to leave. I think he moved to a new level of himself in that moment. He discovered a dimension in himself whose first reaction wasn’t to cry over spilled milk. He found a measure of inner strength that enabled him to cut loose some of the ballast that kept putting him in the path of emotional disaster.

Next time we find ourselves reacting to someone’s negative comment or some negative appearance, we would do well to take Chuck’s advice. Instead of trying to “correct” the behavior of another or “fix” an upsetting condition, we make a decision to move! Run away? No. We move to a higher place within ourselves, recall the bigger picture of our journey, through the exercise right judgment, accept that I am where I am because of who I am choosing to be. Not who I am in Truth, but who I am in my own appearance-based judgment. I do this by recognizing and releasing the ballast of my limited self image and all it’s accompanying thought patterns.

In Truth, I am a soul on an eternal journey of unfolding beauty. I am here to grow and prosper in every way. I let go of my worn out ways and choose to soar high above all that has gone before me!