March 29, 2017 – Judging Others

At first out of the busy hum of mind

As if from a loud thronged market into a cave

By an inward moment’s magic she had come.

A stark hushed emptiness became her self:

Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought

Stared at a void deep’s dumb infinity.

Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed;

All fled away from her and left her blank.

But when she came back to her self of thought,

Once more she was a human thing on earth,

A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight,

A mind compelled to think out ignorance,

A life-force pressed into a camp of works

And the material world her limiting field.

Amazed like one unknowing she sought her way

Out of the tangle of man’s ignorant past

That took the surface person for the soul.

Then a Voice spoke that dwelt on secret heights:

“For man thou seekst, not for thyself alone.

Only if God assumes the human mind

And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak

And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,

Can he help man to grow into the God.

As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works

And finds the mystic inaccessible gate

And opens the Immortal’s golden door.

Man, human, follows in God’s human steps.

Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,

Accepting his sorrow thou must bring to him bliss.

In Matter’s body find thy heaven-born soul.”

Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book VII, Canto III, page 488

Judging Others

Unless your vision is constantly the vision of the Divine in all things, you have not only no right but no capacity to judge the state which others are in. And to pronounce a judgement on someone without having this vision spontaneously, effortlessly, is precisely an example of the mental presumptuousness of which Sri Aurobindo always spoke… And it so happens that one who has the vision, the consciousness, who is capable of seeing the truth in all things, never feels the need to judge anything whatever. For he understands everything and knows everything. Therefore, once and for all, you must tell yourselves that the moment you begin to judge things, people, circumstances, you are in the most total human ignorance.

In short, one could put it like this: when one understands, one no longer judges and when one judges, it means that one doesn’t know.

The Mother

The Sunlit Path, page 198