Thinking more about this, the forest is like a busy sidewalk full of people, but the people in our lives are more like the beautiful tree in the back yard that we take care of.
But it means you don't let it affect you emotionally in the same way. While most people have a kind of internal monologue that goes "why are these people so bad, why is the world wronging me, I didn't do anything to deserve this, why does life suck so bad sometimes, it's all these people's fault" you instead learn to just accept that the world has these people and not to waste emotional angst on them. You deal with them as necessary and then move on internally without anger, hatred, etc.
"Nobody comes to work to do a bad job."
What I realized that judging other people narrowed my vision so that I couldn't see any options. All I could see was that they were bad people who were going to hurt the project.
When I could hold off on personalizing other people's performance then I could start to spot other reasons and sometimes even figure out constructive solutions. Maybe the other person is not delivering the code I need because they were given competing priorities.
So, yeah, as you say, you still have to deal with these situations. I just found that I could see many more options for how to deal once I stopped being so judgmental.
If you can empty your own boat Crossing the river of the world, No one will oppose you, No one will seek to harm you.
This is one option, but not the only one.
"When you go out into the office, and you look at the landscape, you see all these different employees. And some of them are highly productive and collaborative, and some of them are less so, and some of them are positive high-achievers, and some of them are whatever. And you look at each employee and you allow it. You see [or try to see] why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that they didn’t get enough love or understanding, and so they turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the person."
"The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."
I think what Ram is getting at in the last paragraph is something along the lines that, while we can engage with nature in an unassuming, open-minded way, doing the same with other humans is extremely difficult. Due to our lack of control over our own minds, they get up to all sorts of mischief, jumping to unfounded and epistemically unsound conclusions, feeding our conscience minds with a representation of the world that is largely a hallucination.
One way of dealing with this in the case of a problem employee, is to talk to them. Easier said than done though of course, because that process is subject to the very same problem, and others.
> But it means you don't let it affect you emotionally in the same way.
“When the great doctor D. T. Suzuki was asked what is it like to be enlightened he said, ‘It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.’”
— Alan Watts
When you see someone cut you off in traffic, you might instantly assume they are just a born jerk that doesn't care about others, but maybe they are rushing to the hospital.
While "appreciating what is" is a great general rule, like any world-view it can be limiting.
I can imagine it's much easier to follow these concepts when you're safely surrounded by admirers. It's probably much harder to walk into a hostile / life-threatening situation and "appreciate what is".
I can imagine that Vietnamese Buddhist monks of the 60s would share your sentiments. But they, too, could only imagine how much easier it might be. Well, I guess they didn't have to imagine very hard, as it was a lot easier just a few years back. (As background just in case, puppet pro-Catholic government was installed in Vietnam, and the national religion of Buddhism was effectively outlawed, leading at least one monk to set himself on fire in protest.)
I appreciate what you're driving at, I really do as I sit here on my couch in my warm house in one of the most wealthy U. S. suburbs in the country. Easy to do White Guy Suburban Buddhism in that environment. But just because many have it easy doesn't mean it's useless when times are hard.
Except a handful of spiritual gurus who get famous, a overwhelming majority is not surrounded by admirers.
In your mind, sincerely wish them well. Even if you can do nothing else for them it's OK - you are already doing good in the world.
Most people, when they look at life see it through a haze of memories of the past and worries of the future. To be able to see things as they are is the aim of spiritual practice.
IOW sure if objective judgement is needed towards some utility - making formal/societal ones - do it. The point like with every 'don't' is not to say don't judge no matter - point is don't generally judge unless it is fair/useful/targeted towards general betterment.
If I am truly honest, I think it is ironic to preach for people to not do something (like judge) as a means of supporting an acceptance of people's behaviors. I feel like there is an underlying assumption to your stance that judgement and harsh language is inherently bad. You can both accept someone the way they are and judge them for it.. and I personally believe it is /required/ to accept them the way they are in order to provide a more "objective" judgement.
edit: to answer your question, yes i believe idle judgements are the grassroots to future formalized societal rules. formalism is a well studied idea in philosophy and is ultimately a self sustaining illusion built upon informal phenomenon. In other words, you cannot create a formal system to govern subjective behavior without informal subjective behavior laying the groundwork first.
Let's state the obvious: humans _choose_ to modify themselves and their surroundings in a way trees do not, and it offers us the ability to move away from the light if we want. Failure to recognize this apparent difference stunts any drive to investigate further and it's insulting to both humans and trees.
On a level of empathy, I get it. We need compassion for eachother and predicaments that are often not of our choosing. Fine. Let's at least say that in some ways people are like trees and in other ways they are not. Ultimately that's not a very deep insight and rings very much like the kind of thing teenagers say while stoned.
However - I mean no disrespect to Richard or Ram or however he wanted to be called. The man did incredible work toward helping his fellow humans and for this reason alone he deserves great respect. I'm sad for his loss and I hope I can do even a portion of the good he did during his life.
In other words, if they are asleep they're blameless and if they are awake they're harmless.
I'm not claiming it's true, I'm just saying that it's helped me to be more forgiving and easy-going.
True. Being present means you observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking and the body acting. It means you bring yourself into focus, becoming aware of your own existence, watching the motives and the results of your actions, and Studying the person you have built around yourself, inadvertence. I became less judgmental, and calmer since i began learning to 'query' and question my motives. These days I don't do it as often as I used to, but i am much less on auto-pilot.
There are philosophies that believe otherwise.
1. Choose a movie title
2. Now do it again with your eyes closed and try to figure out precisely how you chose the movie title.
3. Keep doing it.
After a while you realize that stuff just “appears” to us. The same holds true for more than just movie titles. How exactly that process works, or why it appears like as if we have free will is an interesting subject.
But we also make choices and decisions as we encounter situations. I'm not a particularly creative person, so I see my freewill expressed more in the form of the decisions and choices I make. I am fully conscious that if I do this, that is a likely outcome, good or bad. I have emotions that affect my judgment and decisions, but I also have the ability, with my own willpower, to choose to overcome those as well.
To describe this process as just thoughts appearing to me seems overly simplistic. Just because we don't understand a process in intimate detail doesn't mean we can ascribe to it sheer randomness. There are very real things happening, and we acknowledge this through other, more complex emotions like guilt, regret, sadness, and so on based on our actions that go a certain way and then with pride, happiness, and confidence when they go another way.
It seems like an overly complex system for things that just "appear" in out head. The fact that we experience these emotions as a result of choices indicates to me that we are capable of acknowledging when we've made a "right" or "wrong" choice, and sometimes it's also "complicated", like almost everything else in this world is (i.e., somewhat in between).
I honestly understand why determinism sounds like a compelling theory, but it's not just experience that defies it. I see no compelling reason to argue for determinism if you sincerely believe in it.
Anyway, try defining free will precisely. You'll find that it's an extremely incoherent concept (within our current model of causality) . Try posting your definition and I'll be happy to poke holes in it. There's a reason that the free will vs determinism debate hasn't gone anywhere for thousands of years. Perhaps we need a new way of thinking about causality.
Legally determinism is rejected out of hand, interpersonally we assume that individuals bear responsibility for their choices, it's only in some abstruse metaphysical sense that determinism means anything, and there it's largely meaningless.
And you can use ideological systems, like math or economics or even your impression of another person, to generate endless amounts of ideas. And for each of them you veto all other possible options in order to generate the one you do at the time you do so. Then on top of that you have the conscious power to accept or reject the idea you've generated.
> excerpted from "This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes" by Raymund Smullyan
Tree mutilation
They also don't make you soup, buy a birthday card, bring you flowers, hold the door for you, give you a hug, say I love you.
So, people aren't trees.
trees will recycle carbon into oxygen, provide cover from the sun and rain, and strengthen the soil. so just like people, trees will help you.
I'm saying something pretty banal really, everybody knows this. Ram Dass's quote here is emphasizing that you can be overly judgemental. You can be stuck in an endless rumination cycle where you stew over the failings of people around you. If you're in this mode of thinking, it's good to take a step back and think of humans like trees. But similarly, if you're constantly being taken advantage of because nobody thinks you care strongly about anything, well, maybe consider becoming more judgemental
Being judgmental will do absolutely nothing to stop those people from taking advantage of you. only if you change your behavior can you change the situation. Looking at your situation fully and completely without fear and reactivity, that will save you. Judging all those people who are "doing this" to you, will do nothing but make you miserable. It is of course our nature to be judgmental but the work of Ramm Dass was to separate out those judgements to arrive at a state where you are truly not judging people. Has nothing to do with seeing what it is they do. an earthquake could level your town, and you see exactly what it is this earthquake did, and it was horrible. but you don't "judge" the earthquake, it just is. that's ultimately the state of all people too.
You're right if we're talking about people who know you wouldn't like something and do it anyway (sociopaths / assholes). But you might be surprised how un-subtle the effect of knowing "that person will get pissed if I do this" is on changing people's behavior. Most people are reasonable, and they try to take the feelings of other people around them into account when deciding how to act. If your demeanor is always "Everything's cool, I'm taking it all in with no judgement" you can't really be surprised if people don't consider your preferences when making decisions.
No, you can walk away, or curse them out, or punch their lights out. These are all actions that do not imply you've "judged" them for what they do. There are multiple levels of perspective at play, but if you want to read Ramm Dass' writings with the assumption that being non-judgmental is a crock, that's pretty much how you'll come out of it. He was totally OK with that so in honor of his passing I will try today to be OK with it also.
1. Suppress emotional judgement. (Maybe do this by re-framing their actions as something that is the way it is, like a tree or a river)
2. Evaluate the situation with a calm mind
3. Come to the conclusion that their behavior is undesireable in one way or another
4. Decide that in order to dissuade them from behaving that way in the future, you should punch them in the face.
5. Punch them in the face
I think it's probably a reasonable goal to insert a "stop and think" step before doing drastic things like punching someone in the face.
But I also think there's a non-negligible effect from using your emotions (in this case, the emption of judgement), to propel you to actually take action. I think it's very unlikely people are spurred to action by something that doesn't move them personally. There's just a bit of difference between "I'm mad about Trump. I'm definitely judging the hell out of him." and "I've come to the conclusion that Trump is a suboptimal president." I think a person in the former mindset is more likely to actually take action.
And again, I think in the context where people are too judgemental, and spend a bunch of time unproductively stewing about things, Ram Dass's advice to remove judgement is a good corrective.
And the problem with that is, when nobody conforms, no profit can be made. A large part of Silicon Valley is predicated on people conforming (Facebook/Instagram, Twitter,WeWork, Snapchat, Amazon, Microsoft).
Judgment has been carefully bred in us, otherwise neoliberal capitalism would be unable to function and so the fat cats wouldn't be able to get their salami.
By contrast, "no conformity" is a truly terrifying thing. Acting together towards common causes is a direct result of the ability of humans to sublimate their own personal desires to some degree and conform. Basically everything humans have accomplished is because of our ability to work together, and cooperation means not acting exactly how we'd like in every situation.
> Judgment has been carefully bred in us,
This is 100% true, but it isn't neoliberalism that bred it into us, it's that successful cultures had certain attributes that allowed them to conform, cooperate and accomplish things. This is humanity self-domesticating, not a sinister movie plot about corporations
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."
– Ram Dass