Gain Some Perspective

There is that old adage - that you should never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. It is one powerful way to gain perspective about our fellow humans, and yes, ourselves. And gaining perspective is an important antidote to karma-producing judgment. It it so easy to sit in judgment of people, but judgment does produce karma and karma, as we know always comes back to us.

But there are so many different ways to gain perspective - and mostly they are what break routine. Sit in a different chair, on another side of the room - everything looks and feels different. Take a different walk than you usually take to work, or with the dog, or go through the supermarket.

In busy lives, it is easy to create patterns to help us get through. And these patterns have their validity. If you put your keys in the same place everyday, you know where to find them! You brain marks a pattern to go through the store with the most effective and time-saving precision: go to this section, pick up these items, this section for those items, etc.

Spiritual teachers are masters at helping students gain perspective by creating instances of havoc and there is a reason for this...as long as we are following routine blindly and as long as we are engaging in judgment routinely, we are not absolutely present, we are not really living life.

To be in this moment precludes judgment -because judgment is made up of a mass of thought processes from the past that have deduced a frozen truth - - a truth of the past, which, of course, has nothing to do with this moment. Routine is good until the point where it erases the experience of the moment, but that's generally what happens with routine. Sure it's nice to be able to get in and out of the supermarket in the shortest period of time, but aren't supermarkets also a part of life? Aren't they what you are experiencing now?

The thing is, the more we sink ourselves into things like routines and judging other people, the more we convince ourselves that we are separate from everything else. The Grand Illusion. Of course we are not separate. We are all breathing, pulsing molecules of this one life, we are all together, we are all part of the experience of the present. By broadening your perspective and breaking physical routine, you break the routines of the mind and reduce the tendency to judge.

Do something different today. Eat breakfast in a different spot at the table. Spare a few kind words for someone you always see but never speak to. Consider what it might be like inside the skin of that person you usually judge. Drive kindly. Shop differently. By gaining perspective, you bring your conscious awareness to the foreground, and you will find that every facet of life becomes brighter, richer, sweeter, because you are experiencing it more fully.

Blessings
- Darshan

© 2008 Darshan F Jessop