we'd like to start on number six, which is on not judging. And it seems like a little thing. It seems like, as Dorothea says when she starts this discourse, it seems like a little thing, but it's a big thing. And also, each of these topics that we consider, it's good to try to consider them in relation to the center, in relation to the core. So it's like we're continually going around in a circle, around one big subject, which we never really are able to name, which we're not able to put a word on. In fact, I won't even try. But so it is with this not judging. It's one thing, it's one part of our life, and it seems like a particular case, maybe kind of a marginal case, something that's on the edge of the life, but actually it relates directly to the middle of the life. And it's like that kind of thing that tells you right where you are, that kind of symptom, that kind of experience or reaction or whatever you want to call it, that locates you immediately, that tells you your own position, in a sense. And also it's a kind of index of not only where we are,

[01:09]

but where we're going. So it's an important thing. It's a kind of index of progress. It's a kind of thermometer of monastic progress, in a way. It's not infallible, because there's more than one. It's one thing to be in a, what do you call it, a summer situation, it's another thing to be in a winter situation. It may be very easy to be indulgent with other people in a pleasant situation. The same as it's easy to be generous when there's lots of food or lots of anything else to go around. It's another thing to be generous when there's a famine, and when you don't have enough to eat yourself. So similarly in the spiritual life, it's easy to be indulgent with other people, often, when we feel okay about ourselves, and we're sort of thriving, when our own ego is humming. It's another thing to be generous with other people, and not to judge them, when we're really in a pit, or when we're very much in anxiety ourselves, or in any kind of stress or torment. We have to...

[02:10]

A lot of the things in the early monastic tradition we don't understand so well, because we're well off, even physically, often. So it's hard for us to understand the intensity of which they talk about certain things. This is one of them, I think. Even though this, we'll find, is a big problem for ourselves, we can live by the time. We're not liberated from this at all. And thank heaven, because it's very useful in a way, even a problem. About bibliography, things to read about this. There's a book in the Saints of the Desert Fathers, it's book nine, which is the classical Desert Fathers treatment of this. A series of stories. I don't think I'll read any of those stories to you, unless it comes up somehow, because Dorotheus quotes several of them himself, which he gets often from another source. There are all kinds of different manuscripts of sayings of the Desert Fathers, that are straight here and there, and so you pick them up in these different books. And Dorotheus has got one or two that are not in the ordinary collection. They're not in our ordinary collections.

[03:13]

The only collection that I know that has them all, or at least pretends to have them all, is that Solem collection, in French, in three volumes. They even have a chart that locates them from the different sources, the different people who have published collections of the Desert Fathers' sayings, and they try to get them all together, and then to cancel out the duplications and so on. But often, from a different source, you'll find two different versions of the same story, that differ significantly, even the point is different from the story. One version. Questioner 2, inaudible. This here? Questioner 2, inaudible. This is Chadwick. Yeah. Because, you see, word is alphabetical, it's under the names, and so you can't get one subject together like it is here. This is book nine, that we should judge no man. It goes from page 102 to 104. It's not a big collection of sayings. Questioner 2, inaudible. Yeah, we're beginning on that, number six. Then there's this book by Joe Brode,

[04:16]

Transformed Mind and Heart, which I still have to read one step in, which really is right down the middle of the subject. What he's talking about is paternal correction, not judging or judging, and expectation, the kind of expectations we have of people. And, of course, what we expect of them is going to determine how we judge them. We can lay a heavy burden on them, as it's said, not as a heavy trip. And the question of envy is very close to the question of judging, and so if you have people like Van Kam, I don't know what I'd envy. Then there's this whole business about typology, you know. The idea of judging is connected with a view of existence which is completely vertical, in a sense, or completely longitudinal, you could say. So as it's said, everybody is lined up in a very narrow car, so narrow that only one person can walk through it at a time. And so one person has to be in front

[05:21]

of another person, and one person has to be on top of another person, and nobody's side by side. It's that view of existence, I think. Then you can have another view of existence in which everybody is side by side, and nobody's better than anybody else, nobody's on top of anybody else, and there really aren't any differences. Obviously, both of those are distortion, both of those would be. And yet, it's as if, in looking at our brothers, we have to look at them in that latter way. If we start lining people up, the way that we're going to line people up is a self-interest in a way. And so what we're trying to do is rank ourselves in the scale, we're trying to get ourselves somehow placed on the ladder for the purposes of security, because we want to feel we're grabbing onto that because we want security, basically because we're insecure and because we're afraid. And so as soon as we can start to establish a ladder by putting somebody else below us, we feel a certain relief, we can breathe easy. It's a mysterious thing, it's this trap that springs shut, this trap of judgment, or even

[06:22]

of criticism. And we'll talk about it more, because it goes right to the heart, I think, of our whole problem, right to the heart of this question of the false self. And so part of this business is being able to recognize a pluralism, being able to recognize that you can't judge everybody according to the same standard. In fact, we can't really judge other people because we don't know who they are, we don't know how they are, we don't know what to expect of them because we don't know how they're made, and we don't know how their life is. That's what our theistics make it into this discourse. Now, we were talking about this typology thing, you know, the Briggs-Myers test and so on, and we find that it really comes right into this area, because it's a lot easier not to judge people if you know how they differ, basically. If you know that somebody is made differently from you, then you can understand how he sees differently from you and acts differently from you, and you stop, as I said earlier, you stop feeling that you have to judge him because you know his whole life is different from yours.

[07:23]

So I'd like to get into this very sketchy typology thing afterwards. If you realize that there are four or five different types, or 16 or 20 different types of character or personality in a community, then you stop lining people up. At least that's the first break in that habit of judging, of trying to rank everybody on a very narrow ladder with one on top of the other. Remember, some of you have heard of the old thing of the four temperaments. The four temperaments were the choleric temperament, the sanguine temperament, the phlegmatic temperament, and the melancholic temperament. It's an old classical thing that goes way back, probably to pre-Christian times. It probably goes into Greek and Roman medicine. It's Hippocrates, in fact. When was Hippocrates? He was before Christ. Remember, he was a medical guy among the Greeks. Okay, the four temperaments. And if you read about that, even in the old way that they wrote about it, 50 years ago or 100 years ago, you see a lot of wisdom in it, you see a lot of truth in it, and you say, ah, that's right, that's me, and that's so-and-so,

[08:26]

and so-and-so. You recognize immediately that these types exist, more or less. Now, when you do that, immediately a lot of things, a lot of problems disappear. It's, oh, I always thought he was mad at me. That's just the way he's made. Or I always thought he was, I always wondered why he was so slow. I always wondered why he was so judgmental. I always wondered why he was so shallow. But as soon as you find out that that's a personality structure that you're looking at, that it's a temperament you're looking at, it immediately removes a lot of that judgmentalness, removes a lot of that stuff. And so you learn to live with other people, and then we learn, and instead of competing for that latter business to be, which we do instinctively, it's a matter of complementarity, that somehow, in living together, we fill up what is lacking in the other person, so that we need other people, because we're not complete in our own personality. And on a certain level we are, but on another level, on the everyday level, we're not complete, and we need other people to fill in the scale.

[09:27]

And they're not inferior to us, just because their gift may be a little less showy than ours. Naturally, we relate best to our own gifts, our own personality. I'll put that temperament thing on the board, just for fun. Sure enough, you can make a square out of it. Phlegmatic is a novel, strong, and Melancholy, I'll put it on here, surprisingly, because that's just a bad name for something else. And the sacraments, I'll put them down here. There's this classical book by Koch, do you remember? K-O-C-H. I suppose it was perfect

[10:36]

I think it's actually pretty much unfortunate. It's just called unfortunate. Yeah, you got it? I've got a copy, I made a copy. Yeah, well, refer to that, you know, and you'll see what they're like. Yeah, I guess in John Keaton. Yeah, shows up again. Paul is obviously a colleague, he's a lion. He's a lion. And the ox, the ox is a phlegmatic. And that's the patient, I suppose, the duty person. He kind of gets chapped in the fourth chamber. He doesn't have a whole lot that he can say. He's kind of dumb. He's like, everything, nothing can go all the way to the bottom. Yeah, he gets a little bit, it seems like he only gets about one point percent. Each one's got the core. Each one's got the core. And then each one has this other thing. So John, you call him the melancholic, but actually it's the eagle. It's the eagle and the lion and the ox.

[11:38]

And the man and the ox. But the sanguine, the sanguine type is usually the extrovert type. He gets along very well with people. He's out in his study, he's out in front. He notices everything. And he's very much involved. Who's in here? Oh, sure, everybody does. And this gets very sophisticated when you get to Jung. Because then Jung talks about four functions. And this doesn't quite line up. He talks about intuition. And he has two groups of opposites. Intuition and... Intuition and sensation. Sensation means sensing. And then he's got thinking and feeling. And intuition and sensation work out fine for John and Peter.

[12:42]

The sanguine is like the interior person. I don't know if you can tell. The sanguine is like the exterior person. It's pretty crude. But the other two don't work out well. You can't put thinking and tolerating simply as the equivalent. Or feeling and pragmatic. There's a certain language that's not as simple as that. Thinking, Steve, I'll put it as crude as it is. It doesn't get concealed. Those are Jung's four types. Jung's four functions. And then out of that, depending on what characteristic is leading. If you're a thinking type, probably your feelings are going to be suppressed. Your feelings are going to go to the inferior function. Your dominant function is thinking. Your inferior function is feeling. And then you probably lean this way. And so they have this collection of types. I'm afraid of two or three or four letters.

[13:46]

The Riggs-Meier thing. But it brings in another thing, another category, which is from judging. And this is very important for our questions. Your preference for judging or for perceiving. Judging or perceiving. Now, you can say that that's closure or openness. You've got a certain type of person who's always in a hurry to conclude something. He's in a hurry to get a job done. He's in a hurry to arrive at a decision. He's in a hurry to finish something. And you've got another type of person who says, well, let's flow with the S on the table. Let's flow with the stream of being. Do you recognize this? I mean, if you think about it, it's common. There are people who don't like the monotony. One person always gets the same idea. They should go out on the road and just get the flow of the road.

[14:48]

It's actually a good answer. It's a closure person. And the other person has this whole set of things. Openness. Of course, the Italians have a lot to do on the openness side. They did it in Italy. Over in Italy, they did an animation program. It's on one side of the table. On the other side, everybody's nationality is on the table. Probably, all of us have both of those goals. The problem is to know when to be open and when to be closed. The problem is to know when to gather more experience, when to perceive, when to experience everything. When to be open completely to the world, to the film experience, and when to decide that that's enough. You see, the judging person is going to be an acting person. The perceiving person can never act. They never get around to doing anything.

[15:51]

Because to do something, you've got to make a decision. You've got to, in a sense, close the book of experience. It's out in a series of studies. Okay. So, it turns out that they have one, two, three, four. They've got four different preferences. The other one is Introvert-Expert. This just happens to be related to this subject. Yes. It's classical. Did he use his name? Did he mention him? I didn't know that he was actually an authority. I thought maybe he just wrote that little book. Yes.

[16:53]

Yes. I'm sure he does that. In the book on psychological types, he goes through the previous work, I think. And then with Jung, there's a kind of quantum leap in that department. Okay. And then these others take off from Jung, and they make him more sophisticated still. But they purify Jung, in a way, because they do a lot of thinking about it, and they make some improvements on him, I think, in his typology. But his was a brilliant breakthrough, though, to the idea of those four functions. But you realize that all of those four functions are functions of experience, right? That's all input. And so you have to have that judging, perceiving thing in order to get you just off the level of what we call the logos, off the level of experience or input, because there's more to life than that, isn't there? If you want to talk about personality types, you can't base it all on how a person's input operates, on how he takes in. You have to base it partly on what he does with that, where he goes from there. And it seems to me that the perceiving-judging thing is also the introvert-extrovert thing, is a beginning of saying something about how the person goes from what he does perceive,

[17:57]

from what he does experience. But maybe more could be said about it. The yin-yang is a very approximative thing, and it lumps everything into two sides. And this tries to take these polarities out and make different levels of polarity, it's like taking the yin-yang thing and then projecting it along a whole line with the different polarities, instead of just putting them into two boxes. It seems to me that way. Okay, now, aside from this, Victor yesterday, he brought some books down, and he happened to bring this one here, which is The Animals of St. Gregory. And lo and behold, what is it? It's a typology of the monastic life based on the morality of St. Gregory. There are all these different monastic characters, each one in terms of an animal. And Gregory writes like this all the time. Remember in Ezekiel, already he's got the four creatures there,

[18:59]

the eagle and the lion and the ox and so on. Now here, Gregory didn't put this together himself. This is spread all through, dispersed all through that enormous work of his, the commentary on Job. So this fellow who was a monk over in Scotland picked these things out, and then he wrote about them. He just took a little piece of Gregory, and then he writes about this character. It's brilliant, it's really good. And he's got about twelve of them, so it's not quite as simple as Gregory's thing in Ezekiel. Got a cockerel, got a raven, got a camel, got a sheep, got a locust, got a lizard, got a beaver, got a horse. The pictures are better than the text, believe me. So you've got to see this. I'll put this up on the screen. Yeah. This is Brother Camel. Down at the bottom. That's a real camel up on the top. Ha, ha, ha. There's a real family resemblance there. Gregory is a master of typology, really.

[20:11]

He's always looking at people, and he's always, he's got kind of a, what do you call it, a political mind, an administrative mind. He's always looking at people and trying to understand character. So. Okay. The other thing about, the other direction on this is because the Will of Saint Benedict, and especially Chapter 72, and that business about bearing one another's burdens. Bearing one another's weaknesses of mind or of body. Bearing the differences between us and not judging. Some preliminary thoughts. The continuity between this discourse and the other discourses. As we notice, there's a tight relationship between the different conferences of Dorotheus. For instance, the fourth one was on the fear of God, remember, versus this parousia, this negative self-confidence,

[21:16]

which is precisely the same thing that makes it easy for us to judge other people. In other words, parousia is a kind of stepping away from judgment of yourself. Whereas the fear of God, of course, is standing always in the judgment, as it were, of God. Standing always in the presence of God and before the judgment of God. And so, we, in a way, judge ourselves. We're always subject to judgment. But the parousia is the forgetfulness of that. And then the next one is on counsel, remember. And what he's hitting against there, the enemies there, are self-will and self-righteousness, the dikayama we were talking about. And then at the end of the conference, remember what he says. If you do something, don't be too complacent because you don't know what God's judgment is about it. As Saint Agathon said when he was asked if he was afraid when he was dying, he said, I've done my best, but I do not know if my work is pleasing to God. God's judgment is one thing and man's is another. The business of judgment, then, is running.

[22:18]

It's a thread that runs throughout what he's talking about. And then the next one after this is on self-accusation. Self-accusation. You see what he's doing? He's trying to get at that hard kernel or that hard shell of the ego. And that's a place where feeling and judgment somehow are joined. It's close to the root of our personality. There's a thrust there which is a thrust towards our own fulfillment which at the same time tends to put down other people. In other words, it's kind of carnivorous. And that's this false personality of ours which is really lethal in a way. It's civilized and so we don't murder other people. But the thing is still there. The roots are still there. Okay. There's something that has to be radically transformed. And when you say radical, we're talking about roots. And that's that somehow that judgment thing is very near the root of our personality, the root of our heart. It has to be broken and recreated. It has to die and be reborn. And it's deeper than just changing our ideas or changing our feelings.

[23:23]

It's at the root of our ideas and at the root of our feelings. Because it's our vision itself that's distorted. And it's where our feelings are coming from that's somehow out of whack, that needs to be repaired. It's not just the feelings themselves. It's like you can't change, transform the whole tree by just pulling the branches. You've got to go to the root. So we're talking about the root. It's beyond any power of persuasion. It's not something we can make up our mind about. Our mind has to be changed. The metanoia notion, the change of mind, the change of heart, conversion is very significant here. It's really, that's what this is about. And somehow it's a question of our own salvation. And it's a question of receiving the Holy Spirit, actually, in such a way that there's love inside of us instead of emptiness and therefore fear, the fear of death, and therefore hatred, basically. As long as we've got death inside of us in some way, we're fearful and we're also, we're hating other people in a way, and we're angry, we want, we've got death inside of us.

[24:26]

And until life comes in and pushes out that death, and until we feel the assurance of that life, which is the very Holy Spirit welling up within us, it's as if we can't love because we've got death gnawing at us inside. And as long as that's so, then we can't really love other people, we can't really respect other people, we can't even permit them to live, because as soon as they seem to be alive in some way, we feel our own shadow more, we feel our own, that worm of death inside of us more. Well, you know, you can think of it that way, but take it back just another inch to Cain and Abel. This is precisely what Cain and Abel did, okay? It's as if Cain, why did Cain hate Abel? Because Abel offered a sacrifice and the sacrifice was accepted by God, okay? Cain hated Abel because in some way he saw the glory of God in Abel's face, I think, okay? In other words, Abel had this life flowing up within him, okay? And Cain, for some reason, maybe he had committed sin or something, but for some reason, he himself, as it were, didn't feel that in himself.

[25:30]

And that's why we're envious, is because we see the glory of God somehow reflecting in somebody else, and we don't see it in ourselves, we haven't got it. And it's our thing, we have to have it, we can't live without it. And so we hate others, and so we judge others, you know? Because that thing seems to be there, and we don't have it. Either we hate others or we desire others. If it's a case of a woman, something like that, we see the glory of God in the beauty of a woman, we desire that, and somehow it makes us sad, because it's ours, and it is not ours, you know? It's meant to be ours and we don't have it. What we're really seeing is our own glory reflected in somebody else, and because we don't have our own glory, therefore we become, as it were, murderous, you know? If we don't catch that, of course. And it's caught by civilization, we don't go and we don't kill anybody, but the thing is there, that envy is there and that desire is there, because we don't feel that life which is glory, which is the Holy Spirit, which is glory welling up inside of us. We don't feel, as it were, the fullness and the beauty of our own likeness, of our own self. And so when we see it in somebody else, Cain and Abel, it's the same thing.

[26:31]

So he had to kill him because he couldn't stand to see that glory which he knew belonged to him, in somebody else. It's like we feel our own uniqueness, that we're the one son, this elder son, younger son thing is always in the same context. Each of us feels that he's the one son, and the glory of God should be sitting on him, you know? And so we're always envious of the other brother, the other son. We can't really let there be another son. And if we don't feel that thing in ourselves, we can't let him live, the other one. Cain and Abel. There's more to the importance of the younger son being the preferred one than the older son. It's not just that it's not a matter of God picking the weak, but it's also about becoming the stronger one. I want to feel it in myself, and I want to feel it in Cain. It's as if there has to be a death and resurrection, and that's why the younger son, in a way, is the one that's preferred. Because the older son is already there, and he, the glory is his. Until the younger son comes along and challenges that. And then the Cain and Abel thing has to go on over,

[27:32]

and the older son actually has to die and be reborn. Like the older son of the prodigal. The older brother of the prodigal son really has to undergo a kind of death and be reborn in order to find himself inside that house with the glory. Anyway. You started out saying that it's easy to be kind to everybody else when you're on top. Sure. When Abel comes along. When Abel comes along and he's shining, he's in the favor of God, then we don't feel that same thing. Then we've been replaced. You see, we've been replaced. It depends on the type of person. It depends on where he's coming from. Because you've got the kind of strong person who always lashes out at the other. You've got the lion type. Who always lashes out at the other. And he'll vindicate his own strength. He'll grab that thing for himself like Cain did with Abel.

[28:35]

Then you've got the other type of person who doesn't have that courage, who doesn't have that confidence in himself. So what's he going to do? He doesn't have that strength. He's going to fall back on himself and feel that he doesn't exist. Are there ways in which one can have that strength? Yeah. He gives himself to the other because he can live vicariously. And so what you do is you hook yourself to the other in some way and you feel your own life somehow vicariously in his. Hero worship, that kind of thing. Because you identify with the other and you live sort of like an appendix kid. There's not a real life in you. Because it doesn't have feeling in it. It's not a home. You can do that. You can know that there is a very large community of spiritual strength in this world. You can see the capacity of the people who are attracted to that. You know, it's a large community. And then in a situation like that,

[29:39]

you have to look at the fact that there are always going to be many people who are going to have much more ability to do more or less. No matter what you can do, there's always going to be someone who's going to be able to do better. But whatever ability you have in you, you're going to be doing that sort of thing. One way or another, you're going to be doing that kind of stuff. I think that the question is to realize you don't have to develop it. You don't need it. But you don't have to hook it to anything external, right? In other words, you don't have to be better than anybody else in any particular way at all. I think that in a situation like that, we have to contribute as much as we can. Usually there's a meeting involving a lot of contribution.

[30:41]

Funding is very important. That particular contribution is very important. In fact, vital to what we do. If we were to make it more, it wouldn't work. If we were to make it less, it wouldn't do it. It has its place in the community. It should do it. That's the beauty of a large community. It's harmony. We judge ourselves. Because we judge ourselves at the same moment. When we judge the other, we judge ourselves. We make it impossible for ourselves to live that being that you're talking about.

[31:46]

That's what it means. Because we've got to decide on what level we're going to live. If we're going to live on a competitive level, we're always going to be getting our head knocked off. We have to get to the deeper level of being, as you say. And then when we're on that level of being, we don't judge. Because somehow we're all one. Everybody else is like our good. Everybody else is our good. Even if he does what we do better than him. It's hard to get to that level. But that's what a community forces us to. Like it or not. It seems like the thing that David said though, something that I'm trying to argue, is that if you break down the different frequencies next to you, and the way I see it, that's the problem, I think. It's an impassive statement. If you find a thing that you identify as you as well, you're not happy with it. You're still standing there and you're joking. There can't be anything special. Nothing special. There's no one thing that I have, or no one wavelength that I have that's different from everybody else. But in another sense, it's true that in the context of being,

[32:49]

it's as if I'm the only one in the world, in a sense. Because each of us, everything belongs to each of us. And each of us has his own name and his own face, right? We're going to get, in the Book of Revelation, you get a stone with a name written on it that nobody knows except the one who receives it. But we don't know it. That's the thing. We don't know it yet. So we can't really hang on to that. And anything we do hang on to is going to fall to pieces. And the only thing that's left is that stone, right? The only thing that's left is the stone. He gives it to you. And somehow it's completely common because it's just stone. It's just rock. It's a little stone. It's got your name on it. That means it's God's love. You're the son, the only son. There is that uniqueness, but we don't know what it is. And every other uniqueness and difference and superiority that we have is only a kind of symbol of that. And every one of them is going to fall apart. I think that's a little competitive in some sense. We naturally think we want identity. And we tend to find it in terms of our function. That's always in comparison to somebody else's relative ability and ability to give us that function.

[33:52]

So as long as we're doing that, whether we're happy with our function or whether we're not happy with it, we're still seeing the world in that way. We're still finding our identity in terms of other people. So you may be lucky. You may have a function that you can cling to your whole life and succeed with it, but you're still not leaving it. And then at the end of your life, what happens? There's a certain... It's almost as if the first half of life is building up something like that. Because we use that. That motivation is what makes us grow. Just like training in sports. The competitive thing in sports is what makes people... What does it make them do? It makes them build their characters in some way. But then, and in many ways, even in education, even though we can say that all the things that are wrong in the system are wrong, but in a way, the competitive, the social thing, in some sense, is necessary to build us up, and then we have to be able to get beyond that point. If the social structures were different, it might be possible to start with a self-transcending motive right from the beginning. I don't quite understand your question.

[35:05]

I don't understand it either. It seems like God is saying, well, this is too much, I can't bear this punishment. So, you know, be compassionate for us, as human beings, that what falls down upon us when we fall into that judgmental train is all that comes from up there, up in the air here, and there's no proof, and the light is coming in, and you feel that opposition. The heart is sterile. And yet somehow God protects us from being totally destroyed by non-destruction. Whatever the mark may be. Another angle of this. These are just some preliminary thoughts before we dive into the content. There's a judgment, a basic judgment that you make in faith, okay? Notice that faith is a judgment in some way, isn't it? This is the Christ. Remember Peter says to Jesus, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. That's a judgment. That's a judgment that comes from beyond him.

[36:08]

It comes not from flesh and blood, but from the Father. So he makes that judgment, and what we do when we get religion, when we get saved, we make that judgment of faith. We do it when we're grown-ups. And then it's as if that's the affirmation of Christ, the affirmation of Christ in God. But it's our own self-affirmation at the same time. We're saved in that somehow. We found ourselves in him. But then something else has to happen after that. That thing is closed, and we spend the rest of our life trying to open it up. Open it up to other people. So you get those two movements. The movement of faith, which closes, and then that other movement of opening, where faith has to turn into love, where light has to turn into compassion, and where what we've just sort of locked into our own little self has to increase, has to flow out, until it's there for everyone, like the blood of life. Which is, I guess, what we see in Jesus. It's as if the little self has to open up after it's locked around that word of faith, after it's locked around Christ, the gift of God, grace. It has to open up until it's the big self, in a sense.

[37:12]

It's the person. And it's no longer competitive, but it's open to all. But that takes a long time. It takes a lot of... something has to happen. Suffering and humiliation seem to have to happen because that's a seed, too, in order for that to crack open and fall apart and be open to everybody. But that business of a judgment of faith and then our being inclined to use that judgment of faith to give ourselves identity and then to repeat it by judging other people immediately with it. You know the harsh, judgmental, somewhat Jesus-people, evangelical type of Christianity, where your self, your identity, your sense of identity is almost the same as the sense with which you judge other people. The measure of your own sense of identity is almost the same as the measure of the judgment of others. Your judgment of yourself and your judgment of the other person, one being positive and the other negative, are so related that they're almost the same thing. Now, that's the rudest, most unrefined and most...

[38:14]

What was it called? Most immature type of Christian grace. And then it has to go all the way from that kind of bitter zeal to the good zeal that St. Benedict talks about in chapter 72. Where a person, even in some way, feels that other people are better than himself, but not with a sense of inferiority. He just feels that life welling up within him, and it's for everybody. And he feels his own uniqueness, but it's not because he has anything special. It's because God loves him. It's the mystery of the Trinity in the end, of being able to be the only son, and yet so is everybody else. Isn't that just according to the Old Testament? Yeah. Isn't it the same thing in the Old Testament? It's called God's word, you know? And God says, go and kill all those people. We seem to have to... We haven't found a handle to that yet, but there's a kind of handle which is in this line. That that's actually the human heart, that you talked about. That wants to go and wipe out everybody. And it's like Saul, you know? Saul's funny because one time he's supposed to kill everybody,

[39:14]

and he doesn't. And another time, I think, he spares the king, you know, and the whole thing. Has to compensate. I don't want to get into it now. But Saul is one of these... Saul and David, you see, are on one side and the other on this thing. And the scribes and Pharisees and Jesus. So there's a... The act of faith, both in Peter and Abraham, this act of faith. And then there's that... That's a closure. That's a slamming shut of a door. A judgment. And then, based on that, there's an opening, which may take a lifetime. And there's a death and a resurrection. Now, the opening for Isaac, for Abraham, and the sacrifice of Isaac, for one thing. Because as soon as he makes that act of faith, as soon as he's got that promise, he has to, as it were, give it all up. He doesn't give it immediately to other people, but he gives it to God. And its opening is the same. And then Peter, in his denial,

[40:15]

and then in the resurrection of Pentecost, he's a transformed person. And what's in him, then, is for everybody. There's no fear. No envy. In one of the books of wisdom, the writer says, I write this without any envy. The grace of God that I receive, the light that I receive from God, he says, I'm not going to hoard it for myself. I'm going to give it to everybody. It's as free as it may be. That may sound like an unimportant statement. I think it's kind of important. It's kind of key. Because the key is the changing of our way of relating to God's grace from the keeping of the light for ourself, and just sort of hoarding up the light, hoarding up truth, or being able to let it turn into love. Do you keep the seed in a bin? Do you stir it up? Do you let it fall into the ground? Do you keep the light? Do you use that light to judge other people? A real intense light, not a bittersweet. Or do you let the light turn into love so that you become bread for other people, or something like that? And if we keep the truth bottled up, what happens?

[41:16]

It builds up a pressure on us. If we keep truth unused, it builds up pressure on us, just as if we were a boiler or something. And how is that pressure going to be relieved? If you do it, if you do the truth, and then the truth is going to turn into love when the pressure is relieved. But if you don't do it, it builds up pressure, and pretty soon you've got to judge somebody. You've got to judge somebody because there's pressure in you. The pressure of truth is so great, and so it's going to come out as truth, but truth without love, which means that it's lethal, which means that it's murderous. Or it can come out in the other way. It can come out in terms of depression and knocking you down, and the pressure just pushes you down. It's self-hatred instead of self-condemnation, instead of condemnation of the other person. The pressure is there. What kind of truth are you talking about? The truth that we get from God, the light that we get from God, say, the insight in the Word, the understanding of, call it the understanding of God, the knowledge of God, okay? That truth. In other words, it's an interior truth in some way. Insofar as your faith is luminous,

[42:17]

and you believe in God, and you feel love for God, that truth has to go somewhere. And insofar as the light that we get from Him doesn't go the way it should go, it doesn't get turned into love, and it builds up this kind of pressure. Is it because when we see God's truth about God, it says something about our own identity? Yes, it's not only the truth about God. It's just, it's light. It's as if it were a substance, something that we receive, and something's got to be done with it. It's the talent in the handkerchief, you know? He says, the servant who buries the talent in the handkerchief and puts it in the ground, it's the same thing. So he keeps it in the form that it's in, but you can't keep it in the form that it's in. It's got to turn into something else, you see? And if you do that, it builds up pressure. That's not, the parable isn't about building up pressure, but that judgment is there at the end. It's something like that. Also, when you're sad, when you're close to a person, you just want to help that person. When you're happy, when you're sad, you just want to help that person.

[43:21]

Every time you try to do anything, it cuts us down. You want to do something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like hanging on to Christ. You're hanging on to that image of Christ. And hanging on to Christ in a pious way, in a devotional way, you know? Because you can be devotional and you can have all that sweetness of prayer inside of you and you can hate everybody. Because, and you judge him in terms of that devotion, because he doesn't feel the way I do, you know? He doesn't worship, he doesn't pray the way I pray, he doesn't say the prayers I say. You've got a very sweet devotional thing there. And then, on the other side, just need everybody else. Now, there's a relative. You can be that way. Yeah. Peter cuts off the high priest's ear, and that's not accidental. No, there's a reason for that. Why he cut off his ear. The Jews still can't hear the Word,

[44:23]

even to this day. Peter cut off the high priest's ear, yeah. Still. There's a whole thing. No, it doesn't mean just one thing, it can mean all kinds of things. But one thing, if... That's part of it. Okay. That's enough for preliminary statements. The importance of judgment is very great on the scriptural level. I think you've got the law in the Old Testament, and remember St. Paul, in Galatians and Romans, you go from law to spirit, you go from the letter to the spirit, and you go from that closed thing, that judgmental thing, to freedom, from the judgmentalness to openness. It's as if there's one judgment that's made. You make the judgment of faith, and then, it's almost like that's the only judgment you make, and every other judgment is made by God. Every other judgment is made somehow by the light within you, not by your own ego. And remember, this conflict of Jesus with the Jewish leaders is going to be coming up, especially in the Gospel of John,

[45:24]

in these next two or three weeks. It's precisely a conflict of judgment. See, they're judging him. When he heals on the Sabbath, when he does all of those things, what's happening? He's challenging their judgment. Right? He's challenging their understanding of the law. So, it's the impact, the confrontation of Jesus, who is the word, who is the word of judgment, in a sense, with the word of God, the judgment of God, which has been turned into human judgment by the scribes and the Pharisees and the high priests. And ultimately, what do they do? They judge him, they condemn him, and they put him to death. He said he was the Son of God. We have a law. Moses gave us a law, and by the law it exists, so they put him to death. And so, it's a direct conflict of judgment. But why? Yeah. There's no one answer that we can give to that. I don't think it's just something that we have to meditate. And when we meditate about it, we don't get one answer. Where do we go? Where does the meditation lead us? Right back to our own heart.

[46:26]

And we find that there's the same tendency inside of ourselves to take what God gives us and to possess it and to use it, and then to exclude God in some way or another. Now, the way that this happens, typically, is when we begin to get something from God, we begin to get a vocation from God. And what do we do? We use it to make ourselves better than other people. We get a grace from God, a life from God. And what do we do? We use it to separate ourselves in some way. And in the end, we use it to shut out God. The reason why there are those who are so turned off, or they can't even... Why are they blinded? They're blinded because they've closed that thing. Because they've made a judgment. They've even forgotten that they've made that judgment. They've made a judgment which really is the judgment of their own self. That's just putting it in terms of the subject of judgment. They've got a judgment which is so hard that it precludes perception. You know what a judgment and perception are? Along that scale, a judgment versus perception? You can make a judgment that blinds you. We can make a judgment

[47:28]

that's so heavy, that's so closed, that we can't even perceive anymore. And that was the situation with them. And that's the comedy of the hand-worn blind, right? Because he can see and he didn't see before, and they won't even admit that he can see. He sees the light and they can't even believe it. They can't see that light that's the truth of his healing. What do you mean you're a Jew? How could you be a Jew? How could it happen on the Sabbath? It's a joke, it's a comedy. It's their judgment. Now this whole thing is very important because it's the thing that's happening in fashion time. The thing that's happening in the inner St. John's Gospel is when Jesus runs into the temple, when he runs into Jerusalem, the whole thing is a judgment day. And it's also in us. You don't know it, but it's the inner sanctum, it's the castle of our heart in some way, that's in question. And it closes it. It closes it. Yeah? Right.

[48:39]

That's men in the church. If you say the church, it is the church, it's the official church, but it's the synagogue. It's like the high priest. See, in our days it comes from another direction. It can come even from science. If you reject the truth of science, you reject it, you say it's not true. The thing that you can see with your own eyes almost because you believe it conflicts with scripture. A similar thing stands out. Candidate. If you compare the Second Vatican Council with the First Vatican Council, you find quite a contrast. In the First Vatican Council you find this expression that if so-and-so believes such and such, let him be an Atheist. Let him be an Atheist. Let him be an Atheist. That's the traditional language of the condemnation of error. But let him be an Atheist. That's pretty heavy. It means let him be a curse. In the Second Vatican Council you don't find any of that. There's nothing like that at all. It's a whole different whole different attitude. There's a movement even in the history of the Church.

[49:45]

We have to be very careful about condemning the Church itself, about judging the Church. We do the same thing ourselves. If we judge the Church and say they were all wrong in those days, we really have to be awfully careful because remember that summer-winter thing, you know? It's one thing to sit here in the 20th century and say, oh, look at that. It's stupid. It's another thing to be back there in the thick of the battle with stuff whizzing around your ears, you know, and you're just trying to hold things together and there's error and everything on all sides and you're trying to keep things, just keep things afloat. You have to do something. What could they ever do in those days? They had to do what they did back in those days. But also it follows that law of the Old Testament where you go from the real heavy condemnatory ban type of thing, you move to gradually the love of God, the truth of God is really expressed through the Church finally. But it can't be at first. There's a law of development. But it's a really surprising development. In a hundred years from Vatican I, which was about 1870, to Vatican II, the Chancellor wants to go ahead, too.

[50:46]

Yeah? It seems like in this desert if you go right back there, there's a million of beings which go right back to the old country. That's right. No matter where we go, we keep coming back. That's right. That's right. Especially in the Because real humility gets you beyond that need to judge. It's the need to judge that's the problem. It's not the same process. You talk about the categories of everything and everything is really what I mean. You know, one cannot argue that the same paradigm will always come with religion. And yet, if it was judged that way,

[51:51]

ask myself don't necessarily have to be all the way around. Can you be humble on one side and still unhumble on another side? Something like that. Also, can the culture of your time actually make encourage a certain type of generalist, okay? So that even in spite of your own humility or whatever, you sort of accept the judgmentalness of the time. But St. Bernard is really a paradox. I don't think I understand it anymore. Also, you know, some of this prophet, for instance, if you take St. Paul, he doesn't seem so humble most of the time. And why is it? Is it his personality? Is it because he's not holy? Sometimes God wants that thing to be expressed at a particular time, and there's no way around it. There's an element in history which gets beyond these personal considerations. Yeah, yeah. He really doesn't have it. He says, May God do something. Sometimes that's a prophetic word.

[52:54]

Sometimes that comes from the Holy Spirit, strangely enough. Then when Ananias and Sapphira adopted it, Peter sent Peter, right? Now, Peter hardly said anything. That was God. He's a little judged by it sometimes, isn't he? At least on a visible level, you know, on the level of what we can see in this life. According to the Old Testament, he did, yeah, according to the Word. That's a hard one. That's one of the toughest parts for me. It's a good first part. Well, the only trouble is, it seems to be going in the opposite direction. You could at least tell him, well, be as nice as you can, fellas. But he doesn't. He tells him to go and wipe them out. It's not even going the same way. I don't know.

[53:54]

Right. Now, those are real questions. I don't have an answer for those. They say, collect them out of the air. God, then we'd be in trouble. No matter what we do, no matter how clever we are, no matter how much stuff we have on site, if Christ is that kind of a racist, we can get to think, no matter what we do, it's just kind of ours. That's right. When you see Joe Brogan next to us, he's full of it. That's right. What's he doing? What's he got? He's an asshole. That's right. So, could this be a good thing? I think it is. It's like McCain and Abelson, okay?

[54:56]

Grace. Grace can make us judgmental. Either because we feel we've got more than he has, or because, maybe we have, you know, but because we've got more grace than he has, we say, well, why isn't he more virtuous than he is? Why isn't he better than he is? Maybe he doesn't have that much grace. Maybe he doesn't have that gift of faith. On the other hand, suppose he's got more grace than we have, then we judge him out of envy, you know. Because, well, who is he to have that? Like Joseph and his brothers, you know. We'll talk about that later. Yeah. It seems to me that we have to wrestle with God within ourselves, and then somehow, the problem is better this way. Because the wrestling with the angel solves the problem of desire, solves the problem of fear, and judgment, and competition. The interior struggle. You can call the angel God, or you can call the angel, also, that self in us, that shadow self in us, you know,

[55:56]

which is our own enemy, which is the mother's enemy. It's an interior enemy that we have. Okay, I don't know. Maybe we used up all the time. Well, this don't judge thing, this is in tension with various things. One thing, obviously, is, well, a tradition, but the duty of fraternal correction is that once in a while we should tell somebody that he's done wrong, right? It's not that you can let everything pass by, and so we've got to work that out. How is it that we can correct our brother when we need to, say the right word, and still not judge him? But also, there's something about our own integrity. Either because we can't simply be walked over by somebody else, therefore we have to say stop at a certain moment, but also because we can't renounce our own vision. We can't renounce what we see. We can't see and say that we don't see. We cannot sort of bend the truth of which we're aware, because that doesn't do justice, somehow, to the dignity of our own intellect, to our own dignity as persons. There's that problem. And then there's the other factor,

[57:00]

we simply can't help judging. I don't mean the bad kind of judgment, the envious kind of judgment. We can't help seeing and knowing that something is wrong, for instance, when it is wrong, right? And finally, there's that need to judge and to correct ourselves. A lot of this, prisoners, is a matter of putting our attention in the right place in the beginning, moving in the right direction. Not immediately being ready to shoot like a loaded gun towards the judgment of somebody else, but rather to be attentive to our own thing. It's catching the thing at the beginning, and the basic attitude that's on our mind. That's part of it. Judgment sounds more final, sounds more conclusive, and assessment sounds sort of provisional. Assessment sounds more statistical, or something like that, and judgment closes. Judgment, theoretically, means that somebody is sentenced. That's a good way of putting it. However, it doesn't cover the whole problem,

[58:03]

but in part it's good, because we can say, I can assess someone, but my assessment is fallible. Because all the returns are not in. I don't have all the information before I can make an assessment. Even now we have to be careful, because we can't assess the person totally, because there's a lot of him that we don't see. So even the assessment has to be remembered in that way. It's as if our very salvation rests on judging another person. That's the thing. It's as if our whole being, our whole identity, our whole salvation at a certain point rests on judging somebody else. And there's a total conversion that has to happen there, because as the Fathers say, our salvation depends on our brother, and it depends on his salvation. It depends on our relating to him. But when we begin in this judgmental thing, it's as if our salvation depends on being able to condemn him. It's as if Cain's own salvation, that he can't be saved unless he kills Abel, in a sense. That's why he has to get Abel out of the way. His own salvation depends on the other person

[59:05]

somehow being blessed, or being diminished. The saints... Dorotheus has got this in him somewhere. They've done it in turn. From the neighbor is life, and from the neighbor is death. There are other sayings which more clearly say what I wanted to say there. And the way seems to be through humiliation and suffering on my side, that breaks that shell of self-complacency and self-forgetfulness that makes us judge. And on the other side, the Spirit of God coming into us, pouring into us, which simply fills us and makes us able to relate to others in a positive way, makes us able to give instead of taking. Because once again, it boils down to the question of giving or taking. Do we give life, or do we take life? Okay, we'd better quit for today. Next time we'll go on with the discourse itself. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,

[60:08]

and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

[60:17]

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