Judging People

In her Questions and Answers of June 26, 1957, the Mother remarks at length on the presumptuousness of judging another’s consciousness:

“…so long as it is not the divine Presence you address when you speak to someone, it means you are not conscious of it in yourself. And then it’s terribly presumptuous to judge what state the other person is in. What do you know about it? If you yourself are not conscious of the Divine in the other being, what right have you to say whether he is conscious of it or not? On what basis? Your small outer intelligence? But it knows nothing! It is quite incapable of perceiving anything whatever.

“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 judgment 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.”