Letters from Shanti Ashram, India

66. Who are We to Judge Others? - Oct 2000

Who are We to Judge Others?

October 17, 2000

Dear Parents,

Namaskars, Hari Om and Sai Ram! All is OK here. Praying all are well there.

I sent you the birthday card yesterday. In the afternoon as Mataji was dictating letters to me, I mentioned that your birthday was coming up. To my surprise, immediately she dictated a letter and asked me to mail it along with mine.

You can just imagine my face as she dictated innocently, THE TWO ARE ONE! (Regarding my Dad and Mom being one and the same.) I tried hard not to burst out laughing, remembering that day in Prasanthi Nilayam room, us all laughing about that subject, hee hee! Hope you have a good laugh again! I just barely controlled bursting out in peels of laughter. But I wonder what she thought of my face twisted in a gaping smile, quivering to control a laugh! As usual she was her serious, caster-oil self. Hope she just thought the smile was due to being thrilled at the loving Mataji writing to my dearly beloved mother!

First, the toilet situation here is pretty miserable. The stench, renewed freshly every early morning, of the washed-ashore poop and pee is pretty nauseating and atrocious. Anyone outside my house can sniff it up nicely. But the situation is literally not in my hands. Karma is karma, no one can do anything to escape it.

Now, why are we here? What do we want to gain? What exactly is the goal of life? What will help us and what will harm us? These are very important and vital questions that we must never forget. Otherwise, we will be swept away into the very muddy whirlpool from which we have all good intentions to extract ourselves from.

The reason why I have avoided from the start, things like newspapers and news around the world is that they generally convey horrific and depressing stuff. Our duty in spiritual life is basically PURITY which leads to UNITY then DIVINITY. Do you or do you not all agree or not? To pour over all terrible events around the world and I guess newsy stuff on the Internet also, is to fill our heads with things that will destroy all the hard-earned purity of all these years of Sadhana.

I remember you mother writing me once Mom (how is she now, anyway??), how she reads the newspaper because she can find out things to pray about. You know my opinion is that we can just say LOKA SAMASTHA SUKHINO BHAVANTU! and be done with it. Why fill the mind with all unnecessary details? God has made the world like this. If we harp on the bad and leave the good, what good will it do to us and how in the world will it purify the mind? Remember this and beware.

That is one point. Another is, who are we to judge about things that we never witnessed first-hand? Jesus was a great Messenger of His Father. Even today some people speak against Him. What exactly is our duty, to purify ourselves by following His teachers or by filling our minds with doubt of His personal behavior, how he spent time around Tax Collectors, Mary Magdalene and etc.? Personally, I do not believe it. But even if it is true, what does it have to do with our own Sadhana and purification?

When we proclaim boldly that all is God and all are God, will it or will it not drag our consciousness down, to spend time in wild imaginations on the conduct of others, even great Messengers of God? We follow our hearts and conscience and behave accordingly.

Actually, who are we to judge others? What exactly is the extent of our perfect purity that we can spend time in talking against others? Is it not hurting our Sadhana to gossip with juicy joy, about the imagined or true faults in others? Do we have that authority to judge?

What about the Lord Krishna? Would it do us any good to talk of His well-documented 16,008 wives and ten children by each wife? Could we believe that such a being was God, were we living then? What about Rama sending His wife into the forest due to the word of a washerman? Is this wrong or not? Does it matter? Are we in a position to judge the ways of a Divine incarnation, from our puny and infinitely small consciousness?