Holding Back Judgment as a Conscious Being

When you have the compassion that comes from understanding how it is, you don’t lay a trip on anybody else as to how they ought to be. You don’t say to your parents, “Why don’t you understand about the spirit, and why I’m a vegetarian?” You don’t say to your husband or wife, “Why do you still want to ball when all I want to do is read the Gospel of Ramakrishna?” A conscious being does all he can to create a space for going to God, but he does no violence to the existing karma to do it. So you work with your fire, but not patronizingly because you’re not superior; you’re just different. When you understand about incarnation, and that surrounding you are beings at every level of incarnation; some of them very new beings who just started to take human forms and are very busy materially getting it together. While there are other beings around you that are very old who have been born again and again and again, and they’ve worked out an incredible amount of karma and are all ready to float into the Akash, to float back into God.

Some of the beings around you every day are very ancient beings, and some are very new. But is it better or worse? It’s just different. Is it better to be twenty years old than fifty? It’s just different. So why do you judge someone because he’s not as conscious as you are? Do you judge a pre-pubescent because he or she is not sexually aware? You understand. You have compassion. Compassion simply stated is leaving other people alone. You don’t lay trips. You exist as a statement of your own level of evolution. You are available to any human being, to provide what they need, to the extent that they ask. But you begin to see that it is a fallacy to think that you can impose a trip on another person.

– Ram Dass