Judging others comes so very naturally to me, and it’s a part of my ego/psyche that I like the least. I have taken the long journey from Christian religions to Taoism, which is a philosophy that encourages self-truth, similar to Jungian shadow work. Taoism also eschews any religion, though it encourages borrowing from other philosophies as you see fit. I left the American Christian church because it is even more judgy than I am!
My first change of beliefs that I had to expunge from the Christian mindset I had been beleaguered by was to see homosexuality as an anathema to society rather than a part of the spectrum of human sexuality. I knew several gay men and women prior to reaching that position, and one was a coworker willing to field my questions about his relationship with his partner in an honest and raw fashion. Others were dear friends of mine, though I never wanted to see that side of them, so I didn’t.
The next two changes have been very recent. I do care for people who are on the autism spectrum, but those who are profoundly autistic to the point of speechlessness frightened me. I think it’s because my interaction with them was medical, and medical interactions for autistic people are terrifying, and they fight back hard. I heard about the podcast “The Telepathy Tapes” from several people, but I only listened to it a few months ago. If the revelations about telepathic communication amongst non-speakers are true, and I think they are because I trust the researchers involved, then autistic non-speakers have an incredible ability that we need to revere as if they are modern-day oracles. At the very least, they should be involved in parapsychological and neurological studies involving non-verbal/non-physical communication.
Just yesterday, I was listening to “The Breakdown”, a YouTube podcast starring Mayim Bialik from “Big Bang Theory,” who also has college degrees in the neurosciences. I recently discovered her podcast when her subject matter and my interest intersected with an interview of Tom Campbell discussing his theory of everything. Yesterday, Mayim and her partner, John, were interviewing Betty Guadagno, who is a life coach for those suffering from addictions. Her story interested me because she claims to have had a near-death experience during a drug overdose. It’s not clear if she was clinically dead and revived, so I will not say that it was definitive. She may have had an amazing hallucination, but it had the earmarks of an NDE. That is splitting hairs, and it isn’t that important to me. She began the interview by discussing the many addictions she suffered from, and that it was a family disorder. She saw all of the dysfunction that addicted parents have and absorbed the low self-esteem from them. She also fell into selling drugs, prostitution, and pimping women to make enough money to be high.
Frankly, I was disgusted to hear this part of her interview, and I wanted Mayim to move on to the description of the NDE. In my judgy head, I said, “Just another junkie who died and came back.” Well, slap my face, but my lesson came a few minutes later when she spoke about one of the hallmarks noted in afterlife studies: the choices we make prior to coming to this world from the astral plane.
As an aside, we have free will. We choose our parents and the issues we will deal with on Earth as these thick and plodding human creatures. Then, we forget all about that as we undergo spiritual amnesia and think that God is a very cruel deity to make us suffer so much. We continue with a level of free will, as much as can be in a material matrix, and then, hopefully, we have a spiritual awakening in our latter years. Obviously, this doesn’t happen for many, and they fall in love with their Earthbound existence, or they just cannot stand their lives and commit suicide. No judgment there, I once tried to commit suicide myself when I was a teen.
Betty, during her NDE/hallucination, was being shown the life experiences she had and how they affected others. She met her father, who became one of her spirit guides. She found out that she had chosen her parents, her addictions, and her prostitution so that her astral self could advance to the next level. Look at it this way: life is an MMORPG, and you are living as an avatar on Earth. You have levels to your existence, and they keep getting harder to accomplish as you progress. Then you become this kick-ass character with all the armor, weapons, magic spells, mana, whatever. But the goal of the game is not to fight the last major boss, but to love. It’s that simple.
What smashed me in the face was that Betty chose the existence of a drug-addled prostitute and pimp. There are very few more lowly in our society, and we shun them. I had very little compassion for people with addiction, thinking that it’s some kind of character flaw and a lack of self-preservation. It didn’t help that my stepfather was an alcoholic who caused a rift to develop between my mother and me. What an important epiphany to find out that we choose to be the lowest in society, to suffer the greatest humiliations in order to gain the highest levels in our afterlife. Instead of reviling those who suffer on Earth, we should be recognizing them as doing their greatest spiritual work. We should offer love and assistance rather than anger and suspicion.
The moral of the story is that we will always have spiritual work to be done as long as we’re corporeal. We must realize that judgment is a falsity that we all believe to be true, only so that we can feel superior to someone else. Newsflash: no one is better than you, and no one is worse than you. We are all connected, and judgment prevents connection.