The Invisible Trap of Judgment

Today I want to explore a concept that I call positional thinking.  I am basing my thoughts on some original work by Dr. David Hawkins.  Dr. Hawkins, to my knowledge, originated the concept of positionality.  For the longest time, I have had difficulty wrapping my head around this label.  I just didn’t understand it, or rather, I would understand it briefly, and then the idea would slip away.

At some point, I realized that Hawkins was discussing a particular way of thinking, and this opened up the idea for me.  Positional thinking involves making a judgment about something.  The seduction of a judgment is that it maintains

 the illusion that we understand what’s going on, when in fact we don’t.  By making these judgments, we hide ourselves from the truth.  We also assume that, by means of our judgment, we now have some control over the object of our judgment.  These are wonderful delusions that reinforce our ego and our spiritual stuck-ness.

Let’s start by examining the concept of judging.  For example, I might say, “It’s too dark in here, so let’s turn on a light.”  This is the kind of judgment that we all engage in on a daily basis.  We look at a specific phenomenon and then make a variety of judgments about our experience.  On the surface, this seems absolutely ordinary and unremarkable, but just below the surface, we find an amazing error.

We have assumed that light and darkness form a continuum, with various degrees of light and darkness.  In actual fact, there is no such continuum.  Instead of a continuum, we are actually observing a unipolar phenomenon – light!  Darkness does not exist as an entity that can be labeled.  I know this sounds weird, but bear with me for a moment.

When have you ever seen somebody flip a wall switch and turn on the darkness?  That never happens, does it?  It doesn’t happen because only light exists.  What we call darkness is actually the absence of light.  Here is a clear example of our tendency to not see reality, to not see what is actually before our eyes.  We think we see darkness; we label what we see as darkness, but in actuality, we are seeing the absence of something, not the existence of an entity we call darkness.

If this were an isolated example, we could easily ignore it.  Unfortunately, our perceptions are riddled with this kind of error.  Let me give you some examples.  Let’s take hot and cold – two apparent polarities that are very important to us every time we step into a shower.  However, cold doesn’t exist.  Cold is the label that we give to the absence of heat.

“Okay,” you say.  “But what about good and evil?  Surely you are not going to say that evil doesn’t exist!”  Once again, let’s look at this carefully.  When have you ever seen a measure of evil?  The only measurements of evil that exist are in our subjective judgments.  When you examine the writings of the great thinkers who have explored this issue, philosophers such as Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Baruch Spinoza, they universally conclude that evil is simply the absence of good.  Once again, we have a unipolar phenomenon – only good exists.  Evil, as we understand it, is simply the absence of good.

So, what are we doing here?  In essence, we are mistaking our perceptions for reality.  We have created a series of collective delusions – by assuming that something exists when it actually doesn’t – and we’ve enshrined these delusions in our language.  Because of these shared delusions, we have changed our behavior to accommodate them.

I know all of this sounds terribly abstract and difficult to comprehend, so let’s try to create an example.  Imagine that there is a spot in your living room where you imagine a very special chair rests.  Everyone in the family honors this imaginary chair by walking around it.  Nobody is allowed to sit in this chair except for honored guests.  So far, so good.  This shared delusion is relatively innocuous right up until the moment that special guest arrives.

Can you imagine that guest’s consternation when invited to sit in this special but imaginary chair?  The guest might comment, “But there’s nothing there – I don’t see a chair!”  The family insists and says, “Not only is there a chair, but it’s a very special chair and reserved for special guests just such as yourself.”  You might wonder what would happen if this guest actually tried to take a seat in this very special chair.

It’s the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, isn’t it, but set in a different context.  And like the Emperor’s new clothes, this imaginary chair can lead to catastrophic consequences.  This is what happens with positional thinking.  It seems to work just fine, right up until the point that it stops working.

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Not only does positional thinking lead us to misperceive the reality around us, it also impacts us in other ways.  For example, by assuming a continuum between good and evil, we have created an illusion that we understand the nature of these two categories.  But when we assume that they exist on a continuum, we have actually turned our back on the reality of the situation.  It means that we assume evil has some objective existence, and therefore some sort of validity.  Nothing could be further from the truth!  Of all of the distortions that we might engage in, making mistakes about the true nature of good and evil might be the most dangerous.

A case in point is the rise in Satanism in Western cultures.  If you mistake evil for something that has an independent existence, it seems logical, and perhaps even reasonable, to worship the God of evil, Satan.  You would simply see Satan as one of many gods, and thus, as a powerful entity.  Once you realize that evil has no independent existence, however, then Satan is revealed as a chimera, the figment of our overheated imaginations.

Sadly, the damage doesn’t stop here.  When we use positional thinking and make judgments about things or behaviors, we have created for ourselves the illusion that we have some control over these mental objects.  This harkens back to the magical thinking of our forebearers – that if you can name something, having that name gives you power over that which is named.  This is simply not true.

The sad part is, by not reflecting on this matter so that we can discern the truth about it, we waste time and energy.  We situate ourselves at the center of a delusional fantasy, a kind of ‘pretend’ situation, all the while thinking that we have mastered the matter.  When reality knocks on our door, our fantasies disappear in a poof of smoke, and we are heartbroken.

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There is yet another critical aspect to our mistaken beliefs.  While believing that we control something as a result of our positional thinking, we are actually being controlled. 

Our positional thinking – our judgments – lock us into a fixed position.  By engaging in positional thinking, we have bound ourselves to a particular position.  For example, by saying things like, “I’m a Democrat,” we have locked ourselves into whatever being a Democrat means to you.  The same with saying you are a Republican.  For example, you may support the political position of having secure borders for our country, but be appalled at the way the current administration is treating immigrants.  By locking yourself into a particular political position, however, you are identifying yourself with something you don’t actually support.  We take a position, thinking that we are defining ourselves.  We don’t typically see it as a process whereby we sacrifice our freedom.

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So, what does all this mean?  In effect, we are creating a prison for ourselves by our positional thinking.  Here’s how it works.  What we believe is what we experience.  Using the light/dark example above, we have always thought of darkness as a thing-in-itself.  Because we believed it to be a separate thing, that’s exactly what we experienced – we saw darkness as a separate thing, even though careful analysis shows us that it isn’t.  

Now, let’s take a step back and look at what is driving our thinking.  It is our ego.  Your ‘I’ is what is generating your thoughts.  For example, we commonly say, “I think (fill in the blank.)  While our ego is necessary to get along in the world, it actually is in business to gratify itself.  It is about Me-Me-Me.  And ultimately, our ego becomes an obstacle in our search for the Divine.

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Has your head exploded yet?  If it has, don’t worry.  Your ego will soon put it back together again.  But hopefully, I have started you on a road that will lead you to question our conventional reality.  What is actually real is radically different from what we have assumed, and careful analysis helps us peel away the deceptions so that we can get to the Truth.  And it is the Truth that will set us free!

This week, you may find it helpful to read this newsletter several times.  The material we are covering is very difficult to understand.  It is also very important as it bears heavily on the success of our spiritual journey.  So hang in there, and remember to meditate every day.

With love,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

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