The judgment beneath Ra’s balancing exercises

When our thoughts veer to one side of a polarity, Ra’s tips help balance the scale. Where we see impatience, we now also see patience — a more balanced view, but still rooted in judgment and polarity. Another option is to realize that the scale itself is a distortion, and discard the entire structure.

Judgment is the cause of the polarity

The polarity of impatience/patience springs from an underlying judgment. The creation process looks like this:

1. I judge that something is taking longer than it ‘should.’
2. This judgment creates a behavior: thought becomes form. I check the time, tap my foot, view others as obstacles instead of fellow humans.
3. I judge my behavior, this time to label my behavior as ‘impatient.’
4. I conceive of ‘patience’ as the corrective behavior, the remedy to ‘impatience.’

The typical approach: move to the preferred pole

The usual advice is to be patient: take deep breaths, know that the situation is out of my control, find something to distract the mind. This approach remains stuck in polarity. It addresses the symptoms, not the cause. It seeks a heaven to the hell of impatience. The impatience remains; it’s simply masked by other thoughts or behaviors. With she help of Ra’s balancing exercises, I notice that sometimes I and others act both impatiently and patiently, 5.2 but I never transcend the polarity.

The radical solution: remove the underlying judgment

The other option is to pull the weed and its root, to throw out the scale instead of trying to balance it. To do so, I go straight to the underlying judgment: This is taking longer than it should. Is that so? Is there such a thing as how long something ‘should’ take, or does it simply take as long as it takes? Can anything take longer than it ‘should’? Am I the authority on these things? Do I know what’s going on at the front of the line? From my limited point of view, can I possibly have the full picture? As in all distortions, the source is the limit of the viewpoint. 99.5

Instead of pretending my judgment is fact, I recognize that I cannot judge — that is, my judgment is meaningless. In Ra’s words,

Indeed, any seeker discovering in itself this complex of mental and mental/emotional distortions shall ponder the possible non-efficacy of judgment. 94.9

My judgment does not have the desired effect, Ra says. I think we can take this a step further: My judgment has no effect on whatever it is I am judging. My judgment’s only effect is to further distort my perceptions. Since I cannot possibly know the full picture, my every judgment is premature judgment: that is, prejudice.

I accept that I do not determine every condition around me, and my judgment has no reality. Each acceptance smooths part of the many distortions that the faculty you call judgment engenders. 5.2

In this approach, I don’t look at the physical manifestation: I go to its source, which is mental. In the case of patience/impatience, the source is the mind’s judgment that this is taking too long. This is the distorted judgment that I must correct. Patience/impatience will continue to manifest until the judgment is corrected.

When the judgment is removed, there is no manifestation of impatience and no need to practice patience as a balancing mechanism. The polarity has been transcended, resulting in what Ra describes as the truer balance. 42.2–9 Instead of reacting to a preprogrammed judgment, I now simply observe and am free to respond as I choose.