Judgmental vs. Judicious

People often come to meditation having been warned about the dangers of being judgmental, so they’re afraid to pass judgment on their practice of meditation. They’re told that there is no such thing as a good or a bad meditation; there’s just meditation—and that you’re not supposed to pass judgment on anything anyhow, just accept what is.

But that’s impossible. The idea that all judgments are bad is a judgment, and a pretty judgmental one at that. There are lots of areas in life where we have to use our powers of judgment. If you’re going to decide to act, you have to judge what’s the best action to do, and what’s the most reliable information on which to base your actions.

So we have to make a distinction between being judgmental and being judicious. Being judicious is when you use your powers of judgment wisely. One way of doing that, of course, is to wait until all the information is in. Then you pass judgment.

But we live a life in which not all the information is in, and yet we still have to act. In fact, that’s the way most of our life is. So we have to practice what’s called success by approximation, doing our best and then monitoring our best.

A simple example is the element of directed thought and evaluation in meditation. Directed thought and evaluation are things you’re doing all the time. People sometimes come and ask, “What is this directed thought and evaluation? How do I start doing it?” You’ve been doing it ever since you learned language. You direct your thoughts to something and then you judge it. Ask questions about it. Answer the questions. Make comments. This is how we conduct our inner conversation.

As you begin to meditate, you’re trying to conduct an inner conversation about your breath. And you want to do it well. In the beginning, it’s very simple: What kind of breathing feels good? Here again you can get tied up thinking there must be a perfect breath someplace. Well, no. The question is simply: What’s good enough to settle down with?

If something seems okay, try it for a while. If, after a while, it doesn’t feel good, you can change again. If it does feel good, you can maintain it.

So those are the basic questions of evaluation on this level of the practice: What kind of breathing feels good enough to settle down with? Once you’ve got it good, how do you maintain it? And then when you maintain it, what can you do with it?

The Buddha recommends that you spread the sense of comfort through the body. Ajaan Lee is more specific about how you do that. You think of the breath as part of the energy element of the body, and it’s flowing through all the nerves, all the blood vessels. So you think of that sense of ease flowing through the nerves, the blood vessels. Down the spine, out the legs. Down the shoulders, out the arms. From the middle of the chest down through the intestines.

Think of the breath energy in your eyes and the areas around your eyes. The muscles that get used a lot as you think: Let them be bathed in good energy. Then, once you’ve spread that awareness and that sense of well-being, try to maintain that.

Actually, all our knowledge contains an element of judgment. Think of dependent co-arising: Before there’s contact at the six senses, you’ve got fabrication; you’ve got name and form. Part of fabrication, of course, is directed thought and evaluation itself. Part of name and form is attention, knowing what questions to pay attention to, which ones to ignore. That requires that you use your powers of judgment.

As Ajaan Lee points out, this is the beginning of discernment. You’re learning to develop this faculty by success through approximation: not hoping for a perfect judgment right away, knowing that you probably will make mistakes, but being alert to what you’re doing, what you’re assuming—and what you’re doing based on what you’re assuming—and then what the results are. Over time, as you practice, you get an expanded sense of what possible results there may be.

As with any subject you learn in school: You learn the basic steps and you’re proud, say, that you’ve learned addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Then you move on to learn more, because there’s more to math than that. This doesn’t mean that what you learned at the beginning was bad. It’s a necessary step. Without that step, the higher levels of math wouldn’t make sense. In the same way, in meditation you’re trying to develop your powers of sensitivity, and your sensitivity grows through experience as you learn from your mistakes.

Experience is something that’s devalued a lot in our society. Older people are not up on the latest in terms of what’s new in AI, what’s new in the computer world. But they do have experience. They’ve seen a lot of things. And that shouldn’t be devalued—particularly in meditation. AI is not going to do the meditation for you. Nothing on the computer will do it for you.

You’ve got to learn how to use your own powers of observation inside your own body and mind. That’ll take time. There will be setbacks. And there will be points though where you realize, “Okay I’ve been wrong up to now, but now I’ve seen for myself why I was wrong.” That’s a step forward. And you wouldn’t have gained that step forward unless you had made some provisional judgments earlier.

That’s what it means to be judicious. In areas where you don’t have to act right away, you wait until the full body of information is in. But in areas where you can’t wait for the full body of information before you act, you take what seems to be the best alternative and watch what happens as you follow through with it as your working hypothesis.

That’s what working hypotheses are for. You take a stab at something and then see how well you’ve stabbed. If you don’t take a stab at all, you’re never going to learn. You can’t wait until the perfect breath comes on its own to you. You can’t wait until concentration comes on its own to you. You’ve got to approach them through trial and error—or as the Buddha would say, through commitment and reflection. You commit to doing it as best you can, and then you reflect on the results.

Where you did it well, you pat yourself on the back. But you don’t rest content, because you realize there’s more work to be done. Where you realize you didn’t do it well, you take it like a good sport. Say, “I’m here to learn.” This is how we guard the truth.

So many people come to meditation with lots of preconceived notions—what in Thailand they call “uncooked arahants” or “people who know everything before they’ve even tried it,” neither of which is a term of praise. Those are the people who never learn anything. The wise people are those who know they have more to learn, that the basis of the knowledge they already have is not yet fully reliable. What they’ve learned from books, what they’ve learned from listening: That’s what they start out with. It’s meant to point them to what they’re actually experiencing.

And they have to make themselves reliable judges of their experience. Again, you do that by success through approximation—commitment and reflection. And then further commitment, further reflection. That’s how you use your powers of judgment judiciously.