I had a sociology professor at University who suspected that the first thing that entered people's minds when they cross people on the street is a judgment. If you live in a city of eight or 10 million people, that's a lot of judgments, don't you think? But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that we project our way of being onto others, which means that we assume that they're doing to us what we do to them. And that means that we walk around with an underlying fear that we're constantly being judged. I'd like to make a distinction between discernment and judgment.

Discernment is when your mind says, Oh, I better look twice before I cross the street. judgments on the other hand, are really just adding more unknown to the already unknown. For me, judgments are based on fear And fears ultimately are based on ignorance. We fear the unknown. And our minds make assumptions and judgments in order to protect us and make us feel safe. But there's literally an infinite number of things and experiences and sounds and tastes that we don't know.

And there's even a larger quantity of things that we don't know that we don't know. Most of us don't want to accept the fact that our thoughts are constrained by language. We'd like to think of ourselves as being super smart. Really, the way our minds operate, most of us would unwittingly prefer to be certain and wrong and to embrace uncertainty. The problem is that our assumptions often manifests themselves as judgments. Because if I believe x and you believe why, and we don't have time to sort out our suppose the differences, how our minds judge and dismiss these other possibilities, We'd like to believe that the way we do things is the right way.

And that often implies that other ways are not as propitious or favorable. I know this is gonna sound funny to some people. But I think that if there's any intelligent life left in 500 years, when they look back on our culture and see what caused the demise of our civilization, they're not going to say, oh, is nuclear weapons or some airborne plague or something like that? They're going to say, it was caller ID. And the reason is, is because every time we call someone and they have a smartphone, they are looking at it to say, oh, gentleman's calling, and then they decide whether you're worthy of their time. 30 years ago, when before answering machines, it was like a peasant.

It was like a gift to get a phone call, you know, everyone in house would run towards the phone and answer it be a surprise. But nowadays, it's the exact opposite end I think people send text messages because they're really afraid of being judged as not worthy of being unaccepted that someone else is doing something with their time. That's supposedly more important than answering the telephone. That's a great example of what mindfulness is being aware of how your mind is want to act and react. So let's try another simple meditation. I'd like you to close the eyes.

Sit up straight, shoulders over hips. Relax the face. unconstant jaw and tune out the noises from whatever city you're in. tune out the cars. tune out the buses. tune out the sirens.

Tune out the air conditioners a heating system. Just tune it all out, empty the mind and release all judgments