The Illusion of Judgment

6. The Illusion of Judgment

This is The Sixth Illusion:
JUDGMENT EXISTS

Your decision that there is something that you must do in order to obtain that of which there is not enough—including God—required you to answer difficult question: How will it be determined whether a person has met the Requirement or not? And what will happen to those who have not?

Your answer to these questions produced the invention of Judgment.

Someone, you reasoned, must be the final arbiter. Since the Creator was the one who established the Requirement, it seemed only that the Creator would also be the one to decide who had met the Requirement and who had not.

For a very long time your species has held the thought that there was something you had to do in order to please God—and that failure to please God produced dire consequences. That you came to such a conclusion was understandable. Looking around you, you saw that people’s lives went well, and some did not. Primitive mind asked, Why? And primitive mind came up with a primitive answer.

Fortune smiled upon those who were in favor with the gods. It was the gods who had to be satisfied, and then the gods would judge.

Sacrifices and rituals of all kinds grew up around this belief, all designed to mollify difficult deities.

In these earliest days, your sense of Insufficiency was so strong that you even imagined the gods to be in competition with each other. There were many gods to please, and it was often not easy to keep track of what had to be done to keep everybody happy.

Each new earthly disaster, each hailstorm, each hurricane, each drought, or famine, or personal misfortune was seen as evidence that one of the gods had not been satisfied—or, sometimes, that they had been warring each other.

How else to explain what was going on?

Now, these beliefs arose in ancient times, and through the millennia they have been refined and clarified. Most humans today do not believe that there is a long list of ill-tempered gods who have to be mollified. Today most people believe that there is only one ill-tempered God who has to be mollified.

And although it may seem as if your species long ago evolved out of the primitive constructions that created an “I’m-going-to-get-you” kind of God, these idea continue to dominate your planet’s theologies.

This God As Avenger model of Deity has never lost favor in your societies. You’ve used both personal and planetary disasters as evidence of its validity. Even in very recent times, such as when your AIDS epidemic hit, there were many people—including some religious leaders—who proclaimed life’s misfortunes to be God’s punishment for the individual or collective misbehaviors of the human race.

Humans continue to agree in numbers that there is a Requirement set down by Me, which they must meet in order to become eligible for rewards here and in heaven. They continue to agree that there is a system of Judgment by which it is determined who has met the Requirement and who has not.

On the other hand, some theologies state flatly that no one can meet the Requirement, no matter what they do. Not even if they lead a perfect life, without error, blunder or mistaken of any kind. This is, the teaching declares, because everyone is born imperfect (some religions call this Original Sin), with a blotch on their soul even before they begin.

This blotch cannot be removed by any act that the person performs, not even an act of true repentance, but only the grace of God. And God, it is taught, will not grant this grace unless the person comes to Him in a very specific way.

This teaching claims that I am a very particular God, one who will bestow the joys of heaven upon anyone who does not do as I say.

It is said that I am very stubborn about this; that it truly does not matter how good people may have been, how compassionate or generous or kind. It does not matter how sorry they may be for their offenses, and it does not matter what they have done to make amends. Indeed, it does not matter if they have made the greatest contribution to the betterment of life on the planet that the world has ever seen: If they have not come to Me by the right path, saying the right words, believing in the right religion, they cannot sit at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
Because such rightness is required, this idea could be called righteousness…
Given their belief that this is the way God has set things up between Himself and the entire human race, members of the human race have set things up precisely the same way with each other.

Taking a page out of God’s book (what’s good for Me ought, certainly, to be good for you), humans have put a “blotch” on each other even before they begin. As I have already described, they do this to others of the “wrong gender”, color, or religion. They extend it to those of the “wrong” nationality, neighborhood, political persuasion, sexual orientation, or whatever other “wrongness” they choose to create. In doing this, human beings “play God.”

Yes, it is God, you say, who taught you to prejudge like this, for it is God who put the first blotch of imperfection on your own soul—who prejudged you, even before you had a chance to prove yourself, or the other.

Pre-judgment—that is, prejudice—must, therefore, be okay, for how can what is acceptable for God not be acceptable for man?

And what is the reason for My having declared all of you imperfect at the moment of your birth? I have done it, so the teaching goes, because the first humans were bad.
So we see how you have doubled back to the first Three Illusion to justify the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth. And so it is, with each Illusion producing the next, and each new Illusion proving those preceding.

Your cultural story says that when Adam and Eve sinned, they were driven from Paradise, losing happiness and their claim to eternal life—and yours along with it. This is because I sentenced them not only to a life of limitation and struggle but to eventual death (The Fourth Illusion)—none of which they experienced before they misstep.

Other cultural stories and theologies that arose and exist on your planet do not embrace the Adam and Eve scenario but nevertheless create their own evidence of the Requirement. On this, most agree: Humans are imperfect in the eyes of God, and there is something that they have to do in order to achieve perfection—variously described as Purification, Salvation, Enlightenment … whatever.

Because you believe in human imperfection, and since you believe that you have received this characteristic from Me, you have felt perfectly free to pass it on to others. all the while you have expected the same thing of others that you have been told I expect you: perfection.

And so has it come to pass that humans have gone through life demanding perfection of those whom they, themselves, have called imperfect—namely humans.
First, they do this to themselves. This is their initial, and often most costly, error.

Then they do it to others. This is their second mistake.

They have made it impossible for either themselves or others to ever fully meet…
The Requirement.

Parents demand perfection from their imperfect children, and children demand perfection from their imperfect parents.

Citizens demand perfection from their imperfect government, and the government demands perfection from its imperfect citizens.

Churches demand perfection from their imperfect followers, and followers demand perfection from their imperfect churches.

Neighbors demand perfection from other neighbors, races from other races, nations from other nations.

Your world rushes to judge, in particular, anyone receiving the rewards—fame, power, success—that are supposed to go only to the perfect, and your world condemns those in whom it uncovers the slightest imperfection.

So fanatical have you become that you have made it virtually impossible for people to become leaders, heroes, or icons in your present day and time—thus robbing yourself of exactly what your society needs.

You have placed yourself in a trap of your own devising, unable to release yourself from the Judgments you have imposed on each other, and the Judgment you believe God has imposed on you.

Yet why should a simple observation about you make you so uncomfortable? Is simply observing that something is so really a Judgment? Couldn’t it be merely an observation? So what if someone has not met the Requirement? What does it matter?
These are the questions that humans began to ask.

Clearly, there was a flaw in The Sixth Illusion. This should revealed the idea of Judgment as false, but humans knew at some very deep level that they could not give up the Illusion, or something very vital would come to an end.

Again, they were right. But again, they made mistake. Instead of seeing the Illusion as an illusion, and using it for the purpose for which it was intended, they thought they had to fix the flaw.

It was to fix the flaw in The Sixth Illusion that The Seventh was created.