Discernment vs. Judgment

Lorraine Sinkler’s 1981 Palm Beach Class

Tape 3, Side 2: Catalog No. 8103

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Most every problem that you might have, or anyone might have, concerns a person or a person’s condition. And how do we get around that? How do we get free of that? The answer is to ‘kill off’ all the human beings. Now that’s a big order, but amazingly enough, you can do it. You can get to the point where you don’t have any human beings in your experience. Where all you have is the presence of God. Where all you have is that one Self appearing as everyone you know. And this is possible through the principle of impersonalization, which to me is one of the most practical, the most important, and the greatest of principles. Impersonalization; having no persons.

We must know, first of all, that I am that divine Consciousness, individualized and expressing. And that everyone I meet is that same divine consciousness. There is only the One. God the Infinite Invisible, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, is the only being there is. There is no other. There is only God appearing, God manifesting, revealing and disclosing Itself as individual being. If we truly realized this, we would have the Christ. For that Christ consciousness is an absolute conviction that there is only the One.

This is a very difficult thing to practice because we are so used to looking at people and judging them. So we have to see that there is no one who is good, for only God is good, and there is no one who is evil, because God manifest could not be evil. This picture before me is but a suggestion that there can be another person beside the One. This is coming to me for my acceptance and I have a choice. Do I want to buy it, or don’t I? Am I going to accept into my consciousness some evil or sick or lacking person? That’s my choice. And if I accept that, I also accept that picture for myself. Why? Because there is no other, only the One.

We have to give up the whole approach to life where we believe we can see what a person ‘really is’ humanly. You know people who pride themselves on that. ‘I see what’s operating in that person.’ And we don’t see it as the carnal mind, we see it as something very, very human. That’s not discernment, that’s just judging. What we have to develop is the spiritual discernment that sees through this disguise that the person appears to be wearing.

So we go back to the principle: There is only God appearing as individual being, endowed with all the qualities and capacities of God, and only with those. We work with that principle, we meditate upon it, and every time the temptation comes to judge some person, we remember who that person is. We say to ourselves: ‘Dare I judge God made manifest? This is the divine Consciousness expressing, and in It I find no fault.’

And don’t rest in the ‘good’ that we see either. Reinterpret that good and see that the good is not of man, it is of God. Impersonalize what you are seeing so that your gratitude for a ‘beautiful’ person is gratitude that the person is such a beautiful instrument for the Divine flowing through.

Then everyone who came into your experience would come only as a blessing, a blessing to you, and a blessing to them. For it’s always a two-way street. And our blessing is to know the spiritual identity of every person; to know that at the center of every person the Christ sits enthroned. The Christ is the individualization of the divine Consciousness unto all this spiritual creation.

Impersonalize by recognizing God as the Source of all, the one Cause. See anything unlike that all-loving, all-wise Cause, as a suggestion, a mirage, an illusion which has no substance, no law to maintain it, no person through whom it can operate. Clad in that armour of Oneness, we go forth into the world with confidence, assurance and unending joy.

‘And there was a Silence in heaven ‘ How true. In the degree of inner silence, the stilling of the mind from judging persons, things, or conditions, as ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ do we attain heaven here and now.