Standard of Perfection

Student: If we don’t have a standard of perfection that we are aiming for, how do we gauge where we are in the process of our evolution?

Barbara: First of all, the self-judgment doesn’t come from listening. The self-judgment comes from our conditioning over a lifetime. We’ve learned this way of being with ourselves, this way of dialoguing. Somewhere early on in our existence as human beings, when we first began to communicate, we heard the communications of “you’re bad, you’re not enough, you’ll never be as smart as your sister”, etc. We’ve heard the communications that said that “we are not” and we agreed to them because we had no reason not to. They are coming from people that we hold as authority figures. We made those agreements and the judgment became a way of being. Once you start listening, you do become aware.

Now, the tendency because you’ve become conditioned to judge is to judge what you’ve become aware of, to start to judge your judgment. Now, that is pretty evolved right there! It doesn’t get you out of hell, but just to see you have been judging yourself and you are constantly delivering messages to your body that says that you are not enough is a fantastic step. To judge the fact that you are judging yourself is an evolution, but it is not the end of the listening.

Because it is not how you express your own condemnation of yourself, how you critique yourself that is the problem; it is the ultimate pattern of judging, no matter what the excuse is. You can make the excuse the way you look or you can make the excuse the way you think, it is still a pattern of judging. So the listening just gets deeper and deeper.

Here we go into the area of where is your attention? If you came to a spiritual seeking for the purpose of changing yourself, of being happier, of being clearer, of being more loving, enjoying life more, then this is part of the process. You have to control your attention. Up until now, your attention has been controlled by a belief system that says, “I am not enough.” And, “I need to be afraid,” and “I need to constantly, constantly, be putting myself in distress through judgment, through fear, through what I think I know about myself.”

If my attention is on how I am reacting to what I perceive and how that falls into the old patterns and categories of judging myself, and I am going to modify that, that is accomplishing what you say you came to a spiritual teaching for.

Attention. Listen, pay attention, and modify according to what you perceive in terms of your emotional reaction.