I had an interesting talk with a client once about judgment and the influence that it had on their life. It really got me thinking – and it doesn’t take much to get me thinking. The discussion we had headed toward the concepts of Love versus Judgment.

Through this discussion I felt that we came to some powerful insights, for them and for me. Perhaps the most powerful insight was the conclusion that Love is the opposite of Judgment. Let me help explain how we came to this conclusion, and why it is important.

For many of us, we have been taught that the opposite of love is hate.

The more that I have come to understand emotions, I would have to disagree with this long held belief. I see love and hate, back to back to each other at times, looking in different directions, and if love turned to hate to embrace it, hate would still need to look away. I see that we often feel hatred to protect us from the fear of not feeling lovable and/or from seeing our own flaws and inadequacies that are based in our judgments and others which often leave us feeling unloved. This is not opposite, Hate is just protective.

So just how is Love the opposite of Judgment: Let me count the ways…

• Love is an emotion. In its purest form, love is the most powerful emotion that exists. It is the light that shines through all darkness to every corner of our universe. Judgment, on the other hand is devoid of emotion. In its purest form, it is pure logic and is extremely powerful to refute. Judgment can, however, evoke emotions in others, because of the strength or lack of strength in the logic used to support any judgment. However, regardless of the emotions that one feels, judgment is still not an emotion.
  
• The power of love can draw even the most distant people together. Love traverses race, religion, age, gender, income, political affiliation – there is almost nothing that love cannot draw together. We can see the power of love in the most unlikely of marriages and friendships. Judgment, on the other hand, almost always serves the purpose to separate and categorize. It often contributes to creating hierarchies and divisions in families, neighborhoods, politics, nations and religions. Judgment often justifies war and genocide. Even when it does serve to draw some people together, it still serves to separate others.
  
• Love often lacks objectivity and in its truest form is unconditional. It neither evaluates nor questions -- it just is. The very nature of Judgment is conditional. It requires questions and answers, and while one would hope it is based in truth, it often is not.
  
• Love often hits us like a ton of bricks. There is not much that is subtle about it. Like a teen crush or a running, jumping hug from your child, love can knock you off your feet. There are times that love can sneak up on us, but not very often. Judgment is often very subtle, and many of us do not realize when we have formed judgments, whether those judgments are fair or not. Judgment is tied to our opinions and world views, and while sometimes we hold onto some judgments as truth, they are often based in opinion, conjecture, rationalization and justification. The subtleness of these influences often lead to arrogance and tease us into defining a false truth. Propaganda is often uses pieces of truth combined with subtle misinformation to feed false judgments.
  
• Love does not consist of stratifications. Judgment often depends on stratification. The person judging is often seen as or wants to be seen as having a higher status than the person being judged. The need to be seen as or consider oneself as above or below others feeds this stratification and further judgment.

We live in a world that requires both love and judgment, to some degree, but in my impression, too many corners of our world have settled on judgment as the way to truth, however, when if we really feel deep down inside, Love feels so much more true. Of all the times that I have heard that “Love is blind,” I have seen that many more times when “Judgment is blind” and feeds hate, ignorance, prejudice…

Even in the eyes of absolute truth, hate can close its eyes and rely on previous judgments to maintain its view.  

The irony is that billions of us have chosen a religion and/or spiritual path to follow for supreme guidance. We look to our “supreme being” who we have determined to be the cornerstone of our beliefs to help us define our direction, assist with our moral compass and serve as a model of our life aspirations. The various prophets of religions throughout history consistently taught us to love one another and not to judge.

Unfortunately, our religions are often based in judgment and the ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, strong and weak. I ask you, is this the definition of love that any of our conceptions of God would wish for us to engage in? Some may think yes. With this in mind, even our own definitions of our creator are based in judgment, not love.

Just like we have light and dark, hot and cold, night and day, we need opposing  constructs.

Quantum Physics supports that the universe would not exist without them at a physical level. Opposites do not have to be bad or wrong. I believe that we are here to find our own truths in balance with others’. These truths may be ever evolving, and don’t have to be based in judgment, but instead, many points of observation. As for the discussion of judgment versus observation, I will save that discussion for another day.

After all, “To err (in judgment) is human…To love, divine. While the act of judging may be a human predisposition, I would ask that we challenge ourselves to aspire to a higher standard. We may not be perfect, but we can aspire to perfection. Rather than judge, choose to observe, grow, evolve and love.