What's Beyond Right & Wrong?

We live among a world of judgment.

It’s everywhere.

Other than even the most obvious forms of judgment that people do of each other, it also runs a lot of what people are doing with their lives.

You've probably felt or sensed it weighing down on you your entire life, even if you don't really think about it all that much.

Everyone had their own points of view about the right or wrong ways to do everything, the right and wrong ways of how to live.

And some people are a lot more vocal about sharing their points of view and projecting it onto others.

This idea that there is a right and wrong way to live of course exists on a larger level in society as well, with different industries, organizations, political groups, and such imposing their views on the world.

We’re constantly bombarded with other people’s ideas about how to live, morally, psychologically, financially, with our bodies, in our relationships and social lives, in our work or careers, …

And a lot of it may actually be intended as well-meaning advice, but it’s all based on judgment nonetheless — judging everything as the right or wrong way.

It’s not about you having choice how to live your own life based on your own awareness of the unique person you are, or the unique body that you have, or the unique circumstances of your life as it may be in any moment. Rather it’s about someone else’s imposed, absolute point of view of what you should or shouldn’t be choosing.

It’s basically saying that for anything you choose that isn’t what someone else approves of as the right way to live and choose… “you’re wrong, and you should choose this right way of living instead”.

When you’re surrounded by this idea — in whatever forms it may show up — of “You’re wrong and you don’t know how to choose right”, then it’s only natural that for a lot of us, we internalize that judgment and one of our basic points of view that we approach life with, whether we’re aware of it or not, becomes… “I’m wrong and I don’t know how to choose right”!

What if any time you find yourself making yourself wrong for anything, you ask a question instead…

What’s right with me I’m not getting?

What if you actually do know how to choose what works for you?

What if you actually do know what would work for you as your life and how to get there?

… even if it’s not what everyone else thinks is the right way for you to live?

What if the things you’ve been made wrong for, or that you are now making yourself wrong for are actually not wrong at all?

What if behind that idea of wrongness is simply a difference that just didn’t fit the right judgments of someone (or lots of people) in your life at some point, so you learned to think of yourself as wrong, rather than just acknowledging that you’re different than someone else’s idea of how to be?

If you start asking this question anytime you start making yourself wrong, you might start to have an awareness of something other than the supposed wrongness.

It’s not actually about making anything “right” in an absolute sense, as with judgment, but rather just looking from another direction, for a different awareness.

Even more than just judging ourselves and our own choices, we learn to judge the overall state of our lives as right or wrong, based off of the ideas that are prevalent in our culture or the social circles around us.

Everything is supposed to be rather black and white and definitive, like your life is supposed to follow, more or less, an agreed-upon script… and if it does, then things are going well… and if it doesn’t, then something is wrong.

But what if it was possible for your life to be something different, something better than whatever script you think it should follow?

What if it was possible for your life to follow a different path to get you to bigger and better things, in ways that don’t make sense to your logical mind?

If something doesn’t work out for you, or if you lose something or someone, or if you have an unexpected expense, or if anything doesn’t go the way you hoped it would… what if that’s actually not wrong?

For anything in your life that you’re making wrong or feeling bad about, you can ask…

What’s right with this I’m not getting?

And if nothing else, at least there’s always awareness to be gained from every choice you make, whether it works out the way you hoped or not. At a minimum, for anything you think went wrong in your life, there’s awareness to be gained so that things may work out better next time.

So for anything that you think went wrong in your life, you can also ask…

What awareness did I gain from this choice?

To take another step further, what a lot of us learn to do to compensate for the supposed wrongness of us and our lives, since we didn’t have these questions to ask a long time ago when we started learning to think of ourselves as so wrong… is to try to be right instead.

If we can put our points of view (a lot of which may not actually be our own points of view, but ones we bought from others) out into the world like so many other people are doing, if we can prove and defend the rightness of our points of view, then maybe we can be right instead of wrong.

The thing is that this is still judgment.

It’s still an absolute way of looking at things rather than an awareness of what works for each individual person, each individual situation, in the moment.

It still doesn’t give us choice.

And any time you have to defended yourself and your points of view against anyone else, you don’t get to have the ease of just being present and unaffected by other people and their points of view.

A tool you can use any time you find yourself needing to defend your rightness or your point of view, any time you find yourself in conflict with someone else or their way of trying to do things, any time you’re upset with someone or in a state of negative reaction to someone’s opposing points of view or their judgments…

… just say (in your head, not out loud), ten times…

You’re right, I’m wrong.

Notice if it lightens things up a bit, if you don’t feel so much of that intense need to defend yourself, or that upset that takes you out of a sense of peace and being at ease in your own life just because of something that someone else said or did…

You may have to say it a lot more than ten times, but notice how it goes if you keep saying it.

It may seem counterintuitive because the last thing you want to say when you’re defending yourself, or defending against some perceived disrespect or offensiveness against you, is that the other person is right and you’re wrong.

But it’s not really about believing that that’s true. It’s not about actually conceding that the other person’s points of view are correct. It’s just about saying those words in the privacy of your own head and giving yourself the gift of the freedom to not have to take the judgment of who’s right or wrong so seriously that it controls you, or puts you into a reactive state, or takes you out of the ease of just being you and living your own life.

What if no one was actually right or wrong, and all the points of view that everyone had were just interesting points of views?

What if there was no absolute right or wrong in any situation and everything was just a choice?

If you allow yourself to not judge any absolute rights or wrongs, no matter how real this way of thinking is to others, then you have the freedom of just being, and just having choice, and you can still do what works for you, but the weight of constant judgment that you’ve been living with — probably for as long as you can remember — starts to lighten up.

What would it create for you in your world, in your life, if you started to use these tools and see if maybe judgment is in fact not so relevant to you and your choices after all?

Of course you’re probably not going to want to give up every point of view about right and wrong that you have right now, but what if you just try out using these tools and see what it does create for you?

What would be possible for you then if you allowed yourself that much freedom to just be?