Even though we may not be aware of it, we are constantly judging everything in our experience. Judgment is the act of choosing how we feel about something or what we think something is. If we see something that looks like a banana, the automatic reaction or judgment recorded in the mind will be: that is a banana.

But what if we misjudge something? What if our first reaction isn’t really the best? If we don’t reexamine the response then this becomes an automatic impulse or reaction, a program. And we’ve all heard how judging is not something we should do, but I think what this wisdom is really saying is that not having respect for our judgments can make us victims of them. Many times, problems encountered in life are a result of impulsive reactions that come directly from our programming. Freeing ourselves from these programs is the ultimate form of awakening.

It is our programming that has the biggest influence on our behavior, beliefs, and worldviews. Most people do not exercise their conscious mind (discernment) to reappraise or judge something again; to respect it. The word respect comes from the latin respectus, or the prefix re,meaning again, and specere, meaning to look at; the word literally means to look again. So to have self-respect, means to look at yourself again, to re-examine what we’ve created with your choices so as to separate the good from the bad, the true from the false, the disempowering from the empowering.

Since we live in a world where we’re constantly being flooded with subliminal suggestions, our attitudes, reactions, and worldviews are probably not our own. By the time we’re reached five to seven years old, our perspectives on life have been almost fully formed, and these will continue to alter our perception unless we respect them, unless we consciously reprogram ourselves using the conscious mind…