Chapter 26
Criticism
The older I got, the more realizations I had. Things were beginning to ‘sink in’. One realization was about criticism. It goes out of me, goes in to you, bounces back to me. We all criticized. And don’t think we didn’t! You could feel it as soon as it came out of your mouth! We all criticized each other. One teacher told me, “You think you don’t judge others? Every thought you have is a judgement.” My siksha guru told me, if you criticize someone, those bad qualities might come into you. So there we go. How did we deal with it? How would we become aware of it and change it? My only solution was to be compassionate and forgiving. Ok, we can say, “Look at him. His parents were alcoholics and he is an alcoholic too. He is worse because he is living on the streets, is dirty and is wasting his life.” Now we can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped and we can’t go around trying to save everyone, so what do we do? My only solution was to have compassion. That sounded pretty vague, I admit, but it went a long way. If I saw someone lying on the street, drunk and dirty, I thought, There, but for the grace of God, go I, and all of a sudden, my harsh judgement and criticism just flew out the window. I could have easily been born in an unfortunate circumstance. Maybe I was in a previous life.
Maybe it’s all karma when a person is suffering. Maybe he hurt someone else in his past life and he is getting hurt in this one. Thinking in that way did not help me to be compassionate. And, if I thought I was any better, then I was truly only deluding myself. I may have been there before or I may be there in the future. So criticism appeared to be a like a vortex sucking us into a hellish, dark place where anger causes us to rip each other apart like wild animals fighting for bloody food.
My teachers taught me about the word Paramahamsa. The word hamsa means swan. Swan-like people are called Paramahamsas, parama meaning supreme and hamsa meaning swan. A swan will find the nectar, even in a dirty place. What that meant to us is if we elevated our consciousness, we would become like the swan, looking only for the nectar in the lotus, looking only for good in others instead of searching out and emphasizing the negative things, because we all know the negative things are there.