On Education

Correct Judgment

One of the great problems in sports competitions is equity of judgment.

To avoid the clashes and quarrels which would otherwise be inevitable, it has been decided once and for all that the competitors would submit without argument to the judges' decision. This may solve the problem for those who are being judged, but not for those who judge; for, if they are sincere, the more trust they are shown, the more care they should take to be absolutely correct in their judgments. That is why, to begin with, I eliminate all the cases in which the judgment is made beforehand, so to say, for reasons of policy or for any other reason. For although unfortunately this happens all too often, everyone agrees that it is vile and that human dignity demands that it should not be done.

As a rule, everything is thought to be all right when judgments are based on a thorough technical knowledge and on a sufficient degree of impartiality. These judgments rely on sense-perception, which is normally considered incontrovertible. In fact, however, this mode of perception is in itself uncertain. The sense-organs are directly under the influence of the psychological state of the individual who uses them, and thus the sense-perceptions are altered, falsified, distorted in one way or another by the perceiver's feelings towards the thing perceived.

For example, those who belong to a group or an association are either too lenient or unduly severe towards the members of this group. From the point of view of truth, neither leniency nor severity is worth more than the other, for in both cases the judgment is based on a feeling and not on the objective and disinterested perception of the facts. This is a very obvious case, but even without going to this extreme, no human being, unless he is a Yogin, is free from these attractions and repulsions,

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which are rarely perceived by the active consciousness, but which nonetheless exert a great influence on the functioning of the senses.

Only one who is above all likes and dislikes, all desires and preferences, can regard all things with perfect impartiality; the purely objective perception of his senses becomes like that of an extremely delicate and faultless mechanism which benefits from the light of a living consciousness.

Here too yogic discipline will come to our aid by helping us to build characters of such nobility that they can become instruments of the truth.

Bulletin, November 1949

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