Message #18755

[mccoy]

It appears that this issue has 2 different aspects:

1- If we see evil in others, the seed of evil is in us. Yogananda's aunt slapped the young Yogananda walking blissfully and unawarely naked after a bath in the Gange. Yogananda retorted: 'You see evil because the evil is in you'. In India it is told that nakedness used to be a taboo. But actually, the aunt identified such harmless nudity with sexual sin, which was not at all the case.

2- We must apply God-given discrimination. So we must recognize evil and judge the others for the following puroposes:
a- avoid the company of the one behaving evilishly, or at least be careful of his/her negative vibrations
b- avoid to behave in the same evil or unappropriate way we observed in the others.

Recognizing a negative trait does not necessarily means we posses that negative trait. That comes from my own experience. I can recognize a junkie and judge him as a junkie, but I never took any drugs in my life and if I have such mental seeds they are so far back that I cannot think about them. My discrimination tells me the junkie will lie to get his dose, that the junkie is unreliable, that the junkie needs badly help but probably I won't be able to fix it and that money given to the junkie will be used for his next dose.

Same goes for many other traits