Self Evaluation – Response to an Email
In your writing, which I enjoy, you talk about self evaluation. Can you please explain what you mean?
Roger.
Self-evaluation is one of the most difficult things to do. Very few people are interested in this and I thank you for your question.
First of all, in order to self-evaluate one must be free of all of one’s personal opinions and biases. You must be free of all prejudice. And that means you have got to face what you are attached to in the situation. Attachment is the root to all anxiety. Because we cling to things and people and ideas, for comfort and our own sense of meaning, we are slitting our own throats and will live on in a life that is petty, small and meaningless. What a tragic thing, at the end of one’s years, to see that all life’s suffering was self-inflicted and meaningless. It is meaningless because what I have attached my self to either dies or decomposes. Most of the anxiety we live with is caused because of our attachment to things and the fear of them being taken away or leaving us. Or perhaps we have attachment to ideas and we have anxiety because we find out that clinging to the right or the discovery of the wrong has no bearing on how we have lived our life.
In order to self-evaluate, there must be freedom from all the belief you have about a certain situation. Say you are angry. Can you self-evaluate that anger – which means to see the network of it from its inception to its death. This means without judgment or any condemnation. You can’t understand anything you are not close to. Being close does not mean agreeing or disagreeing – anybody can do that. Self-evaluation is getting close and seeing all your reactions without any judgment, seeing the action you are doing now and how that effects what happens within you and around you. Self-evaluation is looking at you, not the other. In order to do that, the mind has to be very quiet and watchful. It must turn in on itself and watch without fear or predetermination. Self-evaluation is the heart of love. Love never evaluates another – it only wants to see its own disorder and free itself from that.
Coach bri