How can I transform my judgmental and fearful mind?

How can my judgmental, self-opinionated, guilt-inducing, fearful mind be mutated? It is giving me the shits. I'm completely fed-up with it.

As he was clinging on for dear life, he looked up into the sky and said 'Lord, please save me.' A booming voice answered back and said 'Let go and have faith!' The man, still hanging on, thought for a moment and then looked up again and said 'Is there anyone else up there?' That is the situation. I am telling you: Let go of it. In its very dropping is the benediction. But you are afraid of dropping it. You are so much identified with it: you think it is you! That is the problem. And when you say 'I am fed-up with it', who is this 'I am'? It is again part of the same mind. And the mind is very cunning in playing games. It divides itself and goes on playing games. This one who says 'I am fed-up' is but a part of the mind and…

I heard you say existence is non-judgmental, but our minds are full of judgments. Where do they come from? Are they also related to the idea of god?

Existence is non-judgmental. That is one of the greatest contributions of Zen to humanity: that you need not be a saint to be awakened. You can be awakened from any angle, from any dimension of life. It is almost like somebody is dreaming that he is murdering someone, and somebody else is dreaming a very sweet dream that he is serving the poor people. Somebody is dreaming that he is very virtuous, a saint, and somebody is dreaming that he is a murderer, the worst kind of criminal. Do you think the saintly dreamer will wake up sooner, and the sinner and the criminal will take a little longer time to wake up? They will both wake up exactly at the same time, by the same method. Just throw one bucket full of ice-cold water on both and they will jump out of their beds. It does not matter whether…

Now the only possibility is that whenever you feel you are trying to escape, stick there, be stubborn, and give a good fight. Just for one month try the opposite and then we will see. Once you can do the opposite I will tell you how to drop both. Both have to be dropped, because only then a man becomes fearless -- and because both are wrong. Because one wrong has gone too deep in you, it has to be balanced by the other. So for one month you be a real warrior -- about anything. And you will feel very good, really good, mm? Because whenever one escapes, one feels very bad, inferior. This is a cowardly trick -- to close oneself. Become brave, mm? Then we will drop both, because to be brave is also, deep down, to be cowardly.

How to drop judging people?

From the outside that's what we can judge. From the outside it is always wrong. Seeing it again and again, understanding it again and again, penetrating it again and again, you will not need to drop judgements, they drop of their own accord. Just watch. Whenever you judge, you are doing something foolish. It does not apply to the person at all, it can apply only to the act. And that act too is taken out of context because you don't know his whole life. It is as if you tear a page from a novel and you read it and you judge the novel by it. It is not right; it is out of context. The whole novel may be a totally different thing. You may have taken a negative part, an ugly part. But you don't know anybody's life in its totality. A man has lived for forty…

Remember only one thing: the past is a hindrance, the greatest hindrance. It has to be completely dropped, utterly dropped. To be with me is to be in the now -- no past, no future. This moment is all there is and just this moment is god. Everything else is just the mind dreaming, desiring, imagining. Once the past and future have dropped -- and they are always dropped together; if you drop one, the other disappears of its own accord. They are two aspects of the same game. The past projects itself into the future. It wants to repeat itself -- in a little more modified way, but still the same. Between the two is the moment. The moment, this moment, is the only reality, and the door to reality. So let this moment become your whole life.