According to Osho, you don’t ‘stop’ judging by willpower; you outgrow it through understanding. You can see only behavior, never the person’s inner being, which remains private and mysterious. Acts are momentary and misleading—smiles may hide tears, anger may flash from a loving heart. Recognize this limit, refrain from conclusions, and let respect for each soul’s privacy dissolve the impulse to judge: judge ye not.
You only see what people do, not their secret inside, so don’t decide who they are from one moment.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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…
Beloved Osho, I often feel that people, particularly men, only see certain facets of me, thinking this is the real me, but deep down I feel misunderstood because I don't know if all these facets are all that I am. But I feel there is much more to me that nobody sees or perhaps wants to see. With you I feel the situation is just the opposite: I feel you contact the real me. When I am surrounded by people, it makes me sad that they don't see the real me. Could you please say something about this?
Firstly, people can see only aspects of you. They cannot see your real self because they have not seen their own real self. Neither have you seen your real self. You simply feel that people are taking your aspects as your whole reality -- and that is not true, because you know there are other aspects. But you also are not aware of your real self. Even the sum total of all your aspects is not the real you -- you are more than the sum total of all the aspects. In fact, it has nothing to do with aspects. Your real being is only a watcher, a seer, a witness. All the aspects are of your mind, of your personality. You are simply a mirror which reflects anything that comes in front of it, but the moment it has moved away the mirror is again empty. So the first…
Beloved Osho, I am constantly criticizing myself and judging other people. This makes me feel divided and tense, and I cannot establish a real contact with people or nature. I want to open my heart and I don't know how to do it. Please, could you say something about this?
I said, "You are right: that was the place from where it came and through where it got out. And if you really want the proof...." I pulled out the snake from my bag and I showed him that this is the snake. "You are such a fearless man, and this is only a rubber snake. And it just touched your face -- two, three times, not much -- and such a scream came out of you. I was not expecting that it would create so much fear in you." He was so ashamed that that very evening he resigned and escaped from town, because everybody was asking him, "What happened with the snake? Was it real? -- because somebody said that it was just a rubber snake and that some boy in your class had accepted your challenge." The whole town was talking, and it became so difficult for…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHY DO I JUDGE SO MUCH? It is a great disease. And we carry the disease from generation to generation. Everybody is brought up in a climate of continuous judgment, condemnation, criticism. This makes people hard, this makes people without compassion. And the society needs people who don't have compassion, who are hard, and who are always putting everybody down. Your continuous habit of judging is nothing but an effort to put everybody lower than you. When you criticize something, when you judge someone, you have already taken a higher position. You don't know the other person. You don't know his life story, you may have known a little fragment. On that fragment, you judge the whole life of a man -- unashamedly.
Beloved Osho, when we drop the attitude of judging people negatively, it follows that acknowledging the positive in people has to be dropped too -- the whole package has to go, does it not?
You never think that Rama obeying his father -- a dying man, under the influence of a young wife.... In the first place, to have four wives was wrong. Then, even at the point of death the man has not the courage to say no to his young wife. Such a henpecked husband! For no reason at all he orders Rama to go to the forest for fourteen years. And this was a value in those days, obedience. Rama is respected for centuries because he obeyed his father without even asking, "Why? What have I done? For what is this punishment being given to me?" Fourteen years he passes, on foot, in the forest. Today, nobody who has any intelligence can say that obedience can be of such a high value. He should have disobeyed. And this is my feeling, that if Rama had disobeyed Dasharatha, his father, this country…