Romeo & Juliette: A Series of Bad Judgement Calls
The other day, my daughter and I watched Romeo and Juliette together for the first time. We watched how, over the span of five days, a young couple met, fell in love, married, suffered their first tragedy, and met their untimely demise.
The end of Romeo and Juliette illustrates the epitome of bad judgement calls. The priest fails to deliver the message that Juliette is under the spell of a sleeping potion that makes her appear dead. The rouse is to ensure that she can awaken and run away with her love, thus escaping the grudges of their dueling families. Romeo only gets word from a friend that she is dead. He takes his word for it. He buys a poison intent on killing himself. He runs back to the church to find her lying in repose.
Without so much as trying to find the priest to find out what happened to his bride, he immediately commits suicide. His actions are taken over by emotion of grief. She wakes up just in time to catch him dying of poisoning and she, too, commits suicide. Indeed, a plague on both their houses.
The story of Romeo and Juliette explains how we hate and hurt based on grudges; how those grudges control our every action. Each family's shared limiting belief - any one who is not us is an enemy - perpetuates the fruits of that belief: murder, suicide, abuse, lies.
The priest sees an opportunity for the families to become enjoined - to become one. The wisest of the cast of characters sees how unity creates harmony, peace, and empathy.
The young couple is subject to their family's control - mentally, emotionally, and financially - and struggle to break free from it. Romeo and Juliette succumb to the binary thinking of their family - all or nothing - and meet their fate.
How do we break free from our senses? How do we break free from making immediate judgement calls?
How A Psychic Can Deliver A Poor Reading
I am mentoring several young intuitive people in their teens and twenties. I see Romeo and Juliette through these young people who are discovering their abilities and more importantly how to use them.
Intuition goes beyond recognizing one's spiritual gifts. The practice of intuition goes beyond using the spiritual faculties. The goal is to accurately discern what is actually happening to respond appropriately.
Sometimes, I interpret what I sense incorrectly. I see signs, symbols, and convince myself that's what it means. I could be exaggerating or totally off base. I don't necessarily see that as a failure of character or even a symptom of an underlying problem. Rather, something else is getting in the way of accurate interpretation.
Take an example: I am presently mentoring a teenager who exhibits powerful psychic ability. She can pick up the core spiritual issues that are presently affecting an individual's personal life and how those issues manifest as suffering in their world. I give her tests to see what she picks up, how she perceives/senses the information, and how she delivers the messages.
What I noticed in this young person was a tendency to judge the subject of the reading by the sensory impressions they pick up. For example, I gave the student to read a photo. She immediately said, "Addict". That's not true about the person in the photo. I asked her, "Tell me how you arrived to that conclusion?"
The young person said, "Well, I saw an image of my cousin and he's a heroin addict and that's why I said addict."
Tell me more about your cousin. She said, "His name is Jason".
"That's the name of the subject in the photo," I told her, "Do you see how you're getting accurate information, but you're delivering it improperly? Judging what you sense instead of illustrating it for the sitter and letting them to decide what it means is what makes a poor quality psychic reading."
Discernment Is The Key To Outsmarting Your Senses
The strength to build for any intuitive is discernment.
“Clairvoyance is the faculty which is awakened when this quality is developed and disciplined, not the clairvoyance of the mediumistic seance rooms, but the true clairvoyance or clear seeing of the mystic. That is, this aspect of the mind has the capacity to interpret that which is seen. Discernment or the capacity to diagnose is the quality of James the son of Alphaeus.” ― Neville Goddard, Your Faith is Your Fortune
The talented psychic doesn't just see stuff, but rather they know what it means, have the capacity to check their sources, question the quality of the information, and accurately describe with detail what they're picking up - all without judgement.
For example, while on the phone with a woman, I saw the Grim Reaper; which to me, it references someone who is under the influence of hard drugs and, because of that, the death follows them. Alarmed, I asked her "I see the Grim Reaper. Who is doing hard drugs?"
She confessed that she and her lover indeed ingested a large amount of cocaine, and that he lover was still using hard drugs to reach so-called spiritual states.
If I judged what I saw without questioning it, I could can thought that the Grim Reaper was coming for me or my husband. Or something worse. Rather, I just asked the question.
Some people get upset when a psychic asks questions about what they see and call that cold and hot reading. Yes, cold reading is a thing; con-artists do it all the time. But that doesn't mean that they're not using their psychic ability, either. To make such a statement that cold-reading means that there is no such thing as extra-sensory perception or spiritual ability and gifts is to say that because someone misuses their hands to hurt someone, love doesn't exist.
It's important to understand what one is seeing by using the process of inquiry. When Daniel Beavers (my co-host on my webseries Valuable Insight) came to me for mentorship to harness his intuitive abilities, I gave him the book by John C Maxwell Good Leaders Ask Great Questions . The goal of the gift was to teach him how, by not accepting what he immediately feels as the truth of what he sees, he could gain understanding by taking a discerning approach to life. As the old saying goes, There's more to life than what meets the eye, Daniel had to stop immediately judging and start immediately asking.
It's easy to drop into a judgmental state. As soon as someone doesn't call us back, we immediately think, "Oh, they don't want to talk to me, they're avoiding me, they're up to something." That type of thinking is a trap. It literally closes our mind to other possibilities.
Another symptom of judgmental thinking is worrying. I was an Olympic level worrier. I let what I experienced duped me into believing that what I had experienced determined the outcomes of my life. It freaked me out, gave me headaches, and I couldn't enjoy life because I was so mentally pre-occupied by the worrisome images in my mental screen of space. I had to learn to focus on my ability to choose a different thought, to control how and what I felt about my experiences.
We get addicted to instant reaction and the roller coaster of emotion we experience as a result. As someone who loves roller coasters, I see the appeal. We surrender to the experience and let it control where we are, how we feel, and where we end up. The problem is, in life, when we live reactively we are not in control at all. That leads to feelings of powerlessness, worry, and hopelessness. Furthermore, if we're not in control of our experience, God knows someone or something else is manipulating us. And these people, who know how to control situations to elicit a response - political public relations specialists, media creators, people who control optics - can easily control you.
By not immediately judging what we see, we can control our response to life. We can control our experience and the our outcomes.
When facing tough times, know there is more to it. There is more to understand. And, if you find yourself making things worse, ask yourself, "Do I really understand what's going on right now?" "Am I misinterpreting my feelings and perceptions based on false beliefs?"
Odd are, you are seeing things clearly, but you're not interpreting them clearly. That poor interpretation - which is on you - is your responsibility and "karma". This is usually what happens when we get scammed or endure a bad relationship. We don't only "see it clearly" until after the relationship is over and we have distance to really understand what the heck we just went through.
Ask yourself, "Does this person actually care about me or are they trying to project an image of selflessness?"
We see this all the time with people who video tape themselves feeding homeless people. Do they really care about the homeless person or are they trying to project an image of being a philanthropic person?
Conflicting Identities Produces Conflicting Results
I leave this with a final point. I remember referring one business man to meet another business man. To the first business man, who is a family man, "I think you'll find some commonalities with X because he is a doting father and family man."
After the met, X asked me, in exasperation, why I said that to the first businessman.
I said, "Because it's true. You prioritize your family. You have shared values."
X corrected me and said, "I don't want people to know that about me. I want them to think that I'm a shark."
As absurd as this story sounds, this incident truly happened. He thought the image of the family man somehow did not associate to respect and success in the business world. Being a shark and getting others to believe it was how he was going to achieve business success. People are always trying to control their narrative by the images they project out because those images say something about who they believe they should be in order to get something.
That's how Romeo and Juliette's family operated: in order to maintain familial primacy, we must cut down anyone who is not us. When they saw people who are not them or things that don't look the way they want they made very bad judgement calls.
Instead of intelligently asking themselves What's at the core of the problems I'm experiencing in my life? Or, How can I be a better parent? The parents of Romeo and Juliette saw only their feud - their enemies - and were powerless to the control it had over them.
So, this is why I always tell my students to carefully examine what they're experiencing in life - to analyze their sensory impressions, and to meticulously describe their experiences without judging them or others in the play of life.
For, as Shakespeare said,
"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;"
We assume a role when we make judgment calls: the victim, the piteous waif, the duped, the thief, the martyr, the healer, and so forth.
Make sure, whatever role you play, you don't let bad judgement calls typecast you.