Judging your actions isn’t the kind of final judgment that some judge is going to place on you, to determine guilt or innocence. It’s the judgment of a craftsman judging a work in progress.

"You have to see everything as an action. You have to see yourself as being responsible for what you’re doing. Your level of stress right now comes partly from past actions but the important element is what you’re doing right now. Particularly any stress you feel in the mind: It’s a result of what you’re doing right now.

So learn how to look at your actions. And learn how to notice your mistakes, admit your mistakes, and not get all flustered by them. The judgment here isn’t the kind of final judgment that some judge is going to place on you, to determine guilt or innocence. It’s the judgment of a craftsman judging a work in progress: something that an artist or a carpenter or a musician would do. You look at what you’re doing, you’re looking at the results, and then you take what you’ve noticed and you improve what you continue to do, without tying yourself all up in knots.

So remember that it’s all about action. The Buddha’s asking you to be responsible. This is why the element of truth is so important. If you go around thinking that you’re basically good or basically bad, you’re throwing the responsibility off on other things over which you have no control. In other words, if you’re basically bad, then you’re going to need somebody else to do all the work for you. If you’re basically good, you just tap into your natural goodness, telling yourself you don’t have to think about anything; the goodness will take over and do your work for you. But the Buddha’s saying that you can’t think in either of those terms. They get in the way of seeing what you’re actually doing. You’ve got skillful actions; you’ve got unskillful actions. You’ve got to learn how to distinguish the difference between the two. And if you see something is unskillful, you’ve got to learn how to abandon it. If something is skillful, do what you can to encourage it, develop it."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Truth in Action"

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