"But you cannot see their consciousness, and without knowing their consciousness your judgment is not only superficial but inhuman. Your very effort to judge is nothing but a desire to condemn or a desire to praise.

"You condemn that which you yourself want to do but are afraid of the consequences; you are a coward. And you praise that which you want to become – it is your desire, your longing, your lust for power, for prestige, for respectability. If you look at yourself, your judgments show much more about you than about the judged.

"A man of true understanding is without judgment because he has neither repressed any desire nor has he any lust for power and prestige and respectability. He is clean and pure. How can he judge?

"Kahlil Gibran is saying a few very significant things here:

Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.

"Do you have any idea what is wrong? – because what is wrong in one culture is right in another; what is wrong in one century becomes right in another century. What is right today may not be right tomorrow, and what is right this moment may not remain right the next moment. Life is such a flux – a continuous flow, changing directions, finding a path of which it has no knowledge and moving toward the ocean without any map, any guide.

"So is, just like a river, the river of your life.

"It happened: the emperor of China made Lao Tzu his Supreme Court chief justice. Lao Tzu tried to persuade him, but in vain: 'You will repent if you make me the chief judge of your Supreme Court, because my ways of understanding and seeing are totally different from yours.'

"But the emperor was very insistent because he had heard so much about the wisdom of this man. He said, 'I have decided. And you cannot refuse it.'

"On the first day when Lao Tzu was in the seat of the chief justice, the first case was about a man who was found red-handed, stealing from the house of the richest man in the capital."