People use the word responsibility all the time. Some times in reference to things that they feel that they have to take care of and other times in reference to other people and their lack thereof. The word can be comforting or it can cause pain. It can be a weapon or a healing balm. It’s use and meaning can vary over time and space. To different people, it can mean different things. In different parts of the world it can mean different things. And yet, for such a powerful term, it is curiously unremarked upon.
re·spon·si·bil·i·ty (r
-sp
n
s
-b
)
n. pl. re·spon·si·bil·i·ties
1. The state, quality, or fact of being responsible.2. Something for which one is responsible; a duty, obligation, or burden.
If you break the word down into its component parts it looks something like this:
re·sponse (r
)
n.
1. The act of responding.2. A reply or an answer.3. A reaction, as that of an organism or a mechanism, to a specific stimulus.
a·ble (
adj. a·bler, a·blest
1. Having sufficient power or resources to accomplish something: a singer able to reach high notes; a detergent able to remove stains.2. Usage Problem Susceptible to action or treatment: The brakes were able to be fixed.3. Especially capable or talented.
A duty then. A burden, an obligation to respond, reply, react or give an answer and being capable or having the resources or power to accomplish it.We are responsible according to our own personal choices to self, family, friends and society to varying degrees. We each have examples in our lives of things that we feel that we are responsible for. Responsibility is a choice.
It is a choice to respond and the ability to do so. To react to a situation in a capable manner.
Individually, we are each responsible for our own thoughts, words and actions. Because the mind can be controlled, every thought that we have is a choice. Because the muscles that move the body can be controlled, every word we say and action we take is also a choice.
We don’t have to think certain things. If we choose to and practice, we can turn off the constant running chatter of thoughts that passes through our brain. Dwelling on the past and the future is not necessary. Dwelling on thoughts of people and situations that give rise to feelings of jealousy, avarice, hatred, passion or even love is a conscious choice. It is a choice that takes us out of the moment, out of the Now, and into the indeterminate space of contemplation, removing us from our outer environment and immersing us within the inner creative environment of imagination and emotivity.
The thoughts we allow our minds to entertain are always of the imaginative variety as none of them are based in reality in any way other than containing a cast of characters based upon real people, or a series of events based upon what we think are potential occurrences given the information that we possess at the time. How we recall the past, how we create the future with our thoughts is totally constructed by the series of synapses and connections within our neural nets and the emotional content that the images give rise to and that we use to determine which potential path holds the best possible outcome for our current emotional state and belief system.
None of it is real until we attempt to make it so. We remember selectively. Our perceptions are bounded by our capacity to process information and our knowledge bases, which limits our ability to understand everything going on around us. Often, things did not happen in the past in the manner that we envisioned, nor did the events hold the emotive weights to others that we might have given them at the time.When we think about current events, our perceptions fail us as well. We do not have all of the information, and yet we attempt to forecast other people’s actions, or how situations will play out. None of it comes to pass outside of our minds and in the ‘real world’ in exactly the manner we had envisioned it either because there are other actors involved. Other people who are acting out the plays they’ve also envisioned in their minds. The Comedy of Errors that our lives then become is in direct correlation to the lack of clarity and knowledge that we bring to the table in each circumstance and instance of interaction with other sentient beings and the natural world.
The interplay of multiple consciousnesses engaged in personal, mental dramas upon the sound-stage of 3D reality is life as we know it. Our engagement with the social system and our interpersonal connections to others comprise our levels of responsibility. The social compacts that we agree to as we mature within the different cultural realms of production across the world determine the nature of that responsibility.
As individuals living within greater systems that integrate ritual and belief in a criss-crossing interweaving of institutions and interactions, lesser and greater forms of coalescence around ideologies and material manifestations of such in all areas of people activity including capacity limitation, intellectual bounding, moral culpability, interpersonal interactivity and individual and collective responsibility, we make the conscious choice to maintain the system with our acquiescence and our mental and physical support. We become the system and uphold the system as an agreement with others within the system.
Our responsibilities are then determined by outside forces that we have internalized. Our choices are then bounded by a complex of ideas and formulations that limit our capacity to respond creatively to life and to the unlimited potentialities that surround us because of this mental encapsulation that we subscribe to and represent in our words and actions, if not our thoughts. We become beholden to family, to friends, to society. We limit our thoughts, our words, our actions based upon what others think of us or because of our fear of the potential ramifications of going beyond the boundaries and the imposed responsibility of societal production.Responsibility in the cultural sense often has to do with the continued propagation of society. Inter-generational societal production. It is almost as if cultures were alive, thinking and conscious entities comprised of countless individual souls who live and die within them much like cells within organic bodies. They are born and die without remark but the body lives on. Humans engage different processes of societal production during their lifetimes, acting very much like cells and we often attempt to pass on our roles to our children, who then pass them on to theirs. We re-create what are often outdated memes as we are conditioned to do even as the world changes around us. Culture must conform to the world within it is expressed, response must be commiserate with ability.
At a certain point, those who seek freedom through spiritual practice come to recognize the limitations of societal responsibility and make different choices. It becomes possible to recognize personal responsibility and to cast off imposed structures that are not necessary for one’s own progress in life. But the ramifications of such are not without consequence. Social censure and castigation, banishment or disowning, disapproval, anger, disappointment and every other form of emotional and physical punishment available, even unto bodily harm and death, are the potential costs an individual must pay for their mental and physical freedom.
The higher notions of philosophical and spiritual responsibility of collective involvement and interactivity is bolstered by the quantum realities of entanglement and superposition. Everything and everyone is connected in a web of consciousness and choice is a matter of perception and attention resulting in the collapse of the wave function into a pattern of lived reality corresponding to personal knowledge or belief. We are individuals acting within a collective, affecting it but possessing our own unique perspectives. We engage others’ perspectives and enter into and exit different time-lines and realities with the course of each series of thoughts, words and actions. This is the real nature of responsibility: to be true to ourselves and, by doing so, being true to the whole.The only physical responsibility we are born with is to ourselves. Whatever we do is our destiny; is the way it is supposed to be. The only spiritual responsibility we are born with is to our own evolution of consciousness. However we individually evolve is of benefit to the All, is an expression of exactly how things are supposed to turn out. Everything else that we pick up along the way that cause us to doubt ourselves, to self-flaggelate and to entertain worry and regret is to misunderstand the nature of incarnation and life and to misappropriate time and energy upon pointless recrimination.
Life is not designed to be thought out, it is designed to be lived. Taking it as it comes, immersing yourself in the Now opens up the vistas of possibility unto the infinite, releases flows of energetic potentiality that expand human ability beyond dreams and material limitations. Choose your responsibilities wisely and make the choices that lighten your soul instead of those that increase the burden. Accept where you are and what you can do based upon your options in the Now. Be prepared for immediate change by keeping your mind clear and open and watching for the synchronicities that lead you upon your soul’s perfect path.
But mostly, do what you have to do. Own your thoughts, words and actions without regret. It is our most pressing responsibility in life.
It is believed by some that the state of Samadhi is an end in and of itself. An experience of Oneness, of Unity, beyond which there can be nothing further. In addition, that the goal of meditation is to reach this perceptive modality and to abide there in perpetuity, beyond the necessity of interacting with the material world in any fashion other than procuring food and drink to sustain the basic functionality of the body for the purpose of continuing engagement with the higher states of transcendent BEing.
And yet, what is not formally recognized and accounted for in these traditions is the necessity of the human entity to encompass all forms of material existence and to experience all desires native to her or his incarnate character in order to bypass and transcend them, thereby moving up into a higher state of consciousness and vibratory BEing-ness. Until an individual has fully experienced something to their total satisfaction they will continue to seek it. A man will continue to watch porn until he’s had enough, an addict will continue to do drugs until she’s had enough, emotional addictions will continue to obscure clear discernment and thought processes until the individual has had enough. It is only at this point that it is possible for anyone to put aside a behavior in order to embrace a higher form of existence. An ethical nature cannot be faked. It must originate from within the individual which will result in its manifestation in his or her words and deeds.
Understanding the state of the balance as represented by yin and yang where each aspect rises and falls accordingly necessitates a spatial and temporal viewpoint outside of manifest reality, looking back in. A good deed done 100 years ago may result in a negative occurrence 200 years from now. An evil done a year from now may result in a good that happened a thousand years ago. Outside of time, the balance is maintained beyond the ken of mortal understanding and incarnation-bound interpretations dependent upon time-strictures understood by the logical and limited mind.
The understanding that this is the natural and normal state of BEing must be internalized. Acceptance of the world as it is must precede any real understanding of it, just as acceptance of the self, the ego-based personality construct, is necessary before any real understanding of the Self as a higher form of consciousness can proceed. Accepting the necessity of navigating the fields of light and rejecting all doctrines which attempt to gainsay individual will and initiative frees consciousness from the constraints of limitation and opens up the vistas of possibility to reveal an endless array of realities awaiting full manifestation.
I am currently at a school campus of some sort. It’s really a small, impossible city dedicated to spiritual practice. Impossible because it feels like home and yet I’ve never been there before. It feels like I’ve lived there for an eternity and yet this is my first remembered experience of my sojourn in this wondrous space and place.
I am to go to the Temple. To the place where the Master resides. I walk through the city, slowly. It is a trip down one street, a right, then a small building on the left side of the new street. I am still separate. Still doubtful. Wondering if a mistake has been made. But how can that be? I am chosen. The Master has chosen me. He cannot be wrong. Can he? I enter.
Simultaneous to the Master’s statement and gesture my consciousness field separated from the astral form of my student identity. The movement was slow, turgid, mechanical, I felt it simultaneously in this world and in that one. The movement was one of an energetic form moving upward a very specific and measured distance and then turning at a mid-point, rotating around a fulcrum, the focus of my primary perception curving backward so that my “eyes”, which had been facing forward, would have then been facing upward and slightly to the rear. As my primary energetic form left the secondary astral form and the separate and tertiary awareness of my physical form in the material world increased, the scene around me disappeared.
3 days of experimentation and observation have led me to the understanding that this change was real and has resulted in an elevated sense of the moment, of a heightened perceptive ability which I am able to draw upon at will. I have come to the understanding that the movement of my astral form from the dream-form of the aspirant to the space somewhere between there and the material world was a specific type of maneuver that is indicative of accessing certain innate capacities of the human psyche and that anyone who can actuate this potentiality can indeed visit the same space that I hesitate to name and yet must be some form of Samadhi and experience of Nirvana. The release that has occurred afterward seems indicative of a form of moksha, or release from suffering, from anger and desire and the travails of samsara.
I suppose awakening fully to the knowledge that you’re not being all you can be is a daunting prospect. Realizing that all that you’ve done during your life is only a portion of what you’ve always been fully capable of is an indictment of intention and purpose that really begs the question, why?
Continuous series of memories of ghostly interactions that are no more real now than they were when they occuring. The statement by the spiritually-evolved that life is an illusion makes a little bit of sense when you think about how quickly things happen, and the fact that by the time something happens it’s already over and you’re interpreting it in your mind, applying weight and meaning to events that occurred in the space of an instant and then receded, becoming memory almost before you even knew that it was happening. All of life is like that, and most of our mental work is concerned with keeping up, trying not to go down beneath the continuous flow of happenings, of thoughts, the cause and effect of all movement, be it mental, physical or spiritual in nature.
Taking control of your mind will be a form of warfare. It is used to being in charge, to defining who you are, to telling you what your goals are. Becoming familiar with what lies beyond the mind, then, becomes our paramount task. That powerful consciousness that observes, watches, calculates and stores energy and intention in a depthless resevoir of potential. Accessibility is gained through prayer, service and meditation. Prayer addresses the Divinity in Creation, the perceived Outer World. Service is an affront to the Ego, because the Ego is selfish, and so by serving others with a good will and true heart, the Ego retreats from the stage, leaving your individual portion of Divine Love shining like a star for all to feel, and bask in. And meditation familiarizes you with those inner shores of your spiritual sea, the waters that connect to the greater consciousness without, making what is within part of that greater whole.
I’m finding it harder and harder to make myself worry. I’m like everybody else, I’ve got plenty to worry about. But, whenever I try to do it, it just doesn’t work the way it used to. We all know the process, right? You think of a problem that you have, either stemming from past actions or from perceived future reprecussions, and then you think of all the bad things that can happen as a result of the choices you made, and you dwell, and you dwell, and you dwell. You continue to think about it, continue to visualize negativity until your body enters the fight or flight state and endorphins are released and, finding no fight, and no obvious reason to flee, just cycle and utilize precious resources, leaving you drained, exhausted and mentally wore out. I’m not sure what is wrong with me.
Am I hurt? Are my children ok? Does someone require something of me right this moment? Am I about to be evicted? Upon going through this mental checklist I find myself, inevitably, calming down, experiencing a sensation of peace as my presence arises, obliterating regrets of the past or worries about the future, I find myself feeling lighter, as if a serious weight has been lifted from me, I find myself even smiling, even if the day is overcast, or rain is falling, or I’m being accosted by some minor annoyance or another.
At the level of the family, we are indoctrinated into love relationships, the idea and practice of which differ across cultures. Pain and heartache become intimate companions as we learn the ins and outs of emotional interactions, of power relationships and intergenerational disfunction. In our own, American/Western European culture, the ideal of romantic, chivalrous love has a long and sordid history, leading directly to our current state of disfunction and perennial unhappiness/happiness, conditions between which we swing like pendulums on a remorseless, emotional clock, the idea of seeking one’s completion and happiness within another person also tossed by the tides of emotional instability being a dubious prospect at best.
Society is a remorseless force permeating our daily existence, codified by institutions and regulations that are so pervasive that they become static, monumental sub-realities of a paradigm unquestioned, the assumptive basis of reality itself, as we define it during the nascent stages of our development. And as we age, these assumptions become ingrained, and we forget that it is even possible to question the fundamental basis upon which our social indoctrination was conceived. External success, keeping up with the Joneses, getting paid, looking like a model, working that 6-pack, wearing the newest clothes, driving the best car, living in the biggest house. Even those of us who decry those leavings of materialism are, by definition, in opposition. And opposition, being a function of duality, is only half of a whole, and therefore, a part of that whole.
How about those times when you’ve been in a situation of extreme stress, the onset of which was sudden and surprising? Perhaps a car accident, perhaps a fight, perhaps an earthquake or a sporting event, or even a test of some sort where your concentration was engaged far past the usual. In those instances, time slowed, didn’t it. Everything around you appeared in greater detail and clarity, your thought process was curiously detached, and an eternity seemed to exist right there between seconds, between impressions, and affecting the perceptive world of your surroundings to the extent that it seemed to be moving in slow motion.
When you think about it, Now is all we have. Right this moment. We are not promised tommorrow. We are not promised even 5 minutes from Now. So that’s why it’s important for me to know where I am right Now. Right this moment. So I close my eyes, bringing my presence to bear and awaken my inner-body consciousness to begin the process of examining the state of my spirit and the situation of my soul. And, right this moment?
I opened my eyes to a new year and didn’t remember who I used to be. I reveled in the freedom but found myself wandering the streets looking into glass windows desperately trying to forget places I knew. People brushed rudely past, pointedly ignoring my knowledgeable look, their eyes shifting away as they retreated from the Now back into the past and future of their regrets and fears, their own attempts to forget as clear to me as the clashing shades and hues of their auras. I chuckled knowingly. This was the way of the world.
Are you ok with the fact that the past is gone, never to return? That the good old days no longer exist and are best left to stories told to children and strangers, gathered ’round? That what was true back then is only an indication of the way things used to be, and not an indication of how they are going to be tommorrow?
The night I found out that I could fly was an important milestone for me. I remember it vividly. I was escaping from a situation and found myself walking. The lightness of leaving lifted my spirits and body simultaneously and I found myself bouncing higher and higher with each step. By controlling my emotions I found that I could regulate my height and I explored a prison for psychic criminals, passing recalcitrant Yogins, Fallen Angels and social Deviants alike, searching for her.
If there are an infinite array of Quantum universes, one after another receding into the timelessness of the eternal, who is to say what is real and what is not? In an infinite Creation aren’t all things probable? And, if they are, does that mean there is a Disney universe out there somewhere where Mickey Mouse is King and Minnie is his Queen? Daisy could be his Courtesan while Donald plots jealously to murder Mickey in his sleep, reclaim his woman – and make Minnie his Ho’ - then take over the Kingdom. Could it be possible that we access these universes or travel through them with each random imagination and daydream, and that we sojourn those dimensions/universes closest to our current reality with each decision that we make, shifting through them like fish through layers of the ocean? That the possibilities that we envision become real if our intentions are clear enough? That our ability to manifest our desires takes us irrevocably through higher or lower dimensions along the trajectory of our eternal journey, depending upon our innate spiritual propensities?
I observe the daybreak from the vantage point of a convict, trying to figure out how to break out of this prison I’ve created for myself. The walls close in around me and I chafe beneath the weight of my chains. The stars seem so close as the sun rises and they fade, leaving me with only a vague memory of their position. If I can only remember where they are, I know I can find my way back home, where you are waiting for me, knowing that I will come when I can.
Random moments find me wondering about you, and what it is like living your life. When I pass people on the street sometimes, or see them in cars or sitting in restaurants, I try to envision their lives. I wonder how their houses smell, where they work and do they like it. I try to see the state of their relationships in their eyes and body language, how they interact with the ones they are with, are they restless, and whether or not they know the Secret of Life. I find it most difficult to imagine the ambience of your life. The feel of it.
Making love. Driving. Heated arguments, rollercoasters and reading all require some semblance of Being-ness, or living in the Now. I just found a quote by Paulo Coelho, taken from his seminal text, 
We are driven, often past the point of sanity or rational thought, by desires that we barely recognize the origins of.
In battling against the one thing, the moment is our purest weapon. In the midst of our relatively unconscious lives, the onset of the Now often occurs automatically. We do not recognize the shift since the state of living in the Now is inimical to cultivating memory, or engaging in reminiscence.
The one thing is a distraction. A distraction that we often allow to take over our lives. That we allow to remain unconscious, never questioned, causing us to make choices in service to its own resolution. The mistake we make is to underestimate the power of the ego and its formations. That is its power. Its ubiquitousness, its seeming pervasiveness and all-encompassing presence. The one thing is the ego’s primary tool it its own self-preservation, or that which allows it to fool us into quiescence, into continuing to follow the patterns and pratfalls of our lives to our eventual ruin; because ruin is inevitable, when we entrust our lives to our limited intellects and emotional complexes. It is only when we seek those deeper waters of spiritual and archetypal awareness, that we tap into that G-d-powered super-reality that awakens our ability to take note of and follow the path of synchronicitous occurrences that blast us unerringly into another consciousness-level altogether.
Every sunrise promises new beginnings. Every sunset promises new endings. There are false starts and mistakes, hopeful possibilities and joyous surprises. Each choice takes us closer to the place we wish to be, opening new doors to lands that lead us into lives more beautiful than we ever could have imagined.
Internal and external are both illusory expressions representing a dichotomous holism within which we endeavor to find unity, past the shifting facades. If all is one, the uncomfortable realization is that what is without, is also within. The bad things that happen outside of us find their resonance with bad feelings that happen inside of us. The same is true of the good things. Depending upon our individual orientations, our life experiences reflect this truth.
We are all equal, no one is better than another, and no one can certainly achieve impossible heights of psychic and ethical accomplishment that shatter the laws of reality that we subconsciously co-create with each successive thought.
Then, and only then, can we state that there is something new under the sun, because by then, we will have become One with it, the planets and the infinite stars and worlds beyond, returning to a state of existence inconceivable to us now.
