Taking Responsibility

 

Photo Credit: Twitter || Eckhart Tolle

Taking Responsibility

From our very childhood we have been taught to be responsible to our parents, to our siblings, to our family, to our country, to all kinds of nonsense. But we have not been told to be responsible for ourselves, that there is nobody who is going to take our responsibility.

No, on the contrary, our parents were taking our responsibility, our family was taking this responsibility. The priest was taking responsibility for our spiritual growth – we were just to follow all these people and do whatever they said when we were children. Now, we have grown up and are no longer children, a great fear arises as we now have to take responsibility for our lives and we have not been trained to do so.

We do something, we feel guilty, we go to a priest to confess – and over time we realise that we are bound to the priest because he knows all our secrets. We are weighed down, because we feel our salvation lies through our confessions to the priest – who is to decide what is a sin and what is not a sin? This is all a part of our mind – we feel guilty, we feel we have sinned, and we look for a mechanism to release ourselves from this guilt syndrome. The more one goes on confessing, the more one is tied down.

It is better to become independent, to become responsible for yourself. Do not be responsible for the whole world, just be responsible to yourself. Do whatever you feel like doing. If it is wrong, the punishment will immediately follow. If it is right, the reward will follow instantly. There is no other way.

This way we will start finding what is wrong, what is right, on our own. We will grow a new sensitivity — Indians call it the third eye. We will start seeing with a new vision, a new eye. Instantly we will know what is wrong, because in the past so many times we have done it and always suffered in consequence. We will know what is right, because whenever we did existence showered great blessings on us. Cause and effect are together, they are not separated by years and lives.

We are responsible then. If we want and enjoy a certain act, although it brings suffering, then do it. It is good, because one enjoys it. The suffering is not big enough to deter one from the enjoyment that our act brings. But it is up to us, wholly and solely up to us to decide. If the suffering is too much and the act brings nothing, no joy, and necessarily a long anguish follows it, then it is up to us if we are absolute idiots, then what can anybody do about it?

This is the meaning of being responsible to oneself. There is no God on whom we can dump our responsibility, but human nature is such that we keep looking for someone on whom to dump our responsibility. Become responsible for everything that is happening or not happening in life.

Rejoice in this freedom. Rejoice in this great understanding that we are responsible for everything in our life. This will make us individuals. And to become an individual is to know all that is worth knowing, is to experience all that is worth experiencing. To be an individual is to be liberated, is to be enlightened.