Talk about a tough question. What is the most important realization in our soul’s journey to its inevitable conscious oneness with all of existence? I can hardly speculate, but among the elephants in the conversation surely must be that we alone are responsible for our every opinion, emotion and action, since they are the sole result of how we define reality for ourselves. Other people and circumstances may trigger our response, but the cause of it is always us: our definition of what’s real.
I’m no doubt stepping into metaphysical territory where full understanding requires an enlightened mind, which of course I do not possess. But I do carry enough scars to feel the truth of which I speak despite being unable to detail the nuts and bolts of it.
Whatever confidence I have stems in large measure from my own experience of liberation the result of my attempt to assume responsibility for my every thought, feeling and action. Equally meaningful is the prison I see myself and others inhabit, the prison of feeling a victim of life, whether it’s “this makes me this” or “this makes me that,” including happy, angry, disappointed, grateful, you name it.
Perhaps the grandaddy of addictions, at the core of all human dysfunction, is our addiction to the belief that some event, other person or group is responsible for how we feel and think and act in a given situation.
Most of us, if we were unjustly convicted of a crime, would likely be alarmed by the miscarriage. Yet, meanwhile, we live in the starkest of confinements because we believe that things such as a fly in our soup, a rainy day, our sweetheart’s smile, the results of the World Series, along with the vast encyclopedia of happenings and ideas, painful and joyful, right up to and including our last breath, can be responsible for how we feel. There may be no more widespread form of self-harm than that.
In the long run, gratefully, our lack of understanding is not that big a deal. It’s simply an example of our immaturity at this point in human evolution. What’s really going on is we’re waking up. Some number of incarnations from now we’ll chuckle at the lunacy that Santa Claus (or Trump) is responsible for how we feel about him.
Suddenly God told me the prayer He would listen to,
and I said quickly, “Change no circumstance of my life. Change me.”
~ Sri Gyanamata, “God Alone: The Life and Letters of a Saint”
❤️🙏🤗