Taking Responsibility is Hard Work
LIFTING THE BOULDER FROM OUR PATH IS TRUE HEROISM
‘Every human being has totally forgotten their true nature and is talking through ignorance.’
Nisargadatta Maharaj
One of the innumerable paradoxes of this life is that we are responsible for both everything and nothing.
From a higher perspective, hidden within our true identity, which can go unseen for many lifetimes, lies the deepest and — to some — unfathomable truth that we are not an individual, nor even a person.
That birth is a calamity, a disastrous fall from our divine status and everything that occurs thereafter is simply an appearance, an unreal dream, the truth of which is revealed at death.
Consciousness, the sense I Am, then goes back in its box and we see that rather than being outside us — life appearing in a subject-object universe — people, places and things are illumined in our own light.
That is the light we are here to discover, the meaning of Self-Realization. How many will make that leap?
How many will remove the skin that separates Brahman from Parabrahman? It can never be done without divine assistance.
It says in the scriptures that only one in a million will really look and only one in a million of those who do will succeed.
How come? For one thing, the seductions of the world are so immense — a reflected light seen in our own unrecognised brilliance — that we keep following the five senses into experience.
What the true teacher offers is the end of experience and most of us don’t want that.
We only know how to fill up our emptiness and ameliorate our pain by tasting more and more of the world. Our incompleteness has unleashed the seeker upon the world and we run amok.
The mind imposes too many veils on Reality for us even to begin to see who and what we really are, so we continue with the false, believing it to be real.
The conceptual world — disastrously — is taken for Reality itself which, as the late teacher Adi da Samraj points out, ‘is always already the case.’
Reality is always here — eternal, permanent and Self-shining; it is we who are absent from life compensating for the lack of true joy with more of everything.
Working on myself all these years and with many others, it seems there is always a Rubicon to cross, a place we don’t want to go bolstered by numerous self-justifications and rationalizations.
Often, after traumatic injury in childhood, there is a demand for justice, an angry boulder that sits in the way of full maturity which we simply can’t get past.
We are hanging on to our body identification, charged with painful feelings and utterly unwilling to let go.
Life then ups the ante with more loss, more pain, recycling of the endless loop of self-destructive patterns and self-punishment, where peace and freedom is exchanged for a life of self-righteous anger.
No amount of therapy, courses, workshops, will change the concretized mind without humility, the willingness to take total responsibility for our lives, even when what we appear to suffer is not our fault.
Many are they who cannot separate fault from responsibility.
The Rubicon must be crossed, however, if we are to heal. Bowing to a power greater than ourselves becomes both urgent and imperative.
As it says in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: ‘We have ceased fighting anything or anyone. Love and tolerance of others is our code.’
Such humility brings the Prodigal Son home. Nothing else will do. As the great sage Rumi states: ‘Instead of fighting the world, kill your ego.’
That doesn’t mean we should not stand up for what is right and proper, rather we must not lose ourselves in the process.
The invitation concealed throughout our lives is the invitation to transcend the five elements and the senses and uncover the peace that passes all understanding.
There is no peace until pride disappears.
In the Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono, it is said that if you are angry for two or three days then sickness will come; the antidote is confession.
Just like in the 12-step programme, responsibility must be taken, not projected outward to others as the cause; holding fast to fault is not permitted.
Instead, a simple prayer is used to take responsibility for everything and everyone that enters our lives — ‘I love you, I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you.’
Just like in my own practice of Advaita Vedanta, the idea is to return to a divine neutrality called a ‘zero state’ where there are neither memories, nor identity.
Of course, it is much easier said than done, but for the person who feels wronged and aggrieved, there is nothing like the healing balm of humility to set them straight so they can move on with their lives.
Many courses and workshops instead of healing participants simply develop the spiritual ego, often at great financial expense, while the essential and very basic issues are never addressed.
This frantic search for healing then becomes a pleasant distraction, a subtle avoidance of the real work of self-confrontation.
When we begin to think differently, finally accepting we alone are responsible for our lives, I have seen countless blessings soon flow.
Alas, if we don’t, then we begin to calcify, bitterness and anger taking hold, rendering us toxic to self and others.
Perhaps the key discovery in life is that the universe is inside us. For anything to appear, we, as consciousness, have to be here first.
Without your light, nothing else appears, hinting at the fact that even the light of individual consciousness we so laud is a deviation from our origins, the unblemished heart, which has no awareness of itself.
The divine sees and knows itself through us. Finally, all need of more experience comes to an end, and we are more than happy to return home, back to original innocence.
Unlike all other human beings, the jnani, who is no longer a person, sees death as both moment of supreme joy and final liberation.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
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