I’m sure at least part of this will sound familiar to many of you.
All my life, while growing up, my Mom reminded me to think of others before myself. In my 20′s when I first broadened the scope of my programming, my therapists all suggested I learn to take care of myself before taking care of others. Interesting.
It took me a long time to reconcile all that opposition.
Now, 30 years later, I can see the many reflections inside my personal bubble of life that tell me I was brought up to look outside myself for everything. Everything from parents, to teachers, to novels I read, to the way my country and its leaders interact in the world with other countries and other leaders; it was all about looking outside.
The same thread weaves through all of it. We consistently look outside ourselves for answers, power, someone to blame, and even for that brief moment of something that reflects both our innocence and our goodness. We are so terribly mean to ourselves, we have to look outside for validation and because we can’t stand to feel lonely, we invalidate others to gain equal footing.
We bomb and tear apart other countries, pointing fingers for something we project onto that country; we give away money and food to all but our own smelly, hungry-eyed beggars. We manipulate religious extremists with the hands of our own rigid beliefs and actions, claiming Jesus or some other higher being made us do it.
Because I study ownership as what I call the “only” gateway to enlightenment, I have to look at my own levels of responsibility for the state of this world, through myself and my own growth as a thread in the cape that swirls around this global fiasco…the times in which we live.
I fully believe, no, I know, that the only way we will expand our consciousness and change the world is through attention to our own thoughts, feelings, emotions and whatever we expect and project into the world. And so many of us are sitting on our couches watching violent television shows and news, imprinting that into our thoughts. We sit there in the milieu of all that, getting riled up, ready to fight something.
The war is inside us, therefore the peace we seek is in there too. What we see as war in the Middle East is really just a reflection of what is inside our own minds and bodies.
It’s our responsibility to own and take action based on what we discover inside…to act from this level of ownership on our own internal wars. If we follow the thread we see out there, back into ourselves, we will find the knot that ties it all together. When we find peace within ourselves, then we can follow the thread back out, making a real difference.
And if everyone looked inside first, we wouldn’t have to go out there to make a difference. There would be nothing to handle out there.
Several years ago while walking the Canal path between Crinan and Lochilphead in Scotland, my friends and I were criticizing our governments; they their Prime Minister and English Parliament, and me our President and the rest of Capital Hill. We yelled and growled in between the gasps of “wow, look at that” as huge fish bodies surfaced near us. The conversation was only a minor distraction from our surroundings.
We were all bundled up in our rain jackets, of course it was wet and cold that day, October wind chafing the skin already wrinkled from hoods tied so tightly they pinched our faces. The raindrops sliding down my cheeks to my lips became full gulps of water as I opened and closed my mouth in vehemence about the US Government.
Suddenly I said something new. It was one of those rapidly spoken thoughts coming down from somewhere in space, reaching my tongue before I was conscious of it. It was the first of its kind in a long line of many to come.
“Whether we want responsibility, whether we voted for him or not, we all elected Bush,” as I said this, I looked around to see who else might be there, walking silently behind me. There was no one; I must have said it!
“I mean, even the rest of the world called this guy in. Our global complacency, our immature consciousness and greed is reflected in this man…and he is a leader for more than just the U.S.!”
My friends nodded as though they’d had this thought before. It was a singular moment of truth; we had awakened for a brief second in time to the greatest expanse in cosmic understanding. Then we went on to discuss the nature around us, looking out at the West Hebrides in awe of this incredibly dramatic and almost surreal country, the land of the Scots, the home of the brave and responsible highland warriors.
After a very gory New York cop movie a couple weeks ago, I said to my friends, “we all have it in us.” They looked at me in shock, knowing to what I was referring, and we walked on without another word.
Sometime late last year I was in a heated discussion about responsibility with friends. As I said, “when we really get that we are the murderers and the rapists, when we realize that those convicted are just reflections of our thoughts, that’s when we will truly be responsible,” all I saw was fear and resistance; grief-stricken eyes filled with disbelief.
So I get off on the value of shocking people…so what. It’s true, isn’t it?
Since that day while walking the canal, I’ve tried these same commentaries on other people, American people, Democratic people, people who claim to be liberals and those, especially those, who claim a spiritual view and practice of “Oneness” and responsibility. They are mostly all full of the lies they tell themselves to feel comfortable in an otherwise very frightening place.
In the end, or the beginning, it’s all a matter of addressing our individual internal make-up, not oneness. We are forever and always one with each other and the Universe, God. That’s the beauty of it. We don’t need to try to be one, we need to recognize our autonomy and to clean our own individual houses!
I’ve never reached anyone in quite the same way as that day in the mists on the West Coast of Scotland, yet I’ve never stopped trying.
Check out these books: “Zero Limits,” by Joe Vitale; “At Hell’s Gate,” by Claude Anchin Thomas. Both books speak to this level of responsibility.
For more on this subject, check out my newsletter,“Quickening the Rhythms of Change;” this link will also take you to past blog posts on responsibility and ownership as well as the Energetic Connection website and its online courses, Opening to Spirit.
