i alone am responsible for my freedom
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
Who can take responsibility for my own psychological/spiritual freedom but me? While we can get help and guidance from so many sources, insight belongs to the individual alone. No one but me can see what I can see; no one but me can be who I am. And, of course, the same is true for anyone and everyone.
Asking for help is admirable, but we have become complacent, relying on others for our happiness and fulfillment. This is a habit, like no other when it comes to our so-called spiritual health, that cannot be applied to finding out who we are related to thought. We have been trained not only to lean on others, but to surrender our identities to them. We speak of irresponsibility in others but we rarely turn around to look at ourselves and how we have developed into reactive beings, mentally and emotionally responding according to the ideas and information we have ingested through our brains and minds. We tend to have a “tell me what to do” approach.
Even when we think we are being responsible, at best we are doing so as fragmented beings. We hold others accountable for their thoughts and actions, yet refuse to look at our own motives and conditioning to free ourselves. We are seeing ourselves in others but are too blinded to realize what we are seeing.
In the East there is a long tradition of the guru-student relationship that pushes the student into the depths of the self. In the West we are accustomed to being taught what to think by following religious, scientific, trendy, and unquestioned ideas that are so insidious that they have crept into every nook and cranny of the mind. If we cannot see what we are then it is impossible to be responsible to ourselves and to others.
We are layered beings encrusted with a hard surface of thoughts, memories, judgments, ideas, and biases. These determine our degree of responsibility. We all have evolved with this structure and yet we are so surprised when someone cuts in front of us in line at the coffee shop, when someone cheats in school, or when a power-obsessed leader manipulates hapless followers to overthrow the government. We cry out at their irresponsibility when we ignore our own.
Who is responsible for your happiness? Have you ever asked yourself this question? Who can save you from sadness, sorrow, depression, anxiety, and emotional pain? A therapist? A priest? A rabbi or imam? Who can make your broken heart or shattered dreams whole again? No one can do this but you, because no one else has access to the depths of you. Your insights and realizations are completely your own. Can anyone but you probe the depths of your own mind and thoughts? Of course not.
So many sages have come and gone over the millennia, offering the same exact message in so many words: Know thyself, set yourself free, be who you are, find your bliss, wake up! Plato showed us that we are like prisoners, chained and staring at a wall, while those who we cannot see implant our minds with partial truths and images that form our reality. We are conditioned to live in a default mode of surrender and then we cry out that we want to be free. But we do not know how to be free.
We have not been trained to live our own lives and be rid of beliefs that keep us in inertia and make us lash out at one another. When the kernel of what you are becomes known then responsibility bursts forth, because you come to realize that all of what exists is within you and you are the capacity for everyone and everything, and that which is inside you is worthy of your unconditional protection and love.
All you have to do is open your eyes and look back at the looker. Look in here where the heart is. Place your hand over your heart and know that it is in here where the birds sing, it is in here where the music plays, and it is in here where I feel for the world.
©2024vicshayne
