I Am Responsible

I was talking with a friend today – a friend of mine who used to lead a spiritual discussion group I was once part of about 10-15 years ago.  We hadn’t seen each other in years.  He said that after years of spiritual seeking, he has summed up his spiritual beliefs with three simple words – “I am responsible.”  The irony of it is that is had taken him years of spiritual study to come up with that simple statement.  After years of reading, praying, meditating, doing yoga, visiting psychics and tarot card readers, he came up with “I am responsible?”

Here is the thing.  It rang true with me.  More on this a little later…

One of the reasons we start a spiritual journey is because we feel lost.  That was true with me.  I was raised atheist – well, I don’t know if you could say I was “raised” atheist – maybe it is more true to say that I lived, most of the time, with an atheist father and step-mother.  It is not like atheists espouse their believes upon others.  For most atheists, it is my view, it is just a matter of not believing God exists.  They don’t go to some “Church of No God” or anything.  It is more like, “I don’t believe in God and this is why.”  My dad and step-mother were both raised in religious homes.  They both felt something was missing in their church’s belief in God.  In both their cases, I seem to recall, they felt as though they weren’t getting very good answers to their questions.  Since they didn’t believe their answers, or since they didn’t get answers at all (It always amazes me that when some parishioners try to ask questions, priests and ministers often try to brush them off and tell them to “just have faith.”), when given an opportunity, they just stopped attending church.

Well, the beliefs of my dad and step-mother did not ring true with me.  So my journey took me in a different direction.  Fortunately for me, one of the greatest gifts I received from my parents was the freedom to pursue whatever religious or non-religious beliefs I chose.  They gave me the freedom to attend the churches I wanted to attend, or explore the spirituality I wanted to explore.  They attached no judgment whatsoever to my own desire to search.  It is a gift I want to pass on to my own son.  I think it is a gift that every parent should pass on to their kids.  After all, God gave us free will, shouldn’t we give our our own children free will?  I can’t think of a better gift.

I have a cousin from England who calls himself an atheist.  He was working a well-paying job in a cubicle in an office building and he felt so trapped and bored.  What he really wanted to do was just quit and travel around the world.  Though he didn’t have much money to his name, he hit upon the idea of working in the countries to which he traveled.  So that is what he did.  He quit.  And, he traveled to his first country and worked there to make enough money to live and save enough to travel to his next country.  This was about 15 years ago, he is still continuing on that journey.  He has installed scaffolding around bridges so that they may be painted in Australia, become an expert tile flooring installer in the United States, become a tour “truck” driver (it was more truck than bus from the pictures I saw) in South America, and a technology specialist for a large non-profit organization in Africa.  All along the way, he never really knew what he was going to do next, he just knew that he didn’t want to be cooped up in an office cubicle all day.

I can’t help but think that my cousin was on a spiritual journey of sorts.  He certainly didn’t choose to live by a mantra I once saw on a license plate: “Life sucks, then you die.”  He took his own life into his hands and decided to make something exciting of it.  I haven’t talked with him lately.  I am curious to find out, now, if he has had any inspirational moments in his travels.  While his own family thought he was crazy for doing what he did, I think it is safe to say that his “American Family,” yours truly included, is pretty impressed with what he has done – some of us might even be a tad bit jealous. ;-)

Back to my friend that I got together with today.  When he discovered the statement, “I am responsible,” he felt as though he’d been freed.  He didn’t feel the need to lead a spiritual discussion group, or read spiritual books, or visit medicine men, or bang meditatively on drums in search of spiritual fulfillment anymore.  He felt like a load had been lifted off his shoulders.  In many way it has.  But isn’t that part of the point?  To lift the weight of the world off of your shoulders?  I certainly think so.  Now he did not begrudge the fact that he went through all he did in order to find out his spiritual truth – “I am responsible.”  In fact, he acknowledged that it was all necessary in order for him to reach this point.

Have you ever heard of this quote? — “Where ever you are, there you are.”  This is part of what my friend was talking about.  Where ever you are in your journey is exactly where you need to be.  You are in exactly the place you should be at this moment.  There is something about this moment that you need to know about yourself, and trust me, it is always about you, that you could not find out about yourself if you were not where you are right here and now.  Let me write that again – that sounded pretty good – There is something about this moment that you need to know about yourself that you could not find out about yourself if you were not where you are right here and now. Interestingly, you will stay stuck in that moment, or at the very least, revisit it, until you learn something from it.  It will keep happening over and over and over again until you learn what you are supposed to learn from it.

My best example is “anger.”  Anger has been an issue for me for most of my life.  I have done some pretty stupid things because I was just plain angry.  Malcolm Gladwell discusses this in his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.  He says that we still have a part of our brain that is distinctly mammalian – of the mammal.  Scientific studies have shown that when our heart rate reaches a certain level, we stop functioning at our human level – rather we function at a much more animal level.  It is the animal instinct that is coming out.  When I used to become livid, for whatever reason, I would find my heart racing.  Once it reached a certain level, I truly wasn’t of my right mind.  If someone did something I viewed as confrontational, that would just make my heart race that much more and make me act even more irrational.  When my heart rate would slow down, I would wonder how on earth I got to that point.  How could I even think the things that I thought in those moments – I would look back at it and not recognize that person who got so angry as my true self.  Now I know.  I am not functioning on a human level anymore when my heart rate gets up that high – I might as well be any other mammal.

Do you remember the story about that chimpanzee that was treated like a human being by its owner who hadn’t taken medication for anxiety and ended up mauling a woman’s face off?  Well, the owner of the chimp couldn’t believe that her “friend” could act so violently.  But a chimpanzee is a wild animal.  I would be willing to bet that this chimp’s heart rate was off the charts.  The owner had given this chimp distinctly human characteristics.  Though chimps have evolved as well, they have certainly not evolved as much as humans have – they are more likely to see nothing wrong, and not suffer negative consequences for their actions.  Now, extrapolate that idea onto human beings.  Aren’t a high number of killings the result of intense anger?  They certainly are. Therein lies part of the reason why we are not as evolved as we would like to think.  Imagine if our heart rate could not climb that high?  Would we eliminate a high number of killings that way?  I certainly believe so.  Can we evolve to a point where our heart rate doesn’t get out of control?  It has to be possible, I have been able to do it to a great extent – I am certainly not perfect, yet, but I am much more in control.

I have learned to control my anger.  And I don’t mean that I handle my anger in a controlled way, I mean I take actions to stop my heart rate from getting that high in the first place.  This is something I started doing before I understood what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in his book.  I instinctively knew that getting angry did not serve me.  I knew that if my blood started to boil – a sign that my heart rate was getting high, that I was headed somewhere that I was going to regret later if I didn’t control myself as quickly as possible.  Sometimes I am amazed that I got through my anger without doing some societal damage of some sort!  Seriously!

What it comes down to is that I am responsible for me and you are responsible for you.  We are all in this together.  When I show responsibility for my own actions, then I am truly evolving.  The same is true for you.  When we all take responsibility for ourselves, then the human species evolves.  When we place, or project, those responsibilites on something outside of ourselves, then we are not evolving anymore – we may not be going backwards, but we certainly aren’t evolving.

We are using 100% of our brain capacity (don’t believe that myth that says we are only using 10% of our brain capacity!), so the only way that we are going to evolve is to create new neural pathways between the bone structure of our skulls.  Evolution doesn’t come from believing what others tell you, either, it comes from knowing yourself – coming to understanding on your own.  Fear the words, “Trust me.”  Never, never, never trust anyone or anything that does not ring true with you.  Keep asking questions; keep seeking answers.  It is the only way that you will know.

I didn’t believe what my friend said when he said, “I am responsible,” because I respected him or because I thought he knew more than me.  I believed him because it rang true with me.  It rang true with my own experience up to this point.  It was an incredibly refreshing experience.

Namaste