Responsibility
About responsibility, being and acting, with regard to the world and the people in it.
Being with felt experience begins to tend the ground of surrendering to Being, which is yin, receptive, still, just here. Out of Being rises true yang, holy impulse, integrous-with-Being action, without stress and effort, without “you” doing it. These impulses are clean, clear, simple, effortless and beyond reason. It is the Holy moving as us, the Holy dancing as us.
The beautiful thing about being wrecked is that the doer who thinks she can do it all perfectly and well and save the day, avert disaster, starts to be undermined. We become sick to death of being the tool of fear and conditioning – we can’t stomach it any more. From there, entirely humbled and on the ground in stillness, in Being, we listen at the mouth of the cave for what impulses come, and feel into the motivational ground of those impulses. We develop a taste for the True, a willingness to feel through whatever we have to in order that our system be cleaned of the dross and become simple, clear and able to hear and taste the resonance of the Holy and of true action.
One of the biggest pieces of dross for those of us with hearts that want to help is to reckon with the world as it is, with the pain that’s here—the model of this is the sacred heart of Jesus, as he looks on from Being, still, and immeasurably tender. Because we carry this unplumbed heartbreak, because we carry this unmet terror, of our own trauma and pain, discerning the holy impulse and right action in the moment can be difficult, blurred by our own fear, unexpressed heartbreak and over-responsibility as we look out at the pain in the world around us.
Desperation rises. Pain rises. Heartbreak rises. It's too much! Save them! This must all be felt through to the bottom, until we are wrecked, and we look out and only see what Love asks of us. How Love/Holy wants us to move. And it's not what the everyday mind says. Sometimes it's not at all what we "think" is proper or loving.
So what do we do when we are in a position of responsibility? Our best. We do our best to feel what’s lurking in the wings and beneath our pulls from fear and control, the heartbreak, the grief, the fear, the concern to be the bad one, the blamed one, the neglectful one, the harmful one. We become willing to be whatever “one” is necessary to be obedient. Sometimes we can’t feel through all that there is to feel that obscures our right action, that distorts our view of what’s happening, that confuses our minds and makes our hearts ache. And then we do our best.
The everyday mind is not necessary in matters of responsibility and discerning right action. It’s much more a heart question. It’s much more a question of if we are trying to stand in for God because somewhere long ago we decided God wasn’t qualified to hold the world, we had to help Her, or if we have come to that great reckoning that humbles us into handing the world back to God and simply feeling through what there is to feel through and doing our best.
There is a great paradox in here and a requirement to do a lot of fine discerning to tell, what is ours to do? What does Holy will want of us? And what is painful but not ours to do, ours to hand back, ours to grieve, let go of and be humbled before the great and mind-blowing movements of life that we cannot understand?