I wrote a little article some years back. You can read it on my website. It is called “Responsible” and after meandering through a series of different scenarios the article refers to a goldfish I adopted by saving it from certain death. It’s a small act in a way. But for me it really was tremendously significant. I actually learned to care for something other than myself. Day after day, week after week, something other than me relied on me for feeding, cleaning out the tank, putting in oxygenizing pond weed, making sure the water was tipped out and changed. A small thing but a responsibility.
Over the last 25 years I have taken responsibility for a life partner, several children, and a large number of animal life forms too many to count! It has been extraordinary, a privilege, a challenge, and a life-enriching experience.
When I was young I remember being at a wedding of a friend and dallying someone’s toddler/baby on my shoulders and knees. An old friend looked at me with moist eyes and sincerity and cried you are going to make a great dad one day. I remember thinking very vividly that I would like to be a dad but I was surely too selfish. It’s still true. I really am too selfish. You don’t get over the traits of your nature so easily, if at all.
People are going to say, “Well, what’s he talking about then? What case can he possibly make for therapy when he’s still selfish and he can’t even heal himself.”
Raw Material For Transformation
In personal healing some aspects of self do change, some metamorphose and some transform, some disappear altogether. But some don’t and those that don’t, which you may have a hard time with or even an aversion toward, must be accepted. There is no second guessing just how and where the stone in the torrent will be rounded by the water or sharpened by a fall. There is no predicting the shapes and forms that are created in the streaks of cloud in the November sky. There is no saving the fairy castle that appears momentarily in the log fire before it crumbles into your grandmother’s face, into a goblin or a witch or a dog, and finally into charred timber and ash. You have no say in what you change and what you accept. It is all fuel, all raw material for transformation.
This personal responsibility, this duty or obligation, between one and another is not what I want to leave you with today. Whether or not you are selfish or not, dutiful or not, conscientious or not, simply accept it all. Accept yourself as you are, accept yourself entirely, allow yourself to be natural… act naturally. Know that you are the whole thing, that nothing is separate, that all is Consciousness, the unity of life is Godliness, the totality of everything is Divinity. There is no division and when you reach, attain eternity, fall through the cracks of the separative mind into formlessness, timelessness, mindlessness, egolessness—all synonymous, absolutely the same… you can respond! spontaneously respond. Responsibility, your obligation, your service and your duty, are… they become less than burdens… they are as natural as feeling your own breath entering at your nostrils, feeling your own feet on the ground, your own body swaying in the heavens and the meeting of arising forms becomes an orchestra of serene synchronicity…. as you experience at last the very truth that we are One.
You cannot be responsible unless you can be. We therapists and teachers have an edge here… every day in my work alone, quite apart from anything else I do or feel or experience or practices I indulge in and activities I carry out, in my work itself I practice more than anything else—being. Over the years you deepen through this practice and enter the silence, the effortless the deep trust in Existence profoundly and deeply.
This practice is available naturally to us all. In fact it is only because we are unnatural that we are not in the sublime state of being all the time. In the depths of true responsibility—not being responsible, responsible for something or someone or confined to the expectations of duty or interpersonal obligation—you are with everything, everything that is, was, or will be, here, there or in any place.
I Am Responsible For Myself / I Am Responsible For You
Am I responsible for you? Am I responsible for myself? are not really two different questions anymore. In the transcendence of both lies the real meaning, the real significance and the spontaneous transcendence of responsibility.
Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].
