Live Quality
The ordinary mind always throws the responsibility on somebody else. It is always the other who is making you suffer. Your wife is making you suffer, your husband is making you suffer, your parents are making you suffer, your children are making you suffer, or the financial system of the society, capitalism, communism, fascism, the prevalent political ideology, the social structure, or fate, karma, God…you name it!
People have millions of ways to shirk responsibility. But the moment you say somebody else – X, Y, Z – is making you suffer, then you cannot do anything to change it. What can you do? When the society changes and communism comes and there is a classless world, then everybody will be happy. Before it, it is not possible. How can you be happy in a society which is poor? And how can you be happy in a society which is dominated by the capitalists? How can you be happy with a society which is bureaucratic? How can you be happy with a society which does not allow you freedom?
Excuses and excuses and excuses – excuses just to avoid one single insight that “I am responsible for myself. Nobody else is responsible for me; it is absolutely and utterly my responsibility. Whatsoever I am, I am my own creation.”
I am responsible for my life – for all my suffering, for my pain, for all that has happened to me and is happening to me – I have chosen it this way; these are the seeds that I sowed and now I am reaping the crop; I am responsible – once this insight becomes a natural understanding in you, then everything else is simple. Then life starts taking a new turn, starts moving into a new dimension. That dimension is conversion, revolution, mutation – because once I know I am responsible, I also know that I can drop it any moment I decide to. Nobody can prevent me from dropping it.
Can anybody prevent you from dropping your misery, from transforming your misery into bliss? Nobody. Even if you are in a jail, chained, imprisoned, nobody can imprison YOU; your soul still remains free. Of course you have a very limited situation, but even in that limited situation you can sing a song. You can either cry tears of helplessness or you can sing a song. Even with chains on your feet you can dance; then even the sound of the chains will have a melody to it.
Once a person is blissful he is blissful forever. But the quality that has to be learned is of awaiting, of patience, of trusting that whenever the time is ripe it is bound to happen, it is inevitable. This is trust.
Bliss is always something that comes from the beyond; it is always a gift, never an achievement. You cannot be ambitious for it; you can only pray. You cannot desire it; you can only wait. If your waiting is total and your patience is infinite it comes in its own time. And when it comes of its own accord it transforms your whole being. When somehow you manage to bring it, it never comes in the first place, and what comes in its place is something false, manufactured by the mind. Apparently it is bliss, but only apparently: deep inside the torment continues, the nightmare continues. You remain sitting on the volcano; it can empty any moment. But when real peace, real bliss, real silence, descends from the beyond — not that you bring it, but when it comes, showers on you, slowly slowly penetrates and permeates your whole being — you are transformed, you are no more the same person. The old is gone and gone forever. The new has come, and the new knows no death, the new is eternal.
Tags: Become Responsible
