The politics of and the spiritual opportunities that come with more or less nuanced understandings of personal responsibility

I’ve been thinking about responsibility of late—specifically, taking or not taking personal responsibility for and ownership over our lives particularly in how we interact with the world around us, how we perceive the world interacting with us, the primary prisms through which we hold those interactions, and how blaming others, or blaming other various circumstances for who we essentially are and for how our life unfolds. I have also been thinking about all of this within the construct of my evolving and fundamental teaching around not getting what we want and/or getting what we don’t want and how we decide to address that.

Very soon after I began thinking deeply about taking or not taking personal responsibility for how we experience life and especially with regard to the primary prisms through which we hold and understand the entire concept of personal responsibility, I realized I was strongly aware of two basic, polar, and extreme tactics that many people employ around this topic.

First, as soon as I began this exploration, I had to admit to being aware of people who attempt to use personal responsibility as a weapon through which to emotionally batter, bully, guilt and shame other people, and through which to discount or dismiss large and important aspects of such people’s lives. What I am speaking of here are people who use personal responsibility as a weapon potentially against a lot of other people, typically people who have had a great deal of misfortune, abuse, stolen opportunities, trauma, economic struggle, addiction, and other similar occurrences in their lives. More specifically, I am aware of how certain people—and they tend to be people who have had or have experienced a great deal of unearned and typically unacknowledged privilege in their lives—use the construct of personal responsibility as a way to first separate themselves from other people, then otherize such people, and then to blame those same people for how naturally occurring consequences of socially engineered inequities have manifested in these people’s lives, to then simultaneously delegitimize those same socially engineered inequities and the resulting lives.

Such people tend to blatantly ignore (or pretend to blatantly ignore) such things as the effects and impacts of structural racism, the effects and impacts of structural poverty, the adverse effects and impacts of living in a homophobic/heterosexist, biphobic, and transphobic environment and being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans, the adverse effects and impacts of patriarchy on everyone, the ever increasing and ever more extreme adverse impacts of corporatocracy, the adverse effects and impacts of living in a heavily male dominated world on those who are not male or do not present as male consistently or in ways that are universally understood as being “male,” the potentially incapacitating impacts of PTSD, etc. From an ideological perspective, such people, at least in America, typically fall into the category of being ideologically labeled as conservatives or sometimes more specifically as being fiscally conservative especially with regard to ideas around not generally being supportive of using government funds to address these often governmentally conceived social impacts.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who tend to stridently use all of those above mentioned naturally occurring consequences of socially engineered inequities and more, as an opportunity to downplay, completely dismiss, or to conveniently ignore the incredible power of the human spirit, the personal resiliency of the human spirit and soul, or to disavow the simple fact that all of us, each and every one of us, are much, much more than what has happened to us not only in this lifetime but also generationally too—that we all have the great potential to soar to unimaginable heights even when faced with the staggering weight of multiple socially engineered inequities that in some cases may have existed for thousands of years and many multiple generations. From an ideological perspective the people who most often fall into this conceptual of either intentionally or unintentionally creating cultures of victimhood often get or wear the labels “liberals” or “progressives” in America, although I must admit that I scarcely know what either of those labels are exactly or really pointing toward anymore.  Often what such people either intentionally or unintentionally are creating is a culture of victimhood. I understand more deeply than anyone can ever possibly imagine just how it is anathema to certain people in America for me to even suggest that there could in reality be something that can be called “a culture of victimhood.” And yet, here I am doing just that. Deal with it. Or don’t deal with it, I really don’t have a preference which. Just don’t dream of denying me my right to speak my truth around this because I will deny you the right to do that. I might suggest you go attempt to bully someone who is not nearly as fierce as I am.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I have come to believe that life must be lived outside of each of these two conceptually incomplete and spiritually ungrounded polar extremes in order for one to truly be living in the highest Light possible with regard to understanding personal responsibility. I have come to view each of those extremes I discussed above as essentially being equal in their ability to quite intensely miss the point of a sacredly lived life and as also being equal in their attack on the human spirit. I believe people who take into their consciousness either of these approaches have some very important lessons to learn and some very specific healing work to do—as we all do, of course, however I am not  directly addressing everyone in this piece of writing. I am specifically addressing people who one of the two approaches to personal responsibility that I have outlined here. Like all healing work that is being called upon to manifest in our lives, we often must find out what specific content area or content areas that healing work falls into. It could be an increased need for compassion, or an increased need for more self-forgiveness, or a need for more personal humility, or a need for higher levels of trust, or for a sacred integration of experienced trauma, etc. Very often this needed healing work will find its way to us in repeatedly occurring messages and events or “problems” repeatedly occurring in our lives. Please pay attention.