Accepting Responsibility

You know the saying “with great power comes great responsibility”?

Each person is incarnated into this existence with an ego and a soul. The ego, operates in the form of “I”, which is important because it allows for us to have an experience of the world which is personable. In almost every religious and spiritual view, each person is fully liable and responsible for themselves. This means that each individual has personal accountability for acquiring each of their needs. The ego seeks to fulfill these needs through external means: validation, romantic love, money, fame, etc. This, as many people come to understand, is extremely problematic because external means are fluctuating, fleeting and conditional. For example, people give love at the capacity they are able to love themselves. In almost every instance, to give love to another human being is usually fully dependent on the individuals ability to find beauty, likeness, admiration and thriving “acceptable” traits in another person. This is the meaning of conditional love, which is fully dependent on the ability of the opposite person to fulfill one(or more) of the ego’s needs.

The soul, however, is believed to be derived from God/All That Is. In many Abrahamic religions, God has been said to have blown a piece of his Spirit into man and with that– completed His wonderful creation. Within this context, it is important to comprehend that the soul is whole on its own. It is timeless. It can love unconditionally because it is directly derived from a being whom is limitless and unconditional in His existence. Nevertheless, the only “need” the soul has is to be in connection with God. This need cannot be fulfilled by external means: it’s contentment is found in the acquisition, communion and connection to The One. And because God is everlasting, this wholeness is everlasting as well.

Why is this important? When attempting heal to core wounds, it’s important to fully comprehend their roots. For example, a person who’s experienced childhood abandonment often has a distorted view of fault vs. responsibility. Fault is the belief that you control others and the choices they make. Responsibility is the ability to take accountability independently of others. The ego of a young child experiencing abandonment has not yet matured enough to understand that the actions of others do not serve as reflections of their own worthiness. The ego takes fault and thinks to itself, “Their absence is a result of my doing. I must not be good enough” and experiences feelings of guilt, shame and fear, which confirm its self-imposed suffering. The person then grows up seeking validation from external means in order to prove its worthiness to themselves. But no matter how much validation they receive, it will not heal the core wound of unworthiness.

This story of lack in it itself is an illusion created by the ego. The fact is that no one thinks about you as much as you do. This means that other peoples actions are often self-serving and not a personal attack on another being. The journey of each person is to fight off mental attacks from the psyche and shatter the ego’s illusory perceptions.  This takes time. If a person has been living in the ego’s illusions for years it will often take just as much time to unlearn their beliefs and rewrite their own reality. The wonderful thing about the human mind is that perception is individualistic to each being. While we are not responsible for the actions, ideals and perceptions of others we are responsible for ourselves. With this knowledge can come great relief; that our personal power is not dependable on another persons intrinsic reality—but our own.