How to be the Change You Want
Responsibility is a word that has followed everyone throughout their lives. Whether it be your childhood chores or something work related, we have all been pressured by responsibilities. But what are we else are we responsible for? This post is about finding and unleashing your Zen Responsibility.
We create responsibilities to help ourselves, and often each other
I remember being responsible for the recycling when I was younger. Every Tuesday night I would sort and take out the recycling. For me, I saw this as an assigned responsibility, given to me from my mother. In reality, it was my mother who had taken the responsibility of recycling, she had merely put me in charge of it. This responsibility for her is rooted perhaps in the idea of taking care of the earth, or possibly a number of other things. Whichever it is, it was undoubtedly something from this world that caused her to take on this task.
Most responsibilities exist behind strings of ego
We often attach ourselves to our responsibilities and lose track of what is really important. Because of this, our responsibilities can often bring about dysfunction. The Zen word for this may sometimes be sickness. This isn’t to say that responsibilities are evil, but our common responsibilities exist purely in the physical, tangible world. Certainly taking the recycling out was of some benefit to this world, which truly is great, but what about responsibility for your world?
Today, we are going to forget our daily responsibilities, and focus on a different task. Focus today on your Zen responsibility.
Your Zen responsibility is your consciousness, more specifically, controlling and being aware of your consciousness. Your state of consciousness directly, and indirectly, creates the world you live in. This includes your thoughts, feelings, as well as your physical choices.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I cursed taking out the recycling when Tuesday nights came around. It took me probably all of ten minutes, but dropping the video games or whatever mind numbing activity I was doing at the time seemed like a huge loss. What was happening here, is purely a fulfillment of my outer world responsibilities. Sure, I would get the job done, but not without tearing me apart on the inside. This may sound a bit intense over a little childhood chore, but I’m serious. I hated getting in their and sorting everything, and suffered because of it. It was almost as bad as cutting the grass, but that is another story.
My point is, beyond all of our daily responsibilities, is our Zen responsibility. There is extreme potential behind learning to be fully responsible for our consciousness. Because our mind, emotions, and egos create the world we live in, a responsible mind will be evident in our waking lives.
“Only a diseased or dysfunctional state of consciousness produces a diseased or dysfunctional world out there. By world I mean the human made world that has been imposed on what is already there, which is the planet. Which is of course, a paradise…Your state of consciousness determines what kind of world you create, what kind of action you take, and what consequences your actions have…The cause of dysfunction exists in the mind. There is a deep seeded dysfunction in humans, without a shift in this, the dysfunction will destroy us as humans.”- Eckhart Tolle
- Take responsibility today. Not tomorrow, or next week, but now.
- Be the change in the world, don’t do the change. It is about who you are, not what you do.
- So who are you? Is your consciousness illustrating beauty?
- What about negativity or conflict? Are you suffering because of it?
- However you are, or aren’t, know you are fully responsible for it.