Self-Responsibility

Truth, responsibility, acceptance, and freedom are powerful words. If you understand what they mean and how to use them to heal yourself, they can change not only your life but also the trajectory of society itself. What is Truth?Truth is not human rules. It is not the story you tell of blame, shame, guilt, or victimization. It is not morality or religion. Truth goes beyond human perception, feelings, and thoughts. It is deeper than that. To find truth, you have to walk away from the things you’ve been taught about how life is supposed to work, what your life is supposed to look like, and who you were told you are. Human rules and perception cause more pain than the original experience offers. The original experience is contained to a time and place. It is finite, with a beginning and an end. Once the experience is over, it is no longer generating pain—which means that everything that happens after it is up to you. The pain can be limited to just your initial reaction because that part is not under conscious control. The automatic pain response is pre-programmed, usually based on the stories we tell, our previous experiences, and our judgment of what happened. At some point after the experience, we can begin to regain control over our thinking. Here we decide whether to add more pain by telling stories or to let the pain flow through unencumbered—by not adding any additional stories to our memory of the event. From this place of no longer adding to the experience, we can find truth. Every experience offers you tools you can use to heal. If you are too busy telling stories about the experience or wallowing in the pain, you will miss these tools. In short, the tools are the truth of the experience. They show how your own interpretation causes you pain and reveal a different way to see the experience—one that frees you instead of trapping you. The truth is where freedom from the pain is found. What is Responsibility?Responsibility is something we choose to do or take on in our external world. It is meant to be a choice that can be changed at any time. Society turns responsibility into a trap by conflating it with obligation. Obligation is internal. It is something you do within yourself, for yourself, by yourself. The only true obligation you have in life is to yourself. Everything outside of you is a chosen responsibility that you are free to walk away from at any time. The system wants you to believe that once you take on a responsibility, you’re not allowed to walk away. That’s a lie. It’s a fear-based form of control built on the idea that chaos would follow if everyone simply chose their responsibilities without external consequences. This is what perpetuates the system of reward and punishment on which society rests. What is Acceptance?Acceptance is the ability to allow things to be as they are without trying to fix or change them. It is complicated by the human story of how things should be. We tell ourselves that the experience should not have happened—but that’s not true. If the experience shouldn’t have happened, it wouldn’t have. If it happened, then it was supposed to. Our judgment of the experience as something unwanted or bad doesn’t mean it wasn’t supposed to occur. We may not want it to happen—and that’s reasonable—but the idea that it shouldn’t have happened is untrue and causes additional pain. Often we simply accept an experience as a thing that happened outside our control. We can’t change it, make it go away, or prevent it. We have to make peace with it so it can exist without hurting us further. That’s a tall order when the experience directly affects you and causes pain. Pain, while usually unwanted, isn’t necessarily bad. It can be a beautiful teacher. Pain can show you your own perceptions. When you learn to use pain as a tool, you stop needing to avoid it, and it becomes easier to accept experience as just something that happens. What is Freedom?Radical freedom is the ability to make your own choices—including choices other people don’t like, choices that have been made illegal, and choices that are considered morally or religiously wrong. Radical freedom is the truth. Limitation is the lie. Limitation arises from fear and a need for control. By keeping people contained and limiting individual freedom, society tries to protect people from each other. The intention may have been to hold society together through shared morality, but the reality is painful. The limits on individual freedom came from misinterpreting truth, responsibility, and acceptance. When those are seen through a clear lens, there is no need to limit freedom. Experience is accepted; truth is sought and found; responsibility is a choice instead of a constraint. When truth, responsibility, acceptance, and freedom are taken on cleanly by the individual, life changes. People are freed from the perpetual sense of limitation and lack that society offers. When everyone feels fully supported and no longer has to struggle to survive, life becomes easier, freedom is far less threatening, and fear subsides. The goal is not to create chaos for the sake of chaos. The goal is to free people from the pain they have trapped themselves in, while giving them the freedom to make choices that align with their truth, their sense of responsibility, and their ability to accept experience as simply something that happens. Love to all, Della

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