Check out part 1!
Part 2 - The birth of responsibility
so you see, Because we have divided events from one another in this arbitrary way, we have a puzzle of how do events lead to each other. In actuality, there are no separate events, life flow along like a stream of river. and it's all connected as the source of the river is connected to the mouth into the ocean.
And so, all events are really one event streaming down on time. And the whole point of measuring time is to pin point a particular event in the flow. But we don't need causality to explain time. we're looking when we talk about different events we're looking at different sections or parts, different snapshots, of one continuous happening. and therefore the idea of separate events which have to be linked by a mysterious process all cause and effect is completely unnecessary. having thought that way we think of present events has been caused by past event. and therefore we tend to regard ourselves as the puppets of the past and driven along by something that is always behind us.
Now if one wishes to overcome this impression, it's actually quite simple, and it helps to approach this by closing your eyes and see the world through your ears. If you shut your eyes and make contact with reality, purely with your ears, I mean it's kind of silly perhaps to shut your eyes when you're watching TV, but try it. Once you close your eyes you will realize that the sounds you are hearing are all coming out of silence, you hear it and the it fades away. It fades into the oblivion to finally disappeared. This isn't fascinating not because you perceive reality through sounds coming out of nothing but rather you don't see any reason for them to begin, they simply just appear and then they echo away through the corridors of the mind that we call memory. now if you open it's a little harder to see this with your eyes because unlike sounds the eyes rather look at staff , and everything looks still to your eyes. but you must understand that the world you are looking at stays when you look at the light that light is vibrating all material things are vibrations and they are vibrating at you now in the same way as the sound was vibrating on your ears. in other words the present world that you see is a vibration, just as the sound comes out of silence.
In our visual perception of the world, light is coming out of space, coming out of nothing straight at you right now and echoing away into the past. so the course of time is really just visual memory of the past, which tells us what we have seen or done.
We become so accustomed to perceiving time as sequential event, that we tend to think of our behavior as causality, with no self responsibility at all. Once upon a time, in psychology, it was fashionable to describe human behavior in terms of instincts -i.e instinct for survival. Psychologist use to say instinct for survival made life so and so. But, in modern psychology, it's common to use the term driven to describe human behavior. In other word, we speak of our need for food, survival, sex and etc. as a drive for our behaviors. That's significant, and it's isn't brought out by people who feel driven per se, but by our sequential perception of time.
So, the whole notion of I being driven is connected with the idea of causality of life, moving under the power of the past, and that is so ingrained in our common sense, its becoming very difficult to get rid of.
But when you get rid of that sense of causality, that’s real freedom. It involves in other words getting rid of the habit of thought whereby you define yourself as the result of what has gone before and instead get into the more plausible a more reasonable happy for in terms of which you don't define yourself in terms of what you've done before but in terms of what you're doing and that is liberation some people get a glimpse that we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe. And you are creating it at every moment. Because you see, it starts now. It didn’t begin in the past. There was no past. If the universe began in the past, when that happened it was now. But it is still now and the universe is still beginning now.
Things are not explained by the past. They’re explained by what happens now. That creates the past. And it begins in the here and the now, at this place at this moment.
‘That’s the birth of responsibility. Because otherwise you can look to the past shoulder and say, ‘Well, I am the way I am because my mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was neurotic because her mother dropped her.’ and we go way back to Adam and Eve or to a disappearing monkey or something. We never get at it. But in this way you are faced with that you’re doing all this. And that’s an extraordinary shock.
You can’t blame anyone else for the kind of world you’re in… And if you know, that the I — in the sense of the person, the ego —really doesn’t exist, then it won’t go to your mind too badly if one day you wake up to discover that you’re God.
