Life is, of course, complicated by the fact that our lives are, for the most part, the consequences of our actions, and for most of us, our actions are dictated by our unexamined whys (as in, why we do what we do, why we think what we think, etc.).
Now, how much control we have—as opposed to our “whys”—over what we do seems to, you know, have at least some relevance in human life. While I don’t think we can be responsible for what happens “to” us, we are certainly responsible for our own actions, whether those actions are manifested as beliefs, values, and assumptions, or re-actions to what happens to us. I am not sure that I can agree that people can do things to us in the direct, cause and effect way that we normally assume it to be, but that issue is somewhat examined elsewhere in my notes. Either way, we are responsible for our own actions because our whys are made up of our misguided, flawed, and obtuse perceptions of what happened to us, around us, and by us. Thus, if we are responsible for our own perceptions (for who else could be?) then we must be responsible for our own actions. This, then, begs the question: if we are controlled by our whys, and thus do not control ourselves, how can we be responsible for our actions when we do not control our actions, our whys do?
It is that which makes our perception warped—off, misguided, clouded, confused—that is to blame, then. What makes our perceptions skewed is our ego-self. The products of these distorted perceptions are illusions, and it is also our belief in, and our perceptions of, the illusions we see that produce more illusions and baseless beliefs. It’s a self-sustaining cycle of illusion feeding belief, and belief feeding more illusion, and so on.
The thing is, we must be responsible for our actions because no matter where the illusions come from which distort the vision of our perception, our perception is wholly our own; and we are is the product of our distorted perceptions. We are responsible because just because most people do not make the effort to not be controlled by their illusion-based conditioned existence, that does not mean that they can not, and the fact that they can means that they, and only they, must be responsible for whether they do or not make that effort.
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From my personal notes, 11/15/99.
