New Earth tools #11 – Self-responsibility
Some tools are more powerful than others. Some tools are easier to use than others. It doesn’t come as any real surprise that the most powerful tools are the hardest to use. Case in point: the tool in this article.
Like the self-observation tool discussed in the previous article, this is one of those tools you need to hand at all times. It’s not something you dig out of the bottom of the toolbox every once in a while for a particularly pesky job.
Self-responsibility is the stock-in-trade of anyone who wants to embody Christ and you won’t get too far without it. Self-responsibility is also known as emotional responsibility.
What is self-responsibility?
Galatians 6:5 tells us that “We each must carry our own load.”
What self-responsibility entails is the full realisation and acceptance that you have co-created whatever is happening in your life. If you step onto a pedestrian crossing and get hit by a bus, legally the bus driver is at fault.
What self-responsibility entails is the full realisation and acceptance that you have co-created whatever is happening in your life.
From a consciousness perspective, however, no one is at fault. You and the bus-driver co-created this event for your own different reasons. Your job, as you’re lying in hospital with a broken leg, is to figure out why you created it.
The tool you need here is self-responsibility: why did I manifest this situation?
Without taking responsibility you will not figure out why, and you will not get to heal the underlying damaged belief that precipitated this situation into your life.
Instead you will have a painful experience from which you learn nothing and, worse yet, may have to repeat until you accept full responsibility for whatever manifests in your future.
This means repeating negative situations in our lives are a clue that we’re not accepting responsibility. It also means they are a doorway to transformation.
Repeat situations
Do you know anyone who keeps recreating the same mess?
I knew a woman who was attracted to charming men that became abusive when they were drunk. She knew she was attracted to such men but didn’t accept responsibility for it. She never realised she was effectively attracting them into her life. So she carried on believing the next man would be better. He wasn’t.
So if you have a situation that keeps repeating—or any other challenging issue, for that matter—step into self-responsibility.
Ask yourself: why did I create this? What do I need to learn?
It can be very hard to do, whether it involves other people who cause you grief—or you’re causing grief to them, as I have unconsciously done. But it can also bust the situation wide open and give you a completely new and liberating perspective.
“Washed their robes”
Revelation tells us we cannot enter the New Earth without self-responsibility. “God will bless all who have washed their robes. They will each have the right to eat fruit from the tree that gives life, and they can enter the gates of the city.” (Revelation 22:14)
It’s part of the entrance exam, and it’s not one of those easy-peasy multi-choice questions. You have to really get it and demonstrate it. Your commitment to emotional responsibility must be total and impeccable, no matter how poor a light that puts you in.
The path of self-responsibility is a path of suffering. You will emerge cleansed. “These are the ones who have gone through the great suffering. They have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb and have made them white.” (Revelation 7:14)
Self-responsibility is a narrow path that you must resolutely tread, no matter how tempting it is to blame others or hide behind excuses of inherited trauma, difficult childhoods or arrested development. The sooner you start doing so, the sooner you’ll progress.