Responsibility & Freedom

Listening to Sadhguru and doing Inner Engineering has changed my perception of a number of aspects of our day-to-day lives. In this, I will talk about two fundamental words/aspects that are very pervasive in our every day conversations.

The two words are Responsibility and Freedom.

Responsibility

Responsibility is commonly used to convey one's obligation or duty to a person/thing/ situation or instead to point at one's mistakes . If someone says that you have a responsibility to someone or that you are responsible for something, it means that you have a duty to fulfill or that you are the reason something terrible has happened. So, it often has a very burdensome or negative connotation in our daily usage.

But if we take a step back and deconstruct the word "Responsibility", it is simply "Response + Ability". Which literally translates as one's ability to respond. If you are responsible for person/thing/situation, it means you are able to respond to it . 'To respond' doesn't mean that you need to act in a specific way. It just means that instead of ignoring and turning a blind eye to things around you, you are "open to" / "receiptive of" everything around you and do what you can in any given situation. The action per se i.e. how you act in any situation depends on your resources and constraints. Actions can vary from time to time, individual to individual and can be limited or bounded by a variety of constraints, but your ability to respond does not need to be limited to select few things. As humans, we have the ability to respond to every living and non-living entity around us.

Take an example. Imagine you are walking in your office corridor and see a pen lying on the floor. Let's see what being "responsible" means in this context - it doesn't mean you are the reason the pen is on the floor or that you are obligated to return it to its place. It means instead of ignoring it and walking past it, you choose to respond and do something about it. You could pick it up and hand it over to the lost and found section in the office. If you are in a hurry to attend a meeting, you could pick it up and hand it over to a colleague or janitor and ask them to do so. If you are in more hurry, you could just move it aside so people do not step on it. Or you could be so involved in something else that you see it but you cannot do anything about it at that moment. You don't need to feel guilty about it. Responsibility is not about performing a specific action and being obligated to resolve a situation in a specific manner, but it is about being open and receptive to all things and situations around you and doing what you can and what is approrpiate at any given point.

In that sense, if glaciers are melting in Antarctica, are you responsible?..........

Yes, you are. Ignoring it or responding to it are the only options you have. Agian, choosing to respond here doesn't necessarily mean you go on a mission tomorrow to end global warming. One may do that if he has attained that level of clarity and purpose in life. Some people are doing that. But if that is not the case, you can be more conscious of your own lifestyle choices or contribute where it matters. The context of your life and resources and constraints can limit how you act in a particular situation.

You must be wondering what is the point or necessity of responding to everything around us. Being responsible is not about being morally or ethically upright and imposing a code of conduct for oneself. If you look at it closely and practice it, you will see that it is a natural way to exist and it is quite liberating, contrary to what it feels like on the surface. Ignoring or not responding to people/things/situations is mostly driven by one's narrow self-identity. The rigid identities and personalities that we unconsciously build make us want to ignore many things around us. It seems convenient at that moment but tends to make us more rigid and miserable in the long run.

Freedom

Freedom is another word that is not well understood, as what is deemed as freedom by people in many cases, in quite some contrast, is reflective of a deep-rooted compulsiveness in human beings. People are aspiring for freedom of all kinds: freedom to eat, drink, consume what they want, freedom to conduct relationships whichever way they want, freedom to wear what they want — essentially, freedom to do whatever one wants. Nothing is wrong with this. But with all this materialistic freedom, can anyone claim that they are free? Not necessarily. All these freedoms mentioned above are matters of choice. Whether one is free or not depends on what is driving these choices, not the choices themselves.

Imagine someone who is addicted to drugs. There is a deep sense of awareness in him that it is negatively impacting his health, career, and relationships. He still consumes drugs because his body is used to them and craves them. He is essentially a slave to his bodily compulsion. The choice is driven by his body. Can you say he is free?

The above example may be an extreme case, but every one of us has various kinds of compulsions—physical, mental, emotional, etc. There is a lot of internal conflict that goes on every minute in managing and fighting these compulsions. Like, you want to watch a movie badly, but at the same time, you know it is not the right time because you have an exam tomorrow. The movie wins most of the time (or you may study half-heartedly with the movie playing in the back of your mind) . These decisions and actions are often driven by the urges and compulsions of one's body and mind which don't let one do what is appropriate in any given situation. Do you consider this as being free?

A real sense of freedom is being free of such compulsions and making a conscious choice depending on what is needed at any given moment. The fundamental essence of spirituality is that there is something beyond body and mind in an individual. Crudely speaking, you can call it soul/atma, consciousness, life-energy, etc. Being in constant touch with this dimension is to be beyond the compulsions of body and mind. Call it enlightenment, awakening, or something else, but it is a state where an individual's actions will be conscious and not dictated by the compulsive nature of one's body and mind. Every individual (spiritual or otherwise) does experience this conscious state now and then, but moving closer to that state and fully establishing oneself in that experience is what people in spiritual traditions fundamentally aspire for and so every individual

Here is a short poem that I have written on Freedom a few years ago:

"It is not in the pursuit of whims and fancies of the mind,

It is not in the indulgence of pleasures and urges of the body,

It is not in crossing the boundaries of geographies or social norms,

It is not even in scaling the heights of mountains or material riches.

Real freedom is not in 'being able to run after your compulsions' but 'being free of your compulsions'. A state of being where you are no longer a slave to external situations, not even to your own body and mind"