Greetings friends and fellow students!!
I am starting a new topic I hope will inspire your participation and conversation about a topic that has been important in my life for a long time – even before the Urantia Book found me over 35 years ago. I’ll not post any quotes just yet but a key word search of “response”, “responsive”, and “responsiveness” will lead you to much that is written on the subject. I imagine many of you will have your own experiences related and perspectives which might be beneficial to all truth seekers and pilgrims in the spirit.
First, a brief mention of “responsibility” as opposed to response-ability or responsible vs. response-able. I’d like to make a distinction clearly here. The premise of the original term karma or reaping what we sow declares that for all of us our situation and our circumstances are determined, primarily, by our free will choices (three notable exceptions: first, there are those too young and those in the grips of disaster, war, famine, and other forms of suffering which are NOT their responsibility; second, every individual is also subject to social-karma or that collective situation and circumstance which we did not create by choice and are born into and subjects of regardless of our personal choices; third are the true accidents and other physical events like weather and geological events). There are many who choose to believe they are victims of others in all ways and that only others can change or improve their circumstances/situation. There are even some academics and “scientists” that claim there really is no free will at all…we are preprogrammed to respond to stimuli and “apparent” choices but don’t really have free will. These issues are not those of my focus or intention here (but all here are free agents with free will I believe so I can’t control or predetermine what happens here next).
To the topic at hand. My premise here is that we do not and cannot truly control the future or that which happens to us or transpires in our daily life. That there are many forces at work and, of course, those free will choices by a few billion others we share this world and life with – all of which combine to create constant flux, change, unplanned, and unexpected intersections of free will choice for each of us every day. While some of those are common to us all in life, we appear to each have a rather unique set of intersections to manage and face day to day. You will find many forms of responsiveness for our discussion that exist in the universes of time and space and between time and space and eternity and infinity or the central universe and all its components and the supers and the locals – sympathetic and harmonic effects or this begets that – the universes respond and so do planets respond to retain equilibrium or return to median.
I begin though with how we choose to respond to situations daily as we walk by – in our families, our employment, our community, etc. For while we cannot predetermine our future or determine the choices we face, we DO and MUST choose how we RESPOND to every situation and intersection and relationship and emotion we experience. It is those responses that then determine who we are, who we become, and how ABLE we are to cope, deal, progress, and SERVE. The more response-able we are and become, truly the more control we exert in every situation and the more able we are to take advantage of opportunities to display love and serve others. Our ability thusly enhances our capability. I have contemplated on this for decades and know it is true by experience. There is plenty of corroboration of this important truth from many different sources – including the Urantia Papers. We are in charge of nothing except how we respond to everything.
A related premise is our personal love-response. The first response mentioned is not specifically spiritual and may or may not enhance spirit progress, but the love-response is definitely key to spirit progress. It is my contention (and there is significant UB text in support) that love is God’s “secret sauce” and that no matter our ignorance of facts or truth, if we respond to love and extend love to others, we have entered the circles and are making progress in the spirit…we add to soul and to the Supreme with every act of love extended to others and do so regardless of “religion” or lack of “religion”, that love is a vital ingredient of and indication of personal religious experience and is so whether we know it or believe it. Remember the cave man story?
Enough for now. This should get us started in discussing Response-Ability and its importance to universe reality and our individual alignment with reality. Free will is power, personal power, and it determines who we are, what we become, and our ability to focus on the more important issues in better ways by our awareness of this personal power to choose…wisely and by love how we are able to serve in the universe and in our daily walk. Think about what “maturity” means – might it include response-ability?
Perhaps I should clearly state that while this awareness has changed my life for the better, I am no expert or master at this…it is my guiding philosophy however although I obviously have much to learn and improve in my personal response-ability. The human emotions of anger, fear, and grief have been the more difficult to manage. When those become our initial response to a situation, it is often so hard to make good free will choices. And bad choices, like good ones, feed into a loop of reality creation for the one making the choices. I hope you find the topic of interest.
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
