Your True Responsibility (extract)

"When you come right down to it, there’s a part of you that’s totally alone as you come into the world, totally alone as you face your sufferings, totally alone as you leave here. Even when you are with other people, there’s an internal dialogue that’s just between you and yourself. That’s what you’ve got to be responsible for. The world would be a nice place if we could provide for each other’s happiness — and we can a little bit — but for the really deep down parts, we each have to be responsible for ourselves. If you constantly worry about this person and that person, no matter how close you are to them, there’s going to be a part of you that gets neglected that you really are responsible for.

This is a lot of what the Buddha’s teaching is about: that you’ve got to take responsibility for yourself. Because who’s making the decisions? You can’t say, well, someone else made that decision for me or this person made that decision for me, because there’s got to be a part of you that decides to go along with those decisions for whatever reasons. So you have to look at those reasons. This is not to say that believing what other people say is bad. The Buddha never said that, but he says you have to take what other people say and look at what your mind says and then examine both very carefully to see which is more appropriate, which really does correspond more closely to the way things are, the way things should be, the most skillful way of reacting to a particular set of circumstances. If you don’t develop your own powers of mindfulness and alertness in these areas, your judgment is going to be clouded, and that’s going to cloud your life."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Your True Responsibility"

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