The second of 5 tennants.

Date:   5/21/2006 6:19:52 AM ( 18 y ago)

The Second Tenet:
The Law of Volitionality

The second tenet, The Law of Volitionality, states that if you want to be free more than anything else, you must be willing to take absolute responsibility for your own self.

Living the second tenet is no easy task. There are many influences that come together to make up the self: personal history, cultural conditioning, biological instincts, and perhaps even the karmic imprints of previous lifetimes. There are the fears and desires of the ego and the evolutionary impulse of the authentic self. But what makes it possible for you to take responsibility for all of this is the recognition that, in the end, you are always choosing to be the person that you are. You are making conscious and unconscious choices in every moment that determine what actions you will take and what impact you will have on the world around you.

The power of the second tenet entirely depends upon accepting the fact that on some level, we all always know exactly what we are doing. It boldly declares that if you want to manifest the revelation of wholeness, nonduality, and enlightenment in this world, you must actively take responsibility, right now, for everything you are doing in the present moment, for all you have done in the past, and for the conditioned responses that arise as a result of things that others have done to you.

Enlightenment means freedom from karma. Karma is created every time you act out of unconsciousness, ignorance, and selfishness in ways that cause suffering to others. For most of us, karma is a powerful force—the accumulated momentum of literally countless actions. The momentum of karma is what makes the personal world of ego and unenlightenment appear so attractive to us. The authentic self in each of us is compelled to become enlightened and perpetually evolve, but the ego is driven by the need to always be in control and ever remain the same. And it is the choices that we make in every moment that determine which part of our self will be creating our destiny. Each time we act out of ego, karma is instantly created.

There are few human beings who truly aspire to be absolutely responsible for themselves. Most prefer to see themselves as unconscious victims of the forces within and without. As long as you allow yourself to be victimized by your own conditioned responses that arise as a result of past wounds and traumas, it is inevitable that sooner or later you are going to wound and traumatize others, and the momentum of your own karma will only increase. But when you renounce the victim position, you finally take the weight of your karma upon your own shoulders. You bear it so that no one else has to suffer. Heroically, you choose to liberate the world from your own miserable ego—and if you care about the evolution of consciousness, you will be in a position to make a significant contribution.

In an evolutionary context, the individual is aspiring to become liberated so that the authentic self, the evolutionary impulse, is free to act, to respond, to transform this world. The authentic self has no past; it has no karma; it has never been wounded or traumatized by anything that has happened to the historical personality in time. It is egoless by nature, and when it meets itself in others, a state of ecstatic intimacy and perfect trust emerges that brings heaven to earth. But in order to be a vessel for that miraculous emergence, you must be living the second tenet to such a degree that the conditioned and irrational responses of the ego are always contained. Then the multidimensional complex of energy, consciousness, and contradictory impulses that you are will become the expression of an integrated whole that not only ceases to create karma, but begins to generate an entirely new and positive momentum as it moves forward on its evolutionary trajectory.

Andrew Cohen



 

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