From International Viewpoints (IVy) Issue 8 - September 1992
 
Thoughts on Responsibility
by Britta Burtles, England

God is love, perfect knowledge, perfect beauty, perfect life, etc. 
Love, truth,knowledge, beauty, life have no beginning or end: they 
simply Are. So they are infinite, are eternal.

Every Human Being is somewhere on a scale from zero to total 
perfection regarding those non-physical aspects of life, and is 
striving to become more perfect. You often hear people saying: "I am a 
perfectionist" or "He/she is a perfectionist". Man is basically good. 
Man is made in the image of God (bible).

Some human beings like Jesus, Mohammet, Buddha etc. are very high on 
that scale. There are and were others who are very high on that scale.

God is not a human being, but a human being can be God, as the 
Christians express it in the concept of the Trinity - God Father, Son 
and Holy Spirit. So, Jesus - is - God.

God is not of this physical universe. God is neither "he" nor "she", 
nor any single entity. God has no persona. There is not "a God" or 
"the God", but just God.

God cannot be accurately defined with words. God is essence, is being, 
is existence, is life, is eternity.

Why call it God?

Question: Why call it God? Why not just call it Perfection? Answer: l. 
Perfection is an abstract. People cannot so easily relate to an 
abstract, cannot associate themselves with an abstract. God is 
personal. One can connect to God. One cannot connect to perfection, 
but one can strive towards it. 2. If one says "perfection", one 
usually means - in one certain aspect, like "that was perfect timing", 
"he is a perfect husband" etc., whereas God means: Perfection combined 
in any and all pro-survival aspects of a living thinking being.

Working out salvation

"We are here (on Earth) to work out our own salvation". Eventually we 
will, return to/develop into, what we once were - good, right, 
perfect, whole, complete beings.

The sooner we realise that we have to work out our own salvation, the 
sooner we can take full responsibility for our selves, and knowingly 
continue our daily activities. Moving and developing towards ever 
higher states of perfection, we will not only get closer to God, but 
to that state of salvation which we usually - for lack of better 
expressions - call Heaven or Paradise, i.e. we will go back to where 
we came from.

J.C. (Jesus Christ) and the others on a very high level of perfection 
are pioneers, forerunners. They are and set examples, and show the 
rest of us that we humans can and will get there, reach the ultimate 
state again, be God. So there is hope.

There is not an ever-so-perfect being "out there", who is going to do 
it for us, however much we pray, beg, implore, worship, thank or 
grovel. "He" has never interfered and will never interfere. "He" 
leaves it all to us, mainly because "He", "She" or "It" does not exist 
"out there".The only place we will ever contact or find God, is in us, 
in our thoughts, our awareness, our consciousness. If there was a God 
out there who could talk to us, he would probably say something like: 
"You are the God you once were, and one day will again be, if you stop 
looking into the distance for the resolution of your predicament. 
Start taking responsibility for yourself, so that eventually I will be 
you, and you will know it".

The snag

But there is a snag: We will only reach that ultimate state of 
perfection, if at each step on the way we have successfully brought 
every other human being to that level of improved beingness as well.

Most religions have as one of their most important goals - Peace on 
Earth, but Earth is still as far away from Peace as it has been since 
history has been recorded, and before. Many of the most horrible wars 
in history were, and still are being fought in the name of a religion, 
in the name of the founder of a religion, or even in the name of God. 
In many religions people are told to think of "A" God "out there", 
instead of as part of themselves. Worshipping, praying, talking to "a 
God out there", Man fails to address what he wishes and claims to 
address. All he is doing is pushing away responsibility. This 
misidentifying and mislocating of God is one of the basic reasons why 
Man does not achieve what he wants most - Peace on Earth. If God was 
properly identified and located, Man could no longer shirk 
responsibility for everything.

At the moment Man says: "God is in full control; He guides us; He is 
in charge; He is responsible. So why bother to get it right". Human 
Beings seem to want/need a leader, need to be controlled, need someone 
to be in charge over them. And those "things" Man does not like a 
benevolent and merciful God to have caused or allowed to happen, Man 
still thinks God is responsible for, and Man justifies this thought by 
saying: "God in his great wisdom lets these things happen, because 
they fit his all-over great plan, which only He knows. It"s just that 
we don"t understand Him and we don"t know".

Since this universe is a two-pole universe, it is so much easier, 
especially in times of hardship, to mentally reach out to a God in the 
distance for help and comfort, like the troubled child reaches out for 
mother"s arms for reassurance, comfort and protection.

Three groups

There are these 3 groups:

1. There is Cause and Effect. 2. There are Considerations. 3. There 
are Postulates.

ad 1. At this stage of Man"s development, most "things" happen on the 
principle of the law of Cause and Effect.

ad 2. Whatever a person considers to be real/true, is real/true in 
that person"s world.

ad 3. The higher people rise in their development to total perfection 
in all pro-survival aspects of life, the more able they will become in 
causing their postulates to materialise! (Postulate = A truth created 
by self).

Three vital axioms

I found these 3 Axioms specially interesting:

23. The soul has the capability of total knowingness. Total 
knowingness would consist of total ARC. (Affinity + Reality + 
Communication = Understanding).

24. Total ARC would bring about the vanishment of all mechanical 
conditions of existence.

29. In order to cause an AS-ISness to persist, one must assign - other 
authorship - to the creation than his own. Otherwise his view of it 
would cause its vanishment. (AS-ISness = Condition of Existence with 
no life or time continium).

Since Man is basically good, and since there is the law of Cause + 
Effect (Overt/Motivator Sequence. After committing a harmful act, the 
person has to claim receipt of a harmful act.), punishment is not only 
superfluous, but even counter-productive, since it generates violence, 
more punishment and revenge.

Punishment creates a vicious circle, and as long as it is used to 
solve or end a situation, there will not be Peace on Earth.

Whilst J.C."s "Turn the other cheek" makes a lot of sense, I can see 
two reasons why people generally don"t follow his advice: 1. they 
think it signifies weakness; and 2. it, in fact, takes a lot of 
strength, courage and wisdom, which many people don"t yet have.

There is a saying: "Punishment was created by people who don"t dare to 
be responsible". Punishment is a lie. Punishment rejects 
responsibility, i.e. it is an example of "misownership", of "other 
authorship" (as per Axiom 29).

Man is not only basically good, but also basically perfect. Man is 
striving go get back to His original state of perfection. To the 
extent that He achieves that, He will be close to God, personify God, 
be God, - i.e. reach His salvation.

The sooner Man quits the eternal search for God, realising and 
accepting responsibility for Himself, the sooner he assumes His place, 
the sooner He stops the - misownership - of saying "My God is out 
there", the sooner He will have the chance, will be able to start on 
the road to fulfilling His destiny and reach Salvation.

Since people are basically good, they find it difficult now and then 
to admit not to have been so good, or right. They look for and find 
more or less clever, more or less rational justifications for their 
"not so good" thoughts, words or actions, and in the process shift 
their "wrongness" to the other person or "thing" or circumstances. 
Hence the eternal "I am right and you are wrong" syndrome. This shift 
in "ownership" is the basis for non-acceptance of responsibility, is 
actually synonymous with it.

People are afraid to admit "ownership", are afraid to have Caused, are 
afraid to take responsibility, because they think, if they do, they 
will be punished, or the walls will crash down on them. And yet: 
Taking Responsibility just means - saying: "I have thought, or said, 
or done...". It means admitting "ownership", admitting being - cause -
; and that is the only way to make the "wrongness" vanish for the 
person who is basically good. If he does not admit Cause, even if he 
is the only one who knows, he will "punish" himself, i.e. he will 
redress the balance, he will make something happen which he considers 
punishment; no-one needs to do it for him.

If you don"t believe me, look around you and see the many unhappy, ill 
poor, miserable and sick people, who, instead of accepting 
responsibility for the condition they are in, prefer to either lament 
"Why is God punishing me thus?" or they look for a culprit on whom 
they can take revenge for their misfortune. Or they call it "bad luck" 
or "an accident", or just about anything to avoid accepting 
responsibility for "reaping the seed they have sown".

God out there

There are three reasons why Man will find it difficult to break away 
from the concept of "a God out there": 1. Man would have to break with 
the old tradition, but Human Beings find "change" difficult, and find 
it especially difficult to break old habits. 2. Man finds it difficult 
to accept more responsibility. 3. In hard times Man finds it much 
easier to cope, if He can communicate with someone, even if it is an 
assumed someone.

One might say: "Praying works, and some prayers get answered." There 
are two reasons why praying works, when it works: 1. It is a form of 
communication. 2. A prayer is the same as a decision, an intention, a 
postulate. Such is the power of the Human Spirit expressed through his 
Mind, that correctly done, praying works; just as superstition works, 
spiritual healing, casting spells etc.

A wise man (possibly LRH) once said: "It is better for a person to 
have a bad religion, than no religion."

Religions provide needed guidance and operating rules. Despite the 
fact that the purpose of a religion is often violated, distorted, 
abused, misinterpreted and misunderstood, Mankind is still much better 
off with a religion than without one.

Conclusion

It would be very difficult to start a new system of beliefs for the 3 
reasons given above, the main one being that Man cannot accept a very 
high level of responsibility.

Pioneers in any field are regarded as cranks, are sneered at, laughed 
at, ridiculed and often attacked for "rocking the boat" of 
established, predictable, accepted and thus comfortable ways of 
thinking.

"Not another religion" is the outcry. Well, call it what you like, but 
propagate the idea that one of the biggest and best hidden traps for 
mankind is - misownership -. To break away from it, however difficult 
and unpleasant the process might be, can only be profoundly 
beneficial. The high level of responsibility which the acceptance of 
this idea necessitates, would bring us much closer to this goal - 
Peace on Earth, and at the same time it would take us much nearer to 
the other goal - our salvation.