Realize Responsibility, and Love Flows from You
Adi Da: “To be so responsible is what it is to be a man, male or female. That is manly responsibility. That is appropriate human responsibility. That is true civilization. To be civil is to be responsible for yourself, to know that what you do not only affects yourself but also that it affects others, and therefore to assume responsibility for yourself. For the sake of your own life, continued growth, development, and freedom and for the sake of the same in others, you must experience a great unwillingness to contaminate other living beings.
This is another way of describing the Bodhisattva principle of Buddhism – to live in such a way that everything you do your whole life serves the Liberation of others instead of yourself. To live casually and to be worldly in the egoic fashion is to agree to contaminate others constantly, to agree to have a bad effect on everyone, not to mention on yourself. Such is not the religious commitment. It is a Godless, ego-based disposition – not only Godless but Truthless, without Reality, without understanding, without discrimination, without seriousness, without commitment to life as a serious process that has great dimensions to it and not just the local, contaminated point of view of the herd at the moment. True religion is a willingness to be clear in yourself and to live the righteous life, whether anyone else does it or not.”
