CHAPTER 16
Do Not Blame
SRI DA AVABHASA: As long as you do not get the Lesson of
life, as long as you think that life is about becoming
Happy, you can blame anybody and everybody. But when you
understand the Lesson of life, you understand that your
Realization of Happiness is a matter of what you do. It is
your responsibility only. There is nobody to blame. In fact,
there is everyone to praise, no matter what anyone does. All
others are serving your Happiness because they serve your
responsibility. No matter what occurs or what anyone does,
you have the choice to transcend your own contraction – or
not.
“Consider” this: Every time you dramatize reactivity, you
are thinking you are the victim of someone or something or
some event – every time. Reactivity is the sure sign that
you have this point of view. If you react and dramatize
reactivity, you are always blaming the event, blaming the
other, instead of introducing the self-responsible
discipline into the occasion of difficulty or stress.
Always. It is always so.
Of course, there are all kinds of events in life, and
there are reactions to them. Therefore, perhaps you cannot
altogether stop reacting to the events of life. But to
dramatize the reaction, to extend it into a whole period of
drama, irresponsibility, egoic “self possession”, weakness,
non-practice, is to act like the victim. It is to blame the
event, as if the event or the other is the reason that you
are weak, the reason that you are not responsible, the
reason that you cannot deal with yourself, the reason you
get crazy. It is your own reactivity, and you must become
responsible for it. Every time you dramatize reactivity you
are blaming something or someone and not being responsible
for yourself.
Before your reaction becomes dramatization, you must deal
with the reaction itself. And to truly deal with the
reaction itself, you must come to the point of most
fundamental self-understanding, before the reactivity,
before the action that precedes all reactivity, all
desiring, all seeking. You must become responsible for that
action in every instant-moment by moment. Especially from
that point of view, then, you can retard the dramatization
of reactivity.
* * *
Westerners – and Westernized people everywhere – are
always looking for somebody or something to blame. There is
nobody and nothing to blame. Even the latest psychiatric
wisdom is all about blaming something or other – you know,
your parents, your past traumas. There is always something
to blame, always somebody to abuse, as if somebody or some
experience is the reason that you are so messed up. You are
the only reason.
Whatever you may have experienced in your life, it is
your reaction to it that is binding you, and you must deal
with your reactivity. There is nobody whatsoever to blame.
In order to stop blaming everyone and everything and the
universe itself and whatever you think God is, you ought to
get down to dealing with yourself.
* * *
All martyrs feel very self-important. To view yourself as
a victim is to be very self-important. It is strong egoity,
manifested in a particular fashion. A strong egoic tendency
is also what you got out of your childhood, a great sense of
self-importance and difference, even superiority.
Everybody has difficulties. Life is difficult, and it
requires something of you. Another way of characterizing the
so-to-speak “victim” consciousness is that it is always
looking for something or someone to blame even for the most
petty of life’s difficulties and demands. If you feel you
are the victim, you always look for somebody or something to
blame, some past incident, whatever it may be, to justify
your lack of responsibility, your lack of clarity, your lack
of effectiveness.
It is not just in reaction to the most traumatic of
life’s incidents that this mechanism is generated. It is an
ordinary mechanism, and it is also culturally enforced, and
socially reinforced, politically reinforced, reinforced by
social and political institutions even. It is not associated
with traumatic life, really. It is just the strategy of
living life in such a fashion that you are always relieved
of responsibility, because there is always something or
someone to blame and you, therefore, need not be
responsible. You just presume that the seat of
responsibility is not in yourself but in all the causes in
your life. And they are just what they are, so there is
nothing you can do about it.
You are always running through the time-streak of memory
to find where you were victimized, to find what there is to
blame, what incident you can blame for your trouble, what
people-mommy, daddy, whoever else-what incidents, what
experiences, what diseases. You are always going down the
time track to find what to blame and then dramatizing being
victimized there and receiving sympathy from everybody else
about your bad experience.
Responsibility is in the person, the “own” state, the ego
place. That is where responsibility must arise. You must
understand that it does not make a bit of difference who has
done what to you, or what experience you had in the past
recently, long ago, before this lifetime, in this
lifetime-it does not make any difference. You may discover
how in the past you established patterns that are effective
now, but there is no true healing in such discovery unless
you get down to the “consideration” of your responsibility
for your own reaction, ultimately for your own
self-contraction.
In the “own” position, the egoic self-position, you must
realize responsibility for your own reactivity, your own
dissociation, your own separativeness, your own generation
of a victim ritual. There will be difficult events in the
future just as there have been difficult events in the past.
How are they to be dealt with? By responsibility for your
own reactivity, your own egoic “self-possession”, your own
self-enclosure, your own dissociation, your own
separativeness.
This is the key to healing people of their various
disorders and life-problems-the development of
responsibility, not the constant finding of things to blame
and, in effect, practicing shamanistic rituals to just relax
your mind so that now you feel cured. No-responsibility is
the key, responsibility for the ego-act, the
self-contraction itself, and all the reactivity,
dramatization, seeking, desiring, pursuit of objects and
others and so forth that arise by your own act.
Realize that responsibility, and love, forgiveness, flows
from you toward all events, all past, all future, all
present, and you can live freely and transcend
life-difficulties. That is religious life manifested in
action.
Of course, the religious life most fundamentally is about
self-transcendence to the point of Most Perfect
self-transcendence and Realization of the Divine
Self-Condition. But as a manifestation in life, it shows
itself through responsibility for the self-contraction, not
through rehearsing the victim rituals.
There is absolutely no one to blame. Blame is the game of
evading responsibility. All your indulgence in reactivity,
as if you have reasons not to grow! You have none.
* * *
Do not blame anybody ever again. Embrace the discipline
of blamelessness. Never blame anything or anyone ever again.
You have no right to blame anybody. It is all your personal
business. Therefore, as My devotees, embrace one another
personally, cooperatively, as such responsible people.
* * *
In your fitful association with others, objects,
relations, experiences, you become less and less aware of
your fundamental Happiness, the Self-Existing and
Self-Radiant Love-Bliss of Divine Being. And becoming thus
dis-eased, analyzing your “problem”, and diagnosing it, you
tend to do the opposite, which is to separate yourself from
relations. You start blaming the world or blaming the
body-mind, blaming others, blaming birth. And then you try
to get rid of all that, as if when you finally and
exhaustively cut everything away, you will suddenly find out
that you are Happy.
* * *
You alone, you entirely, you as a manifested personality,
are the only structure that limits feeling. Nothing else
does. Nothing else has the power to do it. When everything
suggests that you are not responsible for the limitation on
feeling, it is because you have already relinquished your
responsibility. You project your un-Happy state on
everything, and you feel that everything that arises is just
cause for the limitation that you place on feeling. In that
disposition you are blaming everyone, you are blaming the
universe, you are blaming God for your un-Happiness.
Therefore, you look to everyone, to the universe, and to God
to relieve you of your unHappiness, whereas you and only you
are the cause of it, and therefore you and only you through
your devotional surrender to Me can do anything about
it.
Be free of betrayal, or the presumption that you are not
loved and that you are weak, separate, starving, and never
full or inherently blissful. Be free of your infantile
philosophy. Bring an end to the perpetual adolescence of
seeking in dilemma for the absent bliss. By existing as love
in love with Me be free of the search for love.
You are not certain of being loved and, thus, you do not
love. But to love is the Law. You must love, regardless of
the circumstance. The essential principle of Spiritual life
is unobstructed feelingContemplation of Me, enforced via all
functions, in all relations, under all conditions. The
principle of Satsang with Me is to be realized as love in
all the complicated mechanics of your relationships and at
every developmental stage of your practice in the Way of the
Heart.