Consider This – Victim and Responsibility

ADI DA SAMRAJ: 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.

Perhaps in an instant a reaction cannot be avoided. If a
tiger jumps out of a bush, fear occurs – fine. But to make a
life out of such reaction, even when the tiger disappears,
that is the dramatization of reactivity, egoity showing
itself in a life-form. 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.

People with some developmental maturity are supposed to
understand themselves and be able to deal with their
dramatization with significant self-understanding, apply a
great degree of self-discipline, not roll with their
dramatizations and abuse everyone. Every dramatization
abuses others, because the dramatizing ego thinks it is the
victim of others and events. As long as you think that way,
you will display sometimes horrific dramatizations and abuse
and collapse. Such drama is infantile, certainly adolescent,
and not the kind of thing that adult human beings should be
doing.

Even though you may be older than 18 or 21 years of age,
you perhaps feel you still have the right to react like an
adolescent or to live and react in an infantile manner. You
should still be at home with your parents in that case! You
should not be permitted association with adult humanity.
Unfortunately the world is roamed and infiltrated by
adolescents and infantile characters who never finished
their life-business in the first three stages of life, never
became responsible for themselves. What part do they play in
a civilized life, then, a human life, an adult life? They
are not prepared for it.

If we sent all the aberrated characters back home to
their parents to be locked in their room, there would hardly
be anybody functioning in the world! The world, as it is, is
based on the adolescent mentality and the infantile
mentality. The world justifies a mentality that is not
civilized and that has nothing to do with true religion. It
is suffering. It is chaos.

Unfortunately, there are no norms for true, adult human
behavior. Many petty expectations are brought out of the hip
pocket whenever it seems convenient to abuse somebody, but
real norms of human life, of civilized life, of politics and
social life, do not really exist anymore. What is regarded
to be an acceptable way of living is brought out as a matter
of convenience usually in order to abuse somebody. But where
is the presumption of real adulthood? Where is true humanity
in politics? Where is it in the relations between nations?
Where is it in the relations between people face to face,
one by one?

The psychology of irresponsibility pervades the entire
world, not only in the West, not only in America. The whole
world is dramatizing the self-contraction and losing its
order, losing its positive human basis, losing its true
religious basis. Real human life is being thrown down the
toilet by dramatizations. Everybody is in the trenches,
wary.

THE WOMAN WHO BEGAN THIS CONVERSATION: Beloved,
everything You are saying I feel so served by.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Make sure you remember it. Do not just
forget about it tomorrow because the gathering is over. Keep
it in your notebook, keep it in your heart.