What happens when you take your life in your own hands? You would have no one to blame. Self-responsibility is the cornerstone of self-realisation. Achieving it is an ongoing process. We begin by placing responsibility outside self. We like to say you are responsible. We hold the doctor responsible for a treatment going awry; a friend responsible for the break-up; the govern-ment, judicial system, police, and plumber for our myriad problems. We hold the 'other' responsible.
At some point in life, this sense of responsibility expands to an accep-tance that we, too, play a part — that both, the other and self, are responsible. So we acknowledge the fact that we are responsible. Initially this is more easily discernible in personal relationships. Now comes the third phase of responsibility and understanding "I am responsible", moving from 'you' to 'we' to complete self-responsibility, which is the beginning of spiritual growth.
At this point we acknowledge our creatorhood and view how we are indeed completely responsible for our personal realities, environment and world; we view self as the cause of outer effects - as the energy field that draws from around us. Most of us are at varying stages of this self-empowering responsibility - from it being wholly intellectual to it being a larger part of our beingness. Then we would observe the friend, doctor, government, as a reflection of self, and seek to redress the outside by addressing it from within. Once self-responsibility becomes as natural a response in our personal lives as the former two, we ought to expand it further: having moved from you are responsible, to we are responsible, to I am responsible, we need to stretch this to no one is responsible. This deeper truth is yet intellectual for most; but this is where anyone on the journey to Self is headed.
There is a dawning that no one is responsible because everything is happening for the larger whole - call it larger self, universe or God. This is not a shelving of responsibility as it may appear, but a deep acceptance of the Oneness pervading all and the perfection of its functioning.
As these inner workings of Self become increasingly apparent and clearer to our waking consciousness we take one more leap - that there is nothing to be responsible for. Concepts like Maya - the play of creation, Shakespeare's 'the world is but a stage' and quantum physics theory of the 'now moment' - have tried to describe this deepest of understandings but can only point towards it. This stage cannot be an intellectual understanding but must be as experientially 'real' as the former experiences we have journeyed along. Analogies may help: you would not invade a country on awakening from a dream of being attacked, nor would you penalise the friend who jails you while playing monopoly!
For most the first two stages of responsibility are completely experiential and the last two perhaps completely intellectual - with some being poised somewhere along the middle. This centrifugal point of complete self-responsibility is what we must expand to. Once that empowering tilt happens, we would be able to make self-responsibility as natural a part of our human experience as anything else.