Inner Work

For the week of August 28, 2006

Inner Responsibility

With increasing self-awareness comes increasing responsibility, even for our secret thoughts and emotions. Though we do not have full control of our thoughts and emotions, we can be responsible for what we agree to, for what we accept as proper, and for what we inwardly own as an expression of our truest self. How we relate to our thoughts profoundly influences and shapes our life.

Happiness begins with accepting the whole of ourselves as we are, but we need not and should not accept all within us as being appropriate and right. We accept ourselves as we are and we work to improve. Part of that means adopting a discriminating attitude toward our inner life, toward this ever-changing and repetitive jungle of thoughts and emotions.

While we do not fight or reject our destructive and unbecoming thoughts and emotions, neither do we feed them, agree with them, take them as who we are, nor act on them. What then? We give them space. We expose our wasteful, distracting, and unwholesome thoughts to the great, purifying spaciousness of consciousness. Within that boundless inner space of awareness, all thoughts and emotions gradually dissipate, leaving us in peace. If we refrain from bothering the thoughts that bother us, they cease their problematic manifestations, healing the wounds that drive them.

But our thoughts and attitudes are subtle and ingenious, selling themselves to us. Inner responsibility means not buying into the wasteful, distracting, and unwholesome ones. Although our true reality lies well beyond thought, who we are in the external world is a function of what we think, of the thoughts we adopt as our own.

Nearly all our thoughts consist of randomly patterned associations reacting to inner and outer perceptions. Where are we in this? Surely not everything in the stream of thoughts represents who we are. The mere fact that some thought runs through my brain does not mean that is what I think or what I intend. When do we think intentionally?

A similar situation exists with our emotions.

Inner responsibility means to stand our ground in the midst of this endless stream of thoughts and emotions: to be ourselves, not our thoughts. For this week, work to be more responsible for your inner world.

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