Broken down, responsibility doesn't mean 'obligation' as it has come to mean in our society, which is suffering a plague of litigation based on the idea that someone else (especially if they're loaded) is responsible for my well-being. As a result, the McDonald's company is 'obligated' to reimburse me when I spill hot coffee in my lap. This is nonsense of the worst kind.

Responsibility, broken down, simply means 'the ability to respond'. That ability, like most things, begins at home. In this case, home is where your heart, or attention is. Only you can best respond to the things that are available to your own attention. Since your attention dwells within a spirit-mind-body complex with which only you are intimate, only you truly have the ability to respond to it. No one else can possibly know more about your dreams, desires, intuitions, feelings, thoughts, and experiences than you. Your primary responsibility lies there.

This quickly eliminates the kind of thinking which says it was McDonald's coffee, so they're responsible. Rather, it was your lack of attention to what you were experiencing in the immediate moment which allowed the coffee to spill. McDonald's simply wasn't available to respond. You were. To attempt to make them responsible after the fact is soul-killing to the worst degree.

When you look at it in terms of available attention, it gets much simpler. You are responsible for your kids to the extent that their own attention is insufficient to what they are experiencing. The same yardstick can be used in measuring our responsibility toward a parent with failing awareness.

It works in other relationships, as well.

If you tell someone "Gee, your hair looks nice today!" and they respond with "Are you saying it looked like sh*t yesterday!?!", then they are the one with the problem. It's called taking yourself (or 'things') too seriously.

And if you take their outburst seriously and then proceed to take seriously the potential consequences of what you say to others when speaking from the depths of your heart, then you will have caught the disease and be dragged down to their level. In their minds, this is good, because now they have company with which to take things too seriously. But if someone is stuck down a hole, going down into it with them just traps you as well. Better to stay out of it and be available to pull on the rope you give them, if and when they decide to exercise the intent to climb out.

If the lady whose hair you complimented is so severely stressed that you're certain that she doesn't have the wherewithal to understand what you intended, then you can compassionately cut her some slack in your response to her outburst. If you find yourself unable to, and wanting to retaliate, those feelings are inside of you, and if that's the case, it's because your own attention is caught up inside you, unable to encompass her as well, and your first responsibility is to work with those feelings, rather than with her. See?

And that's what spiritual growth and enlightenment boil down to. Continually working on the feelings and accompanying beliefs that trap our attention inside us, and gradually expanding our attention, as it becomes freed, to include more and more of the world around us, to which we then have the ability to respond.

The ultimate reality to achieve would be an awareness that is so expanded that there is noone and nothing it doesn't include. Such is the awareness of the Divine. And yet, do we see evidence that this divine awareness responds to us in the ways we usually assign to responsibility? Does it act on our behalf as another human would? Does it act at all?

My own experience with this suggests that awareness itself is the highest form of action, but involves doing nothing. An example of this principle:

I'm sitting with a friend at work, and he's telling me about a problem in a relationship. As he talks, part of me is becoming aware of what he's describing from a more expansive point of view. As a result, I'm beginning to see what it is he needs to see in order to arrive at some resolution. I notice that I'm beginning to put this in words in my mind, so that I can speak them. I also notice that, when I do this, I lose touch with his awareness and what it's conveying. I also realize that if I speak what it is I'm seeing, he will also lose touch with what he's concerned about. His attention will shift to me - outside of him - and away from the issue. He may even resist my words for that very reason: despite any wisdom they might contain, my words will shift him out of his center, and preclude the possibility that he can arrive at the solution from within, and wouldn't that be preferable, and increase the likelihood that he would be willing to hear the truth?

So I abandon the desire to speak, to be wise, to be recognised and appreciated. I abandon putting what I am seeing into words. I rejoin him in the middle of his perspective, and resume my expanded awareness of his situation, in a wordless awareness. As a result, I begin to feel that his attention is following mine, moving into the expanded perspective in which the solution is obvious.

The next thing I know, he is verbalizing, from within, the exact words I had been about to say to him. It was a most edifying and uplifting experience.

A similar thing has happened too many times for me to count. I will be aware that the room is too hot, or the sound is too loud. Rather than say or do anything, I will simply be aware. Then someone else will turn down the A/C or the music.

What if divine awareness operates in this way - knowing all that is felt and desired by everyone, and being able to respond, not through direct action, but by raising our awarenesss to the level where the resolution is obvious, or by causing the universe at large to address our needs?

I once had a vision which suggested that if humans could tithe, not 10% of their money, but 10% of the attention they normally use to create division (we each live in our own separate dwelling that requires our own separate source of power to maintain our own separate environment, etc., etc. - and almost 100% of our attention is spent in the process of creating and maintaining this separation) - if we took 10% of that attention and united it in creative desire, the atmosphere of the planet itself might just respond to the degree that we wouldn't need our separate dwellings. The weather would be that perfect. There are legends that suggest that the planet was once like this.

Okay, I know I've gone a little far afield here, but the power of attention vs action, as illustrated by my talk with my friend, is unquestionable to me, and I honestly think that power is much more unlimited than we believe.

This isn't suggesting that we shouldn't act, any more than we shouldn't eat. But fasting has its value, as well. Food and acting are for the body. Fasting and being more expansively aware are for the spirit.