Imagine you’re watching TV, and it’s the series finale of your favorite show. You’ve been watching these characters for years, and you appreciate all their little jokes and quirks. After an hour, the show comes to a beautiful ending, and the credits roll. You turn off the TV and experience a slight sinking feeling as you ‘come back to reality,’ remembering that this is just a TV show, and it has no actual significance in your life.
This sinking feeling, this disappointment, is the ‘coming back to reality from a vacation’ feeling. You have given this show so much attention that your very sense of identity has leaked out into it, just a little bit. This show has been your escape from the reality of your self and your life. By identifying with the glorious people and events taking place on the TV screen, you pretend, just a little, that you know these glorious people, and that this is your glorious life. Ah, what a vacation! I’ll be the last man to deny how pleasurable this little vacation is—but ultimately, it restricts you.
Most people live life with the same ‘vacation’ mindset that they have when they watch TV.
“Oh, I have a crush on this guy and it’s driving me INSANE!”
“Oh, that guy insulted me and I’m so ANGRY!”
“Oh, I have a math test today and I’m so WORRIED!”
“Oh, all my life’s events and opinions MATTER SO MUCH!”
We take vacations in the drama of our lives by placing huge amounts of attention on things that don’t actually matter, and thus we allow our very identities to leak, little by little, into these objects of attention. We do this so that we don’t have to face the emotions that we’ve repressed into our subconscious, or the fact that our fundamental beliefs about the world are wrong, or that our behavior hasn’t been so loving or ‘good’ over the years. We KEEP these things subconscious by burying them under the excessive attention we give the phenomena of the world. We take vacations in the phenomena of our lives in order to avoid taking responsibility for the phenomena we have rejected, or are hiding from, within ourselves.
The ultimate vacation from responsibility is the belief that each of us is separate from the All—from each other, from Life itself, from God.
After all, “If I am separate, I can’t help it if someone hits me with his car! Everything that seems to happen outside my physical body is out of my control! Therefore, I am absolved of all responsibility!” 
Sorry folks, it doesn’t work that way. 
By taking this ‘vacation’ from responsibility, we place responsibility in the hands of the false identifications we’ve created. Now that we’ve got the illusion of separation, oh no! Now we have to find food and shelter for our separate selves so that we don’t die! And then, oh no! That guy is taking the food I collected, now I have to fight him to get it back so that I don’t die!
It’s easy to see that all suffering comes from this illusion we’ve given our identity to in order to try to escape the total responsibility that comes with A) being of divine nature and B) having Free Will. It is also apparent that freedom and responsibility are the same thing. Our freedom is directly proportional to the amount of responsibility we choose to take over our experience of reality. The more we vacation in false identifications, the more ‘victimized’ we feel at the hands of the world. And to take complete responsibility, to accept your divine nature as a co-creator with God, is to take responsibility for reality itself, and to free yourself from the illusions you created in order to escape that responsibility.
As we create illusions and escape our responsibility, our true nature as co-creators with the power to shape reality doesn’t change. We project the false identifications we’ve created for ourselves onto reality, and the universe mirrors back exactly those identifications. The universe, subject to our divine will, manifests exactly what we tell it to with the power of our attention/identification. As we become angry, we see anger in others. As we become stubborn, we see stubbornness in others. As we believe ‘I have no money,’ the universe obeys by manifesting our poverty. As we believe ‘I’m no good with women,’ the universe obeys by refusing to date us.
Before we realized what was happening, we’d used our power and freedom to render ourselves powerless and limited. We attempted to give away the responsibility while keeping the freedom, but the two aren’t seperable. We gave away so much responsibility/freedom that it may indeed seem like the entire world is out of reach, or maybe even out to get us. It sure may appear that we are separate beings, whose only power is over the movements of our own physical bodies. How limited this is compared to our true nature!
(Side note: Trading freedom in exchange for safety/freedom from responsibility is exactly what the United States is doing with the Patriot Act and all that counterterrorist airport security bullshit. Ben Franklin said, “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither freedom nor security.” I finally see why. It’s denial of a COSMIC law, not just a human one.)
There is only one way to remove the limitations we’ve put on ourselves.
As we release our false identifications, as explained here, we “inherit the Kingdom of God.” This kingdom was ours all along—but we attempted to reject the responsibility while keeping the freedom. This was later called the Fall of Man.
July 13, 2008 at 4:32 pm
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