When you know who you are, it’s the end of excuses… because who you are is simply nothingness and everythingness. When you know who you are, it’s not constantly changing. The ‘you’ that made a decision when you were two years old is still the same ‘you’ sitting here, reading this and making a decision about it.
If you believe that you are your emotions, well, emotions are constantly changing and so you can very easily not take responsibility for the things that you do. Love is a good example. The way we experience love in our modern relationships drifts and changes. Once love is gone, we feel like, ‘Oh, the promises I made when I was feeling love don’t apply to me anymore’.
Thoughts are another good example. Thoughts are even more drifting than emotions. If we believe we are our thoughts, then we’re constantly in this state of flux, changing, changing, changing. So, we feel that we’re not actually responsible for our actions.
That’s why I call it the powerful ‘I’m me’ moment. One of the defining qualities of it is that you realize you have been you your whole life. It’s the end of excuses. It’s also the beginning of your ability to make true, right, correct choices because you’re not being flicked around by your emotions. You’re not being flicked around by your thoughts and your images and your beliefs about things. There’s a solid core.
Think about this: You become a truly reliable human being. You are now able to interact with the world from this awakened state in a way that can truly make a difference. Now you’re not a programmed robot of your culture anymore.
This is why Awakening is so vital for solving the environmental problems we have in our world. Everything that’s going wrong is the result of culture – all wars, all pollution. It requires an entire culture to create these things. That’s us.
As long as a person believes they are an independent, separate, entity it’s impossible to bear the reality that we are all responsible for what we have done. That’s why the environmental movement projects all evil polluting onto a “them.” We have to own it to cure it.
To be clear, it’s not like you completely step out of your culture when you have your “I’m me” moment, that’s impossible. But you become a vital, awake element of that culture. With us all there we can start doing something about moving ourselves back into the worldview of harmony and responsibility. The harmony that humans lived in for thousands and thousands of years. It’s from that worldview then that we can start repairing the world. And frankly, we don’t have to repair anything. All we have to do is just stop damaging it, right?