The Law of Responsibility

[Jade]

My understanding of the Law of Responsibility is that when we know better, we should do better. Yes, we all have a very thick veil, but we are afforded "holes" in the veil that give us a truer picture of reality. If we continue to live in our falsehood after seeing that reality, I believe that is when we begin to incur karma, which is what Ra is referring to when Ra says that money was a side effect of the Law of Responsibility - as we were less willing to stand up for what was right, what was wrong became much more available.

As far as Greta, Ra uses some weird wording, but basically what they are saying is that the closer that one gets the purity, the more care they have to take with being pure. If you stand close to the light, and then get lazy about it, your Higher self will give you catalyst/lessons/"workings" (which seems to refer to a negative greeting) that give you the catalyst to either return to a higher form of loving nature, or continue basically to be mean to others/the self. Ra goes on to say that this is the value of others who reflect negative internal states: So that we can see ourselves in our negativity, and adjust/correct. Otherwise, if you start to slip too much to "the dark side", you will surround yourself with sycophants who never challenge you, and avoid those who do, and then you lose that ability to check yourself.

I posted this quote of Tolstoy's recently, I like it a lot; I think it, specifically, is about the Law of Responsibility. You can take ownership of your role as being hitched to a cart with other horses and do what you know you are supposed to do (be kind, compassionate, accepting, and recognizing unity), or, you can refuse (be bellicose), and the cart and other horses that you have hitched yourself to will drag you with it. We are responsible for taking action, within the confines of our reality, to make our reality better, or else reality is going to beat on us until we wake back up.

Tolstoy also refers to our freedom as a "trivial degree of freedom", meaning, when we know better, we don't actually have free will as much as we believe. It also makes me think of Ra speaking of the STO path as "strait and narrow".

I think it also helps to remember that "free will" are those actions which we take because of the veil. Before the veil, there was no free will - so, presumably, those actions which are most congruent with unity, are only those actions which were taken before we received "free will". Free will is the will to act as separate from the Creator - which is what the illusion is all about, after all.

Truth not only points out the way along which human life ought to move, but reveals also the only way along which it can move. And therefore all men must willingly or unwillingly move along the way of truth, some spontaneously accomplishing the task set them in life, others submitting involuntarily to the law of life. Man's freedom lies in the power of this choice.

This freedom within these narrow limits seems so insignificant to men that they do not notice it. Some--the determinists--consider this amount of freedom so trifling that they do not recognize it at all. Others--the champions of complete free will--keep their eyes fixed on their hypothetical free will and neglect this which seemed to them such a trivial degree of freedom.

This freedom, confined between the limits of complete ignorance of the truth and a recognition of a part of the truth, seems hardly freedom at all, especially since, whether a man is willing or unwilling to recognize the truth revealed to him, he will be inevitably forced to carry it out in life.

A horse harnessed with others to a cart is not free to refrain from moving the cart. If he does not move forward the cart will knock him down and go on dragging him with it, whether he will or not. But the horse is free to drag the cart himself or to be dragged with it. And so it is with man.

The quote goes on, and I think it continues to speak of the Law of Responsibility, and the responsibility we have to our social memory complex to stand up with what is learned to be true by our efforts to pierce to veil. I think it's about blue-ray.

Whether this is a great or small degree of freedom in comparison with the fantastic liberty we should like to have, it is the only freedom that really exists, and in it consists the only happiness attainable by man.

And more than that, this freedom is the sole means of accomplishing the divine work of the life of the world.

According to Christ's doctrine, the man who sees the significance of life in the domain in which it is not free, in the domain of effects, that is, of acts, has not the true life. According to the Christian doctrine, that man is living in the truth who has transported his life to the domain in which it is free--the domain of causes, that is, the knowledge and recognition, the profession and realization in life of revealed truth.

Devoting his life to works of the flesh, a man busies himself with actions depending on temporary causes outside himself. He himself does nothing really, he merely seems to be doing something. In reality all the acts which seem to be his are the work of a higher power, and he is not the creator of his own life, but the slave of it. Devoting his life to the recognition and fulfillment of the truth revealed to him, he identifies himself with the source of universal life and accomplishes acts not personal, and dependent on conditions of space and time, but acts unconditioned by previous causes, acts which constitute the causes of everything else, and have an infinite, unlimited significance.

"The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." (Matt. xi. 12.)

It is this violent effort to rise above external conditions to the recognition and realization of truth by which the kingdom of heaven is taken, and it is this effort of violence which must and can be made in our times.

Men need only understand this, they need only cease to trouble themselves about the general external conditions in which they are not free, and devote one-hundredth part of the energy they waste on those material things to that in which they are free, to the recognition and realization of the truth which is before them, and to the liberation of themselves and others from deception and hypocrisy, and, without effort or conflict, there would be an end at once of the false organization of life which makes men miserable, and threatens them with worse calamities in the future. And then the kingdom of God would be realized, or at least that first stage of it for which men are ready now by the degree of development of their conscience.

Just as a single shock may be sufficient, when a liquid is saturated with some salt, to precipitate it at once in crystals, a slight effort may be perhaps all that is needed now that the truth already revealed to men may gain a mastery over hundreds, thousands, millions of men, that a public opinion consistent with conscience may be established, and through this change of public opinion the whole order of life may be transformed. And it depends upon us to make this effort.

Hope this gives you some further understanding!