That’s the thing about responsibility. If you cannot accept that you are responsible for your own suffering, then say, “Yes, the other is responsible for my suffering but I am responsible to reform, transform, elevate the other. I will have to agree that the other is causing me suffering but just as he is responsible for my suffering, now I will be responsible for his transformation. Read more....
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Questioner: Acharya ji, this is evident that the root cause of suffering is ‘I’ itself but practically the firm belief in ‘I’ never goes. Even in deep suffering the tendency is to find out the cause of suffering outside of me, some person or some situation. So, what is the way, when the suffering is there, it should keep reminding me that there is something inside me which is the root cause. But what I find about myself is that mostly I do not remember that always the root cause is something inside myself only.
Acharya Prashant: It will not always be so easy to discount the other’s culpability. Right? Some violent fellow appears and throws a stone at you and the stone hits you and you bleed. It will be obviously very difficult for you to conclude that your suffering is your own doing. Intellectually, you might succeed. You might say, “After all the stone hit only my body and the body could have continued to pain, but it was upon me not to allow that pain to turn into suffering,” which is all very good. But somewhere you will keep feeling that the other fellow had really no business hitting me with the stone.
It is now that the role of responsibility appears. When such a thing happens to you, wisdom lies in seeing that all is connected to all and even if you are not directly responsible for the conduct of the violent man, you still have a responsibility to reform that violent man. And now you have a responsibility towards that person, the tendency to feel aggrieved would be weaker.
