A Quote by James Redfield

Blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility. — © James Redfield
Blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility.
Rationally speaking, blaming one's behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.
I think the Bhagavad Gita is about both the forces of light and the forces of darkness that exist within our own self, within our own soul; that our deepest nature is one of ambiguity. We have evolutionary forces there - forces of creativity, and love, and compassion, and understanding. But we also have darkness inside us - the diabolical forces of separation, fear and delusion. And in most of our lives, there is a battle going on within ourselves.
In the larger view the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States, and our recuperation has been retarded by the unwarranted degree of fear and apprehension created by these outside forces.
We begin to change the dynamic of our relationships as we are able to share our reactions to others without holding them responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices & actions. We are responsible for our own behavior and we are not responsible for other people's reactions; nor are they responsible for ours.
The vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only as one of the many and manifold forces of human community.
Everybody has some responsibility. The point is, how are we going to fix it? And you don't fix it simply by blaming the other guy, or blaming the past.
The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
We must control the politics and the politicians of our community. They must no longer take orders from outside forces. We will organize, and sweep out of office all Negro politicians who are puppets for the outside forces.
We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.
Blaming is so much easier than taking responsibility, because if you take responsibility … then you might be to blame.
Love is a way of seeing and a way of being that honors God in everyone we meet. And it changes us in the most fundamental way. All we need to do is welcome the challenge of our relationships, training our eyes to look beyond human behavior to the Presence within. When we seek to live love, we discover through our interactions with others the divinity within ourselves.
We must master our egoism, and through this mastery, step outside ourselves and educate ourselves in giving. Fasting requires that we rediscover all that is alive around us, and reconcile ourselves with our environment.
We have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own human species. . . . Environmental responsibility – for if there is no God, then, obviously, it is up to us to put things right.
And we remember the end of our combat mission and the emergence of a new dawn - the precision of our efforts against al Qaeda in Iraq, the professionalism of the training of Iraqi security forces, and the steady drawdown of our forces. In handing over responsibility to the Iraqis, you preserved the gains of the last four years and made this day possible.
When we fill our souls up with creativity, artistry and intelligence ...we have a better chance at avoiding the behavior that leads to destruction.
Writers are given the responsibility of sight. I think that the whole burden, responsibility and beauty of the gift forces us to construct our lives differently so that we are able to become vehicles to transcend, to encompass and articulate not only our own experience but the experiences of others.
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