22 Responsibility And Duty

A man's mental atmosphere, if it could be seen, would show what he is responsible for. Of some, but not of all, of this responsibility he may be conscious.

  • He is responsible for his honest and for his dishonest thinking, for his good acts and for his evil acts, for his characteristics favorable or unfavorable, for his desires and for his feelings, for what he does with what he has and with what happens to him.
  • He is responsible for the subjective mental and psychic and for the objective physical conditions which he is making. He is also responsible for the thinking he does around and about the thoughts of others.

He is aware of what he thinks and does in the present life and is therefore conscious of the responsibility that attaches to this thinking and acting.

  • He is not aware of his previous lives and is therefore not conscious that his responsibility for his previous thinking and doing accounts for most of the conditions of his present life.
  • He is not conscious of, but nevertheless responsible for, the conditions in his mental atmosphere.
  • Mere ignorance does not free him from the responsibility which he engendered in the past, else he would never learn to free himself from that past and get Self-knowledge, that is, knowledge of the Triune Self.
  • There is no responsibility for the thinking that is done without attachment to the results.
  • The responsible one is the present human.

What happens to a human in one life is an exact retribution or reward for what the same portion of the doer had done in a prior life.

  • Each of the twelve portions of the doer must continue its re-existences as long as its responsibility is not discharged.
  • A human is responsible to his thinker and knower and to his great Intelligence, and through that to the Supreme Intelligence.
  • He is not responsible to any outside God.
  • He is made responsible by the law of thought, which is an expression in the earth sphere of universal justice.

The center of responsibility is in the mental atmosphere.

  • It is produced there from the knowledge one has on the subject of which he thinks.
  • The knowledge itself is in the noetic atmosphere and a flash of it comes into the mental atmosphere through rightness when morals are involved.
  • Rightness makes the human conscious of his responsibility, and thinking can work it out.
  • Responsibility is there always, calling ever for doing a duty by acting or omitting to act.

Responsibility is with the human when he rises in the morning, when he performs the ordinary duties of the day and when he acts in a crisis.

  • His responsibility is lessened by his incapacity to receive messages from conscience.
  • This failure comes from insufficient knowledge on the subject of thinking.
  • His responsibility is increased by ability to understand, due to knowledge sent from the noetic atmosphere as conscience.

There is a distinction between the responsibility for thinking and the responsibility for thoughts.

  • A train of thinking may go on for a considerable time without showing any resulting acts.
  • Yet during that time a record of the thinking is made in the mental atmosphere and on the breath-form; it may affect feeling-anddesire;
  • and it may affect bodily organs and the units in the body, stimulating them to health or disease;
  • the thinking may affect other human beings thinking on similar lines, or it may affect directly the people thought about, and yet such thinking may be insufficient to cause the thinker to create a thought.
  • To all of this thinking some responsibility attaches, but no balancing of a thought is yet necessary.
  • The thinking carries its responsibility at once and the human must answer, without a balancing factor being involved.
  • Usually the sum of the accumulated thinking is taken up by the one who thinks and causes him to create a thought.

The thought always contains a balancing factor.

  • Until then the thinking can be changed or cancelled, though the thinker remains responsible for such thinking as has been done.

When the accumulations are of such a nature as to cause the thinker to issue a thought, the balancing factor is based on the responsibility which he had at the conception of the thought, and will compel a balance in accordance with it.

  • The thoughts issued during a lifetime and thoughts previously issued which have to do with the present life come back to the human who is their parent, to be by him nourished, entertained, reinforced.
  • He is responsible for their support and must continue to support them or else balance them.
  • He must support them with his desire and with Light from his mental atmosphere.
  • He does this when he thinks about them or around them.
  • The good and the evil thinking that men have done remains with them, in the mental atmosphere, until it is removed by thinking.
  • The good can be removed by thinking evil in the place of it, and the evil by thinking good in its place.
  • The acts, good or bad, that men have done do not remain; what remains is the thinking of them.
  • That stays in the mental atmosphere.
  • There it energizes and nourishes the thought that was exteriorized as the act, or it nourishes other similar thoughts and there the thinking may be the means of balancing the thought.

There is an immense amount of debit and credit to the account of each doer, in its mental atmosphere.

  • The doers now in bodies have awaiting them there many of the good and the bad things which they long for, despise or dread.
  • They may have waiting for them accomplishments which are now wished for, but which may not be developed in this life.
  • Dullness of intellect or powers far beyond their present attainments may be in store.
  • Intellectual development may be prevented by poverty, cares or ill health.
  • All these things may be quite foreign to one's present outlook, possessions or limitations, but they together with worldly position and prosperity will come home in time.

In the course of about a dozen lives a doer travels from obscurity to rank, from lowness and want to prominence and wealth, from simple-mindedness to intellectual power or back.

  • Consciously or unconsciously, man determines that part of his destiny which he will suffer or enjoy, work out or postpone.
  • Though he knows not how he does it, yet, by his mental attitudes towards himself and towards others, he calls into the present from the great storehouse of his mental atmosphere the endowments and qualities which he has.
  • An attitude of readiness to recognize responsibility and to meet obligations and to restrict the indulgence of desires, will allow his thinking to be guided by rightness, to focus the diffused Light more steadily and to build more successfully.
  • In this way he develops mental excellence, which is at death stored in the mental atmosphere as an endowment, and will thence appear as such in a future life.

Responsibility, the capacity to know right from wrong, determines and is the measure of duty, be the duty physical, psychic or mental.

  • As a rule duties are connected with physical acts or events and every man knows what he should or should not do in a given situation.
  • A man need never be in doubt about his duty. The only duty he should do is that of the moment.

Conscience through rightness shows him what not to do, reason shows him what to do.

  • In both cases his thinking will confirm this inner voice, if he will listen to it and not to the onrushing desires.
  • Duty is the one thing a man has to go by.
  • It opens out from the exteriorization of a thought.
  • He can always know the duty of the moment, and if he does that duty willingly he either balances or prepares for balancing the thought of which that duty is an exteriorization.

A duty shows what is necessary to balance a thought or to work towards a balance.

  • Most of the thinking that men do is concerned with physical acts, objects or events; a large part of it relates to their duties.
  • Hence come experiences. Feeling anything is an experience.
  • The feeling compels desire to stimulate and start thinking on the subject of the feeling.
  • If the feeling is strong enough it will bring out a coordinated and searching course of thinking.
  • Thereby doer-learning is extracted from the experience, and this learning may lead to self-knowledge.
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