"Life happens" but what role do we play in how that unfolds? Are we primarily just an effect of "upstream" causes or are we the prime cause in our own life? "Of course I am the prime cause!" we exclaim. But to what extent do we play the role of a meaningful participant in shaping our life? For instance do we know what the outcome we are trying to make happen? And how consciously are we engaged in making that happen? Do we really believe in our ability to do this, and have the capability? And if we do, then what price of effort are we willing to pay for it?
I believe that these are all essential questions, the answers of which collectively create a spectrum of personal cause and effect. At one end of the spectrum is life "happening to us" and at the other end is life "happening through us". We exist somewhere along that scale.
<aside> ℹ️ In the terminology of Meaningful Participation the former is called Rusty Autopilot and the later is called Self Authorship
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A law ****is a general principle that describes the relationship between two or more things. For instance Newton’s law of gravity says that 2 bodies will attract one another with a force relative to their size and distance apart. Some of the most useful laws are those that define the relationship between actions and outcomes.
The beauty of a knowing these kinds of laws is that they provide the ability to anticipate, and therefore shape the future. That’s really what the purpose of a brain is; to predict the future; the brain is a prediction machine. And laws are a kind of building block that makes up its predictive capability. When you know a law then you can make use of it to inform your behaviour. When you don’t know a law then its like a portion of your “predictive vision” is missing. The difference between knowing and not knowing has a direct impact on the degree to which life happens to you or through you.
Whilst there is a big difference between knowing and doing, it starts with knowing. There are “5 laws of happening” that it’s helpful to know.
Imagine its the middle of the night and we are asleep in bed. We turn over in our sleep, and fall out of bed. Directly onto the cat sleeping on the floor beside the bed. The poor cat; its a little worse for wear. We feel pretty bad, but really there’s not much we could have done differently; we were asleep. We are both responsible, and not responsible at the same time.
When we are not fully awake our ability to shape our future is severely diminished. All we have is our habitual responses. They work well when the present is the same as the past, but if something changes then their value is limited, and sometimes even works against us.
We live much of our lives on autopilot, operating out of our habitual responses. The Law of Snore says that life can only fully happen through us when we “wake up” out of our Habituality and Rusty Autopilot . We do this by a capability I call The Reawakener: Reawakening.
When we have reawakened to the present then a new opportunity is presented to us. We have the opportunity to be responsible for, and the primary agent of, our own outcomes of our life. Responsibility is about taking ownership of an outcome; it is an affirmation that the outcome belongs to me; “if it’s to be, it’s up to me”. It’s about intentionally moving yourself to the right of the “happening spectrum” and standing there to say “life happens through me, not to me”.
Werner Erhard says this about responsibility;
"Responsibility begins with the willingness to be cause in the matter of one's life. Ultimately, it is a context from which one chooses to live. Responsibility is not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt. In responsibility, there is no evaluation of good or bad, right or wrong. There is simply what's so, and your stand. Being responsible starts with the willingness to deal with a situation from the view of life that you are the generator of what you do, what you have and what you are. That is not the truth. It is a place to stand*. No one can make you responsible, nor can you impose responsibility on another. It is a grace you give yourself - an empowering context that leaves you with a say in the matter of life.*