With the clever phrase „awareness of responsibility“ we describe the ability of a person to live his life while fully aware of his responsibilities. The better someone – consciously or unconsciously – considers the consequences of his decisions in advance and acts accordingly, the more aware he is of his responsibilities.
As already indicated in the previous section, a decision we make often triggers other events. A further practical example from the family: The cat chases after a bird. As a punishment the owner doesn’t give her anything to eat, and because of this the cat steals the meat which is waiting on the table for the family’s lunch and on top of this, it also knocks over the bowl containing the pasta. The family react irritably, the children begin to fight etc.
Because of the tremendous amount of interlinking on the earth, our decisions often result in many additional consequences which we ourselves may not even notice, and for which we certainly didn’t strive. We presumably did want the immediate consequences of our decision, otherwise we will have made a blind decision, i.e. we would have made a decision without knowing what we wanted to achieve with this decision.
In the above example with the cat the owner gave the cat no food as a penalty. As an immediate consequence the cat suffered from hunger. This would certainly have been clear to the woman as she had decided to punish the cat in this way. The fact that the cat would then as a further consequence «remove» the family’s lunch (first indirect consequence), was however presumably not so easy to foresee and certainly not the further consequence that the family would react irritably (this statement would be incorrect if this same event with the cat and the lunch had already happened many times before.