Personal responsibility or social rules
Definition of personal responsibility and self-responsible action. Difference to state rules, limits of personal responsibility and misunderstandings.
self-responsibility
Book «ABC of Awareness»
Personal Development as the Meaning of Life
This book explains human development on the basis of easily-understood examples and simple models. It is intended to arouse thinking about your own life and to offer help as to how we can specifically change our lives.
The author describes how we can achieve constant harmony and inner peace. The right choice and deliberate pursuing of our own, self-selected goals take on a key role in this so that we can achieve our own goals and not let ourselves be manipulated by others.
Review of personal growth as the meaning of life
As multifaceted as we human beings may be, once our existential needs are covered, we all finally strive for the same thing: We want to be perpetually happy and satisfied and we want to be able to live our lives without worries and cares. This search for harmony and inner peace, for self-realization, or however we like to describe this state, as our top objective in life, is practically the same in all the different methods of representing human needs. Not least the advertising industry also frequently attempts to make use of this striving for happiness and harmony.
From our experience we know that wherever we are or whatever we do certain rules prevail. On the roads these are the traffic regulations, in football the rules of play, in nature there are the natural laws. For those that respect these rules the corresponding activities or deeds are easier to accomplish than for those who violate these rules and therefore have to be reprimanded in one way or another.
- What drives us as human beings?
- Why do we exist?
- What is the purpose of life?
- What do we strive for?
«Time for change» is about your life, your objectives and your decisions. We are convinced that basic human needs are the same everywhere and finally we all strive for the same thing:
We want to be happy and satisfied and
we want to be able to live our lives
without worries and cares.
This search for harmony and inner peace, for self-fulfilment, self-realization, peace of mind, for calmness or however we may wish to describe this condition of our personality, is indisputably the top goal in the case of virtually all models of human needs.
- Have you already reached this goal of life? Or do you still have weaknesses which can disconcert you?
- Are you actively and consciously working towards happiness, joy and perpetual harmony?
- Have you clearly set out your objectives for living?
If not – this might just be the right time for change! This site offers thoughts and advice about personal growth, spiritual development and about the meaning of life. It’s also about ethically correct behaviour in the centre of daily life. «Time for change» is meant as a platform for sharing ideas and elucidations.
As a starting point, you might want to read some chapters of the book «ABC of awareness – personal development as the meaning of life» or download the pdf-file. We encourage you to generally to make your own critical thoughts about the information presented here.
Get active! If we change ourselves, the world will change, too. But we must begin now, the sooner the better. It is time for change!
What does personal growth have to do with the meaning of life? – An overview
With this website and with our range of lectures and consultation activities we would like to impart information about life’s most important interrelationship. In particular how we ourselves can set and achieve sensible objectives for our lives.
In addition we offer techniques and help with which personal growth towards harmony and inner peace can be consciously controlled and efficiently arranged. Our greatest interest is the integration and the concrete application of these thoughts to our everyday lives, both our working and our private lives.
There are more and more temptations for substitute dealings, which for a brief moment in time give us the illusion that we have reached the above mentioned objectives. Personality development and spiritual growth to reach a higher consciousness are however inevitable if inner peace and happiness are to become a lasting experience. We ourselves with the help of our subconscious are our best teachers and our environment both in private and business life are our best trainers.
One of the most important keys to personal growth is to realize that we can and must set the goals for our life ourselves instead of letting others (e.g. advertisement, family, media, „friends”) decide upon our goals (self-determination).
We are personally responsible for all our decisions, for whatever we do or do not do because from self-determination follows self-responsibility. Only through our deeds can we develop a higher consciousness over time and thus reach the above mentioned goals of perpetual harmony and inner peace.
In order to exercise responsibility, we also express our view on current issues of politics and society e.g. cause, effects and potential solutions for global warming, phase-out of nuclear power, the need to increase energy efficiency and more.
We ourselves together with the information presented here are independent of any religions, associations, sects, political and economic organizations or similar.
My personal contribution
The expansion of our awareness is only possible through solving those tasks which are matched to the actual status of our training. The tackling of tasks which are «too difficult» does not lead to any kind of acceleration of our development. In fact it is the opposite, it leads to a slowing down or even to a standstill or to steps backwards. The same is also true where the demands are insufficient.
This is immediately obvious in virtually every other form of training: A music student who learns a piece which is too difficult for him during his training will not make faster progress in his learning process than another musician, who only plays pieces which are matched to his actual abilities. If a good piano player only ever plays quite simple pieces with one hand, in time he loses his ability with the second hand: He takes steps backwards or forgets what he has learned about two-handed piano playing. A car driver who also drives a formula one racing car, will not become a better car driver because of this. A sportsman who trains to run over a length of 5 km will obtain no advantage at all for his 5 km stretch by completing a 42 km marathon, even if he finishes the marathon in a very good time.
Co-responsibility
What about the situation where tasks are carried out by a group of people? Who carries the responsibility for the decisions? Is there such a thing as collective responsibility? How far does the responsibility go within a group in the event of a causal chain of consequences? Can responsibility be shared?
To deal with the most important question here first: There are no changes to the responsibilities. Every person is responsible for the consequences of the decisions which correspond with his awareness, or in the case of the model of the sphere, for all those consequences which take place within his awareness sphere. The co-responsibility in a group or in a company therefore does not primarily depend on the individual employee’s position in the hierarchy, but on his personal development. To return again to the example of supplying war equipment components, it would be theoretically conceivable that the cleaning lady carries co-responsibility and the company directors do not – assuming here that the cleaning lady is personally further developed, in other words she has a higher level of awareness than the members of the board of directors.
The consequences of being overtaxed by a task
By carrying out a task which is too demanding, the person carrying it out in the first place impedes his own development. In considering the development of humankind we have seen that further development is only possible in stages. Just as for a pyramid the individual stones and layers must be symmetrically placed on top of one another one layer at a time. If someone is overtaxed by a given task, he is attempting to insert stones into a pyramid in which the lower stones are still missing, or are not correctly fixed. It is not possible to leave out individual building stones and then insert them later! Such an attempt is a pure waste of time.
Consequences from the acceptance of tasks
Since in principle every conceivable task can (and should) serve the further personal development of a person, in the next section we want to consider the acceptance of tasks from this point of view. Everyone can decide for himself whether he wants to accept and carry out a given task. Before someone accepts a task however, it is essential that he checks that the task is suitable for him, i.e. on the one hand whether it is compatible with his personal goals and on the other hand whether he has the necessary abilities for carrying it out. Here we mean not only manual skills or intellectual abilities but also especially awareness. He who takes up a task is responsible for making sure that he has the abilities to solve it.
This is a consequence of self-responsibility: Everyone must be able to freely and independently decide whether he wants to take on a given task or not. It is after all impossible to force someone to carry out a task and then afterwards to make that person responsible for the consequences!
Responsibility is somewhat individual
We have called the ability to perceive responsibility the awareness of responsibility. The awareness of responsibility cannot be any greater than our general awareness, since the corresponding awareness (of responsibility) is the basis for our perception of the possible consequences of decisions.
The ability to perceive our responsibility is provided within the awareness sphere. Whether this is also perceived is decided in every case by the respective person himself. It is also possible to ignore the respective information or senses. Even if I look away so as not to have to see the results of my decision, in spite of this I am still naturally responsible for these consequences! For the time being however we will assume that the responsibility is always fully perceived.
If I cannot assess the consequences of a decision
We have previously represented awareness with the model of a white sphere around our body. The greater the awareness of a person the greater the diameter of this awareness sphere. With this model we are responsible for all the consequences of our decisions, which take place within our awareness sphere. The light of our awareness is very bright here so that within this sphere we can see or perceive the consequences of our decisions.
It is therefore possible to come up with the idea that very far-reaching decisions should be made by people with low awareness, since such people would therefore apparently not be responsible for the consequences. This would not however make sense for several reasons: