Slave to the King: Learning to Take Subjective Responsibility

By Janine Schimmelpenninck

Slave to the King is all about responsibility, as taking responsibility is one of the most important things we can do in life.

In Slave to the King, a specific description of how to take responsibility is discussed in detail. In contrast to the conventional form of taking responsibility, which can be heavy and depressing, this particular form of taking responsibility is in alignment with reality and functions beautifully. It generates a lot of space and energy, and it has great transformational power.

All changegreat or smallbegins with changing ourselves first, and changing ourselves begins with taking responsibility. To take subjective responsibility is the only way to change ourselves successfully.

Already a lot has been written on the importance and the need for changing oneself. However, Slave to the King discusses in detail the essential and practical role of taking a precise form of responsibility as an absolute necessity for changing oneself. To take subjective responsibility is an intelligent act that fits the logical mind of this day and age perfectly. The set-up of the book provides the reader easy access to an introduction and short explanation of the term subjective responsibility and to many detailed case studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504332415

Janine Schimmelpenninck

Janine W. Schimmelpenninck was born in 1964 in Arnhem, The Netherlands. In 1989 she graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a masters degree in the political-social sciences, specializing in medical anthropology. After a short career in the pharmaceutical industry she joined her husband in 1996 in their first private company and has since been co-director and co-founder of several private business companies in The Netherlands. She and her husband have one son. Janine has always had a fascination for psychology and spends most of her free time in studying Buddhism, Buddhist psychology and Ancient Indian philosophy. In 2014 she founded the Orange Tree Foundation. The Orange Tree Foundation is dedicated to the development and recognition of Subjective Responsibility SRA (as described in Slave to the King) as a key human skill in society in general and in business and education programs in particular

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Copyright © 2015 JANINE SCHIMMELPENNINCK.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-3240-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-3242-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-3241-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907109

Balboa Press rev. date: 5/26/2015

Contents

Introduction

I. Object & Subject Consciousness

II. Subjective Responsibility

III. SRA and Case-Studies

1. Case Study SRA and discipline

2. Case Study SRA and smoking

3. Case Study SRA and the environment

4. Case Study SRA and unconditional love

5. Case Study SRA and the reality of death

6. Case Study SRA and being spoiled

7. Case Study SRA and acceptance

8. Case Study SRA and gratitude

9. Case Study SRA and competition and ambition

10. Case Study SRA and stress

11. Case Study SRA and balance vs. extremes

12. Case Study SRA: pain creates pain

13. Case Study SRA and energy

14. Case Study SRA and abundance

15. Case Study SRA and negative internal dialogue

16. Case Study SRA and innocence

17. Case Study SRA and ego

18. Case Study SRA and money

19. Case Study SRA and time

20. Case Study SRA and worry

21. Case Study SRA and honesty and truth

22. Case Study SRA and spirituality

23. Case Study SRA and giving and receiving

24. Case Study SRA and education

25. Case Study SRA and victim consciousness

26. Case Study SRA and relationship

27. Case Study SRA and (self) confidence

28. Case Study SRA: shall we be happy or right?

29. Case Study SRA and emotions

30. Case Study SRA and a trustful nature

IV. Slave to the King

"Love is against all emotions,

Love is the highest logic"

-

Venerable Tulku Lobsang Rinpoche

Introduction

Welcome! The book you hold in your hands is about freedom. We must be very clear about this from the outset. The book’s title might give you any number of ideas about its subject matter; however, it is simply about freedom and opportunity. As you read it, the title will become clear, and you will understand why it was chosen. This book has been in my mind for many years, and I am grateful to have finally written it, and grateful to be able to share it with you.

I said a moment ago that this book is about freedom. I should expand on that a little. The book is also about - because freedom is about - responsibility. I realize that may not sound especially thrilling, but when I say responsibility I am not using it in a traditional way. Most of us associate responsibility with a kind of dreariness. Responsibility feels heavy and loaded, as if it were inescapable, a burden that we have to learn to live with for the rest of our lives like a grim disease for which there is no cure.

When we say to someone you are responsible, it often sounds like an accusation. When we tell someone that we hold them responsible for this or that, we are asking them to carry something heavy. Expressions such as I accept my responsibility or I take my responsibility may be accompanied by feelings of nobility, wisdom or even strength, but they are rarely made with a deep sense of joy. They are rarely uttered in the voice of one who is releasing a heavy weight to which they have been too long bound.

This is exactly where Slave to the King comes in. The type of responsibility to which this book refers is very different from the conventional one we have just considered. The type of responsibility referred to in this book is closer to great joy. It is the kind of responsibility a child would love to take because it generates all of life’s possibilities and therefore offers an ecstatic and celebratory freedom. Life is one big call to celebrate and our job is to learn how to respond to that call with all our heart. Responsibility is nothing more than the ability to respond and, importantly, it is the quality of our response that will determine the quality of our life experiences.

When I was a teenager, I had a particularly vivid and challenging opportunity to take on a form of responsibility that I would later know as subjective responsibility (SRA). This experience had a great impact on my life and helped shape my overall path in years to come, guiding me to a vision of living that allows me to respond to life with a sense of creativity, endless potential and infinite possibility. Nor is this my experience alone. We can all come to know it.

When I was fifteen years old my parents decided to get a divorce. It happened very suddenly and came as a great shock to my sisters and me. I had spent a wonderful summer in the United States with my American family - I was happy and fulfilled. I was looking forward to the future when my mother picked me up at the airport.

My first indication that something was wrong was the car my mother was driving. Her traditional Peugeot sports car had been replaced by a Volkswagen Golf. Looking at it, I realized how fond I had been of the Peugeot. The Golf was like a stranger where one had expected a close friend. Thus, before my mother even spoke, it was clear that something was amiss.

As we drove home in the unfamiliar car, my mother broke the news about the divorce. She had become involved with somebody else and my father had left the house. Their marriage was over. In a matter of minutes - with just a few words - my life was altogether changed. The family structure I had grown up with was irretrievably gone.

In those days, divorce was relatively rare in the Netherlands. I was under no illusion what it meant for my sisters and me: the children of divorced parents were always pitied. They were seen as victims, pawns in a conflict they had not started and were powerless to bring to an end. Everyone felt bad for them.

It was not a pretty picture. And yet, there in the car, listening to my mother and imagining what my life would become, I did not feel like a victim. I did not feel like a young woman who needed anybody’s pity. So I threw that image aside. I refused to carry it for even another second.

As I was coming to clarity with respect to my own feelings and needs - and my responsibility for them - my mother was still finding her way through her own emotional and spiritual turbulence. When we arrived home, her need to ventilate literally weeks of psychological trauma finally broke. I stood in the kitchen feeling the maternal anguish and pain. My mother was miserable, disempowered, and incapable of finding any safe or solid ground on which to stand, draw a deep breath, and consider healing. In that moment I saw myself clearly as a child of all this pain and hurt and - just like earlier in the car - I did not want it. I would not accept it.

I stepped out of the kitchen and sat down in the quiet study. My heart was pounding and tears strained at my eyes. I could hardly keep my breathing steady, let alone control the tempestuous flow of my thoughts. My lovely summer in the United States seemed to evaporate in this new haze of stress and anxiety. It was as if all that happiness had never happened; all that remained - all that was real - was pain and tension. My body grew heavy and dense. I felt certain that the shock waves pulsing through were likely to be fatal.

Indeed, it was that sense of doom that finally roused me. It was so strong and intense that it left only two choices: submit to it, which meant death, or take control of my mind and body in order to end it. There was no middle ground.

So that is what I did: I took responsibility for my own state of mind and took control of one of the most important decisions in my life. I had convinced myself that a belief in victim-hood was not functional. That was so healing and I have never looked back.

I. Object & Subject Consciousness

In order to understand the nature of responsibility - its meaning, its nature and its various modes of expression - it will be helpful for us to briefly explore consciousness itself.

The funny thing about consciousness is that most of us - most of the time - are not really aware of it. It is so normal to just simply be that we are not aware of our awareness of being. We take awareness for granted and thus never become consciously aware of who and what we truly are.

Our common daily consciousness could maybe best be described as dualistic. It is a consciousness that sees the world as fragmented. It perceives a me and a world which are inherently separate from each other. This feels right to us and so we rarely - if ever - question it.

Our life experience - which amounts to a kind of mind-training - begins with a process of objectifying all our experiences. When we are young we are increasingly confronted with a world full of objects. Thus, when we grow up, we perceive reality as an object or collection of objects. Everything around us is constantly labeled and thus objectified. When we ask our parents about the nature of something, the answer is almost always a name, a label.

Thus, slowly but surely, all reality becomes a single mass of objects structured and perceived according to our conscious and unconscious thoughts, ideas and wishes. As we grow older, our object-focused mind encounters still more stimuli in its surroundings which it objectifies (through labeling) in order to reinforce itself and its perception of reality.

I call this type of consciousness object consciousness. It correlates to the dualism mentioned earlier. Most people most of the time are in a state of object consciousness. Being in that state means that we approach reality from a so-called objective perspective. Reality is seen as an object and our view on reality is therefore completely determined through object seeing.

This feels natural to us because traditional education plays a significant role in sustaining this approach to consciousness. In school we are trained to develop our objective thinking skills, often at the cost of developing other skills or modes of perception. Eventually, it becomes impossible to even conceive of alternatives. Objective thinking becomes the ultimate - indeed, the only - way of looking at life.

But an important question remains. Is objective thinking really objective thinking?

The conventional meaning of objectivity means a certain non-negotiable quality of truthfulness. That which is objective is correct. It is right, regardless of what we think or do. When we say I will give you an objective opinion, it means we are giving a true and honest opinion. In our society, reality and objectivity are considered equal. In a sense, they are seen as the same thing. In science - which aims at knowing reality in the ultimate sense - a high degree of objectivity is required. A scientist who does not practice objectivity would quickly see their work dismissed as unscientific.

So it is clear what we mean by objectivity but that still does not tell us whether there is such a thing, such a phenomenon, as objective thinking.

I do not believe that objective thinking exists. We may from time to time have an idea that comes close to objective thinking, but it remains a far cry from asserting that we can approach reality objectively. In fact, we cannot approach reality that way. What we think or see is not reality but rather our awareness of reality. The difference is not insignificant.

Object consciousness is consciousness of separation. It considers life as separate from itself. There is a ‘you’ and then there is ‘life’. Object consciousness focuses primarily on object (the perceived) and actually ignores the subject (the perceiver). This means that it looks at the world and sees objects and does not consciously realize that it is seeing this object through its own vision - through a subject, in other words. Thus, object consciousness addresses reality as if it could address reality directly while in effect it is addressing reality only indirectly, through a subject.

Object consciousness is ignorant of its indirectness; that is perhaps its defining characteristic. It is also the dominant consciousness on the planet at the present moment, and forms the ground or essence of all our daily experience. It is our general state of mind with respect to almost everything we do, see, hear and relate to. It is important to realize and understand this because when we explore the meaning, function and effects of responsibility, we have to be clear that people generally act from this state of object consciousness.

Perhaps a metaphor will help us get a clearer perception of what we mean by object consciousness. Object consciousness functions like a camera. With a camera, we look through a lens and see what we might call reality, the ‘world’ or ‘life’. But what is the world? What is our life? Our life and world are the result of our experience of reality. They are not objects but perceptions. What is it what we do when we live, when we drive to school or to work, go shopping or jogging or skating? We are experiencing our life and our world. Our world and life are simply our experience of reality. That is what our lives are - they are our own experience of reality.

Thus, you could say life as we experience it is always experienced at the level of relative truth. We can only think from our own awareness, as subjects, and so we are always being subjective. But - and this is critical - we believe somehow that we are not being subjective but rather objective. We believe it is possible to take a neutral stand.

For the