These Weekly Words of Wisdom chosen by Lama Surya Das tie into what I wrote yesterday about Mindfulness in Health Care. The idea of human responsibility expressed by Václav Havel is equivalent to the concepts of interbeing and interdependence.
Mindfulness practices engender a sense of human responsibility. The Buddha, himself, taught rulers of kingdoms in ancient India how to treat their people responsibly. See, for example, 2500 Years Of Social Revolution.
Václav Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. He was also a playwright, essayist, and poet.
“Whenever I encounter any problem of today’s civilization, inevitably, I always arrive at one principal theme: the theme of human responsibility. This does not mean merely the responsibility of a human being towards his or her own life or survival; towards his or her family; towards his or her company or any other community. It also means responsibility before the infinite and before eternity; in a word, responsibility for the world. Indeed, it seems to me that the most important thing that we should seek to advance in the era of globalization is a sense of global responsibility.
Somewhere in the primeval foundations of the world’s religions we find, basically, the same set of underlying moral imperatives. It is in this set of thoughts that we should look for the source, the energy and the ethos for global renewal of a truly responsible attitude towards our Earth and all its inhabitants, as well as towards future generations.”
—Václav Havel,
Millennium Summit of the United Nations, New York,
September 8, 2000
In your opinion, what happens when personal responsibility becomes human responsibility? What are you willing to do to be “truly responsible attitude towards our Earth and all its inhabitants?” Please share your feelings and thoughts.
