Sovereignty, Responsibility, Freedom, and Empowerment

[Shawn King]

Birds on wing, keen eyes

To one another, sky, land

Flock, and soar alone

 

How are personal sovereignty, responsibility, freedom, and empowerment interrelated by their inherent nature?  I offer my musings on the question, and invite yours.

 

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I am already whole, empowered, and free.  This is the trinity of my personal sovereignty as a creator-being. This is my fundamental, natural state in every waking moment. And as sovereign of my life, I am responsible for it.

 

Thus everywhere I apply my awareness, I perceive the necessary and immutable interlock of sovereignty, responsibility, freedom, and empowerment.

 

If I look over my personal history, it becomes obvious that I have always been whole to the world.  Always, in every circumstance, in terms of every result and to everyone I have ever encountered, I have been the source of choice, taking action in the moment.  In this way, I am one to the world far beyond the extent I am one with the world. From an aware perspective, there is an “I” that chooses each action, and an “I” that is the wellspring-source of each impulse within channeled through choice into action. 

 

Although sovereignty may be my fundamental, natural state, it is not always the state of my experience in a given moment. Within the aspect of myself that I call my mind, I may invent a game, the game of division, where I may pretend I am divided into many persons, the good-me that quiets down the bad-me who gets angry, the good-me that “tries” to “resist temptations” that the bad-me “cannot resist,” the “resistant” part and the “allowing” part, the unconditionally loving part and the judgmental part, the high-vibration part and the low-vibration part, etc. ad infinitum. Using my mind, I can pretend I am one way, and see myself that way, when I behave in another way, even in the opposite way. All of this game is entertaining illusion that may block my awareness of my own responsibility for all that arises from and within my being, and for all I choose to speak and do.

 

Just as I am already whole, I am thus also necessarily already free, making all my own choices.  No one can stop me from making my own choices, or make them for me.  Any attempt on my part to make someone else responsible for the results of my own choices will ring false. Even in a situation where I have been misinformed by someone else, accidentally or intentionally, the core responsibility remains with me.

 

If I claim as true that someone else is responsible for my choices, have I not made them more powerful than me, given them power over me?  If in my mind I believe someone else “makes” me do something, I create for myself the experience of having given away my sovereignty and freedom, and thus a sense of having lost empowerment. No one can do this to me, I can only create it for myself.

 

Note that nowhere in this discussion do I intend to suggest, by use of the word “sovereign”, that the true nature of the individual is as perfectly separate from all else. Given this, as a sovereign being, how am I then one with the world and with others?  I have the experience of oneness with the world when my experience of this moment matches this moment.  By this, I mean when there are no modifications of my experience of this moment made in my mind, or when the modifications of my mind are merely present in my awareness with the rest of my experience, rather than these modifications permeating the whole of my experience.  I have the experience of oneness with another being when my awareness of them fills my experience, and that awareness includes my awareness of their being aware of me.  When I have the sense that I know that person is present, is aware of me, is aware of my awareness of them, and the sense that all of this is true for them of me, I experience oneness with them. 

 

Note also that I do not intend “sovereign” to mean pure independence.  I can clearly observe that I am irrevocably co-mingled, in each moment, with nature and human culture. The questions of separation and interdependence are not related to what I wish to convey here, which is self as source of creation and choice, and locus of awareness of creation and choice, and thus the source of responsibility.

 

And, in a conversation I recently had with her on the topic and concept of self-sovereignty, Julie Keniry made the keen observation that when a person is fully aware of their own sovereignty, they necessarily recognize everyone else’s sovereignty. Sovereignty of self and other are joined in this way.

 

As a sovereign creator-being, my loving qualities in romantic partnership, in family, and in community all arise not from a place of need or dependence (lack) or from a place of rule-based agreements, but from a place of understanding, respecting, and experiencing desire:

 

Desire to nurture,

Desire to play and explore,

Desire to share in someone else’s experiences, from mundane to magical,

Desire to express and share my own experiences,

Desire to participate in creation, i.e. to participate in a lived-into future created

           through the choices of each moment,

Desire to participate in excellence,

Desire to be clearly aware of the actuality of events, of “is-ness”,

           for the making of the clearest choices

[Shawn King]

This week, I am expanding a little on last weeks post, above.  What about agreements, commitments, and intentions?  The question is, can such phenomenon work within my understandings as shared above?  To answer, first I must ask, are agreements, commitments, and intentions all attempts to create a desired consistency from moment to moment, or a desired directionality to or shaping of moments to come, based on understandings held in the moment of agreement, commitment, and intention-setting?  I believe this is true.

 

Now suppose agreements and commitments were made or intentions set based on unclear or factually incorrect understandings, or conditions change, such that I find myself working against my wellbeing, working at odds to truth, or working against someone else’s wellbeing in the current moment as I act to honor agreement, commitment, or intention created in a previous moment. Suddenly, my choices, as guided by agreement, commitment, and intention, have undesirable results. I would argue that my responsibility then becomes to communicate my awareness of what is in the new moment with everyone involved with or affected by the agreement, commitment, or intention, so that each person has the best chance to become aware of the nature of this moment, and to renegotiate an agreement or commitment, or accept a revised intention, that is true to this moment, in the interest of well-being. 

 

Thus I propose that in each moment, to the best of my ability, I carry with me the deeper and perhaps unspoken agreement to be honest and revealed, the commitment to clear communicating (speaking and hearing the truth), and the intention to relate directly to others, rather than relating to others through rules, agreements, commitments, or intentions that are held between beings in the moment in such a way that the channel for direct relating, for resulting compassion and empowered choice, is closed.

[Victoria SkyDancer]

How are personal sovereignty, responsibility, freedom, and empowerment interrelated by their inherent nature?

I am the sovereign, the Queen, of my realm. My realm is where I live. I am 100 percent responsible for everything that happens in my realm. Sometimes, that's just my room; other times, it's the house.

Mine is to choose consciously and wisely how I maintain my home and relate to the others, two- and four-legged, who live with me in my home. The sharing of power and open communication are essential. I have the freedom to choose my actions and my words; when I choose them well, I am empowered by my interactions and feel supported. I am then able to take this confidence out into the wider world and my other relations with the other people I know - coworkers, soul family, and random strangers.

An important part of my interactions - and the key to being a responsible Queen - is to set power*full and positive intentions for myself, honor the agreements I make with others, and follow through on my commitments. I take my word seriously and show that I am reliable, dependable, and trust-worthy; I show, in other words, that I am a responsible person. This allows for interactions of mutual respect, honoring, and power-sharing. Collective empowerment helps expand feelings of individual and collective freedom.

This is how we bring positive transformation to the world...by showing peeps how it's done! :-)