Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
~ Andrew Boyd
Listen, Little Man! is a great physician’s quiet talk to each one of us, the average human being, the Little Man. Written in 1946 in answer to the gossip and defamation that plagued his remarkable career, it tells how Reich watched, at first naively, then with amazement, and finally with horror, at what the Little Man does to himself; how he suffers and rebels; how he esteems his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he gains power as a “representative of the people,” he misuses this power and makes it crueler than the power it has supplanted.
Reich has us to look honestly at ourselves and to assume responsibility for our lives and for the great untapped potential that lies in the depth of human nature.
Let me start this post with a couple of questions:
What does it mean to be responsible in life?
How can one feel responsible in a world filled with nothing but irresponsibility?
Allow me to give the late Spiritual Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti the opportunity to answer the previous two questions in the following quote,
“And if one sees the truth of this matter, then what is our responsibility? Not only one has a family, wife and children, one has to be responsible for those naturally, but what is your responsibility globally? You understand my question? For the whole of mankind, because you are the mankind, you have your illusions, your images of god, your images of heaven and so on and so on. You have your rituals, you know, the whole business, exactly like the rest of the world, only in different names, they don’t call themselves Christians they call themselves Muslims, or Hindus, or Buddhists, but the pattern is the same. Right?
So when you realise that, what is our responsibility? That is, how do you respond to the challenge? You understand my question? How do you answer? What is your reaction when you feel that you are humanity? This is a challenge – you understand? How do you meet a challenge? If you meet it from your old individual conditioning, your response will naturally be totally inadequate. Right? It will be fragmentary, it will be rather shoddy. So one has to find out what is our response to this great challenge? Does your mind meet it greatly, or with your fears, with your anxieties? You follow? The little concern about yourself?
So the responsibility depends, if I may point out, upon the response to the challenge. If one says this is your responsibility, join – not the League of Nations but some other nations, form a group, do this and do that, that is not an adequate challenge. How do you respond to this challenge psychologically? Inwardly? Is it just a flutter, a romantic appeal? Or something profound that will transform your whole way of looking at life? Then you are no longer British, American, French – you follow? Will you give up all that? Or merely play with the idea that it is a marvelous Utopian concept? Right?
So the responsibility to this challenge depends on you, whether your mind is capable of meeting this enormous human wholeness, this human current.”
