Consciously establishing the basis...

of each interaction.

6 LEVELS OF RESPONSIBILITY

A distinction that no one talks about that affects everything in your life.

-Article by Vera Franco-

Everything that you do and think—or not do and not think—comes from a very specific, very intimate and personal relationship to Responsibility.

Even though Responsibility is on a spectrum, you can distinguish 6 different Levels of Responsibility anyone can practice at: Zero, Child, Adolescent, Adult, High, and Radical. All of these Levels are available to be practiced by any average healthy person over 18 years old at any time. You are designed to grow up and practice at higher and higher Levels of Responsibility.

What is Responsibility? Well, it is very clever that even the word Responsibility can take on different meanings depending on which Level of Responsibility you play in. I am defining here simply Responsibility as Consciousness in Action. And Consciousness causes various kinds of Pain, especially in your heart, such as Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Joy. (I write Pain with a capital ‘P’ to differentiate from the victim-persecutor-rescuer pain of reactivity). When you feel the Pain of Consciousness without avoiding feeling any of your feelings, you are compelled to act in alignment with that Pain. This is different than blame of beating yourself up, it is simply being with the current Reality without avoidance, and it requires emotional maturity. Your Responsibility relates to your power and capacity to create impact in the world.

Why do I put emphasis on practice? Simply because if Responsibility is applied consciousness, then your actions or inactions reflect your awareness, in a practical way. It also means that you can decide to change the Level of practice to a Level of more Responsibility so that you can transform and grow into someone who can live and create from that Level of practice.

Let’s look at the different Levels of Responsibility:

At ZERO LEVEL RESPONSIBILITY, either you do not have the mental or psychological capacity to take any responsibility for your actions because you have a deep mental or psychological impairment, or you live under the illusion that there is no such thing as Responsibility and that there are no consequences for your actions. You consciously or unconsciously choose to live under a bridge or in some kind of institutionalized prison where most of your decisions are made for you.

If you practice at CHILD LEVEL RESPONSIBILITY you behave as if life happens to you and you have little to no power. You make messes with no real intention of ever cleaning them up. You live under the fantasy world that Responsibility is something you can force or pressure or manipulate yourself or another person to take. You manipulate others around you to take care of you, you blame and complain, and in group meetings you say things like “we should do this”, or “someone should take care of this” or “they should take care of this”. You focus on the lack of some kind of resource or solution instead of focussing on your part in allowing that lack to keep happening, especially if you are one who can see the lack. You become an expert at playing sophisticated dramatic oscar-worthy acting roles where you are a victim, trying to make others responsible for you and your emotional reactivity. You consume resources and give nothing or very little back to the field or spaces that nourish you. You sit around hoping to be found, hoping to be taken care of, or for your needs to be met so you can be safe. You are a hostage of your own needs and reactions, so adulthood is not for you.

Practicing at ADOLESCENT LEVEL RESPONSIBILITY in terms of Responsibility is stands very close to Child Level of Responsibility: you do your best to avoid Responsibility at any cost, including lying, stealing, and creating wars with others, also consuming energy and resources and giving very little back. And if you do seem like you are taking Responsibility or giving back it is merely a show for you to get more votes, more customers, more likes and followers, to have more status, to belong, to make more profit, or to look good and be seen as a good person in society. You are not taking authentic Responsibility, because it does not come from an authentic desire in you to care for whatever is at hand. Deep down Responsibility is just stupid and a burden, so you live a double life where on paper your actions look responsible, but underneath you are playing the avoidance and competition game, and benefitting from other people being impacted by your destructive messes.

If you choose to practice at an ADULT LEVEL RESPONSIBILITY you are playing a fair game. You make a mess, you clean it up. You decide to create an organization, you take care of the organization, you take care of your people, you fulfil your end of the deal. You take care of yourself and your own. You have done your part, it is fair. And it ends pretty much there. You live in the satisfaction of not being a hostage of other people’s agendas or expectations. You are not a victim of other people not changing for you to have the life you want.

Then we start going to unfair Levels of Responsibility. When I say unfair, I mean you go out of your way to create beyond what benefits you, your business, your family, your tribe. For the people practicing at unfair Levels of Responsibility, this is not a burden, this is a joy and privilege!

If you practice at HIGH LEVEL RESPONSIBILITY you start cleaning up messes that you did not create. When you see a street (not just your street, for your own benefit) being dirty, you might get a broom and also a neighbour. You get actively involved. The thing is that when you do get involved, if it is truly authentic Responsibility, then it is a free victimless choice. It might not be an easy job, but is not a self-sacrificing burden that kills you from the inside. You tend to see Responsibility as a simple expression of your Love in the world. Responsibility is an authentic expression of your natural generosity. You are not busy surviving, you want to clean things up not just so you and your loved ones can have better lives, but because you want even strangers and people you will never get to meet to benefit from having that mess cleaned up. And you do it not because you are a superior person, you do it because something deep inside you compels you to do so. You are baffled that you can be considered special and unique in doing this, because for you it is so natural to live like this. You could not imagine living otherwise.

I want to point out that to live at High Level of Responsibility it is not required financial wealth. There are plenty of examples of people and communities that are well below what is commonly considered as financial wealth that live incredibly generous lives practicing at High (and Radical) Levels of Responsibility.

Then there are people who practice at a RADICAL LEVEL RESPONSIBILITY. This is the most unfair level of practice. There is no one to blame, ever, not even yourself. There is no blame, period. There is only participation and neutral creation. Radical Responsibility means you take Responsibility for even the Level of Responsibility that is being taken at any moment of your life, even if the space is not yours. This means your life is about creation, invention, experimentation, because you decide to carry inside you impossible questions to answer, Quest-ions that create real transformation in you, and in the world. You create new cultures and Gameworlds, new ways of thinking and seeing the world never-before thought and seen. This means that you are in constant creative collaboration with others: when you notice something that could empower a person or a team, you open that space for them to win. When you have a valuable insight that you learned or discovered, that you share it with others to empower them so they too can discover new insights that you could never have discovered.

This is one of the deepest transformational Quests for the Archetypal nature of human beings to come alive. In this Level there is no scarcity of anything because you can source whatever resource you want, and you are in collaboration with others for the resources that you are not yet absurdly competent at sourcing. You can become the space through which Archetypal Forces of Nature can move through and inform you, making your life bigger, more adventurous, and can activate your Destiny, or the work that you came here on Earth to do. You have been designed to live and navigate the groundless reality of the Archetypal Domains and experience ecstatic 5-body intimacy life journeys that have real practical application and transform the world.

The interesting thing about distinguishing the different Levels of Responsibility is that even Responsibility looks and feels very differently to each Level of practice. The three first Levels of Responsibility view Responsibility as a 'bad' thing, a thing to avoid, an overwhelming thing related to blame, and guilt, and terror. It is how children and teenagers see Responsibility, and this is appropriate for children and teens because they are not adults, they are still developing their brains and their bodies. Moving forward in the spectrum, Responsibility becomes more and more creative, more freeing, and brings the capacity of liberating human potential.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is that communication between people who are practicing at different Levels is delicate, because they do not share a common practice, they do not share a common commitment. So oftentimes when people from different responsibility levels come together, the only level of practice that is known for all participants is invariably the lowest common level of practice. This often demands very clear contracting, agreements, and boundaries between all participants, to make sure that any kind of neutral and collaborative communication can happen.

None of these Levels of Responsibility is better than the other. And each Level of Responsibility creates entirely different consequences. Most people in the world are at a Child or Adolescent Level of Responsibility. They are at the top of hierarchies, controlling nuclear weapons, laws, prisons, oil companies, banks, water supplies. Or trying to survive, following orders, getting sucked in on their phones being entertained instead of being alive. There is no government or country in the world that operates that higher than this. Isn’t that crazy?

This is because modern culture killed off Authentic Adulthood Initiations, where any living teenager could go through and become someone who authentically takes higher levels of responsibility, as an expression of their Love and natural generosity.

Even indigenous cultures have been bought up by capitalist modernity. It was their teenage boys that allowed themselves to get lured into leaving their much more noble culture behind and staying arrogant teenagers by getting cheap gas lighters, blue jeans, and sodas. And now phones. All this so they believe they need money to live, instead of food or a home, or they need likes and followers instead of a Village. Read Helena Norberg-Hodge’s book Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, or watch her documentary to know more about this.

Almost no one in the world is talking about this distinction of Level of Responsibility. Not even in the Regenerative movement, the Ecovillage movement, or the social activism movement.

Thinking that you can truly change without upgrading to a higher Level of Responsibility is a fantasy world. It is green-washing yourself. Green-washing yourself is only needed if you need to relieve some guilt or blame. And guilt or blame has nothing to do Responsibility.

How do you authentically grow up? You create every circumstance possible for yourself to go through Authentic Adulthood Initiations. This means Initiations that go way beyond the intellect. I am talking about 5-body Initiations.

How do you know if the initiation worked? You create completely different results and consequences in your life.

Why could this distinction of Levels of Responsibility be useful, life-changing even?

Well, because without being clear at which you and people in your life or team are playing at, you have no clarity why are things not working out.

And also because when two or more people come together to collaborate and they are practicing at different levels of responsibility, what you get is context war. This is because the only playing field that everyone in that team can play in is at the lowest common denominator: usually Child, or Adolescent Level of Responsibility. Right now you might think you are in an ecovillage or intentional community or team with other people. In fact there are likely multiple ecovillages or communities happening at the same time, one for each distinct applied practice of Responsibility, and they do not get along with each other.

The most powerful Teams I’ve ever seen or participated in have a clear practice of level of Radical Responsibility. Part of their meetings involves deepening that context towards developing practical experiments to fulfil the purpose of the team, and discovering new dimensions of what it is to practice at that level. These practitioners are constantly creating and evolving culture consciously and carefully. Having a clear context that everyone involved is agreeing to practice at, creates an infinitely clearer and powerful space of creation, evolution, and possibility. And an infinitely clearer and empowering culture.