Responsibility assumption

Responsibility assumption is a doctrine in the spirituality and personal growth fields holding that each individual has substantial or total responsibility for the events and circumstances that befall them in their life. While there is little notable about the notion that each person has at least some role in shaping their experience, the doctrine of responsibility assumption posits that the individual's mental contribution to his or her own experience is substantially greater than is normally thought. "I must have wanted this" is the type of catchphrase used by adherents of this doctrine when encountering situations, pleasant or unpleasant, to remind them that their own desires and choices led to the present outcome.

Logical difficulties

Logically consistent application of the doctrine, especially the total responsibility version, encounters various logical and philosophical difficulties that must be handled, and which are handled by proponent groups in various ways. For example, if all physical effects in the world are merely the result of mental processes, it can be asked what truly causative, non-physical factors set those mental processes in motion in the first place; in other words, what caused the mental cause? The answer given to address this difficulty depends on the mythos or "backstory" in place for each proponent group. In the book A Course in Miracles, for example, separation from the mind of God and fragmentation into individual minds set up the mental conflict and tension that plays itself out on the screen of the physical world.

Related Topics:
Mythos - Backstory - A Course in Miracles

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Another difficulty is the seeming stability and commonality of a physical world that, according to the doctrine, is the net result of so many different minds in apparently different conditions, or in other words, how could so many causative minds at odds with each other have caused one apparently stable external world to result? The answers given to this difficulty vary from solipsism to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

Related Topics:
Solipsism - Many-worlds interpretation - Quantum physics

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Meanwhile, proponents of the partial responsibility version must for their part grapple with questions such as to what degree and by what mechanisms the subjective internal and objective external factors of causation interplay to produce net effects in the world, and here again, multiple answers are offered.

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