Jeff & Katherine,
     I appreciate the integrity in your listening. It seems if we support each other in staying present to the urgency – for it is the urgency that makes it real – we will step up to the plate and be rigorous in the use of the five tenets as a forum of inquiry into integrity and its impact on the human condition and evolution. In the face of integrity we see the deepest cowardice of human condition as well as the noblest courage.
David

Dear David,
     I very much appreciated your contribution to last night’s call. I have been thinking about the idea of urgency and what it is that makes our calls crackly with reality. It occurred to me that the “urgency” that you were calling for last night comes when what we are talking about is personally implicating. Last night for instance the real urgency of this matter of integrity doesn’t come from ideas about the need for integrity in the world as much as the need for integrity within ourselves. I think it was this aspect of personal implication that you felt was missing from the first part of our discussion last night. And as you said I should re-examine my own conclusions that people are not ready to handle urgency and find out if they are.
     It takes, as you say, a very courageous soul to even begin to face our own lack of integrity. To look square in the face of the fact that most of us have recognized much more about what is true than we are willing to live up to. We all use excuses like “I don’t know what to do,” but in the end they are in fact just excuses. I know from my own experience that anytime you decide to act on what you really know, beyond all of your fears and hesitations, you discover that you were always completely surrounded by opportunities to act with integrity. I think next week’s call will be along these lines as we discuss the third tenet, Face Everything and Avoid Nothing. I intend for there to be plenty of urgency to fill the airspace.
Jeff

I agree with Jeff’s take on the call and also appreciate the question of urgency that came up. I have found there is really no urgency out there somewhere for me to find or to be moved by. Even understanding the world’s problems more doesn’t make me more urgent, unless that understanding is in the context of that deep recognition that I am the world and the only way the world changes is through my change. That recognition that we are the world is already there in us, not far away or hidden at all, it’s the willingness to see clearly and unflinchingly whether or not our lives are a reflection of that recognition that puts the fire under our buts and that develops our integrity at the same time.

Katherine

Hi Jeff

Loved the conversation on soul development -2. Talking about urgency. I am just experimenting with few ideas…..If I look upon the soul as beyond this life time (which means even after my death, the soul take on a different life time)... Which means what ever my actions are develops or not develops 'my' soul. At the time of my death, what ever is the level of development of 'my' soul at the time of my death is the level to which the soul appears again through another life form (this life form is not me as ego). So for example 'my' soul is now having a life form called Arul Dev. 200 years from now 'my?' soul may have another life form called Mary (who is not me as ego). When I allow this to hit me, it dawns on me a huge moral responsibility. If I don't develop my soul Mary is going to have to do lot more work. Its like in Shuttle relay that we play in school. If out of the team one person slows down the whole team loses. This really compels me with high urgency that every moment I contribute to development of my soul and that of others.

Now another question arises what happens to the soul after death. When I asked this to someone she said, it joins God or consciousness. Well this hits further. If what I do today, this moment, is going to develop my soul, which impacts other life forms and which ultimately impacts God or Consciousness, there is no choice. I am implicated to develop soul of all in this life time to the very best and more of what I can. In spite of all odds.

The danger of this implication is that one is overwhelmed. And sometimes then one says this is too large; and can just go on the opposite direction. So I guess the action path is to push and allow this implication to hit you and at the same time take action and succeed in being integral again and again and again.

However the way I am looking at this seems a bit too 'personalising'. The key I guess to action in terms of integrity in day to day life is to look at this impersonally, as a human condition. And fully participate in the development of soul as if my life and others depended on it

Thanks for the call. I listened to it in podcast

Arul Dev