The Need for Urgency

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