This latest “stack attack” that I’ve been going through has proven very fruitful for me. I and a number of lightworkers have had an emotional disagreement that has triggered my shadow side emerging, and perhaps theirs as well, although the latter doesn’t interest me in the end.
But my own shadow side does.
And this stack attack has brought a lot of introspection and a plumbing of the depths of what I’m about in life. All of it is very rewarding.
I’ve come to see that one of the things I love most and am most about in life is integrity. Please don’t hear that as me extolling myself and saying I have integrity. My own integrity is … perhaps so-so. But my fascination with integrity grows and grows.
So if I can proceed without you thinking we’re talking about my own integrity or I’m beating my own drum, which is not particularly appropriate at this point in my life or rewarding, and if you can hear that I’m talking about integrity itself, integrity as goal and a divine quality, then I can safely proceed.
I’ve gotten to experience in the last few years some of the rewards of paying attention to integrity. There’s a feeling of bliss that attends being fairly clean, relatively integral. It’s enough to bite me and give me the itch for more.
In regard to this latest stack attack, I saw myself descend into my shadow side and get angry, self-righteous, come from indignation, play the lightwarrior, attempt to steamroller people. I got to see my excesses and missed marks. That’s all well and good.
But when I penetrated down through all that debris, what was confirmed at a deeper level was just my intense desire to live my life by and in integrity, whether or not I’m hitting the mark at the moment – or anyone else is, for that matter.
Just as living life as love is how life was meant to be, so living life in integrity is also how life was meant to be, or so it seems to me. There’s a whole set of circumstances that come into play when life is lived, as the est Training used to call it, “squeaky-clean” and I feel myself attracted to that set of circumstances.
I feel blissful when I’m squeaky-clean; no bliss when I’m not. I feel upright, happy, in love with life when I don’t sell out on my integrity. I feel proud of myself, the genuine pride of a genuine accomplishment, not the false pride of simple self-servingness.
Viewed from many angles, life is improved by how much I “true up” to the tenets of integrity – not harming others, not transgressing, respecting others’ boundaries, leaving others to learn their own lessons – all that the notion of integrity entails.
When I transgress against my own integrity or that of others, the feedback is fairly instantaneous and uniformly unpleasant. I get to see that every time I transgress, no matter what the transgression is or how small, I lose touch with some aspect of myself. I can’t write. I can’t love. I can’t open to people.
I’m not averse to calling myself on my own number, because that too is part of integrity.In fact the faster I can call myself, the better. A lack of integrity yields suffering, from my experience.
I’m not attracted to being a stickler for integrity or to the false integrity of simple self-righteousness. No, it’s not a compensation for some undeveloped side of myself that I’m referring to. It isn’t integrity as an act or a number, as a come-on or as a distraction from something else.
So I remain fascinated with a life lived squeaky clean. I’m not sure if I’ll ever reach that mark but I’m attracted to it nevertheless.
No matter how dismally I may have behaved last year or last week or whenever, I want to explore this circumstance. this divine quality. What does it mean to live one’s life with integrity? I want to know. Enquiring readers want to know. This seems to me worth following and it seems to me worth sacrificing for.
Footnotes
(1) What I call “vasanas,” which are our habitual reactions, rooted in past trauma but triggered in the present, Werrner Erhard called “records.” And when a lot of records are triggered at once by a “number one” or major upset, he called it a “stack attack,” a whole jukebox full of records going off. I have recently been immersed in a stack attack.