This article by John-Roger was first published in The Movement Newspaper, January 1984. We are becoming part of a global shift in which each individual is the model for a positive, caring, productive, cooperative and loving member of the human family. Because of this, there is no alternative to personal integrity.  You count, I count – we all count.

A critical mass change in consciousness is creating the possibility that we can liberate ourselves from the idea of impossibility.  When we agree with the idea of impossibility, we are bound to outmoded, untenable beliefs – beliefs that produce stagnation and destruction, either by design or default.

What, then, can one person do?

Being true to oneself is the heart of personal integrity.  It requires commitment, awareness, courage and practice.  Consistently exercising your own integrity produces inner harmony and can ultimately extend the spirit of universal cooperation to more and more individuals.  It begins with you.

Living your integrity becomes the rule instead of the exception.  It transforms the quality of your life.  You can observe its transformational currents radiating in wider and wider circles through your universe as you become living proof that loving is very effective.

It isn’t a matter of trusting or not trusting.  For around you, because of your integrity, there will be trust.  There will be an alignment, a universal truth and universal loving.  Each of you, because you are part of God and part of the energy field that God created, becomes responsible not just to love your neighbor as yourself, but to love this world as yourself.  For every being on this planet is part of God in action.

This can only be done when we come to a truer knowledge of who we are.  When you act out of that place which is for the highest good, which doesn’t hurt others, which doesn’t hurt yourself, and which lifts others and yourself, a transformation takes place in your physical body.  It actually starts to get health.  You start to have happiness and find yourself smiling when you’re all alone.  You find yourself feeling joy when there’s nothing to be joyful about.

I’ve had people ask me, “What is your position on nuclear warheads?”  And I’ve answered, “I don’t care if they don’t disarm nuclear warheads; I just don’t want anyone pushing the button to send them off!”  If I were sitting with my finger on the button and was told, “Push the button,” I would not do it because my personal integrity couldn’t send destruction to other people in this world who are part of me in a spiritual way.

A long time ago, I found out that when babies are sick and dying in South America or South Africa, parents cry and grieve just like they do in the United States.  It happens everywhere I’ve been.  They feel a depth of despair, grief and loss and in our personal integrity we can’t sit and allow that to happen any longer.  The personal integrity of one soul whose time has come is a more powerful force than all the bombs in any universe.

As part of my own integrity, I decided a long time ago I would not do anything that I did not like to do.  Not that I would always feel good; it was a deeper commitment than that.  I became aware that there was something that would move inside of me to the heartfelt response of integrity.

Because I work with people on the inner path, it becomes awkward for people who haven’t had that experience to grasp what it is, to have an understanding and to be able to flow with it.  And those who do grasp it have found that their own integrity says, “But you see, that happened to me as my experience.”  And that experience builds; not only inwardly, but it tends to flow outwardly.  People around you start to be very thankful that they know you.  Oh, there’s going to be some who will try to degrade you because they don’t yet know the integrity of their own life.  They think degrading and blaming cures anything.  Curing happens when you take responsibility for something and get it done.  If blaming really solved anything, we’d all be off the planet.

Healing is the alternative action to curing and can take place with anyone at any time by loving yourself enough to get your priorities lined up and finding out which way you’re going.  And then – stick to that.  As you do, the energy of who you are, that spiritual being, will come flooding through you.  You’ll touch other people and that energy can move uninhibited to others and they can feel it.

In a similar way, you can choose to put your energy into the negative doom trend.  There is always going to be something in this world that will hassle or teach you a lesson.  You can either take what happens in life as a stumbling block or a stepping stone.  You can stand up in personal integrity, in the spirit of your life and your own honesty.  Not as a polarizing nor a majority/minority force but rather as an individual – a majority of one.  Coming from that space, there really isn’t anything that we as human beings cannot accomplish.

My job is to remind you of the living, the loving and the laughing that exists in all of God’s creation.  When God made us, he didn’t use junk.  He also didn’t use all of His power nor all of the material.  There are still tremendous improvement opportunities and when we move toward similar goals, we can accomplish what no other sentient being can accomplish.  We can build empires or destroy peoples and nations.  We hold it in our hands to be able to do that.  The question is, “Do we want to?”

Collectively, we hold power, authority and position.  Singularly, we hold integrity.

Many of you have said to your children, “Don’t lie to me. Tell me the truth.”  What you’re really saying to them is, “Have integrity.”  We know integrity when it’s demonstrated to us.  Children know integrity when their mother or father own up to their faults instead of lying and blaming them on others.  As adults we can also see through it real fast.  And when you get the cobwebs of darkness pulled away from your face, you can see through it so fast that you pass it before you realize you’ve seen it.  You may have to back up, stop and take a look.

How do you know you have learned?  You will change your behavior.  That shows you have learned.  However, learning is no longer enough.  We must transform ourselves – enlighten and spiritualize ourselves.  We must regenerate and become the new being in the very thing that keeps us alive – the essence and energy of God.  It’s called many things in many cultures; I call it the Beloved because people relate to that.  I also call the inner awareness integrity, because we can all relate to that.

If I had a prayer for you, I would pray that you would get the disease called integrity.  And I would pray that you would have it so contagiously it would travel around and you would follow it up with loving and demonstrate it by being that. Those people who have demonstrated integrity in the past, have been killed because only one or two demonstrated it.  Now, when we stand up as a people, who will there be left to harm us?  No one, because we’ll all be standing in the integrity of life.

By loving, serving and working together, we can redirect the potentially destructive course charted for our planet towards positive upliftment where humanity wins.  Don’t wait for a better future; create it now in the present.