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Integrity : Expressing the Unity of Who You Are

Article imageThe very nature of the word “integrity” implies simplicity, honesty, sincerity and wholeness. Sometimes we, as humans, try so hard to reach those natural levels inside ourselves which, in reality, can be so easy to attain. In a world which is overcrowded with information and choices of paths to enlightenment, it is refreshing to find a man whose teachings are indeed simple.

“Take care of yourself so you can take care of others. Don’t hurt yourself and don’t hurt others. Use everything for your upliftment.” These are the basic teachings of John-Roger who is the founder of The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, President of Peace Theological Seminary and College of Philosophy as well as the author of books pertaining to spiritual growth.

In 1963, John-Roger received the keys of the “Mystical Traveler Consciousness” and since then has traveled around the world giving seminars, lectures and trainings to provide opportunities for people to experience his practical, down-to-earth techniques and wisdoms to awaken the soul to the simplicity and joy of its beingness.

In the following interview, John-Roger explains the meaning of integrity. He is a man of integrity who demonstrates the freedom and living love he teaches. He simply shares with us the integrity of spirit by reminding us of the spiritual realities which exist within us all.

QUESTION: What is the importance of knowing yourself?

JOHN-ROGER: All the ancient writings have stated, “To thine own self be true.” If you know yourself, you know the truth. And the truth of who you are is really a part of God, or the spirit of God, which is where all creation starts and ends. The importance of knowing yourself is to know what you created-how you started it and how you can end it. Also, you can have compassion for other people when you see how they started and how they might end their creations.

Q: What you teach best, to my point of view, is “practical spirituality.” Could you explain what you just said about being true to yourself so we can apply it to everyday life?

J-R: Being true to yourself is a form of integrity where what you know to be true for yourself must be validated in your everyday life through various forms and sources. People can have hallucinations and be very true to them, even though no one else can relate to their abstract reality. They’re called crazy. So the form of integrity must be one that a lot of people can relate to and identify with. When you come into that place of integrity, everything you do is done with a sense of completeness, honesty, nowness and trueness. But first and foremost, you have to realize it inside yourself. If I have integrity inside me, I won’t let you compromise the inside of me. If I have integrity inside me, I’ll have it on the outside of me and I won’t let you compromise me on the outside, either. Not only that, but I won’t let you compromise yourself in my presence, because integrity is also a loving teacher. It’s not necessarily a corrector, but a form of energy that shows you what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, what the results will be, and then another way to do it. Your integrity will choose the right way. On the other hand, your rebellion will choose a way that is disobedient to the integrity and will cause trouble.

Q: If someone says they are being true to themselves and yet they are standing all by themselves, would that be an indication they are rebellious rather than standing in their integrity?

J-R: Perhaps they are being true to their ego, their feelings, their beliefs, or the rules they’ve made in their minds. Those factors aren’t the true self, but the personality. When a person is true to the personality, they are being true to what they pretend is, instead of what is. At any given moment everyone has available to them the knowledge of whether or not they’re being true or false-if they care to listen. Jesus said, “My Father doeth the work.” That shows the integrity. The Father could also be called God. A man of integrity is a man of God. The more integrity speaks through you, the more people will see God in you and feel the essence and trueness of that. And the further you get away from that, the more they will sense the guile or negativity.

Q: How do you stay true to yourself?

J-R: By finding the trueness. That is done by going past all the obstacles, including the personalities and human factors, and continuing to say “next” to whatever appears. We come to that place where there is no “second”; there is only oneness, and that oneness is integrity. When you come to that place, it’s the true experience of being born again. There’s no need to be true to that because you are that. There is no leaving that place again. You can leave it in vocabulary and dialogue, but you can’t leave it in trueness. For instance, you can agree with somebody just to agree with them so you can get to another point they’re talking about, but you’re not actually in agreement with them. I might say, “Yes, I agree with your point,” but I’m not in agreement that your point is true or valid. To agree with somebody is not agreement, and agreement is a form of integrity-a giving of your word.

Q: If I state my opinion and you say you agree with it, does that mean you’re cooperating with what I’m saying?

J-R: It means I’m just accepting what you say.

Q: But you’re still true to the integrity inside yourself because you may feel or think entirely differently.

J-R: I’ll listen to you because if I cut you off and say, “That’s not true,” then I haven’t given you the chance to demonstrate how you get into integrity. When I’m in the process of agreeing with you, I allow you to teach me how you do what you do. If you don’t come into integrity, then I’ll say, “May I present a point of view on how I’m experiencing that?” And then I’ll come from the integrity point of view, the oneness of it, rather than the polarity of it. You can always tell someone who lives in integrity because there is a oneness with them all the time. They may talk to doctors and use medical terms, to teachers and use educational terms, or to children and use childlike terms, but inside they are always coming from that constant place of who they are. They don’t have to remember or be concerned about what they say because they are only dealing with a here and now representation. I use the word representation because you have to see past the physical form to see the integrity. The presentation would be who they are, and the representation is what we seem to think they are.

Q: What’s the most important thing we can do in order to know ourselves or to strengthen the soul?

J-R: Know the results of reciprocity: as you sow, so shall you reap. The law of karma. Because you did this, this is the effect. The effect of your actions may not take place for a long period of time. If a girl goes out and has sexual intercourse, she doesn’t have a baby the next day. She has to wait a number of months to see the result of her action. The results of some actions are more instantaneous. When you put your hand on a hot stove, you burn yourself. But even then most of us don’t learn from the pain because we have all burned ourselves more than once. The other, longer range effect could involve something we did at the age of seven or eight which doesn’t show up until the age of 50 or 60. For instance, you can be exposed to radiation and 15 years later come down with the effects of it. It seems that many people on the planet don’t want to be responsible for their actions. The excuse is, “Well, I don’t remember that,” or, “I don’t know if that’s true.” The law of cause and effect, or reciprocity, doesn’t care what you think.

Q: Does this extend beyond the individual experience?

J-R: It goes into the whole nation, world and planetary karma.

Q: But what can we do right now? Where do we start today? What’s the most important thing to do?

J-R: Be true to yourself and do not compromise the ideal-not the ideals-the ideal of integrity. When that happens, something starts to radiate out from you. And I’m not speaking here in terms of physics, I’m speaking of spirituality. When you come into contact with somebody else who is radiating that spiritual energy, something takes place which is more than a process of one to one.

Q: Can you explain that?

J-R: There is a third element which comes into being. That third element brings us back to oneness again. It’s a circular pattern. It’s called loving. When two people are loving each other, there are really not two people, but one. It might look like two, but they become one in thought, one in feeling, one in direction, and one in philosophy. All their divergences become focused in attainment rather than in the law of cause and effect, catastrophes or penalties which results in poor relationships. We can all be teachers to each other without any effort at all. But we have to allow the space to have that divergent individuality merge into the space of integrity.

Q: For someone who has never heard about you how would you describe what you do and what that Consciousness is?

J-R: The Mystical Traveler Consciousness empowers the soul to return to the heart of God by way of the Sound of God (God’s Word) and the Light of God (the Holy Spirit)-and then to stay off this planet of negativity and become a co-creator with life and with God in life. And while you’re here, living in this Light and Sound becomes a way of life, not necessarily a religious experience. You can be a dentist and be an initiate. You can be a Christian or a Buddhist and be an initiate. When the connection is made through the Sound Current initiation, people come into a profound knowingness that can be reflected back into this world even though it isn’t necessarily designed to do that. Often a person may know no results in this world, but the results they get in their Soul Travel are so profound. They often bring back the recollection of that Travel and are able to walk through this world with much more joy.

Q: Are you the only one on the planet who holds the Mystical Traveler Consciousness?

J-R: Everyone on the planet is the Mystical Traveler-everyone. It’s the very thing in creation which keeps creation going. It must have a form on every level of creation to which energy is conducted. I have keys, or the spiritual mantle, to open the doors to the higher kingdom. People don’t like the idea of going to somebody else for keys to the kingdom, but then most people are here because of spiritual rebellion. By demonstrating they are still in a state of rebellion, they’ll be taught by the world that their actions bring hard knocks. Through the process of purification, just as in the process of life, they’ll come to the place where they’ll see the one who has the teaching key for them, and they will approach that one and reach for the key. When the person approaches the key-bearer lawfully, not rebelliously, the key cannot be withheld. It’s like giving someone a sacred diamond. The key is not a physical thing which is given to just one person. The key is a level of consciousness that all have access to. When the key to a level of consciousness is given through initiation to the Sound Current, that person then becomes an authority unto themselves, which is again the integrity. So the Traveler’s job is to restore the integrity to each individual.

Q: Do you have moment-to-moment conscious awareness of each of your students as you go about your everyday activities?

J-R: The subtle bodies of the Traveler and the subtle body of what we call the votary or seeker of truth are together all the time because we’re the same energy. One way to illustrate this would be to line all the students abreast down one slope of a mountain and up the other and tell them that their job is to stay in line. We don’t have to be concerned about those who are in line, only those who are out of line. It’s actually a very easy job, because the Spirit doesn’t bring people into the Sound Current initiation who are not in line. Once in awhile someone will come into the line to receive the energy field and will move back out again. If one who is in the line starts to waver, then it may be their karma to move back out again. My awareness of my students is like having a radar scan on them which scans back and forth. As soon as somebody moves out of line, I immediately know that. Because what happens is that all of them become one line with one person. There’s no distance, so I have nowhere to go to be with them because they’re all present inside of me.

Q: I’m admiring the way you describe that process, because it sounds like it should be complicated to verbalize.

J-R: It’s impossible to verbalize. To tell you this is to lie to you because it isn’t quite like that. The idea is very simple, but to explain it spiritually would be to take you there spiritually and let you see it.

Q: A lot of us are using visualization as a technique to get the things we want. Does visualizing a peaceful planet or a better job actually do any good?

J-R: Well, energy follows thought and thought follows form. Visualization is a form. So if we visualize the form, the thought goes into the form, and the energy follows the thought. When that process is complete, the manifestation starts to take place physically.

Q: I’ve had experiences where I’ve visualized something I wanted to do or someplace I wanted to go, but later something else came instead which was even greater than what I had been visualizing. Can you explain why that happens?

J-R: Sure. When we’re under spiritual guidance, nothing is allowed to happen that is not for our highest good. In other words, when we get high enough in our spiritual consciousness, we often change the visualization because we see where the original one was inadequate or not going in the direction of the flow of spiritual energy. Then we just move. During the night travels, people get to see what the visualization was, and they might say, “Oh, that’s not going to work because I have desires and greed on it.” In the morning they may or may not have the memory of having changed the picture. Sometimes there is a sense of disappointment, which lets us know we have attachment to what we’ve created. Attachment is the suffering we experience. When people suffer, look for their attachment. When something comes to us in a way we really like, we’re so surprised that we become childlike. It goes beyond what we thought we could have imagined. We did imagine it in a higher state, but not knowing that, we say, “I would never have imagined that.” Yes you would have, or you wouldn’t have gotten it.

Q: When people are visualizing peace on the planet, what are they actually asking for in the higher levels?

J-R: It depends how high they go. Each person has to come to peace within himself in terms of the glamour of the world. That glamour attracts illusions, and people get trapped by what’s known as the negative power-negative energy fields. It’s difficult to get out of those fields. It requires a tremendous effort. But one way is to get sick and tired of being tired and sick. At Insight Training Seminars, they present techniques to let people see how they can change their approach to problems and then watch them disappear in the very process of living. Therefore, there is no need to deal with the problem; it’s just a matter of changing the approach. Then people begin to live in a level of anticipation, not expectation. Expectation is what I call the Siamese twin to attachment, which produces suffering and agony. But if everyone on the planet got exactly everything they wanted, they would have to deal with boredom. The boredom would soon cause dissension, and there would be fighting again.

Q: Do you mean that if everybody on the planet wanted peace and we finally got it, we would then look for the next thing we wanted?

J-R: If we started looking for the next thing we wanted in terms of what we’re attached to, we would not have had peace. But peace can involve moving forward to a new level of existence and awareness. Peace is the absence of conflict, internally and externally, but it’s not the absence of sandpapering, refining and moving towards excellence. There can be divergent points of view without having war. I call it conversation, communication, dialogue and sharing of ideas. Again it’s back to that thing called integrity which allows all people the moment to speak their truth in the line of the Spirit.

Q: Are we learning to communicate better?

J-R: All the evidence on the planet seems to say “no.” But we truly are moving that way, and one of the prime indicators is how rapidly we can communicate occurrences that take place around the world. A disaster 20,000 miles away can be communicated in minutes, and relief can be sent into that area. Years ago it may have taken months for us to hear about it. Of course, the ideal communication would be having one language everyone understood.

Q: Do you mean telepathic communication?

J-R: It could be telepathic, where we just understand the known. We would still verbally speak French, Spanish, German or English but would come together in the integrity of knowingness. Those who were not in that integrity would not be part of the communication. Many of the Lamas in Tibet have communicated from one temple to another through telepathy. There was no verbal communication, but the people knew when they were sent for and would arrive saying, “I got your message and I’m here.”

Q: Are we communicating telepathically with each other now?

J-R: Oh sure. You are an initiate of the Traveler, and the initiates know what’s going on with each other. But what they know in Spirit they cannot bring down into this world to use adversely against another person. That’s a spiritual crime, because knowledge of Spirit is not to be used for personal gain or to put down somebody else. It is to be used for all, and in the using for all, more is gained. But it can also be lost by hiding it away in a miserly fashion.

Q: Sometimes I hear people say they’re afraid of “misusing” the spiritual power. They end up doing nothing with any of their energy. They seem to be afraid of going into the world as if the world will corrupt them. Is that a realistic fear?

J-R: The person who has that type of feeling will create what he fears. It’s possible for the world to corrupt you, but as long as you maintain the trueness to your integrity and renew yourself from the well of Spirit through spiritual exercises, meditation, or contemplation, the world can’t corrupt you. As a matter of fact, your presence in the world starts to purify it. Some people are afraid to go where drugs are being used because they fear being influenced by those frequencies. But there’s another way to look at it: you can go there and neutralize the drugs and influence others to change by radiating spiritual energy. We have many people in MSIA who have been on drugs, and when they came to my seminars, they never corrupted me – but they changed. Anyone with integrity and spiritual authority can walk right into the midst of it all and not be affected. But they must also go with wisdom, because it might not be time to release the karma of that area or with that person. Jesus Christ walked with impunity and built a bridge of Light so that those who wanted to turn to the Light could walk over the bridge through the Christ Consciousness into the spiritual heavens. That’s the salvation and it’s already done. The negative power leaves the initiates of the Traveler alone. It will hassle them, but it will not take them in death into a negative realm because the Traveler will go after them. When he goes, he releases all he finds who are in bondage, which is exactly the same thing the Christ did as a Traveler in His time. The negative power doesn’t want that to happen again.

Q: Are you expressing the Christ consciousness?

J-R: No, I don’t express that. That was a specific consciousness for the time it came in. It is still present and still works. The Christ is the logos or head of this planet. It is therefore the head of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. When we get beyond this planet and into the other regions, then there is a Christ in each region referred to as the Lord of that realm. They are all the Travelers, and out of them comes a Christ.

Q: If you’re not a guru or a savior, what are you?

J-R: “Savior” comes out of the Judeo-Christian tradition and implies that to be saved you must be lost. So a savior is one who returns the lost back to the fold. A “guru,” in the Eastern tradition, is one who is enlightened into God, and their job is to let people worship them and radiate the spiritual essence of divinity. The person who sees an “enlightened one” knows they can be uplifted to a better expression in their life. But far too often, the guru becomes separate from his followers to maintain the guru position. Guru is spelled “gee-you are-you.” It means they are who they say they are. The true guru is one who brings enlightenment. I’m not a savior because that job has already been done. And I’m not a guru because that is not a line of energy I carry. But I’m in what we call the line of the Travelers who can function as saviors, gurus, and wayshowers – although primarily they are the servants of man. They come to serve mankind. They can serve from lofty positions or lowly positions. The job of serving is one of giving. And part of that giving is receiving from others, for in receiving from others they give others the gift of giving. It may seem strange, but it validates people’s worthiness to be able to give.

Q: It sounds very complicated, yet I see the simplicity of it also. Is it difficult to do?

J-R: On a personality level, allowing others to give to me was probably the most difficult thing I had to learn when I came into this Consciousness because I could give more than my students. Once one asked me, “Can’t I give you anything?” I said, “What is there to give me?” He walked away, hunched over, and I saw I had shamed him. So I called him back and said, “What is it that you have for me?” He had a tiny toy trinket he’d had since childhood which someone important had given to him. Because I had become important to him, he wanted me to be the caretaker of this object. As I recall, it was a little plastic whistle. I took it and blew it. He said, “That’s exactly what I wanted you to do.” And I was going to say, “I know,” but that might have ruined the whole essence of the energy that was present. My receiving of that gift allowed his love to overflow to everybody in the room. I watched him walk back past the line of people, just loving everybody and doing my work right down the line, carrying the energy of the Traveler to others in the room. A lot of them got the answers they came for by the touch of this other person. A guru usually reserves the transmission of power to himself, but the Traveler uses everybody to transmit the power-it’s the power of the Spirit. That period was difficult because people would say to me, “Oh, I don’t want to burden you down with my problem.” But it’s like thinking the postman is burdened down because he brings you a letter. It’s his job to deliver the letter, and if he doesn’t, he loses his job. Well, it’s my job to take your burdens. Go ahead and give them to me and I’ll deal with them. Those areas of working with people’s misconceptions in the physical world are the only difficult areas I ever had to deal with. In the spiritual, invisible, none of that exists.

Q: Do you still have a personality you deal with?

J-R: I have a multifaceted personality, but it doesn’t get in my way. I use it as a stepping stone to reach people.

Q: How did you achieve that?

J-R: By using everything that happened to me as a resource instead of something to regret or get rid of. I said, “Oh, this is all here for me. All these things that have happened are useable for me.” So I don’t try to get rid of any negative experience.

Q: Are we making any progress in lifting the negativity of this planet?

J-R: That the spirit of God is more present is evident by more negativity on the planet. When there’s more negativity, there’s a call for more of the Spirit, and when the pure light of Spirit appears, it throws up the negativity for purification. If that negativity is inside of us, we go through our tragedy or drama. If it is out there in the world, then a nation or some geographical location experiences suffering, dilemma or a predicament. But the negativity can only surface if it’s already there, and it can only be there if it’s being created there or exists as a karmic repository. If it’s a karmic repository, people are already there to take the karma through themselves in order to remove it from the planet.

Q: Do people choose to incarnate to some particular location to do that?

J-R: Yes. Some do it knowingly, some unknowingly, and others do it haphazardly. The end result is still the same-they’re there to do it.

Q: So, if we’re looking at somebody starving someplace, it may be the perfect place for that person to be. Are you saying they chose that time and situation to lift the planet?

J-R: Either to lift the planet, bring a teaching to the planet, or show how we’re not being one in the Spirit. They may not know they’re doing this. The media may focus upon a poor lady who is starving to death, and the moment we see her, that part of us who is also her, says, “Let’s get something there to help.” It may be too late for her, but in the giving, in the serving of humanity, the Spirit of God comes forward in an individual. We get the God Spirit here on the planet by the action of serving.

Q: We have plenty of opportunity to serve!

J-R: The big key here is not the rescue itself, but rather the giving from ourselves to them. That process of giving strengthens the integrity and awakens it in others. The biggest challenge we have now is how to distribute all the wealth we have on this planet. There’s plenty here. We hear the media report stories of trucks dumping loads of food into oceans and lakes to maintain market prices, while in other parts of the world people could have used that food. Whether it could have gotten to them or not is debatable, but they were not given a choice or a chance. It was decided for them. They could have said, “No, thank you, I’ll starve to death.” Undoubtedly they would have said, “Maybe I’ll die, but let my child have the chance.”

Q: Is that part of the reciprocity you were talking about? For instance, years from now we may all be starving, but we probably won’t remember the times we were dumping trucks of food.

J-R: Exactly. But if we come into integrity, we will utilize things so efficiently in the present that 30 or 40 years from now we won’t have to experience the reciprocity of our avarice. We’re actually receivers of the Spirit and the givers of life. We step down spiritual energy, get it into this level, bring things into physical existence, and see that it’s distributed.

Q: Can you “sum up” what you’ve told us about integrity?

J-R: You don’t have to know your soul to be a man or woman of integrity. You just have to come to the place of realization where you will not compromise yourself or the truth within you any longer. Just stand up. You may get your head knocked off, but it’s doubtful because very few people stand tall enough to swing that high. The questions you’ve asked me seem very appropriate for the time we’re in and for the times we’re moving towards. We’re going to hear from many of the leaders across the planet in various fields of activity – physics, architecture, metaphysics, religion, business, politics – about integrity. I’ve been talking about integrity for 20 years. The man of integrity is also the man of understanding, and it can be a difficult life to lead up to the point of integrity. After that, there’s no other way to live.

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