It's The Economy, Stupid!

This morning I listened in to a discussion on Capitol Hill. The Senator asked, "do you feel that your agency's oversight was a failure?" She was referring to FNIC's audit every two years of an individual who ran a 50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme. "Isn't it a failure when every two years you reviewed the books and didn't notice that no trades had actually taken place?"

The individual responded to her with "I think that the system failed us. I cannot answer specifically whether that agency failed until I have had a deeper conversation with them."

The answer jarred me. It might have been legally correct, but everyone in the room, his supporters and naysayers, and he himself knew it was a clever lie, a justification for something that quite clearly could not ever really be justified.

I know that I could have been angry or indignant. I just had to laugh.
What is real clear, is that this individual was invested only in the integrity of his rear end, not Integrity as a living force of clarity and manifestation. Instead of dwelling on how wrong he was, I used my mudra for atonement to ask that a channel of justice, light, and balance be manifested in this place on Earth, where there once was the misuse of energy.

When I gaze into Integrity, (which we use the picture of George Washington on the quarter to represent), I notice three elements: impeccability of the word; self-contained, economy of using energy; and attunement to finding harmony.

Part of the challenge we are facing is in the task of restoring integrity, not only to our leaders in Washington, or our institutions, but within ourselves. If we were a society that promoted and supported impeccability in our words, actions, and gestures, this individual would never have considered such a response. Probably there would never have been a need to have a "congressional hearing" in the first place.

This individual is not evil. Most likely he simply overextended his energy. Most of us are so busy supporting ideas, ambitions, projects, the requirements of social etiquette, that we have overextended our energy and our attention. When this happens we stress ourselves out, and we are tempted to compromise with our integrity.

During this last inaugural ceremony, once again the Shaker Hymn, "Tis a blessing to be simple ... tis a blessing to be free" was played, by a joyful Yo Yo Ma and ensemble in a freezing 29 degree Washington morning.

This hymn, really the unofficial anthem of American values, is like gold. "To be simple" is a blessing -- and one of the great openings to being free in your mind, and having liberty as a person or nation.

I have been working this year with my various skype groups (and you can join them if you e-mail me at huntravel@aol.com) with crisp and clean energy. Why? Because our great frustrations in life for the most part come from OUR manifestations of OUR creative energies, not from the circumstances of the society and land that we live in.

If our ship is not ship-shape, if there are barnacles encrusting our keel, if our sails are tattered and scattered about the deck, no matter how clear and forceful your statement of intents are, Intent has a hard time helping us to create our artistic vision for our life.

Just like our bankbooks and our federal and state economies, we too have been overcommitted. We don't simply start and then finish a compact unit of creation before commencing on the next one. We often invest the energy we would need to complete them in drama and new enterprises rather than in completion. Consequently nothing ever gets completed and appreciated. Nothing ever gets resolved. Not the books we are planning to write, nor the relationships with family that we planned to resolve before we died.

We are in constant stress because the restorative signal of the Sigh of Completion is never given the body. The satisfaction of a job well done can only be experienced by our Integrity when the job is truly done. This is not about what we say, or even what is printed on a banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier years before our adventure in Iraq is likely to be over. It is about what we feel deep inside in our core. What that witness the Upanishads call the Self has seen.

I had a beautiful night last night writing an accounting of where I am in my personal energy economy. All the projects that I had partially began, and never finished. Behind each uncompleted project was either a faulty agreement, an unacknowledged and dealt with fear, or a question of clarification that had never been asked or answered. Either way, the direction is clear.

Crisp and clean. One step, one moment at a time.

Whether it is our banking system, our government, or our very lives, it is the economy, stupid!

With love and clear direction,

dr. Gene