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Understanding Progressive Development - Part 1
A Talk given on March 1st, 2007


This year during the Planning Session we chose some topics and themes for the Community to be able to discuss and study in my absence and one of those themes is a long theme but it's actually to start to go through the eleven principles of Progressive Development that I crafted back during the time of the Pro-gress Agency. And I think there's a tremendous amount of substance there. Those principles were very well thought out, extremely carefully crafted and they're extremely concentrated, so you can literally take one sentence out of any one of those principles and that could be a whole course of study, certainly more than an evening. And they were designed purposely that way. As I was telling some of the people out at the farm the other day that sometimes when we were putting these together, we would labor for an extensive period of time over even one word because of the implications of a word.

And so just the use of a word like to be so bold to craft statements that would be taken into any situation, whether they were business, political, economic, spiritual, social or in the development industry, and to take the risk and say we're going to enter into that dialog the word love and why we chose the word love. And what are the implications because in the first principle, the idea of spiritual unity, which we have certainly plenty of experience in discussing and trying to align ourselves with, in prints is also re-ferred to as love. So this has, just this relationship between spiritual unity and love and choosing these two words, just that, in itself, ought to give you plenty of implications to mull over in your discussions and in your head.

So with the advent of me traveling and the discussions starting among the group and people taking turns facilitating, I was asked by members of the Katib Committee if I wouldn't start to give some talks to set the stage for discussing Progressive Development and why that's such an important part of our vision. And so I want to start with that tonight. And what I want to start with tonight is to go back to the funda-mentals on the foundation of which these principles were written and talk about progress. And that's why I said, hey, the rise and fall of being sick and being better relates to tonight's subject.

Life, birth and death, this relates to the subject. Because we've actually spent the last two or three weeks exploring more in depth cause and effect and how our relationship to cause and effect is changed by our attachments and the form in which our attachments come through. You know, our desire or our craving to control, to know, to own, to do and then certainly to be entitled to the fruits or the outcomes or the rewards, the benefits of controlling, knowing, doing, and owning. All of this cause and effect is part of the platform of this foundation of what we call Progressive Development. It was all considered when we put together the principles to draft them because we were trying to describe in words a very holistic vi-sion.

The vision that we're trying to describe isn't a vision that can ultimately be understood with one's mind. And it's not a vision that can ultimately be measured by any instrument, nor can it be factored through any one of our senses. It's not ultimately a vision that you can see. To talk about seeing this vision is really very symbolic. So the idea of putting this type of vision or these ideas into words really only is an attempt at prodding - prodding us to go deeper within to the Reality of our own true Selves in order to discover that that reality of our own true selves is Reality. That gives a little hint or insight into why spiritual unity is also equated with love.

Now one of the things that we've already established in our talks in the last three weeks, plus in our own experience, is this idea of longing. And that's a subject that the Sufis have cultivated over fourteen hun-dred years in prose, poetry, verse, song and in ritual and have done a far better job of awakening longing and describing it than I have. But nonetheless the subject of longing can't be overlooked because the subject of longing ultimately is that subject which has us literally long for more. Longing means to long for more, to want more and more and more and more. As a matter of fact we all know that we literally have a limitless thirst for unlimitedness. Whatever we are offered in terms of Allah's favor, somehow it comes back around that we would like more of that favor. No matter what subject it is, no matter what level it's on. And we have a very artificial means of measuring how much of that favor we have and how at peace that we are with that favor.

In Surah Rahman, the revelation of the Qur'an asks us the question, Which one of My favors will you deny? And then poses to us a number of scenarios that has us reflect into what has been provided for us and at the same time, how we might feel, react, think or be in relationship to these things. And it all isn't positive. Some of it looks negative. And some of the negative we are questioned whether or not isn't the negative actually positive. And some of the positive we are caused to question and reflect, isn't that posi-tive something that if we relate to it in the wrong way, could become negative. But here is an unlimited stream of favors that is being delivered to recipients that have an unlimited desire for them. And that unlimited desire for favors is longing. And as we grow - and I'm going to come back to that word growth in a minute - as we grow or feel more complete, more at peace in these favors, we measure that in our-selves by calling that development. How developed are we? How much have we grown? In other words with this giant, empty bucket which is an infinite bucket that wants to be filled, we still try to measure how much the bucket is filling up. Is it half full? Is it two-thirds? Is it three-quarters? And we set up arti-ficial methods of measuring success.

And as we grow we measure that in ourselves by calling it development.

You know if you want to measure success in business terms, then you count your pennies and how much you have in the bank. But this unlimited longing for success isn't fulfilled by any amount of pennies. So then we look at other ways to count it and we start to count it by how good-looking we are. And then we find out that as good-looking as we try to make ourselves, each day that we go into the mirror, the effort that we made on the day before has deteriorated as we get older. And so on. And so each category that we've tried to know, own, control, do, which are all types of accumulation - each category ultimately fails us in terms of the measure of development that we want to have in ourselves. Because that measure of development is going to come down to an intangible experience. But if we're trying to translate for the purpose of prodding human beings into the realization of Unity, how, in the practical, in the real world, will we measure development? What does it mean to grow? And what fairly could you call de-velopment? That you are really growing. That it's really happening. That you can to some degree, even if it's a limited degree to say my process is working, my Community is working, my city is working, my society is working. How would you measure that?

And we came up with this term Progressive Development. And development means the measure. How much growth. And progressive comes from the word progress.

And here's why this relates to cause and effect. Because we can all notice that it seems that no matter what advancement is made in the material world, that for every advancement that's made in the material world, there is a corresponding set of consequences to that advancement. Now sometimes those conse-quences appear as positive. But really if you look very carefully at the movement or the advancement of things in the material world, for every movement that is positive - now this is physics - you have a nega-tive response. Something as simple as this. If for my advancement, for my good health I am taught to drink more water, which is a standard recipe among any of the holistic practitioners - drink more water - and you have a form, a glass to hold that water in, and you're going to make the advancement in your health, as soon as you drink this water, which was the positive acceptance of that advancement, you now have an empty glass and so what is negative in here [tummy] is seeking to be filled with positive that's in the form of the glass, and when that is filled here, the glass now becomes the negative empty space that must be filled. Now that seems like a totally trite and mundane example. It's just right in front of us. It's a glass being full or empty. But that is the issue itself, the material world which I said includes the mental and emotional world, is a world of full or empty. It's a world of up or down. It's a world of in or out, left or right, black or white and all the transitions between them. So it's not that I can just be a static being and drink that water. When I drink that water, it's going to be causative for me to do something else. And that's going to be causative then for me to do something else. And every one of those actions through thought, word and action is going to be causative to something else. And there's going to be a corresponding effect.

So if we want to look into the real issue of progress, which ultimately means the fulfillment of some-thing that's unlimited, the idea of fulfillment logically would tell us that you cannot fill an unlimited de-sire with limited things. If you have limitlessness and you want to fulfill it, you cannot fulfill limitless-ness with limited. So this raises the question in development terms, how well am I doing? How well is my Community doing? How well is my city doing? How well is my society doing? This raises the ques-tion what the hell are we doing? Because it seems like we have the dog-chasing-its-tail phenomenon.


I know and you've heard me say this before, that many of the religious traditions or the philosophical traditions, whether they came out of Greece or Rome or Persia, the Middle East, the Far East or South Asia, they all like to somehow romanticize that somewhere near the beginning of their belief system, that was when the golden era was. Well, the golden era then of Islam, institutional Islam, was at a time when women, girl babies were being buried in the desert, where people were being bought and sold of-tentimes for less value than cattle. I can go on and on and on and this doesn't sound like a very golden era to me. And as a matter of fact in order to establish the teachings of truth and honor, a lot of fighting had to go on in order for people to be able to survive so they could stand for truth and honor, and I don't care what kind of fight it is or when it happened, fighting doesn't really resonate to me as a golden-era kind of feeling. So I don't buy this thing that you know two thousand years ago when so-and-so walked the earth, that was the golden era or fourteen hundred years ago when so-and-so walked the earth, that was the golden era, or five hundred and fifty years ago in Bengal when so-and-so walked the earth, that was the golden era or there was any time that was any more of a golden era than now or that there was any time that was any less of a golden era than now. Why? Because anything in the material world is subject to cause and effect. It's going to have up. It's going to have down. It's going to be sick. It's going to get better. It's going to get sick again. It's going to get better. It's going to die.

What was the second reason I said tonight? The first was sick and better. The other was life, birth and death. There, there's one that's hard to argue with. Life, birth and death.

So when is the golden era? And this seems that the idea of measuring something that feels golden to us is a subjective feeling and this whole science is a subjective science.

Progress. Advancement. So we've starting using terms to denote that advancement means where there is movement in the material world that people see as a benefit without necessarily understanding the con-sequences - technological advancement, industrial advancement, personal advancement, spiritual ad-vancement. Do you realize that just these terms in the material world, every one of them has correspond-ing consequences. For instance, there were things like chariots and bullock carts back in the Middle East fourteen hundred and two thousand years ago. You know, wooden wheels with things hammered onto them and beasts of burden carrying things along. You know. And now today using the wheel we have Lexus. That's an advancement, right? Or is that progress?

Say that industrially and technologically we have progress. Well it just so happens that perhaps among the largest contributors to CO2 emissions, which is one of the largest contributors to the degradation of our ozone layer, which is one of the largest contributors to global warming are these global out-gassings is the fossil fuel that we're burning in all these vehicles that we're driving. So, but it's hard to argue with that getting in your Lexus or in your Volvo station wagon or in whatever car that we're driving, it's hard to argue with the convenience of that. I mean, it just made it so much easier to get here from the Long Branch to Satsang or to have guests come down from Minnesota or to be able to take a trip back to see your kids in Texas. It's hard to argue. I mean, this seems like progress. And this advancement seems like a truly, a true advancement to our convenience but at the same time there is opposing forces or conse-quences to the advancement.

So how do we measure that long scheme, long term when it comes to development? It's hard to measure that spiritually and call this dependency or attachment that we have to knowing, owning, controlling, and doing and the fruits of those actions, the rewards and benefits of those actions - it's hard to call that progress. It's something. It's convenient. It advances us. It may even give us scope, like an environment that we can study progress and maybe live into progress. Like, you know, we are very fortunate to be in a brick constructed building that has a heating and an air conditioning system with dimmer lights and ventilation to keep us warm in the cold and cold in the warm. That's very convenient. Hopefully we use this for studying the subject of progress. But every motion through thought, word and action in the mate-rial world carries consequences and there is an opposing force through cause and effect to every move-ment that is made, whether it's a thought, whether it's a word or whether it's an action. And until we be-come keen to this idea, we will continue to simply react to all of the reactions that are around us. It's an-other good reason why we have to practice the presence exercise. We have to be keen. We have to see what we are doing, what we are thinking, what we are saying and the possibility of their corresponding effects so that we don't stay locked in this wheel of sick and better and sick and better and rise and fall and up and down and feeling good and feeling bad and being on the swing between pleasure and pain and approval and disapproval.

Now just look for a moment into the basic six areas that we've identified that people are living through on those six spokes of progressive development. And they were people's personal lives, and everything that has to do with a personal life, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually - people's interpersonal lives or their relations to each other on every level, people's cultural life or how they come together in groupings to express relationship. You'll read that culture is the expression of what we have come to love and believe. And ultimately culture can't take place unless and it depends on the spoke before it which is relationship. So culture is the expression of what we love and believe through relationship, by being together in groups. You don't have a culture of one.

And as you go through each one of those spokes, the political spoke, the environmental spoke, the eco-nomic spoke, etc, you see that any activity through any of those spokes, if it's simply a material activity, has a corresponding deficit to its asset. And ultimately, nothing lasts. You end up going to your friend's funeral. Ultimately nothing lasts. I don't have to beat that point to death. You all could give me the lec-ture now on how nothing lasts. It is born, it has a lifespan and then it retires. Everything in the material world, born, lifespan and then it retires.

What is progress? How do you in this motion of cause and effect and the fact that by the time you're done playing the game and you go around one more time, that you don't get to collect $200 and pass Go. That's what's going to happen. You know, every funeral that I go to and every day of my life, this isn't a foreign idea to me and I ask it not to be foreign to you, but I'm very aware that I'm going to die and I'm very aware that you're going to die and I'm very aware that we're going to watch each other die and I'm very aware that it doesn't last. How aware are you of that at every moment? I ask you to be more aware of it. It's a great teacher because it really guides how sensitive and careful and compassionate you might be in your life, in all of your life.

So if we're going to die and you can't own anything anymore, what does it mean to spend your life trying to own? If you're going to die and you can't stop it and you can't control that and then you can't control what happens after that, what did it mean spending a whole life trying to control? If you are going to die and there's no more doing and no matter what you did won't stop you from dying and there's no more doing to be done, then what was a whole life of doing about? Uh, control, knowing. Who the hell knows what we know? I spent a whole life being right, trying to be right and ultimately have to step over a threshold, through a doorway that nobody has come back from to tell us what it is. I didn't say that -there's another whole subject - I didn't say that nobody's returned, but in this medium, in this mode, no-body's been able to report for anybody else's satisfaction what the afterlife is. A lot of great ideas about it but you know, really it remains the great mysteriousness - with maybe somewhat enlightened and in-tuitive senses that we might have about it. Like we all have a sense that there's more to this than what meets the eye. We all have that sense, don't we?

There's more to life than what meets the eye. Otherwise nobody would be sitting in this room. All of us have the sense that the physical death just couldn't be the end and that's it. So already we have, each one of us has some intuitive senses about death. But what it's really like, do we know exactly what that is and then what happens? You know, we're probably all going to be surprised, but we also have the intui-tive sense that we'll find out. And everybody's going to find out. You don't have an option of not finding out. Everybody's going to find out. And that's the great equalizer. So we spend a whole life of trying to be right - know everything, and always be the one at being right.

And yet when it comes to the very thing that we can't control, we don't even know what that is. What are we doing? How do we measure progress? Let alone that once we've been good at business or at politics or at relationships and we've gotten good at owning, accumulating, knowing, having, controlling, that once we've gotten good at that and we've stockpiled our money and our clothes and our watches and each other, we all fall apart. The watches stop ticking. The cars get old and stop running. You've got to put oil in them again. The bodies don't work the way they used to work.

Even the preacher had the presence of mind to talk about that during the ceremony today about how as you get older, in your mind you'd like to think you could do, be and own the things that you used to, but you just can't do it. Your mind would like to think you can. But if you go to try to execute it, you don't want to live with the consequences. This knee still reminds me.

And the longing doesn't stop. It still wants more, and our minds are still measuring whether the more that we're getting is working or not. Is the more that we're getting working or not? And as soon as we get more, we're not satisfied with that. We want more. And as soon as we get more, we're not satisfied with that. We want more. And inside our ego, through controlling, knowing, owning, etc. is being an ac-countant, trying to figure out the development. Am I growing? Am I progressing? What's progress? What is progress?

Well, Progressive Development teaches that you can't measure true progress in material terms. Because if you try to measure something in material terms and you then account yourself to an asset, as soon as you've accounted yourself to an asset in material terms, you also have a deficit. This is not only a princi-ple of physics, it's the basis of all accounting systems - the double ledger. You know when we stood up at the Planning Session and we said, hey, to understand the budget and to understand the financials aren't that hard. You either got money or you don't. All the rest is just fancy ways of putting it into compart-ments. It's either an asset or it's a liability and in order to make a balance sheet balance, what do you have to do, Vinnie, to have your balance sheet balance? Your assets…

[Vinnie: you have to have a corresponding liability or ownership equity.]

That's right. Every asset on a balance sheet needs to have a liability and every liability needs to have a corresponding asset so that when you get to the bottom, they equal the same thing. That's called a bal-ance sheet. Now isn't that amazing, even in standard accounting.

What's progress? How would we know if we're growing? How would we know if we're actually improv-ing? How would we know if we're actually developing? Because our longing has done something else to us. Even though we keep trying to go after things materially, our longing's never satisfied. It just is never satisfied, if we're trying to satisfy it with limited things. As soon as I think that I got the best deal that I could snag on the coolest watch in the price range, I get a magazine in the mail of high-end watches and I open up the first page and I go, whoa. I can't even - I can't wear all these watches.

You know, today I was offered a taste of chocolate velvet cheesecake. After I had eaten my meal at the Long Branch, my mind wanted that. I mean, chocolate velvet. Just listen to it. Chocolate velvet cheese-cake. It's like, give me some of that. And fortunately I've developed enough personal discipline because I knew that my stomach was full and I had had a calzone which has a lot of cheese in it already. But I had to make the decision, no! Right before my own eyes, I had to make the decision no and there's a voice inside protesting, going you know you want more of that. And I had to turn back and look at that voice - and it all happens in a split second - but I had to turn back and look at that voice and say, no I really don't want more of that. Discipline is remembering what you really want. No, I really don't want more than that. But I still would like a bathtub full of Katya's chocolate mousse and just be able to soak in it up to here. And as soon as you get that, you'd get sick. So this isn't progress. Any of these things that produce liability is not progress. It's something. It's convenience. It's technology. It could even be advancement. Advancing forward in the understanding of something. Advancing forward in the paying down of your debt. Advancing forward and making profit. Advancing forward and being better at play-ing the guitar or in sports or in whatever your avocation is. It's like, you know, we have people who have been sick, we're getting better. We've had people who've had long term illnesses. And spent all this en-ergy to get better so you can die. Really. What's progress?

Because of our infinite longing, Progressive Development defines progress as that advancement that does not diminish, nor does it have a material liability to its advancement. It doesn't diminish, nor does it have a material liability to its advancement. Wow, that's really intense, because everything else we try to measure in every other field of life has a corresponding liability to it. And we're saying that progress is that thing that you can measure in development terms that has no corresponding liability to it. It just continues to grow.

Now we have to go off and try to find that thing. Where do you look for that? Where do you look for the thing that has no corresponding liability or consequence, that continues to fulfill and it continues to grow? It continues to develop in its own right. It has no corresponding liability or consequence. Where do you find that? It'd definitely have to be nonmaterial. What's that? That's love. That's why, that's why these sets of belief statements were literally submitted onto boardroom tables and submitted in develop-ment meetings between the likes of Chase Manhattan, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, the United Na-tions and all these people. That's why these things were put in front of them because they're still just moving things around. It's like, they look at the world like it's a tabletop. And they keep just resetting the silverware. You know, move the plate here, move the plate there. And they cut up the world, the east and the west, the north and the south, the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere, the third world and the first world. Now it's not hip to call the third world third world anymore. We call it the de-veloping world, but it's still all these divisions about how the material pie of things and ideas, of how they're cut up and distributed. And if you got more money and more power, you get a bigger piece of the pie. And if you got less money and less power, you get a smaller piece of the pie. And if you got more power and more money, you get a really big piece of pie. But what happens when you eat too big of a piece of a pie?

[You get sick.]

That's why I turned down the cheesecake. So even those, you look into the world right now, the people with the most money and the most power who got the biggest pieces of the pie, what's happening? They're getting sick. So then in comes all the other material attempts to satisfy the longing. The pharma-ceutical industry, okay. Pumping out the money, pumping out the money, hold onto the money, pumping out the money. I don't know why but I feel anxious, my heart palpitates, I'm depressed, I have anxiety attacks. Take this pill or that pill or this pill or that pill. You watch how everything in the material world is getting moved around to try to actually fulfill unlimited longing but to serve the same attempt that's in the five areas of attachment that won't get out of those areas of attachment. Until there's a breakdown.

And the breakdown means that the five modes of attachment can no longer be practiced. That's what a breakdown is. When you break down, you're no longer in the position to know, to own, to control, to do and if you're really breaking down, you don't even care about what happens next. That's what a break-down is. And the breakdown is the opportunity for regrouping.

Insha'llah, the Sufis have a statement that says Die before you die. Because what we're trying to attempt is the realization of great things in this life before we have to break down in our death. Because breaking down in your death interrupts the five modes of attachment, doesn't it? Well that will be a breakdown. And we really hope that we don't have to go live our whole life in pain, suffering and confusion to have death itself be the thing that breaks us down, that stops us from the addiction of these five modes of at-tachment. We're trying to interrupt that cycle ourselves, consciously.

Near death experience. See, near death experience. It's become quite a popular theme on talk shows lately, and books. Near death experience. There are two things that are repeatedly the dominant subject of everybody's near death experience. First, almost dying or having come close to death and coming back from it is not what I thought it was, which also proves my point of nobody really knows. First. And second, it's life altering. Near dying is life altering. Near dying is life altering. No wonder our Master Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, said Die before you die. Because near dying is death, I mean near dying is life altering. How about getting really sick. You reach a point when you get really sick that the crisis of that sickness has the potential for having you completely change. That's why some years back, oh thirty-five years ago, some good marketing agent in the new age industry developed this term called a healing crisis. We've been using it ever since. That was an early seventies term that guy thought up. A healing crisis. A healing crisis. Oh, you mean sick. No, no, they're not really sick, they're having a healing crisis. I mean, nobody's ultimately sick, I guess.

Everybody's ultimately the true Self. So it's all a healing crisis and anybody who thinks that they're not is ultimately sick. You know, because when I said sick, I just didn't mean physically sick. I meant men-tally sick or emotionally sick. Or making yourself sick. How about that? Making yourself sick. Why do we make ourselves sick? Why? Because we're struggling with the five modes of attachment and if we make ourselves sick enough, Allah's mercy will come and we'll stop. We won't be able to do it anymore. In other words, it's kind of like, you know, that knock yourself out. God gives us enough mercy. He goes like, I created you, and I created everything for you and I told you Fabi 'ayyi 'aalaaa'i Rabbiku maa tu-kadhibaan. Here's all of my favors - which one would you like to deny? I'll give you every single one of them. And I'll give you an infinite amount of them. And you know what? You can knock yourself out. You know, by the way, I do have some recommended ways for you but if you don't even want to follow those, you don't have to. I created you with a free will. I gave you life. I gave you energy. And I gave you all of your senses, and I gave you the feeling that you're really something down there. Have at it. Knock yourself out. And when people do that, they knock themselves out until they're so sick of them-selves that they can't do it anymore. People get, people will grieve to the point that either they'll grieve themselves to death literally, and I've seen it happen. I've seen it where, where people have been to-gether sixty years or so and then a spouse dies and then soon after, the grief is so strong that it's ready to… but most people grieve themselves sick and then at some point, they're just too sick of themselves. It's like, time to live life again.

People get sick with whatever they get sick with. They break their toe, they bust their knee, they hit their head. They get a cold, they get a sore throat, they get pneumonia. And after you've been sick for awhile, you get sick of being sick and there's something that happens when you get sick of being sick. It's some-thing that life, through cause and effect, which is one of Allah's principles, it's something that life does to you. It breaks you down and when you get sick of being sick and when you get sick of yourself or you get over yourself, you now have a brand new opportunity, once you drop that stuff, to be something else from what you were before.

So in order for us to discover what is progress, part of what we're going to have to do is break the cycle of what we've already observed, measured and known that isn't progress. And we're going to have to identify it. Like the ancient yogis said, it's not this and it's not this and it's not this. So we've done a pretty good job of that already in our lives. It's not money. It's not power. It's not prestige. It's not posi-tion. It's not relationship. It's not good looks. It's not sex, it's not drugs, it's not rock and roll. It's none of these things. We've already done that. We've measured that accounting. That's part of determining what's progress.

Now the measurement or the development on the other end will be the degree of something else. And in Sufism that something else has been called peace or it's been called love. Sufism has been described as a path of love. Allah has been described as ultimately all that is loving and mercy is certainly non-different than love. So absolute unity which is infinite, that is fulfillment. Absolute unity is non-different than love and the closest thing that we can measure in our human experience to unlimited, infinite, un-ending spiritual unity, the closest experience that we have personally that we can all relate to is love. So Progressive Development teaches that progress is the degree in which you subjectively can measure the increase of love in your life. That you subjectively can measure the increase of love in your life. I did not say the increase of comfort. I did not say the increase of pleasure. I did not say the increase of hav-ing a good time. I did not say the increase of having things the way you'd like to have them. I did not say the increase of the way that things the way you'd like to know them. I simply said the increase of love. Because certainly all of us have been through experiences that we knew love grew and that love was growing but in the middle of that experience, it was difficult or it was painful or it wasn't the way that we would have done it. But we couldn't argue with the fact that love is growing. And everybody who comes through one of those experiences knows internally that there's progress in themselves as a being.

However, because of the five modes of attachments, our mind and our emotions become confused to the messages around pain. Because up until being able to define progress, for us pain means bad, pleasure means good. Forget about the love thing. If it hurts, I'm not interested. Forget about this measured growth and this development. If it's not the way I like it, I'll go try to find something else to get it the way I like it. And our wires get crossed through our ego dimensions and through our modes of attach-ment. That we, the Sufis will say, forget. That's why the remedy is remembrance. We forget love and we forget this movement of progress or this motion of progress. So in our own limited small fashion we de-fine pain as bad, pleasure as good. Pleasure means progress and success and pain means something that is not progressive - what's the opposite of progress? Regress. It's taking me backwards because, why? I'm not having as good a time. So if it's painful, it's regress and I'm not getting what I want. So obviously we'll need to develop a practice that has us, gives us the insight and has us be able to discern the differ-ence between pain and harm.

What's the purpose? What's the purpose of even having a Progressive Development platform? What's the purpose? We've established that a long time ago. One purpose. What's the purpose? The realization of -Allah. So in this Progressive Development model, something that is harmful would be that which would prohibit or inhibit the realization of Allah or the Spiritual Unity that we're calling Love. It takes away from realizing love. That's harmful. Something that's helpful promotes, opens the way, and delivers us to greater realization. That's helpful. This is the science of sin and virtue. Sin, that which is prohibitive, that which inhibits, provides obstacle and makes one's thoughts, words and actions problematic to oneself and the realization of Allah. That's why it's called sin. Virtue, it's the opposite. Those things that open the heart, open the way, give one illumination and realization so that one has a better capacity to realize Allah. So the whole idea of even sin where we pray for our sins and pray for the sins of others, that's all just a cause and effect exercise. And sin is a religious term that's identifying those things which are det-rimental to progress. It's just a religious terms saying this is detrimental to progress. And virtue is an-other religious term saying that this is complementary or helpful for progress.

The Qur'an in Suratul-Baqara has a very insightful line, one of my favorite ones and I repeat it over and over again, and be prepared to hear it or think about it for the rest of your lives, but it says, Fighting is prescribed for you. Perhaps, fighting is prescribed for you but you dislike it, but perhaps you dislike a thing which is good for you and you love a thing which is bad for you. Now the fighting just doesn't mean running out onto a battlefield with a sword and battling the dark forces of the unbelievers. The fighting really is the context of being in life. It's the struggle to be alive. It's prescribed to you. It's what our beloved Prophet (saws) called the jihad al-akbar or jihad an-nafs, the great struggle of (for) the Self, or the great struggle. Yeah, that's really what's going on. And you have to deal with that every day you get up. Every day you get up, you know, the meter starts running and as you become conscious of your-self, you go like, this body's feeling a little achy and creaky today. You know, or other days it's like, whoa, I got a lot of energy, I'm feeling good today. Or you look at the measure of your emotions today and it's like, I'm up or I'm down or I'm sad or I'm happy or I'm depressed. But you know there's your bat-tlefield right there. And fighting, living in it, working, making your effort, it's prescribed for you. But you dislike it. But perhaps you dislike a thing which is good for you and you love a thing which is bad for you. Which also changes the definition of what is harmful and what is painful.

In other words, the Qur'an is teaching us cause and effect right here. You know, something that you think isn't harmful could actually be harmful to you because the definition of harm is that which inhibits or prohibits you from your realization. And something that you think is bad, it might be good. Well, why is it bad? I know why it's bad, cuz it's painful. It's painful in one form or the other. And here's how pain works. It's always too something. I'm too tired, I'm too hot, I'm too cold, it hurts too much, it's too far, it's too long, it's always too. Pain is always too. Pain is the subject of too much of something.

Even in the opposite, you know, I'm in too much poverty in order to have something to eat but it's really the subject of too, too much, and much and little are just the same thing. But in reality if the struggle of life or the living of life in its pain has you face the things that clear the path for you to be fulfilled in what you're here to be fulfilled in and to fulfill your purpose, is that helpful or is it harmful? It's helpful. So we have to change all the definitions. But to change the definitions, we'd have to struggle with the definitions because we already got them defined in five ways: I know, I do, I own, I control and what-ever happens, I want it to be the way I want it. It's mine. So that's what we have to struggle with. So even to change the definitions, we don't want to change the definitions. That's how deep it goes. We dis-like even to have to change the definitions.

Progress is measured by the degree or the increase of the growth of love. It's the only thing that satisfies. Love. So in this point love is a very sophisticated subject for developers, economists, politicians, scien-tists, not just religious people or spaced out people, or airy fairy people to be looking at. The subject of love isn't just a comic strip with some kind of unicorn jumping over the rainbow. Because when you get down to the nut-cutting, to the meat of it, you have to ask yourself from a development standpoint, do you know of anything else that satisfies you? Feeling loved. And what is the attempt of every other mode of behavior? It's to feel okay about myself. To feel love. Have self confidence. You want to put it in modern terms? Have a good self image, have self confidence, be at peace, feel self-secure, feel okay. Yeah, you want to put it in common terms but we're still dealing in the same subject. We're dealing with the subject of love. How I feel about myself and how I might relate to others.  
Now I don't know that I've exhausted all the avenues of looking for fulfillment but I've done my share and if I haven't done enough, I know collectively all of us together in this room, if we put all of our ef-forts of everything that everybody's done for our whole lives in this room, we'd have quite a list of ef-forts and attempts of what we've done. And many of those things we would not like to be shared with somebody else. But we've done some stuff. If that was progress, if any of those thoughts, words or ac-tions were progressive, why didn't they add to the degree or measure of fulfillment of ourselves? And why then do we still keep longing and keep looking for something else? This is a serious subject. This is the subject.

What Progressive Development teaches in terms of helping people to open up into a vision of a possible way of living is that every realm of life's existence has to be measured through the eyes of this subject. That nothing is exempt from it. There's no separate compartments, separate rooms. Even the effective-ness and the productiveness of hell has to be measured through the subject of love. Every subject that we can conceive of in thought, word and action, its fundamental, its foundation, its development platform is sitting on this issue of us longing for love and trying to fulfill it and all of our behavior is an acting out of it. Every behavior on this planet is an acting out of this thing. So why do we want to control the Mid-dle East? Why do they want to prevent us from controlling them? Why do we want to own more oil? Why does somebody else want a better price and to own that oil that they can own? You know, every behavior is an acting out of trying to fulfill this thing. And when do we get it that you can't fill an unlim-ited hole with limited filling?

Lynn made homemade éclairs for me for lunch the other day. Homemade éclairs, God, that was really good. But we're talking about that pudding filling that goes in éclairs. We're talking about enough of that pudding filling to fill all of time and space. What's that? Drizzled with whatever your imagination comes up with because as soon as I just said, filled with all time and space, somebody has the desire for some-thing else. And there it is right there. It wasn't enough that all of time and space and that the whole uni-verse was filled with sweet sugar pudding. That wasn't enough. We gotta drizzle that with chocolate now. Right? There it is. There it is.

The Progressive Development then is, based upon a spiritual definition of progress, something that has our vision be transcended to the spiritual realm. And then that will teach you how to see everything else. It would change the whole way that you see, every thought, every word and every action and it changes the way that you interact in relationship with all other things. Because if indeed the Qur'anic ayat, "inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajiun" - from Allah do all things come and to Allah do all things return - if indeed this is Truth, then that means that anything that I encounter through thought, word and action in my rela-tionships is also coming from Allah, returning to Allah, is of Allah and I'm interconnected with that thing. So that means everything has been encoded with a divine birthright - water, soil, air, ozone, ani-mate object, inanimate object. Whatever is the form of the object also has come from Allah, is imbued with Allah's essence and in the process of its lifespan its purpose is to return to Allah.

So who am I in relationship with when I'm, if I'm actually seeing, who am I in relationship with when I'm in relationship with all things? When I'm burning gas in my car and I'm riding on my tires down the street, what am I doing? Who am I in relationship with? I'm taking money out of my pocket and I'm throwing it on the counter of the Long Branch and I'm buying a coffee or a pastry and all these things are trading back and forth, up and down and in and out. Who am I actually in relationship with? What's actually going on?

Well, Progressive Development teaches you to see what that is, to have a whole picture. And then if you realize that you eternally are in a relationship with the divine and that the only measurement that is worth measuring is how fulfilled you are in that relationship then it's no longer that hard to figure out how to treat people and how to treat things and how to distribute the resources. See, money doesn't ful-fill me anyway. So might as well distribute all the money. Or at least find a way that people can get their basic needs met. Right, you know. I can't live in more than one house at the same time. So might as well let everybody have a home. You go through the six basic necessities or the birthrights, food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education and security. The fact of the matter is if you see things according to pro-gressive development, there's actually enough for everybody. Because the taking away of those things, I mean, or the excuse me, the abundance, the over-abundance of those things wasn't going to fulfill any-body anyway.

So here you have some people on the planet that have so much money that they could buy all of the rice on earth, but over here in a little country like Bangladesh, just outside of our village you have a family that doesn't have enough rice to feed their kids for tonight's dinner. And the person who has enough money to buy all the rice on the whole world, that person will still get hungry and then when they eat, they'll get full and then after they digest it and went to the bathroom, they'll get hungry again, just like this person over here. No difference. And owning all the rice in the world didn't stop them from getting hungry again, did it?

And having more rice than you could ever eat in ten thousand lifetimes, didn't stop you from getting hungry again. So why not make sure that other people got some rice? Food. Why not make sure that other people have some of their basic clothing, shelter, healthcare, education and security, etc. All these resources. Why not make sure everybody has them? And what's the reason to make sure that everybody has them? And this is what you'll study in progressive development, is because the purpose of having them wasn't just to enjoy them anyway. It was so that you were balanced enough that you could do what you're here to do. What are you here to do? Realize. And everybody's here to realize.

So the purpose of having nice clothes and the purpose of having nice things, it's a legitimate purpose, and by the way, it's fun to have some nice things. There's nothing wrong with it. But you know what, there's enough to go around, so a development platform has to deal with issues of distribution. So pro-gress, progressive development is going to later ask us questions. How do we distribute things and under what pretense do we distribute things? And how do we utilize them and what does good utilization mean? And the answers will all start coming up being the same thing. The good utilization of something is its virtue and its virtue is to open the path for you to fulfill your purpose. The bad utilization or the misutilization of things in religious terms is called a sin. And its problem is that it will take you away. It will take you off the straight path. So if we know that all things come from Allah and all things return to Allah and all things are imbued with Allah and all things have the same purpose and that it's spiritual unity and that the way that we can experience that in relationship is through love and that love has to be a real subject in all of our earth subjects.

Politics, economics, environment, trade, industrialization. Then when we start discussing how we're treating the water on this planet, we would have a different outlook of how to treat the water on this planet. Because water is no longer just a material commodity for the purpose of my five modes of at-tachment, to have it, to own it, to control it, right? Water is here for… and also water has its own birth-right. Did anybody ever stop to ask the water what it thought about being poisoned? I mean, Allah im-bued water with certain natural qualities. Water is-the Sufis like to, the mystics have always liked to use water as one of those great metaphors because it keeps changing its form but yet it's the same thing. It's a liquid or it's a solid or it's a gas. Water was meant to be allowed to be these things and it adapts to any one of these material conditions and it can change its form and still be itself. And it was created to flow. You know what happens when water's not flowing? It gets stagnant and the water gets sick and every-thing in it gets sick.

So under a progressive development platform, economically, politically and industrially, what would we have to consider is the most loving way to handle water? Not just because love is the lovey-dovey feel-ing. No, the actual the most loving relationship with water, for the reason that water's here to fulfill itself and for the reason that others are here to fulfill itself. So this starts to answer the question about handling water on this planet, handling the soil on this planet, handling the air on this planet, handling the ozone on this planet, handling trade on this planet, relationships on this planet. It's a whole different platform to look at. And it still allows for incentive. Progress always will allow for incentive because the more that you feel that you're growing in love, the more creative you are in your expression. It still allows for incentive.

But it doesn't allow for people who are making the effort to live their life to be lost. It's a startling thing to realize, if you haven't realized it before, when you hear terms thrown around on television through the military, or terms thrown around in the boardrooms of corporations like collateral damage. And then you say, but we're talking about human beings and not just human beings. We're also talking about life. Col-lateral damage. Progressive development doesn't allow for those things to be lost but it's not commu-nism, as you'll study, trying to turn everybody exactly into the same thing. Because some people like to wear black shirts and some people like to wear black and white shirts and some people like to wear blue shirts and some people like orange scarves and some people like white scarves and some people like black caps and tan caps. And some people like short hair and long hair. And that's part of the culture as-pect of the spokes. Expressing what you love and believe with your entitlement to do so. But it's all con-nected here in this realm through cause and effect to everybody and everything else.

So there could only be one way to measure progress. And it's not the movement of material things. It would only be the movement of a spiritual movement and that could only be something that is increas-ing without retiring. Love - Spiritual Unity. That's the context of the rest of the principles. And that's why they start out with spiritual unity being the first and then the whole, the new vision being the last one and all the stages in between. And you'll see that we'll hit on the different spokes and then in each category we'll hit on all these different aspects. But there has to be, there had to be a context for trying to communicate the principles. And that context was the platform. You know, we would go into the UN and they would say, what's your platform? We'd say progressive development. Never heard of it, they would say. Let us introduce you. You actually have heard of it. You actually have heard of it.

And it's not meant to profit off of. It's meant to have one's thoughts, words, and actions become profit-able in the realm of love. It's not meant to profit off of its platform. That's a huge leap for us to make, because of the fifth - what was the fifth mode of attachment? Desire for the fruit of the action. Desire for the fruit of the action is wanting unlimited profits, in other words, having things unlimitedly the way that you want them to turn out. So this model isn't meant to profit. It's meant to produce profitable results through thought, word and action for the fulfillment of love. Not for the hoarding of things or ideas.

The other thing is whether you live it your whole life or not, but I mean, haven't we all had a glimpse at times, even if it was just a few moments or a few minutes or an hour in a day, but at the times when you felt profound love, you needed not much of anything else? Like have you ever had a moment where you just want to be with somebody you love and it doesn't even matter where you are, where you go, what you do, what you eat, what you have and what the temperature is. Right? You just, you know. You could, you know, you want to get together for dinner and there's nowhere else to go and all there is is a carrot in the refrigerator. And you will turn that carrot into a feast because you're in love. We've all had moments of this. But what would it be like to actually have a development platform that was an infra-structure of people living into a life like this and calling it real, rather than backing off on it because people were too shy to deal with this subject because of what somebody else is going to think about you or say about you. You know, you walk into the boardroom or to walk into the realm of success out there with this train that is now, you know, rolling off the track and start talking about love. Or God. They'd look at you like you're an idiot.  
And yet they're caught up in the same dilemma, not only by their external behavior, but when they go home and at night they hope their sweetheart is like taking care of them. They want love too, after they went and did their thing all day long at the board of trade or wherever they were doing. Right? Or went out and was a big general in the war. When they get home they want to be able to lay their head down in a place that's safe and have somebody stroke their head and they want to be able to rest in peace. So they're still looking for love too. But yet you know you want to talk about love. They think you're an id-iot. Well, we're idiots not to. It's like the one thing that that we can't allow not to be in the development platform or the dialog is the reality of spiritual unity.

Everything comes from it. Everything returns to it. And if you, the principles and having a development platform and having our projects gives you a chance to be thinking about this and to be in relationship with it all day long. Because actually you are, whether you know it or not. So all day whatever you're doing, the way you spend your money, the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you breath, the way you think, the way you have friends, the things that you own temporarily, the things that you do tempo-rarily. All of this is this subject. And your progress is continually being measured, the development is continually being measured. As you pass through these stages of cause and effect, and it's being meas-ured by whether or not you're in love or at peace.

And everything is being measured. What's the Qur'an and the Bible call it? To a particle that is small as a mustard seed. And in other parts of the Qur'an they talk about the smallest particles which are actually immeasurable. That much. And how much is being seen? As much as a black ant on a black rock under the new moon under a black sky. Everything's being measured. Of course it is because it's in cause and effect. So you're in relationship with this principle of progress all day, every day, wither you are con-scious of it or not. But if you were conscious of it. I'm not guaranteeing that you becoming conscious of it is going to deliver you pleasure. If that's what you're looking for. Because if that's what you're looking for, then ignorance is bliss. Sometimes what you don't know is you were better off, if you just are inter-ested in pleasure. But if you are willing to measure progress in a whole new way, then enlightenment is the uncovering of knowledge. So the uncovering of knowledge will have you be present to all things. But is that helping you fulfill your purpose or not? So that's my first talk in introducing the idea of pro-gress again. And what the Katib Committee can do is go back and pass out those handouts that were written back in New York that actually maybe more succinctly than this talk but defines progress as an idea and defines progressive development as the platform for its idea.