The Quest for Integrity
Gary van Warmerdam
Integrity: the quality or state of being complete, undivided: spiritual, or aesthetic wholeness: organic unity: completeness.
It is a simple thing, wholeness that is undivided. It is also a very elusive quality. Integrity comes about when our mind, heart, and will are acting undivided. The phrase of, “my mind says one thing, but my heart says another”, may be all too common in our lives. When this happens our will is divided and our actions are with hesitation and the conflict of doubt.
When we live our lives from a place of Integrity we do not doubt ourselves. There is no second-guessing our actions and our words. Sometimes I see people try to superimpose a sense of integrity into their decisions by refusing to consider their own second opinions. This is the pretense of integrity in the name of not appearing weak or not living up to our own image of what we believe we should be. This is the ego’s version of integrity. The mind has the desire to believe that everything we do is in our integrity. Often we work very hard to make ourselves believe it. But, it is a false integrity.
When we are acting from our Integrity, what we could call our authentic self, we don’t try. We don’t’ have a need to try. We just take action. We don’t question whether what we are doing is the right thing. We also don’t have a need to justify or defend what we are doing to anybody. This includes ourselves.
The break in integrity is the division of the mind itself. Our mind says one thing and our mind says another thing in contradiction with the first thing said. We look at something we did in the past and we think, “I shouldn’t have done that.” Then we try to justify what we did because we don’t want to accept our own judgment. We defend what we did to ourselves. We say to ourselves, “We’ll it really was okay because I got (blank) out of it.” We project an opinion to ourselves, and then we defend ourselves against our own opinion. We can see that our mind is not in Integrity. It is divided.
Often in dreams the mind is represented as a house. It is the structure of beliefs in which we live. A mind that is not in Integrity is like a house divided against itself. It cannot stand. We find this to be true when we engage in the quest for truth. It is frightening to face the truth because when we do, it feels like our house of beliefs will fall. We mis-interpret this to mean that we will fall because we identify and attach so closely with what we believe. It feels like we will fall because we believe that we are that image we created of ourselves
This is the time for the courage of a warrior. A warrior must have the courage to face and accept the death of their beliefs with peace of mind. It is with this attitude that we can let go of our house of false beliefs. When the false beliefs fall, we find that the truth is still standing, because it can stand on its own. The truth does not need us to believe in it in order to survive.
After the fall of the belief system, we can create a new dream, based in Integrity and Truth. In the ancient mythologies this is the resurrection to a new life after death. It is the Phoenix that is formed from the ashes. In this process our physical body does not die. Actually we do this process with our bodies intact. We need our body in order for our mind to have a place to function.
In the Power Journey to Teotihuacan we set our intent to let go of our false beliefs. We surrender to death what is not the truth. We let go of our attachments that trap us in a house of conflict that we call Hell. After we let go of our old dream, we go to recover our Integrity and create a new personal dream of Heaven in our lives. In this process we discover that we are not really what we believe we are. We are the force that creates all the ideas and images of what we are. We are the force that creates dreams. We are Life.
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