Integrity

Too many human beings in this life never make it over the hurdle of integrity. In fact, most people don’t even really know what integrity actually means. It’s not, for example, to them, an unbreakable bond with honesty, and love of the truth. For them, it means an unbreakable bond with anything at all.

It’s not enough, to the function of human integrity, to form unbreakable bonds with our values. We must also make the conscious focused effort at scrutinizing those values for their intellectual integrity and their alignment with our authentic self. When I did this, for example, I had the realization that several of my values weren’t even actually my values, but my parents values that I had subliminally adopted as a child and implemented into my life subconsciously as an adult; without thought. And that’s not necessarily to say that ALL of those values were incorrect, or wrong to live by, but simply that they weren’t the result of my own conscious choice to possess them, because I’d never even really thought about it.

It seems that more people than not are under a hypnotic spell, and perhaps something akin to “coach’s son syndrome”. There’s hardly an authentic human being left at all; most are not themselves in any way, but who others want them to be. It’s not always our dads or parents we sacrifice our authentic selves to gain favor with, but it is quite often the hub or starting point of thinking it’s something necessary for a functioning human life. Spoiler alert: it’s not.

Yes, your butt really does look big in that dress. No, it’s not the dress, it does the same thing in the jeans and the sweatpants. Now the burden is no longer on me to lie to you, now the burden is back on you to either be content with a large badonkydonk, or actually put in the real work on yourself to change the truth to something you actually like to hear, by actually being that truth. I used to think it made more sense to lie to save others feelings, pretending to like things that I actually didn’t and hate things that I secretly liked, simply to be accepted by people who weren’t even like me. After all, if they were like me, neither of us would have needed to put on any face. Madness.

Integrity is the firm resolve to one’s own self to be completely honest in all situations, and in no matter what company. There’s no putting on this face for our parents and that face for our friends, and another for our boss and another for our hairstylist; everyone gets the same face. We might even be wrong about something, but we’re going to be honest about it and make the conscious focused effort to correct our mistake when it’s pointed out. It’s very freeing, in the effect that it’s no longer my burden to carry around the weight of so many different expectations of others in my mind. It’s no longer my problem if they accept me or not. I’m going to be who I actually am, and if you like me, cool. And if you don’t like me, well that’s okay too. Being in tune with my own intellectual integrity and autonomy requires me to sacrifice any desire for acceptance from others, as this is a potential deterrent from the one way train rail called “the truth”, which integrity requires us to be in line with without any deviation.

To live with integrity is a personal bond with one’s own self to live in honest connection with our authentic selves, unbiased fairness, and a deep love affair with the truth. Sometimes we don’t know what the truth is; and we don’t make up something on the fly and run with it, when “I don’t know” is still on the table as an honest response. Sometimes people are ashamed of themselves for not actually knowing. So pretending to know, making something up to sound smart, or even just parroting something they heard, are perceived as legitimate substitutions in a dishonest mind for actually knowing or admitting to not knowing. Not knowing an answer is honest, ‘knowing’ a potentially false answer is dishonest. It is wiser to be in a state of questioning doubt, than holding any possibility of being comfortably numb in an illusory state, and it really doesn’t matter what topic of discussion.

People will say this: “I honestly believed it was the truth,” as if this redeems their integrity. It doesn’t, and in fact confirms they don’t actually possess it. Integrity doesn’t believe any words that hold any possibility of being false, at all. It puts our integrity in the hands of things we cannot control. If something can possibly be false, adopting it to occupy our thoughts can only mean we are possibly false, which integrity cannot accept. Our bond with integrity requires us to be in alignment with the truth only, absolutely no falsity or even any potential falsity is allowed into the given premises of the honest mind. ONLY the clearly observable and demonstrated truth will be allowed to rest here. Not what we think might be true, not what we want to be true, but what’s actually observably and demonstrably true only.

How can we tell the difference between someone telling us the truth, and someone trying to take us for a jolly ride on a derailed bs train of thought? The answer is inside of you, because in literally every instance, we actually do know if they are telling us the truth or not. Quite often we ignore what our own self is telling us and talk ourselves into something else, don’t we? You see it sometimes with relationships, when we actually knew better deep down than to get with that obviously toxic person, and ignored our gut instincts for some illusion of a legitimate reason we sold ourselves on – because in reality, it’s just what we wanted to do, didn’t we? All of those excuses crumble like the house of cards they actually are eventually.

No lie can possibly last forever, and no truth can possibly be extinguished. The absolute best a deceiver can possibly do, is smother the truth with layers upon layers of false. They can never make it magically disappear, they can only hide it under blankets of believable falsities. Possessing integrity in a dishonest society is something like Roddy Piper’s character in the banned film, “They Live.” When he puts on the glasses, he’s observing the reality as it honestly is, and when he takes off the glasses he sees what is desired for us to believe. To see the actual truth of a thing (or metaphorically, putting on our integrity glasses), we can read behind the words, understanding the intent and meaning behind the presented information with an honest unbiased focus on the conundrum, “is this actually true or is it what someone wants me to believe?”

There’s perhaps an arguable distinction between reading behind the words and reading between the lies, although not enough of one to argue with myself about it here. The point is that it’s a function of our intellectual integrity, not just to understand if something is a lie, but to decipher the actual truth for ourselves with our own brains given only the false information. Homicide detectives have to do this for a living, for example. Very few of those criminals come clean with the detectives but they’re still able to decipher the actual truth, typically. This is done by understanding the motive for deception, how the words match up to the evidence, and the honest exploring of more likely truths.

No matter each specific individual motive, it’s observed that a deceiving individual is ashamed of the truth, and the need to lean on the false exists to take the place of honest shame in the brain. To acknowledge the truth means to acknowledge the shame, and it’s particularly the shame and pain that the deceiver is running from, and not necessarily any particular truth. People don’t lie because the truth is pretty. They lie because it’s ugly and they are ashamed to be a part of it. The honest human being doesn’t run from the shame but embraces it honestly, making the conscious focused effort to understand what we can do better, to actually be better. We understand that the only honest way to not feel the shame is to not perform shameful acts, and then there’s nothing to lie about. Burying the shame under layers of dishonesty is quite a major social problem going on around here, folks. Hardly anyone is in tune with their own authentic selves; in fact they are, for the most part, deceiving themselves.

Dishonesty is the mental plague of humanity, that must be overcome if we wish to prevent our own destruction. Practically all of our problems boil down to the common man’s (honest vs dishonest) responses to media propaganda. The dishonest believe what they want to believe, and the honest can only accept what’s actually and factually true. Honest skepticism is required of all projected information, and absolutely nothing is taken at face value.

The dishonest will say things like “everybody lies”, and quite a few other cliche dishonest projections they hold onto like the covets of a tenet. These people could, if they actually wanted to, prove themselves incorrect, by becoming the first honest person to ever exist. Then they would know for sure, no guessing required that, “everybody” doesn’t lie. They would themselves become the evidence that honest people are real. But instead of doing this or even trying to do it, they simply deceive themselves in a lame effort to convince themselves that everyone does it. Now they can keep doing it and not feeling guilty about it, because it’s “just what everybody does”.

Whether you believe it or not, more and more human beings are actually making the focused resolution in their brains to become honest in all situations no matter the consequence. A house of cards can’t stand a gust of wind, so we form the foundations of our thoughts on the unshakable mountain of truth. When it’s demonstrated to us that something we think might be false, we don’t get mad or offended – but perform a rigorous and thorough investigation into the topic. Observing all available evidence and testimonies, arguments from all sides, leaving absolutely nothing out (for any specific detail can be critical to shining the light on the truth) and form clear, sound judgments in honest observation of all possible information.

Quite often we see in our researches, when viewing things from a humble, honest perspective, that, “the truth” of the topic is actually quite obvious. To believe a lie we had to ignore the obvious truth (ignore-ance); recognizing the actual truth invalidates the false that we wanted to be true. In this inner conundrum is where the human discovers, themselves, whether they actually have integrity or not. The actual truth of a thing requires us to sacrifice the tunnel vision of what we want to be true, to actually understand it. The actual truth does not magically bend to our desires.

Sometimes, the hard truth is, it’s ourselves that’s really the problem going on around here. And it’s particularly our honest commitment to changing ourselves that’s going to make this place better, even if only one individual at a time. Dishonesty has distracted mankind quite severely from our true purpose here as caretakers of Nature, and the results are ugly. We deserve better. Nature deserves better from us. I might not be able to expect literally everyone to change overnight, but I can BE the honesty I expect to see, and hold a legitimate disappointment for not receiving it. I no longer tolerate dishonesty, and I can tell who is who, because I am that honest thing myself. You either honestly observed the same obvious truth of a thing as I did, or you dishonestly deceived yourself to believing something you want to believe, and that’s the simple truth of that fork in the road folks. If you think it’s me that’s the one deceiving myself about the topic, let’s talk about it and get to the truth, because it’s the only possible answer two honest people can actually settle on. If we are both honest, then the demonstrated incorrectness will be corrected. The unseen perk of integrity is only being wrong about something ONCE. The intellectually honest will correct the mistake and move forward in the correct honest understanding, and the dishonest will “agree to disagree” and continue on with the incorrect understanding in an ignorant bliss. Integrity, there’s those who have it, and those who don’t. It’s always been our own choice.