The link between.....identity and integrity

Firstly I want to say how moved I have been by everyone who has been in contact with me to reassure me about the possible insignificance of this blog having a flag against it. Mind you, there was no flag when I signed into write it now. For me, it is another example of how events in life work to throw the conscious mind from certainty into confusion so that it can expand. My uncertain state of mind reached it's pinnacle on Tuesday night.

I have often wrote about the importance of having integrity for having a life that works. Integrity is as much of a law as is gravity. However, the workings of integrity is more subtle than that of gravity. With the law of gravity, if I go up to the top of a building and jump from its roof, I'm going to go down regardless of whether or not I am a good person. With integrity the effect comes with whether or not I keep my word or not. I was dimly aware of this but up until Tuesday had not linked a way I was feeling directly to not being my word around something. Readers of this blog will know that I have almost completed a one year's team management and leadership programme with Landmark Education. Central to everything is the emphasis on integrity which is not about being right or wrong, just about being your word. I find it similar to Buddhism in that it says, I am not my thoughts, or feelings; I am simply MY WORD. It's funny but as I have just written this I am reminded of the sentence in the bible that says 'in the beginning was the WORD', why have I written this, is there any connection. I don't know I am going to have to sit with that insight for a while. Maybe there will be more explanation in a later blog entry....maybe not.

Anyway, back to me and this blog entry.....This year's programme is all about being my word and every breakdown is put down to a lack of integrity or integrity being out in some area of life. For a long time now I have been aware of a seminar that was starting on Tuesday night. I had said that I would go myself and would enroll people into coming to hear what might be possible for themselves. After all my mission for this life-time is to teach people to fish so that they can elevate consciousness for themselves. For me the access to this is the Forum which is offered by Landmark Education but I am aware that there are lots of other self-development programmes. However what Landmark offers is an opportunity to study and transform how we are made up as human beings and how the identity operates. But this is just how it occurs to me, it's not the truth and not how it may occur to someone else. So I will do what Buddha did which is to say 'check it out, and if you find it's not for you, find something else', what is important though is to find something else.

Tuesday morning dawned and I remembered that I was going to go to this seminar and speak to my college students about it. Then immediately I had a thought about an exam we were to have on Wednesday and I immediately said to myself 'I need the time to study'. The result is that I went into college, spoke half-heartedly about it and then promptly forgot about it. Later on in the morning we heard that the exam we were going to have is put forward a week. Even then I didn't offer the alternative to people of going to this seminar. I finished my day and came home. The people who I live with had arrived home and suddenly for some reason I felt so tired and lonely. I excused myself and went upstairs where I sat on my bed wondering what on earth was wrong with me. I had some conference calls but I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. As for studying....forget it, I couldn't focus on the books never mind torment my mind with deciphering squiggly lines. I chose then to withdraw my consciousness from the world by going to sleep, but no sleep would come. I was tormented by all kinds of dark thoughts.

Then with a flash of insight I knew exactly why I was feeling like I was. I had given my word to go to this seminar and be powerful and bold in sharing what I got from it so that people would have an access to them having a life they lived and I wasn't my word. I know that this can read that I am being hard on myself but this is the only way that insights and shifts occur. The insights I get may not appear to be rational but I know with the force with which they hit me that they are relevant. I experienced enormous relief when I could declare a breakdown in my integrity and really be in the impact of not being my word. I then thought back to other times where my mood was dark and in some way the mood has always been linked to whether or not I am in integrity or not. But up to now, although I have written about it ad nauseum in some places, the kind of direct causal link I experienced on Tuesday night had eluded me. I had the theory, had a vague idea that there was some truth in it but had no direct evidence of the link. On Tuesday night I got that link so forcefully.

After this realization I went off to sleep and woke up early this morning, ready to make up for the time I had lost the night before. I woke up refreshed and determined to do everything I could to clean up on areas where my integrity was out. It started with the people I live with here and continued all through the day. Each time I made a phone call and told the truth about why I hadn't done what I said I would do, I felt lighter and freer. My final restoring of integrity came at the end of the say when I went up to a woman outside a health food shop to ask her about her experiences of meditation. I had promised myself everytime I went into town that I would do this as part of an article I am writing on meditation and the different kinds but always came home again without doing it. Not yesterday.....I strode off down the street and without thinking went up to a girl who has unlocking her bicycle and explained what I was doing and could she give me a couple of minutes to speak about meditation.

It wasn't a great interview because she doesn't meditate but that doesn't matter. Where the power is for me is that I was my word around what I said I would do. The result of all of this was an evening last night where I had so much energy and life. What I see now looking back is how my identity acted to sabotage it so that I wouldn't be my word. But unfortunately the law of integrity is a law as obvious as gravity but much more subtle. I believe that it begins working the minute we commit ourselves to doing something. If we are our word then life works, if we are not then the consequences of violating any law come into effect.

There are many ways to interpret what I have written here. What came back to me yesterday when I shared this with people was 'you're too hard on yourself, where's the freedom and ease'. For me, and I don't write for anyone else, it is this being hard on myself and refusing to accept appearances for the reality but to look for that which is hidden and so transform it is what continues to shift my consciousness. It's not easy to live this kind of an austere life but I do believe that it is necessary to reach the ultimate aim of living life from an enlightened state of consciousness so that others can know it is possible and go for it themselves using whatever means works for them.....