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When you experience unity of intention, fascination, and purpose, you live like a bloodhound on a scent, joyfully doing what feels truest in each moment.
Your own life is probably somewhere between utterly blissful and completely wrecked. You have a vague sense of purpose, which you hope to follow someday. Though your job isn’t perfect, it’s good enough. And your relationships are fine. Mostly.
But your nature is forever colliding with a force that can tear it apart: culture.
Humans create elaborate cultures because we are intensely social beings, dependent on the goodwill of others from the moment we’re born. We also have an enormous capacity to absorb and replicate the behavior of people around us.
In this rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings—even intense ones, like longing or anguish—to please our cultures. At that point, we’re divided against ourselves. We aren’t in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things). Or we may try to fit in with a number of different groups, living in multiplicity (many things).
Everything in and around us is negatively affected when we lose integrity. And because our true nature is serious about restoring us to wholeness, it hauls out the one tool that reliably gets our attention: suffering.
Physical pain comes from events. Psychological suffering comes from the way we deal with those events. It can grow exponentially in situations where pain is entirely absent.
Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period.
Of all the strategies and skills I’ve ever learned, the ones that actually work are those that help people see where they’ve abandoned their own deep sense of truth and followed some other set of directives.
In The Divine Comedy, Dante goes down into a huge pit (the inferno), then up a mountain (purgatory). He grows stronger and walks with less and less effort as he reaches the mountain’s summit.
Dante uses flight as a metaphor for a life that feels unlimited, literally heavenly.
The most common reason we end up feeling this way is by doing what we’re “supposed to.” We learn from our culture how a good person is supposed to behave, and we behave that way.
Even after doing everything we can to be good, we don’t feel good.
Looking back at that experience and the stories of so many clients, I feel enormous gratitude for all our confusion, and despair. Those feelings meant that our internal guidance systems were working perfectly, signaling “WRONG WAY!” as clearly as they could. With nothing but the best of intentions, we’d lost the way of integrity.
But no one can sleepwalk away from integrity indefinitely, because things get worse the further we travel in the wrong direction.
Dark wood of error symptom #1: Feeling purposeless
Very few actually want to die, but many tell me they see little point in living.
Our sense of purposelessness doesn’t disappear in the face of culturally defined achievements. It remains a persistent, goading force, a biting fly that won’t stop buzzing around our heads until we begin pursuing goals that truly fulfill us—in other words, following the way of integrity.
Dark wood of error symptom #2: Emotional misery
Neediness, panic, depression. Welcome to a few of the emotional states that may jump you as you wander through the dark wood of error.
Whatever your repeated or persistent negative emotions, try thinking of them as Dante’s wild beasts, whose job it is to make your life unbearable when you stray from your true path.
Dark wood of error symptom #3: Physical deterioration
But from what I’ve seen, it’s rare for someone who’s internally split not to develop some kind of health problem.
But speaking of science, solid research shows all sorts of links between living in harmony with our truth and maintaining good health.
If you’re inexplicably sick, weak, or accident-prone, your body may be trying to tell you you’re lost in the dark wood.
Dark wood of error symptom #4: Consistent relationship failures
It’s simple logic: if you don’t walk your true path, you don’t find your true people. You end up in places you don’t like, learning skills that don’t fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong.
When humans meet in the dark wood of error, all of them sleepwalking, the relationships they create tend to be shallow or toxic or both.
The path to true love—true anything—is the way of integrity. No other person can ever find yours for you, much less give it to you. But you can always, no matter what your circumstances, find and follow it yourself.
Dark wood of error symptom #5: Consistent career failures
When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern.
If you continue to resist your genuine impulses, you’ll become slowly aware that what you’re doing to make a living is turning you into the walking dead.
Dark wood of error symptom #6: Bad habits you can’t break
We hanker constantly for just a little more mood-altering . . . something. Anything. A little more beer, a little more nicotine, a little more cocaine, a little more all of the above.
When we’re feeling fundamentally lost, afflicted by purposelessness, foul moods, and bad jobs, anything that stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers can become an addiction. Some of the most common, aside from the dynamic duo of drugs and alcohol, are gambling, sex, intense relationship drama, shopping, binge eating, and staring at the internet day and night without pausing to sleep, eat, or pee. I myself have been known to spend hours solving urgent problems that existed only as pixels of colorful light on my smartphone. (Though, in my defense, all that candy wasn’t going to crush itself.)
Whatever happens, if you don’t leave the dark wood of error, you’ll find your bad habits almost impossible to break. Eventually, they may well break you.
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