The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

by Martha Beck

Eye-gaze is a powerful way to fire up the mirror neurons in our brains and shift the way we feel toward others.

Some people experience enlightenment as one huge, irreversible event. Others sense it in moments of insight and heightened perception that gradually increase and lengthen.

Throughout his adventures in paradise, he tries to explain two basic perceptions that are alien to his prior human experience. First, he no longer feels any separation from anyone or anything. It’s absolutely obvious to him that the entire universe is just one entity. Second, his personal will (Buddhists might call it his “ego”) begins to dissolve, and diminishes steadily the further he goes into paradise. He finds himself directed by absolute love, which also motivates the actions of everyone else in paradise.

For an American, admitting to such total ignorance is anathema. We aim to know everything. We’re socialized to think that not knowing is stupid and shameful. But in traditions like Zen, “don’t know mind” refers to a way of thinking that’s free from rigid concepts, as clear and fluid as air. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” said Suzuki Roshi. “In the expert’s there are few.” From a place of enlightenment, the mind’s job isn’t to shore up beliefs, but to let them go.

Whatever measure of integrity we find seems to turn us toward service.

The only thing that will keep us from destroying ourselves at a collective level is exactly what keeps us from destroying ourselves at an individual level.

As Larry says, on the path to happiness, our final destination is service.

Remember what the poet learned in purgatory: love doesn’t divide the pool of goodness available to all humanity, but multiplies it for everyone.

When things return to their true nature, they can heal more dramatically and quickly than you might expect.

They found that our culture is divided between people who see the universe as dangerous, frightening, and meaningless, and those who see it as “safe, enticing, and alive.” The researchers called these two perspectives “primal world beliefs.” They described how, because perception is selectively screened and interpreted according to belief systems, people in either camp can find abundant evidence to support their worldviews.

It boils down to this: peace is your home. Integrity is the way to it. And everything you long for will meet you there.

The way we see determines what we see, whether our primal world belief shows us a universe that’s dangerous, frightening, and meaningless, or safe, enticing, and alive.

If the transformation of consciousness is real, what lies before us is not a time of building but of unbuilding, not thinking harder but thinking less. (As Lao Tzu puts it in the Tao te Ching, “In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Way, every day something is dropped.”)

“Eternal” doesn’t mean something that lasts for a long time, but something outside of time. Remember, Dante is becoming identified with light, and at the speed of light, time no longer exists. A photon can be anywhere, everywhere, at every moment in history.

Because we are all one thing, one being, each experience is all experience.

When we fully dissolve the lie of being isolated within ourselves, we join Dante and everyone else, everything else. We forget ourselves as small, doomed beings on a threatened planet and remember ourselves as l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”