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

by Martha Beck

The most dangerous places for creating change are also the ones where it’s most desperately needed.

integrity requires a particular kind of courage: the willingness to be seen as we are.

You may set firm boundaries, honoring a new level of self-respect.

Being seen in ways we can’t control terrifies us all.

Love-beams, like sunbeams, light up our lives.

She knows Dante needs to look at the love that’s looking at him.

Most of these methods involve long periods of quiet introspection—not learning new thoughts, but loosening our grip on all thought.

“centering prayer” have similar effects.

That joy is in everyone, always.

is going to happen to me because I wrote that book” made me feel sick, frightened, and trapped. I’d long since learned that true thoughts didn’t feel so much like poison. Noted.

“Who or what would I be without the thought?”

That turnaround was “I’m going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book.”

“It’s all nonsense! It’s delusional to perceive an inner light, to have no fear of death, to lose all sense of guilt. It’s attacking our way of life!” Yes, it is. And that doesn’t make it any less real.

The path toward Enlightenment is not only real, but we are biologically predisposed to seek it.” Brain scientists are hard at work figuring out how and why.

Remember Dante’s feeling that all reality is one united thing, and all action is driven by love? That’s what people feel when these “separateness” and “control” areas of the brain go quiet.

And it seems that the more I dissolve my internal suffering, the more these mysterious things happen.

As a twig is to a branch is to a tree trunk, so one human’s integrity is to a couple’s, a family’s, a nation’s. This is how individuals and small groups may end up influencing huge numbers of people.

One thing that can happen at this point is a sense of increased social pressure.

Connect frequently with soul teachers who can ground you in your own integrity.

If someone says you’re superior, don’t buy that either.

Be transparent: hide less and less of yourself.

The astonished will separate from you. The gratified will bond with you more closely.

Allow the “beams of love” to light up your inner life.

love doesn’t divide the pool of goodness available to all humanity, but multiplies it for everyone.

When I look around me now, everything appears “safe, enticing, and alive.” The acronym for this is “sea.” From this perspective, we’re all intermingled drops in what Dante calls “lo gran mar de l’essere,” the “great sea of being.” Absolutely united, perfectly unique, and constantly communicating.

Imagining may be the key to finding paradise, in our individual lives and then in all life, all consciousness.

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.

what lies before us is not a time of building but of unbuilding, not thinking harder but

thinking less.