Āya Bhuwan: may you live long!

Welcome to episode two of Being Integrity, where we establish a firm foundation for your progress in this series. Why is integrity so difficult? Sometimes when we try to explain it to people, it’s as if we’re speaking a foreign language. But actually, integrity has been trained out of us; it has been socialized out of us; it has been basically beaten out of us by a society surrounding us that’s completely out-of-integrity itself.

The government is spying on everybody, they’re lying to the press, to the Congress; businesses are stabbing each other in the back; there’s all kinds of covert wars and stuff going on all over the planet—and these are the leaders! So if the leaders are like that, then imagine what the rest of the population must be. In school, it’s supposed to be about education; but it’s actually just about social conditioning, about training easy-to-manage workers for the industrial corporations.

So we’re not really getting what we’re promised in any area of life: government is corrupt, business is corrupt, school is corrupt, families are corrupt; people are cheating on each other, nobody’s following any kind of moral standards. It’s very rare, and when they do, it’s only because of external coercion like a church, or because they’re afraid of getting caught.

So we live in a world where being out-of-integrity is pervasive, and to get along in that world we often find ourselves compromising what we know is right and wrong, in order to get by. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs. But this is the typical consciousness that we find in the world today. We want to do something about this; we want to encourage and help people to regain their integrity, and to become a fully integrated, whole, fully functional human being.

Why? Because without integrity, without the intention to reduce suffering or eliminate suffering for ourselves and others, we are less than fully human. A full human being—human being in the full sense of the term—is one who is committed to reducing or eliminating suffering for everyone. Of course, this is a Buddha, or at least an arahant: a fully Self-realized person.

So a full human being is something very far above the average human being of today. Yet without integrity, we cannot even take a small step toward that platform. We’re stuck in the subhuman consciousness of thinking we are the body; we’re thinking we are some abstract designation related to our social or economic or political status. That is a conditioned state of consciousness. It’s not real consciousness; it’s consciousness in terms of some symbolic representation or some abstract relationship that we take on and say, “This is my self.”