Āya Bhuwan: Welcome to the next installment of Being Integrity, where we’re going to talk about the definition of integrity used in this series, and also discuss the cultural limitations or assumptions that cause most people to misunderstand, not only integrity, but the entire teaching of the Buddha.

Buddha spoke on integrity often. It was a favorite theme of his. He used the word sappurisā, which means sat or a truthful purisā, man or person. So a sappurisā is one who speaks the truth.

In our modern society there are so many excuses for lying, or fudging the truth, or telling little white lies. But they’re not really white because we deceive ourselves, as well as others. And once we get in that habit it’s very difficult to break. So part of integrity is being truthful; but there’s a lot more to it than that.

The dictionary definition of integrity is not very useful for our purposes. Let’s go over it though, just so we have a baseline for comparison. Integrity is defined as a noun, “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness,” and the example is: ‘He is known as a man of integrity’. The second definition given is “the state of being whole and undivided,” and the example is: ‘upholding territorial integrity and national sovereignty.’ Third is, “the condition of being unified, unimpaired or sound in construction,” for example: ‘the structural integrity of the novel.’ And finally, “internal consistency or a lack of corruption, [as in electronic data]: ‘integrity checking’.”

Now what is the problem with this? Whose moral standard, which moral standard? and when? Morality is a relative thing; it’s external to the personality. So if we’re following some moral code it means it’s imposed on us from outside, number one; and number two, morality changes over time—it’s relative. So the morality of New York in the 1920s, is completely different from the morality in a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka in the 17th century. Which morality are we talking about?

And it’s unfair to make an assumption and say that we accept this morality or that morality as the morality, when actually there are so many contradictions in different moral teachings that it’s basically a useless standard. A much better standard is completeness, consistency, wholeness, fully functional.

This leads to a very interesting definition of integrity. Thus in this series we define integrity as:

“The objective, measurable state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, in perfect condition—born of compassion: the intention to eliminate suffering for self and others without creating dependence.”

So this begins the auspicious introduction to Śrī Lalitā-sahasranāmam, the thousand names of Goddess Lalitā; the most beautiful and powerful prayer. In the opening you heard:

अरुणां करुणा-तरंगिताक्षीं धृत-पाशांकुश-पुष्प-बाण-चापाम्।

aruṇāṁkaruṇā-taraṁgitākṣīṁ dhṛta-pāśāṅkuśa-puṣpa-bāṇa-cāpām |

“I meditate on Bhāvanī: Āmbā, the supreme happiness, whose color is like the Sun at dawn—in other words red—and from whom rays of light are emanating. Her compassion for Her devotees comes out of Her eyes like waves of the ocean. She has four hands. In the rear hands She holds two weapons: pāśām (lassoo) and ankuṣam (elephant goad). In the front hands, She holds a bow made of sugarcane and arrows made of flowers. I meditate on Her form called Bhavānī, the state of supreme happiness, with beams of light.”

So this is called the dhyānam. Before every stotram or prayer, there is a verse that defines the object of meditation, and this is called the dhyānam-śloka. You’ll find it in every Sahasranāmam, or in every major prayer. So this practice is to focus our minds on Devī—Śakti, the goddess in Her most auspicious form. What does auspicious mean? It means, it gives good results in the future.

There are two kinds of happiness: immediate happiness and extended happiness; happiness that we get right now, and happiness that we pile up for the future. So this kind of prayer, either hearing or reciting, give us happiness in the future. It’s called śreyas; whereas immediate happiness is called preyas, and from which comes our English word pray. ‘God, I want this right now!’ But God is not our order-supplier. He’s not our servant. God is more like the controller; that which manifests.

So, any manifestation takes some time. Try to understand: it’s not that you can pray for something and get it right away. That’s not how it works—unless, of course, you’re praying for a particular state of mind. But even in that case, it takes some time to adjust everything. So really we should be interested in śreyas: eventual happiness, future happiness, happiness in the next birth even. So these prayers don’t give immediate results, but they very quickly give results.

Integrity is based on the principle of truthfulness: keeping one’s word. Integrity has to be based on something real; thus integrity cannot refer to a corporation, religion, nation-state or other abstraction. Integrity is meaningful only in the context of an individual: ‘a man or woman of integrity.’ Integrity is how to live with a clean conscience.

Watch the video: Being Integrity 0—Introduction

Āya Bhuwan: may you live long! Welcome to Being Integrity. This is going to be a series—quite an extensive series, I think—about integrity and the Buddha’s teaching.

Now integrity is based on truthfulness. We hear these days a lot of talk about ‘integrity in business’. But this is actually an oxymoron. For those of you who aren’t on good terms with your dictionary, an oxymoron means a self-contradictory statement, like military intelligence or integrity in business.

Because what’s the first thing you do when you start a business? You file a fictitious name statement and then you incorporate, and your incorporation is simply some words on paper and signed by a few people. And then suddenly you have this entity that has all the rights of a person! Of course a corporation isn’t a person; it’s a lie, and so is the name. The whole thing is a fabrication.

So in that context how can you have any integrity? It’s just self-contradictory, oxymoronic to have integrity in the context of a corporation. It’s just impossible.

Of course one can have personal integrity himself. But then to work for a corporation is definitely a breach of personal integrity, because that means you’re recognizing an entity that’s fictitious! Anyway, so we’re not going to talk about integrity in the context of business and we’re not going to talk about it in the context of religion either.

Because religion is also a fabrication. You might say well you’re a monkey or in the ‘buddhist’ religion, but actually there is no such thing as ‘buddhism’. As another ‘buddhist’ monk, Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu has kindly pointed out, that religions are also fabrications. They are also abstractions; they also have no real physical existence. They’re just information, they’re just software. So what to speak of talking about corporate context, it’s meaningless to talk about integrity in a religious context as well.

What is meaningful, however, is to talk about a man of integrity, a person of integrity; and Buddha used the word sappurisā. Sappurisā is a combination of sat and purisā. Sat means truthful or actually, eternally existing, and eternal is real being. A temporary being is only fabricated, phony being; but eternal being is real being. So that kind of man, purisā, who is eternal who has eternal values, eternal verities and truths, is known as a sappurisā.

Sappurisā is a man of integrity. So we’re talking here about how to transform your being into that of a sappurisā, a man of integrity. Because integrity is not something you have—that would make it a virtue. And that would make it disposable, dispensable or changeable. But we’re talking about a type of integrity that is so deep that it’s integrated with your very being: integral integrity, wholeness; sappurisā, eternal truths.

This video lesson is about how to learn skillfully: the science of study.

If you duplicate and apply these methods in your study of Skillful Living, you will get much more out of the materials.

Most schooling deliberately teaches you the wrong way to learn. First, you should not approach a subject because someone else is making you study it you should approach it because you want to learn it and put it into practical use in your life in other words you should learn to acquire skills.

The first necessary skill in the art of Skillful Living is how to learn skillfully.

Presentation Design

The presentation design in an informational course is intended to leave you informed. The presentation design in this course is intended to open up a new world of experience for you: the experience of Skillful Living and specifically, the skill of being able to teach yourself any skill you desire. We use a simple form of presentation to accomplish this.

We have developed precise language for the materials that experience and testing show we must make available to deliver our promise to you. Quite a bit of thought and testing has gone into the language: the semantics or the way things are stated.

On most of the slides, we will read the slide aloud while you read those same words silently to yourself. Please read the slides to yourself at the same time you are listening to them being read. From time to time, we will pause to comment on what has been read, demonstrate a technique, or have a discussion with you.

At any time, if you do not understand a word that is used or the meaning of what is read is not clear for you, please stop the video and look up the term in a good dictionary. If you have a comment or question about what has been read, please post it in the comments.

There are four stages of becoming genius any field: duplication, understanding, ontological analysis and metacognition.

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Authentic learning, not imitative but real genius, requires changing your being. This tells you how. Based one the Buddha's teaching of paṭicca-samuppāda, dependent origination.

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How the different states of consciousness are localized in the chakras. 

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Namaste

So we’re going to talk about consciousness again. And remember the last time we talked about consciousness, we talked about it in terms of the light—the quality and kind of light that we see in the different states of consciousness.

So just to review very quickly, let’s go over that again. There are four states of consciousness: jagrat, where we see the world; svapna, in dreams; suśupti, deep sleep or the void; and turīya or the Self. In jagrat consciousness, the light is reflective, and it reflects off of external objects. In svapna, the light is internal, and the objects are self-luminous. In suśupti the light is covered. It looks like the Void: there’s no light, no objects, no nothing. And in turīya, there is only light—the light of the Self or Brahman.

Now let’s take another look at these same four states of consciousness that everyone experiences all the time. I want to emphasize that the four states of consciousness go on concurrently; but our focus changes. So just like, for example when we’re asleep, we’re in svapna or even suśupti. Still, a loud noise can wake us up, which means there’s still some awareness of jagrat.

And of course behind all of them there’s always turīya. Let’s take a look. Turīya is the Self. That’s the positive state of consciousness, where Self is the only object, meaning there’s nonduality. So this is the Truth; this is Self-realization, this is enlightenment. And turīya is always there; we’re always in turīya! But most of us don’t realize it because we’re focused on the other states of consciousness. So what are they again?

Suśupti, the Void: in this state the object is darkness, emptiness or nothingness. And this is actually a state of ignorance. It covers over the pure consciousness in turīya, and also embodies the three types of ignorance: positive desire, negative desire and delusion. And the delusion is, of course, that we are a separate individual being. And that we can desire things, both positively and negatively. Negative desire means, “I don’t want that”; positive desire means, “I want that.”

So because of this ignorance, the pure light of turīya becomes covered. And then once that’s covered, dreams can arise in svapna. In this, the object is internal, self-luminous thoughts. Dreams, in other words. So in this state of consciousness we perceive dreams and thoughts also. So thoughts are actually dreams, but when we’re focused on svapna they appear real, they appear solid.

Finally there’s the state of jagrat where we perceive the world through the senses. And in this state the objects are external, individual objects and ego, the illusion of “I”. The ego is not present in the other states; we simply experience, in dreams for example, bits of karma that are too small really to be experienced in jagrat. But they seem real, even though we have no ego in that state. But we sure do in jagrat; in fact the ego is the dominant perception in that state. How many sentences do we begin with “I”? “I want this,” “I don’t want that,” “I do this,” “This is mine.” It’s all illusion, because it’s temporary.

Anyway let’s take a different look at these four states of consciousness. Let’s take a look at how it appears to our experience. Up till now we’ve been looking at them analytically; but let’s look at them experientially, how they actually appear to us.

Namaste

So this is a little video about something I noticed the other day in meditation. And that is, the different qualities of light in the four states of consciousness. So check this out.

OK, you know there are four states of consciousness: jagrat, where we’re conscious of the world; svapna, dream consciousness; suśupti, deep sleep or the void; and turīya, which is the Self, the transcendental consciousness.

Now as far as jagrat, the light in jagrat is external, and it illuminates reflective objects; and then we perceive those objects by the reflected light. At least the light is apparently external from the point of view of the body. But in svapna, dream consciousness, the light is internal, and the objects in that consciousness are self-luminous. We perceive those objects without any external light source. And if you think back on your dreams or your  daydreams, you’ll see that all those objects are self-luminous.

Now suśupti is the void—in other words there’s no light, and no objects, even if there was light. So you just see nothing: zero, blank. But in turīya—turīya being the Self, is only light. Light is the subject and light is the object. And this means one sees the Self as a nondual object of consciousness.

Now this is extremely amazing. This allows you to distinguish which level of consciousness you’re in during meditation. So just like in jagrat, worldly consciousness, the light appears to be coming from outside, externally. But that whole state of consciousness is enfolded within dream consciousness, svapna. And then we see that the objects that we experience in so-called waking consciousness, are really just projected objects of our dreams. And we have really no separate reality in the so-called world.

Namaste

So the last few days I haven’t posted anything because I’ve really been trying to wrap my head around the enormity of the insight that I’ve been presenting in the last few videos, like this one and this one. [pointing to onscreen links]

And basically what it is, is first of all, the understanding that if the conditioned states of consciousness—that is jagrat, svapna and suśupti—are filters, that means they are the mechanism of the upādhis. Remember, we talked about upādhis some time ago. So upādhis are the things that limit Brahman so that it appears as an individual: a person covered by ignorance, subject to karma, and as an individual separate from the whole of creation. And isn’t this actually the root of all suffering? The fact that we’re an individual; we’re answerable for our actions but our actions are largely determined by factors external to ourselves. This is the human condition, the existential condition, and we discussed this a long time ago, at the very beginning of the channel, in this series on the existential dilemma.

So this is everyone’s experience: how does it come to be that the unlimited, infinite, totally blissful Brahman becomes covered over and is subject to suffering and karma, and it happens to be responsible for its actions no matter what the actual cause is? How is this possible? Well, it’s upādhis. And as we discussed last time, the three conditioned states of consciousness act as filters to reduce the original consciousness of turīya into the conditioned consciousness of waking, dreaming and deep sleep.

This is a huge insight, and when you start working out the consequences of it— you know, what it actually means to be an individual in that condition… Well, it just about explains everything, you know everything about our experience as human beings in this world; and why at the same time we can go inside through meditation and realize Brahman.

So this is a wonderful insight, a wonderful breakthrough. Oh but there’s more! See, Goddess has been showing me these things, slowly slowly opening up my consciousness to these insights. And they’re radical, they’re completely amazing. But once you hear them, it’s like, [snaps fingers] “Oh yeah, of course, obviously.”

So the insight that’s blowing my mind today, is the correlation between the four states of consciousness and Buddha’s teaching of paṭicca-samuppāda. Dependent Arising is the core structure of the Buddha’s teaching.