Video link: YouTube
Āya Bhuwan, may you live long.
Welcome to the fourth installment of Being Integrity. And this one is about intention. The intention of the Being Integrity series is to leave you actually being with integrity and being authentically yourself.
In other words, integrity is a state of being. It’s not something you have or something you do, because that would be external and inauthentic.
But it’s a way to be authentically yourself, much more than you’re being now, and still manifest all the moral and ethical qualities of a person with integrity.
In fact, your integrity, your morality, and your ethics will be so much above the average person that it’s just incomparable. Yet, it will be spontaneous—automatic, effortless, without thinking, without referring to anything external outside yourself.
How is that possible? Well, it works by giving you the ability to create an ontology of integrity: a context that spontaneously gives you enhanced integrity and authenticity as your natural self-expression.
Now, if you didn’t go back and watch our other videos, please do it now, because that will define what ontology is, that will define what a context is, and the process of transformation. And we’ll also go into the process of transformation in this series, but you need that background to be able to understand what we’re talking about. So please take our advice and review our previous videos. The links will be coming up in just a minute.
Now, integrity is such an important thing. I really can’t overstress it. I can’t really exaggerate how important it is. And I make the comparison that living with integrity is to human life what energy is to a machine. In other words, your life doesn’t work without it. Nothing happens. You just go round and round in the circle of becoming. And that’s called saṁsāra. Saṁsāra literally means ‘wandering on’. You’re just wandering on and on.
You might think that your purposeful, that you’re directed, that you’re developed, and that you’re making progress. But if you look from a big view, you can see you’re just really going round and round in circles.
What is that circle? Becoming, non-becoming. Being, non-being. Birth, death. And this is going on and on without any end.
So what is the cure for that? The Buddha’s Eightfold Noble Path. But to enter that path, one requires integrity.
People studying Buddhism, especially in the West, often think that they can remain the same. Their personal habits and their ways of dealing with people without any change. And they just sit down and do a little meditation and that will bring them to enlightenment. In fact, some of them even claim to be arahants.
Yet they’re still indulging in intoxication, sex life, lying, cheating, all of these things. So how is it possible? How can they be situated on the Eightfold Path without being a man of integrity?
Integrity is vital to human life. Without integrity, there may be an external appearance of human life. But it’s just animal life in human form.
We all know people who are just viciously competitive, who will do anything, say anything, whatever it takes to get ahead. Well, what’s the difference between that and animals fighting over a piece of meat in the forest? There’s really no difference. It’s the same thing—but in a polished way, with nice clothes, Gucci handbags and so on.
But still, they’re just fighting over sense enjoyment: nothing has really changed. Only the style is a little better, maybe. But definitely without integrity, a person will perform actions that result in suffering. They’ll lie. They’ll steal. They’ll cheat. They’ll kill. They kill animals, if nothing else.
And they will do other things that cause pain to others and themselves. And because of that, they will experience karma. Karma. Their suffering will be unavoidable.
Just consider the suffering that is involved in taking birth. One has to come into the womb and be closed up in this bag of flesh, surrounded by all kinds of nasty conditions for nine months, and then get squeezed out like toothpaste through a tube. And this is such a trauma. One comes out into the world screaming with pain, covered in blood. It’s a mess. It’s nasty. And it’s a terrible traumatic experience that marks us for life.
And that’s just the beginning. And the rest of life is filled with so many sufferings. I shouldn’t have to remind you of this. You should already know this.
Life is suffering: anicca-duḥkka-anattā. These are the three characteristics of life observed by the Buddha. Anicca, impermanent: everything is changing. Duḥkha, everything is suffering. Anattā, everything is non-self—there is no self or anything related to a self. In other words, there is no “I” and there are no possessions of this “I”, because the “I” doesn’t exist in the first place.
So the whole idea of self, ego, identity, being and possession is completely illusory. It’s a construction that we make. It’s an illusion that we create over and over and over again until it appears continuous.
And then we fool ourselves and we fool others into thinking, “I am. I have being.” And then we expect other people to go along with it. For the most part, they do until we meet someone who is realized; and then he’ll pop the bubble.
Another thing is that integrity is the actual basis of authority in leadership. If a person doesn’t have integrity, if they’re not trustable, if they’re not honest, if they’re not responsible, if they don’t do what they say they’re going to do, they have no authority for leadership.
Right now the leadership we have is completely without integrity. They’re breaking all their own laws. They’re spying on their own people. They’re doing all kinds of nonsense because they can. They can get away with it because they make the laws, and so on and so forth.
So what we’re saying is, this is not real leadership. This is not authentic leadership. This is leadership by force or the threat of force. ‘If you don’t follow our laws, we’ll call the police and come and drag you away, put you in jail.’
This is not real leadership. Leadership should be by inspiration—by trust, by integrity. If people really respected the leadership, then they would follow the laws automatically. They wouldn’t have to be coerced by threat of force, by threat of punishment.
This punishment business has been going on for thousands of years and it hasn’t stopped anything. In fact, it’s just made it worse because by punishment people create bad karma. And then that karma comes around and bites them and they get misfortune and suffering, and then of course they strike out against others and the cycle just goes on.
Isn’t it about time we tried something better, something new, something more intelligent? That’s the teaching of the Buddha. Authentic leadership, real human leadership, not just animal life, is based on the reduction or cessation of suffering. If I take an interest in helping others reduce their suffering, that is leadership.
And we’re going to have a whole series on leadership after we finish this integrity series. And you’ll see in great detail how this is so. But for right now, take it as a given: The basis of authority is integrity. Nobody has authority without it.
If somebody is using force, that’s not really authority. That’s just the threat of punishment. That’s not real human leadership. Real leadership is based on integrity.
Now I’m going to remind you again, to get the most benefit from this series, you should review our earlier video series that give the background material necessary to understand what we’re talking about. Those are listed below.
These are live links. You can click on them and go to those playlists. Please do yourself a favor. Review these previous videos because the conclusions that we arrive at in those videos are the assumptions or the taken for granted background of this video series.
And if you don’t know what we’re talking about, you won’t get the meaning and you won’t be able
to apply the knowledge that you get.
It’ll just be words, like ordinary school.
But this isn’t ordinary school.
This isn’t an ordinary training.
This is ontological education. Another thing is, please be prepared to observe these four foundations of study. Show up fully present, participating with integrity, and being authentically yourself. Look up and clear your misunderstood terms as discussed in Becoming Genius.
Be committed to something greater than yourself as discussed in What is Skillful Living?
And be willing to be at cause over changing your being as discussed in Being and Becoming. All of this is without any value unless you use the information to change your being. Okay, if you try to take on integrity as something external to yourself, as a code of conduct,
or a system of ethics or morality, something outside yourself, something that you do or
have, then it’s not going to be real.
It’s not going to be authentic.
It’s not going to be being integrity.
It’s going to be having integrity or doing integrity.
And that’s not what we’re here for. You will miss the real value that you could get from this series.
So please go back and review the other material for background so that you know what we’re
talking about. When I talk about dependent origination, you should get a picture in your mind of the process
of dependent origination.
Not that it’s something you have to go look up in a book.
You should already know.
Now integrity is not something that you just know about.
You have to be able to discern it. In other words, pick it out from other similar things such as morality, ethics, and legality.
The Buddha does a good job here. He says, “And how is a person of integrity endowed with qualities of integrity? There is the case where a person of integrity is endowed with conviction, conscience, concern. He is learned with aroused persistence, unmodeled mindfulness, and good discernment.
This is how a person of integrity is endowed with qualities of integrity.”
So first of all, we have to have conviction.
What is conviction?
Means to be convinced. In other words, we’re not asking you to take up the teaching of the Buddha as a set of
beliefs. We’re not asking you to have faith in the process of integrity. We’re asking you to try it, experience the benefits, and then be convinced about its
value.
Another point is, conscience. Conscience is something we discuss deeply in Call of the Friend.
And you should already understand our point of view on that. Conscience is the truth, the heart calling out silently for understanding of compassion.
And remember, compassion means the intention to reduce or eliminate suffering for self and
others.
So compassion is the basis of integrity, morality, ethics, justice, truth, and the
noble eightfold path.
Without compassion, you’re not even on the eightfold path. There are some people who are actually nihilists, but they pretend to be Buddhists.
And they’ll say things like, “The self does not exist.”
Well, as soon as you say that something does not exist, that means that at some other point
in time, it does exist. Just like you cannot be, let’s say, an anti-tax or anti-war protester unless there are taxes
and wars.
So to say the self does not exist means that at some point or other, the self does exist.
In some place or time, it really does exist.
So the point is being missed. The point is that the Buddha’s teaching is beyond both being and non-being, both existence
and non-existence. Because becoming and non-becoming are both based on the same process, dependent origination.
And that is the cause of suffering.
And we get tired of one kind of being, and we stop nourishing it, and it goes away.
It wastes away and dies.
And then we go ahead and create another type of being that we think is going to give us
the enjoyment that we seek.
And guess what?
That’s just another cause of suffering.
So both becoming and non-becoming, existence and non-existence, are both causes of suffering.
They’re part of the process. We have to get beyond that, and that’s what’s so important about the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Noble Eightfold Path is a process of becoming.
Yes.
But it’s a process of becoming that leads to a type of being that can get beyond becoming,
and never again engage in the causes of suffering.
So it’s a very special, very unique thing that doesn’t really exist anywhere else in
the world.
Now he should also have concern.
Concern means I care.
But I care in a very specific way. I care that you should learn the process that results in the cessation of suffering.
That’s why I do these videos, because I care.
I care that you get the same benefits that I’ve got.
I want to share them. It’s not that I want to become your guru, or take over your life, or tell you what to
do, or any of that nonsense.
But I care, because I want to live in a world of people who are free from suffering, who
are competent, who are whole, who have integrity.
So I share this knowledge to make the world that I live in a better place.
So it’s really kind of selfish.
But I really do care. I really am concerned that the world is headed the wrong way and needs this knowledge to
straighten itself out, if it was concerned with being straightened out, which it doesn’t
seem to be.
But anyway, one should have aroused persistence.
What does that mean?
It means that you don’t give up.
You keep trying until you reach the goal. The Buddha reached the goal, and he’s a human being just like us. He didn’t have anything that we don’t have, except maybe the determination not to give
up until he actually attained the enlightenment he sought.
Our problem is we’re not persistent enough. Anyone who’s persistent is going to get tremendous gains from following the teaching of the Buddha.
And if we don’t, it means we did something wrong.
And we have to go back and fix it and try again.
That’s how we learn.
We try something, we fail.
We analyze it, we fix it, we try again.
Rinse and repeat. That will get you where you want to go, in any field, but especially in the field of
the Buddha’s teaching.
So please, persist, don’t give up, keep trying. Again we have to have unmodeled mindfulness, and mindfulness as we’ll see later on when
we investigate this term.
Mindfulness is not just la-di-da being open to everything. No, mindfulness is based on discrimination, on knowledge, on learning. Learning the eightfold path, learning the process of enlightenment, and on discrimination.
Finally, we have to have good discernment. Good discernment means being able to pick something out from a field of things that are similar.
I used the example before.
I can pick my pet dog out of a crowd of dogs.
Any other dog is not my dog.
I can recognize him any place, any time. Similarly, a person who is learning and has good discernment can recognize integrity, can
recognize the right thing to do, even among a vast field of other choices.
And this is the thing.
What he chooses will be unique to himself. He will solve the problem of integrity in a way that no other person could solve it.
That’s the point.
That’s the quality of being a true individual.
A true individual is unique.
There is nobody else in the world like him. He does things in a way that no one can imitate, or no one would want to imitate, because they’re
uniquely his own. A real individual has style, has purpose, has commitment, has ethics, has values, and has
integrity.
That means he is always whole and complete.
He doesn’t allow himself to be divided by anything outside.
He never hurts anybody else. He always strives for compassion, wisdom, and reduction of suffering in himself and everyone
around him.
That is a person of integrity.
We’re going over this again and again. I know it’s repetitive, redundant, and says the same thing over and over.
But without hearing these things again and again, it’s very hard to establish them in
the mind. We want to have firm persistence, and we want to have deep commitment to these qualities. The best way to do that is to hear it over and over again, because the whole world is
against integrity. All the media that we see is simply dangling objects of enjoyment in front of our nose,
trying to get us to consume more and more.
Why? Because the same corporations that own the media companies also own the food production
and car production and other corporate entities that create stuff for us to buy.
They want us to buy stuff so that they get rich.
Very simple.
They make it look very, very attractive. They’re like, “Oh yes, just buy this perfume and then you’ll enjoy so much.”
Just buy this car and all the chicks will come running after you.
But it’s not true.
It’s a lie. The reason it’s a lie is because that’s not how you get enjoyment. The way you get enjoyment is by creating good kamma, and we’ll get into how to create good
kamma later on in this series. Basically, what you have to do is strive for the well-being of all beings, not just as
a sentiment.
It helps to develop the sentiment by practice of metta, good wishes to everyone.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be without fear and without lack of any kind.
May everyone feel secure and safe.
But beyond that, one has to act.
Actually do something to reduce or eliminate suffering.
And we recommend taking the big view, the same view that the Buddha took, to eliminate
all suffering by bringing beings to enlightenment.
That’s real integrity.
Now all of this leads to a very interesting and powerful functional definition for integrity. Integrity is a state of being leading to reducing or eliminating suffering for self and others.
You see, this is dynamic.
This is just not what integrity is.
This is how to do it.
Can we do?
Reduce or eliminate suffering.
That’s integrity.
And of course, it’s also implied, and we don’t create any more suffering either.
So that means there are a whole bunch of things that we’re not going to do anymore because
they create suffering, right?
And we’ll get into that in the next video about Vinaya, the precepts.
But anyway, 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 we’re not going to run this cult game that, oh, you take up this teaching in your life,
you do this and this and this and that, and then you get to level three and a half.
Even a win and all expense paid trip to Sri Lanka.
No, we’re not going to play that game.
We don’t want to make you dependent on us. We want to make you independent of everything except your own conscience.
And we’ll give you the means to do that in this series.
Briefly, that means the creation of a context. A context is a space or a background against which or in which you perform your activities
and you have your being.
So we want to create a space for being, a context for living that has the quality of integrity.
And since we already defined integrity as a process of reducing or eliminating suffering,
that has to be built into our context. If we build in the bias towards reducing or eliminating suffering in our very being,
then we will automatically act and live with integrity.
That’s the key.
That’s the magic.
And how do we do that?
That’s what this course is all about.
It can’t be explained in two words.
Well, yes, it can.
Create a context.
We’re going to show you how to do that. In our last video, we introduced a new model of integrity where we discriminate or discern
normative values that are external to the individual and that are based on a concept
of virtue or a desirable quality external to the person himself.
And positive values, those which are measurable, objective and experiential that lead towards
optimism that are positive instead of negative.
Normative values establish standards.
And if you break those standards, then you’re punished. That’s been the approach for the last, I don’t know how many thousands of years, and it hasn’t
worked.
But we have to establish values, establish standards that we build into our very being
internally.
And those give us complete freedom of choice, while at the same time producing moral and
ethical behavior.
That’s what we want.
So in the social virtue domain, we have morality.
In the group virtue domain, we have ethics.
And in the legal virtue domain, legality.
But in the objective domain, we have integrity, which is the state or condition of being whole,
complete, unbroken, and so forth, based on compassion. The intention to eliminate suffering without creating dependence. This is so important that I want to go over it again and again, probably in each and every
video until you’re sick and tired of hearing it.
But it will be burned into your mind.
And then you’ll be able to really act on it.
So integrity is a most important skill.
And if you duplicate and apply this skill, your life will work much better.
What do we mean, it’ll work better?
You’ll be more productive.
You’ll be healthier.
You’ll be happier.
People will like you more. You’ll be able to get stuff done that you could never even imagine doing beforehand.
Now there’s so many benefits that I can’t even begin to give them all.
Now into skillful living network, in all our materials, we deliberately set the standard
of integrity very, very high beyond where most people are at today.
And even beyond where most people can imagine being. That’s because we have come to expect extraordinary things from applying our methods.
We’ve experienced this ourselves.
We’re not just theorizing.
We’re talking from experience. If you apply the Buddha’s methods accurately and comprehensively to your life, your life
will get so much better that you’ll find it a little bit hard to believe at first.
But it’s for real. You can expand your capabilities far beyond what you imagine is possible, far beyond your
self-imposed limitations by using these methods.
So we want you to be integrity, to be a whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired human being
motivated by compassion. We expect you to be honest, intelligent, expert in some art and science, committed to reducing
suffering for yourself and others, and to respect the teaching of the Buddha. These are the minimum requirements for someone that we consider to be an admirable human
being. Further, we realize it may not be possible for you to meet this standard right away.
So that’s why we make all our materials available online so you can develop your integrity in
your own way and at your own pace. Whole living, being integrity, will present how to acquire these excellent human qualities. Thank you.