What Is Integrity - The Role Of Integrity In Life

• The Importance of Integrity: Integrity is foundational in personal development, spirituality, ego development, and discovering truth and love. It plays an essential role in achieving a good life, success, and psychological health. People often misconstrue or overlook the importance of integrity due to a lack in religious beliefs or morals but a person without integrity is said to be broken and pathetic.
• What is Integrity: According to the Oxford dictionary, integrity is the state of being whole and undivided. It encapsulates honesty, character, morality, uprightness, virtue, goodness, trustworthiness, and keeping one's word. It's not just an external facade for societal benefit; genuine integrity reflects who a person truly is internally and externally.
• Opposite of Integrity: The key opposite to integrity is opportunism. This could manifest as corruption, evil, sin, hypocrisy, cheating, manipulating, cutting corners, and untrustworthiness. These behaviors are often associated with a dense and insecure ego that strives to survive by any means necessary.
• Prioritizing the Development of Integrity: Developing integrity should be an objective. The first step to this development is understanding the profound importance of integrity in various aspects of life.
• The Importance of Integrity: This part of the lecture highlights the necessity of maintaining integrity across all spheres of life including business, art, relationships, leadership, health and nutrition, among others. It draws an emphasis on how cultivating integrity helps in tackling tangible problems we face in our day-to-day lives. It argues that the consequences of acting without integrity may not be immediate, and hence, it is often overlooked. However, the absence of integrity leads to long-term suffering and has a negative impact on your life, relationships, business, and overall growth. Having integrity not only helps solve these problems, but also leads to success and growth in the journey of life.
• Integrity in Different Relations: Leo asks a series of questions to drive home the point of how we prefer relationships (whether personal like spouse, friends, children or professional like bosses, doctors, teachers) in our life to be with those who have high integrity. This resonates with the idea that the value of integrity extends to all crucial domains of life like business, relationships, community, politics, medicine, charity, education, philosophy, spirituality and more.
• Long-Term Benefits of Integrity: The point here is that integrity is not a short-term value, but one with long-term benefits. Though there might be instances where people with low integrity, like certain leaders or business people, might attain temporary success, it is not sustainable. It is also emphasized that historically, the greatest leaders who amassed massive following were integrous human beings.
• The Significance of Integrity in Creative Work: The importance of integrity in professional life and creative work is highlighted. It is noted that often people prioritize material gain over following their passion or their true creative calling. True creative work requires love, passion, and an almost spiritual connection to one's work, that goes beyond mere materialistic opportunism. It is suggested that true fulfillment is found when one's career or business also represents their life purpose and creative contribution to mankind.
• The Perception of Integrity: Leo ends this part of the lecture by mentioning that integrity is perceived differently by different people, it could be perceived as doing a job meticulously, or following passion, or contributing creatively to the world, or connecting one's work to a more significant spiritual purpose.
• Artistic Integrity: Integrity in an artistic sense means adhering to one's personal values and principles in their creative work, often contrary to the pressures of worldly survival mechanisms. This level of integrity is most difficult to hold in circumstances when friends, family, or colleagues refuse to do the same and opt for the easier path. For instance, in businesses, it's unusual to find high-integrity as most individuals are driven to make money through the path of least resistance, rather than infusing a spiritual connection into their work. However, Leo Gura argues that businesses ought to have a spiritual connection, transforming them into more than money-making entities but also carriers of soul.
• Challenges of Maintaining Integrity: Maintaining integrity is a challenging endeavor due to the costs involved. It demands more thought and consciousness to be invested into various aspects of life such as relationships, education, advertising, marketing, and business operations. For instance, running a high-integrity business requires finding employees who are interested in the company's values and paying them more for their unique possession of these qualities.
• Influence of Values on Integrity: For integrity to be authentic, it requires values and principles to be more than just mental assents. They ought to be actualized and embodied in the real world. This is particularly essential in businesses where it's not enough to have ideals divorced from the company's day-to-day runnings. The nature of the business ought to reflect these ideals and avoid succumbing to any shady practices congruent to them.
• Notions of Leadership and Integrity: An integral leader can only lead followers up to their level of development and consciousness. Hence, any hindrances in a leader's development manifest themselves as a ceiling for their followers. To break through this, a leader must address these bottlenecks by incorporating greater integrity within themselves, a task that is progressively time-consuming and burdensome as the level of integrity increases.
• Integrity as an Honest Signal: Authentic integrity is evident and incapable of being faked convincingly over an extended period. While low integrity individuals struggle to discern the integrity of others, high integrity individuals can easily identify like-minded people as well as those with low integrity. This concept can be seen in the political phenomenon surrounding Donald Trump, where his followers, most of whom possess low integrity themselves, fail to see Trump's lack of integrity that is apparent to those with modest or high integrity. This indicates that people often align themselves with like-minded individuals and that a true comprehension of integrity can only be attained once a person initiates the journey towards personal growth and development.
• Understanding Integrity through Examples: Trump's behavior offers an illustrative example of low integrity, as his actions often demonstrated dishonesty, ego, and opportunism. People with high integrity will not align with or admire the characteristics exhibited by Trump; however, those with lower levels of moral development often admire these very characteristics. Low integrity often leads to predictably unethical behaviors such as lying, cheating, stealing, and exploiting others.
• Looking for Integrity in Our Projects: Personal projects—from marriages and parenting, to careers and creative pursuits—should be evaluated for integrity. Integrity should be more valuable than taking the easy, opportunistic route. Lack of integrity leads to predictable and negative outcomes as seen in the administration of Trump, where there were various scandals indicative of low integrity culture.
• Consequences of Low Integrity: Low integrity cultures or communities cause suffering and damage to themselves and others. Such broken psychologies, while chasing validation and fulfillment through various means, fail to achieve their true desire for wholeness, completion, and love due to their unwillingness to embrace the costs of integration. This leads to an inability to love deeply and genuinely, which is the key to satisfaction and consciousness.
• Impacts of a Fragmented Psyche: A fragmented psyche, typical in individuals with low integrity, battles against itself and creates societal polarity. This leads to a broken, dissatisfied life as they are disconnected from love, which is deeply connected with consciousness, integration, and ultimately, God.
• Integrity and Love: Love, akin to God, is an honest signal and a true measure of consciousness. The inability to love genuinely and deeply indicates a disconnection from God or higher consciousness, leading to a lack of satisfaction in life. Achieving true love and satisfaction requires personal growth, change, and increased consciousness.
• Commitment to Specific Identity Limiting Truth Perception: Leo Gura emphasizes on the limitation of truth perception when one is deeply committed to their specific identity, which may obstruct complete acceptance of absolute truth, causing partiality and segmented consciousness. This particular commitment creates a boundary that restricts the embodiment of absolute truth, love, and integrity.
• The Complications of Survival Instincts: Survival instincts encourage the maintenance of partial acceptance and rejection of experiences, which poses a threat to the achievement of complete integrity and holistic experience acceptance.
• Truth, Love, and Consciousness: According to Leo, truth, love, and consciousness are interconnected. The absolute truth is everything that exists as it is. When we perceive and accept things as they are, we embrace truth, which is a pure form of love and integrity.
• The Relationship Between Ego and Integrity: Leo delves into the relationship between the human ego and integrity. He underlines that the fragmentary nature of ego and survival instincts counter the notion of wholeness and absolute acceptance, ultimately threatening the existence of absolute integrity. Ego leads to the manipulation of reality to suit one's biases, rather than absolute acceptance.
• Human Attachment to Falsehoods: Humans are said to exist mostly in their fantasies, often favoring their fabricated narratives and ideas of reality over the absolute truth. This divergence from reality can be considered a form of falsehood, moving away from the pinnacle of integrity.
• The Limitations of Careers on Truth Perception: Gura also explains how certain professions that require manipulation of truth for success are potentially traps for maintaining a lack of integrity. For instance, Lawyers and politicians often need to manipulate the truth to achieve their goals, which could obstruct the holistic perception of truth.
• Frameworks that Limit Wholeness and Acceptance: People's specific belief system, religious or otherwise can act as a constrictive framework that prevents the digestion and acceptance of the absolute truth and the realization of one's own integrity. These strong committed identities create a rigid boundary that bars an individual from the wholeness of truth and love.
• Significance of Intellectual and Epistemic Integrity: A commitment to a limited belief system, religious or scientific, inherently lacks integrative power, as it does not absorb the complexity of the universe. This commitment forces an individual to create defense mechanisms to maintain their narrow worldview. Intellectual integrity involves understanding where we deceive ourselves intellectually in diverse areas of our lives, from business to relationships. Failure to rectify intellectual self-deception threatens our successful strides in our various endeavors. Epistemic integrity is how we ascertain the validity of our beliefs, without which the workings of our mind can fool us into inconvenient illusions. A thorough study of self-deception mechanisms such as double standards, rationalizations, and justifications is necessary for gaining intellectual integrity. Achieving intellectual integrity requires sacrificing egotistical attachments and ideas and models of reality for truth.
• Self-Deception and Intellectual Integrity: Clearing the mind of falsehoods and misguided beliefs by upholding intellectual honesty is a difficult but necessary process that aligns us with truth. The journey to unravel this entanglement of deceptions is a mark of intellectual integrity. Building success on a solid foundation provides a secure, open-minded, and explorative approach towards reality, contrary to success built on a rotten foundation, which is fragile and liable to collapse at the confrontation of certain truths.
• Attributes of Absolute Truth: Absolute truth provides a sense of invincibility, immortality, completeness, and integrative power. When truth is present, there is no room for defensiveness or insecurity because it provides absolute certainty. Unshaken and incontestable, truth needs no defense.
• Discussion of the way dishonesty affects personal life: Leo Gura emphasizes that living a good life requires honesty, primarily with oneself. Self-dishonesty prevents individuals from achieving higher states of consciousness as consciousness entails absolute truth. The decision to live a life filled with lies and illusions often leads to a heavier cost than following the path of truth, which is the path of integrity. The inability to be true to oneself leads to low self-esteem, insecurity, and a feeling of living a life built on a house of cards.
• Lying as a survival strategy: Lying is common because it seems to be an effective survival strategy that helps humans avoid emotional labor and negative consequences. However, maintaining a lifestyle based on lies only perpetuates a cycle of dishonesty and self-disconnection. Individuals who lie to others often lie to themselves too, and because life fundamentally revolves around truth - existing dishonestly makes one's life worse.
• Impact of growing up in low integrity environments: Gura addresses the challenge faced by those who grow up in low integrity environments, discussing his personal experience of being raised by a low-integrity parent. This can have significant impacts on an individual's life and development. Those from war-torn or impoverished societies, for example, may find themselves forced into dishonesty and manipulation simply for survival. However, Gura encourages viewers to take on the arduous journey of transforming low integrity to high integrity, even if it requires psychiatric help or years of conscious efforts.
• Discussion on high integrity living: Gura encourages facing the pain of purification, a necessary part of living life with high integrity, rather than succumbing to the negative consequences of dishonesty or 'devilry'. Precisely aligning one's life with truth, even if it's difficult and demanding, will ultimately lead to a better life. Gura emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and paying the costs associated with the path of truth and warns against the deceptive desire of reaping the benefits of truthfulness while residing in deceit.
• View on how truth relates to life: Gura believes that life revolves around truth because truth is the only existing thing. He argues that the more disconnected one is from truth, the worse their life becomes. Similarly, the more a life is aligned with things that are non-existent or untrue, the more difficult it becomes. On the other hand, a life based on truth and integrity is aligned with beauty, love, and God, all of which are desirable attributes for an enriching life experience.
• Teaser for part two of the lecture: Gura wraps up by hinting at part two of the lecture where he will delve deeper into the topic of raising oneself from a low integrity environment. Despite acknowledging the challenges, he reassures listeners that with hard work, it's possible to correct even deep-seated low integrity habits.
• The Consequences of Low Integrity: Low integrity leads to self-sabotages such as breaking commitments to oneself, which results in a loss of self-trust and self-esteem. This leads to a negative cycle of falling short of one's values, leading to more failures, and a victim mentality rooted in learned helplessness.
• The Importance of Perseverance: Even in the face of failures, it is crucial to persevere and not be discouraged. Failures should be seen as opportunities for growth rather than dead-ends.
• The Downside of Cheating & Selfishness: Although cheating and selfish actions may bring temporary gains, they ultimately backfire due to karmic principles, thereby leading to more suffering.
• The Connection between High Integrity & Emotional Responses: High integrity actions, often depicted in movies or stories such as sacrifices or heroic acts, can evoke strong emotional responses. They connect us with universal truths of love, selflessness, and spirituality, breaking through layers of ego and connecting us to a higher consciousness.
• True Integrity in Leaders: A leader with high integrity is naturally admired and looked up to because they challenge the status quo and stand up for truth and love, often against their own self-interest. This kind of integrity cannot be faked and requires a genuine commitment to truth and service.
• Role of Integrity in Personal Growth: High levels of integrity connect us to the deepest aspects of reality, truth, and love. Genuine integrity is recognized universally as beautiful because it encompasses all aspects of truth and love. Emulating high levels of integrity in life can have a profound and unifying impact on those around us, in turn establishing a strong sense of life purpose.
• Integrity and Consciousness: Integrity is associated with the truth, enabling it to eliminate illusions and resist manipulation. Throughout history, powerful entities have sought to control or suppress those with high integrity because they challenge illusions that maintain power structures.
• Limitations of Religious Teachings on Integrity: Although religious teachings stress on virtues like integrity, morality, and honesty, they are often interpreted and implemented rigidly, leading to hypocrisy. The true value of these virtues is often lost because of dogmatic enforcement. While religious values are important for good life, living these values authentically requires understanding beyond scriptures and dogma.
• Link between Consciousness and Virtues: The genuine observance of values and virtues requires a deep level of consciousness that understands the essence of these virtues. This consciousness can only be achieved by breaking down the ego and ideologies. Acquiring such consciousness and developing virtues genuinely is challenging, making it an infrequent achievement.
• Integrity in Spiritual Development: Achieving high levels of integrity requires self-sacrifice, facing the greatest fear of humans. This sacrifice aligns with the ultimate goal of spiritual development. To become more integris, an individual has to challenge and overcome their deepest fears and insecurities, showcasing the difficulty of this journey.
• Dilemma of Modern Morality: The modern interpretation of morality focuses on rule-following rather than understanding the depth and significance of these moral codes. This shallow interpretation results in the misapplication and manipulation of important values.
• Significance of Stage Blue In Spiral Dynamics Model: Stage Blue carries significant values such as discipline, family values, honesty, responsibility and more. However, the strict and typically dogmatic enforcement of these values can lead to skepticism and rejection. A more open-minded, non-dogmatic and inclusive approach, characterized by stage turquoise, is suggested for better realization of these values in life.
• Importance of Non-Judgmental Attitude towards Others: Consciousness and the ability to transcend egocentric tendencies are more powerful motivators than guilt, which can often attach itself to notions of integrity. Adopting non-judgmental and compassionate attitudes can foster genuine integrity.
• Transition towards a Life of Integrity: Transitioning towards a life with high integrity may involve painful changes, sacrifices, and confronting fears. However, it leads to a path of growth and purification. High integrity is not enforced by an external entity. Rather it is an internal process and realization anchored in the understanding that one belongs to an interconnected, holistic reality.
• Importance of Integrating Stage Blue: Leo discusses the necessity of integrating "stage blue" in New Age teachings, which is typically disregarded by scientifically rational individuals. This neglect often leads to a disregard for ethics and morality, especially in fields like business where unchecked capitalism can run rampant. Despite the hypocrisy often displayed by those in "stage blue," it is vital due to the social order and ethics they promote. Their dogmatic approach, although potentially restrictive and damaging, serves as "training wheels" to prevent individuals from becoming "monsters," promoting a more orderly society.
• Religious Teachings and Integrity: Leo points out a crucial problem with many religious teachings—that they provide a rigid formula to follow for morality but often lack depth to truly foster integrity. Those in religious circles appear to be hypocrites because they act out these moral principles without truly internalizing them. This hypocrisy, however, is not a valid dismissal of the importance of these teachings or stage blue, since it boils all forms of morality down to avoidance of punishment rather than upholding integrity out of consciousness.
• Challenges in Developing Integrity: Developing integrity is a difficult, messy process filled with numerous traps and self-deceptions. This challenge is why religious institutions often provide a rigid, dogmatic formula, serving as a guide for morality despite its limitations. It offers some semblance of morality, though often out of fear of punishment. On the other hand, when the conventional restrictions are lifted, the challenge lies in preventing one's self from becoming destructive or "monstrous."
• Traps in Developing Integrity: Leo highlights several traps in developing integrity; one significant pitfall is the superego's trap of judgment and moralization. As individuals work on their integrity, they might find themselves taking the moral high ground and condemning those with perceived lower integrity. This action, ironically, is a departure from true integrity, as judgment is a low-integrity activity.
• Compassion for those with Low Integrity: As individuals strive to increase their integrity, it's crucial to develop compassion for those with lower integrity levels. Recognizing the struggle and effort it takes to attain high integrity levels enables understanding of why many fail to do so. The ability to love and forgive is key in genuinely refining one's integrity.
• Avoiding Envy of those with Low Integrity: The quest for integrity should not lead to envy of those disregarding it while seemingly succeeding, such as in extreme capitalism. Persisting on the path of personal growth and upholding high moral standards remains essential, irrespective of these temptations.
• Fragility of Basing Success on Low Integrity: Though successful people often exhibit low integrity, Leo suggests that their success is built on a shaky and fragile foundation. Genuine integrity, conversely, provides a strong and solid foundation, leading to empowerment, completeness, and integration.
• The Potential of Integrity: Real integrity goes beyond following rigid rules but encompasses self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. Instead of guilt and morality, consciousness, love, selflessness, and the transcendence of egoic cravings should be the driving force for behavior. Despite the difficulty of practicing these principles, Leo emphasizes the necessity of self-reflection in one's own life and the need to assertively work towards the development of integrity.
• Importance of Integrity and Its Challenges: Leo Gura discusses the importance of integrity and the challenges of maintaining it. He criticizes the stage blue mindset that reduces integrity to a rigid set of rules meant to prevent anti-social behavior, saying that this does not reflect genuine consciousness or integrity. Also, feeling guilty about breaking rules doesn't promote personal growth. Consciousness, love, selflessness, and the transcendence of egoic cravings are the real sources of ethical behaviors.
• Gura's Approach to Integrity: Gura emphasizes that preaching about integrity is one thing, but practicing it is another. He states hypocrisy and a lack of alignment with self, truth, and love are the backlashes of not practicing what he preaches. He encourages viewers to contemplate how a lack of integrity affects their lives.
• New Channel and Integration of Conservative Values: Leo announces a new channel, Actualized Clips, which will feature shorter clips from his long videos. He also acknowledges the value of conservative traits such as discipline and work ethic, which are important for success and personal development. He criticizes the extreme manifestations of these values in right-wing media but encourages viewers to incorporate healthy, moderate conservative values into their lives. He ends by recommending viewers watch his series on the Spiral Dynamics model of personal development.