What is Integrity?🔗

Listen!

Integrity is the first sacred principle of life. Integrity is the principle on which the cosmos runs!

The sun rising every morning without missing a day is integrity. Your heart beating continuously without missing a beat is integrity. By nature, God built you with integrity. Your inherent nature is integrity. That is why, whenever you are not in integrity, you feel so uncomfortable and incomplete.

Undertstand: Integrity is neither honesty nor morality. It is beyond both.

We all know honesty. But with the tattva of integrity, I am taking you a step deeper than honesty. With honesty, you only have to honor the words and commitments that you give to others. With integrity, you have to honor even the words and commitments you give to you!

# Your words are your Life

Why is it so important to honor your words?

Whether you realize it or not, your life is built on your words and commitments. The words you give to yourself and others is the structure on which your life-building is built! If your life can be compared to a building, the words you give to yourself and others is like the foundation of this building. It has to be free from dust and rust, which means that it has to be free from unconscious patterns.

The unconscious words you give to yourself and others is the dust and rust on your building. A building built upon a rusty, dusty structure cannot last long! It has to be made of pure, authentic, strong steel. In the same way, your life is built on the words and commitments you give to you and to others. It has to be without any unconsciousness or unawareness.

I tell you, the strength of your life is based on the words you give to you and to others. If your words are conscious, your life will be conscious. If your words are unconscious, your life will be unconscious. When you utter unconscious words in your

Integrity is also not about your actions alone!

For example, going to work on time every day, or coming on time to morning satsang – all these are good, of course, but integrity is much more and much deeper than that.

Coming on time is not integrity. That is the side-effect of integrity. Your very thinking should be integrity. I tell you - a person who lives in integrity will always be on time – because punctuality is just a side-effect of integrity!

If you are thinking in integrity, you are in the space of unclutching, continuously freeing yourself from the negative mental patterns that you create and suffer with. Integrity has to be practiced continuously. Your very internalization – your manana - has to be with constant integrity.

Today, throughout the day, continuously try to think with integrity. That means, be very aware of the words you say to yourself and others, and the consequences of your words. Remember: in order to be in integrity, you have to fulfill the commitments you give to

Listen: when you give a commitment to yourself or to others, it becomes the bone-structure of your very life itself. If you continuously break the bones of your life, can you imagine how your life will be? Full of pain, distorted, and perverted!

The words that you give to you are the bone-structure of your inner personality. The words you give to others are the bone-structure of your success in the outer world. If you are constantly breaking the bones of your life, naturally life will be painful!

You function based on the words and commitments you utter to yourself and to others. Am I right? Everything in your life starts with these two things. So the words you give to you and to others is life, literally Life! They are the basis of your actions, inaction and reactions. In order to be successful in your relationship with yourself and with life, you must keep your word. It is your very life!

If, for some reason, you are really sure you can't fulfill your commitment, at least do bone-transplantation! Don't fracture the bone. Do bone transplantation, which means completing the word by declaring that you will not be able to fulfill it. When you do this with yourself and others, it is called completing with that original the space of integrity. There is no room to leave anything without fulfilling or completing.

Today, fulfill the words or commitments that you give to others - as if your life depends on it! Don't make excuses for yourself. Just decide to do whatever it takes. You will take a leap to a whole new level of living.

You should be aware that when you give a commitment, your life has already started getting built around that commitment. You have started building your life based on the commitment, and your life-energy has already started flowing to make that commitment a reality.

If you find yourself out of integrity continuously, look into you to see what pattern you are carrying. It could be a lot deeper than just having issues with managing time. It could mean that you are living in utter unconsciousness, because when you give the word, you are not aware of what you are doing! If you give one hundred commitments and ninety-nine are not kept, what does that mean? It shows that you are not even aware of what you are doing, or how you are abusing the energy of your life. Eventually, even you lose respect for your word, because you don't even remember by afternoon the commitments you made in the morning.

Not caring to keep your word is also a subtle sign that you have no respect for life. When you carry too many incompletions with yourself or others, one of the first things you drop is integrity. This is a highly dangerous pattern, because you entire life's natural flow is

Sit and write down all the words that you say to yourself about yourself. Do it without editing and changing anything.

Read what you have written.

Now rewrite any negative words that you say to yourself in positive words.

For example, if you think, 'I am not good enough', change it to 'I am good enough.'

Keep repeating these words to yourself for at least one week.

You will see that what you think about yourself will change - and life will bless you with that.

Your key to peace

When you take the responsibility for the words you utter to you and to others, what do you think will happen? A sharp reduction in the words in your inner space will happen. The amount of inner chatter that goes on continuously inside you will lessen considerably.

The father of yoga, the sage Patanjali says, Yogasysa pratamam dwaaram vaang-nirodhah. The first step towards yoga is the reduction in the words you create inside you. When you bring integrity, the words inside and outside will drop drastically. When you bring awareness to what you are saying and committing to, automatically your authenticity will increase, and your capacity to fulfill your word will also increase. A beautiful, enriching virtuous circle begins when you practice integrity.

When you take the responsibility for the words you utter to yourself and to others, your inner chatter will drop on its own.

With integrity, not only will you honor the words and commitments you give to you and others, but you will constantly live in a space where less words are created.

You must learn to make commitments consciously, so that you have enough time and energy and space to fulfil those commitments. The great enlightened saint, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa says again and again, ‘mann mukh ek karo’ - unite the heart and speech.

Integrity is not just about living as per your word - it is also about creating a space where you carry less words, so that the words you commit to yourself and the words you commit to others can be fulfilled by you.

Listening - shravana – has to be done with awareness. Internalizing

Living true to your word means living without your mind. You may not have destroyed the mind, but you will use the mind when you need it. You will be moving through your life in an unclutched way. Being unclutched means you will not be tossed around by a constant flow of random thoughts. You will be in an inner space of restful awareness that expresses as integrity and high achievement.

If you are truly integrated, you will not give a single false promise to yourself or others. With integrity, you will literally wipe clean your inner space of all the unwanted beliefs that you constantly carry. The strong belief you carry that you are a failure will continuously lead you to failure. When you start living in integrity you will diagnose those self-fulfilling negative prophecies that you constantly feed to yourself, and remove them from your inner space. By continuously consciously cognizing this, your incompletions get healed.

Write down all the self-fulfilling negative prophecies that you constantly feed yourself with . One by one, cancel them out and make a conscious declaration not to allow them into your inner space again.

Having desires is not wrong. Not having the integrity to fulfil those desires, which are the words you have given to yourself, is wrong!

When you are integrated, you will either work to convert your desires into reality, or if you are not able to fulfil those desires, you will complete with yourself and accept the reality as it is. When you don’t have the integrity to convert your desires into reality, they remain hanging as unfulfilled fantasies and incompletions in your life.

The mooladhara chakra or root energy center is the energy center that controls your ability to create the reality that you want to experience. The energy flow to this center gets blocked when you are filled with fantasies and unfulfilled expectations about life. When you lack integrity, your life will be nothing but unfulfilled expectations from you and others.

The mooladhara or root center chakra has a certain innate energy. A vast reservoir of inner potential energy lies dormant in the mooladhara. When you have integrity, this energy will become a powerful visualization which can manifest as reality. When there is

Without living in integrity, which reduces your inner chatter, you cannot clearly visualize the highest vision for your life. You will only be filled with irritation and useless verbalization.

What is verbalization? One way to think of verbalization is to use the analogy of thread being created out of cotton. Visualization is like the cotton, the base material. Verbalization is the thread, the product, made out of that base material. If you have cotton, then it is easy to make thread out of it. If you have only thread, it is not possible to make cotton out of it!

When you add integrity to your life, suddenly the visualization power in your mooladhara awakens. Right now, you have only verbalization. Unless it becomes visualization, it can never become reality! Can anything be made into reality if you don't visualize it? No!

If you clean out your inner space with integrity, you will have powerful visualization. Then picking up the right verbalization is very easy, and you will create what you want in the world.