My attempt here is to create a new possibility for you. You might be thinking of integrity as a moral act – keeping your word, being honest, acting ethically. These are all vital. But I’ve come to see that this is only a shadow of a much deeper reality. So I want to offer to you the possibility of a different kind of integrity: structural integrity or ontological integrity.
It is the state of our inner world, and it is the source from which all our actions flow.
Lack of Integrity
Within each of us, there are different movements, different forces. There is the silent, witnessing consciousness. There is the intellect, which analyzes and dissects. There is memory, which informs our present experience. From these arise our thoughts, our beliefs, and the emotions that stir within our bodies.
For many of us, these components are in a state of division. The intellect wants one thing, but an emotional impulse wants another. The adult in us wants one thing and the child craves for another. A belief from our past conflicts with the reality in front of us. When these components are not aligned, they clash.
This inner division is the root of what we experience as stress, as confusion, as paralysis. It is an act of violence within our own being. And when we act from this place, what emerges in our speech and in our decisions is not the pure expression of our potential. It is a muddied concoction, the compromised outcome of an inner war. This is the state of non-integrity.
Presence of Integrity
Integrity is the state where all of these inner components are aligned and in sync. There is no division between the impulse, the thought, the feeling, and the action. They operate as a single, unified force.
When the pre-cognitive desire is cleanly translated by the mind into language, and flows through the body into speech and action without internal conflict, we are in a state of structural integrity.
This is not a state to be achieved through effort. It is a state of deep alignment, presence, and effortlessness.
This principle presents itself repeatedly across different traditions: in the Taoist concept of Wu Wei, or effortless action; in the yogic teaching of ‘inaction in action’ from the Bhagavad Gita; in the athlete’s experience of being ‘in the zone’; and in the psychologist’s description of a creative ‘flow state’, and perhaps in your own experience when you lose yourself in the beauty of a breathtaking landscape.
Integrity is the experience of our being operating as it was designed to: as a force of nature. From this place, our actions are no longer the compromised results of an inner battle. They are the clear, powerful, and authentic expressions of life moving through us.
Imagine how different your life would be if you cultivated this structural integrity within yourself, as you continue to do what is needed in your outer world.
