Can you achieve perfection? Can you always do the right thing? Is there such a thing as perfect integrity? Can you have 100% truth value?
As you may know, I live by principles, here is one of the principles… more to come in this article:
It is hard to be silently brilliant: lots of thoughts occur when you open your mouth.
But not all thoughts that occur are brilliant… not in a person who isn’t opening his mouth… 1 or who are saying the same things over and over again.
Things not worth thinking are also things not worth saying but you don’t know that until you hear the echo. 2
What happens when you speak?
Humans didn’t quite become humans until they had something to say. But speaking doesn’t make someone human: having something worth to say does.
70% of humanity, more than five billions people have nothing worth to say.
This could not have been the proportion always… but this is it now.
There are two kinds of people: people who have something to say, and people who have to say something.
I am not ranting… I have no problem with people talking and talking and talking. I am, maybe, having a problem you not seeing the difference. You not being able to tell whether you have something to say, or you have to say something.
Many people may have something to say, maybe not much, but they choose to just talk… because if you don’t talk people look at you funny.
Everyone can hear that you have nothing to say, you know you have nothing to say, but you keep talking.
The quality of your speaking reflects the quality of your insides… your coherence, your knowledge or the lack of it, your humility or lack of it, your vocabulary, your clarity, your vibration.
But saying something worth saying is a tremendous risk… you can become vulnerable… you might be mistaken… so you choose to not say it, you choose to lie, you choose to just make noise.
The further your two selves, the public self and the real self are from each other, the more inauthentic you are, the more you have to hide, and the less things you can say that are worth saying.
The less you have to pretend, the closer the two selves are, the more integrity you have.
The most important part of integrity is about the selves. The invisible part… the part that your speaking gives away.
The further away the two selves are, the less integrity you have, the unhappier you are. Because your two selves cannot love each other… and you cannot love your life.
You also know another main principle of my life:
when something isn’t working in your life (big or small) there is something you don’t know.
Goes hand in hand with another saying:
without integrity nothing works.
So when something doesn’t work in my life, in my health, in my money, in my mood, in my fulfillment, the first place I look is my integrity.
Here is the integrity statement… swiped from Landmark Education, I found it on the web and edited it.
- Level one: Integrity is Nothing hidden, being truthful and honest, doing complete work, working from an empowering context, and doing very well what you do; doing it as it was meant to be done or better, and without cutting corners.
- Level two: Integrity is being true to your values, standards and ideals.
- Level three: Integrity is HONORING your WORD as your Self
And when anything is not working, or not working well, you have a self-examination to start with: where is my integrity “out”.
- Most people are habitual liars… for them this is easy: they lied.
- Many people make the mistake of doing things from a context that is not empowering… dutiful, homework attitude, more interested in the result than in the process, want it to come out perfect from the get-go. All integrity issues.
- Many people, especially the chronically judgmental ones aren’t true to their professed values and standards
- And almost no one is honoring their word as their Self.
When you have a public self different from your private self, you cannot be “in” integrity… you are always out of integrity. And life cannot work for you…
In my experience this is the work one needs to do to get from wherever you are to human being level.
It’s hard to believe, but your fundamental need to fulfill your own expectations of yourself are in line with that integrity statement.
And even if you fulfill others’ expectations of you, unless you fulfill your own expectations of yourself, you’ll be always miserable… deadened… at best: blah.
The world, others, expect you to make life good for them. All the moral, ethical, legal rules and regulations are about you fulfilling others’ expectations of you.
In fact, others do not want you to do, feel, be anything that interferes with that.
If Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, or the Buddha were alive today, they would be in prison… or killed, or hunted. Because their integrity would interfere with what the “people” and the governments want people to be: sheep. Consumption. Wars. Hate. Taking sides.
Your personal integrity takes courage.
I was lucky as a child: my mother didn’t want me, and therefore didn’t pay much attention to me, except to punish me: she simply beat me. No words.
I wasn’t given words to tell me what is good and what is bad… So I made my own decisions about what gets me beaten… Some are so bad and so deep, I haven’t been able to uproot them.
Here are the rules I feel my mother wanted me to live by:
- Taking care of yourself is bad
- Asking for anything for yourself is bad
- Asking questions is bad
- Being alive is bad
- She never noticed that I was a high achiever… so I was safe doing that.
- She didn’t beat me for reading… so I was safe doing that.
- She didn’t know I did a lot of thinking and pondering… so she didn’t beat me for that.
- I was beaten around food a lot… so I am uncertain and waffling about food.
- I was berated about sexuality… so I became confused.
- And I was always beaten when I asked for money.
And I could bring a ton more examples of the messy inside I have.
Finding the Self, knowing what I like, what I want, who I am was near impossible inside that mess.
You don’t have to be beaten to have a messy inside, conflicting ideals, ambivalence.
When two interests conflict, confusion results.
I have used the “it’s hard to be silently brilliant” principle of mine to get some clarity and certainty about who I am, what I like and what I want.
I used the “without integrity nothing works” to hunt for areas where I haven’t chosen myself
I used “when something isn’t working, there is something you don’t know” to know when I need to start hunting for what i don’t know. And then tell the truth about it.
As you may know, humanity, 50% of humanity is infected with a microscopic (tiny) mite.
I have been conscious of that for a few years now, and have decided to fight it, for humanity and definitely for myself.
It’s cost me a lot of money, a lot of sleepless nights.
I have tested 30 different chemicals in these few years.
In the past few months it looked as if I was starting to win the war…
While I was sick last month (food poisoning) I ran out of the remedy I was testing and what seemed to produce a miraculous decimation of the mite population.
I decided to watch what happens…
And despite of not taking that remedy, the numbers were still going down… WTF?!
Turns out that after I watched a youtube video some 2-3 months ago… unrelated to the mite infestation, I started take a mineral the video recommended, an essential mineral that in all my muscletests NEVER tested deficient. But the video said that it is suppressed by fashionable vitamins and minerals, so I HAD TO test it for myself by taking it.
My lifeless hair turned curly and springy again. Much of the gray turned back into black.
And the mites: it seems that they are dropping dead…
I am mortified that I have been wrong, that I have assumed one thing to be true that wasn’t. I ALMOST sold my idea to many people… and it would have been selling a lie.
Each person has a “preferred” way to pay the piper.
- Some pay with their finances
- Some pay with their health/weight
- Some pay with their relationships
- Some pay with their depression and unhappiness
Most pay with all of the above.
I get sick. I spill my drink over my computer keyboard. I forget to record important calls. I am afraid to market my best products and lose money. And my little brother doesn’t want to talk to me…
So yeah, I am paying through my nose. These are just the past month’s payments…
Life works not through doing the right steps… but through correcting, diligently, persistently the wrong steps.
That is the nature of Life… that is the nature of integrity as well.
There is no such thing as perfection… so don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Make them, observe the results and then correct correct and correct again.
That is life.
I remember reading the book Choose: life or death, and the scientist, Carey Reams of RBTI 3 fame, says: you never achieve the perfect health numbers… until you are dead.
In my eating regimen coaching: the regimen, the food-list changes at least twice a year, sometimes more often.
That is how life works. Correction, correction, correction.
So don’t be stupid and don’t live in an imaginary ideal of perfection. Learn to course correct. It’s a skill. And the only way.
- in the cave of your mind everything feels like a brilliant idea. Or looking at it another way: I had two boy friends who were alcoholics. They both fancied themselves profound and brilliant when they were drunk… lol.
- This also includes writing that is published… Unfortunately thousands upon thousands of author wannabes, second handers publish crap, but that is another issue entirely. Just like my old van-mates talk and talk and talk about things not worth saying, these wannabes do that in writing…
- The Reams Biological Theory of Ionization, 30% truth value: very high. A normal book or theory has a truth value between 1% and 10%
