Integrity means being integrated and not divided. As national integrity is mandatory for the progress of any nation, similarly personal integrity is necessary for the growth of any individual. Integrity means being united. United with the inner self, the consciousness. When we get disintegrated from the inner self, we develop conflicts. We make some or other thing the center of our life and whatever center we choose, it is bound to create conflicts with the other things. The reason is very simple integrity is not possible with the divisive perspective of life.
There will always be conflicts between money, power, relationships, prestige, and fame. social validation, inner peace, fun, and entertainment. For example, somebody likes to earn more money. Since time is limited, he will have to prioritize time for earning money or giving time to his family. If somebody chooses fun and entertainment as the core of life, there will always be a conflict with social validation. Programs to watch movies will conflict with the need to put in more hours for office work to please the boss. If someone chooses power and fame, he will have to spend time for the social service and that may come in conflict with his relationships and family life.
These conflicts are the results of a divided perspective of our lives. There were no such conflicts in the life of Krishna. In his childhood, he used to play with Gop and Gopis and was the blue-eyed boy of the entire Brij. However, when Akrura ji came with an invitation from Kansa, he knew that it was time to go to Mathura and free his parents from the prison of Kansa. There was no conflict in his mind, It is because he was integrated with his inner self. He listened to his inner voice and the rest of the voices obeyed the command of the inner voice. No doubt, his emotional mind would have tried to convince him to stay back with Yashoda and Nandbaba and keep playing with his friends. After all that was a dream place for him. But He had the integrity of the character and therefore his inner voice was strong enough to subsume all the outer voices and his intellect and emotional mind could tune to the inner voice to give him energy to fight the battle against Kansa rather than making him divided and waste energy in the conflicts.
Arjuna did not have such integrity and therefore when he reached the battlefield, he got confused and divided. One of his minds wanted to fight the battle while the other part developed certain disillusionment due to the fear of criticism from society to fight against his own brothers. However, the best decision he made in his life was to choose Krishna for his army. Krishna integrated him back into his true self by making him realize the eternal reality. Once Arjuna understood the divine play, he realized the bigger picture and could understand his Dharma. The inner voice became strong and all the outer voices were subsumed into that inner voice and he could fight the battle of Mahabharata and win that battle by defeating the other side.
The inner call is always very clear, though we are unable to listen to the same because we keep playing loud music in our minds. Since childhood, our parents and society have taught us to play loud music foron fun, entertainment, money, power, name, fame, etc. This conditioning starts very early in life and by the time a person develops the capacity to think and analyze, his mind is already conditioned. The inner voice is very hard to listen to. He chooses one of the other things available on the menu offered by the society and pays the price for the same. There is no free lunch. We miss integrity we we always live lives full of fears and divisions. Unless we get integrated into our inner self, there is no question of integrity. Our lives will always be full of conflicts.
We are never clear what we want in life. Even if there is clarity as to what we want in our lives, life is always full of conflicts because we never get an integrated perspective of life. We look at life from a limited perspective and make choices based on that. Since we are never sure, we lack integrity in our decisions and often keep making conflicting choices. Further, there is not much force and conviction in our decisions, We often do not take responsibility for our decisions and try to find the scapegoats to put the blame. Since we are disconnected from the inner self, we are full of fear and that fearfulness does not allow us to take responsibility for our decisions. In such a state of shakiness and lack of clarity, we end up making the default choices for our life that are the most easy ones and least fulfilling. We end up choosing what society generally approves of because those are easy choices. These easy choices offer us scope for putting blame on others but take us nowhere. We need to reestablish that inner connection in order to live a life of integrity so that we may live the life of Swadharma.
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