How Does Integrity Fit In With Praxis?

One of my favorite definitions of Integrity is simply "a quality or state of being complete or undivided." The reason I like this is that so many people live incomplete, divided lives. So many people perform actions each day that, if analyzed in concert with the big picture of what they desire in their lives, could be said to be in direct and blatant contradiction to those desires.

Why then do people do so many contradicting actions? It has to do with the word integrity. Why are our actions not more integrated with our beliefs? Well, for one thing, most people claim publicly one set of beliefs, but if their beliefs as reflected by their actions we laid bare, their beliefs would actually be shown in most cases to be very different.

Many people do in fact act in concert with their beliefs, but their core beliefs are not what they would be said to "truly desire" were they listed out and dealt with individually. Most of our core beliefs are things that were fed to us, or hammered into us over a lifetime, and that we have accepted. We keep many false beliefs in place simply by the entrained method of selftalk passed down to us by previous generations. "I'm no good at that," "Why do I even try," "I can't control my emotions." "Why always me?" and so forth.

I call them false beliefs because they are not beliefs that we at our core really want, they are things we were led to believe because they were real enough to our teachers that they were taught as incontrovertible fact. The truth is much grander, and would please us if we were to know it through introspection, or by associating with others who believe it.

So what about our actions? So many of us are on autopilot without realizing that we are in complete control of the program that runs the autopilot. Once we get in touch with our true core beliefs, there are ways that we can imprint our beliefs into our psyche such that we can begin the process of rooting out those actions that are not correspondent to those beliefs and replace them with actions which, when codified into habit, will allow us, even carry us into the life we thought we could never have, when all the old programs held us down.

Integrity then is very similar to the process of Praxis, it is the integration, into one harmonious whole, of our true core beliefs, and the actions we manifest. Praxis is the process whereby we attain integration of the two.