NOTE: I recieved (actually helped transcribe and edit) the following response to my 1996 paper (Maintaining Spiritual Integrity While Working In The Media) from a dear friend, who is fearlessly prepared to leave this world due to recurrence of colon cancer.  I find it to be quite a refreshing take on reality - or rather, the lack thereof. You can use the link above to read my paper first - there's another link in a comment at the end to bring you back here when you're done. Sooo, without further ado, here is what he had to say:

"Do as you will, life’s a fiction made up of contradiction." 
    - William Blake

Peter,

I have read and re-read your paper on integrity from the point of view of the marketplace. It’s an excellent paper, and with very little work, could easily be dressed up to become the foundation for a major motivational dog-and-pony show, including the foundation for a best-selling book, and a series of high-powered seminars that would promote the idea that with a little personal effort, we can all acquire integrity, and by the sheer force of that acquisition, take heaven by storm.

Well, this may sound good, but it is a seriously distorted misunderstanding, and one that is essentially as bogus as a new-age positive-thinking snake-oil salesman who is selling you colored water to heal terminal diseases.

Strangely enough, if you are suggestible, that totally bogus remedy will work, and relieve the symptoms of whatever illness the mind has conjured up. Unfortunately, whatever problem the mind resurrects and subsequently attempts to resolve, it inevitably feeds back into the same irresolvable misunderstanding that is inherent in the split, dualistic, conditioned ego-mind that is in fact the problem to begin with.

The insanity of all of us who want to “help” is succinctly coined in one of Neitsche’s quotes (paraphrased): “A man, having failed in his attempts to find an answer for himself, now attempts to find answers for everyone else.” In short, the selfsame mind that created the problem out of its confusion now wants to solve it. And nothing can come out of this bogus effort but more of the same kind of insanity that the estranged, alienated, isolated ego-mind produces in its mad thrashing to avoid seeing its own utter impotence and meaninglessness. And, in fact, the haunting suspicion of its own non-existence.

The answer to the human dilemma obviously cannot lie in the distorted efforts of the ego-mind that created it, except perhaps by an exhaustive re-examination of the illusions upon which it rests.

A brief examination of your paper, and the entrenched social assumptions that create the collective psyche from which social man builds his personal towers of Babel, may perhaps begin a different kind of inquiry, and a radically different kind of result.

Now, to address some specific aspects of your paper:

The title, “Maintaining Spiritual Integrity While Working in the Media”, gives me real pause for incredulity. From the time I was a small child, I had great difficulty with vague abstract concepts such as God, Spirit, Eternity, etc., and was chronically looking for definitions that would give me some adequate sense of these terms.

Even though I was almost totally alienated from the kind of Christianity that was forced on me as a child, there were always a few exceptional people in my life who seemed to appear almost magically when a real need arose and one of them was my mom. One evening after a particularly intense diatribe on my part about the absence of any such entity as spirit, mom suggested I read John 3-8 and I laughed sarcastically and disregarded her advice. But somehow that request nagged at the back of my mind, and 2 years later I pulled out the Bible and read it. The verse was this: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou can’st hearest the sound thereof, but can’st not tell from whence it cometh, or whither it goeth. And so is everyone that is born of the spirit.” That verse suddenly ignited my mind and the word spirit took on great meaning and coherence.

The word integrity through its use in literature has always been a fulcrum word in assessing the character and significance of any communication. As the word is defined in the Encarta World English Dictionary, the first definition (it’s most common usage) is a business definition: “The quality of possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles or professional standards” and has very little relevance in the way I am applying it. I am basically aligned with its second definition: “Completeness, the state of being complete or undivided” and the third: “The state of being sound or undamaged”.

And while the word integrity is appropriately used in your title, the word “spiritual” becomes almost an obscene oxymoron, if you consider the Bible’s definition of the word. This bastardization of the word has become a compulsive mantra of yuppie hypocritical idealism, in an attempt to legitimize a twisted business model and pretend that god is not only on their side but actively guiding the whole fiasco. This blindly egotistical stance obviously lacks integrity.

Let it be noted that every new-age group on the planet seems to have set up the concept of “spirituality” in their identity as an imperative to having a legitimate status in a world that worships hype instead of integrity. The wonderful thing about the word spirit, as John 3-8 defines it, is that it can’t be legitimately dragged into the marketplace and made to represent personal objectives. It’s interesting to note that while no one would think of trying to use business ethics to promote spiritual growth it has become the rage to promote spiritual values to further ones business opportunities. This travesty could only be perpetuated by people who have not touched on the spirit and don’t know they have one.

I think your title would have been much more accurately represented as “Maintaining Ego Integrity While Working In the Media”, but this becomes an even a greater misunderstanding. The worlds of Business, the Media, and the general concept of working for a living demand a certain amount of greed, self-interest, self-recognition, proper economic rewards, positions of power, status, ego-gratification and so forth to function. Fitting the concept of “integrity” into all this is a bit of a stretch.

“Integrity” operating within the modern business environment, no matter how enlightened it may pretend to be, is much more of a rationalization than a factual description of the actual process or intent. Any such words used in this way become meaningless buzzwords. The glitz and glamour by which we package our economic and social endeavors end up having almost nothing to do with the original intent or meaning conveyed by those words.

Now, as relates to paragraph 3 in your paper, “retreating from the world to become enlightened” does not necessarily have either integrity or transcendental potential. The ego and its unbelievable ability to put a bright twist on its own efforts to avoid the truth of its pseudo-existence are epic. The ego has neither the intention or the capacity to confront its own insanity. It does, however, have an enormous inclination to create the appearance of being “enlightened” in order to maintain its claim to legitimacy.

I would contend that the Spirit has no tools, nor does it need any tools. Any “internal witness” one may have only gains its reputation for “tenacious, unshakable non-judgment and vigilant awareness” after that entity has been taken over by the very ego it was intended to witness, and only gains this status as that process proceeds. In other words, the very self-conscious nature of the process means that the witness has already been hijacked.

It is safe to say that any description of internal process becomes a subterfuge to enhance our self-identity. One must always ask the question about any aspect of mind that we are consciously taking credit for: in whose service is it actually functioning? Anyone that can’t answer this question immediately should ask his ego to examine itself more closely, and then proceed to ignore the inevitable biased results. Any such dealing with the function of internal intellectual states rank as sophisticated subterfuges to hide the actual intent of the ego.

As to the “art of negotiation” in the marketplace: stripped of its veneer, this is the art of finding out how much it takes to buy and sell people in the marketplace. There exist no business climates of which I am aware, where any real honesty, integrity and compassion are even possible. And your paragraph on “negotiating from true power” is a wonderful example of the difficulty of trying to live by these ideals.

You make a statement that “true power starts with knowing that we don’t need to take advantage of anyone in order to get ahead, and we don’t need to let ourselves be taken advantage of, in order to survive.” That being said, your next paragraph provides a wonderful disclaimer, if you read it carefully, of how impossible the ideals in that statement are to actually implement. Powerful, categorical declarations like that demand that you actually already have the kind of integrity that cannot be subverted, that neither attacks nor defends anything. If you really mean these things, you have to have dropped all concern for your own welfare.

In the following paragraph, you proceed to give legitimacy to all the concerns of life that serve to force one into innumerable dishonest positions and half-truths; all the things that lead us into servitude. If one can’t deal with the difficulties inherent with these risks at whatever level, then one has no integrity. If your integrity is conditional, as soon as the stakes are raised, you will inevitably sell out to the highest bidder. For me, all of this relates back to one essential understanding, and it is this: A man can only truly be happy if he knows that he needs absolutely nothing in order to be.

As for what you call “Humble Confidence”, this sounds good on the surface, but then you immediately touch on the issue of respect. Wanting to gain any kind of “respect” is totally antithetical to integrity. The best definition of integrity, that would have any meaning in this case, is really “selflessness”. If one has no “self”, one is now free to act in a way that is most appropriate to the circumstances. Being in a genuine state of “fearlessness”, one sees that any defenses he may put forth create exactly the dangers he thinks he is trying to avoid. It seems to me that you have not actually made this paragraph strong enough to justify the power of that initial statement.

Then, you again bring up all the survival concerns that compromise people’s desire for unconditional truth. To your closing statement in that section that “One who has nothing to protect cannot easily be attacked”, I would say that until the truth is unconditional, it’s a lie. Remove the word “easily” from that closing statement and it is true.

Yes, one can easily be twisted by one’s desires. When we are playing in the marketplace, a real ingenuity forms behind the desire to get ahead, that being the skill of capitalizing on other people’s weaknesses. In any of those arenas, where we have a desire to get ahead, it automatically triggers an inner state of competitive, violent and ego-gratifying emotions that allow us free license to practice the game of one-upsmanship. Mastery, in this context, becomes the ability to control every level of the game, and everyone in it.

As long as there is any rationale for why we can’t risk being totally honest, we are going to continually fall back into very limiting, self-defeating ego-states. Many of the ideals that you have stated about running a successful “spiritual” business would only be appropriate if your entire staff was made up of selfless people. Resurrecting such unrealistic ideals actually has a tendency to gradually turn people who originally believed in the company’s goals into actors who are playing a role they no longer genuinely feel.

The deeper problem, and one that almost no-one is willing to address, is that the self that is trying to solve the problem, by the very nature of its split existence, is the one that has created it. Put another way, the ego that wants to solve the problem is itself the problem.

In your final section, you talk about the “process of self-transformation”. There is in fact no formula or process for self-transformation, since there is no such “self” to transform. (Anyone that has gone deep enough will understand this, and everyone else will think I’m nuts, and that’s perfectly okay.) Using all these idealized intellectual schemes to build a platform from which to launch “spaceship integrity” could only happen in a zero-gravity universe, and not one where the self is the densest object in it.

As to modern media or any such external reflections, they have no power to change anything. There is no power or reality in an image. The idea that one can have a constructive role in straightening out the world, or oneself, all rests on the assumption that this petty little entity that we call the “ego” or the “self” actually exists. It doesn’t.

In closing, here are some general statements that may shed some further light on the subject:

The true test of integrity is of course the absolute surrender to infinity, a release of all the ways one would identify oneself. Only those with no personal interests at all are available to openly and freely respond to the moment. Anyone who lives in the spirit has nothing at risk, and no possible loss can occur, since he owns nothing. The rest of us are masquerading behind endless disguises, busy adopting and conforming to various postures, positioning ourselves to get ahead, and learning to act as if these pretenses are somehow real. All the way down the line, one who is even beginning to get to know himself will see that he is hedging on so many bets that his very existence is in default to a currency that was bankrupt from the beginning.

If you can’t act on something for its own merits, regardless of any threats from the past or the future, you have no integrity. Any time your actions are conditional, you are heading down the primrose path toward more and more limited and circumscribed behavior. You are building your own prison. If you have the courage to act unconditionally and actually see that within your illusions there is nothing to defend, then you are free to do as you will. There are no implications to fear, because there is no longer anyone to be afraid. This does imply the death of who you think you are, and it is impossible for the ego to contemplate its own demise in any meaningful way.

This is the paradox that can actually put you in touch with your true Self.

In closing, in order to restore integrity of the mind, you must transcend the ego’s motivation to imprison it, and no one leaps blindly into the vastness of that unconscious void or faces the fear of that emptiness, until he has no place left to go.  Anybody who asks me about integrity these days, I simply point to the abyss and change the subject.

- Jim