Best Quotes from The Way Of Integrity by Martha N. Beck with Page Numbers

"Like Dante, we’re a bit dim about exactly what’s wrong, or how we got here."

"The experience of noticing we’re on the wrong path, in what feels like the wrong life, comes to almost all of us at some point."

"We learn from our culture how a good person is supposed to behave, and we behave that way. Then we expect the promised rewards."

"Confused, we figure we’re somehow not doing enough, or not doing it the right way."

"Suffering arose from our bodies and hearts as a result—and riveted our attention on fixing the problem."

"The dark wood of error syndrome—reveals places where we’re in denial, out of alignment with our real perceptions, desires, and instinctive wisdom."

"Your true self is intensely interested in your real life’s work—but it could give a rat’s ass about anything else."

"When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern."

"The path to true love—true anything—is the way of integrity."

"You’re just lost. By definition, that means you don’t know where to go or what to do next. Fortunately, I can direct you to a surefire next step, the single step that will put you squarely on the way of integrity."

‘If whatever you’re doing isn’t working, don’t do it harder.’

‘The problem isn't how hard you're working, it's that you're working on things that aren't right for you.'

'Trying to climb the mountain of “better” almost always involves huge amounts of exhausting labor, when we’re already dead tired.'

‘The way we handle trauma is shaped by socialization.'

‘Social comparison theory means that we tend to measure our own well-being not by how we feel, but by how our lives compare to other people’s.'

‘Your true self, by contrast, is pure nature. It doesn’t give a tinker’s damn who wore it best, or if anyone wore it at all.'

‘We can’t lose our true nature, since it’s in our DNA, but we can divide ourselves from it to get better at various cultural games.'

‘Whenever you go against your true nature to serve your culture, you freaking hate it.'

‘If you choose to leave Mount Delectable behind, you might not get what you want in that socially driven, craving kind of way. But you won’t care, because your entire world will fill up—with all the things for which you yearn.'

‘There’s only one reason you did the unpleasant thing: at some level you thought you had to.'

"Just when a teacher became necessary for forward progress, someone or something showed up to help."

"We tend to meet teachers after we’ve realized we’re wandering in a dark wood of error."

"Without some outside assistance, we might never see them, no matter how earnestly we try."

"The role of soul teachers is crucial but limited."

"Real love doesn’t want anyone to be immobilized or attached, certainly not in the dark wood of error."

"When we meet a true guide, there’s often something almost eerie about the encounter."

"A teacher will eventually show up, often in unexpected ways."

"The outer teacher is merely a milestone. It is only your inner teacher that will walk with you to the goal."

"Our truest guides don’t help us get comfortable in our illusions; instead, they rattle our cages, make us uneasy, confiscate our sedatives."

"Every real soul guide will bow to the teacher inside you."

The only way out is through.

To continue along the way of integrity, you must go in among the secret things—that is, the things you’ve been keeping from yourself.

Ultimately, leaving denial is the most productive, grounding, calming thing we could possibly do.

Abandon hope, ye who enter here.

We hope that things aren’t as they already are.

Denial is a survival mechanism that keeps us from dying of shock.

Whatever you least want to know, whatever makes you most fidgety, uncomfortable, irritable, and anxious, is the general area of a gate to hell.

This is the place where all cowardice has to die.

By dropping resistance to whatever is happening right now, we are always able to cope.

Trust in me, just in me; shut your eyes and trust in me.

I don’t happen to believe there’s a geographical place where awful things happen to dead people. But I do believe in hell. I’ve been there.

Pain comes from events, while suffering comes from the way we handle events.

What upsets people is not what happens to them, but their thoughts about what happens.

Being split from ourselves is hell. Reclaiming integrity is the way out of it.

The purpose of suffering is to help us locate our internal divisions, reclaim our reality, and heal these inner rifts.

Believing things that aren’t true for us at the deepest level is the commonest way in which we lose our integrity.

You don’t have to believe any of your own new ideas. Just keep working on this exercise until you find the part of yourself that is capable of doubting your demons.

The process that frees us from our inner hell is very simple, though not necessarily easy.

When you observe your suffering, yours will change, too.

Your true self is showing you that. It’s trying to get your attention, to help you question, doubt, and drop the beliefs that are trapping you in hell.

Most of us unconsciously put 'Avoid Suffering' at the very top of our lifetime to-do lists.

After all our efforts, one of the few certainties of human life is that we all suffer.

Believing things that aren’t true... stems from insidious lies, aspects of our cultural training and assumptions so deeply entrenched we don’t even realize they exist.

I believe it’s closer to Dante’s meaning to call these problems 'errors of innocence'.

Many 'inexplicable' feelings of depression, rage, and anxiety are actually reactions to hidden false beliefs.

The more I tried to 'balance' contradictory roles, the more off-center and miserable I felt.

Once you’ve seen through a false assumption, you don’t need another belief to replace it.

Getting out of hell doesn’t mean picking up a new set of chains, a new set of absolute beliefs. It means replacing rigid convictions with curious openness.

It can be frightening to let go of such beliefs... as you dissolve them with observation and inquiry, you’ll soon end up breaking the rules.

You’ll feel a thousand times freer—and they won’t like it. Don’t worry. This can actually be evidence you’re on the right track.

Even if you’ve never raised your hand against a living thing, you’ve almost certainly been violent.

The righteous mind at its full tilt is completely insane.

The desire to destroy others is fundamentally hypocritical, because no one, especially an attacker, wants to be destroyed.

Humans depend for survival on belonging to close-knit groups of cooperating individuals.

Anger at inequity or ill-treatment seems to be embedded in our biology.

When we see ourselves described (in errors of righteousness), we’re not connecting with our sense of truth.

Self-critique allows change.

A closed mind is like a weapon whose only function is to harm.

Living in errors of righteousness wears us out and drags us down.

When we go to war on something that we see as a war on us, the ultimate winner isn’t either side of the conflict, but war itself.

"Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently."

"Every lie you stop telling is like a layer of soil in your archeological dig toward your core truth, your full inner integrity."

"The most awful thing we can believe is that we are doomed to solitary confinement."

"You need to know it, too—we all do. Here it is: You are infinitely worthy. You are infinitely precious. You have always been enough. You will always be enough. There is no place you don’t belong. You are lovable. You are loved. You are love."

"When we deliberately leave our own truth, we live in a foggy world where nothing we experience feels trustworthy or reliable, because we ourselves aren’t trustworthy and reliable."

"It’s important to know that you may be doing these things to others. But it’s absolutely crucial to see where you’re doing them to yourself."

"To accept your own mistreatment is to participate in a lie."

"You may unearth fake pretenses of happiness and dishonest excuses for people who’ve treated you badly."

"The relief that comes when we’re fully honest with ourselves can take us from seemingly intransigent suffering to calm and peace, even before we’ve changed a thing in our outer lives."

"Lying, like a ubiquitous blood-sucking insect, is insidious partly because it’s so small, so common, so nearly invisible."

"It's a kind of paradise training camp. Even though the climb is strenuous, Dante sees that Saint Catherine of Siena was right: all the way to heaven really is heaven."

"Learning to walk the walk of integrity is arduous at first, effortless by the end."

"The ultimate self-help strategy, the one practice that could end all your suffering and get you all the way to happiness: Stop lying."

"To be whole and free, we must move forward anyway."

"Integrity is the way to happiness."

"The only reason Dante gets past the lowest reaches of purgatory is that he just wants it so damn much."

"The longing to be whole became steadily more intense until it overwhelmed every inner obstacle, all their worst fears."

"The truth sets us free. All of us."

"In the end, Janice's immense courage, strength, and persistence created major social change toward justice."

"If the way grew so difficult I could no longer climb it on foot, or even on hands and knees, I’d just have to use my wings."

Radical truth-telling rocks a lot of boats, so other people may be reacting badly to your no-lie challenge.

Resistance from others is often evidence you’re on the right track.

If you’ve really stopped lying, with both words and actions, you may face pushback, but that’s a sign of your integrity.

You’ll dissolve the beliefs that split you from your nature, then change your behavior to reflect your deepest truth.

Cultures rely on consensus—if everyone agrees, there’s no pressure on the system.

If you start honoring your true nature and find yourself missing your old culture, don’t panic.

Everyone who decides to embrace integrity must mourn the known misery, the familiar patterns and dysfunctional relationships they’ve left behind.

Your no-lie challenge leads to a choice point.

It’s when we make this major commitment that we begin shifting not just our thoughts, but every word and action, to align with integrity.

When we’re trying to be good and someone attacks us for it, we feel hurt. Usually angry. Sometimes furious.

Know what you really know, feel what you really feel, say what you really mean, and do what you really want.

Real relief—the sort that brings us back to the person we are meant to be—comes only when we embrace our true natures.

You have no time to waste on suffering, no time to keep torturing your nature to serve your culture. The time for integrity is now.

Every single choice is a chance to turn toward the life you really want.

Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect; practice makes permanent.

What I really want is to drink beer on a beach forever? People who say that get bored after three days and start developing career ideas.

The more of these beautiful feelings we receive, the more we create. Giving doesn’t impoverish us; it makes us richer.

If I live in the truth, I’ll always come out okay. Because only the truth has legs. At the end of the day, it’s the only thing left standing.

Make small changes, not large ones, your entire life will be transformed.

Each time, you’ll get better at it. A stumble isn’t the end of the world.

"I realized I didn’t want to end my life, just the way I’d been living."

"When I thought of myself as already dead, I didn’t care what anyone thought about me."

"If you follow the way of integrity long enough, something like this will happen to you, too."

"The last step in purgatory, for all of us, is to return to Eden and regain our lost innocence."

"What starts as your own Eden can ripple out further than you’d believe."

"We are put on earth a little space / that we may learn to bear the beams of love."

"Courage requires the willingness to be seen as we are."

"As their lives align with truth, they begin to shine—the way Sharee did, the way Derek did."

"Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional."

"When we let painful lies dissolve in oblivion and look at them from the opposite side, our own switched perspective tells us how to go beyond culture."

Without self-deceit, fear, or shame, he’s in a state of full integrity: body, mind, heart, and soul aligned with truth.

If you follow the way of integrity far enough, you, too, may find yourself 'rising' into it—maybe in small ways, maybe in big ones.

It’s impossible to describe in words what it’s like to transcend the state of being human.

The sense of oneness and the dissolution into love show up consistently in people who have 'awakened.'

The path toward Enlightenment is not only real, but we are biologically predisposed to seek it.

Knowing that you don’t know everything doesn’t turn you into a drooling ignoramus. On the contrary, it liberates your vastly intelligent true nature to see reality as it is.

People who are 'awake' experience everyone and everything as part of themselves, and since they are driven by compassion, their primary goal is to set themselves completely free by freeing other people.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Once you leave suffering behind, you may spend at least part of your time going back to the dark wood of error, looking for suffering people—the lost pieces of yourself.

Your next steps on the way of integrity—our next steps—could change everything.

"Fractals form because of the interplay between the basic shapes and forces that make up the material world."

"One human’s integrity is to a couple’s, a family’s, a nation’s."

"As you follow your own way of integrity, the effect on everyone and everything around you may be greater than you can imagine."

"The only thing that will keep us from destroying ourselves at a collective level is exactly what keeps us from destroying ourselves at an individual level."

"You can’t build a high-performance airplane out of broken parts."

"As you make your one-degree turns toward your own happiness, you’ll stop being part of humanity’s problems and become part of the solution."

"Your way of integrity will lead you to serve the world in ways that increase your own happiness."

"Love doesn’t divide the pool of goodness available to all humanity, but multiplies it for everyone."

"Every individual who develops a clear mind becomes part of a fractal that brings us into alignment with one another and with nature itself."

"Maybe we can realize the opposite of our worst fear. Maybe we can reach the point where everything reverses, where going down becomes going up."

If you follow the way of integrity far enough, your life may go beyond our culture’s definition of 'normal'—not because you’re departing from reality, but because you’re connecting with it.

The further I’ve traveled along my own way of integrity, the stranger the experiences I’ve had myself.

Experience has convinced me that the closer we come to our integrity, the more 'magical' our lives become.

I began to imagine that the universe works like this: whenever we humans long for something, the Powers That Be immediately send it. But everything we’ve ordered is always delivered to our real home address: peace.

This is why, when we struggle for things in a state of desperation, they don’t come to us—nothing works when it’s misaligned.

It boils down to this: peace is your home. Integrity is the way to it. And everything you long for will meet you there.

The way we see determines what we see, whether our primal world belief shows us a universe that’s dangerous, frightening, and meaningless, or safe, enticing, and alive.

If anything can save us at this point, it will be the kind of magic we work by clearing our minds so completely that we can see beyond anything our combined cultures have ever created.

The moment we call 'now' is like the line where the plane of eternity intersects with the plane of time.

When we fully dissolve the lie of being isolated within ourselves, we join Dante and everyone else, everything else.