Are you Mingyur Rinpoche?

My father asked me this question soon after I began studying with him, when I was around nine years old. It was so gratifying to know the correct answer that I proudly declared, Yes I am.

Then he asked, Can you show me the one thing in particular that makes you Mingyur Rinpoche?

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Helen Tworkov – In Love With The World – New York – Spiegel & Grau – 2019

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Do you know this feeling when you attempt to describe something, and the subject of your attention is evading your focus like a moving target? Or at other times, it all feels like a cloudy foggy thing which you can not grab? Like, to the extent that you begin to doubt your own capacity to use elaborate, meaningful words? Ultimately doubting you have anything relevant to say at all?

Every now and then this feeling gets me when I attempt to muster fresh energy for my book projects. Since months I am working on finishing writing about the term “integrity“. There are several chapters on integrity within my draft book project on policing. I try to use examples from my own professional socialisation, reflecting on what guided me in adhering to principles such as “integrity”. In doing that I got caught up in memories about situations when my integrity was challenged, situations in which I may just have been lucky enough to escape a nearby-by catastrophe, allowing me to learn, after wiping off the cold sweat of anxiety and fear. Learning almost never happens through absorption of theoretical knowledge alone. It is always based on experiences, including mistakes. Especially making mistakes. Consider this an essential and it will soften your reflex to quickly judge people who made a mistake. As long as this leads to learning. How often got I lucky when riding my motorbike, escaping from a crash just because something like fate, or pure luck, protected me? How lucky was I when I fell from a tree two years ago, finding myself on the ground with a broken vertebrae, but no lasting damage? “What if things would have gone a little bit more sideways?” This question has been so pervasive in my life. And sideways many things in my life went, of course. I don’t know of any human being gaining experience without things going sideways.

So, if I just managed to act with uncorrupted integrity in my line of professional work, but at the same can not claim that this is true for every other aspect of my life, where does that leave me? Well, I can say that I know what I am talking about, both related to areas where I maintained integrity, and related to areas which required some thorough amendments, ultimately. It doesn’t make my statements less true, or weakens them. He or She who sees the splinter in the eye of others but not the big chunk of wood sticking out of the own eye (does this German idiomatic make sense in an English article?), is hypocritical: “It would never happen to me” is a statement which, at minimum, is foolish. Or may be that person has little imaginative capacity how fast things can go sideways. All too often, those who state things like these, they hide their own skeletons in the basement of their houses. I have witnessed moral sermons from people who got caught with their own dirty secrets later on. We live in times where it has become possible to act without any integrity at all, and to recklessly pursue egoistic agendas based on never ending streams of lies, and bullying behaviour. Tearing down the foundations of anything which is standing in the way. By the way: Huge kudos to the U.S. judiciary these days.

So, what is integrity?

And, speaking of my doubts: I am attempting to write my books since ten years. Nothing has seen the light of the day. But this blog has, since now almost ten years, captured a stream of consciousness which I initially had planned of being captured in books. May be I am not meant to write a book. May be I am meant to write here.

Integrity is one of those terms which can be subjected to a definition. Any definition I found or came up with myself is grounded within a context. Like “structural integrity” as an engineering term. Like “organizational integrity”, within a business corporation, or within a government administration. “Personal integrity” as well can relate to so many different situations. Integrity as a police officer, integrity as a partner in a relationship, integrity in adhering to principles, or, in a very specific context, integrity as a preventative firewall against relapse, into self-harming behavior, or substance abuse. In these, and so many more situations we use this term “integrity”.

Things that appear simple if we don’t think about them, or take them for granted, they get very complicated and hard to describe when you take a closer look. “Integrity” is one of these concepts that fall into this category. In a more recent private conversation I was presented with a sentence from Brené Brown: “Integrity – Choosing courage over comfort, choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.” Less a definition, more a pointer related to ethical behavior which, if applied, constitutes integrity as a character trait.

Leaving you here for the day. I’ll start to define integrity in my next blog entry.