I’ve been reflecting for a long time on what it means to be a conscious, conscientious person, someone inside that often overused idea of ‘our spiritual journey toward enlightenment.’
What does it mean to be someone with integrity, and how do we define our placement along the way in terms of ‘all things being equal?’
One day while watching the second martial arts movie about Bruce Lee’s master teacher, ‘Ip Man2,’ I heard my answer.
Ip Man said at the end, “No man’s integrity is more valuable than another’s.”
Something really clicked in me and this was my mantra for several weeks. One day while reflecting on the message of Ip Man’s words, I saw an image of two circle patterns. Each circle had an outer ring with a fairly large center point in the middle. The first and larger circle appeared to be a Universal metaphor for integrity and had a lot of dots along the outer ring.
The second, smaller circle symbolized the individual circles in which we humans live and operate. It was an enlarged version of the dots around the Universal circle ring.
In that moment I felt truly clear about this idea of who is where on the way. We are only as enlightened as we are whole, and wholeness, or integration, is the same for everyone. No one person is better than another or further along the path than someone else when integrity is at the center.
All other points are just varying degrees of integration–stages along the way.
Each one of us is walking inward toward center; inward to our own center and inward to the center of the Universal principle of integrity. A balance of yin and yang inside of us, yin and yang together, inside a circle of oneness.
