Is Integrity Obsolete?

“Yeah, cash is great.  You don’t have to pay tax on that,” Sally said.

 

I just stared at her, stunned.   “I report all of my income.” 

Now it’s her turn to look at me like I’m an alien lizard from Alpha Centauri, or clinically insane.  “I prefer cash for my international clients because it’s easier, that’s all.”  Now she’s looking at me with pity.  I’m really, really stupid, she’s thinking. Could be.

I admit to disappointment in my friend.  Professors Kohlberg and Gilligan developed frameworks to explain the levels of sophistication of our human moral reasoning, and doing whatever you can get away with is the level typical of a 3^rd grader.  Later in our development, we grow through understanding that general lawfulness makes everyone safer, on up to doing The Right Thing just because it is The Right Thing, from focusing solely on yourself through level after level until you arrive at the place where all living creatures are your siblings and the earth itself is your mother and father, and you devote yourself completely to the alleviation of suffering in the world.  Nobody gets to that summit but some folks get closer than Sally seems to be aiming.

Then there’s another colleague, who changed her email signature to “Amazon Best-Selling Author” a month before she even finished writing the dang thing.  Her reasoning: she had hired someone who guaranteed to make her book a best-seller (it only sold 200 copies), and thus she was just jump-starting what WOULD be true.  Except that she didn’t change it when she saw the sales results.  [Which were totally predictable, for a newbie author tackling a popular topic that had dozens of real bestsellers to compete against.]  I’ll bet that “I’ll make you a star” charlatan suggested it, but it was my colleague who did it, and still refuses to own her lie.

And she’s not alone.  Everyone who releases a print or even an e-book these days claims it as an “Amazon Bestseller” before it’s even on the metaphorical shelves.

I pity the real bestselling authors, who have their hard work and quality product cheapened because everyone (including me) who knows about the “Amazon Bestseller” scam, assumes they are lying also.  Except Ian Brodie, who does such good work, he doesn’t have to lie to impress you.  I’d be willing to believe that his book really IS the best seller in its category of e-mail marketing.

That’s something that my blow-hard pals don’t seem to understand.  If you cheapen the status of an Amazon bestseller because everyone with any level of thrown-together product is claiming it, then when and if you ever do achieve that real pinnacle, no one will believe you.  It’s a short-sighted strategy, based on the belief that the rest of us are too stupid to see the pattern.  We’re not.  So cut it out, already.  Work for your accolades, like your pre-iPad ancestors’ generations did.

My colleague – whose name really isn’t Sally and isn't even a woman – who thinks that integrity is something you turn on and off, is an example of the driving force behind so much cheating, on every  level, these days.  You tell yourself [and there’s always at least a tiny grain of truth in here] that you have been cheated, or the whole system is unfair and corrupt; this belief and the resentment it generates frees you from your moral imperative to being fair and honest yourself.   And then anything is possible.

Many people have a situational-cheater’s response to taxes.  Taxes are, as my anthropology students learn [see my YouTube channel Anthroisfun], the way that complex societies make sure that resources are redistributed.  In small groups of 20-40 individuals, as our ancestors lived for millions of years, until around 7,000 years ago, we shared our good and bad fortune on a daily basis.  No one hoarded; you shared the food you gathered or scavenged (or later, hunted) and no one went hungry.  If you made two knives, you gave one to your sister or cousin-in-law.  Once a money economy emerged, people could contribute coins instead of wheat and barley and goats, and still no one went hungry.  

Modern Western societies have become so complex, and so many of them,  including the USA, are unequal, unfair oligarchies, that the original purpose of taxing – to share food and provide for common goals like roads, medical care, education of the young, and defense against enemies – can be ignored, while you focus on the things you don’t like or approve of.  It’s impossible to have 330 million people agree on anything, including “the sky is blue.”  For example, in Seattle, the sky is actually varying shades of grey.  If we get a tiny patch of blue sky, we all go nuts and stop talking about politics for the duration of the blessed event.  My otherwise-admirable colleague could give you a litany of things that she refuses to contribute to, and thus is morally justified, in her own mind at least – maybe in yours – in pocketing cash that she refuses to share.

But taxes support children and disabled people, and I’ve been both. You have been a child.  If you are blessed to live a long life, you will be too old to earn a salary.  Taxes fix the roads, provide fire protection and libraries, and you need those things.  Taxes provide Sesame Street and Nova, the National Weather Service and Meals on Wheels; I’ve learned from the former and may live long enough to need the latter.  We all may.

 

I know how selective resentment can make nearly anything seem morally acceptable – and I am asking you all to become aware of it, too.  I have a class that brings people into connection with all the components of their ancestry (Meet Your Ancestors, launching on www.soaringdragon.biz/classes) including the noble and heroic.  These heroes are the parts of your DNA that you can tap into when you feel yourself getting up a head of steam around justifications for resentments.  A new class on Freeing Your Soul From the Poison of Resentment is debuting soon to give you tools for this.  

It all starts with awareness of what is really going on inside your thinking, and a commitment to listen to the better angels of your nature.  Deep breath and make a choice.  Pay your taxes, on all your income.  Give generously to those who have less than you do.  Realize what a hero you are for doing both.  YOU, my friend, are protecting seniors and children, and the disabled, and you are the guardian and protector of your community.  Be proud of yourself.  

And remember the Hindu scripture, “Do not despise your neighbors who are poor, for many poor people were once well-off.  And you may someday be poor.”  We’re all in this together, my friends, we truly are.

If we all learn how to call on our inner hero, regardless of the choices that the swamp around us makes, we will have a roadmap to creating a paradise out of this Earth that we have inherited. 

  Take a step on that path today.  Take another step tomorrow.  Repeat until the day you die.

Soar With Dragons to Genuine Joy (part 2)

In the first part of this exploration, I recommended learning new things, exploring creating things and slowing down to the point where you can actually experience the world you live in.  Today I want to look at some examples of joy that came to me like a bolt from the heavens - unplanned, unexpected and amazing.

It was almost two decades ago, and a Russian colleague was visiting Silicon Valley to share best practices on the use of technology in education.  At that time, I was director of a university extension program in network management. [Too true.  Before I saw the light and switched to healing minds and bodies, I used to teach network engineering.  My first published book, by Prentice-Hall was titled Networking and Data Communications and was the first readable tutorial on LAN technology ever published.  For your homework assignment, research how long ago that was and DON’T TELL ANYONE!]

I was in a major-league funk, not whining about anything, just much more subdued than usual, in a serious crisis of confidence.  He noticed that I wasn’t my usual sunny self, nagged me to tell him why, and I gave him the 20-words-or-less version of What Wasn’t Working in My Life.  I’ll never forget his words, because they not only brought me out of my funk, they have sustained me for two decades.  He said, “Remember: you are the beloved child of God.”

Not so extraordinary, you say?  Well, consider this: I don’t think he believes in God.  I know I don’t and never did.  While I’m a very spiritual and religious person, my faith doesn’t have a First Cause (God/Creator being).  The universe follows laws and arose however Stephen Hawking and his colleagues say it does and did.  We Buddhists don’t care.  Religion is about ethics, conscience, love, honor, transcendence and the meaning of our human lives, all the things that chemistry and physics and biology can’t create experiments to study.  But what my colleague was saying wasn’t about the simplistic definition of God as creator being.  He meant God as a word that equals “the spirit of love that animates the universe,” which the Upanishads, humanity oldest literature, says is the axis that all matter revolves around.  Every faith I’ve ever studied sees that three-letter word as denoting a concept or an energy, not an actual being.  What he was really saying was “Victoria, it’s just a trough in the overall arc of a good person’s life.  The universe still rotates on an axis of pure love.  See that.  Don’t forget it.”

Seeing to the heart of what he was communicating transformed my whole conceptualization of what my life was about and what my response to the latest life-insult [a serious health issue] should be.

Fast forward to two years ago, when I was spending four days above the Arctic Circle in mid-winter, and it was every bit as icy cold from 10PM to 5AM as you are envisioning – times twelve.  The auroras were glorious; I could feel those magnetic fields resonating in my soul.  They danced their sparkling dance across a sky blazing with starlight. 

I noticed a Japanese woman who was traveling alone and reached out to try to share the experience, but her English was poor and I wasn’t pronouncing my 7 words of Japanese correctly.  So I held her hand, shared some reiki, and crocheted her a scarf, with reiki symbols in them, so they would continue to create a channel through me to her even after we all went on our ways.  So few words.  But the channel was profound.  We stayed in touch, she continued to study English.  Today, she is marvelously fluent, I’ve learned to pronounce better and we are doing wonderful spiritual healing work together. [If you can read Japanese, find Wami Amami online and sign up to work with her.]

We can find joy, we can find wisdom and we can find deep connection with unfamiliar words and with no words at all.  Joy can flow down like a mighty river into our unsuspecting souls, if we open ourselves to it.  I hope you will.

Bio: Victoria Leo offers both science-based and spiritual solutions that really work! Visit www.soaringdragon.biz and choose the program that will transform your life.  You deserve to soar with dragons! Victoria’s Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies welcomes you, as does her blog SoaringDragoninJapan.blogspot.com. You can find her books on Amazon or at your local bookseller.