This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book...
Healing happens on many levels. One of the levels is the mental level. When you don't use your mind properly, you create chaos within yourself which makes healing much more difficult, because mental chaos creates physiological chaos. The way your mind functions is directly related to your self image, which includes the ideals about yourself, the beliefs about yourself, and the way you treat others. The four noble principles address your mental set up and how it influences your self image and your interactions with others.
The Four Noble Principles of Life
There are four fundamental noble principles for the correct use of your mind and for guiding your life in a constructive way. If these four noble principles are followed, then your life will work really well. If they are not followed, your life will become chaos. This post describes the first noble principle.
Noble Principle #1 - Integrity
Integrity means keeping your word with yourself and with others and becoming complete within yourself, with others, and with all things. We frequently tell ourselves that we’re going to do something, or we’re NOT going to do something anymore, like a bad habit. Then, at the first sign of difficulty, we abandon the commitment that we made to ourselves. This is a lack of integrity. We all do it from time to time, but the more we do it, the less control we have over our life. To the extent you keep making commitments to yourself that you don’t honor, to that same extent you lose control over yourself. The Universe doesn’t trust you anymore and doesn’t try to help you, because it knows you are not reliable. Why bother?
On the other hand, if you keep your commitments to yourself, then every aspect of your life is strengthened. The Universe then makes every attempt to support you in the directions you have chosen. It may sound strange to talk about the Universe supporting or not supporting you, but the reality is, you are not separate from everything else. It’s like every point in space knows everything about you. It knows what you will do and what you won’t do. If you are to regain the trust that the Universe has in you, then you must rebuild the trust that you have in yourself.
This same principle is true with your commitments to other people. If you continuously break your commitments, then that unreliable quality in you will be sensed by everybody you meet. If you wonder why people don’t respond to you in the way you want them to, it may be that they sense your lack of integrity. When you begin to honor your commitments to others and to yourself, a new energy builds around you which signals to others that you are a reliable human being who can be trusted.
What does it mean to keep your commitments? It means you’re really going to do the commitment with every fiber of your being. Do or die. That doesn’t mean that you can’t change your mind. If you make a commitment, and later realize it’s a mistake, then you can decide to change the commitment. In that case what you tell yourself is, “I made this commitment. At the time I thought I could honor and fulfill it. I now realize it was a mistake and I’m not going to fulfill this commitment. I’m going to make another choice.” So with yourself, whenever you make a commitment and realize you’ve made a mistake and you’re NOT going to fulfill it, then you must consciously acknowledge that you’re canceling it. Otherwise it becomes a drag on you.
The same is true if you make a commitment with someone else. Don’t just say, “I’ll call you,” and not do it. Oftentimes you may think you’re being nice by telling someone you’re going to do something. You want to keep them happy by not saying “no” – but now, they’re expecting you to do it. When you don’t do things that you say you will do, if you don’t fulfill your commitments, they feel let down. If you do it repeatedly, soon they don’t trust you. In addition, as before, the Universe doesn’t trust you and doesn’t send you reliable people to work with. In the end, you are damaging yourself and hurting others. When you lose integrity, you lose relationship to life itself. If you don’t walk your talk, your life degrades into chaos. Carefully watch every thought and every commitment you make.