The fight against corruption has to start within you, as integrity is an inner quality. When we say corruption, most tend to think in terms of a government official, a clerk asking for money to do his duty, or a politician, or a policeman, or that kind of stuff. We have to look at corruption and integrity in a completely different way.
If you want your life to be on absolutely stable foundations – well to take something very controversial, well religion is corruption. Not because of something, somebody misuses in the religious process. That is also there, but fundamentally if you claim to know something that you do not know, that’s corruption. Do not look at corruption in terms of your transactions with other people. Look at corruption as an internal process.
That you are insincere within yourself that’s corruption
That you are insincere within yourself that’s corruption. You’re not absolutely straight with yourself that’s corruption. How you transact in the world has too many ingredients to make a judgment as to what is corruption and what is not. But within you, corruption is simply being something other than what you yourself see as. What we do not know, we must be able to say we do not know.
Between right hand and left hand one is favoured, not judiciously seeing which is better to act, but one is superior to the other. Between a male child and a female child, one is superior to the other – this is all corruption. Between one colour of the skin to another, there is superiority and inferiority – this is corruption. So like this, corruption is very deep rooted within oneself.
It takes a certain amount of intense focused work to get rid of this within yourself. Once you rid yourself of this, your life is on such stable foundations, that you can simply seamlessly act, because there is clarity of what you will do and what you will not do, always.
Integrity means just this, that there is a coherence between the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you act
Integrity means just this, that there is a coherence between the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you act. This coherence will come only if you uproot the fundamental corruption of prejudice. Prejudice is a consequence of being identified with something. This is good that is bad, you will become prejudiced. This is mine that is not mine, you will become prejudiced. This is my country that is not my country, that becomes prejudice. This is my race that is your race, that becomes prejudice. This is my religion, that is your religion, this becomes prejudice. So once you establish prejudice within you, which is a consequence of being strongly identified with something – this identity will not allow you to establish absolute integrity within yourself. Or in other words integrity is a consequence of absolute sense of inclusiveness.
