The word integrity means being honest with self and others. Emotional integrity involves being honest with the deepest, most personal part of yourself: your own feelings. It means being willing to face uncomfortable truths inside yourself so that you don’t allow them to harm others. Ancient spiritual wisdom considers our connection with the environment as the basic level of human experience. The belief is that if our environment is clean and positive, it will have a positive impact on all the other layers of our existence. Historically, an intimate relationship with the environment was built into the human psyche. This attitude of treating Nature as sacred needs to be revived in modern times. Dualism is the metaphysical view that all things are reducible to two different realities, mind and matter. Idealism and materialism also represent two different and opposing world views. In philosophy, theory of materialism holds that all things are composed of material, and that all emergent phenomena are the result of material properties and interactions. Idealism asserts that reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mentally constructed and immaterial. Materialism believe the mind is just the brain and emphasizes material concerns and sensory experience whereas idealism gives primacy to mind over body. The longstanding philosophical debate between idealism and materialism has recently become critical to our survival. Avoiding your emotional truth gives it more power over you. Materialism brings us unhappiness and anxiety. It's also demonstrated in the epidemic levels of high blood pressure and hypertension among today's "successful" professionals. When people have significant attachment to achieving materialistic values they are less happy. They have poor overall psychological health. Their sense of security and safety are diminished. People feel less competent and have lower self-esteem. Social connectedness suffers. They test less well for authenticity and autonomy. Another danger of materialism that is very pervasive is the danger of equating economic prosperity with religion. There are many scriptures that do talk about success, wealth and great gain. Even religious traditions can be toxic when they place allegiance to beliefs and doctrines above personal spiritual experience. Toxic faith is a destructive and dangerous involvement in a religion that allows the religion to replace a relationship with nature and reality. Emotional and mental treatment in authoritarian religious groups also can be damaging because of 1) toxic teachings like eternal damnation or original sin 2) religious practices or mindset, such as punishment, black and white thinking, and guilt, such as sexual guilt. We need to attend to the human psyche, which is the root cause of our problems. We need to create the means of protecting our beautiful planet Earth. For this to happen, human consciousness must rise above greed and exploitation. Pollution, overconsumption, and human overpopulation that are ruining habitats and killing off species while also disproportionately afflicting the poor. Thousands of species are disappearing every year, compared to the normal “background” extinction rate of one annually. The current destruction of life on earth by human action has the character of deep failure. To speak scientifically, we are wiping out the fruit of millions of years of evolution on earth, and we are shutting down its future. To speak philosophically, this is a moral failure. The generally Christian moral framework of the previous 200 years has now been rejected as an overly restrictive relic of a bygone age. But morality exists independently of religion. The inability of individuals and society to perceive reality has, today, become critical. Our world faces worsening political, ethical, ecological, and spiritual challenges on a global scale. The overpopulation explosion is worsened by the exhausted soil, the poisoned environment, and, worse, the poisoned mental and emotional climate.
"The wars and crises have exposed the terrible potentiality for evil
which still lurks in man despite his civilized appearance. Not so long
ago he thought he had left savagery far behind but his recent and
contemporary activities show quite definitely that he has not. The real
tragedy of our time lies not so much in the unprecedented external
events themselves as in the unprecedented ethical destitution and
spiritual infirmity which they glaringly reveal." - Paul Brunton
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