The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

The second half of Stage 3 brings the reader to an understanding of the momentous nature of the transformation that integrity could bring to their lives. Chapter 11 represents the completion of the ascent up Mount Purgatory, with the remaining chapters—describing Eden and heaven—offering a vision of something altogether different. As such, Chapter 11 is the endpoint of most of Beck’s active advice for making progress, because after that point, the goal has largely been reached. A reader expecting The Way of Integrity to be a straightforward self-help book would largely see their expectations met by the sections through Chapter 11, after which Beck’s book transitions into topics more commonly found in books of New Age spirituality.

Chapter 11 represents the pinnacle of the book’s expression of the theme regarding Finding Meaningful Change Through Small Steps. Now that one has made a break from one’s own culture in order to completely align one’s outward behavior with the inward reality of one’s deepest values, all that remains is the small, everyday decisions that offer opportunities to continue carrying out one’s commitment to integrity. The emphasis now is no longer on big, transformative behavioral changes, as those were addressed in Chapters 9-10, but rather on how to press on through the incremental choices of daily life, now that one is in a position to order one’s entire life toward integrity. This thematic focus shifts with Chapter 12, as Beck suggests that those small steps might not only lead one to an incremental process of growth, but to a sudden leap leading to a permanent state of mystical enlightenment.

The other two themes—Integrity as the Key to Emotional Healing and Learning to Read Our Internal Signals—take on a more muted role in this section, as their assumption and application is what undergirds all the progress which has brought us up to this point. Now, the readers prepare to consider a new reality: the possibility of a life where integrity is no longer a future goal but a present reality. Simply to reach this point, they would have already become skilled at learning to read their internal signals and to follow the voice of their inner guide. There is, however, a transposition coming in the theme of integrity, as Beck moves away from a view of one’s emotional life and toward a view with more spiritualistic dimensions.

Integrity as the key to emotional healing is now presented in a different light: not simply as “wholeness” in an emotional sense, but of a mystical unity of the self, opening the door to spiritual enlightenment. Beck subtly shifts the meaning of integrity here. In the previous sections, it had largely been presented as an internal state of harmony with oneself, and thus it was possible to read it in thematic terms as emotional healing. At this juncture, however, the potentialities inherent in integrity are described with a broader vision in mind—not just internal harmony with oneself, but harmony with the underlying nature of all reality. Should one attain this level of integrity, Beck suggests, one might experience a sudden and dramatic shift of perspective, an epiphany that leads to a permanent state of personal enlightenment.