Our lives, in modern society, often leave us with a strange sort of emptiness, which we usually don't notice--except for the few quiet moments we give ourselves right before sleep and just after waking.
To avoid confronting this emptiness, we tire ourselves out with intense effort at work, jog endlessly to run away from ourselves, gossip lest we mutter the truth, or hypnotize ourselves into a stupor with television.
We wonder when our lives will improve and hope that someday, when luck strikes, something magical will make our lives happy and meaningful.
In the meantime, we wonder if humanity will be any better for our role in it after we are gone.
The truth is that nothing around us will change unless we change our selves.
Since the world is kind enough to reflect to us who we are, we should know that our pleasures, pains, and empty moments are just mirror images of the void within.
This gnawing emptiness is the result of living an illusion, a lie.
We deny who we really are and what we believe deep inside for the sake of decorum and societal standards.
We unwittingly prolong our denial, since we seldom listen deeply enough to our inner voice and true identity.
However, our repressed self constantly nags us from deep within.
Even though we may have hidden our true self so well we don't recognize that it even exists, our subconscious certainly feels the conflict and we notice the resulting energy drain.
We continue to struggle for "normal" lives, satisfying the illusion of what our past has led us to believe we are.
Thus, we are at odds with ourselves from moment to moment, wondering why we are so tired, why our lives are not full of joy and light.
This discord is what I call living in illusion.
To satisfy ourselves that the illusion is reality, we must perform actions that make us feel good on the outside.
We wear fine clothes to cover weak and misaligned bodies, put on a mask of make-up to hide weary skin, and give to charities to feel better about making money.
We talk about honesty only when it benefits us, drink coffee and eat sugar so we no longer feel as tired as we really are, and drape our surroundings with the trappings of temporary prosperity.
Not all of these qualities are undesirable, but when the reason we do them is to hide the pain inside, what are we really accomplishing? I have had deep discourse with super successful people who have attained every goal, but they can't explain why they worked so hard or what they should do next.
They have fulfilled every desire and met every want, but they still feel empty.
As the Canadian poet Robert William Service writes in his poem, "The Spell of the Yukon," I wanted the gold and I sought it; I scrabbled and mucked like a slave Was it famine or scurvy-I fought it I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it Came out with a fortune last fall, Yet somehow life's not what I thought it And somehow the gold isn't all There is an alternative: living with integrity.
Imagine a state of fullness, where life is joyous, everything falls into place and you can access an unlimited stream of energy, wisdom, and power.
We can achieve this state of integrity when our outer life matches our inner life.
To wit, integrity is being lived when our deepest beliefs and thoughts intermesh perfectly with our daily words and actions.
As Socrates said, "Integrity is better than charity.
The Gods approve of the depth and not of the tumult of the soul.
" Knowing this, what must we do? First we must discover what our innermost beliefs are, and clearly realize that, as the Mother of Pondicherry so aptly put it, "Each one of us has a work to do, a role to fill, a place which we alone can occupy.
" In the silent moments when we are still--or involved in inner exercise such as yoga--we must turn our awareness inward to listen to the festering truth.
In yoga, we call this Dharma.
In the West, we often call this a "life mission" or "purpose.
" Unless we answer the two questions "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" honestly and with conviction, all of our words and actions are false--they hide the fact that we do not really know why we do what we do, or why we go where we go.
I have learned in the international business world that if you teach people how to answer why, the how will take care of itself.
Once we understand the reason for our life and decide to take the steps to live it, effort will seem easy, passion will infuse each action and we will be at one with our inner and outer surroundings.
We will feel full again.
We will seek inspiration from everyone around us, and everyone around us will seek inspiration from us.
We will strengthen each word and action with the foundation of conviction.
We will, at long last, be able to live in integrity.
© 2008 Aadil Palkhivala