You have three tasks to accomplish in this life, you have to provide for your needs in order to survive, you have to reproduce and avoid immediate danger in order to survive long enough. Someone with integrity is able to do any of the tasks without sacrificing the other two.
When you are going through a period of adversity you might find it very tempting to start cheating, in order to provide for the area of life where you now have a deficiency.
As we already discussed in previous post there are two ways to cheat other people that create the same outcome, you can do it through violence or through lyes. This are two different strategies that accomplish the same outcome.
By cheating to overcome a deficiency in an area of your life it will not only lead to another deficiency in another area of your life, but you are also creating a deficiency to another person. Win/lose dynamics are win/lose only on the short term, because ultimately when you hurt another person you also end up hurting yourself.
For example if you are poor and decide to do armed robberies in a dark alley to make some quick money, this will make you unlovable. Love is an involuntary response to virtue, when you are not practicing any virtues it is really hard for other people to love you, so your relationships will suffer. Also because you are taking a very big risk you the potential down fall from that could be catastrophic, like what is going to happen to you if one of the people you robe is also armed.
The motivation behind the destructive actions is always fear, the people that are willing to hurt you are scared of something, there is always anxiety behind abuse. Not only you will experience external changes in your life but you also will experience internal changes. By not overcoming your anxiety, the person without integrity remains trapped in to it. And from living with constant anxiety a hole range of other problems will be created in your life like addiction or any other mental health problems.
Because we live in a world of duality, there will always be something to challenge your existence. Integrity is not something you have as much it is something you practice every day. There is always a temptation or something to inspire fear. Integrity is not the absence of adversity as much it is one's personal self discipline to always find his way out of the anxiety through the practice of virtues.
One of the most important virtue is patience, because patience is the process of accumulation. What makes you lose your integrity is a deficiency or a threat to a potential deficiency. So in order to overcome that deficiency you need patience to accumulate skills and resources to the best of your ability.
As life will constantly tempt and challenge you the solution to all the possible imaginable scenarios it always consist from the three most important virtues: honesty, patience and humbleness.
