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

Having broadened the view of integrity beyond one’s internal state, Beck continues that movement, suggesting that our journey of integrity will have significant effects on all those around us. She appeals to the mathematical feature of fractals: repeated patterns that commonly appear in nature. Our own inner transformation, she says, will establish a pattern of truth and love that, when unleashed in the world, will spark similar patterns of truth and love in the lives and behaviors of others.

Eventually, as more and more people follow a pathway of integrity, the scope of the pattern’s repetition could become limitless: “My point is that as you follow the way of integrity, solely to end your own suffering, you will end up helping the whole world” (288). Beck reflects on the current state of the world, which at the time of her writing in 2021 featured relatively high levels of political and social instability, as well as a major global pandemic. She suggests that the whole world is lost in a dark wood—the state in which Dante was caught before his journey began.

What the world needs, she asserts, is people who are committed to the way of integrity, who through the patterns they establish can bring about a “fractaling” process whereby all humanity is led toward enlightenment: “Whatever you do to heal the world, it will replace dark wood of error symptoms with purpose, happiness, vitality, love, abundance, and fascination that specifically match your true nature” (294). Beck suggests that this might eventually lead to a tipping point whereby humanity suddenly finds itself moving together toward an altogether different destiny than the perpetual struggle that has marked every age of our history up until now. Referencing Dante’s transition from hell to purgatory, Beck writes, “Maybe we can reach the point where everything reverses, where going down becomes going up […] Our scrappy, inventive, unthinkably destructive species could end up heading beyond the inferno, all the way to paradise” (304).

Following Dante’s journey up through paradise, Beck again suggests that the strangeness of his mystical language points toward it being an account of his actual experiences. His descriptions appear to fit some of the conclusions that modern physics has theorized about the nature of reality—the underlying unity of all things in a single energy field, for instance—and about the limited and segmented nature of our perceptions.

Embracing these counterintuitive aspects of Dante’s descriptions, Beck builds her case that the enlightened life of integrity really is suffused with a kind of “magic”: “[Y]ou may feel yourself not as separate from the world, but as existing in a continuum with everything around you. This continuity may show up in coincidences so improbable they almost couldn’t be accidental” (307). Beck relates several anecdotes of mystical and paranormal experiences, both from her own story and those of others, but she insists that she is not really speaking about magic or miracles properly considered but rather about some scientific principle that we simply do not yet understand, a feature of one’s harmony with the universe that comes out in ways that defy the expectations of normal, everyday existence.

Beck posits that it may be the power of imagination itself, as a human feature of mental projection onto reality, that actually creates some of the repeated patterns of fractals and leads to the mystical encounters and coincidences that she describes. If that is true, then using one’s imagination as a tool of integrity could have far-reaching positive effects. The highest point on this journey, matching the close of Dante’s journey through paradise, is to experience and express that underlying harmony with the universe, letting go of the final lie: “the belief that there has ever been any distinction between the separate scraps of matter we imagine we are, and the all-inclusive truth that extends beyond anything we can conceive” (324).