Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.
In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence - self-preservation - it may even be deemed self-indulgent.
Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World
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In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence - self-preservation - it may even be deemed self-indulgent.
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In the course of our journey leading to Consciousness, our objective should not be creating a positive character, and thus a pleasant scenario, but finding the Existence behind every scenario.
The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish one's territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride regardless of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one's own behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible. -Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Singing Over The Bones, P10.
The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply __he other_, __n object_, __ommodity_, __hing_. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain.
Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.
And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself.