40 Characteristics of Integrous Teachers and Teachings
Surrender is much more likely when the integrity of a teaching or teacher has been verified. Consciousness calibration distills and verifies spiritual truth in its essence and identifies the characteristics of integrous teachers and teachings. Whatever you entrust your soul to should be verifiably trustworthy. The list below serves as a standard of spiritual integrity.
1. Universality: Truth is true at all times and places, independent of culture, personalities, or circumstances.
2. Nonexclusionary: Truth is all-inclusive, non secretive, and non-sectarian.
3. Availability: It is open to all – nonexclusive. There are no secrets to be revealed, hidden, or sold, and no magical formulas or “mysteries.”
4. Integrity of Purpose: There is nothing to gain or lose.
5. Non-sectarian: Truth is not the exposition of limitation.
6. Independent of Opinion: Truth is nonlinear and not subject to the limitations of intellect or form.
7. Devoid of Positionality: Truth is not “anti” anything. Falsehood and ignorance are not its enemies but merely represent its absence.
8. No Requirements or Demands: There are no required memberships, dues, regulations, oaths, rules, or conditions.
9. Noncontrolling: Spiritual purity has no interest in the personal lives of aspirants, or in dress, sex lives, economics, family patterns, lifestyles, or dietary habits.
10. Free of Force or Intimidation: There is no brainwashing, adulation of leaders, training rituals, indoctrinations, or intrusions into private life.
11. Nonbinding: There are no regulations, laws, edicts, contracts, or pledges.
12. Freedom: Participants are free to come and go without persuasion, coercion, intimidation, or consequences. There is no hierarchy; instead, there is voluntary fulfillment of practical necessities and duties.
13. Commonality: Recognition is a consequence of what one has become rather than a result of ascribed titles, adjectives, or trappings.
14. Inspirational: Truth eschews and avoids glamorization, seduction, and theatrics.
15. Nonmaterialistic: Truth is devoid of the need for worldly wealth, prestige, pomp, or edifices.
16. Self-fulfilling: Truth is already total and complete and has no need to proselytize or gain adherents, followers, or “sign up members.”
17. Detached: There is non-involvement in world affairs.
18. Benign: Truth is identifiable along a progressive gradient. It has no “opposite” and therefore no “enemies” to castigate or oppose.
19. Nonintentional: Truth does not intervene or have an agenda or purpose, inflict, or promulgate.
20. Nondualistic: All transpires by virtue of intrinsic (karmic) propensity within the field, by which potentiality manifests as actuality rather than by cause and effect.
21. Tranquility and Peace: There are no “issues” or partialities. There is no desire to change others or impose on society. The effect of higher energies is innate and not dependent on propagation or effort. God does not need help any more than gravity needs the “help” of an apple’s falling off the tree.
22. Equality: This is expressed in reverence for all life in all its expressions and merely avoids that which is deleterious rather than opposing it.
23. Nontemporality: Life is realized to be eternal and physicality to be a temporality. Life is not subject to death.
24. Beyond Proof: That which is “provable” is linear, limited, and a product of intellectualization and mentation. Reality needs no agreement. Reality is not an acquisition but instead is a purely spontaneous, subjective realization when the positionalities of the dualistic ego are surrendered.
25. Mystical: The origination of truth is a spontaneous effulgence, radiance, and illumination, which is the Revelation that replaces the illusion of a separate individual self, the ego, and its mentation.
26. Ineffable: Not capable of definition. Radical subjectivity is experiential. It is a condition that replaces the former ego-centered condition. With this event, context replaces content, devoid of temporality and beyond time. Reality does not exist in time, of it, beyond it, or outside of it, and it has no relationship to that which is an artifice of mentation. It is therefore beyond all nouns, adjectives, or verbs, transitive or intransitive.
27. Simplistic: One sees the intrinsic beauty and perfection of all that exists beyond appearance and form.
28. Affirmative: Truth is beyond opinion or provability. Confirmation is purely by its subjective awareness; however, it is identifiable by consciousness-calibration techniques.
29. Nonoperative: Truth does not “do” anything or “cause” anything; it is everything.
30. Invitational: As contrasted with promotional or persuasive.
31. Nonpredictive: Because Reality is nonlinear, it cannot be localized or encoded in restriction of forms, such as secret messages, codes, numbers, and inscriptions, or hidden in runes, stones, the dimensions of the pyramid, DNA, or the nostril hairs of the camel. Truth has no secrets. The Reality of God is omnipresent and beyond codification or exclusivity. Codes are indicative of human imagination and not the capriciousness of Divinity.
32. Nonsentimental: Emotionality is based on perception. Compassion results from the discernment of truth.
33. Nonauthoritarian: There are no rules or dictates to be followed.
34. Nonegoistic: Teachers are respected but reject personal adulation or specialness.
35. Education: Provides information in a variety of formats and ensures availability.
36. Self-Supporting: Neither mercenary nor materialistic.
37. Freestanding: Complete without dependence on external or historical authorities.
38. Natural: Devoid of induced, altered status of consciousness or manipulations of energies by artificial exercises, postures, breathing, or dietary rituals (that is, non-reliance on form or physicality; no invoking of entities or “others”).
39. Complete: Devoid of exploitation or gain.
40. Nonviolent: Not coercive, benign, nonthreatening.
Spiritual truth is universal. The same essential truth has been taught by the enlightened mystics, saints, sages, and avatars who have appeared throughout history, in different religions and cultures, separated by different sides of the globe and across many centuries. No person or religion or group is the sole possessor or purveyor of truth. A truth is true at all times in all places, independent of cultures, customs, opinions, personalities, or circumstances.
A true teacher claims no specialness but rather points the seeker to realize the same truth from within. The Self of the student is said to be the same Self of the teacher, whose state of Self-realization serves to activate the student’s own inner awakening. True teachers humbly acknowledge that divine states are a gift of Grace and therefore do not offer spiritual teachings for a price beyond covering expenses required for dissemination.
Integrous teachers and organizations are not interested in controlling the personal lives of students, promotionalism, gaining followers, or entertaining people with theatrical presentations. Their integrity requires them to share the gift of Realization they were given, with the unique capacities bestowed them, but they have no attachment to the response; what people do with it is up to them…
David R. Hawkins
Quoted from the book,
The Map Of Consciousness Explained
The Map Of Consciousness Explained
