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

“Hellgate” is a term Beck coins to describe the thoughts, events, or psychological issues that cause the strongest reactions of pain, fear, and avoidance in a person’s life. The term is inspired by Dante’s journey, as he enters hell’s inferno by means of a gate. The only way to ultimate healing and wholeness, Beck insists, is to go through that gate—that is, to face head-on the thoughts and issues we would rather avoid so that we can be liberated from the hold they have over us.

Your “inner guide,” according to Beck, is your true self—the expression of your deepest values, desires, and goals—but in order to listen to the voice of the inner guide, you must first attune yourself to it. This is done by paying attention to the emotions that arise from your thoughts and decisions. Often, progress toward hearing your inner guide is attained by first listening to an external “soul guide”—an author, speaker, friend, etc., whose message and manner of life strike you as being startlingly true. This role of guide correlates with the roles of Virgil and Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Beck uses “integrity” in a way that calls on some parts of its normal semantic range but not on other parts. Whereas general usage often employs “integrity” to speak of the exercise of character virtues, Beck tends to avoid this usage. Instead, she uses it to refer to a sense of inner wholeness, of being entirely at unity with oneself.

Where the exercise of virtue is in view, Beck is mostly concerned with integrity as honesty, the absence of lying. By not lying—meaning by not acting in a way contradictory to one’s own deepest values—one can progress toward that unity of self that marks Beck’s vision of integrity. Ultimately, Beck believes that personal integrity—a unity with oneself at the deepest level—also extends to establishing a mystical unity of oneself with the underlying nature of all reality.