Listen. When you take responsibility with authenticity, consciousness starts growing more intensely in the body! Shrinking does not happen. Consciousness growing in your body is enlightenment!

Many of you in corporate life are focused on results. You will do something only if we think that it will be effective. You get caught in the result even before you start. So how do you define what is effective? Ninety percent of the time effectiveness is interpreted as something that benefits our self-interest. Even if it benefits the organization, we do it because our performance will be recognized and we will be rewarded. We learn this lesson early in life. Our elders teach us this rule from infancy. ‘Do this and we shall reward you; do that and we will punish you.’ We are all brought up with the deep root pattern of what is good for us and what is bad for us, what will be successful or what will be a failure. Both success and failure, siddhya-asiddhyoḥ are based on anticipated rewards or punishments.

Sometimes, you take up failure as a self-sympathy creating mechanism. Or you think that you have to work for success, but failure is natural. No! Success is natural; you have to work for failure. Bring integrity, you will understand that success is the natural flow of your life just like Nature. Society operates on this principle of greed and fear to prevent us from doing actions that it does not want us to do. Religions do the same. Society threatens you with legal punishment here and now; religion threatens you with punishment in the hereafter, in hell. What is hell or heaven? Do they exist? No, they do not.

When you clean your inner space with the power of integrity, you will realize that all the contradictions, conflicts and confusions you carry are responsible for your whole life, for all reactions you attract from others and society. You are responsible for all your actions, the reactions you attract from others and the happenings of life. Integrity will automatically teach you responsibility. You will understand that for everything happening in and around you, you are responsible. You are not in integrity with yourself, when you say one thing and do another. You do not walk your talk. But, when you do walk your talk and your talk is in integrity and authenticity, then your words will become reality. You will have vāk siddhi, the power to manifest your word as reality! But if the talk itself is lacking integrity, then your walk and your actions will also be out-of-integrity and you lose self-confidence. Ultimately it is all about the truth of integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching from your space of completion.

Integrity is the first lesson of spiritual life. Integrity is not just a simple vow, a simple word. Integrity is all about ironing out your thinking, aligning your thinking. If you bring integrity to your inner space, you will realize that even accidents are attracted by you. You are attracting everything in your life, whether it is wealth or poverty, right or wrong. You are responsible for your life.

You need to know a beautiful story about the child devotee, Prahlād’s life. When Prahlād’s angry father asked Prahlād—‘Is your Narāyaṇa, your God, in this pillar? Is He inside that pillar? Is He in this stone?’ Prahlād was about to raise his small finger and show his father that his God was really there in the pillar. When Prahlād was about to point-out the pillar, Narāyaṇa started running from his heavenly abode in Vaikuṅṭa! His consort Lakṣmī asked, ‘What happened? Why are you running so fast? What is there to be in such a hurry about?’ Narāyaṇa said, ‘No, you don’t know! Wherever my devotee Prahlād points his finger, I have to enter into that pillar! Wherever he points, I have to occupy that place and emerge from it!’

Listen! When a child is established in integrity, just for his hand movement or the direction he shows, God lands! Listen! The whole world moves as you want when you are established in Integrity.

When you are in completion, with integrity, without internal conflict or contradictions, whatever you project on the cosmos is a project for the cosmos! Simply cosmos does it. When you are integrated, the outer world obeys you just like that. That is the power of integrity!

Please listen: nothing is political or accidental on the planet Earth. Everything runs on the natural law of life, dharma of these four principles. What Kṛṣṇa says here is the law of Nature. Nature just is. Nature just acts as per these four cosmic principles. Nature does not think about end results, successes or failures, rewards or punishments.

source: chapter 2, Bhagavadgita Decoded