Authenticity and The Power of Thinking
What is authenticity
Authenticity is you being established in the peak of your capability, and responding to life from who you perceive yourself to be for yourself, who you project yourself to be for others, and what others expect you to be for them. Authenticity is tuning your thinking to your peak possibility.
Tune your thinking to your peak possibility
Whether you know it or not, believe it or not, you can control your mind in the same way you control your body movements. You can decide and declare who you want to be. It is possible to train your mind to encourage only the thoughts that align with your highest possibility and discourage and complete with low consciousness ideas.
Your thinking makes you or breaks you. Thinking is not accidental. It happens with your voluntary involvement. Your thinking process is encouraged, entertained and enriched by you. But unfortunately, you believe that thinking is accidental and you cannot control your mind.
When you unlock the power of your thinking, you will be able to spontaneously focus your thoughts to achieve your highest potential. Constantly functioning at your peak possibility is authenticity. Authenticity is the key that unlocks the power of thinking.
The Four dimensions of authenticity
You have four dimensions. You don’t have just one identity as you imagine. You have four identities. At all times, you carry these four identities inside you. All these four dimensions put together is your personality. You are responsible for all these identities.
The first identity is mamakara or inner image. It is the inner image and experience you carry about yourself. I am healthy, I am ugly, I am intelligent, I cannot tolerate hard work, I love people, etc. We carry many such inner ideas about ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea you carry about you is always less than what you project yourself to be for others.
The second identity is ahamkara or outer image. This is how you project yourself to others. You try to project yourself as powerful, talented, honest, helpful, or whatever. Unfortunately, what you project is always far more than what you believe yourself to be.
The third identity you carry is the image or expectations that others have about you. This is called anyakara or others image about you. How others perceive you may be different from how you project yourself to them, because people create their opinion about you from the subtle signals you give them, rather than what you openly project. Human beings are intelligent enough to catch even what you don’t say, or especially what you don’t say.
The fourth identity is very subtle, because you will feel it is not directly related to you. It is called swa-anyakara or Life Image. Life image is what you experience Life to be for you. You may feel Life is lonely, Life is complicated, Life is sacred, Life is scary, or Life is always showering me with everything I need. This is also your identity because it defines the exact experience you will be receiving from the people and situations in your life.
Authenticity means living at your peak in each of these dimensions.
Root Thought Patterns - source of your conflicts
A thought pattern is a pre-defined way of responding to any situation based on a powerful past experience like failure, rejection, being punished, being subjected to abuse or witnessing the death of a loved one. During these moments of crisis, you create an idea about yourself and life – like, I am weak, or I am a failure, or nobody loves me, or life is dangerous, so I have to be very careful. Almost all root thought patterns are negative, even the ones which may lead to success in your life, because they are born out of your feeling of powerlessness.
Some common root thought patterns are –
I am a failure
Nobody loves me
I am alone
I am ugly
Life is out there to cheat me
I am weak and unhealthy
I am powerless so I have to please everybody
Life is hard, so I have to be extra smart
Life is too big for me to understand.
All these thought patterns are based on inadequate cognitions, because life is different every moment, and you need to respond to it spontaneously. Right now, you are nothing but a bunch of programmed actions and patterns that never let you contact life and respond as it happens. Rather, you respond based on your past thought patterns.
You may have many thought patterns, but a root thought pattern is one of the few defining thought patterns that continuously run your life without your knowledge.
Even the conflicts among your identities is nothing but the result of your root thought patterns. If you have a certain idea about yourself inside, but you project a different personality outside, that is inauthenticity.
Anything is Possible
All your impossibilities are the projections of your past into the future. You keep saying, ‘Nothing new is possible! It is all going to be the repetition of the old.’ What does this mean? You just denied yourself the possibility of life! For every decision you make for your future from the past pattern, you deny that component of life for yourself once for all. If you think creating wealth is difficult based on some of your past failure, you have denied the possibility of wealth for you once for all. If you think health is not possible for you in the future due to your past diseases, you have denied the greatest possibility of health in your life once for all.
How does authenticity unlock the Power of Thinking
If you look deep, all your problems arise from conflicts among your four identities. When any of your dimensions is out of alignment with the others, it causes disease, suffering and incompletion in your life.
All these identities you carry are actually thought patterns that you carry about you. Even, others image about you is an idea that you have created in them. So, you are the creator of all your identities. Understand?
Now when one identity is fighting with another, how can your thinking be focussed? All your energy is going to be used in reconciling your fighting identities. When all your identities or images are in tune, all your thinking will be aligned in one direction. Your thinking becomes clear and sharp like a laser beam. You will awaken the power of thinking. There will be no more space for unconscious living, thinking and living, because you will always be aware of the causes and effects that are playing in your life.
Whatever you can imagine is real
Your thinking goes hand-in-hand with the way you want to build yourself. These four parts of your thinking need to be completely purified and aligned. Look inside and identify the images that you carry about yourself. You can then re-write what you feel will be the peak possibility, the best qualities you can posses, of these four images. Let your thinking be aligned to your peak Inner image, peak Outer image, peak Others image and peak Life image.
Usually your inner image will be lower than the image you project to others. It means that the higher identity is already there in your visualization space, in your thinking space. Whatever you can think of as yourself, you already have the capacity to make that into reality.
An exercise to align your inner and outer image
· Take a piece of paper and make 3 columns – inner image, outer image and chosen image. Make a list of your top ten inner and outer images in the appropriate column.
· Then, compare what you have noted down. If the belief in both inner and outer image is the same, ignore that point and move on to the next. If there is a conflict, start tuning your inner image and outer image by always choosing the higher idea. If you perceive yourself as weak, friendly in your inner image but strong and friendly in outer image, choose and write strong and friendly under the chosen column. Don’t reduce what you project to others but increase what you perceive yourself to be for you.
· Repeat for each of the 10 points and then compare both identities. Whatever qualities are best in both, choose those. If there are some great qualities in your inner image, you need to raise your outer image to match that. If there are some great qualities in your outer image, you need to raise your inner image to match what you project. Use this exercise continuously to tune yourself to your peak possibility.
Bring authenticity to your thinking
Authenticity in thinking has two steps. First, find out what you REALLY want in your life by sincerely contemplating on what you want your four dimensions to be. Make a list of your best inner image, outer image, others image, and life image and place it by your bedside, office desk or any place where you can see it as soon as you wake up and all day. Then, find out what are the obstacles that stop you or distract you from achieving what you want to be, who you want to be, how you want to be.
One of the biggest obstacles for most people is self doubt, which is a negative thought pattern that happens because of the memory of past failures. Drop your fantasies about failure. Write down all the self doubts and consciously and decisively, complete with the self doubts. The other two obstacles are self hatred and denial. All three are know as SDHD in short. Complete with them.
Whatever the thought trend is in alignment with your peak possibility, encourage it, enrich it and entertain it. Whatever the thought trend is not in alignment, complete with it. Consciously, decisively, complete with that pattern. Go on completing every day with those patterns which are stopping you from achieving your peak possibility.
Power of Thinking
When you start living in authenticity, you know the right way of thinking and will use the right way of thinking to achieve what you want in Life. In Hindu spiritual practice, this is called manana, authentic thinking. When you have a powerful clarity in your thoughts that makes whatever you think into a success, you have unlocked the Power of Thinking. Let your thinking be established in authenticity, continuously expanding you towards your peak possibility.
