Chapter 4: Align your Beliefs, Feelings, and Actions

What is alignment and why is it necessary?

Honesty is a holistic quality that can be divided into how you think, feel, and act. These three facets of your behavior are incongruent by default, and always will be until a person becomes deeply honest.

Your thoughts, actions, and feelings in life are like waves. To the extent that how you think, feel, and act differ from one another, they work against one another. When waves all flow in the same direction at the same time, they boost each other. Your life can be as focused as the light in a laser. Normal waves of light flow in many directions and out of sync, but laser light is coherent, meaning that the troughs and peaks of the different waves occur at the same time. A laser is only more intense than normal light because all the photons work in concert. When you align how you think, feel, and act, you boost each aspect of who and how you are.

Dishonesty makes your life incoherent, injecting deviations between your thoughts, actions, feelings, and the world around you. While you remain unaligned, your thoughts, feelings, actions, and experiences in life will all work against each other. Each of the following are examples of incoherence:

• Desiring something different than what you believe is most valuable.
• Saying you want something different than you actually do.
• Acting in ways other than the best you know to obtain what you desire.
• Making choices other than what you believe will bring about the greatest long-term benefit.

While you remain incoherent:

• You will not have the strength necessary to accomplish what you otherwise could.
• You will not have the meaning necessary to endure the challenges you otherwise could.

While your thoughts, feelings, and actions remain incoherent, you will never have the inner peace that you could if they were aligned. Many say they want peace, but don’t understand that they will never find it by only seeking to change what is outside of them. Greater peace always requires internal improvement.¹ Can any amount of external peace overcome internal discord? A house divided cannot stand:

And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: (Matthew 12:25)

The path to greatest happiness lies in aligning yourself to what you recognize as best, within and without. Can you have inner peace while your desires, beliefs, and actions are warring against each other? Of course not. Yet, do any who claim to be searching for inner peace actually pay attention to, let alone align their thoughts, feelings, and actions? As you recognize and correct any incoherence between your beliefs, feelings, and actions,² you will find the strength, meaning, and peace that eludes you.

Authenticity is a basic virtue

In recent years, “authenticity” has become a popular word describing special intimacy to be shared with people you care about very much. It is treated by modern people as some high moral virtue akin to sacrificing your life for a stranger. Authenticity is rare, but not because it is some supreme virtue, but because most people are dishonest.

Authenticity actually just means to be yourself. To be authentic is to be veritable—to be as described and perceived; not false, unreal, or imaginary. Authenticity is the integration of self through alignment of the inside and the outside. To be authentic is to be candid—to freely share and live according to what you really think and feel.

It ought to be easy to find someone who is authentic. Any decent person should be. It isn’t the case that being authentic makes you a virtuous person, it’s that being inauthentic makes you a terrible person. It is not acceptable to be inauthentic, because to be inauthentic is to be duplicitous, deceitful, misleading, fake, and false. Pretending to be who you are not, either by withholding what you really think and want, or by feigning that you want something you don’t, is a deplorable way to treat others.³ If an accomplishment so basic ranks among your highest attainments—let alone aspirations—you stand in need of a serious retooling.

Incoherence inhibits your ability to obtain what you seek

One of the reasons that authenticity ought to be more common is because it is the obviously optimal way to obtain whatever it is you seek. Authenticity doesn’t require altruism, just common sense. To lie is to move away from whatever it is you desire. Because reality is governed by laws of cause and effect, any willful deviation from your estimate of how things really are is a choice for worse outcomes, less confidence, and more negative surprises. Dishonesty always removes you from reality, and this is always bad.

The pernicious idea that reality is subjective is a cancer that has metastasized in the modern world. The insistence by modern culture that reality is whatever you want it to be creates cascading implications, each with cascading consequences:

• There is no law of cause and effect.
• You deserve whatever you desire.
• Any negative experience is someone else’s fault.

Today, we find people challenging objective reality in ways so extreme that doing so just a few years ago would have resulted in them being committed for insanity. Here are just a few examples:

• They pretend that men can choose to be women, and women can choose to be men.
• They pretend that men and women are the same, and that they are interchangeable.
• They pretend that people don’t age, and that older people are interchangeable with younger people.

Those increasingly encouraged to dissociate from reality under the lie that reality is just a social construct unsurprisingly suffer from unprecedented amounts of mental illness and general inability to cope with even normal challenges in life. Those who deny reality are doomed to accumulate the involuntary effects of choosing to ignore it.

Denying reality will cause you future pain in terms of consequences that could have been avoided as well as regret over the loss of better outcomes that could have been yours if you had been more honest.

Joy comes from meaningful progress towards worthwhile goals.⁴

Many deceive themselves, pretending that anything other than learning and living according to the truth can result in happiness.⁵ No matter what you seek, dishonesty cannot draw you nearer to it; it can only offer empty promises based on what is not true, and therefore cannot enduringly occur.⁶

A dishonest person cannot make as much progress towards goals that are as worthwhile as they could if they were honest. To the degree you think, feel, or act contrary to the truth, you cannot effectively aim, no matter what you are aiming for. To intentionally act contrary to the truth, as far as you know it, requires you to believe that throwing a dart away from the target will result in something closer to the center than actually aiming. Of course, this is absurd. Yet, all dishonesty is at least as absurd for those who claim to believe in objective reality.

Be honest with others about what you desire

One specific facet of your feelings is your desires. Desire is treated as a well-guarded secret in the lives of most people. What you desire, how much you desire it, and why you desire it should not be any mystery at all—not to you, and not to those around you. If your desires aren’t totally obvious to those around you, it’s unlikely you are consistently or sufficiently acting in a way that accords with what you think you want. Hiding what you want from others will also likely limit your ability to get it, since your ability to obtain what you seek will almost always depend on others, to at least some degree. To the extent you do not know or do not divulge what you want, how much you want it, and why you want it, your ability to identify and utilize the people and other resources crucial to achieving your aim will be diminished.

Do, say, and think according to what you really desire, and be open and transparent with others about it:

7 In all things shewing thyself a pattern of good works: in doctrine shewing uncorruptness, gravity, sincerity,
8 Sound speech, that cannot be condemned; that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you. (Titus 2)

Don’t lie about what you want for the sake of what others will think or how they might push back. If you believe they are correct, you should upgrade your desires to something better. If you don’t agree with the opinion of others, their opinion shouldn’t matter to you. If you find yourself caring about opinions you don’t agree with, it’s a strong sign that you don’t yet desire what you think you want as much as you need to in order to overcome the obstacles preventing you from getting it. You can either care more about what you say you want or what others think about it—not both.

Aligning your actions to what you want by using your thoughts

Almost no one on this planet aligns their actions with what they say they desire. It is a great travesty when a person doesn’t know what they desire, how much they desire it, or why. Yet, it is not uncommon that this is exactly the case. For most, life is a passive mix of whatever comes their way and whatever they feel in the moment. Even for the few who make an effort to pursue a specific aim, regular deviations away from what they say they want and towards something different are the norm. Not surprisingly, this leads to unproductive suffering and never ends the way people would say they wish it would.

You should strive to become an integral person, which means that everything you do is to get what you want the most, and that everything you do is the best way to get what you want. No one ever obtains integrity without taking the time to make an explicit plan.⁷

What do you want? Answer the question truthfully, not with what someone else expects you to want. Honesty is a question of intentional alignment to understood value. What you desire should be what you believe is most valuable given your understanding of reality. The value you find in different possible actions is attained from your beliefs. In aggregate, they provide a menu of potential actions that you can rank according to expected outcome based on your desires.

How do you plan on getting what you want? What will it require, and are you willing to do it? If you don’t know, what are you willing to do to find out? It’s dishonest to expect what you don’t believe has any reason to occur. Don’t pretend you are pursuing a goal when you don’t have a plausible plan to achieve it.⁸ Without a plausible plan, you can’t tell the difference between meaningful progress in a worthwhile goal and ineffectual busyness. With a plan, you will know what you are aiming for, what you are willing to pay to obtain it, and how to recognize when you need to make a change to what you want or how you plan on obtaining it. Your beliefs should tell you how to obtain what you desire. If they don’t, you need new or better beliefs that include causes that lead to the effects that you seek.

What are you actually doing? Honesty requires that you actually follow through with your plans without excusing deviations for ease, convenience, or comfort. Do what best aligns with what you really want. Live so as to deserve what you desire. It is dishonest to expect what you do not deserve, according to your beliefs of cause and effect.⁹ Your actions ought to be those that you believe will bring about the greatest progress towards your most worthwhile goals. How do you identify whether your plan is working or not? How effectively are you working towards the outcomes you desire? Is there a better or less expensive way? Don’t overlook the little choices in your life. You turn away from the big improvements by turning away from little improvements, and you turn toward big improvements by turning toward little improvements.¹⁰ The outcomes of your decisions compound as they chain together. Make the most of the little things, and you’ll see big improvements in your life.

How focused are you? Life has a way of filling itself, and those who do not choose an aim and intentionally order their lives toward it will find themselves at least as occupied as anyone else, just with results that provide far less joy to them than if they had been more intentional. How many things do you do that have nothing to do with what you want? Each distraction reveals itself to be more important to you than whatever you should have been doing. Apportion your greatest effort to what is most important, and the least effort to what matters the least. Care the most about what matters the most, and the least about what matters the least. Structure activities in the form that makes the most sense, all the time. Avoid the tendency to fill the empty spaces in your life with things of little value.¹¹ Busyness is not progress.¹² Figure out what you actually want, and work tenaciously towards it.

How much are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want? It is dishonest to desire something without desiring what is required to get it. Too often, we divorce the outcome from the path required to obtain it, desiring the outcome but not what is required to obtain it. The honest fully attach the desire they have for an outcome to the sacrifices they sincerely believe are required to obtain it. They use the motivation they have for what they want to find out how to get it, and to pursue it until they do. How you allocate resources provides an easy test for how well your actions align with your desires.¹³ Do you prioritize what you want the most above all other activities?¹⁴ How often do you desire something different than what you say you want? How often do you refuse to do what you believe is required to get what you want?

Avoid hypocrisy

The Lord taught the importance of aligning what we do outwardly with what we think and feel inwardly. He said:

34 O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
35 A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.
36 But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
37 For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned. (Matthew 12)

In scripture, “words” is a metaphorical descriptor of an individual’s outward actions.¹⁵ You speak “idle words” when your outward actions are misaligned with your thoughts or feelings. Instances of “speaking an idle word” include:

• Pretending to be someone you aren’t.
• Doing something you don’t believe in or desire.
• Not doing something you believe in or desire.
• Saying something that you don’t believe to be true.
• Not saying something that you believe to be true.
• Holding a self-worth higher than your actions or desires merit.
• Criticizing someone for doing something you also do.
• Criticizing someone for something less bad than what you do.

All of the preceding behaviors are examples of hypocrisy. A hypocrite is someone who claims to think, feel, or act differently than they do. All forms of hypocrisy make you a liar.

Hypocrisy is a problem because it precludes sincerity, which precludes the spirit, which is required for inner (or any) growth. When your outward actions and inward thoughts and feelings are misaligned, you condemn yourself to lesser outcomes in life than you could otherwise have, because you will never choose what is best without intentionally aligning how you think, feel, and act. Hiding from yourself or hiding yourself from others may provide some positive outcome in the short-term, but never as much as expected, and never for very long. The price of dishonesty is always more than the benefits it brings.

Because God is just, all hypocrites will eventually be brought to judgement. To be brought to judgment as a hypocrite is to receive the consequences of what you actually think, feel, and do, and not what you tell yourself or others.

36 But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
37 For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned. (Matthew 12)

To avoid being a hypocrite, live in accordance with what you actually believe and desire. “...Provide things honest in the sight of all men.” (Romans 12:17) Think, feel, and act according to what is best, as far as you can figure it out. Do not participate in rules or systems that you do not see as right or valuable. You don’t have to play games you don’t care about or live by rules you don’t agree with. Don’t allow yourself to be corralled into systems, restraints, and incentives you do not agree with.¹⁶ Don’t do things you don’t care about. Don’t waste your time with what doesn’t contribute to what is important to you. Don’t allow other people to dictate your morality to you. Always do all you can to learn about as much as possible about reality—including from others—but always trust your own idea of right and wrong above the edicts of others.

The importance of living your beliefs

A critical part of what you think is what you believe. Your beliefs describe what you do and why you do it. Your beliefs are your model for how reality works. Your beliefs are a description of the world in relationships of cause and effect. Your beliefs are limited by how much of the world they describe and how accurate they are.

Most people can’t list out what they believe because they’ve never really thought about it. If someone were to ask you what you believe, what would you say? How much of what you would say would be what you have carefully thought about and live up to? How much would be made up on the spot, how much would be something you wish were what you believed, and how much would be what you expect the other person wants to hear, even if it’s something you don’t believe at all? An honest person knows what they believe and why, lives their lives in accordance with their beliefs, is aware of alternative beliefs, and changes their beliefs when given sufficient reason to.

It is important to consciously define your beliefs. Subconscious beliefs can act as an unseen anchor that prevent you from accepting and acting according to better beliefs. Even when subconsciously held beliefs are better than any available alternative, you will never live them fully until you are aware of them. With every belief that you make explicit, you make identifying a superior replacement easier and acting against it more difficult.

Personal ownership of beliefs

Morality is always a personal issue, because it is conditioned on your own personal understanding. Don’t do things you don’t agree with. Act in accordance with what you believe, not what others believe. Learn that convention, habit, and edict are poor reasons to do anything. Strive to understand the purpose in everything you choose to do in life, and push back against all things or people that inhibit the purpose you choose.

Fidelity to your professed beliefs

A person’s possession of a belief doesn’t imply that they consistently live up to it. Your actual beliefs are not what you profess to believe, but what you demonstrate by what you actually choose to do, think, and feel. Honest beliefs prescribe behavior. A person’s lack of honesty determines the distance between their professed beliefs and actual actions. A perfectly honest person feels, thinks, and acts according to what they believe, and they believe what they think, feel, and do.

When you are honest, life serves as a mirror that shows you who you are. Life provides you with the daily opportunity to reconcile what you believe, what you feel, and what you do. You constantly face situations where you have the opportunity to live up to what you believe, do, and feel against opposition. Each such decision point provides you with an opportunity to show that you are who you believe and represent yourself to be, or to choose to be someone less. If you live up to what you believe, you will accumulate evidence that you are really that way.

How well do your outward actions align with your professed beliefs? Suppose it were illegal to lie. How would you prove that you actually believe what you say you believe? How closely would your choices align with your professed beliefs in the eyes of a judge? How would you fare if your professed beliefs were compared to your actual actions by those who know you best? Under this standard, most people would be condemned. For example, the majority of Christians would stand condemned for living lives contrary to Christ’s example and teachings.

Beliefs as a ranking of value

In order to make your beliefs into a description of behavior, you have to realize that they are a tool for measuring value. An honest person actively asks themselves what is best at all times and in all things.¹⁷ They use their beliefs to assess cost and benefit of everything.

One reason that so many struggle to live their beliefs is that they use them as a rigid list of what is good and what is bad. This artificial representation pits desire against belief, when they are designed to work in concert with each other. Real morality is to live according to what is best, and what is best will never be some rigid set of rules externally given. Instead, what is best is determined by your understanding of the value of all potential choices. When you aim for what is best, your desire accomplishes your morality, rather than fighting against it.

As your understanding of reality increases, you will come to see the set of choices available and the cost and benefit of each more clearly. Your model will grow to include detail about things that must co-occur and things that can’t co-occur, as well as things that require prerequisites. All of these details will factor into the value you appraise in certain options, and this will, in turn, change what you desire and how much you desire it. Always be willing to override your prior understanding of what is best.¹⁸

As you come to adopt a more robust understanding of right and wrong as a gradient instead of two discrete lists, you will more easily reconcile your beliefs and desires, because you will be freed of the need to do what is right through the exercise of brute force willpower. Instead, your desire for what you see has the greatest value will automatically increase as a result of explicitly thinking about what is valuable, why it is valuable, and what other options exist.

Feelings are an indication of honesty

The modern assumption is that how you feel comes from the world around you or the physical processes in your body. Those searching for an answer to why people are significantly more depressed, anxious, and less happy today than at any other time need only recognize that never has a society more effectively convinced people that have so little control over who or how they are or what they do in life.

The truth is that how you feel comes from what you want, what you do, and what you think, relative to your experience in and with the world. The beliefs and actions you choose will strongly influence how you feel. Your desires come largely from what you believe, and your feelings largely come from how well your actions align with those desires.

To the extent that your actions or desires are out of alignment with your beliefs, or your beliefs are inaccurate or incomplete, you will experience more frequent and intense negative feelings such as pain, anger, guilt, and unhappiness. Your mental and emotional state is very much subject to the degree of alignment between your thoughts, feelings, actions and your perception of reality. The fact that dishonesty creates physiological stress is shown by the fact that lie detectors don’t measure lies—they measure impaired breathing, increased heart rate, and perspiration. Your body language and even your voice change when you lie!

While the presence of intense negative feelings is obvious, their root source is less so. Some clues can help you decipher whether your negative feelings might be from dishonesty rather than something else. Do you find yourself hesitating to do what you believe is best? Do you lack motivation in doing what you believe is most important? Do you struggle to start, focus, or finish what you choose to do? Do you apply anything but your best effort toward obtaining what you say you want?

Honesty is the key to accomplishing amazing things while being totally free from anxiety, depression, and guilt. You will always feel greatest possible peace, confidence, contentment, and joy when you are acting in full alignment with reality, as far as you know it. If your desires, beliefs, and actions do not align, you will experience frequent and possibly intense emotional distress. The only way to resolve this distress is to align these three classes of behavior. Maximizing your understanding of reality and aligning your actions and desires to it will maximize feelings of satisfaction, happiness, purpose, and peace.

Feelings are an indication of what you really desire

You can say or think you desire something, whether you really do or not. Your feelings are an indication of what you really desire. How often do you find yourself wanting what you believe is bad? How often are you unexcited or even repulsed by what your beliefs indicate is good? You will only feel bad about what you claim to believe is good or good about what you claim to believe is bad when you don’t really believe what you say you do. You either need to be more honest about the evidence you’ve seen in favor of your current beliefs, need to find stronger evidence for your current beliefs, or you need to find new beliefs.

If you are honest, what you desire and by how much is informed by your beliefs. When you are honest, you desire what you believe is most valuable. Do you ever complain while in the path most likely to yield what you say you want? Do you find yourself doing something other than what you feel is most important? These are all signs of a mismatch between your beliefs, actions, and desires.

If you find yourself preoccupied with something, investigate whether there are actions available to you that would affect the outcome, and whether those actions or the changes they cause are more important than whatever you might do instead. If no actions are available to affect a change, or if those actions or their expected outcome are a lower priority to you than something else, the only honest thing you can do is focus on something else instead.

Focusing your concern on the most important things you can actually change so extensively improves your outcomes while limiting your stress that doing so cannot be recommended highly enough.

Learn to submit your feelings to your thoughts and actions instead of the reverse

It’s important to remember that your feelings flow from your beliefs, your actions, and many other things outside of your control. As such, they ought to be subordinated to the rational process, rather than promoted to something above it. Your feelings are a source of information, but they aren’t facts. If you don’t have facts to support your feelings, honesty requires you to soften or abandon your position.

While the feelings of a person whose beliefs and actions are aligned will be optimal over time, there are many times when doing what is best requires you to feel bad in the present. Life will provide a stream of situations where you have a choice: feel better now and worse later, or feel worse now and better later. These decision points will consist of opportunities to say, feel, or act in a way that is out of alignment with your sincere understanding of reality. Don’t succumb to the temptation. Although deviating from alignment will make you feel better in the moment, the consequences will be worse than remaining aligned. Embrace opportunities to feel better later, even if they require you to feel worse now.

Generation Z provides an example of those who choose to prefer the present over the future. Generation Z survey respondents overwhelmingly defined “wealthy” as the ability to live comfortably without financial concerns, and yet they notoriously overspend beyond prior generations, debt-financing luxury lifestyles typical of affluent empty-nesters. These kinds of people will never reach the point where they can afford not to be concerned about finances later because they aren’t worried about their finances now.

It is through your willingness to face short-term discomfort that you will minimize long-term discomfort. As you consistently opt to remain in alignment, you will find that you face fewer moments where remaining in alignment causes you any mental anguish.

Honesty requires avoiding, recognizing, and closing open loops

Every interaction you have with a thought, a feeling, or the external world creates or extends a process. These processes—called open loops —expend emotional energy, whether you pay attention to them or not, and only cease to do so when they are resolved. An illustrative example of an open loop is a new table for a waitress. The people become her problem whether she is attending to them or not until they pay their bill and leave. Just like a waitress, we have to juggle our limited resources around all open loops.

In modern times, most people deal with most open loops in ways that do not actually resolve them, either mistakenly thinking they are closing them or by intentionally ignoring them. Technology has facilitated this by lowering the price of opening loops while providing several imitations of loop-closing that fail to provide the benefit of actual loop closing. You open many loops every time you open and scroll through social media, creating thoughts that will continue to occupy your emotional energy—at least subconsciously—for some time after you put down your phone. Emails and texts proliferate open loops that fail to close when unanswered or ignored. Online arguments create many open loops, and they don’t close through anything other than a valid counterargument or acknowledgment of agreement. Snarky responses, blocking, ghosting, or knowingly insufficient counterarguments—including lies—leave loops open, whether you like it or not.

You can choose to ignore open loops, but open loops will not ignore you. Open loops consume resources, even if we do not consciously realize they exist. What you refuse to address consciously will engage you subconsciously. As such, you should be extremely careful not to pretend that ignoring open loops is the same as truly closing them. For example, it is important to note that emotive evasions of rational discourse are not counterarguments, but deceitful attempts to dismiss what is presented without having to disprove it. Here are some common emotive evasions:

• Describing your emotion (“you disgust me,” “I am disappointed that you would say that,” etc.)
• Expressing your offense (“how dare you,” “who do you think you are,” etc.)
• Denigrating the other person (“who hurt you,” “where is your degree,” etc.)
• Ghosting.

You’ll notice that nearly everyone who engages in these tactics suffers from anxiety and depression. Every instance of this kind of evasion creates an open loop that will subconsciously eat away at your peace of mind until it finally fades away or unless you address it by coming back to the argument you dismissed and either making a real and sufficient counterargument or changing your belief to accept what you previously rejected.

Do not betray what you believe for the sake of external reward

The world around you will present a constant source of conflict with your inner self. This will only increase as you gain understanding and the world continues to fulfill its End Time destiny. For example, modern culture constantly pressures individuals to deny realities that they know to be true—whether through experience or logic. It likewise pressures people to affirm ideas which they know to be false.

Outward pressures will present the choice of living up to what you believe or face external threat, whether loss of status, wealth, or wellbeing. While this compromise can come in overt forms,¹⁹ it usually occurs more subtly: in the form of saying or doing something you don’t believe in, or refraining from saying or doing something you do believe in.

Opposition between your internal compass and external threats is by design:

And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. (Mark 4:19)

Resist the temptation to betray what you believe is right internally in order to keep what you have externally. What you lose by betraying yourself will be much greater than whatever you lose for being who you really are. You can’t think, desire, or act against your sincere understanding of what is best without damaging your eternal access to what is best, and that loss alone is greater than anything it costs to avoid.

The Lord delights to save those who are persecuted for following him.²⁰ If you lose your job, your friends, your parents, your siblings, your children, your spouse, your health, your wealth, or even your life for standing up for what you believe is right, remember the Lord’s promise:

And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life. (Matthew 19:29)

The fulfillment of this promise may take time, but the confidence you have with God in knowing that you have lived up to what you believe is instantaneous:

Verily I say unto you, all among them who know their hearts are honest, and are broken, and their spirits contrite, and are willing to observe their covenants by sacrifice— yea, every sacrifice which I, the Lord, shall command— they are accepted of me. (D&C 97:8)

Learn how to push back against the world by remaining who you really are in spite of external pressure. Seek people, places, and activities that increase the volume of your inner self. Learn to recognize people, places, and activities that decrease that volume, and do what you can to minimize the time and intensity of your exposure to these influences. Always choose the light within.

Exercise caution in activities that dissociate your thoughts, feelings, and actions

We were designed as creatures that can think, feel, and act. When we attempt to live in a way that separates these influences from each other or when we choose to act in ways that deviate from how we truly think and feel, we remove some of the most important regulation mechanisms available to us. In these cases, we remove ourselves from the path of greater awareness, greater outcomes, and greater joy, refusing to see limits to them that would have been revealed if we had kept our feelings, thoughts, and actions aligned.²¹ Think of the many situations in modern life that separate the mental, emotional, and physical aspects of your being. For example, social media and video games are mental and emotional experiences devoid of the physical. Pornography is a mental and emotional experience separated from the physical world.

One of the main problems with dissociative activities is that they can powerfully inhibit our ability to appraise value. While some good and useful practices, such as reading, are necessarily dissociative, you should exercise caution in ensuring that any such activity is actually the most valuable thing you could be doing with your time.