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.