The Power of the Heart: Finding Your True Purpose in Life (13 page)
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Authors: Baptist de Pape
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
—PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA
Mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story about the Buddha. The night before his awakening, he was attacked by an army that shot thousands of arrows at him. But as the arrows arched toward the Buddha, they turned into flowers and fell harmlessly at his feet. Understanding and compassion help us transform negative emotions into harmless ones, into awareness. This is Authentic Power.
You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible.
—DEEPAK CHOPRA,
THE THIRD JESUS
Picture your heart and soul as the mother ship of a large fleet. Your personality is one of the many ships accompanying it, but, ultimately,
only one ship, the mother ship, knows where the entire fleet is headed and can stay the course. When you follow your heart, aligning your personality with your soul, you exercise Authentic Power. You feel on course. You feel joy, meaning, and purpose. You are aware of your energy, thoughts, and inner guidance. Whenever you are off course, you feel unhappy.
GARY ZUKAV
The pain in your life is a measure of the distance between your current self-perception and the reality of yourself as a powerful and compassionate, creative and loving spirit. Closing that distance to zero is the spiritual path. It is now the evolutionary requirement for each of us to create Authentic Power.
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
—CARL JUNG
The four fundamental properties of Authentic Power are
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Love:
This kind of love includes compassion, caring about others. This kind of love makes you view every hungry mother and every hungry child as your own mother and your own child.
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Humility:
This kind of humility recognizes that the lives of others can be just as difficult as your own, that everyone goes through life with some pain, loss, and difficulty. Humility allows you to bear in mind that everybody is a beautiful soul and that everybody struggles.
•
Forgiveness:
Forgiving someone for hurting or wronging you is like laying down a heavy burden. The person you forgive may not even be aware of your action, because you do it first and foremost for yourself. Unless you forgive, you will find yourself looking at the world as if through a pair of dark glasses that makes everything look dreary and adversarial. Forgiving is like taking off those glasses and seeing that the world is full of love and light.
•
Clarity:
Clarity is seeing your life as part of a greater whole. You realize that you are not a victim, but that you are here on earth to learn from all of your experiences, both positive and negative. You realize that you are an immortal soul and thus infinitely more than just the body and personality you possess at present.
Day-to-day life often unfolds in a kind of competition between personalities—lovers, spouses, parents, siblings, businesses, social classes, and nations. All try to exert control over one another. Called external power, this control is based on our senses—what we can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch in the external world. Unlike Authentic Power, it is competitive and seeks to have the upper hand.
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.
—ECKHART TOLLE,
THE POWER OF NOW
GARY ZUKAV
External power is the old way of understanding power. It’s what enabled us to survive, yes. And to evolve since our origin as a species, yes. But it doesn’t work any longer. It’s counterproductive
to our evolution. It’s toxic and it is being replaced. Correction: it has been replaced with another understanding of power.
Everything you obtain at the expense of someone else is a manifestation of external power, which operates on the principle that “one man’s breath is another man’s death.” Things you are scared of losing, like your house, car, looks, and sharp mind are all examples of external power. Relying on these impermanent things makes you vulnerable.
LINDA FRANCIS
External power comes and goes. You can earn it; you can lose it. You can inherit it; it can get stolen.
To move from external power to Authentic Power, listen to the voice of your heart, the seat of your soul. Align your personality with your essential loving qualities.
Linda Francis
GARY ZUKAV
Authentic Power is the experience of joy, of meaning, of purpose, of fulfillment, of being in the right place at the right time. Of knowing that your life has a purpose and what you are doing is contributing to that purpose. It is the alignment of your personality with your soul, with harmony and cooperation and sharing and reverence for life.
Authentic Power recognizes meaning and purpose in the smallest things.
ECKHART TOLLE
Authentic Power is not personal power. It is a power that far transcends who you think yourself to be as a person. It is a power that lies at the very heart—not just of yourself—but of the very heart of the universe. So if you are connected with that level within yourself, you’re not just connected with the essence of who you are, but you’re also connected with the very essence of the universe. And that is pointed to in the ancient dictum, “As above, so below.”
To create Authentic Power, it helps to become aware of any emotions that keep you invested in external power. Because your feelings and emotions are the force field in which your soul operates, you have to become aware of your emotions in order to align your personality with your soul.
GARY ZUKAV