True Self

What do you think is your biggest weaknesses and your biggest strengths?

Your friends can be a strength or weakness, your financial situation can be a strength or weakness. For many of you reading this, your biggest strength is that you’re reading this right now.

Depending on your level of self-esteem you will have a compulsion to deflect either your strengths or your weaknesses. That’s why some people have a hard time coming up with a list of one or the other. These people have an unclear view of their own identity.

As soon as you go through this process of identifying various strengths and weaknesses, you will realize that there is nothing external, even your environment. It’s either a strength that helps you or a weakness that hinders you.

The reason why this is important to understand is because many people define their strengths and weaknesses poorly. They identify with their strengths and weaknesses.

People with low self-esteem use their weaknesses to feed it. E.g. If you had emotionally abusive parents. It’s easy to be nitpicky about which weaknesses are part of you and which weaknesses aren’t part of you.

A good way to define weakness and strength is something you can do something about. You could say “I cannot fly, that’s a weakness.” but we don’t define that as a weakness because we can’t do anything about it.

You have to drop your idea of identity because identity is not in line with your true self. Going about it this way can help you define an accurate self image.

What is your self image and what is your true self? Your true self is just what you are - the physical world - reality. Your self image is a projection of what you think you are.

If you have an inaccurate self image, you will experience inner conflict. The physical sensation of inner conflict is called cognitive dissonance which is the will to make sense.

When our true self is not aligned with reality, what we really are, we experience noise, dissonance, inner conflict, duality. Because your emotional part of the brain wants something different than your rational part of the brain.

Being better aligned helps keep you in the present - at peace.

Generally, people experience two forms of drives. One is motivation, when the emotional part of the brain imposes itself on the rational part of the brain. The other is discipline, when the rational part of the brain imposes itself on the emotional part of the brain.

But there is a third drive. Choiceless awareness. When the emotional and rational parts of the brain are aligned. When your self image becomes aligned with your true self and you don’t experience inner conflict. You just act. You don’t think anymore. This is often experienced as a constant state of flow.

Making sense is an automatic process when you align your self image with your true self. Aligning yourself with reality and aligning your self-image with your true self is two different ways of explaining the same concept.

Whenever inner conflict knocks you out of the flow, use critical thinking - fueled by exercise, eating healthy, good sleep, etc. - to get to the bottom of it, understand it, correct it, and implement it. Over time you will get better and better.

You stop doing things in order to get rewarded and rather do things because it’s the right thing to do - your actions stem from your accurate self image. The actions happen automatically.

Keep that momentum going. Keep your behavior and your actions in line with your emotional core. You'll be constantly in the present and your reward center is constantly activated.

Scrutinize your self image. Most people have given up and accepted dysfunctional beliefs and stories that explain away their dissonance. But they have triggers that can resurface dissonance so they’re constantly in a battle of avoiding and explaining away triggers and distracting themselves from their dissonance. Be skeptical towards yourself because it's easy to do this without realizing you're doing it.

Whenever you experience dissonance, embrace it, it’s a good thing. Dissonance becomes a chance to better align your self image with your true self. You can find understanding that strengthens your self image.

When you don’t experience inner noise or dissonance, your working memory goes way up. When your self image is aligned with your true self, you become much more intelligent. You can more easily excel in any activity or goal even if you’re not naturally talented. You learn so much faster.

Clicking, this whole idea, can be boiled down to: aligning your self image with your true self. Your true self is the reality of what you are. That's all it is.

Your actions become choiceless. You stop doing things to get rewarded, instead, you do things because those actions are in line with your true self - and that is the reward in itself, regardless of outcome. Even if you fail, you take pleasure in the fact that you did the best you could with the information you had at the time. All failure simply becomes new data points you can use to upgrade your understanding and move forward.

It’s a process. In some situations you can be in the present and aligned, in other situations you can feel inner conflict. It will fluctuate based on your situation, you just need to keep working through it.

On a fundamental level, we are a mathematical pattern. When there is a paradox in the mathematical pattern, we experience conflict, also known as cognitive dissonance. A drive to make sense is wired within our DNA.

Cognitive dissonance arises from your core that wants to make sense, there is duality between self image and true self. The key is to experience it, not identify with it, not get emotional about it, but just work on it. Understand it. It's a good thing, don't use distractions to run from it.

How do you know when you've found the answer? When the inner conflict is gone, after you've acquired more experience and knowledge, the problem is solved up to that point. But more experience and knowledge may bring up more conflict, so you should always be willing to upgrade and override your beliefs. Don't let yourself get emotionally attached to an idea or belief.

The more you repeat this process, the more your self image becomes aligned with your true self.

Throughout this process you will begin to notice less noise in your head. You will be at peace. Eventually, you can achieve this inner peace, inner quiet, no self-talk, and you will constantly be in the present. Your working memory will go through the roof. You will become laser focused and your negative inner chatter will completely go away. You won't have expectations, judgements about yourself and others. All that is a result of duality between your self image and true self.

When you make progress in aligning your self-image with your true self, you stop taking things for granted and experience more gratitude for everything, even your struggles and your weaknesses will not disturb your inner peace.