Authentic wisdom is the ability to monitor yourself at all times to determine your relative state of weakness or strength, and to shift out of those thoughts that weaken you. In this way, you keep yourself in an upbeat, higher state of consciousness, and you prevent your thoughts from weakening every single organ of your body. When you use your mind to empower you, you're appealing to that which uplifts and raises your spirits.

If a simple thought will make the muscles of your arm go weak or strong, imagine what it must be doing to all of the other muscles and organs of your body! Your heart is a muscle that's weakened by thoughts that disempower you. Your kidneys, liver, lungs, and intestines are all surrounded by muscles that are affected by your thoughts.

The thought that makes most people the weakest is shame, which produces humiliation. The importance of forgiving yourself cannot be stated strongly enough. If you carry around thoughts of shame about what you've done in the past, you're weakening yourself both physically and emotionally. Similarly, if you use a technique of shame and humiliation on anyone to get them to reform, you're going to create a weakened person who will never become empowered until those shameful and humiliating thoughts are removed. Removing your own thoughts of shame involves a willingness to let go, to see your past behaviors as lessons you had to learn, and to reconnect to your source through prayer and meditation.

After shame, guilt and apathy thoughts make you the weakest. They produce the emotions of blame and despair. To live in guilt is to use up your present moments being immobilized over what has already transpired. No amount of guilt will ever undo what's been done. If your past behavior mobilizes you to learn from your mistakes, this is not guilt; it's learning from the past. But to wallow in the present moment over your so-called errors is guilt, and it can only take place now.

Releasing guilt is like removing a huge weight from your shoulders. Guilt is released through the empowering thought of love and respect for yourself. You empower yourself with love and respect, letting go of standards of perfection and refusing to use up the precious currency of your life, the now, with thoughts that only continue to frustrate and weaken you. Instead, you can vow to be better than you used to be, which is the true test of nobility.

Apathetic thoughts create despair. They are the thoughts that keep you from being engaged in life. Apathy stems from self-pity and a need to be entertained continually to avoid boredom. You can never be apathetic or lonely if you love the person you're alone with.

Every moment of every day presents an unlimited number of options for living fully and being connected to life. You don't need a television or a radio constantly blaring to avoid apathy. You have your own mind, which is a kingdom of limitless potential.

You have the choice each day to wake up and say, "Good morning, God" or "Good God, morning!" It's always a choice. Any moments that you fill with thoughts of boredom and apathy will truly weaken you physically, emotionally, and spiritually. To me, it's an insult to this wondrous universe filled with a hundred million miracles to ever allow myself to think thoughts of boredom or apathy.

The other prominent thoughts that compete to make you weak include fear and anger. Both of these categories of thought employ force, which produces a counter-force and an inner atmosphere of tension and weakness. When you're afraid, you've moved away from love. Remember, "Perfect love casteth out all fear." What you fear, you resent and ultimately begin to hate. Thus, the dichotomy of hate and fear are at work within you, always weakening you.

Every thought you have in which you're in a state of fear keeps you away from your purpose, and is simultaneously weakening you. Your fearful thoughts are inviting you to stay immobilized. When you find yourself in a fearful mode, stop right there and invite God onto the scene. Turn fear over to your Senior Partner with these words: "I don't know how to deal with this, but I know I'm connected to You, the miraculous creative force in this universe. I'll move my ego out of the way and turn it over to You." Try it. You'll be surprised by how quickly that higher energy of love will nullify and dissolve your fearful thoughts and empower you at the same time.

Anger, likewise, is an emotional reaction to thoughts that say, "I want the world to be the way I want it, not the way it is; therefore, I'm angry." Anger is often justified as normal, but it will always make you weak; and as this principle reminds you, wisdom is avoiding all thoughts that weaken you. You don't have to be angry to right a wrong or work toward a better world. When you become more peaceful, you will only have peace to give away. Moments of frustration won't trigger anger; they'll help you be more aware, and then they'll spur you on to a solution.

Every thought of anger moves you away from love and into violence and vengeance, which are forces that spur Counter forces, weakening everyone involved. All of these thoughts of shame, guilt, apathy, fear, and anger are energies, since everything in our universe is a vibrating frequency. Those that weaken you are low/slow frequencies, and they can only be dissolved by bringing the higher/faster energies of Spirit to their presence.

When you shift from a thought that's a very low energy vibration to one of a higher frequency, you go from weak to strong. When your thought is on blaming others, you're weakened. But when you shift to loving and trusting others, you become strong. Your thoughts come with an accompanying energy, so you might as well shift to those that empower you. Once you realize that what you think about is the source of your experience of reality, then you'll begin to pay more attention to what you're thinking in any given moment.

Many years ago, in a tremendously popular audio program called The Strangest Secret, Earl Nightingale taught many of us that we become what we think about all day long. Your thoughts determine whether you're being empowered or weakened -- whether you're happy or sad, successful or not. Everything is a thought that you carry around with you. Happy thoughts create happy molecules. Your health is determined largely by the thoughts you have. Passionately think that you won't get a cold, and your body will react to your thoughts. Refuse to entertain thoughts of fatigue, jet lag, or headaches, and your body responds to your thoughts.

Your mind tells your body to produce the drugs it needs to keep you healthy. Give someone a sugar pill and convince them that it's an anti-arthritic drug, and that person's body will react to the placebo with the increased production of anti-arthritic energies. The mind is a powerful tool in creating health. It also creates divine relationships, abundance, harmony in business --and even parking places! If your thoughts are focused on what you want to attract in your life, and you maintain that thought with the passion of an absolute intention, you'll eventually act upon that intention, because the ancestor to every single action is a thought.

The most empowering thoughts you can have are those of peace, joy, love, acceptance, and willingness. These thoughts don't create a counter-force. Powerful, joyful, loving thoughts stem from your willingness to allow the world to be as it is. Then you're in a state of inner bliss where serenity replaces fighting, reverence for all of life substitutes for craving and anxiety, and understanding supplants scorn. You become an optimist. Rather than seeing the glass as half empty, it's always half full.

All of this is nothing more than a conscious decision on your part to be in charge of your thinking. Be aware at any given moment in your life that you always have a choice about the thoughts you allow in your mind. No one else can put a thought there. Regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in, it is your choice. Choose to replace disempowering, weakening thoughts with thoughts of a higher spiritual frequency.

Don't convince yourself that it can't be done or it's easier said than done. Your mind is yours to control. You are the creator and selector of your thoughts. You can change them at will. It is your God-given inheritance, your corner of freedom that no one can take away. No one can have control of your thoughts without your consent. So choose to avoid thoughts that weaken you, and YOU will know true wisdom. It is your choice!