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It is not necessary to be filled with anger, jealousy, sorrow and fear. All it takes is the desire to create authentic power and the will to do it—the desire to create harmony, cooperation, sharing and reverence for Life, and the will to create them when you are angry, jealous, sad and frightened. Understanding how to create authentic power is easy compared to actually doing it, but the same is true of anything that develops you.

Baseball is easy to understand. Becoming a good player is more difficult. First, you have to get into good condition and you have to stay that way. Then you have to learn skills such as pitching, catching and batting. Then you need to practice, practice, practice. You need a team to play on and other teams to play with.

Anyone can understand baseball in an afternoon, but no one can become a good player overnight. Everyone needs time to learn, practice, apply, and then learn, practice and apply again. This takes time and intention. It takes focus and determination.

So does creating authentic power. Knowing how is easy. Just set the intentions to create harmony, cooperation, sharing and reverence for Life no matter what, and keep them. The rest is learning what these things mean, how to do them and practice. You also need other people to practice with. In this case, you don't have to recruit them. They are always there. They are the people you get angry with, jealous of, sad about or frightened of.

To improve your ball game, you have to become aware of yourself. For example, you need to become conscious of how your body moves when you swing the bat. Great batters know exactly what they are doing as they do it. They don't close their eyes and swing. They are conscious of every muscle.

Are you aware of your intentions? When you are angry, what are your intentions? When you are jealous, what are your intentions? Trying to change your intentions when you don't know what they are is like trying to go to New York when you don't know where you are starting from. Going to New York from San Francisco is one thing. Getting there from Paris is another.

When you are aware of all your intentions, you are like a great batter who is conscious of every muscle as he moves his body toward the ball. He can change what needs to be changed. He knows how to get where he wants to go because he knows exactly where he is.

When you choose your intentions according to what you want to create, that is responsible choice. When you intend to create harmony, cooperation, sharing and reverence for Life, your intentions and the intentions of your soul are the same. When that happens, you become authentically powerful.

Creating authentic power is a process. Each time you choose harmony, cooperation, sharing or reverence for Life, you challenge parts of yourself that want other things. They are the parts of you that are angry, sad, jealous and frightened. The more you challenge them, the less power they have over you and the more power you have over them. Eventually, their power over you disappears.

That is how authentic power is created—intention by intention, and choice by choice. You cannot wish it, pray it or meditate it into being any more than you can wish, pray or meditate yourself into being a great baseball player. If you want to bake bread, you have to know how to do it. If you want to create authentic power, you have to know how to do that, too.

Then you have to do it.

Gary Zukav is an international best-selling author whose most recent book is Spiritual Partnership. This is an excerpt from Soul Stories.

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