I think it is fairly common for people to define “intention” as something that is done using determination and purpose.  An example would be setting a goal and then doing what it would take to accomplish that goal, such as graduating from college, finding a job, getting to a class or work on time, etc.  However, I have come to believe that intention is more than setting out to accomplish a particular purpose and that many of us tend to limit our thoughts in regards to the powerful “force” that intention appears to be.

First of all I would say that intention is not merely something that we choose to do, but that intention is a driving force within each of us, and that this force is also not separate from us, but is an intricate part of our being.  In addition, I would say that intention is a force that exists in the universe as what we could call an invisible field of spiritual energy that is present in all of creation.  Consider for a moment that this invisible, yet extremely powerful force of energy lies close to dormancy within most of us as we experience physical life and also the lower planes of what we call the afterlife.  Yet, at the same time, this energy field of intention is available to each of us and it can be tapped into and used by everyone because it is not separate from us.  We merely hold a belief in separation, which is part of the human condition.

Consider also that there is no place that this field of intention does not exist.  Every living thing has intention built into it.  Nature for example demonstrates that in every aspect, intention is built into it.  For example, an avocado seed has the intention of growing an avocado tree and not a walnut tree.  Every living thing, no matter what has intention built into it and so do we.  This intention exists in a deeper level of our being than what most of us realize on the surface and certainly human capacity of choice enters into this as well. 

Matthew, I would say this is why you and so many others have had positive results with the use of TMI programs.  By raising the frequency of our vibrations, we can and do tap into the place where our deeper intention exists.  From my experience, when we are aligned with universal intention (purpose) we are synchronized with the universal whole.  In the physical we experience this as feeling a lot of personal integrity, power, and purpose in our life because we are synchronized with universal purpose.  Tim gives an excellent example of how this alignment manifests.  On the other hand, people who take adversarial positions could not possibly be aligned with universal intention and purpose, because universal purpose has no adversaries.

This is a complicated subject for sure and I’m sure some here would debate this concept, however, this is what my understanding and experience has shown to me.

Love and light,
Kathy

Hi Doc-

" Its true, one can wonder what we define as reality.  The "C1" of Robert Monroe.  I believe, and others seem to concur, that there is a shared experience on this plane that we call life, and much of it follows patterns which may be called divine or natural law.  Now it seems to me that a pure scientist would assume that only by conscious action in the physical plane through accepted physical interactions/laws can we have any effect on our lives.

If there is a spritual plane, and if we apply intent while in the hypnagaugic state, or a different focus level (in the TMI system), make contact with our "higher self" (if you believe in that), and can then see the intent translated into our daily lives, that is a different matter - foreign to most scientists.   This of course was my question and my reason for posting."

I think that by this question you've opened a can of worms that will be hard to re-can.  What to me seems most pervasive about the entire issue thus far is that virtually everyone is following your lead into a space in which the "everyday physical world" of experiences is taken as prima facie valid. To this I can offer only a suggestion that if the world is physical in nature, as we presume, then all this talk about "thought", and "feeling" and "intention" is simply wrong - unless, of course, we are willing to anthromorphize bricks, fireplugs and the other furniture of life. All processes break down into statistically probable pathways between the various states of the world, and all the richness of human experience, including this forum, is simply proof that enough monkeys with enough typewriters would eventually write Shakespeare. Once we commit to materialism, we are on a slippery slope that leads to mechancal determinism.

That isn't the feeling we get when we do things. In fact, feeling is primary. Our assumptions about the nature of the "material world" are secondary to sense data. Sense data, in turn, is secondary to a varying locus of awareness. Thus, "reality" emerges first from a projection that we associate with a subjective viewpoint, and also from the next order of projections that we create in order to explain patterns of changes of that viewpoint and their relationship to our own nature, leading to the idea of a source of those changes that we call "reality" etc.

To start out with the materialistic world as a given, however commonplace and customary, misses the fact that the material world is actually an interpretation of sense data. We can't even determine how these sense data arrive, because they can only be defined in terms of other sense data, a circular and invalid approach.  This does not necessarily lead to the pirest or the best science, and it gets worse when we arbitrarily project a material sphere as unconditionally valid.

The common experience of life, based on these limited ideas, and witrhout projecting a material world that is superordinal, must thus arise at the level of our sense data, else we would be isolated monads. However, once we accept that we collectively agree on the world that we project, it locates the nature of the world inside ourselves, and more than that, it locates all others inside ourselves as well. In place of a world of matter, we have a world of patterns of entropy, of which a single locus must be common to all of us, else we would have no communcation.

From this viewpoint, our projection of the material world is simply a convenient fiction that works pretty well. However, the idea of a Higher Self, of a God, or of personal agency in this world, must similarly arise at the core, the commonly shared point from which we project our reality, as a commonly agreed style of projection. Thus, I suggest that the problem is not to locate the manner of arising of the spiritual plane in our materially based lives, but to understand how the nature of a physical projection can arise from our innately spiritual nature to obscure the basic unity that we share, giving the false impression that we are all different beings.

dave

Hi Matthew-
I'm afraid I wandered a bit in trying to make my point, but I get the idea that we're coming closer together in concept. Apologies for being tedious. I'm trying to develop a composite of many accounts of origination, plus my own experiences, from which to return to your basic question.

We can ask the same basic question about intention and results from either side, the material side or the spiritual side. The material side tends to get us stuck in the problem of creating spiritual values out of matter. The spiritual side leaves us with the problem of creating material experiences from a spiritual perspective.  While the former cannot be solved, because of the nature of matter, the latter has a relatively clear path to a solution, because any path to the experience is adequate.

This is where the definition of intent enters. I suggest that there is a single point of origination, physical cosmologists call it a primal singularity, psychic cosmologists call it the immanence of God, Edgar Cayce called it the "Force", Plato called it the Good, for me it's a statistical tendency toward additivity in Riemannian space (a math analogy for St Thomas Aquinas' term, "Uncaused Cause"), and for you it's your personal take on the idea.

Intention, if it occurs, is present in this point, and extended thereafter.  The scenario then unfolds that the present instant is this primal point, somehow developed, so that in material terms, we are, at this very instant, still experiencing the Big Bang - and we are its ripples. Or in spiritual terms, we are the emergent spectrum of ways in which the primal existential point manifests itself. This is something that we can examine more or less directly.

From the initial point there is a projection. In fact there are lots of projections. These directly express intention. The existential transition is from an initial "I AM", to a secondary, "I AM in this manner". Each such projection can be conceptualized as an orthonormal basis in n-space,  of which its self-definition is "I am not the same as any of those other projections", and to all the others its nature is "That isn't me".  This Hindu would say that each is an individual person, yet each is only a manifestation of the One True Self, the Mind of Brahman.

This gives a pretty good model of the neonatal mind as it is born into the company of its fellows. Each is a projection of God, hooked on at the Higher-Self end, and dangling out into a world of common experiences at the other end. The common experiences are then selected randomly, until the most probable experiential scenario is found, a logical space in which relationships can occur, and within which experiences can have common values. This logic is the projected physical world, together with its triangles, its logical consistencies, and in particular, with a tuning by selection of experiential (meaning "physical") constants that allow not only the three alpha process to make carbon, but also can produce fluorine and some other oddball compositions of the logical probabilities and contingencies that we call quantum states. This gives us a material-seeming world of material-seeming experiences. Again, the driving force is innate "intention".

Now, let's connect a specific outcome state to intention. This is a matter of choice of direction as we move through the space of potential experiences. There are three moments to the Platonic dialectic, thesis, antithesis and synthesis. "I would like to manifest that in my life," is thesis. So long as we are in that mode, we are at processual cause. This is also the initial experience of the afterlife according to the "Bardo Thodol", the "I AM in this manner".

The next moment of dialectic is reactive, the Bardo traveller faces the potentially malificent response of the world to prior actions. Or, in a sense, the universe looks around and says, "Well, there you are, and that's how you are." That's the delay interval you experience. So long as you involve with responding, you readjust reality, to some degree restabilizing matters so that they can occur according to the direction you chose.

The third moment of the dialectic is presentation of the result. The Bardo traveller faces both potentially beneficent and malificent responses of others. Your experience is that you made up your mind to include some experience, "I AM in this manner", and then you lived through various events involved in the transition, and finally arrived at the location in logical space where the intended event occurs.

The point I feel important in this,  after all the lengthy stuff, is that intention is innate, not elective, and that we are always at cause in life. The reason that this is not evident is that we simply don't stay on task. Like the man who wanted to cross a small vallet and got sidetracked into swimming, eating and playing until night fell and he was lost in a wilderness, we get sidetracked, and fail to realize that we are the manifestation of the total creative impulse.

While this rendition is imperfect, notice that it explains how placebos can work, how prayer can actually change reality and cure, and how you can, by simple choice of direction and consistency in self-direction, bring to manifest those events you have been experimenting with in your own life.

There is a purpose to all this rhetoric,  other than making a lot of noise. I'm interested in harnessing "intention", whether by prayer, love, projection etc, to see about making some changes in the world. The target I'd propose is that world leaders will progressively realize that a win-win strategy is superior to a win-lose competitive one.  Thoughts?

dave












You set your mind on

Hey Doc, I love the fact that you're exploring this. You're helping me think about it further than I have been.... The example I wrote about meeting my partner was unusual for me. I mostly use focusing intention as a skillful means to help others. The intention I set prior to meeting my partner came after a marriage and 3 long-term relationships ended (over decades). I came to a place where I was asking myself: what is relationship? what were my intentions at the outset of my past relationships? What do I want? There was a period of contemplation before I offered a picture of what i wanted to the universe. And even though I use the word "want", there wasn't any "wanting energy" in offering the picture.  Desire I've ordinarily experienced always seemed tied up with it's opposite, I wish for something and feel the lack of it at the same time.  A confusing picture to show the universe.  When I did it that time, everything was 'already complete', no feeling of want or lack. The mood is hard to describe, but it's that mood that i associate with intent.... Hey, it's occurred to me to set intent for whimsical things to happen in my life. Not necessarily for me, but for me to witness. Not big changes or goals, but things like  "I intend a red balloon to float out of the sky into a surprised child's hands."  ( sounds crazy I know...but I'm serious )  Just as a playful experiment to see, as you say, where we have impact and where we don't.... I've had a lot of success in intending dreams, doing things in them, but that's different than what you're talking about, intention manifesting in C1. Alright, I love what everyone is saying on this thread, a good conversation to have, best to you all, Tim F.

Dave,

Your points are well taken.  Most of us feel that in C1/reality we are acted upon, not the creator of action.  Perspective here means a lot.

What is tricky is the formation of intent, in my "higher self," and the reaction of the universe to my stated intention.  William Hung (was that his name), stated it was his intention to win American Idol.  He was awful (and has made a joke career ever since).  Clearly, there are stated intentions which, the universe will respond negatively to.

If we are all part of one primal consciousness or godhood, we still have our illusory individuality (as many eastern religions believe).  And as individual entities, the use of stating an intention often results in nothing.  Why?  Is it that the person's higher self/subconscious truly doesn't believe in the intention?  Is it karma, or the "worthiness" of an individual?  This, for me is what is interesting.

I think the meditative or hypnagaugic state (or deeper Monroe focus levels) are important, because we can be relaxed, in touch with ourselves and focused.  The placing of absolute intention in this state, I believe is extremely powerful. 

What do others think?

Matthew

I realize I don't have much to say on this thread but I'm still drawn back here...thanks for letting me park here...


Mathew said: I have heard it said that if one states an intention or "wish," that there must be absolute certainty, and often a repetitive process is required.  Absolute certainty is difficult for any of us.
____

I think thats why focus 35 beings watch the experiment going on here..because we do not deal in absolutes or certainty, but a kind of divine chaos operates perhaps..and we bring order to that as best each one imagines....

hmmm. dave. like surrendering what you want to get what u want...or to not even want it anymore by surrendering it...wait, its coming...ok, to get what u want you give away the thing you want and it somehow comes to you.

I was thinking lately on Bruce's meditation exploration of thinking large and getting small, thinking cold and getting hot. our minds work like this to produce the opposite. something to do with a duality world of reflection.

I played that game too, only if someone was staring at me, I'd say don't stare at me in my mind, I'm invisible. they would stare anyway. ha ha! so if I don't care either way it's better.

I love that u tell your story here Kathy   and u inspire me to tell my own with your courage. there are a small group of us who do partnered explorations over at http://www.spiritlinnusa.com/ had fun with it and got ourselves some very good hits. it's called exploration for a reason though because it is exploration, more than that it's resonation with each other. it's easier to grow in a friendly environment in other words   so that being said I pondered on Kat's unique experience of the seemingly solid car slicing through her reality and essentially, probably brought her to her biggest belief system crash ever...I know it would me. I believe. this world is a world where anything that can happen will most likely happen, and that includes the unusual, such as what we call miracles. it miracles were commonplace, well, u could hardly call them miracles.. Kat's story reminds me of abductee's who tell of "waking up" driving along in their car and noting a loss of time has occurred; later on they wonder why a 6 hour drive took 9 hours? going to a hynotist usually clears the mystery up. this too, would lead to a severe belief system crash, such as "holy cow" aliens wiped out my memory of 3 hours! not fair! but we can retrieve the memories. but as to Kat she was conscious throughout..never lost a second of being present. and the reason for this? so she could tell her story, so we could wake up to who we are here and what sort of adventures await us within our lives. for myself, it has been a journey of learning to own myself, own my truth..be as dear Kyo says, "Captain" of my soul. not easy to do this journey, you know! yet I like these boards, I like all the people most the time, and some of the people some of the time

I want to tell u something about Kathy. I have met her out there. I trust her intentions completely. anyone I meet out there, there is a reason. and since I am basically new at meeting others out there, these become special to me as they are involved in my personal growth, but I do like all people, so I'm not saying we have a secular group. it's not that way. we are all connected.  my dream of me and Kat seemed normal, like any other dream. I even knew part of the reason I dreampt it. in the dream things were reversed as sometimes obes can be reversed too. the dream showed myself visiting her house, then taking her into my room to give her something (my music) in reality, the discussion we had within obe/dream took place within board discussion and email. this world is showing me again and again that the astral planes and physical reality is a reflection of one another and fills me with wonder. I promptly  freak each time I encounter a living being out there only to meet them within physical area to enact what has already been enacted on that other more subtle level. I do wonder still which came first? the chicken or the egg. I don't know but I will continue going to school to find out. Kathy had responded to me in response to my intention/wish/desire to give my music away. I did not know who would answer me, but for sure I had this need. I don't know how she knew I had this need. she just did. maybe she still doesn't know fully the part she played in my life although I tried to communicate my gratitude that she showed up. we over at Linn's board had not even begun our PE's yet when this occurred. what we talked about within obe state was not so important...we discussed her new kittens, and how one appeared ill and how she was attending to this matter. she was expressing her joy of owning kittens. I got enough of the message right to relate it back to her more or less correctly for verification. then I gave her my music and pointed to the back yard landscaping taking place. I believe Linn's board was under construction at this time at that's what that was all about. not trying to pump myself up here. don't get the wrong idea..Kat was special to me because she was the first human being out there to go to my website and listen to a song I'd been singing there and to give me the encouragement I needed because I wasn't sure and thought perhaps my singing was creating a flakey self image..   no one had responded to my guest list at the time..just a mentor whom I love dearly, but because he loves me so much, I therefore thought he was biased   point is, we need each other, like someone's tag says here. we DO need each other, to accept each unique individual here who shares because in the days ahead during our "experiment" on Earth we will discover the many ways we can help each other to make the world a better place for the kidlings coming in...clean up our act so to speak as the world is not ready to blow up just yet

my, I am so wordy. sorry to be so long winded. just wanted to say you can trust Kat. she's completely valid person in what she says and I'm glad to have met her here and out there. love, alysia