The Power of Intention Read online

  • One individual who lives and vibrates to the energy of optimism and a willingness to be nonjudgmental of others will counterbalance the negativity of 90,000 individuals who calibrate at the lower weakening levels.

  • One individual who lives and vibrates to the energy of pure love and reverence for all of life will counterbalance the negativity of 750,000 individuals who calibrate at the lower weakening levels.

  • One individual who lives and vibrates to the energy of illumination, bliss, and infinite peace will counterbalance the negativity of 10 million people who calibrate at the lower weakening levels (approximately 22 such sages are alive today).

  • One individual who lives and vibrates to the energy of grace, pure spirit beyond the body, in a world of nonduality or complete oneness, will counterbalance the negativity of 70 million people who calibrate at the lower weakening levels (approximately 10 such sages are alive today).

  Here are two compelling statistics offered by Dr. Hawkins in his 29-year study on the hidden determinants of human behavior:

  1. One single avatar living at the highest level of consciousness in this period of history to whom the title Lord is appropriate, such as Lord Krishna, Lord Buddha, and Lord Jesus Christ, would counterbalance the collective negativity of all of mankind in today’s world.

  2. The negativity of the entire human population would self-destruct were it not for the counteracting effects of these higher energy fields.

  The implications of these figures are immense for discovering ways of improving human consciousness and raising ourselves to the place where we match up with the same energy of intention from which we were intended. By raising your own frequency of vibration only slightly to a place where you regularly practice kindness, love, and receptivity, and where you see beauty and the endless potential of good in others as well as yourself, you counterbalance 90,000 people somewhere on this planet who are living in the low-energy levels of shame, anger, hatred, guilt, despair, depression, and so on.

  I can’t help thinking of John F. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s. He was surrounded by advisors urging the use of nuclear bombs if necessary. Yet his own energy and that of a few trusted colleagues who were steeped in the potential for a peaceful resolution served to counterbalance the vast majority of those who pushed for attack and bellicosity. One person with very high spiritual energy can put the possibility of war into a last-resort category. This is true in your own life. Bring the energy of intention to the presence of conflict even in family matters, and you can nullify and convert the lower antagonistic energy with your presence.

  I’ve done this in a hostile setting where young people influenced by alcohol and drugs were squaring off to fight while a crowd urged them on. On one occasion, I simply walked between two potential combatants humming the song, “Surely the Presence of God Is in This Place,” and that energy alone softened the atmosphere, raising the level of energy to peace.

  In another instance, I approached a woman who was immersed in having an angry fit with her toddler in a grocery store and screaming hateful epithets at the two-year-old. I quietly moved into the energy field, said nothing, but radiated my desire for a higher energy of love, and it nullified the low energy of hatred. Consider the importance of becoming aware of the impact you have on others, and remind yourself that by raising your own energy level to a place where you’re in harmony with intention, you become an instrument, or a channel, of peace. This works everywhere, so be a part of the counterbalance to the human negativity you encounter in your life.

  Five Suggestions for Implementing the Ideas

  in This Chapter

  1. Become aware of the importance of making all of your relationships divine. The holy relationship isn’t based on any religion. The holy relationship emphasizes the unfolding of Spirit in everyone. Your children are spiritual beings who come through you, not for you. Your love relationship can focus on wanting for your partner what you want for yourself. If you want freedom, want it for everyone you love. If you want abundance, want it first for others. If you want happiness, want it more for others, and let them know it. The more you have holiness as the centerpiece of your relationships, the more you’ll merge with intention.

  2. When a question of morality arises concerning how you should act toward others, simply ask yourself, What would the Messiah do? This inner inquiry returns you to the tranquility of intention. The Messiah represents the seven faces of intention all manifested in a spiritual being having a human experience. In this way, you’re honoring the Christ in you that is also in everyone else. Practice wanting for others what you want for yourself by being Christ-like rather than a Christian, Mohammed-like rather than a Muslim, and Buddha-like rather than a Buddhist.

  3. Keep track of the judgments you direct toward yourself and others. Make a conscious effort to shift to compassionate thoughts and feelings. Offer a silent blessing to beggars rather than judging them as lazy or a drain on the economy. Your thoughts of compassion raise your level of energy and facilitate your staying connected to intention. Be compassionate toward everyone you meet, all of humanity, the entire kingdom of animal life, and our planet and cosmos as well. In return, the universal Source of all life will bestow compassion upon you, helping you manifest your own individual intention. It’s the law of attraction. Send out compassion, attract it back, send out hostility and judgment, attract it back. Watch your thoughts, and when they’re anything other than compassionate, change them!

  4. Whatever others want, want it for them so strongly that you disperse this energy outward and act from this level of spiritual consciousness. Attempt to feel what would make others most happy and fulfilled. Then send the high energy of intention to that feeling and concentrate on beaming this energy outward, particularly while in their presence. This will help to create a doubly high field for such intentions to manifest.

  5. Be continually alert to the fact that simply by thinking and feeling in harmony with the seven faces of intention, you’ll be counterbalancing the collective negativity of a minimum of 90,000 people, and perhaps millions. Nothing to do. No one to convert. No goals to accomplish. Nothing more than raising your own energy level to the creative, kind, loving, beautiful, ever-expanding, endlessly abundant, and receptive-to-all-without-judgment frequencies. These inner attitudes will raise you to the level where your presence will impact humanity in a positive way. In Autobiography of a Yogi, Swami Sri Yukteswar tells Paramahansa Yogananda: “The deeper the self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.”

  You have a responsibility to the entire human family to stay connected to intention. Otherwise you could be depressing someone in Bulgaria right at this moment!

  With these words, Mahatma Gandhi sums up this chapter on how we can impact the world by staying connected to that which intended us here in the first place: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” By being it, we connect to the eternal part of us that originates in infinity. This whole idea of infinity and coming to grips with how it affects our ability to know and employ the power of intention is vastly mysterious. It’s the subject matter for the final chapter in Part I of this book. We’ll explore infinity from a body and a mind that begins and ends in time, yet somehow knows that the I that is in here has always been and always will be.

  INTENTION

  AND

  INFINITY

  “Eternity is not the hereafter . . . this is it.

  If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.”

  — Joseph Campbell

  Please indulge me in a little exercise right here, right now. Put this book down, and say out loud: I’m not from here. Let the meaning of the words be clear to you. The meaning is that you are in this world, but not of this world. You’ve been taught that who you are is a body with your name, made up of molecules, bones, tissue, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrog
en. You know yourself as the person with your particular name, and you identify yourself as the person with the possessions and achievements that you’ve accumulated. This self also possesses some terrifying information. It knows that if it’s lucky, it’s destined to grow old, get sick, and lose everything that it’s grown to love. Then it will die. This is a shortened version of what the world has offered you, which probably leaves you mystified and flabbergasted at the absurdity of this thing we call life. Into this bleak picture, which inspires fear and even terror, I’d like to introduce a concept that will eliminate the terror. I want you to know that you needn’t subscribe to the idea that you are only this collection of bones and tissues, destined to be annihilated in an aging process.

  You’ve emerged from a universal field of Creation that I’ve been calling intention. In a sense, this universal mind is totally impersonal. It is pure love, fondness, beauty, and creativity, always expanding and endlessly abundant. You emanated from this universal mind. And as I keep telling you, universal means everywhere and at all times. In other words, infinite. As long as your wishes are aligned with the forward movement of this everlasting principle, there’s nothing in nature to restrict you from attaining the fulfillment of those wishes. It’s only when you choose to allow ego to oppose the expanding, receptive forward movement of the infinite mind of intention that the realization of your wishes doesn’t feel fulfilling. Life itself is eternal, and you spring from this infinite no thing called life. Your ability to connect to the eternal and live in the here-and-now will determine your staying connected to intention.

  Life Is Eternal

  We all live on a stage where many infinities gather. Just take a look outside tonight and contemplate the infinity of space. There are stars so distant from you that they’re measured in the distance that light travels in an Earthly year. Beyond those stars that you can see are endless galaxies that stretch out into something we call eternity. Indeed, the space that you occupy is infinite. Its vastness is too huge for us to see. We’re in an infinite, never-ending, never-beginning universe.

  Now pay close attention to this next sentence. If life is infinite, then this is not life. Read that again and consider that life truly is infinite. We can see this in everything that we scrupulously observe. Therefore, we must conclude that life, in terms of our body and all of its achievements and possessions, which without exception begins and ends in dust, isn’t life itself. Grasping life’s true essence could radically change your life for the better. This is an enormous inner shift that eliminates fear of death (how can you fear something that can’t exist?) and connects you permanently to the infinite Source of Creation that intends everything from the world of infinite Spirit, into a finite world. Learn to be comfortable with the concept of infinity, and see yourself as an infinite being.

  While we’re in this finite world of beginnings and endings, the power of intention maintains its infinite nature because it’s eternal. Anything you experience as other than eternal is simply not life. It’s an illusion created by your ego, which strives to maintain a separate address and identity from its infinite Source. This shift toward seeing yourself as an infinite spiritual being having a human experience, rather than the reverse—that is, a human being having an occasional spiritual experience, is loaded with fear for most people. I urge you to look at those fears and face them directly right now; the result will be a permanent connection to the abundance and receptivity of the universal Source that intends all of Creation into temporary form.

  Your Fear of the Infinite

  We are all in bodies that are going to die, and we know this, yet we can’t imagine it for ourselves, so we behave as if it weren’t so. It’s almost as if we’re saying to ourselves, Everybody dies but me. This is attributable to what Freud observed. Our death is unimaginable, so we simply deny it and live our lives as if we weren’t going to die . . . because of the terror that our own death instills. As I sat down to write this chapter, I said to a friend that my goal was to leave the reader with a complete absence of the fear of death. Let me know if it touches you in that way, even on a minor scale.

  When I was a seven-year-old, I lived with my older brother, David, in a foster home at 231 Townhall Road, in Mt. Clemens, Michigan. The people who took us in while my mother worked to reunite her family were named Mr. and Mrs. Scarf. I remember this as if it occurred yesterday. David and I were sitting on the back porch of our home, and Mrs. Scarf came outside with two bananas in her hand and tears flowing down her face. She gave us each a banana, saying, “Mr. Scarf died this morning.” It was the first time I’d experienced the concept of death connected to a human being. In my seven-year-old naïveté, I asked her, attempting to soothe her obvious pain, “When will he be back?” Mrs. Scarf responded with one word that I’ve never forgotten. She simply said, “Never.”

  I went upstairs to my bunk, peeled my banana, and lay there attempting to comprehend the concept of never. What did being dead forever really mean? I could have handled a thousand years, or even a billion light years, but the idea of never was so overwhelming, with its no ending, and more no ending, that I was almost sick to my stomach. What did I do to handle this incomprehensible idea of never? Simple, I forgot about it and went on about the business of being seven years old in a foster home. This is what Castaneda meant when he said that we’re all in bodies on their way to dying, but we behave as if they’re not, and this is our greatest downfall.

  Your own death. Essentially, there are two points of view regarding this dilemma of your own death. The first says that we’re physical bodies that are born and we go on to live for a while; and then ultimately we deteriorate, our flesh wears out, and then we die and are dead forever. This first perspective, if you embrace it either consciously or otherwise, is terrifying from our alive viewpoint. Unless you embrace the second point of view, it’s completely understandable that you fear death. Or you may welcome it if you hate or fear life. The second point of view says very simply that you’re eternal, an infinite soul in a temporary expression of flesh. This second point of view says that only your physical body dies, that you were whole and perfect as you were created, and that your physicalness emanated from the universal mind of intention. That universal mind was and is formless—it’s the pure energy of love, beauty, kindness, and creativity, and it can’t die, since there’s no form involved—no form, no death, no boundaries, no deterioration, no flesh, no possibility of it wasting away.

  Now which of these two points of view gives you the most comfort? Which is associated with peace and love? Which invokes fear and anxiety? Obviously the idea of your infinite self keeps you on friendly terms with infinity. Knowing you’re first and foremost an infinite being consciously connecting with your Source, which is eternal and omnipresent, is surely the more comforting prospect. Because of its infinite nature, it’s everywhere, and it then follows that the whole of Spirit must be present at every point in space at the same moment.

  Thus, Spirit is present in its entirety everywhere, which includes you. You can never, ever be separate from it. You’ll learn to laugh at the absurd idea that you could ever be separate from the universal mind. It’s your Source. You are it. God is the mind through which you think and exist. It’s always connected to you, even if you don’t believe in it. Even an atheist doesn’t have to believe in God to experience God. The question then becomes, not whether your body is going to die, but rather, on what side of infinity you wish to live. You have two choices, either you live on the inactive or the active side of infinity. In either case, you have an appointment with infinity, and there’s no way to avoid it.

  Your appointment with infinity. Reread the Joseph Campbell quote at the beginning of this chapter. Eternity is now! Right now, right here, you’re an infinite being. Once you get past the fear of death as an end, you merge with the infinite and feel the comfort and relief that this realization brings. We identify everything in this material world through a space-time continuum. Yet infinity has no preference
for time and space. You aren’t the elements that make up your body; you merely make use of the elements. You go beyond space and time and are merged with the infinite universal mind. If you haven’t recognized it, it’s because of your fear. You can keep your appointment with infinity while you’re in your temporary body, with its slavish adherence to time and space. My objective in this chapter is to help you realize and do this. If you make this merger, I assure you of a life without fear of death.

  Let’s take a look at both of the elements in the space/time prison in which we find our material bodies and all of its treasures. The factor of space means that we’re experiencing separation from everyone and everything. This is my space as defined by my boundaries; those are your spaces. Even your most cherished soul mate lives in a world apart from yours. No matter how close in space you get, the boundaries are separate. In space, we’re always separate. Trying to imagine an infinite world without space and separation is extremely difficult, until we make our appointment with infinity.

  Time is also a factor of separation. We’re separated from all of the events and memories of our past. Everything that has happened is separate from what’s happening right now. The future is also separate from the here-and-now where we’re living. We can’t know the future, and the past is lost to us. Therefore, we’re separated from everything that ever was or ever will be by this mysterious illusion we call time.

  When your infinite soul leaves the body, it’s no longer subject to the constraints of time and space. Separation can no longer interfere with you. So my question to you isn’t about whether you believe you have an appointment with infinity. It’s about when you’re going to keep that inevitable appointment. You can either do it now while you’re still alive in your body in the illusion of time and space, or you can do it at death. If you decide to make your appointment with infinity while you still live and breathe, it’s like learning to die while you’re alive. Once you make this transition to the active side of infinity, your fear of death dissolves and you laugh at the folly of death.