The Power of Intention Read online

  A sense of belonging. In a world that lasts forever, you certainly must belong! The active side of infinity inspires not only a strong sense of belonging, but a strong feeling of connectedness to everyone and everything in the cosmos. It’s impossible for you not to belong, because your presence here is evidence that a divine universal Source intended you here. Yet when you live on the inactive side of infinity, you feel a sense of alienation from others. Your idea that this is all temporary and that you aren’t a piece of God’s infinite perfection leads you to self-doubt, anxiety, self-rejection, depression, and so many more of the low energies I’ve written about throughout this book. All it takes is a shift to infinite awareness to leave that feeling of misery. As Sivananda taught his devotees:

  All life is one. The world is one home.

  All are members of one human family.

  All creation is an organic whole. No

  Man is independent of this whole. Man

  Makes himself miserable by separating

  Himself from others. Separation is death.

  Unity is eternal life.

  This concludes my ideas on the active and inactive side of infinity. I urge you to remind yourself every day, as frequently as possible, of your infinite nature. It may sound like merely an intellectual shift of minor consequence, but I assure you that staying on the active side of infinity and reminding yourself of it regularly will put you in a position to manifest your desires. Of all the quotes on this subject I’ve read, this observation made by William Blake stands out: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.” Remember, we’re attempting to clean up the connecting link between ourselves and the field of intention.

  Five Suggestions for Implementing the Ideas

  in This Chapter

  1. Since you already know that you have an appointment with infinity and that you’re ultimately required to leave this corporeal world behind, make the decision to do so sooner, rather than later. In fact today, right now, is a great time to keep that appointment, and get it over with once and for all. Simply announce to yourself: I’m no longer identified by this body/mind, and I reject this label from this moment on. I’m infinite. I’m one with all of humanity. I’m one with my Source, and this is how I choose to view myself from this day forward.

  2. Repeat this mantra to yourself each day as you remind yourself that God wouldn’t and couldn’t create something that doesn’t last: I will exist for all eternity. Just as love is eternal, so is this my true nature. I’ll never be afraid again, because I am forever. This kind of inner affirmation aligns you on the active side of infinity and erases doubts about your authentic higher identity.

  3. In a meditative stance, consider the two choices of belief on this concept of infinity. You are in the truest sense, as I’ve said previously, either a human being having an occasional spiritual experience, or an infinite spiritual being having a temporary human experience. Which of those gives you a feeling of love? And which inspires fear? Now, since love is our true nature and the Source of all, anything that creates fear can’t be real. As you see, the feeling of love is associated with yourself as an infinite being. Then you must rely on this feeling to tell you the truth. Your place in the active side of infinity assures you of a feeling of security, love, and permanent connection to intention.

  4. In any moment in which you find yourself thinking low-energy thoughts of fear, despair, worry, sadness, anxiety, guilt, and so on, just for a moment stop and consider whether this makes any sense from the perspective of the active side of infinity. Knowing that you’re here forever, and always connected to your Source, will give you an entirely new outlook. In the context of infinity, living any moment of your life in anything other than appreciation and love is a waste of your life energy. You can quickly dissipate those lower energies and simultaneously connect to the power of intention by cleansing those lenses of perception and seeing everything as it is—infinite, as William Blake suggested.

  5. Take a few moments to reflect on the people you were close to and loved who have crossed over. Being aware of your infinite nature, and staying in infinity’s active side, allows you to feel the presence of these souls, who can’t die and did not die. In John O’Donohue’s book of Celtic wisdom called Anam Cara, he offers these words with which I not only concur, but I know to be true from my own personal experience:

  I believe that our friends among the dead really mind us and look out for us . . . we might be able to link up in a very creative way with our friends in the invisible world. We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation or pain. They are home. They are with God from whom they came.

  You can not only communicate with and feel the presence of those who’ve crossed over, you yourself can die while you’re alive and rid yourself now of these shadows and darkness, by living in the active side of infinity.

  This concludes Part I of The Power of Intention. Part II will be a series of chapters describing how to put this new connection to intention to work in a variety of ways in your life. As with the first part, read on with a mind that is not only open to the possibility of your achieving all that you can imagine, but to knowing that on the active side of infinity all things are possible.

  Now, you tell me what that leaves out!

  PUTTING

  INTENTION

  TO

  WORK

  “We are already one and we imagine we are not.

  And what we have to recover is our original unity.

  Whatever we have to be is what we are.”

  — Thomas Merton

  IT IS

  MY INTENTION TO:

  RESPECT MYSELF

  AT ALL TIMES

  “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”

  — Mark Twain

  Here’s a simple truth to begin this chapter: You did not originate from a material particle as you’ve been led to believe. Your conception at the moment of your parents’ blissful commingling was not your beginning. You had no beginning. That particle emanated from the universal energy field of intention, as do all particles. You’re a piece of that universal mind of Creation, and you must see God inside of you and view yourself as a divine creation in order to access the power of intention in your life.

  Give this idea a healthy dose of your attention—right now in this moment—as you read these words. Contemplate the enormity of what you’re reading. You are a piece of God. You are a living, breathing creation that emanated from the universal mind of the all-creating Source. You and God are the same thing. Very simply put, when you love and trust yourself, you’re loving and trusting the wisdom that created you; and when you fail to love and trust yourself, you’re denying that infinite wisdom in favor of your own ego. It’s important here to remember that at every single moment of your life, you have the choice to either be a host to God or a hostage to your ego.

  Host or Hostage?

  Your ego is the set of beliefs that I’ve written about earlier in this book, which define you as what you accomplish and accumulate in a material sense. Your ego is solely responsible for the feelings of self-doubt and self-repudiation that you may carry around. When you attempt to live by the low-level standards of your ego, you’re a hostage to that very same ego. Your worth as a person is measured by your acquisitions and accomplishments. If you have less stuff, you’re less valuable, and therefore unworthy of respect from others. If others don’t respect you, and your value depends on how others see you, then it’s unimaginable for you to have self-respect. You become a hostage to this low-level ego energy, which has you constantly striving for self-respect through others.

  Your ego’s belief that you’re separate from everyone, separate from what’s missing in your life, and most egregiously, separate from God, further hampers your ability to live up to the intention of respecting yourself. Ego’s idea of separation fos
ters your feelings of being in competition with everyone, and evaluating your worth based on how frequently you emerge as a winner. As a hostage to your ego, self-respect is unavailable because you feel judged for your failures. It’s out of this bleak picture, produced by the negative ego, that self-rejection emerges. It captures you and makes a hostage of you, never allowing you to play host to that from which you originated.

  Being a host to God means always seeing your authentic connection to your Source. It’s knowing that it’s impossible for you to ever be disconnected from the Source from which you came. Personally, I thoroughly enjoy being a host to God. As I write here each morning, I feel that I’m receiving words and ideas from the power of intention, which allows me to bring these words to this page. I trust in this Source to provide me with the words; therefore, I’m trusting in the Source that brought me into this physical world. I’m eternally connected to this Source.

  This awareness simply doesn’t include a lack of respect for intending this book into form. The conclusion I’ve come to is that I’m worthy of my intention to write this book and have it published and in your hands today. In other words, I respect the piece of God that I am. I tap in to the power of intention, and my feeling of respect for it enhances my respect for myself.

  So, by loving and respecting yourself, you’re hosting God and inviting the energy of Creation to your consciousness, to your daily life, as you connect to the power of intention.

  The energy of intention and your self-respect. If you don’t believe that you’re worthy of fulfilling your intentions for health, wealth, or loving relationships, then you’re creating an obstacle that will inhibit the flow of creative energy into your daily life. Recall that everything in the universe is energy, which moves at various frequencies. The higher the frequency, the closer you are to spiritual energy. In the lower frequencies, you find shortages and problems. Intention itself is a unified energy field that intends everything into existence. This field is home to the laws of nature, and is the inner domain of every human being. This is the field of all possibilities, and it’s yours by virtue of your existence.

  Having a belief system that denies your connection to intention is the only way you’re unable to access the power of intention from the infinite field. If you’re convinced that you’re unworthy of enjoying the field of all possibilities, then you’ll radiate this kind of low energy. This will, in fact, become your attracted energy pattern, and you’ll send messages to the universe that you’re unworthy of receiving the unlimited abundance of the originating Spirit. Soon you’ll act on this inner conviction of self-disrespect. You’ll regard yourself as separate from the possibility of receiving the loving support of the originating field of intention, and you’ll stop the flow of that energy into your life. Why? All because you see yourself as unworthy. This disrespect alone is sufficient to impede the arrival of your intentions into your life.

  The law of attraction attracts disrespect when you’re affirming that you’re unworthy of being respected. Send out the message to the provider of all that you’re unworthy, and you literally say to the universal Source of all, Stop the flow of anything I desire, which is coming in my direction, because I don’t believe I’m worthy of receiving it. The universal Source will respond by halting this flow, causing you to reaffirm your inner conviction of unworthiness and attract even more disrespect in a multitude of ways. You’ll disrespect your body by overfeeding it and poisoning it with toxic substances. You’ll display your lack of self-respect in how you carry yourself, how you dress, how you fail to exercise, how you treat others . . . on and on goes the list.

  The antidote to this dreary picture is to make an internal commitment to respect yourself and to feel worthy of all that the universe has to offer. If anyone is entitled to success and happiness, everyone is, because everyone is always connected to intention. Simply put, disrespecting yourself is not only disrespecting one of God’s greatest creations, it’s disrespecting God. When you disrespect your Source, you say no to it, and you turn away from the power of intention. This stops the flow of energy that allows you to put your individual unbending intent into practice. All of the positive thinking in the world will do you absolutely no good if those thoughts don’t emanate from respect for your connection to intention. The source of your thoughts must be celebrated and loved, and this means having the self-respect that’s in harmony with the omniscient Source of intelligence. What’s the source of your thoughts? Your beingness. Your beingness is the place from which your thoughts and actions come. When you disrespect your being, you set into motion a chain reaction culminating in unfulfilled intentions.

  Self-respect should be a natural state for you, just as it is for all of the animal kingdom. There’s no raccoon out there who believes himself unworthy of what he intends to have. Were that so, the raccoon would simply die by acting on the basis of his inner conviction that he was unworthy of food or shelter, and whatever else raccoons desire. He knows he’s respectable, never finds any reason for self-repudiation, and lives out his raccoon-ness in perfect order. The universe provides, and he attracts those provisions into his world.

  What You Think of Yourself Is

  What You Think of the World

  How do you see the world you live in? What do you think people in general are really like? Do you believe that evil is triumphing over good? Is the world filled with egocentric, selfish people? Can the little guy ever get ahead? Are government entities and all their representatives corrupt and untrustworthy? Is life unfair? Is it impossible to get ahead if you don’t have connections?

  All of these attitudes emerge from your own assessment of your personal interaction with life. If your thoughts reflect a pessimistic view of the world, then that’s actually how you feel about yourself. If your thoughts reflect an optimistic view of the world, then that’s how you feel about your life. Whatever attitude you have about the world in general is a good indicator of the respect you have for your abilities to intend into this world what you desire. Pessimism strongly suggests that you don’t subscribe to the idea that you can access the power of intention to help you create your own blissful reality.

  I recall hearing the following conversation after the events of 9/11 in New York City. A grandfather was talking to his grandson, telling him, “I have two wolves barking inside of me. The first wolf is filled with anger, hatred, bitterness, and mostly revenge. The second wolf inside of me is filled with love, kindness, compassion, and mostly forgiveness.”

  “Which wolf do you think will win?” the young boy inquired.

  The grandfather responded, “Whichever one I feed.”

  There are always two ways to look at the conditions of our world. We can see the hate, prejudice, mistreatment, starvation, poverty, and crime and conclude that this is a horrible world. We can feed this barking wolf and see more and more of what we despise. But this will only fill us with the same things that we find so malignant. Or we can look at the world from a position of self-love and self-respect, and see the improvements that have been made in race relations in our lifetime; the fall of so many dictatorships, lower crime rates, the dismantling of the atrocious apartheid systems, the elevated consciousness of the environmental movement, and the desire on the part of so many to rid our world of nuclear weapons and instruments of mass destruction. We can remind ourselves that for every act of evil in the world, there are a million acts of kindness, and we can then feed the second wolf that barks from a position of hope for humanity. If you see yourself as a divine creation, you’ll look for this in your worldview, and the gloom-and-doom naysayers will have no impact on you and your self-respect.

  When you have a gloomy picture of what the world looks like, you’re unreceptive to the potential assistance that’s there to help you with your own individual intentions. Why would others want to come to your aid when you view them as contemptible? Why would the universal force be attracted to that which repels it? How could a world that’s so corrupt ever be of assistance
to someone who has noble intentions? The answers to these questions are obvious. You attract into your life what you feel inside. If you feel that you’re not worthy of being respected, you attract disrespect. This weak self-respect is the result of an exceptionally rusty link to the field of intention. This link must be cleansed and purified, and that takes place within your own mind.

  I’ve specifically chosen self-respect as the first chapter in Part II on applying intention, because without high esteem for yourself, you shut down the entire process of intention. Without unflagging self-respect, the process of intention is operating at the lowest levels. The universal field of intention is love, kindness, and beauty, which it has for all that it brings into the material world. Those who wish to replicate the works of the universal all-creating mind must be in harmony with the attributes of love, kindness, and beauty. If you disrespect anyone or anything that God creates, you disrespect that creative force. You are one of those creations. If you view yourself disrespectfully, you’ve forsaken, cast aside, or at the very least, sullied your connection to the power of intention.