The Power of Intention Page 6

  But the right-fielder understood what the pitcher’s intentions were, so he threw the ball high and far over the third baseman’s head. Everyone yelled, “Run to second, run to second.” Shaya ran toward second base as the runners ahead of him deliriously circled the bases toward home. As Shaya reached second base, the opposing shortstop ran to him, turned him in the direction of third base, and shouted, “Run to third.” As Shaya rounded third, the boys from both teams ran behind him screaming, “Shaya, run home.” Shaya ran home, stepped on home plate, and all 18 boys lifted him on their shoulders and made him the hero, as he had just hit a “grand slam” and won the game for his team.

  “That day,” said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, “those 18 boys reached their level of God’s perfection.”

  If you don’t feel a tug in your heart and a tear in your eye after reading this story, then it’s unlikely that you’ll ever know the magic of connecting back to the kindness of the supreme all-originating Source.

  — Kindness toward all of life. In the ancient teachings of Patanjali, we’re reminded that all living creatures are impacted dramatically by those who remain steadfast in the absence of thoughts of harm directed outward. Practice kindness toward all animals, tiny and huge, the entire kingdom of life on Earth such as the forests, the deserts, the beaches, and all that has the essence of life pulsating within it. You can’t reconnect to your Source and know the power of intention in your life without the assistance of the environment. You’re connected to this environment. Without gravity, you can’t walk. Without the water, you can’t live a day. Without the forests, the sky, the atmosphere, the vegetation, the minerals—all of it—your desire to manifest and reach intention is meaningless.

  Extend thoughts of kindness everywhere. Practice kindness toward Earth by picking up a piece of litter that’s on your path, or saying a silent prayer of gratitude for the existence of rain, the color of flowers, or even the paper you hold in your hand that was donated by a tree. The universe responds in kind to what you elect to radiate outward. If you say with kindness in your voice and in your heart, “How may I serve you?” the universe’s response will be, “How may I serve you as well?” It’s attractor energy. It’s this spirit of cooperation with all of life that emerges from the essence of intention. And this spirit of kindness is one that you must learn to match if connecting back to intention is your desire. My daughter Sommer has written from her experience about how small acts of kindness go a long way:

  I was getting off the turnpike one rainy afternoon and pulled up to the tollbooth while fumbling through my purse. The woman smiled at me and said, “The car before you has paid your toll.” I told her I was traveling alone and extended my money. She replied, “Yes, the man instructed me to tell the next person who came to my booth to have a brighter day.” That small act of kindness did give me a brighter day. I felt so moved by someone I would never know. I began to wonder how I could brighten someone else’s day. I called my best friend and told her about my paid toll. She said she’d never thought of doing that, but it was a great idea. She goes to the University of Kentucky and decided to pay for the person behind her every day on her way to school as she exits the toll road. I laughed at her sincerity. “You think I’m kidding,” she said, “but like you said, it’s only 50 cents.” As we hung up, I wondered if the man who paid my toll even fathomed that his thoughtfulness would travel to Kentucky.

  I had an opportunity to extend kindness at the supermarket one day when I had my cart filled to the top with food that my roommate and I would share over the next two weeks. The woman behind me had an antsy toddler and not nearly as much in her cart as I had. I said to her, “Why don’t you go first? You don’t have as much as I do.” The woman looked at me as if I’d just sprouted extra limbs or something. She replied, “Thank you so much. I haven’t seen many people around here be thoughtful of another person. We’ve moved here from Virginia and are considering moving back because we’re questioning whether this is the right place to raise our three children.” Then she told me that she was about ready to give up and move back home, even though it would create a huge financial strain on her family. She said, “I’d promised myself if I didn’t see a sign by the end of today, I was going to demand that we move back to Virginia. You are my sign.”

  She thanked me again, smiling as she left the store. I was flabbergasted, realizing that such a small gesture had impacted a whole family. The clerk said as she was checking me out, “You know what, girl? You just made my day.” I walked out smiling, wondering how many people my act of kindness would affect.

  The other day I was getting a breakfast sandwich and coffee and thought my co-workers might like some doughnuts. The four guys I work with at the stables live in the little apartments at the front of the barns. None of them has a car, but they share a bike. I explained to them that the doughnuts were for them. The look of gratitude on each of their faces was rewarding in an immeasurable way. I haven’t worked there all that long, and I think that those 12 small doughnuts helped break the ice a little bit. My small act of kindness turned into something huge as the week went on. We started looking out for one another more carefully and working as a team.

  3. Be love. Ponder these words thoughtfully: God is love, “and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in me, and I in him.” That is God talking, so to speak. Keeping in mind the central theme of this chapter, and in fact, this entire book, that you must learn to be like the energy that allowed you to be in the first place, then being in a state of love is absolutely necessary for you to reconnect to intention. You were intended out of love, you must be love in order to intend. Volumes have been written about love, and still we have as many definitions for this word as we have people to offer them. For the purposes of this chapter, I’d like you to think about love in the following two ways.

  — Love is cooperation rather than competition. What I’d like you to be able to experience right here in physical form on planet Earth is the essence of the spiritual plane. If this were possible, it would mean that your very life is a manifestation of love. Were this to be true for you, you’d see all of life living together in harmony and cooperating with each other. You’d sense that the power of intention that originates all life cooperates with all other life forms to ensure growth and survival. You’d note that we all share the same life force, and the same invisible intelligence that beats my heart and your heart, beats the heart of everyone on the planet.

  — Love is the force behind the will of God. I’m not suggesting the kind of love that we define as affection or sentiment. Nor is this kind of love a feeling that seeks to please and press favors on others. Imagine a kind of love that is the power of intention, the very energy that is the cause behind all of creation. It’s the spiritual vibration that carries divine intentions from formless to concrete expression. It creates new form, changes matter, vivifies all things, and holds the cosmos together beyond time and space. It’s in every one of us. It is what God is.

  I recommend that you pour your love into your immediate environment and hold to this practice on an hourly basis if possible. Remove all unloving thoughts from your mind, and practice kindness in all of your thoughts, words, and actions. Cultivate this love in your immediate circle of acquaintances and family, and ultimately it will expand to your community and globally as well. Extend this love deliberately to those you feel have harmed you in any way or caused you to experience suffering. The more you can extend this love, the closer you come to being love, and it’s in the beingness of love that intention is reached and manifestation flourishes.

  4. Be beauty. Emily Dickinson wrote: “Beauty is not caused. It is . . . ” As you awaken to your divine nature, you’ll begin to appreciate beauty in everything you see, touch, and experience. Beauty and truth are synonymous as you read earlier in John Keats’s famous observation in Ode on a Grecian Urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” This means, of course, that the creative Spirit brings things into the world
of boundaries to thrive and flourish and expand. And it wouldn’t do so were it not infatuated with the beauty of every manifested creature, including you. Thus, to come back into conscious contact with your Source so as to regain the power of your Source is to look for and experience beauty in all of your undertakings. Life, truth, beauty. These are all symbols for the same thing, an aspect of the God-force.

  When you lose this awareness, you lose the possibility of connecting to intention. You were brought into this world from that which perceived you as an expression of beauty. It couldn’t have done so if it thought you to be otherwise, for if it has the power to create; it also possesses the power not to do so. The choice to do so is predicated on the supposition that you’re an expression of loving beauty. This is true for everything and everyone that emanates from the power of intention.

  Here’s a favorite story of mine that illustrates appreciating beauty where once you didn’t. It was told by Swami Chidvilasananda, better known as Gurumayi, in her beautiful book, Kindle My Heart.

  “There was a man who did not like his in-laws because he felt they took up more space in the house than they should. He went to a teacher who lived nearby, as he hadheard a lot about him, and he said, ‘Please do something! I cannot bear my in-laws anymore. I love my wife, but my in-laws—never! They take up so much space in the house; somehow I feel they are always in my way.’

  The teacher asked him, ‘Do you have some chickens?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he said.

  ‘Then put all your chickens inside the house.’

  He did what the teacher said and then went back to him.

  The teacher asked, ‘Problem solved?’

  He said, ‘No! It’s worse.’

  ‘Do you have any sheep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Bring all the sheep inside.’ He did so and returned to the teacher. ‘Problem solved?’

  ‘No! It’s getting worse’

  ‘Do you have a dog?’

  ‘Yes, I have several.’

  ‘Take all those dogs into the house.’

  Finally, the man ran back to the teacher and said, ‘I came to you for help, but you are making my life worse than ever!’

  The teacher said to him, ‘Now send all the chickens, sheep, and dogs back outside.’

  The man went home and emptied the house of all the animals. There was so much space! He went back to the teacher. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ he said. ‘You have solved all my problems.’”

  5. Be ever-expansive. The next time you see a garden full of flowers, observe the flowers that are alive, and compare them to the flowers that you believe are dead. What’s the difference? The dried-up, dead flowers are no longer growing, while the alive flowers are indeed still growing. The all-emerging universal force that intended you into beingness and commences all life is always growing, and perpetually expanding. As with all seven of these faces of intention, by reason of its universality, it must have a common nature with yours. By being in an ever-expanding state and growing intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, you’re identifying with the universal mind.

  By staying in a state of readiness in which you’re not attached to what you used to think or be, and by thinking from the end and staying open to receiving divine guidance, you abide by the law of growth and are receptive to the power of intention.

  6. Be abundant. Intention is endlessly abundant. There’s no scarcity in the universal invisible world of Spirit. The cosmos itself is without end. How could there be an end to the universe? What would be at the end? A wall? So how thick is the wall? And what’s on the other side of it? As you contemplate connecting to intention, know in your heart that any attitude you have that reflects a scarcity consciousness will hold you back. A reminder here is in order. You must match intention’s attributes with your own in order to capitalize on those powers in your life.

  Abundance is what God’s kingdom is about. Imagine God thinking, I can’t produce any more oxygen today, I’m just too tired; this universe is big enough already, I think I’ll erect that wall and bring this expansion thing to a halt. Impossible! You emerged from a consciousness that was and is unlimited. So what’s to prevent you from rejoining that limitless awareness in your mind and holding on to these pictures regardless of what goes before you? What prevents you is the conditioning you’ve been exposed to during your life, which you can change today—in the next few minutes if you so desire.

  When you shift to an abundance mind-set, you repeat to yourself over and over again that you’re unlimited because you emanated from the inexhaustible supply of intention. As this picture solidifies, you begin to act on this attitude of unbending intent. There’s no other possibility. We become what we think about, and as Emerson reminded us: “The ancestor to every action is a thought.” As these thoughts of plentitude and excessive sufficiency become your way of thinking, the all-creating force to which you’re always connected will begin to work with you, in harmony with your thoughts, just as it worked with you in harmony with your thoughts of scarcity. If you think you can’t manifest abundance into your life, you’ll see intention agreeing with you, and assisting you in the fulfillment of meager expectations!

  I seem to have arrived into this world fully connected to the abundance attributes of the spiritual world from which I emanated. As a child growing up in foster homes, with poverty consciousness all around me, I was the “richest” kid in the orphanage, so to speak. I always thought I could have money jingling in my pocket. I pictured it there, and I consequently acted on that picture. I’d collect soda-pop bottles, shovel snow, bag groceries, cut lawns, carry out people’s ashes from their coal furnaces, clean up yards, paint fences, babysit, deliver newspapers, and on and on. And always, the universal force of abundance worked with me in providing opportunities. A snowstorm was a giant blessing for me. So too were discarded bottles by the side of the road, and little old ladies who needed help carrying their groceries to their automobiles.

  Today, over a half century later, I still have that abundance mentality. I’ve never been without several jobs at one time throughout many economic slumps over my lifetime. I made large amounts of money as a schoolteacher by starting a driver-education business after school hours. I began a lecture series in Port Washington, New York, on Monday evenings for 30 or so local residents to supplement my income as a professor at St. John’s University, and that Monday-night series became an audience of over a thousand people in the high school auditorium. Each lecture was tape-recorded by a staff member, and those tapes led to the outline for my first book to the public, which was called Your Erroneous Zones.

  One of the attendees was the wife of a literary agent in New York City who encouraged him to contact me about writing a book. That man, Arthur Pine, became like a father to me and helped me meet key publishing people in New York. And the same story of unlimited thinking goes on and on. I saw the book fromthe end becoming a tool for everyone in the country, and proceeded to go to every large city in America to tell people about it.

  The universal Spirit has always worked with me in bringing my thoughts of unlimited abundance into my life. The right people would magically appear. The right break would come along. The help I needed would seemingly manifest out of nowhere. And in a sense, I’m still collecting pop bottles, shoveling snow, and carrying out groceries for little old ladies today. My vision hasn’t changed, although the playing field is enlarged. It’s all about having an inner picture of abundance, thinking in unlimited ways, being open to the guidance that intention provides when you’re in a state of rapport with it—and then being in a state of ecstatic gratitude and awe for how this whole thing works. Every time I see a coin on the street, I stop, pick it up, put it into my pocket, and say out loud, “Thank you, God, for this symbol of abundance that keeps flowing into my life.” Never once have I asked, “Why only a penny, God? You know I need a lot more than that.”

  Today, I arise at 4 A.M. with a knowing that my writing will complete what I’ve a
lready envisioned in the contemplations of my imagination. The writing flows, and letters arrive from intention’s manifest abundance urging me to read a particular book, or to talk to a unique individual, and I know that it’s all working in perfect, abundant unity. The phone rings, and just what I need to hear is resonating in my ear. I get up to get a glass of water, and my eyes fall on a book that’s been on my shelf for 20 years, but this time I’m compelled to pick it up. I open it, and I’m once again being directed by spirit’s willingness to assist and guide me as long as I stay in harmony with it. It goes on and on, and I’m reminded of Jelaluddin Rumi’s poetic words from 800 years ago: “Sell your cleverness, and purchase bewilderment.”

  7. Be receptive. The universal mind is ready to respond to anyone who recognizes their true relationship to it. It will reproduce whatever conception of itself you impress upon it. In other words, it’s receptive to all who remain in harmony with it and stay in a relationship of reverence for it. The issue becomes a question of your receptivity to the power of intention. Stay connected and know you’ll receive all that this power is capable of offering. Take it on by yourself as separate from the universal mind (an impossibility, but nevertheless, a strong belief of the ego), and you remain eternally disconnected.

  The nature of the universal mind is peaceful. It isn’t receptive to force or violence. It works in its own time and rhythm, allowing everything to emanate by and by. It’s in no hurry because it’s outside of time. It’s always in the eternal now. Try getting down on your hands and knees and hurrying along a tiny tomato plant sprout. Universal Spirit is at work peacefully, and your attempts to rush it or tug new life into full creative flower will destroy the entire process. Being receptive means allowing your “senior partner” to handle your life for you. I accept the guidance and assistance of the same force that created me, I let go of my ego, and I trust in this wisdom to move at its own peaceful pace. I make no demands on it. This is how the all-creating field of intention creates. This is how you must think in order to reconnect to your Source. You practice meditation because it allows you to receive the inner knowing of making conscious contact with God. By being peaceful, quiet, and receptive, you pattern yourself in the image of God, and you regain the power of your Source.