Written by Mathew Naismith
I had an interesting request recently from a very good
internet friend of mine: Hi
Matthew,
I was wondering if you
had any posts about Intention, something that would answer questions for
beginners. Like, what is it and how can one use it to better one’s life. Is
there a prerequisite concept needed before one can understand Intention?
If you can, can you
share with me and ThunderBearVoice via a post?
Thank you.
SpiritRider2013.
Any explanation about intentions is going to be a little complicated
especially when we take in spirituality into the equation; this is mainly due
to various practices used within spirituality, some use intentions other don’t.
In the main however most spiritual practices,
especially eastern practices, take us to think less, meditation is but one of
these practices and so is chanting as they both make you mentally focus on one factor.
This allows the mind to stop thinking about everything else by focusing on one factor
only, in this case our breathing or our focus on certain words spoken.
Intentions =
thinking process + planed goals + future and past + purpose +control + empowerment
Intentions take a thinking process to bring to fruition, intentions
cannot exist without thinking, in other words we cannot think without having
intentions, this is due to the thinking process being all about
intentions. If we are all about
intentions within our spiritual practices, we are not into practices that try
to get us to think less, intentions are also all about a past and future so
practicing in intentions also discounts spiritual practices like living in the
now.
Intentions however have their places within spirituality,
usually to do with the psychological issues, for example, if one finds this
reality to be unsavoury in some way, they will need to first use intentions to meditate
or chant more often, “I have all intentions to meditate more often every day to
dispel any unsavouriness in my life”. Intentions are about us taking control of
our psyche so we can seriously begin to meditate or chant, it’s basically to do
with empowering ourselves.
Un-intentions = thoughtlessness
+ goalless + only the now + purposeless + humbleness
Spiritual practices like being only in the now and thinking
less are without intentions, you can’t have intentions and seriously practice
in these spiritual practices, the less intentions you have in life, the better you
can seriously live just in the now. However, the more intentions we have, the
less likely we will be able to live in the now and of course intentions mean
thinking more and the more intentions we have, the more we are thinking. Obviously
intentions totally negate spiritual practices that teach us to think less and
live in the now. I do feel a life of un-intentions
can only be spiritually practiced successfully if one doesn’t have a problem
with the world or life itself or whatever, in other words one needs to have a
psyche that is well balanced that allows one to focus better.
Let’s us now use examples of how we all use un-intentions and
intentions in our lives. Let’s use going to bed for an example, we are tired so
we go to bed, this action is quite unintentional because our tiredness automatically
says to us we need to go to bed, this is done without thought. Now what if we need
to be somewhere early the next day, we then have an intention to go to bed to
get up early the next day.
The interesting point in this example of going to bed is,
one is controlled by a thinking process and the other isn’t. What is making us go to bed when we have an
early start in the morning? It’s all to
do with thinking processes and a future event because the future event that we
need to go to bed for was firstly created by a thinking process.
Let’s say the future event was a job interview, this job interview is all about thinking
processes, so from the start we are being controlled by thinking processes that
is making us think of going to bed instead of waiting for us to get tired and
go to bed. You could say one is a
natural process and the other isn’t as it’s controlled by a thinking process
from the start.
Now if we look at what intentions represents, (Intentions =
thinking process + planed goals + future and past + purpose +control +
empowerment), we can see it’s all about control either being controlling or
controlled, this is the same with being empowered within oneself or other people
being empowering over us.
Now let’s look at un-intentions, (Un-intentions =
thoughtlessness + goalless + only the now + purposeless + humbleness), humbleness
replaces both control and empowerment in regards to intentions. What have we done by replacing control and
empowerment with humbleness? We have
taken away any control that control and empowerment has over us, we are
actually in a sense more in control in being humble than being in control and
empowered. This is mainly due to being controlled
by controlling factors and empowerment, and most importantly, various thinking
processes in the first place, humbleness actually takes away controlling factors within our lives.
You might think by being humble we are being more controlled because we are not being controlling and empowering within ourselves, this isn’t true, for the main reason it takes far more control to be humble than to be dominating through controlling factors. Try just sitting there while someone is being empowering and controlling over you, it can take a huge amount of self-control and empowerment to not react. Yes we are still talking about control and empowerment but quite un-intentionally through just being humble, in this case humbleness really replaces being controlling and empowering.
Intentional control and empowerment has a different effect
upon us and everyone else, it’s still about control where humbleness is about
releasing control even though it can at times take more control to be humble than
to be controlling. This is all due to being un-intentionally controlling
through simple humbleness. Through learning to be humble, we are also thinking
less as well also through this humbleness we are focused on ourselves through self-control,
not focused on what is trying to control us, this actually takes a lot less
thought.
Learning to be humble automatically teaches us to be more in
control, we don’t have to have intentions to be in control mainly because we
know we should never be controlling of any situation. This is where intentional control and
un-intentional control differ the greatest, intentional control wants to be controlling
of situations where’s un-intentional control doesn’t have a need to be in control
of a situation mainly due to being humble.
If everyone was empowered and tried to take control of a
situation, what would occur? Total chaos, what is our reality dominated by?
Total chaos, would this be the same if everyone was humble? I feel we would all
work together for the betterment of all, there is a huge deference in the outcome
of being intentionally controlling and empowering to just being un-intentionally
humble. To be humble doesn’t take intentions, being humble actually takes away
our intentions of reacting either to ourselves or the rest of the world because
it’s unsavoury to us in some way. Just
be accepting and humbleness will come ever so easily as the following will further
explain.
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