07 October 2008
Intent v. Intent
Normal
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Last night I dreamed that
a big man was attacking me. He looked a lot like the actor Adam Baldwin (the
guy who plays Casey on the television show “Chuck”), but with blondish hair. I
have had a fighter-survivor self-image of myself for most of my life, though
I’m in the process of changing this. Old habits, however, die hard. Under those
dream conditions, the fighter kicked in automatically. There was no way I was
going to make this easy for the guy. I grabbed a giant cast iron skillet and
started beating the crap out of him.
I have this odd habit of analyzing my dreams while I’m in them, and I knew,
even while all this was going on, that I was dreaming, and I also knew that
what I was experiencing was being drummed up by me. At one point, I realized
that the more I fought the guy, the more I was going to have to fight.
I thought, “Ah, this guy is an element of me, a projected image of things that
I’m fighting within myself.”
And for a moment, I was really appreciative of the guy and what I was learning.
He paused as I was thinking this, looked me right in the eye and said, “You’ve
almost got it.” Then he went back to fighting me again. The symbolism was
almost poetic.
This has been a tumultuous year. On the one hand, the emotion wave is kicking
my ass. On the other hand, I feel like the learning has been so accelerated
that I can’t be anything but thankful. For a few weeks now, I’ve been trying to
work out some issues that have disturbed me for an extended period of time.
I’ve been writing dissertations really, but not getting to the heart of the
matter until this morning. The dream framed it up nicely. It was a visual and
experiential depiction of the idea of one intent in conflict with another
intent. In other words, what we find most threatening in life is when the
intent of another person is in conflict with your own intent.
This morning, I scribbled out some of the most common intents that are in
conflict with an individual’s desires:
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Threatening Intent
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Desire
|
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“I want to kill you.”
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“I want to live.”
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“I want to hurt you.”
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“I want to be healthy
and well.”
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“I want to imprison
you.”
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“I want to be free.”
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“I want you to suffer because
I’m suffering.”
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“I want to be happy.”
|
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“I want you to take my
burdens off my hands.”
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“I want to be
burden-free and seek my own personal pleasure.”
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“I want you to devote
yourself to the things I think are important.”
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“I want to do what I
want when I want.”
|
The threat goes up, supposedly, the greater the number of people who are
against your desire. The idea is that people can gang up on you and impose
their will on you. So, in order to express your own freedom, you have to fight.
Well, in my dream, that didn’t work too well. The more I fought, the more I had
to fight. The only break in the fighting was when I had the realization that I
was fighting myself, and then later in the dream when I realized that I needed
to be kind to myself, at which point the guy stopped fighting me altogether and
recommended that I treat myself to a spa, which is something I’m not likely to
do, but I got the message: Be nice to yourself.
In the dream, when I stopped opposing the other guy’s intent, things got
better. The more opposition I expressed, the greater the intensity of the fighting.
I think this is a perfect expression of the issues of daily life.
Now, recently I read an Abraham quote that said that a million people could be
against you, but their intent will have no effect on you unless you oppose them,
and I’ve wondered how that could be. If a million people wanted me to do
something, couldn’t they make me by sheer physical force? Certainly that’s
something we see in the movies all the time. However, I’ve noticed that in
actual daily experience it doesn’t necessarily work that way and that, perhaps,
Abraham knows something about the nature of reality that’s not understood by
most moviemakers. Because I’ve noticed an awful lot of exceptions to that rule
(i.e. that physical might wins the day).
All morning, I’ve been thinking about this. How is it possible that my little
puny intent could be more powerful than a million people opposing my little
puny intent? I kept looking at the schematic above, and I thinking, “There must
be something in the nature of their opposition that is weak, and there
must be something in the nature of my intent that is strong, otherwise
the idea is nonsense.” So, I thought about it. What is it when someone wants
you to do something? Finally, it hit me, and it seemed so obvious. All the
statements in the left-hand column are declarations of lack. These are all
people demonstrating, quite clearly, that they’re in a state of need. They
have to get other people in certain positions (dead, hurt, suffering, locked
up, working, behaving) before they can feel satisfied.
The day before I’d been doing a drawing based on a metaphor by Emmet Fox. Emmet
Fox was your quintessential stadium rock preacher from the early part of the
last century. He was highly intuitive, extremely popular, and knew a great deal
about the nature of energy. He described the way most people use energy as
follows. They stand on a garden hose and wonder why no water comes out. The
idea was that the water is your energy, and you’re the one controlling how much
of that power you allow in your life. His advice was to stop standing on the
hose.
So, I drew a picture of a bunch of hoses, representing individuals, with one
drop of water coming out of the hose, and then on the opposite side of the page
I drew one hose with a massive amount of water bursting out of it. The idea was
that the feeling of negativity was a person clamping down on that hose due to
the ideas they were holding and thereby only allowing a tiny droplet of water
(energy) to flow through. And that just because you get a massive number of
people together, if they’re all in a state of negativity (closing up that free
flow of energy) that does not magnify their power. It makes them a group
of drips. This, I reasoned, was how one individual, allowing the energy to
flow through (being in a state of joy) could be more powerful than a million
who were in conflict with that individual.
We’ve been brought up to believe that criticism, blame, anger, hatred, lying,
mal intent, disapproval, and the withdrawal of love are all expressions of
power when these are the expressions of drips. That growling, nasty feeling is
supposed to be indicative of that clamping down on our own natural ability to
achieve what we want. The rush of play, humor, joy, pleasure, confidence, love,
and fun, in contrast, is supposed to be the affirmation that we are in full
possession and expression of power. Cultural habits tell you otherwise, but
your own feelings carry the real message.
In the old “Seinfeld” television show, the character George decides one day to
do the exact opposite of everything he’s ever had the impulse to do in his
life, and instantly his life works perfectly. I feel like I have to do the same
thing. I’ve trained myself, simply through life in this culture, that
expressions of negativity are powerful and expressions of positivity are weak.
Now, I’ve got the monumental task of reversing those associations. When I look
out over my life and what I’ve lived I can only believe that I have had the
natural order reversed, and as foreign as it is to be happy when other people
are suffering, to be optimistic when other people are pessimistic, to intend
well when other people intend harm to me in return, I can’t help but feel that
these are the true expressions of power.
Quite frankly, though implementing this is going to take some time, I no longer
see the advantage of being a drip. Furthremore, the threat of other drips, even
in massive quantities, is looking less and less menacing. Joy and love and
messing around is starting to have real appeal. It’s starting to look like
legitimate, natural, actual POWER.
Samantha Standish is a writer and a former intellectual property and corporate law lawyer. She received her B.A. in history with honors, and her B.A. in Spanish with honors, in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to get her law degree Cum Laude from the University of Maine School of Law. In her legal career, Samantha worked in government and the private sector, most notably in the financial planning and software industry. In her personal life, she’s been married for twenty years and has a fifteen year-old home schooled son. Samantha resigned from the bar in 2005 and has devoted herself to bridge writing (making complex ideas about space/time easy to understand for the average reader) ever since, focusing mostly on self-help articles for artists and writing bridge books on the side. In her words, “The first forty years of my life were fact finding; the next forty years are about applying, expanding and exploring what I’ve learned.” Her books can be found at samanthastandish.com. Samantha’s NWV blog is titled The Magical Life.