6: The Importance of Intention

The goal of the spiritual life is union with the Divine.  The early church had a term for this process – they called it theosis.  This goal is summarized in the words of St. Athanasius: “God became man that man might become God.”  Pretty wild, isn’t it?  I’ll bet you never heard that in Sunday School!

As seekers of this spiritual union, we are engaged in the process of changing our perceptions: our perceptions of ourselves, each other, and God.  If you will, we are opening our eyes so we can see all of Reality, not just a narrow slice of it.  Instead of being satisfied with the partial loaf we have grown up with, we now want the whole enchilada.  But we will not achieve this by spiritual exercises alone.

This brings us to the importance of intention.  At least half of the value of our first spiritual exercise lies in our intention to draw closer to the Divine.  For the few minutes of your practice, your intention is fully concentrated on God.  You didn’t know what to expect.  You had no idea what would happen.  Perhaps the skies would split open, trumpets would sound, and angels would appear.  Who knows?

These expectations, however they manifest for you, are important.  They are the result of your past conditioning.  For example, if you are Christian, you may have expected Jesus; if you were of another faith, you would have expected something else.  More than just old conditioning, your expectations are evidence of your desires, which are always driven by your ego.

Imagine your ego for a moment.  Every ego has boundaries:  you are okay with this, you are not okay with that, and those over there you don’t even see.  These boundaries are invisible until you bump into them, and then they make themselves known.  While boundaries are useful for navigating the world around us, they are also the primary obstacle to our spiritual growth.  These boundaries keep us from experiencing the living God.

Look what happened during your work with our first spiritual exercise this past week.  You sat down, closed your eyes, went inside, and then opened yourself to the Divine.  This was driven by your intention to sit with your Lord.

You didn’t know what to expect, so you were wide open to receive whatever might happen.  For a moment, you managed to step outside your ego boundaries.  Then what happened?  Your mind was still – at least for a moment or two – and you experienced some quiet.  That quiet felt good, so you probably said something like, “I think I’m getting the hang of this,” which pulled you back inside your ego boundaries.  Then it was off to the races, with your mind thinking about this and that and everything under the sun.

When you noticed this, it was your intention that brought you back.  You realized you had set out to open yourself to God, got sidetracked into your usual jumble of thoughts, and then did your best to pull out of that jumble.  Your intention had been violated by you, yourself.  That may have been a bit upsetting, so you came back to your practice.

Your intention to know and experience the Divine is what started you on this journey, and it continues to help you stay on course.  It is a precious gift from God; without this intention, we would never have started.  And if, by chance, we started, we would immediately derail and fail.

So, cultivate your intention to realize God.  Spend some time within, focused on your intention.  Nourish it.  Cherish it, for without it, we are lost.

Questions and Answers

I received a bunch of questions this week that all asked the same thing: ‘Hey, Doc!  What am I supposed to feel?’  These are critically important, so I am going to attempt to answer them all together.  Here goes…

There is no ‘supposed to’ here.  As you clear away your internal obstacles, you will experience the Presence of your Lord.  In fact, the Divine is within you right now – you just have not perceived that holy Presence.  If you will, it’s like receiving a radio signal.  The signal is always there, but unless you know which channel to tune to, you will never hear the music.

Now, as you start to focus within, tuning into your own deepest self, you will first encounter the obstacles that keep you from experiencing the Divine.  These obstacles are revealed in your thoughts and emotions, and even in the itchy sensations you experienced.

Maybe your mind went to some pressing problem, and you began to think about that.  Maybe you realized that you need to pick up some milk and bread from the store.  Maybe you notice a kind of strange sensation on your skin somewhere.  You tried to ignore it, but it grew and grew until you just had to scratch it to make it go away.

All of these results are simply ploys by the ego to get us to STOP.  At a deep level, your ego understands that your spiritual practice is a threat – a serious threat.  As a result, it will throw at you whatever it needs to trip up your practice.  In short, we all get suckered.  We stop what we are intending to do – our spiritual practice – and follow the direction of our ego.  We find ourselves in the same old round of ceaseless thoughts that have always been there.

What is worse, this ego-driven process is insidious.  As you develop your practice, you will find it happening again and again, to the point that many give up their spiritual work as a result.  There is, of course, a remedy.  It's kind of a clever remedy, actually, since it uses the force of the ego to thwart its drives.  In that way, it is like ju-jitsu – using the opponent's own force to defeat him.

This remedy is most explicitly developed in the Buddhist practice of vipassana.  When you have a thought, simply label it.  Say “thought” and let it go.  If you try to fight it, you have already lost the battle, and your ego has succeeded in derailing your intention.  Likewise, if you feel an emotion, don’t pursue it; just say “emotion” and let it go.  For physical sensations, say “sensation.”  You can think of this as a ‘catch and release’ program.

The critical point here is not to wrestle with your ego because you will lose.  Your ego is always in survival mode, and it is a ferocious opponent!  Instead, step aside and let these thoughts, emotions, and sensations pass through you.  There is no need to struggle, because you have already won.  At your deepest level, God is always with you.  Who could ask for anything more?

1 For more on vipassana, see Joseph Goldstein’s excellent book, The Experience of Insight, first published in 1976.