How do we focus Intent?
I think the best way to understand intent is to work from the inside out. For instance, you don't have to reform the intent to breathe each breath.
That sense of the autonomic system gives us a good clue to how our energy/life naturally forms intent. We spread a lot of words around about intent and the shamanic in general, but it is at its core a non-verbal, action-oriented, practice and way of being.
So, start with your breath. Find the natural intent in your energy, which causes it to work without you being aware of it, (most of the time anyway.) Then translate that feeling outward until you can use it for conscious intents, which act upon the world outside yourself. This helps you bypass the patterns that might usually influence your intent because it comes from a purely natural place.
We form intents on the same basis, but our brains and history have an amount of influence that can be a problem. The difference between now for some people, and several years ago, is that some recognize it for the effect it is having on their process. Most people simply have no clue. Forming an intent is more complicated than wishing for something and at the same time less complicated than constructing a complete to scale model of the space shuttle from macaroni.
As an example, let's say you want to accomplish something - a single given thing. You have to form the intent to do so clearly, without interference from anything else, then you must activate that intent through an act of will, in a very real sense giving it structure and form with your own energy.
Can anything be done without intent in one form or another?
Ask yourself this: why does a newborn take its first breath? It's intent is survival - it intends to live. From that moment on its life is bound up in intent.
The first breath drew IN intent?
Yes, in that moment you learned that intent was the essence of life in a way that it controlled everything. Then you spent decades forgetting that. So all this leads eventually, in my worldview, to a recombining of the self, or our totality. And then, who knows. The problem is we have all these half-assed intents floating around, as well as the intents we create to hold onto all those people and things we feel are so important in our lives.
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