Intentionality in self-awareness

   When properly focused, awareness has the ability to carry out quite specific commands.

  An intention doesn’t have to be a verbally expressed thought; in fact, our deepest intentions are body-centered. Our most fundamental needs – for love, understanding, encouragement, support – permeate every cell.

  The desires that arise in our mind are not true needs; people get caught up in the pursuit of money, career goals, and political ambitions in ways that are disconnected from the fundamental need for comfort and well-being that every healthy organism must fulfill.

   Many of us are so alienated from our basic needs, that we have to relearn the basic mechanics of how attention and intention actually work. There are many ways to get fulfillment besides the outward-orientated ones our culture teaches us.

  We dream of  joy, beauty, love, and appreciation and yet our actions pull us away from them. Moving towards them is hard to realize when the mind sets up its own separate agenda for fulfilling other kinds of desires, ones that are loveless, without joy or satisfaction. Yet many people have programmed themselves -or learn from the society around them- to reach only such goals.

  Awareness is power, for only when we are aware can we really see the choices in front of us. Awareness is a field, and by sending an intention into that field, you shift the flow of biological information.   This registers in the conscious mind as a faint sensation, intuition, or just a silent knowing. The response varies from person to person, but with practice one’s sensitivity to one’s own awareness becomes stronger.

Adapted from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1998).