Setting Intent
The Importance of Setting Intent
Intention is core to waking up. Among other things, you need to intend to wake up. To this end, it is important to set your intention clearly and often. If you don’t, your unconscious, preprogrammed intentions, the voices of your parents and others living rent-free inside your head, and those of advertisers, other drivers, corporate officials, and politicians will. Your intentions will determine the quality of your experience today and both limit and propel the direction of your growth. However, you get to decide which intentions you are aware of and which ones you want to support.
Integral Deep Listening is a process of listening to and clarifying your intentions. It heals, balances, and transforms by listening to other perspectives that teach us how to most quickly awaken, see and become what is true and real, and access lasting life abundance. These other perspectives tell us where and how we are stuck and how we can most quickly become unstuck. Together they form a transpersonal identity that personifies the evolving sacred.
Integral Deep Listening is also a form of yoga, in that it is a spiritual discipline whose purpose is oneness with the divine. It is a dream yoga in that it looks at life from the perspective of spirit, which does not differentiate between sleeping and waking dreams. It views both as equally real and equally illusory. It is assumed that all waking and dream events are best viewed as wake-up calls. Are you listening to yours?
The sacred is accessed through Integral Deep Listening by awakening, and so becoming transparent and luminescent. Your identity becomes a functional tool of spirit that lacks lasting reality or meaning. It is simply another dream character. Spirit is also accessed through seeing through the arbitrariness of our perspectival jail in order to grasp the joyful absurdity of all laws, structures, truths, and realities.
When you habitually become parts of yourself that are sacred, over time you become sacred. This is the magic of Dream Yoga and why deep listening is an integral, transpersonal yoga.
The three most important times to set your intent is when you wake up in the morning, before you go to sleep at night as a form of dream incubation, and before you meditate.
Waking Statement of Intent
Most waking intent is set either unconsciously by habit and life script or consciously by waking priorities. Our waking priorities are conscious and awake only to the extent that they consult and reflect the priorities of spirit. Consequently, most of the time we are running on automatic, thinking and feeling in stereotyped, highly predictable patterns, even when we feel spontaneous and alive, like actors in a play. While we are awake in a dramatic sense, we are less awake in a spiritual sense. We are unconsciously incompetent, from the perspective of spirit. We are not even conscious of our incompetence, from a spiritual perspective, most of the time.
The six core qualities discussed below are components of awakening or enlightenment. As such, they are priorities of spirit. When you play the game of rating your experience of each of them throughout the day, as also discussed below, you make waking up in your life your priority.
Here is an example of a statement of intent to repeat upon awakening. Use it as grist to get you thinking about formulating your own. Write your version down and read it over when you first wake up.
“I awaken into the gift of this day.
My intent is to recognize invitations to drama
in my thoughts, feelings, and relationships
and refuse to play.
Instead I will play the following game:
I will ask myself randomly throughout the day,
“How do I score right now, zero to ten,
in each of these qualities?
confidence
compassion
wisdom
acceptance
inner peace
and
witnessing
I will give myself a number.
Whatever it is I will ask myself,
“What can I do right now to slightly raise it?”
I will then do it and rate myself again.”
Notice that the emphasis is on the quality of what is done rather than on specific recommendations such as, “Practice an integral life practice,” “meditate,” love yourself,” “smile more,” “do an IDL interview.” Do whatever you choose to do with the right qualitative context and trust that there will be greater value in whatever you choose to do.
Now ask yourself,
“What activities, thoughts, and feelings today
are most likely to create drama
in my meditation and my dreams?
What can I do today to reduce that drama?”
Make a list. To create the most energy, address the more challenging ones first.
Pre-Meditation Statement of Intent
Most people sit down to meditate without having clear intent. Maybe it is to be a time of focusing or concentrating attention, to observe breath, to relax, visualize, get guidance, or enter a higher state of consciousness. When meditators do not clearly set their intent, competing intentions, often out of awareness, conspire to disrupt the meditation period.
Rightly understood, meditation is a practice of bare intention, without content. It strengthens and clarifies intent by preferring it to other aspects of experience, such as thought, emotion, visualization, sensory stimulation, relationships, or accessing different or higher states of consciousness. Subsequently, IDL recommends that you begin every meditation session with a statement of your intent.
What follows is an example of a statement of intent based on IDL. Use it as a source of ideas for creating your own. When you arrive at something you like, print it out and read it over before you meditate until you can repeat it in your thoughts.
“I am here to meditate.
I am not here to
think,
problem-solve,
plan,
reflect,
contemplate,
or talk to myself in any way.
When thoughts arise, they are like clouds in the sky:
they aren’t about me.
With every out-breath I exhale whatever thoughts arise.
I am not here to experience the roller coaster of my emotions,
including bliss and ecstasy.
When feelings arise, they are like weather; it isn’t about me.
With every out-breath I exhale whatever feelings arise.
I am not here to watch internal TV,
to look at anything or to visualize anything.
When images arise, they seem inconsequential, like a mirage.
With every out-breath I exhale whatever images arise.
I am not here to explore sensations
of heat and cold, pain or relaxation.
I am not here to explore kundalini or chakra energies.
When sensations arise I will treat them as I do
when they arise when I am asleep or watching a movie:
they exist, but they are relatively inconsequential.
With every out-breath I exhale whatever sensations arise.
I am not here to go into trance or
experience altered states of consciousness, whether
sleep,
hypnosis,
samadhi,
the subtle,
causal,
or the non-dual.
If such shifts occur they are not about me.
With every out-breath I exhale whatever state arises.”
“I am here to become the sky.
As the sky I score ten, on a scale of zero to ten, in confidence,
because I as sky am fearless,
since I cannot die and nothing can hurt me.
I am completely awake and aware.
I inhale Joseph’s fear and unconsciousness.
As the sky I score ten in compassion,
because as sky I give myself completely to
humans, animals, trees, and minerals
for them to use me as they wish to live more fully.
I am compassionate in that I completely take in whatever they exhale.
I inhale Joseph’s selfishness and laziness.
As the sky I score ten in wisdom
because I am in all things and therefore know all things.
I am completely balanced between
day and night,
hot and cold.
I inhale Joseph’s ignorance and imbalances.
As the sky I score ten in acceptance
because I do not judge
my weather or color as good or bad
and do not judge what goes on above me or below, in the world.
I inhale Joseph’s non-acceptance, attachments, and addictions.
As the sky I score ten in peace of mind
because nothing affects me.
I am free.
I inhale Joseph’s stress and imprisonment.
As the sky I score ten in witnessing
because I observe the dramas of life and nature without identifying with them.
As the sky I am clear and empty.
I inhale Joseph’s enmeshment in drama and his cloudiness.
“Because I am the sky,
I am transparent and luminous.
I have no self, yet I am completely
awake,
aware,
and alive.
Because I am the sky,
I both respect the laws that govern life
and experience them with
joyful absurdity
because of their dreamlike nature.
Because I am the sky,
I experience the abundance of life
both within me and around me.”
“As the sky, I am prana.
I am breath.
I enter you and the cells of your body,
feeding them and
lighting your mind.
I leave you and become one with all.”
“Because I am these things,
life is sacred.
This moment is sacred.
Sky, as breath, breathes me now.”
The first part of this statement of intention defines meditation negatively, as the absence of each of the five skandhas, or components of identity. By doing so, it gives awareness nothing to hold onto. The nature of these five skandhas are elaborated in “The Five Trees and Meditation.”
The second part of the statement defines meditation positively and experientially, by asking you to become the sky and experience what life is like from its perspective. While it is obvious that the sky is a metaphor for a perspective of pure witness, it is also a metaphor for the five other core qualities of enlightenment referenced here. You are asked to experience yourself as each of them, from the perspective of sky.
The third part of the statement is based on the three refuges of Buddhism: “I take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and in the Sangha.” “Buddha” means “the enlightened one,” or one who is fully awake, yet with no self. “Dharma” means law, or organizing structure, or truth. IDL sees these as perspectival: totally dependent upon one’s perspective. As a consequence the dharma is not only dreamlike; we are free to choose how we view it. IDL recommends that whatever structures exist in your life, whether they are helpful or hindrances, be viewed with joyful absurdity. “Sangha” is the Buddhist word for spiritual community. In IDL there are two sanghas, your internal, or intrasocial support community, which you encounter and evolve through interviewing and application, and your external support community, made up first of peers and teachers in IDL, then by others who share its values and culture, and finally by the entirety of your waking identity and its social environment: all sentient beings. To fully recognize and embrace these two sanghas is to experience outrageous, unlimited abundance.
The next part centers your sense of who you are in sky and as sky as prana and breath, not as your body, thoughts, or feelings, as you normally do.
The final part centers you in the sacredness of this moment and this moment and this moment as sky, as tens in each of the six core qualities.
At the end of your meditation it is important to set your intent for whatever comes next. Ask yourself, “What thoughts and feelings are likely to come up or get in the way the next time I meditate? What can I do between now and then to reduce them?” Do those things, and watch your meditation improve.
Pre-Sleep Statement of Intent
Our unspoken, normal desire is usually to have a deep, uninterrupted night’s sleep, preferably without dreams or memories. Whether or not you remember your dreams, they are setting the emotional and mental context for tomorrow. The dramas and stresses you undergo in your dreams tonight affect your physiology, shortening or lengthening your life. You are incubating your dreams tonight by what you are thinking and feeling right now and as you go through your day. Your thoughts and feelings just before you go to bed and to sleep are particularly important.
Typical pre-sleep incubation statements involve the desire to remember dreams or to have some sort of experience, such as a lucid dream, or a teaching by an exalted master. Integral Deep Listening recommends that you ask yourself,
“What dream activities, thoughts, and feelings
are most likely to produce drama in my waking life?
What can I do during my dreams tonight
to reduce those things?”
“What dream activities, thoughts, and feelings
are most likely to produce enlightenment and growth in my waking life?
How can I be during my dreams tonight
to increase them?”
IDL assumes that most dream perceptions are distorted and delusional because they are largely based on the limited and skewed perspectives of waking identity. To get beyond these distortions, IDL recommends that you suspend your assumptions and waking perspective when you are dreaming, as much as you can, in favor of asking questions of your experience and listening to the responses. Here is an example of a pre-sleep statement of dream intent. Use it to craft your own. Write yours down and read it over before you go to sleep until you can do it automatically.
“When I am sleeping tonight
I will have experiences that will seem real.
My intention in these experiences is to ask questions
of the people I meet or of the experiences themselves.
My intention will not be to draw conclusions
but simply to ask questions as a humble, respectful supplicant.
I will listen to the answers, and I will ask more questions.
By asking questions my intent is
to stay out of drama so that I may learn and grow.
By asking questions my intent is
to awaken more fully and completely”
Again, notice that there is little emphasis on what to do. There is no statement to remember dreams or to keep a pen and pencil by one’s bed. There are no “signs” to look for in dreams that will induce lucidity. There is no instruction to be thankful pre-sleep to reduce dream drama. There are so many good and relevant suggestions that can be made that each suggestion easily gets lost in a maze of signifiers, with the result being that we get overwhelmed, paralyzed by “oughts,” and end up doing none of them. Consequently, IDL recommends you emphasize how you go about dreaming rather than attempting to control it with a lot of specific steps and disciplines. With such an approach, you can use your dream life to integrate your waking, meditative, dream, and deep sleep realities.
My Next Life Intention
Setting an intention for a future life takes a long-term view of your development. It affirms that you are a co-creator of your future, and that you can do so consciously, instead of simply allowing habits of mind and luck determine where you are planted.
When and if I come back to this planet
I want to be born into a family that practices deep listening,
That works to stay out of drama,
Awaken the six core qualities,
Interviews self-aspects, and
Applies their recommendations daily.
Having this foundation,
I will awaken to my potential
for service and growth.