What is the difference between intention and desire?.
When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.
Question:
Dear Deepak, I have gone through your book “The seven spiritual laws of success” and find it interesting. If there is a center that can be located, the circle drawn however huge or minute must inevitably be limited. That which is limitless cannot have a center. Human thought creates a psychological center as “I” and thinks of itself as different from other thoughts. It gives itself the attributes of controller, observer, meditator and so on. Based on its desires, the “I” tries to control other fragments of thoughts based on its judgments of other thoughts such as “greed”, “violence”, etc. and tries to achieve the opposites “nonviolence “, “peace” etc. through meditation, observation and so on. So meditation as practice and cultivating good qualities is still a movement of desire since the good qualities here are already known and projected by desire. Therefore there must be attention to the entire thought process as one and any movement of thought as ‘I” to attain that state of attention or non-desire, peace, etc. is still a movement of desire and hence futile. When you say enter silence and put your faint intention to the field of intelligence, a question arises as to “who” enters silence. Is intention a desire as part of “I” or there is no division at all as intention, field of intelligence and outcome to a subject “I” that has independent existence.
Response:
It’s easiest to think of meditation as a process by which your silent open awareness has an opportunity to know itself by itself. That awareness is not a separate “I” entity that we associate with ego or transitory thoughts and feelings. Your understanding that meditation is a movement of thought controlled by the “I” is not the meditation I am describing. And whatever one’s underlying intention for meditating might be, the actual process and results are independent from one’s motivations or objectives.
Nor is meditation controlled by desire. The process of the mind settling down and experiencing stillness is an automatic process governed by the natural tendency of the mind to know itself. It is not that you put your intention to the field of intelligence when you meditate, it’s that undirected mental awareness becomes more aware of its own nature and in doing so the mind becomes more silent.
Meditation is easy to understand by doing it and seeing the results. It is only complex or difficult to understand when you try to grasp it with terminology and ideas that don’t include the more fundamental processes of consciousness.
Love,
Deepak
