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When you set an intention, it’s like making a decision about what you wish to attract to yourself. When you decide something absolutely, the universe then responds based on your thoughts. If there is enough of belief behind your thoughts then what you want to attract to yourself will be pulled to you. This is the Law of attraction. When you set an intention you are sending out a signal to the universe. You’re saying to the universe that this event is an experience you wish to draw to yourself in the future.

Intention is a very powerful tool, because it can get you through your life over the long haul. It’s very easy to get lost in the day-to-day struggles of living this life. There’s so much to do on a daily basis that it’s easy to lose sight of where you’re navigating your ship. However, if you set a clear intention for the situation you wish to bring about in your life, then you can still take care of the day-to-day business of life, knowing that a higher part of yourself is working subconsciously, using the infinite power of your soul to bring about the circumstances you wish to experience. All this stuff is very subtle, yet it is extremely powerful, once you get close to it.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of the initiation and creation, there is one elementary truth — ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance for which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic about it. Begin it now. –Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Setting intention is like placing an order with the universe. Once you definitely make the decision to intend something, the universe completely rearranges itself to deliver that thing to you. I say ‘definitely make the decision to intend,’ because there’s a subtle difference in there. When you make an absolute decision then your intention becomes certain. That is a positive signal to the universe. If you don’t make a definite decision then it becomes just a wish or a hope. “It sure would be nice if I could buy a new car someday.” Is a lot different from “I intend to buy a new car by the end of the year.” One is a definite command to the powers that be that you’re clear about the fact that you want a new car before the calendar changes. The other is a weak signal that says you hope someday it will appear. When you set your intention positively as a definite decision, the universe receives your desire as a clear signal and starts arranging things to give it to you.

What about resistance?

A lot of people will tell you about The Power of Intention, and also the Law of Attraction, but nobody explains to you why sometimes when you try to take yourself to a higher level, when you try to create something new in your life, you meet with great resistance. First of all, you meet with resistance because we live in a dual world where everything is polarized. So when you try to take yourself higher, the lower part of you will exert a force on you to try and bring you back.

Everything in our world is based on pairs of opposites. You’ve got up and down, the right and left, man and woman, good and evil. This is the world we live in. Everything has its polar opposite. You can either look at this polarity as positive versus negative, keeping everything separated out, or you can look upon the world of opposites as complementary, two halves of a whole. If you see things as complementary then you allow the world out there to take you back to the oneness of your soul. If you keep everything separated out then you’ll always be seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. It’s this dual world of opposites that is actually a clue into the workings of Karma which we’ll get to later.

The resistance you meet when you are trying to create something new can actually be helpful. As you go off to create your life, when you meet with blocks on your path, it forces you to be even more creative, to adapt and overcome. It forces you to question your motives to begin with. It forces you to look at yourself. Resistance and hardship always turn you inward. The Greek root of the word ‘Patience,’ means to suffer over time. The obstacles that cause suffering in your life invite you to ask questions that turn your attention to reflection: What’s it all about? Who am I? What was I put here to create in this life?

“You come to earth so you can aquire knowledge, so that you can make some contribution.” –Harijiwan

Often what happens is you set your intention, and you’re so excited about the changes you wish to bring about in your life that things start to go well. You’re transmitting a strong signal to the universe and it starts to show up. Things appear to line up and you get even more excited. Then a few days go by, and the first problems come up. It doesn’t look as rosy as it did when you started. You start to doubt. You may even start to fear failure. More often though people will fear success. What will happen if you succeed? Will all your friends resent you? Who am I to be a bigshot? Often fear of failure isn’t even conscious. Many people have made a habit of just enough failure to keep them where they’re at. It’s alot easier to bemoan your fate and celebrate all the hardships down at the pub.

If you press on though, your mind will be the first resistance you experience. All the negative things you know about yourself and your past will creep in and all the positivity that came from inspiration of starting is counteracted by the negative mind. Then a series of external events, seemingly out of nowhere, appear as blocks in your path. These negative events are the tests you’ve attracted on the road to manifesting your intention.

Where do these negative events come from? Karma of course. <more–>

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Karma is like debt: your past actions are recorded out beyond time and space and you bring that with you into your life. The situation of your birth is decided by the collective past actions of your being. Well beyond most of our understanding it is actually as simple as it is complex– a paradox that can be somewhat explained by Newton’s third law: “To every action there is an equal and opposite re-action,” Since, as I mentioned before the world we live in is based on duality, the actions you take are met with an opposite action summed up by the old saying, “what goes around, comes around.”

“Don’t cause a cause for which you are not willing to have the effect. Sequence shall lead to consequence, so don’t build that sequence whose consequence you are not willing to face. ” –Yogi Bhajan

So life is just that: cause and effect. You act and that action has a consequence. Often it’s so sophisticated that we hardly notice as these events find us. Eventually it’s all coming back to you though. Who you are at any given time is a sum total of your actions in this life and all past actions before that. When you come to this life, those past actions are like debts that need to be repaid. They weigh you down with resistence to your going higher, until eventually by persistence, good acts and living from the heart, you clear them.

Now I do believe that this is what our friends the Catholics meant by original sin. I have an inherent problem with original sin. It basically puts forth that from your first breath you’re bad and I don’t buy that. I believe we’re all god and God is all of us, inside out and outside in. You see the difference? If you show up “a sinner” no matter what you do, pray and pray and maybe one day you’ll go to some place called heaven after death, you’re not left with much of a life except one of constant fear.

This as opposed to: You’re here to live to your fullest and gain knowledge so that you can make a unique contribution. Your past actions may weigh you down, but you as everyone else has the unlimited potential to be happy healthy and blissful. You just have to live the hero’s life; the life of the warrior who says yes and goes out in search of his or her destiny. As Joseph Campbell talked about in “The Hero With A Thousand Faces,” we’re all taking this trip down into the dark forest seeking our holy grail, that cup of life that is the prize at the end of your slugging it out– the pure knowledge that you’re eternal life in a present being.

It’s a simple yet complex system all the same. When you set an intention for something you would like to create and experience, it’s usually something that’s going to take you higher, because most people intend for themselves a better life. This again is the hero’s journey reflected in all of our good stories. Everybody has karmic debt and if you have a lot of debt weighing you down, getting to that higher place is going meet with more resistance.

Here’s another way to look at it. Let’s say you’re in California and you intend to drive yourself to New York. You stop at a rest stop when all of a sudden you spot an old friend who reminds you immediately that you owe him a debt. Your friend demands that you pay him since it’s been a long time and he needs the money. You have no choice but to give him the money. Now it’s questionable whether you can make your whole trip because you don’t have enough money for gas. You still intend to go to New York, but now you don’t know if you can make it all the way. You can either turn around and go back home and tell everyone about your cursed luck down at the pub, or you can press on, knowing that somehow you will make it. Call it faith, God, belief in a higher benevolent force, or what you will. For sake of this argument let’s just say you’re sticking to your intention in the face of the unknown.

You press on and all manner of things happen to you on the journey. A few more miles down the road, you see someone with a flat tire and you decide to stop and help him out. After changing the tire, the man you’ve helped insists on buying you a tank of gas to thank you. Suddenly, you’re back on track with your intention of getting to New York. Life is often a series of ups and downs– one step forward, two steps back. You simply must come back to your intention and drive on. A few more miles down the road, something else may set you back, yet you press on and a few miles further another event gets you back on track. This is how the power of intention works. You intend something and you decide that nothing will get between you and that intention and eventually you get there but it’s never what you expected when you started.

Remember now, that everything is your own projection. The entire universe is in your head. The entire energetic make-up of the human being is a self-contained experience giving apparatus with the mind as its engine. There is nothing outside of you, really. It is all a projection of the mind, which is called Maya– illusion. So this karma, these past actions are all carried with you inside your mind, like hidden files on a computer. Your entire energy is shaped and coded by your karma when you show up here to have this life experience. You’re given a distinct coding and placed in this matrix that is your life. Your subconscious mind holds much of this programming and like a security camera it catches everything you do in this lifetime. As you can imagine, especially in our hectic modern world, the subconscious mind gets pretty filled up. It is this weight of the subconscious mind that puts resistance into your projection as you march forward toward your destiny. I’m over simplifying by putting it all on the subconscious mind, but basically it’s all about the invisible “what’s back there.”

To clear out all the garbage that’s back there you need some practice that stills the mind and allows the subconscious to dump so that the lens of the mind becomes clear. When your perception and projection are as clear as they can be, your intentions manifest much quicker and with fewer setbacks. This is why great masters, no matter what the profession or path, are able to manifest what they want with few words and little effort. It’s because they’ve persisted on their path and perfected their chosen practice of life. This gives them confidence and knowing and thus their signal to the Universe is crystal clear and manifests rapidly. When Steven Spielberg wants to make a movie, it gets made pretty easily compared to most filmmakers. People who’ve made it to the top of their game often talk about “paying dues.” What they’re talking about is the resistance that they’ve experienced on the path of their destiny. Each hurdle was a lesson learned and the sum total of their experience has given them the power to create their lives with a little more ease and a lot more confidence.

One problem with movies like The Secret and many self-help books is that they tell you about these laws of the universe: Intention, Attraction, etc., yet they fail to prepare you fully. What every human being needs is a practice that allows the mind to center and become meditative. One needs methods of calming the psyche and clearing the subconscious garbage that weighs them down. Each time you do this, you get a little experience of the sweetness of your own soul in the form of inner peace. Movies and books all talk about this intellectually and that’s where they’ve always failed for me. You can’t think about inner peace and stillness. You can’t think about the eternal inside of you. Nothing gives you the actual power and energy except for the direct experience of your self. It’s this stillness that is the center from which you create your life. For some this is a field of action. Work that you love to do can put you in the center of yourself and if you practice that as an integral part of your life, there’s your meditation.

The world is on the increase. The frequency of everything on the planet is speeding up. We live in an instant world and as a result people are being bombarded by more and more stimuli each day. The need for a way inside the self is necessary now more than ever before on this planet. I believe this is why so many people are turning to yoga and meditation each year. I am seeing more and more that just having something to do that you love and are good at isn’t enough. The world is going too fast. People need a way to energize naturally to survive in our frenetic society.

In my personal experience nothing ever worked to get my mind into its center. Exercise eventually failed, the writing or artistic practices never did it because I couldn’t sit still long enough to push them forward to a flow of manifestation. Alcohol, drugs, sex and cigarettes, as fun as they were at the time never worked either. It wasn’t until I began the practice of Kundalini Yoga and meditation that I was able to clear out all the blocks that held me back.

All rivers end up in the ocean. The key to beating resistance on the path of your intention is to find a practice that works for you and keep going.