Attention to intention is the idea or law (more on this in a moment!) that put simply says that if you place your awareness onto your intentions, and hold that in place for a sustained period, your intentions manifest into your personal environment.
This needs to be unpicked to explain more fully.
Your attention is where you place your awareness.
Your intentions are your wishes and desires.
Manifesting means bringing those wishes and desires into being.
Your personal environment is the way you experience the world around you.
Your internal personal environment is the combined perception, feeling, emotional and thinking state that describes your state of being.
Your external personal environment is the reality you experience and create, beyond your internal state.
If you piece this together than you will see there is a straightforward line, starting from where you place your awareness.
Currently, there is no proven scientific law that shows this works, hence the criticisms you will often hear about the law of attraction, and this is one of the reasons we don’t use this expression much in the transformation work.
There are some hints towards the law of attraction having a scientific basis from quantum physics, however this is untested from a mathematical viewpoint.
What is not in any doubt is the powerful experience individuals gain from using the simple concept of attention to intention. In transformation this abstract idea, implemented into a state of being, works time and time again. So, law or otherwise, if you use this, you can experience it for yourself.
The application is crucial, as we can go wrong from the outset. The starting point is the attention you apply to things. If you accept that your attention is where you place your awareness, then you must understand your awareness.
Most people confuse their awareness with their thoughts. This is why we spend so much time correcting this, and helping people understand the “what am I?” aspect.
When you understand that you are essence, as consciousness or awareness , as opposed to self with an identity and physical manifestation (i.e. body) then all else follows from there.
You are awareness.
Not thoughts, feelings etc.
Your awareness describes something beyond or behind or around your physical experience.
This is the reason why we have to go ‘deep’ in meditation, and get beyond our thoughts.
That is because, and we know this from countless experiences, awareness is innate and needs to be the ultimate guide to our state of being. It is innate and pure, wise and true. It is unfettered, unrestricted, timeless, formless, has no resistance, no judgement, no conditioning and no programming. This is also why sometimes the practice of meditation to raise your awareness is described as the practice of getting out of your own way!
This is so difficult to describe and words don’t do this justice, or even explain it very well, but we have little choice but to try and use language to explain this experience. I will apply some quotation marks in the next few paragraphs to indicate the use of words that are better understood by the experience.
Consider this as a reference towards making the point clear:
If you have ever experienced feeling resentment or maybe judging someone else, or anything similar to this, how does that appear? It does not appear from your awareness. It appears as a projection that your awareness notices. In the form of thoughts or emotions. You then place your awareness on, and “give attention to” the thoughts and emotions that produce the resentment or judgment. What is occurring here is a “situation” where you are conditioned to allow your awareness to focus onto these “things.”
We call this low-level awareness, as your body and thoughts etc. are the predominate state of being.
Once you start to gain the experience of heightened awareness, you can “direct” your awareness towards “things”. Now, you can change your state so that your awareness is predominate and pays little attention to unwanted, unhelpful, and in many ways, unnatural things such as resentment or judgment. These come from the analytical mind, not from your awareness.
As you experience this, you get to understand inherently what this means, and the experience it leads to.
Meditation is the key, but you back this through rewiring and reprogramming, and associated exercises such as affirmation and visualisation. Some of this can be combined into meditation sessions.
Remember that meditation – ultimately – is not something you do, but it is something you become.
So, you can only effectively place your awareness on anything (or nothing) when you have heightened state of awareness.
That explains attention – it is where you place your awareness.
Intention describes your wishes and desires. These are commonly either properly unknown, (i.e. we don’t really know what we want) or vague.
If we lack purpose or meaning in our lives or clarity in other words, or – worse – we have completely misguided aspirations, for example hedonistic or material aims or goals, then we are unable to do what is required. Which is to become our intentions.
For an intention to be realised and manifested into our personal environment, both internal and external, we must have clear intentions.
At this point, we need to be careful, as there are generally two types of intention, specific and material, and general and non-physical.
So if you wish to have a new car that fts into the former, if you wish to have more joy, that fits into the latter.
We know from the transformation work, that ultimately it is the general and non-physical which are what people ultimately want, because your new car, house, job or relationship is desired because you have a gap between your current state of being and your desired state of being. It’s that simple.
Put another way, the purpose of transformation is to become a new self, in a new state of being, where you are living the greatest life and this will include a detachment from outcomes. So, you are not needing a new car to become the new self.
Also you cannot become a new car, but you can become abundant.
Hedonistic aspirations, or big material gains, are superfluous, artificial and will not bring you what you desire.
Your new self will become what you intend, if you do the work. If you intend to be abundant and full of love, for example because you want a great new relationship, then you can start to specify this as your intention. So it can move from general, non-specific, to detailed and specific.
What is that you really want? What do you want to become?
Now, you might see why this moves away from some of the more simplistic aspects of the law of attraction.
In effect, you are not seeking to attract anything, but to become something.
Hence, why we focus so much on the science of what we are (not who we are) as if we can become something else, our new self, we can embed our intentions precisely into the work we do to transform.
This is where we claim the common ground between ancient spiritual methods and teachings and modern science.
The ancient teachings inherently knew how this worked, modern science is giving us the detailed understanding of how this works.
If we get to know what we are, understand how to raise our awareness, and how we can reprogramme /rewire our minds and bodies we can do both the things we need. Identify accurately what is we want to become (the intention), and learn how to attend to this (the attention).
In learning what it is we want to become, we can hone our intentions.
Our intentions are now a subset of our new self, which is why during transformation we tend to transform our wishes and desires, because the exercises lead us to new aspirations, much greater and more pronounced than ever before, with old self.
Let us use an example to outline this further. Many of you come to this wanting to have a new relationship. This is so you can enjoy the love that arises, the intimacy, the fun and so on.
What you want is to experience the bliss, joy and the contentment, the natural state of being, that a relationship can bring to your life. You don’t want to be in the state of being of frustrated, rejected, lonely, loveless or low on self-esteem.
Your intention is to be in one state and not the other. Therefore we place our awareness on love, joy and bliss, and become a person full of these things. We do the work required.
That work leads to a change of state, which is then accompanied by new thoughts, emotions, feelings and behaviours. You cannot bring much to a potential relationship if you are seeking love from the outcome of a new relationship, or seeking fun, intimacy, joy etc. without bringing that or offering it into the world first. If you become these things, firstly you already have manifested them into your state of being, secondly you are going to attract them back, as we know from experience this is what happens due to the way energy transfers.
This is the reality of attention to intention, as you create the personal environment from within, and then your external world changes.
If you want a new relationship, then place your awareness onto that relationship, imagine it, visualise it, create it in your personal environment based on all the aspects of it that are required, so you become it.
Remember, always, you attract what you become, not what you want.
Your relationship is not specific person related, that is dangerous, as it is places a condition on the intention, and intentions should never have conditions placed on them.
You cannot become something ( a new self) if you have a list of terms and conditions attached (outcome specific) – you have to understand this – your true intention is bliss, joy, fun, love not “Hannah” or “Daniel”.
You can visualise Hannah or Daniel coming into your world as your new relationship, but you must allow for all other possibilities to exist alongside this, so your becoming is not dependent on this one possibility. Let love, joy and bliss be your state come what may.
Let us look at money or material possessions. You desire a new car. But do you really? Why do you want a new car?
Or you want “more money”.
Ok, so you get a new car. So what, are you now a different person? Have you become something new? Or more money – what does this mean? If we gave you more money, so what?
You don’t really want these things, what you want is more abundance, a feeling of freedom, or flexibility, to be free to express yourself, to avoid constraints, frustrations and so on.
Your error is to think that more money, a new car or something else, is going to change your state of being. What you really want is a new state of being, and when considered carefully, this is not the material acquisition of anything. If it is dependent on that – you are in trouble, heading for massive disappointment.
Rather than a new car or more money, you need to become a person who is abundant, who is free, who has fun, who can express themselves in the ways they truly desire.
Your attention needs to be on abundance, and then from that position to allow your state of being to become abundant, to allow your thoughts, emotions, actions and behaviours to follow naturally from there.
Then you can direct these to getting a new car, or allowing more money to flow, but you are not conditionalizing either of these to become what you intend to become.
You are going to become more abundant, come what may, and allow the situation to unfold, that unfolds.
Often, this will bring you something unexpected, an opportunity or a person you never imagined would appear, it may produce a miracle, or a synchronicity of some sort.
In your new state of being, you are highly tuned to these potentialities, and you flow with them, building your new state.
This all starts with where you place your awareness, where you direct your attention, and how you understand yourself, and what your true intentions are.
By combining these two aspects you create something new, and this has the effect of changing your personal environment, internal and external.
Provided you then ‘allow’ (which you will in your new state) everything follows, and you develop the ultimate flow state, into which love, abundance, freedom and more flows, just as you desire it.
Allowing detaches from outcomes, and removes all conditions, so it is impossible to offer resistance. There is no longer any reference to absolute specifics, or to timeframes, or to anything.
It is a component part of new self.
Attention to intention is not just an essential part of the transformation work, it has a beauty and an elegance about it which just on its own, is blissful.
Click here to learn how attention to intention is developed in the transformation work, and how you can use this.