So how do I desire to do the things I need to do? Then another necessary question, does intention matter?

It does if you don’t want bad things to happen… have to brush your teeth or they will fall out regardless if you want to do it.

In answer to that question, I must ask another question. How do you identify those things you actually need to do? How do you know what they are in relationship to anything else? Conventional wisdom used to be that bathing was unnecessary, even dangerous. They believed it could make you sick and anyone who wanted to do it was a hedonistic heathen.

Must set priorities, set a goal and objectives to meet that goal.

Well, bathing in rancid water can make you sick. The heathen bathers bathed in streams more often than not.

But in time the truth wins out. People can learn from experience, even if they drag their feet the whole way.

Does your intention right now, in reality as you are “encouraged” to accept it, in fact matter for how your life goes? Does it actually provide your desired outcomes?

Doing what I think I should do often backfires.

I think it can. I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish in my 20s. By the time I got out of grad school, I looked back at that list and realized I had done all of them.

I think it’s why people have the mid-life crisis.

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

So you live a satisfying life?

There are plenty of things that I wish I could change but for the most part I think my life has been fairly satisfying.

I think the trick might be to align your intentions with your deepest desires.

Allowing intention to conform to anything other than desire, to allow your actions to be about anything other than your living being and experience of the living beings around you, is like living life with two hands, but only ever doing anything with your off hand because your dominant hand is supposedly owned by someone or something else, or supposedly because you have to earn the privilege of using both hands.

But what happens when you lose your desire half way through…like what happens to most novelists? No one in fact loses desire. They lose track of intention. Novelists tend to get distracted by many things, and generally don’t start off with an understanding of the spark that inspired their desire to write in the first place.

You can get bored with the thing you love. I offer that people don’t know what they love more often than not, nor do they often know what they want. Much of science and marketing actually backs me up on this now. They can easily prime you into reacting as if you desire anything. Convince you that you love things like supposed democracy or your country, your people, whoever they are supposed to be, and will proceed to promptly punish you with guilt if you fall away from the message. We are very prone to social influence to the point potentially of complete ignorance of the self as an individual. Evidence for this is present in phenomenon like the battle trance. The altered state soldiers get into while in the heat of conflict that so seriously warps their consciousness when they come down from it later.

Michael Bay can convince me I want to watch a movie, but at the end I feel empty and cheated. Indeed, simple superficial triggers that ignore anything substantial about the genuine self. You can even come to want to see a movie just because everyone around you is behaving as if they want to see the movie, even if the premise of the movie holds only very little interest for you according to your personal preferences. Is this not so?

Yes, social pressure is a powerful motivator. Even can make a bad movie a good experience. Not social pressure. The tendency to look for social pressure more firmly plugs you into this process. They have even established this in the lab.

I don’t enjoy parades or ball games, but if I go with a group of friends I can enjoy the experience.

Under FMRI they have tried to get people to avoid thinking about an idea. They are never able to do so. The closest they come to avoidance is when they aren’t actively thinking about the idea at all. They haven’t been told to avoid thinking about it. If they are told, or if they tell themselves to, they will be stuck thinking about it. The more stressed they become about that the more obsessively they will think about it.

Distraction is more powerful than avoidance. It’s easier to quit smoking if you take up another habit, like eating. Or drinking, those being the two most viscerally responsive behaviours, but some have succeeded with more cerebral or psychological habits.

Though ironically, I tend to avoid the things I need to do, and let myself get distracted so I don’t do them. I need to distract myself with things that will lead me to do what I should be doing. Your autobiographical accounts seem paradoxical. You exercise free will well, yet have those problems?

Apparently.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~