THE ATTRACTION LEVEL OF INTENTION

From the Levels of Reality arise our levels of attraction. These levels move from representational attraction (images, inner movies) to the attraction power of beliefs and intentions. Today most people recognize that beliefs operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Beliefs operate so that they attract to us the very things that we believe. That’s what we mean by the phrase —a self- fulfilling prophecy. And yet this process is not absolute. It is not an infallible “law of attraction,” rather it is a basic tendency at work in our psychology.

This process works relative to constraints of external reality and the constraints of our mind-and- body. Beliefs, no matter how irrational, toxic, or morbid will attempt to get our body to actualize it. That’s why above and beyond the state of depression are depressive beliefs about self, life, and the future.

So also with numbness. Above and beyond the state of numbness and a sense of being “out of the body” are fearful beliefs about it being unsafe to acknowledge and own one’s physical sensations. The person may even believe that he or she is not in his body. But they are. There’s no such thing as dis-embodied persons or consciousness. The depressed person is in his body, and his mind in all of its dimensions is running the person’s autonomic nervous system, immune system, heart and lungs, memory, imagination, body temperature and a million other things. The person just doesn’t believe that it’s safe or okay or right to be “in” their body and that belief is attempting to actualize that idea of dis-embodiment. There is no actual “disassociation,” only the feeling of it — numbness, strangeness, weirdness, etc.

[Understanding this should give us pause about the glib way many in NLP talk about and use th word “disassociation.” I’d recommend to avoid using it when you are simply speaking about stepping back from one state and accessing or stepping into another state. These are relative terms. Every time you step out of one, you are stepping into another. We are always in some state.]

What’s the point in this? First, that there’s an attraction of beliefs and second, that it’s good to become picky about the beliefs we feed our mind. Ultimately, as you believe, so you will tend to become. Beliefs work as commands to the nervous system and that’s part and parcel of how they organize us.

All of this is even more true of intentions. Set an intention and, pow! that intention will begin assuming an executive role in your personality. I like to say in Meta-States that “All consciousness is motivated.” Take any piece of consciousness — conscious awareness or unconscious unawareness and within it you will find three strands— content of something, context which then gives that content meaning, and intention. Content is the details and specifics, context is the frame (frame of reference) and intention are all of the thoughts in the back of the mind about it —motivation, agenda, objective, outcome, etc.

Animals and small children live entirely in the world of attention. They responded to any loud noise, bright light, strong smell, touch, etc. — the sensory based facts of the world that gets their attentions. And typically their minds are full of attentions. This and that, then this other thing. They notice this voice, then that music, then those actions. In this there’s hardly any focus, but lots of shifting and changing. An abundance of attentions— yet we call it attention deficit disorder!

Then, when a person gets lots of things in the mind, there’s even more to distract from a focus and more to attend to — this thought, that memory, this fear, that joy, thousands of them! Without taking charge of intentionality, we are doomed to live in the world of attention. We live attentionally highly receptive and response to all of the stimulus around us and in us. Whatever intentions we have are outside-our-awareness and so driving us unconsciously.

To step back and access an intention, then an intention of that one and so on all the way up the reflexive levels until we get to some of our highest and most expansive intentions enables us to then choose to energize those intentions and then deliberately align our attentions to that intention. To do that is to live intentionally, to move through life on purpose, and to enter into the human domain.

And, to do this also is to set an self-organizing attractor in place in our mind that will send out messages to our body and commands to our nervous system that will enable us to attract our intentions. This is powerful. Very powerful. Not absolute power, not divine power. It can be interfered with, but it is nevertheless, a very powerful process.

For most of us, while we have this power, it operates unconsciously within us. We have not consciously set our intentions. Our highest intentions emerge through experiences outside-of- our-awareness and often involve intentions that, while driving, are not all that useful. Our intentions are to always be right and never wrong; to be on top; to avoid criticism at any cost, etc. So the power is there and it participates in creating our experiences, yet it is mis-used and untapped as a resource.

The solution? First, becoming aware of this power and how we are now using it. Then from awareness we can choose to stop the old unconscious intending and set new self-organizing intentions. And of course, this is what we do within the Accessing Personal Genius training as well as other Neuro-Semantic trainings.