Intent is not a matter of running around like a chicken with its head cut off to make things happen.  Nor is it sitting back just hoping for the best and letting things slide.  Intent unfolds in the natural course of events.  It’s a matter of allowing things to develop naturally, and then acting decisively when the moment is right.  

This is how the Jews returned to Palestine after two millennia of exile.  They intended it, and intended it, and intended it patiently for two thousand years.  Then, when the opportunity arose, they seized the moment and did everything possible through political and military channels – i.e. through normal means – to realize their intent.  It isn’t like Jehovah sent their messiah and miraculously split the sea for them to cross into the Promised Land.  Not at all.  Waiting on miracles is for losers. 

This is also the way in which the Spirit does things.  For example, when the Spirit decided that the time was right for life to appear on earth, it didn’t up and create everything like pulling rabbits out of a hat.   Rather the Spirit did it slowly, over zillions of years.  The Spirit patiently prepared the earth and atmosphere and soup of chemicals until ZAP! – a lightening bolt smacked into the soup and voila! – there was a living cell there.  Then that cell began reproducing and eventually evolved into you and me (at least that’s what the materialists say happened).  The point is that even the Spirit can’t command the universe by waving a wand and making things jump.  The Spirit does things by intending them and then waiting patiently until a fortuitous juxtaposition of circumstances pops up.  Then, and only then, does it act.  This is precisely how we have to do things if we want to be magicians.  We don’t force things or bend them out of shape to get our own way.  Rather, we intend our desire with all our hearts, and then we wait patiently for the right moment to come along to further our intent.  

This is why spiritual change is so glacially slow.  Here and there we reach pinnacles of spiritual awareness, epiphanies, breakthroughs of realization and understanding.  But then we always seem to drop back to the same old morass of our everyday lives.   Permanent spiritual growth does happen over time if we keep intending it, but it takes years and years of pushing against the same unyielding wall – like isometric exercise – to see real results.  This is because spiritual growth is patience; we grow spiritually as we lose our sense of urgency and become willing to let things happen rather than flustering around trying to make things happen. 

This is how the ancient alchemists changed base metals into gold.  They mixed their chemicals – the same chemicals – over and over and over, performing the exact same experiment thousands or tens of thousands of times, night after night, until finally it became gold.  Of course in the process what they were doing was refining themselves.   Refining the chemicals was symbolic of what was really going on inside them on an emotional and psychological level.   So, too, is it with magicians.  Being able to command the universe is symbolical of being able to command yourself.   You create your own reality.  You are your own reality.  That is your base metal – the situation in which you find yourself right now.   Intent means relaxing into your present circumstances, no matter how uncomfortable they may be, instead of cringing or clenching up against them and wishing they would go away.  To command your circumstances you first have to be able to command yourself.  This is the magician’s creed. 

It might be asked, what about all the people who seem to be able to get their way, to make their dreams come true , but who aren’t particularly in command of themselves?  What about all the nasties who get what they want?   The answer is that some of these people are reaping good karma from past lives, and some of them are using black magic and the help of demons to get what they want.  The latter is often the case when people rise from obscurity to great fame or worldly success, and then destroy themselves.  However, being nasty is never the way to get what you want in your heart.  You can’t get love or peace that way, only sex, money, and applause.   If sex, money, and applause are what you’re after, then definitely black magic is better than white, and a lot less effort to boot.  White magic requires not only patience, but wisdom.  This wisdom means truly knowing your heart’s desire, not what will bring you glory and make other people envy you.  This is why most people can’t get the Law of Abundance to work – they don’t know what they are really asking for.   The essence of magic, at least white magic, isn’t so much getting what you want but rather knowing what you want – in your heart of hearts, not your mind.  

Sometimes the coincidental nature of the outworkings of intent such as fortuitous events, omens and portents make us believe that the Spirit has a personality, and especially that it cares about us.  But even though magicians sometimes refer to the Spirit’s personality, such as that the Spirit is a trickster, in fact magicians know better.  The Spirit is too vast to care, and we are too unimportant in the scheme of things to care about. 

Conventional religions assign a personality to their God because most people are so embroiled in self-pity that they need a Great Pitying God to cry along with them.  God is seen as some vast being who will intercede or intervene miraculously and save their butts so that they don’t have to take responsibility for changing themselves.  Society inculcates these sorts of belief systems into us to make us as irresponsible and dependent as possible. 

The fact is that nothing in our lives will change until we take upon ourselves 100% of the responsibility for changing it.  It’s true that sometimes people pray to their God and get a miracle, but that is just a response to their own need to buck up their faith.  They are the ones who brought that miracle about by their openness and willingness to rely on faith.  God had nothing to do with it.  

Intent operates slowly, in logical sequence.  You pull yourself out of poverty by hard work.  You find true love by becoming truly loving yourself.  You heal yourself by understanding what lessons you are trying to learn from your illness and listening to what your body is telling you. 

People who are desperately unhappy are actually in a much better position to utilize intent than are people who are merely unhappy; people who are merely unhappy are just seeking relief, whereas people who are desperately unhappy are seeking change.

There is a three-fold progression to intent:  taking responsibility; confidence (faith); and success.  Consider the intent of making money.

Taking responsibility means seeing clearly the mechanism involved:  what you have to do to make money.   This is simply a matter of dropping your self-pity, rolling up your sleeves, and getting to work, even if that means doing work that’s ‘beneath’ you.  Taking responsibility means doing whatever has to be done to address the realities of your situation; not necessarily what you would prefer doing.  There’s usually an important lesson to be learned here.  What this entails is different in everyone’s case, depending upon their individual situation. 

Playing the lottery, however, is for losers.  Anyone who’s playing the lottery is buying into a loser’s mindset.  Money doesn’t drop from heaven by magic.  Rather, it comes to people who take responsibility.  The way you drop your self-pity is by not wasting your intent buying lottery tickets, or watching television shows about the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, or reading the latest non-news about so-called celebrities, or fantasizing about wealth generally.  All these sorts of activities feed self-pity.  They are an actual drain on the energy needed to bring wealth. 

Confidence, or faith, is also required.  People who are lucky at attracting money know that the money will come.  Even when they’re broke or bankrupt, they know the money will come.  It’s a feeling in their bones.   That confidence is what attracts money to them.  In other words, it takes confidence to bring success:  the much-vaunted Law of Abundance.  Unfortunately, it takes success to bring confidence.  Faith in magic doesn’t spring from nothing.  It isn’t blind.  Faith comes from seeing the techniques of magic actually work time and time again.  When the principles involved are clearly understood and applied, the desired result is obtained.  The problem is that in the beginning all we have to work with is blind faith since there aren’t any results yet to base real faith on.   Magicians get around this Catch-22 by using the technique of creative visualization.  This technique is described in my books, and also in Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain. 

Creative visualization is a technique used to strengthen intent by hypnotizing oneself.  C.V. is similar to daydreaming but has the opposite intent.  Where daydreaming stokes self-pity, creative visualization strengthens intent.  In normal daydreaming we are actually pushing away whatever object we are daydreaming about into a future which never comes.  In creative visualization we are actively drawing the object of our visualization to ourselves by imagining it physically happening in the now moment.

The difference between C.V. and normal daydreaming is that the former is a command of fulfillment and the latter is a command of lack.  When we cling to someone or something – when we are needy – our actual intent is to drive them away.  So many love songs contain the line, “I need you.”  But this is not love; this is lack.    It is the same with fantasies, such as sex fantasies.  These are commands of lack, not fulfillment. 

The point is that true faith does not depend upon the realization of a particular expectation.  Believing that your thought form images – your miraculous escape from your present circumstances into some ideal fantasy world – will come true , is not faith.  It’s fooling yourself.  This is what most people spend their entire lives doing.  Most people live for the daydream that someday the object of their fondest fantasies will drop into their laps from heaven with no effort on their part.  True faith, by contrast, is faith that everything is unfolding as it should; so be patient.  True faith is the conviction that things will happen precisely as we, in our inmost hearts, need for them to happen; so go with the flow.   True faith is knowing that you can’t control anything anyway, so you’d might as well quit worrying about it and just chill.   Death will solve all your problems soon enough.

If we keep plugging away long enough in spite of setbacks, fears, and doubts, eventually success will come.   The Dark Night of the Soul is part and parcel of success – you can’t have one without the other.  Of course, you can inherit wealth, for example, but that isn’t success.  Success – happiness – is something which we accomplish.  It isn’t something which we can inherit or can be given to us. 

Part of the mystery of intent is grace.  If we reach out half way ourselves, the Spirit will reach out for us the other half way and give us a lift.  The Dark Night of the Soul is rarely as dark as our self-pity tries to make it.  As Otto von Bismarck put it:  “Life is like being at the dentist’s – you think that the worst is yet to come, but it’s over already.”  

Although it is true that the Spirit is basically indifferent, it is nonetheless quite pliable.  This is what is meant by “our intent becomes the Spirit’s intent”, to paraphrase Castaneda.  In the monotheistic view God is outside of and above us, and dispenses or withholds goodies at His whim, or in response to our pressing or failing to press the correct lever, like Pavlov’s dogs.  In the pantheistic view we are the Spirit:  our command becomes the Spirit’s command.  Therefore it is imperative to see clearly and precisely what it is that we are actually commanding. 

For example, we all believe that we are pursuing happiness.  This is a delusion.  Happiness is a feeling we experience now.  It is not something we can pursue.  The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of a mirage, like the mirage of water in a desert, which recedes as you seemingly get closer and closer to it.  Happiness can only exist now.  In order to be happy, then, we have to find things that will make us happy now, in the midst of our suffering.  This is what the Birdman of Alcatraz did with his pet birds, and what Viktor Frankl did watching the sunset at Auschwitz.*  We have to focus on those items of our everyday lives which bring us happiness now, rather than focus on the things which bring us pain, or daydream about what we believe will alleviate our pain. 

This is why it is an essential part of our practice of magic to go out to nature, away from other people, every single day for at least half an hour.  By choosing to focus our attention on that which brings us a sense of peace and plenitude, our sense of inner peace and plenitude enlarges.  Eventually our intent moves the Spirit to change the outward circumstances of our lives to reflect our new inner state of peace and plenitude.  This is called grace. 

The important point to remember is that we must do the inner work first.  It’s not like the outer circumstances of our lives will change and then our suffering will be alleviated.  Quite the contrary.  This is why you find very few true magicians.  Nobody wants to face this truth. 

There are no shortcuts on the spiritual path.  There is no lottery you can win, no dating service you can join, no instant cure for your chronic ailment, no spiritual master you can find who will wave a magic wand and suddenly make you happy.  Consider the example of Carlos Castaneda.  He was with an enlightened master for over a decade, yet when the master left Castaneda was about as screwed-up as when he began.  Actually, it was only when Don Juan left that Castaneda took the responsibility willy-nilly for putting together all he had learned and turned Don Juan’s teachings into a reality.  

 Commanding our intent, which starts from examining and then controlling our moment-to-moment thoughts, isn’t something we do in one fell swoop.  It happens little-by-little over years of effort.  The only important thing is to intend it, to desire it with all our hearts, and not stop intending it.  This is the magic and mystery of intent.  Even a weak intent, applied unremittingly over time, through thick and thin, acquires force.  Turning the wheel of chance is a matter of unbending intent and infinite patience.  That’s all.  With intent and patience eventually the wheel will turn. 

Each of us has a sword we can wield and a solid rock we can stand on to confront our destinies.  That sword is intent and that rock is the now moment.  It is the purpose of the practice of magic to hone the sword of intent to a keen edge.  

*  Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, Boston 1992.

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excerpted from Magical Almanac ezine, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac