In the world of intentionality there are five intentions that enable a person to be, do, and have what he/she wants and be favored with prosperity, peace, happiness and joy.

What are your intentions in life? This is a question for you to ponder as you continue to read this discourse. Intention is something other than desire, wish, hope or yearning. Intention consists of purpose, deliberateness, determination, objective and resolve. Add to these attitude, commitment and positive action.
Here are five intentions that will produce a full and healthy life:

1. Freedom. Freedom means having the ability to do what you want to do. Economic freedom is the underpinning of emotional freedom, intellectual freedom and social freedom. A person is free when he/she has these four aspects of freedom.

2. Growth. Growth involves learning, change, expansion, evolution and sometimes transformation. The opposite of growth is not stagnation or apathy. The opposite of growth is retrogression, deterioration, effeteness, and ultimately death. Question: What right has a person to exist or occupy Planet Earth if he/she ceases to grow? Sometimes growth requires pain.

3. Altruism. What altruism is not. Altruism is not putting the welfare of others ahead of your own welfare. It is not loving others more than you love yourself. Altruism is putting others' interests on even par with your own interests. It is sharing, giving and receiving, helping and serving. In his "prayer-wish" Tsongkhapa depicted the altruistic attitude this way:
"May I at all times
Be available for others'sake
Just as earth, water, fire, wind, medicine,
And forest should be available to all."
Altruism is a source of goodness for yourself and others. It is keeping God in good by doing all the good you can, in all the ways you can, to all the people and Creation's multitudinous gifts you can, whenever you can, and especially now as much as possible as you can.
Through the practice of altruism you indirectly and sometimes directly achieve your own interests in full. Wow!

4. Communion. While communication is present in spiritual "awakeness" or God-consciousness it is communion, that is something more and other than communication, that brings a person in alignment and harmony with God. Communion differs from communication not just in degree but in kind. Communion is a transcendent experience. Although self-transcendence consists of "other than," "outside of," and "not a part of," a person is never more within one's self, never more in the depth of his/her soul, than when he/she is caught up, even for a brief period, in self-transcendence.
Communion is a faith state that catapults a person into a spiritual union with God. Bliss, contemplation, fusion, harmony and peace are other understandings of conmmunion. In commmunion, words and acts may be unnecessary and certainly inadequate to convey its meaning to others.

5. Joy. Very often pleasure and happiness are inaccurately used as a substitute for or synonymous with joy. They do not mean the same. It is obvious that satisfaction is not the same as joy. Pleasure is more cheerful and involves a more positively favorable orientation than satisfaction. "Being pleasured" relates to being cheerful; being in a "good mood," and so on. Happiness that might come from temperament and favoring circumstance is a lesser thing than joy. Even when suffering a person may experience joy. Henry Sloane Coffin states that "Happiness is like the glint of sunlight on the surface of a river; joy is like the living current of that river, which pours in its deep channel to sea."
To better understand joy we might want to pay attention to this insight offered by C. S. Lewis: "instead of the twofold division into Consciousness and Unconsciousness, we need a threefold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplatd." With this understanding he asserts; "Than to enjoy delights with liberty; What more felicity can fall to creature!"

Let it be known that neither money or poverty produces joy.
Nothing is worth a person being involved with, subscribing to, or embracing, unless from it he/she is able to derive joy or maintain the joy he had before such encounter. Life without joy is life without meaning. We were created to enjoy. Could it be that joy is the highest virtue that is attainable by mortal man?" Jesus admonishes us and makes these promises: "Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be full." (John 16:24.
Possessing this "Quintile of Intentions" is the assurance that a person can experience full life in the Eternal Now.

Copyright 2009 by Uriah J.Fields