The Law of Intention & Desire – Manifesting Your Dreams – Rev. Linda Jackson
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
The Law of Intention and Desire teaches that aligning our focused intentions and desires with the universe’s natural flow holds immense creative power, allowing our deepest dreams to manifest. Practicing this law involves clarifying what you want, focusing your attention, and trusting the process. Join us this Sunday as we explore aligning your energy with the creative power of the universe and allowing your goals to manifest with ease and grace.
SUMMARY
- Manifesting desires through clarity, trust, and presence rather than through striving and control.
- Aligning with the “field of pure potential” or divine consciousness to allow desires to unfold naturally.
- Practicing non-attachment and letting go of specific outcomes, while affirming desires and planting the “seeds” of intention.
- The importance of stillness, meditation, and present-moment awareness in accessing the power of intention and desire.
- Transforming the thinker rather than just changing one’s thinking to create lasting change.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Linda Jackson (00:01):
All right, let’s give it up one more time for that. One of my favorite parts of Sunday is our music team. So thank you for being here. It took a little extra effort to come out today, right? And I do love you folks online, but let’s face it, you’re in your jammies with a blanket. This was a whirlwind week for me. And I don’t know about you. I mean, we’re talking about manifestation. I was saying earlier this morning, it’s a good thing, right? I have a full thriving experience, so I have manifested a lot. But then where’s that balance between the cultural pressures of doing too much, right? So really wanting to check in and stay aligned with what’s right for us. And I had, since I have a slideshow, I was thinking I could hijack you and show you the photo of the bread cornucopia that I made on Thursday and took to my nephews, and then the amazing opportunity and honor to officiate Amy’s wedding on Friday.
(01:09):
Y’all give it up for Rev. Amy, she’s officially married, and I want you to send her a message or post on her Facebook, send her some love. It was really an honor. It was a very small, intimate gathering. It was really lovely. Then I was the bareness at the Sound of Music singalong on Saturday. I had my granddaughter until 10 30 last night. So I really have nothing to talk to you about. So I thought I would just tell you all about my life. I’m Reverend Linda. I use she her pronouns. Happy December. We are continuing our November December theme, thriving Together, and it’s about expanding our capacity for good. We’re using the Deepak Chopra book, the Seven Spiritual Laws, and today we are in the fifth law, the law of intention and desire. So again, this is really looking at manifesting your dreams and the essence of the law of intention and desire teaches us that combining clarity, trust, and presence.
(02:18):
In doing that, we align with the universe’s natural flow, and then our deepest desires unfold naturally or effortlessly. And last week I spoke, it’s unusual that you have the same speaker twice in a row, and these laws sort of interweave and repeat concepts. So I’ll do my best not to make it a repeat of last week, but before I jump in on this fifth law, I want to check in. Did anybody do the practice? I see a lot of new faces in the room, so you might not be aware, but the practice that we did last week was on the law of least effort. Oops. I did mean to change the slide. I wanted to scroll down. I’m having a hard time. Give me a moment. My cursor’s over there and it needs to come back over here. There we go. So the practice we did last week was on the idea of achieving more with less effort, and the work was in letting go.
(03:21):
Were any of you here for that? Did anybody practice letting go? Yeah, any results? How’d it go? Good. Yeah. Yeah. Relaxed. Even while I was doing that. Nice. He said when he relaxed, when he’s doing effort, that it was even helpful. So these things actually really work, folks. And the idea is there that where you’re currently meeting resistance or forcing an outcome to intentionally practice, letting go and letting go at its base is just freeing, practicing non-judgment, attachment to the outcome, allowing what’s occurring. But at a deeper level, it can be a sort of an ego death disidentifying with yourself and your constructs letting go of the meaning that you’ve made, the stories that you’ve made up about how things should be, about how the world should be. And it can be very profound and it can also be kind of unnerving.
(04:24):
It’s unusual to let go of everything as you’ve known it. And I’ve been in a big process of that the last six months. So my experience is that we get comfortable in our usual discomfort and we have fear of a different discomfort. So we tend to stay in the discomfort that we’re accustomed to rather than leaning into the new discomfort and trusting that something greater is possible. So practicing that non-attachment and allowing allows things to be as they are. And I did mention last week, letting go doesn’t mean giving up intentions. It means planting our intentions mindfully and letting them flourish. We talked about how we plant the seeds and we need to let them grow. We can’t keep digging them up. We have to allow things to come out on their own terms, in their own way to trust how the universe will bring things into form.
(05:29):
So let go of attachment to a particular outcome. And this fifth law, what we’re moving into today, the law of intention and desire is clearly about manifesting. It’s about fulfilling our desires through the power of our mind and our actions. But we’re talking about really aligning our being with the desired outcome, being the outcome that we seek. We’re not making it happen out here, we’re making it happen in here. And I just have to acknowledge that when the world looks the way it does today, learning how to manifest our dreams might seem unrealistic, maybe superficial. And I’m not making intentional manifestation wrong. I just want us to remember that our teaching is way more than just getting the new car, which is also great. I have manifested a car before. It’s more than a manifesting technology. The bigger idea is there, and we’re going to explore that a little bit.
(06:40):
So you’ve heard the phrase, change your thinking, change your life. It’s a science of mind catch phrase. And I’ve shared before one of my teachers, the late Dr. Tom Sanner suggested that instead of change your thinking, it should be transform the thinker, which speaks to the more expanded idea. All right, let’s give it up. Transformation of the thinker, right? It speaks to the more expanded idea at the core of this teaching. So science of mind, and many of our sister teachings at their base, they are about transformation. We’re rising out of our current experience. We’re transcending the current world of form experience and moving into something new. But we have to be willing to let go of how it is now.
(07:39):
We are one with an all encompassing power and presence. So we live and move and have our being inside of God, spirit, the divine, the field of pure potential. Whatever words work for you, we are in it and of it, but it is also greater than we are. It includes everything that could ever be. And that is Deepak Chopra’s first law, the law of infinite possibilities. So when you commune with the divine presence, you transcend your human experience, you tap into infinite possibilities, you access that field of pure potential, the consciousness of the infinite, and it is in that consciousness that transformation occurs.
(08:42):
Dr. Sanner also used this phrase, commune command allow. When we transcend our experience to commune with the divine we and receive, this is where we get insight. This is where we get inspiration. This is the inspiration that can move our actions instead of us being on the treadmill of the make it happen. And when we commune and we open to receive, when we receive that insight, then we impress our desires or command. Like in affirmative prayer, we speak it into existence, but it comes from that inspired the inspiration that we received. And when we command, we speak it as if it’s already done. Then we allow, we get out of the way we receive. It doesn’t mean that we don’t take that inspired action though, but it’s not from a place of striving. It’s not on the treadmill. We stay in receiving mode, waiting, taking the opportunities when they arise.
(09:59):
So we’re invited to practice taking action from inspiration, from the guidance receive we receive in spiritual practice rather than the gripping and striving or controlling the outcome, right? So Eckert tole in the power of now said, you can only lose something that you have. You cannot lose something that you are. So this underlines the importance of how you are being unattached to the outcome, but also lifting yourself into the consciousness of the desires, knowing it is already done aligning with that vibration, right? It’s an internal state of being. The things out here come and go. This is temporal. If we’re chasing our fun out here, it’s just going to keep eluding us. We might have it for a moment, but then it’s going to be gone. Our work is to create the experience we desire within us. And there’s nothing wrong with having some fun out here. We are human, but not to seek it out here continuously, to bring it from here to here.
(11:14):
And similarly, Deepak Chopra wrote about the internal reference point and the two internal reference points, the ego and spirit. And he said, when the internal reference point is ego, we’re operating from control, from fear seeking approval. And when your internal reference point is spirit, we’re operating from love, we’re at peace, we’re in the flow. We’re trusting. We let go of striving and resistance because we have nothing to lose. We already are one with all there is. I don’t know if we could really get this. We could just live in a state of bliss to really know that we are one with all there is. We are one with the infinite potential of life. We have access to it. It is waiting to express through us. It can only express through us to the degree that we open to it, that we allow it.
(12:18):
So from Chopra in the book, when you discover your essential nature and know who you really are in that knowing itself is the ability to fulfill any dream you have because you are the eternal possibility. The immeasurable potential of all that was, is and will be. The law of pure potentiality could also be called the law of unity. Because underlying the infinite diversity of life is the unity of one all pervasive spirit. There is no separation between you and this field of energy. The field of pure potentiality is your own self. And the more you experience your true nature, the closer you are to the field of pure potentiality. So it kind of expands on itself, right? The more you practice or commune with the field of pure potential, the more you experience your true nature as that pure potential. And the more you experience this as your true nature, the more conscious you are of the pure potential. And it just keeps expanding the science of mind. Concepts of love and law explain how thoughts become things, which is one of Mike Dooley’s famous quotes in science of mind. The concepts of love and law. God is love and God is law. These are some of our core principles, not duality. Two aspects of the same. One, love points the way law makes the way possible. And there’s a third aspect. It’s this triune nature of the one. And that’s us. We are the physical world of form.
(14:17):
There’s love, conscious mind law, subconscious mind and world of form or the body of God. We are the body of God. So spirit is love desiring to express itself through creation. Spirit operates as law, as creative process. This is how things come into form. Oops, there’s my cursor movement again. And spirit as law receives the direct impress of our feelings, our beliefs. I know you’ve heard all of this before, but it bears repeating. And law is impersonal and absolute. It just says yes. So the predominant nature of our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, the law says yes and brings them into form. Thoughts become things. And it’s also why contradicting thoughts give us a contradicting experience. The law just says yes. So if we put in a muddled request, we get a muddled outcome. If you wonder why you put out a thought and it doesn’t manifest, it’s because of your next thought. We get to just keep checking our thoughts and our feelings and our actions.
(15:47):
So the essence of the law of intention and desire teaches that by combining clarity, trust, and presence, we align with the universe’s natural flow and then our deepest desires unfold effortlessly. And Chopra says that to apply the law of intention and desire, we have to get clear about what you want. And this is where I want to burst into song, the Joe Jackson song from the eighties. You can’t get what you want until you know what you want. It’s so true. And how many of us are in that state of like, I think I know what I want, but I’m just putting out so many things, right? You’ve got to get clear. And Chopra says to clearly write out your desires and take it with you everywhere. Look at the list before going into stillness. Look at the list before going to sleep at night. Look at the list when you wake up in the morning, the first thing in your day.
(16:52):
And then he says to surrender your desires into the infinite. And you have to trust even if things are not going your way, that the cosmic plan has something even greater. It’s like me thinking that I should rent an Airbnb. Instead, the universe gifted me with a condo overlooking like Michigan. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, listen to last week’s talk. That would’ve been me digging up the seeds before they had time to sprout, right? And then presence. He emphasizes the power of present moment awareness. And when it comes to presence, I want to go back to the reading, which Hunter, thank you. I love the way you present things in the fifth spiritual law, the law of intention and desire. You will see how you can introduce a faint impulse of intention in this field. Alright? This field is the field of pure potential, a K, a God, spirit, universe, creativity, whatever word you have for it.
(17:56):
And the creation of your desires will come about spontaneously. But first, you have to experience stillness. Stillness is the first requirement for manifesting your desires because in stillness lies your connection to the field of pure potentiality that can orchestrate an infinity of details for you. And I love this because it actually tells us in simple terms how it works. Imagine throwing a little stone into a still pond and watching it ripple. Then after a while when the ripples settle down, perhaps you throw another little stone. And that’s exactly what you do when you go into the field of pure silence and introduce your intention in this silence, even the faintest intention will ripple across the underlying ground of universal consciousness, which connects everything with everything else.
(19:01):
We can’t even come up with these solutions. That spirit provides the inner weaving of things that are way beyond our human understanding. But if you do not experience stillness and consciousness, if your mind is like a turbulent ocean, you could throw the Empire State building into it and you wouldn’t notice a thing in the Bible as the expression be still and know that I am God. And this can only be accomplished through meditation. Through meditation, we experience the presence of the divine. We can only experience the presence of the divine in the present moment. And it happens through consistent practice. And we learn to be more present day to day and experience it in our daily lives. And for those of you who say, I can’t quiet my mind, yes you can. It just takes practice. It just takes time. And to not be in resistance to the mind chatter, it’s natural. Just let it go. Let it be. Just don’t follow it down the street to your neighbor’s house and tell ’em what’s on your mind. Just watch it go by.
(20:22):
Perhaps you find your stillness in nature or other ways. We don’t have to make it wrong. What our experience is, right? It’s about communing with the divine it, opening yourself to the field of pure potential. So Chopra emphasizes knowing what you want, that clarity, then trusting the universe will co conspire to create it with you. And that co-creation activated through practicing presence. So communing with the field of pure potential and letting go of attachments to the past or worries about the future. Now, we can still create things through striving, but it comes with a cost to our physical health or our mental health. I mastered creating things through striving. In the early years of my brand identity design business, we would work 70, 80 hours a week, man, we were cranking it out and we somehow normalized it. It’s what everybody was doing. And there are some industries that are still normalizing unhealthy conditions. I know my son is a superintendent in construction. He’s worked for a number of different companies, and it’s totally normalized in that industry too. But it’s not sustainable and it’s certainly not healthy. Eventually something gives right either your health or your performance or the job itself.
(21:57):
So this idea of creating through the law of intention and desire through least effort, Chopra gives us five steps to activate the law of intention and desire. He says, slip into the gap. Center yourself in that silence space between thoughts go into the silence. It’s that level of being, which is your essential state. It’s what Tom Sanner called Communing with the divine. And in that state, you release your intentions and desires. So when you’re in the gap, there is no intention. But when you come out of the gap, according to Chopra, when you come out at that point, just between the gap and the next thought is where your intentions are introduced. And he says, this is why writing them down is important and reading them before meditating. And the intention will be in your awareness so that when you go into meditation, you’re planting the seeds naturally, organically, and trusting them to bloom when the season is right, not attached to the outcome, not digging them up early looking, are they growing yet?
(23:23):
And then he says three, remain in self-referral, which is what he describes as your state of true self in that connection to the divine to pure potential. So not seeing yourself through the eyes of the world, not influenced by other people’s opinions or criticisms. And part of this means not sharing your desires with people unless they share the same or similar intentions or they can hold the intention with you. And then he says, let go go of attachment to the outcome. Letting go of a specific result, living in the wisdom of uncertainty, enjoying the moments of the journey even when you don’t know what the outcome will be, and letting the universe handle the details. So when you release your intentions into the gap, they have infinite organizing power. Your desire is fully equipped with everything needed to bring it into manifestation. That’s how it works. Trust the organizing power of your intentions to work out the details.
(24:48):
So I’m going to put this into some practice. So I’m going to kind of combine practice with our closing prayer. And if you’re willing, I invite you to turn yourself inward. And the first idea here is that clarifying your desire. So I invite you to allow an intention and something that has been present for you, something that you want in your life. Bring that desire forward and create it as an affirmative statement. And he says, using a present tense, clear statement, which is what we would just call an affirmation. Something like, I am in a joyful, fulfilling relationship. I feel vibrant and healthy in my body. I express my creativity through my work. So I’m going to give you a moment to allow your own intention to become clear for you. And as you have that intention, the invitation is to remember to write it down later so you can carry it with you. So you can always take it into the stillness that you can read it before you go to bed at night and upon waking in the morning. But for now, I invite you to repeat your affirmative statement in your mind three times.
(27:04):
And this may look a little different when you do it on your own, but in this moment, my intention is to cultivate that sense of communion with the divine. As you do it in silence, it is that stillness, that gap. But in affirmative prayer, it is a recognition of God as the field of pure potential spirit as the generative creative nature, the infinite pure potential eternal nature of life itself. The infinite that contains everything that has ever been, everything that will ever be. And as we bring ourselves into communion with it, we recognize ourselves as an individual expression of the one, an individual expression of the divine. It expresses in through and as us, we are that unlimited potential. We are that generative creative nature we are. And you may repeat your affirmation in your mind.
(28:33):
This is the truth of who you are. And just pausing here, I affirm each of you as the fullness of your intention. I affirm that each desire carries with it all that is necessary for its manifestation in physical form. That is how it works. The seeds are planted, and we let them go. We let them go into the law that always says yes. And we know that in the right time, as the universe has conspired and orchestrated on our behalf, brought all things into perfect alignment for the fulfillment of the prayer, that everything will be made manifest in the perfect time, in the perfect place that each one of us is living in our dreams and our desires, in least effort and right action that we are demonstrating the clarity, the trust, and the presence to live as we choose to live. And I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful to be in a community of people who are practicing these laws. I’m so grateful to know that this community is here to support anyone who chooses to change their thinking and change their life to be a transformed thinker. And I’m grateful for the fulfillment of this prayer. I release it into the law knowing it is so, I call it good. And together we say, and so it’s,
Paige Kizer (30:32):
Thank you, Reverend Linda.