The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-create Your World Your Way

by Wayne W. Dyer

“Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all come . . .” — Michelangelo “Self-realization means that we have been consciously connected with our source of being. Once we have made this connection, then nothing can go wrong. . . .” — Swami Paramananda

The book that you’re now holding in your hands, and all of the information it contains, was once a formless idea residing in the invisible domain of the field of intention. This book, The Power of Intention, was intended into the material world by applying all of the principles written about here. I managed to make my own vibrational energy match up to the all-creating Source, and allowed these words and ideas to flow through me directly to you. You’re holding in your hands evidence that anything we can conceive of in our minds—while staying in harmony with the universal all-creating Source—can and must come to pass. If you’d like to know how this book might impact you and how you might think, feel, and co-create after reading and applying its messages, I encourage you to read the final chapter, A Portrait of a Person Connected to the Field of Intention, before beginning this journey. You and everyone else, as well as all of life, emanated from the universal all-creating field of intention. Live from that perspective, and you will come to know and apply the power of intention. You have an endless stream of green lights before you!

“Intent is a force that exists in the universe. When sorcerers (those who live of the Source) beckon intent, it comes to them and sets up the path for attainment, which means that sorcerers always accomplish what they set out to do.” When I read those two sentences, I was stunned by the insight and clarity it gave me about the power of intention. Imagine that intention is not something you do, but rather a force that exists in the universe as an invisible field of energy!

“Dormant forces, faculties, and talents come alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

Some prominent researchers believe that our intelligence, creativity, and imagination interact with the energy field of intention rather than being thoughts or elements in our brain. The brilliant scientist David Bohm, writing in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, suggested that all ordering influence and information is present in an invisible domain or higher reality and can be called upon in times of need.

If scientific evidence appeals to you, I suggest that you read The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe by Lynne McTaggart. Her book is filled with studies supporting the existence of a higher, faster energy dimension or field of intention that can be tapped in to and used by everyone.

By allowing ego to determine your life path, you deactivate the power of intention.

I am what I have. My possessions define me. I am what I do. My achievements define me. I am what others think of me. My reputation defines me. I am separate from everyone. My body defines me as alone. I am separate from all that is missing in my life. My life space is disconnected from my desires. I am separate from God. My life depends on God’s assessment of my worthiness.

Obviously, it’s impossible to have two infinites, for then neither would be infinite; each would be limited by the other. You can’t divide infinite into parts. Essentially, infinite is unity, continuity, or oneness, like the air in your home. Where does the air in your kitchen stop and the air in your living room begin? Where does the air inside your home stop and the air outside start? How about the air you breathe in and out? Air may be the closest we can come to understanding the infinite, universal, omnipresent Spirit. Somehow, you must travel in thought beyond the idea of your individual existence to the idea of a unity of universal being, and then beyond this to the idea of a universal energy. When you think of part of a whole being in one place and part in another, you’ve lost the idea of unity. And (keeping an open mind as I beseeched you earlier), get this! At any moment in time, all Spirit is concentrated at the point where you focus your attention. Therefore, you can consolidate all creative energy at a given moment in time. This is your free will at work.

Castaneda’s Power of Silence: “Having lost hope of ever returning to the source of everything, the average man seeks solace in his selfishness.”

Our individual thoughts create a prototype in the universal mind of intention. You and your power of intention are not separate. So, when you form a thought within you that’s commensurate with Spirit, you form a spiritual prototype that connects you to intention and sets into motion the manifestation of your desires. Whatever you wish to accomplish is an existing fact, already present in Spirit. Eliminate from your mind thoughts of conditions, limitations, or the possibility of it not manifesting. If left undisturbed in your mind and in the mind of intention simultaneously, it will germinate into reality in the physical world.

Aldous Huxley, one of my favorite authors: “The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning one’s self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.”

Act as if anything you desire is already here. Believe that all that you seek you’ve already received, that it exists in spirit, and know you shall have your desires filled. One of my ten secrets for success and inner peace is to treat yourself as if you already are what you’d like to become.

When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

“Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.” — Voltaire

In Power of Silence, Carlos Castaneda describes silent knowledge as “something that all of us have. Something that has complete mastery, complete knowledge of everything. But it cannot think, therefore it cannot speak of what it knows. . . . Man has given up silent knowledge for the world of reason. The more he clings to the world of reason, the more ephemeral intent becomes.”

Thoughts and emotions are pure energy; some higher and faster than others. When higher energies occupy the same field as lower energies, the lower energies convert to higher energies. A simple example of this is a darkened room that has lower energy than a room bathed in light. Since light moves faster than non-light, when a candle is brought into a dark room, the darkness not only dissolves and disappears, but it seems magically converted into light. The same is true of love, which is a higher/faster energy than the energy of hate.

St. Francis, in his famous prayer, beseeches God: “Where there is hatred, let me sow love.” What he is seeking is the power to dissolve and ultimately convert hate to the energy of love. Hate converts to love when the energy of love is in its presence. This is true for you, too. Hate, directed toward yourself or others, can be converted to the life-giving, love-granting life force of intention. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it this way: “The conclusion is always the same: Love is the most powerful and still the most unknown energy of the world.”

Beautiful thoughts build a beautiful soul. As you become receptive to seeing and feeling beauty around you, you’re becoming attuned to the creative power of intention within everything in the natural world, including yourself.

The face of unlimited abundance. This sixth face of intention is an expression of something that has no boundaries, is everywhere at once, and is endlessly abundant. It’s not just huge, it never stops. This marvelous gift of abundance is what you were created from. Thus you too share this in the expression of your life. You’re actually fulfilling the law of abundance. These gifts are given freely and fully to you just as the air, the sun, the water, and the atmosphere are provided in unlimited abundance for you.

We only need to be willing to recognize and receive. Intention can’t respond to you if you fail to recognize it. If you see chance and coincidence governing your life and the world, then the universal mind of intention will appear to you as nothing but an amalgamation of forces devoid of any order or power.

Be reflective. A mirror reflects without distortion or judgment. Consider being like a mirror, and reflect what comes into your life without judgment or opinions.

The secret to manifesting anything that you desire is your willingness and ability to realign yourself so that your inner world is in harmony with the power of intention.

The way to establish a relationship with Spirit and access the power of this creating principle is to continuously contemplate yourself as being surrounded by the conditions you wish to produce.

Your willpower is so much less effective than your imagination, which is your link to the power of intention. Imagination is the movement of the universal mind within you. Your imagination creates the inner picture that allows you to participate in the act of creation. It’s the invisible connecting link to manifesting your own destiny.

Kindness toward yourself. Think of yourself like this: There’s a universal intelligence subsisting throughout nature inherent in every one of its manifestations. You are one of those manifestations. You are a piece of this universal intelligence—a slice of God, if you will. Be good to God, since all that God created was good. Be good to yourself. You are God manifested, and that’s reason enough to treat yourself kindly. Remind yourself that you want to be kind to yourself in all the choices that you make about your daily life. Treat yourself with kindness when you eat, exercise, play, work, love, and everything else.

Be love. Ponder these words thoughtfully: God is love, “and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in me, and I in him.” That is God talking, so to speak. Keeping in mind the central theme of this chapter, and in fact, this entire book, that you must learn to be like the energy that allowed you to be in the first place, then being in a state of love is absolutely necessary for you to reconnect to intention. You were intended out of love, you must be love in order to intend.

Emerson reminded us: “The ancestor to every action is a thought.”

You cannot know the meaning of your life until you are connected to the power that created you. You are not this body, you are not this mind, you are the Spirit . . . this is the greatest truth. You have to know your Spirit . . . for without knowing your Spirit, you cannot know the truth. Meditation is the only way you can grow. There is no other way out. Because when you meditate, you are in silence. You are in thoughtless awareness. Then the growth of awareness takes place. Connect to the power that created you, know that you are that power, commune with that power intimately, and meditate to allow that growth of awareness to take place.

As William Penn put it: “Those people who are not governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.” Remember as you read on, that those tyrants are often the self-imposed roadblocks of your lower self at work.

Your Inner Speech—Match or No Match? We can go all the way back to the Old Testament to find a reminder about our inner dialogue. For instance, as a man thinketh, so is he.

No match: I don’t have enough money. Match: I intend to attract unlimited abundance into my life. No match: My partner is grouchy and boring. Match: I intend to focus my thoughts on what I love about my partner. No match: I’m not as attractive as I’d like to be. Match: I’m perfect in the eyes of God, a divine manifestation of the process of creation. No match: I don’t have enough vitality and energy. Match: I’m a part of the ebb and flow of the limitless Source of all life.

Practice catching yourself when you have a thought of what others want for you, and ask yourself, Does this expectation match up with my own? If not, simply laugh at the absurdity of being upset or frustrated over the expectations of others about how you should be running your life. This is a way to match up and become impervious to the criticisms of others, and simultaneously put a stop to the insidious practice of continuing to attract into your life something you don’t want. But the big payoff is that these critics realize that their judgments and critiques are pointless, so they simply desist. A three-for-one bonus, achieved by shifting your attention away from what others want or expect for you to how you want to live your life.

No match: I’m so annoyed with my family. They just don’t understand me and they never have. Match: I love my family; they don’t see things my way, but I don’t expect them to. I‘m totally focused on my own intentions, and I send them love. No match: I make myself sick trying to please everyone else. Match: I’m on purpose and doing what I signed up to do in this lifetime. No match: I feel so unappreciated by those I serve that it sometimes makes me cry. Match: I do what I do because it’s my purpose and my destiny to do so. No match: No matter what I do or say, it seems as if I can’t win. Match: I do what my heart tells me to do with love, kindness, and beauty.

Higher energy is better than lower energy. Why? Because this is a book written by a man who stands for healing, love, kindness, health, abundance, beauty, compassion, and similar expressions; and these expressions are associated with higher and faster energies.

The impact of higher and faster frequencies on lower and slower frequencies can be measured, and it’s in this regard that you can make a huge impact on eradicating the energy factors in your life that are obstructing your connection to intention. The purpose of moving up the frequency ladder is to change your vibratory level of energy so that you’re at the higher and faster frequencies where your energy level matches up with the highest frequencies of all: the energy of the all-creating Spirit of intention itself. It was Albert Einstein who observed, “Nothing happens until something moves.”

Everything in this universe is a movement of energy. Higher/faster energy dissolves and converts lower/slower energy. With this in mind, I’d like you to consider yourself and all of your thoughts in the context of being an energy system. That’s right— you’re an energy system, not just a system of bones, fluids, and cells, but actually a multitude of energy systems encapsulating an inner energy system of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. This energy system that you are can be measured and calibrated. Every thought you have can be energetically calibrated, along with its impact on your body and your environment. The higher your energy, the more c...

The material world. Solid form is energy slowed down so that it’s approximately commensurate with your sense perception of the world of boundaries. Everything that you see and touch is energy slowed down so that it appears to be coalesced mass. Your eyes and your fingers agree, and there you have the physical world. The sound world. You seldom perceive sound waves with your eyes, but they can actually be felt. These invisible waves are also high/low and fast/slow. This sound level of energy is where you connect to the highest frequencies of Spirit through the practice of Japa meditation, or the repetition of the sound of God, as I’ve written about extensively in Getting in the Gap. The light world. Light moves faster than the material world and faster than sound, yet there are no actual particles to form a substance called light. What you see as red is what your eye perceives a certain pulsating frequency to be, and what you perceive as violet is an even faster and higher frequency. When light is brought to darkness, darkness becomes light. The implications for this are startling. Low energy when faced with high energy experiences an automatic conversion. The thought world. Your thoughts are an extremely high frequency of pulsation that moves beyond the speed of sound and even light. The frequency of thoughts can be measured, and the impact that they have on your body and your environment can be calculated. Once again, the same rules apply. Higher frequencies nullify lower...

The Spirit world. Here is the ultimate in energy. These frequencies are so supersonically rapid that the presence of disorder, disharmony, and even disease is impossible. These measurable energies consist of the seven faces of intention, written about throughout the pages of this book. They are the energies of creation. When you reproduce them in yourself, you reproduce the same creative quality of life that called you into existence. They are the qualities of creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, peaceful abundance, and receptivity. These are the highest energies of the universal Spirit itself. You came into existence from this energy, and you can match up with it energetically as you remove the low-energy pulsations from your thoughts and feelings.

Consider these words of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Max Planck as he accepted his award for his study of the atom: “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as the result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. . . . We must assume behind this force th...

Why is everyone here so happy except me? “Because they have learned to see goodness and beauty everywhere,” said the Master. Why don’t I see goodness and beauty everywhere? “Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside.”

What you may fail to see inside is a result of how you choose to process everything and everyone in your world. You project onto the world what you see inside, and you fail to project into the world what you fail to see inside. If you knew that you were an expression of the universal Spirit of intention, that’s what you’d see. You’d raise your energy level beyond any possibility of encumbrances to your connection to the power of intention. It is only discord acting within your own feelings that will ever deprive you of every good thing that life holds for you! If you understand this simple observation, you’ll curb interferences to intention.

You cannot remedy anything by condemning it. You only add to the destructive energy that’s already permeating the atmosphere of your life. When you react to the lower energies you encounter with your own low energies, you’re actually setting up a situation that attracts more of that lower energy. For example, if someone behaves in a hateful manner toward you and you respond by hating them for hating you, you’re participating in a lower energy field, and impacting all who enter that field.

Don’t use weakening energies employed by those around you. Other people can’t bring you down if you’re operating at the higher energies. Why? Because higher and faster energies nullify and convert lower/slower energies, not the reverse. If you feel that the lower energies of those around you are bringing you down, it’s because you’re joining them at their energy levels.

You cannot attract attractiveness into your life by hating anything about what you’ve allowed yourself to become. Why? Because hatred creates a counter-force of hatred that disempowers your efforts. Here is how Dr. Hawkins describes it in Power vs. Force:

Simple kindness to one’s self and all that lives is the most powerful transformational force of all. It produces no backlash, has no downside, and never leads to loss or despair. It increases one’s own true power without exacting any toll. But to reach maximum power such kindness can permit no exceptions, nor can it be practiced with the expectation of some selfish reward. And its effect is as far reaching as it is subtle.” [Note that kindness is one of the seven faces of intention.] He adds further: That which is injurious loses its capacity to harm when it is brought into the light, and we attract to us that which we emanate.

The lesson is clear in terms of removing lower energy obstacles. We must raise ourselves to the levels of energy where we are the light we seek, where we are the happiness we desire, where we are the love we feel is missing, where we are the unlimited abundance we crave. By being it, we attract it to us. By condemning its absence, we ensure that condemnation and discord will continue to flow into our lives.

Retreat from low-energy substances. I discussed in Chapter 1 how I learned that total sobriety was absolutely essential for me to achieve the level of consciousness I craved and was destined to achieve. Alcohol, and virtually all artificial drugs, legal and otherwise, lower your body’s energy level and weaken you. Furthermore, they put you in a position to continue to attract more disempowering energy into your life. Simply by consuming low-energy substances, you’ll find people with similar low energy showing up regularly in your life. They’ll want to buy those substances for you, party with you as you get high, and urge you to do it again after your body recovers from the devastation of these low-energy substances.

Become conscious of the energy level of the music you listen to. Harsh, pounding, musical vibrations with repetitive, loud sounds lower your energy level and weaken you and your ability to make conscious contact with intention. Similarly, the lyrics of hate, pain, anguish, fear, and violence are low energies sending weakening messages to your subconscious and infiltrating your life with similar attractor energies. If you want to attract violence, then listen to the lyrics of violence and make violent music a part of your life. If you want to attract peace and love, then listen to the higher musical vibrations and lyrics that reflect your desires.

Become aware of the energy levels of your home environment. Prayers, paintings, crystals, statues, spiritual passages, books, magazines, the colors on your walls, and even the arrangement of your furniture all create energy into which you’re catapulted for at least half of your waking life. While this may seem silly or absurd, I urge you to transcend your conditioned thinking and have a mind that’s open to everything. The ancient Chinese art of feng shui has been with us for thousands of years and is a gift from our ancestors. It describes ways to increase the energy field of our home and workpl...