Intention

“When we wonder, we touch God”, Nontando Hadebe

What was your why today? What motivates you or guides your steps each day? What are you focusing on?

The Buddha once said that “all that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage”

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him”.

It is easy these days to blame, to put people in boxes and cast aspersions based on our superstitions, fears or in many cases, ignorance.

Maybe instead, lean into the roots of your spiritual tradition. In first century Palestine, Jesus engaged in right intention when looking at his cultural landscape, he saw the many injustices cast by both his religious authorities and government. Rather than allowing his personal thoughts and biases to get in the way, he instead leaned into his Jewish traditions and confronted the powers to bring light to the poor. For Jesus, his right intention was insisting on the horizontal relationships so crucial for Jewish spirituality.

Perhaps, we too can return to this notion of strengthening our horizontal relationships with others. Making the intention of love in our daily lives rather than spending our time pushing a vertical relationship with the divine, we engage in the universal love that the Divine has with all creation, thus creating an interconnectedness that reduces hate and self centeredness.

When we are so consumed with ourselves or our personal relationship with the divine, we can cultivate an attitude of indifference, a sense of duality. Indifference is the contrast of wonder. Wonder cultivates an adoration of the Divine. When we begin to wonder about the stranger in our midst, and we can do this in an attitude of love, we begin to see the Divine’s love in all creation, we move out of a sense of binary/duality and move into the realm of non duality. We then cease to see Greek or Jew, Slave or Free, Male or Female and we simply see God’s universal love and the Christ nature in all beings.