The Seeds of Intent

An old friend, now sadly departed, but formative in my younger days, used to say that there were two ways to deal with ‘seeds’: one was to bury them so that they could be forgotten; the other was to plant them so that they would catch the ‘tide of happenings’.

He often spoke of the ‘seeds of intent’ and how powerful a small beginning could be, if sown in the right way. Two questions spring to mind: the first is to decide on the precise nature of the seed, itself; the other is to decide where to plant it, and in what season.

Seasons are important. Nature’s outer cycle of seed, apparent dormancy, emergence, and fruition has much to teach us about how this circle of four provides an envelope within which all types of seeds become, in turn: planted, born into a world they hope to inhabit, become children who learn through play, and, finally, become adults with an understanding of the whole and their place in it – including their part in the procreation of further seeds.

We may be gardeners. If so, we will have a keen sense of these cycles, and how they merge into one another, yet retain a definite identity; a character of process within the whole cycle.

Beyond the organic processes of our biology, we may not think of ourselves as being related to the same cycles. We may not be too impressed with our collective stewardship of the Earth, but few would doubt the capability of the human intelligence to solve problems – and to seed the future.

Greed currently prevents this, keeping billions in poverty and despair because we cannot act together to combat the lower level of our shared nature. It may be that mankind’s journey to this point is part of a vast cosmic cycle in which more civilisations fail than succeed; burning themselves to an aggressive oblivion at the point when they could have done the most good…

Perhaps only a few every make it past this point – but they must be very special places, places that nurture head and heart in equal measure.

Few of us are in a position to affect the world in a way that extends beyond our immediate working and home environments. But, we can change ourselves – or, rather, look for understanding to the problems of a world reflected on our own little stage. And stage it is…we perform each day to a script which has grown habitual, and seldom think of challenging it so that we might fix in ourselves what we despise in the world.

Each moment derives from the last, plus a little bit of magic that infuses both chaos and possible good fortune into the mix. Without these ‘non-predetermined’ extras, evolution would be powerless, and spiral downwards, as we failed to wrestle with the complexity of ‘thinking’ out our own future. The mind, alone, can never solve such problems.

Let us assume that there is goodwill ‘out there’ in our world. We have a certain amount of goodness in us, too–the result of our efforts to date plus an ability to tap into something beyond ‘me’. We may desire to help the Earth as it struggles to escape the downward spiral of greed, violence and political stagnation. The desire to do this is powerful enough to become our seed. To assist this we may visualise the ‘feeling’ of what it would be like to have contributed successfully, to a true betterment of the world, however small. Each such action moves out like a wave, overlapping and reinforcing others…

Now comes the intent…the fertile soil into which we will place this well-formed, but not yet visible seed. The intent is not the seed, itself; it is the special ‘space’ in which the idea of the seed can have a life of its own. Powerful seeds die in the everyday script of ‘me’. To break out of this we might want to frustrate the imprisoning script of our lives by setting aside a special time each day, at some specific hour, at which we will reaffirm our non-selfish desire. There could be many other ways of doing this. As long as it breaks the normal script it will work, be it meditative or, for example, every time we walk past that clock-tower on our way to work.

An oak tree doesn’t grow if we constantly pull up the organism to see whether the winter roots are developing. With our seed, we have to  trust that by providing the space and the ‘water and warmth’ of our new soil we will harness the magic and the super-human cycles that transform that well-founded and selfless desire into a force in the world.

We were not given great powers of creative visualisation to waste them on the trivial… If only we knew this as a race.

The time between Christmas and New Year is an excellent period in which to do something of this nature. Personally, I believe the idea of the New Year’s resolution to be derived from an ancient method of harnessing these magical energies – energies which truly have the power to dispel the inner darkness infecting the state of the Earth at the present.

With a passion, I wish you success with your Seeds of Intent.

The Directors of the Silent Eye School extend best wishes for a very special transition into the potential of the year 2018.

——–

Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via low-cost supervised correspondence courses.

His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com

©️Stephen Tanham.