The Secret to Setting and Manifesting Intentions That Free You Instead of Trapping You

I drummed as a kid, then put it down as a hobby for nearly twenty years. What brought me back was the djembe, the West African hand drum. A couple of years into that, I’m living in Tempe, in the Phoenix East Valley, and I’ve started showing up at an African drum and dance school, learning and playing for the love of it.

One afternoon a man from Cameroon sits in with the class, and afterward he draws me aside from the small circle of drummers. He runs an African drum and dance troupe, he tells me, and there’s a paid gig in a few days. Would I want in? Before I can answer, he puts a brochure in my hand. I look down and see that we’re opening for David R. Hawkins at the Phoenix Children’s Museum. The yes is out of my mouth before he’s even finished asking.

If that name means nothing to you, here is all you need to know: Hawkins wrote Power vs. Force, made muscle testing famous to a whole generation of seekers, and mapped human consciousness on a scale from zero to a thousand.

On the day of the show, we set up early and run a short rehearsal. Afterward I wander into a hallway and find a window ledge wide enough to sit on, and I pull out one of his books, The Eye of the I, the same one I’d been reading the day my new friend from Cameroon first found me. Then, without warning, a frail-looking Hawkins comes down the hallway toward me, a small entourage around him, someone steadying him gently at the elbow. Close enough to touch. I don’t say a word. I just sit there holding his book while the man himself passes by, and the synchronicity isn’t lost on me.

I’m telling you this because that hallway holds the seed of something it took me two more decades to fully understand, something that has everything to do with whether you create the life you want, or quietly sabotage it.

For years after that, I worked with one form of muscle testing after another, and none of them held up for me. The answers were inconsistent. I wasn’t alone in this; several studies have found various muscle testing systems to be unreliable. I assumed, for a long time, that I just wasn’t built for it.

Then I met a man who had also known Dr. Hawkins, and who had spent his life on this exact problem. He had cracked the code. The missing variable, it turned out, was balance.

We live in a world of constant quantum flux. When you are out of harmonious balance with yourself and your experience, your inner signal scrambles. It is not that the body lies. It is that you are asking it a question while you are still in a state of imbalance. Come back into balance first, and the answer arrives clean.

His method for getting there was intricate and elaborate. Over time, I learned to do with words and the skillful setting of intention what used to require complicated protocols and a considerable amount of time: to return to balance in about a minute, before I ask my body anything at all.

Here is the part that actually changes your life, and the reason I’m writing this at all.

A reliable inner yes is not necessarily the prize in and of itself. It’s the doorway. Because the same imbalance that scrambles a yes-or-no answer scrambles something far more important: your ability to tell which of your intentions is coming from survival and which are coming from enlightened thriving.

You are the device. As such, when you set an intention and plant it into the superconscious mind, you are choosing what your entire creative field will organize itself around. So everything depends on which intention you plant. And here is the trap almost no one sees: when you are out of balance, your survival mind takes the wheel. This is the part of you that experiences itself as finite, limited, and exposed to forces that could harm or destroy you. This version of yourself is based entirely on sensory experience. And from that place, it will dress up an old fear in the costume of inspiration. It will convince you that an intention is empowering when it is really just a survival strategy wearing a halo.

Plant that, and you may well manifest it. But it carries the stress of survival folded inside it. It is not aligned with your highest self, so it brings more strain, not less, and it tends to be less sustainable.

Real, enlightened thriving doesn’t come from survival drives at all. It is an overflow from the transpersonal part of you that is already enlightened, already prosperous, already at peace, already safe and whole. That part of you, your superconscious self, is never stressed by anything, because there is nothing left for it to fear.

This is what Hawkins pointed at without naming it. Power vs. Force. Force is the survival mind straining to muscle a fearful reality into shape. Power is what flows through you when you create from the self that is already whole. And the only thing standing between the two is balance.

So balance is not a nicety you do before the real work. Balance is the work. Get balanced first, and your discernment comes back online. Now you can feel the difference between an intention that rises from old survival fear and one that is a genuine expression of your highest self, and you can choose the second one. That single act of discernment is what moves the needle toward your superconscious potential instead of deeper into your stress.

The good news: it doesn’t take elaborate effort. The Superconscious Intention process includes a simple practice that brings you back into balance with virtually anything that imbalances you, in about a minute. One minute, before you ever set an intention.

I suspect you have your own version of that hallway. Your own moment of holding the map while the territory walked right past you, close enough to touch.

Maybe you’ve tried to trust your gut, your knowing, your quiet inner yes, and found it flickering and unreliable. Maybe you’ve set intention after intention and watched some of them dissolve, and watched others come true in ways that somehow left you more anxious than before, and quietly concluded that you’re just not built to create the life you want.

You were never missing the talent or ability. You were only missing the balance, and balance is something you can return to any time you choose, in about a minute. On the far side of that minute, you can finally tell which of your intentions is coming from survival and which are emanating from the higher, transpersonal aspect of your consciousness that is already enlightened and prosperous.

And from there, you stop reacting to your life and start authoring it. You are no longer reading the map.

You are the territory. You are the device, a fractal of Source, making the world out of itself.

Blessings,

Eric

A Man Aligned with His Soul

Curious where you’re actually creating from right now? I made a short quiz that names it for you. [Take it here.]