The Flow of Intention

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I have to admit that one of the most blissful benefits offered by our outfitter was that the guides set up camp for us, and so we landed in our tents completely randomly. The next morning when I was packing up, I found a note under my sleeping pad that read: "This is a lucky tent. Here you will find your life's in-tent-ion." It turned out to be the handiwork of one of my fellow travelers, who had no clue which of us would end up with the note. But there it was -- another little synchronicity, a gentle reminder of the mysterious connections between all of us.

As our trip continued, most of us got dumped in the water and were duly humbled by the river's incessant power. There were a few heart-stopping moments, but no more than were strictly necessary for us to feel fully alive. I think all of us felt the exhilaration of being entirely in the moment. It's telling that the only time I was actually frightened was when a moment of indecision wrapped me around a large rock in a swift and choppy part of the river.

One evening a deer strolled within feet of us into the water. She swam across more quickly and elegantly than I could have imagined, letting the current carry her as she crossed. The next morning we woke to clear water that suddenly turned a deep coffee color, smelling of dirt and topped with beige foam. Apparently a storm we'd heard upriver during the night had unleashed a huge landslide whose effect was just reaching us. That day the water splashed brown on every surface. As the guides explained, the turbid waters make it even tougher for the salmon on their long, relentless journey upriver to spawn.

At the heart of intention lies the idea that everything in the universe is infused with a creative power. Some call it intelligence, the mind field, even love. A related concept can be found at least as far back as the third-century philosopher Plotinus. More recently, the thinker Alfred North Whitehead, among others, envisioned a similar universe in which events are linked in an ongoing process, an ever-changing flow.

As Wayne Dyer puts it in his best-selling book The Power of Intention, ultimately intention is not "something you do, but rather a force that exists in the universe as an invisible field of energy." Dyer acknowledges his debt to the late anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, who in The Power of Silence calls the force intent. Castaneda's characters belong to a lineage of ancient Mexican sorcerers who spend their lives trying to perceive and harness that force. Today, certain Western scientists are on their own quest, investigating the bizarre world of quantum physics. They're studying the way atoms can share information instantly -- what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." Their stated goal is to build an ultrafast computer, but who knows: Maybe they'll shed some light on the healing power of prayer or "psi" phenomena like precognition.

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