Given the onceness of our lifetimes, perhaps the best we can do is posit a graded series of intentions running along a spectrum from "extremely selfish" to "extremely altruistic." Prayer and other meditational intentions would come closest to selflessness, approaching a kind of unbridgeable limit. But this approach to the limit may be less than it seems. Because prayer and meditation accomplish the least tangible of worldly changes they naturally generate less karma, so they can be considered the least volitional of intentions. But if God is viewed as a mental projection, prayerful intentions would also be the most innocuous and some say utterly purposeless intentions unless followed up with human action. It then would hold that among the intentions leading to action, including plans, reflections, meditations, prayers, etc. some would be less self-involved than others. At the higher end of this series we might even encounter certain kinds of purified volitional energies that would enter into the world of events relatively free of a false belief in a self, in effect dropping clear of the doer. These kinds of actions are referred to in the Baghavad Ghita:
He acts, and is beyond action.
(Ghita Chap IV, p26. translated by Swami Pravananda and Christopher Isherwood)
Without a self , it is as if volition moves from the world to the world through the world, shaped, focused, intensified through the lens of the aggregates of sensation, thought etc. -- the aggregates we only call a self out of convenience. These actions would be creative because they form part of the world's own emergence, the world's unfolding, its evolution, the world's art or dance. This makes the really interesting actions the ones that approach but do not reach the limiting case of selflessness. We can think of them as Aikido-like actions, because they are actions, like the defensive martial art, that come from clear intentions, intentions that adapt the energy and momentum of the other for our own use. These actions are so much in concert with the other, that the follow-up deed of the person framing the intention requires very little more for its performance than the framing of the intention itself. But the effect of the slight action following the intention can be great.
These "deeds of intention," however, require what Don Juan called "impeccability," great finesse and precision of timing (again using the Aikido analogy,) since the assertion of the intention in the moment of turning must be delicate and yet strong enough to meet and join the world's onflowing or converging energies. Only when we have this strong delicacy, do we have poise in the heart of time. We're at the fulcrum then -- we enter the action then -- we operate in the world of deeds from within the crucial turning points from which small actions generate great effects.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)