Tuesday, February 21, 2017

The Shocking Truth about Intentions

zero limits 4 :The Shocking Truth about Intentions

Our subjective inner life is what really matters to 
us as human beings.Yet we know and understand 
relatively little of how it arises and how it 
functions in our conscious will to act. Benjamin Libet, Mind Time

After that first call with Dr. Hew Len, I eagerly wanted to know more. I asked him about the seminar he was doing a few weeks later. He didn’t try to sell me on it. He said he was constantly clearing so only the right people went to it. He didn’t want a crowd. He wanted open hearts. He trusted that Divinity—his favorite term for the power bigger than all of us, yet all of us—would bring the right arrangement.

I asked my friend Mark Ryan, the man who first 
told me about Dr. Hew Len, if he wanted to 
attend. I offered to pay his way, as a gift for 
telling me about this miracle and miracle worker. 
Mark agreed, of course.

I did a little more research before the trip. I 
wondered if this therapist’s method had anything 
to do with huna, a popular healing method from 
Hawaii.As I read, I learned it had nothing at all to 
do with it. Huna is the name that entrepreneur-
turned-author Max Freedom Long gave his version 
of Hawaiian spiritualism. He claimed to have 
learned a secret tradition from Hawaiian friends 
while working as a schoolteacher in Hawaii. He 
founded the Huna Fellowship in 1945 and later 
published a series of books, one of the most 
popular being The Secret Science Behind Miracles. 
While fascinating, Long’s work had nothing to do 
with the therapist I was investigating. As I was 
beginning to learn, the therapist was practicing 
something Long had never heard of, at least not 
in the way Dr. Hew Len practiced it.

As I kept reading and learning, my curiosity 
deepened. I could hardly wait for the day I would 
fly out and meet the healer himself.

I flew out to Los Angeles, met with Mark, and went to Calabasa, California. Mark showed me Los Angeles before doing so, and we had a great time. But we both wanted to meet the man we had heard so much about.While Mark and I had stimulating and deep conversations over breakfast, what we both wanted was the seminar.

When we went to the event room, we found a line 
of about 30 people. I kept trying to stand on my 
toes so I could see over everyone’s head. I wanted 
to see the healer. I wanted to see the mystery man. 
I wanted to see Dr. Hew Len. When I finally made 
it to the door, Dr. Hew Len greeted me.

"Aloha, Joseph,” he said, extending his hand. He 
was soft-spoken yet with charisma and authority. 
He wore Dockers, sneakers, an open shirt, and a 
business jacket. He also wore a baseball cap, 
which I later learned is his trademark.

“Aloha, Mark,” he said to my friend.

There was small talk as he asked about our flight, 
how long it took to get from Texas to Los Angeles, 
and so on. I loved this man instantly. Something 
about his quiet confidence and grandfatherly 
style of being made me resonate with him.

Dr. Hew Len likes to start on time. As soon as the event began, he called on me.

“Joseph, when you delete something from your computer, where does it go?”

“I have no idea,” I replied. Everyone laughed. I’m sure they had no idea, either.

“When you erase something from your computer, where does it go?” he asked the room.

“To the recycle bin,” someone shouted out.

“Exactly,” Dr. Hew Len said.“It’s still on your computer, but it’s out of sight.Your memories are like that.They are still in you, just out of sight. What you want to do is erase them completely and permanently.”

I found this fascinating, but I had no idea what it meant or where it was going. Why would I want memories permanently deleted?

“You have two ways to live your life,” Dr. Hew Len explained. “From memory or from inspiration. Memories are old programs replaying. Inspiration is the Divine giving you a message.You want to come from inspiration.The only way to hear the Divine and receive inspiration is to clean all memories.The only thing you have to do is clean.”

Dr. Hew Len spent a lot of time explaining how the Divine is our zero state—it’s where we have zero limits. No memories. No identity. Nothing but the Divine. In our lives we have moments of visiting the zero limits state, but most of the time we have garbage—what he calls memories—playing out.

“When I worked at the mental hospital and would look at patients’ charts,” he told us, “I would feel pain inside me. This was a shared memory. It was a program that caused the patients to act the way they did.They had no control. They were caught up in a program. As I felt the program, I cleaned.”

Cleaning became the recurring theme. He told us a variety of ways to clean, most of which I can’t explain here because they are confidential. You have to attend a ho’oponopono workshop to learn them all (see www.hooponopono.org). But here is the method of cleaning Dr. Hew Len used the most, and still uses, and the one I use today:

There are simply four statements that you say over and over, nonstop, addressing them to the Divine. 

“I love you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please forgive me.”

“Thank you.”

As we went through this first weekend event, the phrase “I love you” became part of my mental chatter. Just as sometimes you wake up with a song playing in your head, I’d wake up hearing “I love you” in my head.Whether I consciously said it or not, it was there. It was a beautiful feeling. I didn’t know how it was clearing anything, but I did it anyway. How could “I love you” be bad in any way, shape, or form?

At one point in the event, Dr. Hew Len again singled me out. He asked, “Joseph, how do you know whether something is a memory or an inspiration?”

I didn’t understand the question and said so.

“How do you know if someone who gets cancer gave it to themselves or it was given to them by the Divine as a challenge to help them?”

I was silent for a moment. I tried to process the question. How do you know when an event is from your own mind or from the mind of the Divine?

“I have no idea,” I replied.

“And neither do I,” Dr. Hew Len said. “And that’s why you have to constantly clean, clean, clean.You have to clean on anything and everything, as you have no idea what is a memory and what is inspiration.You clean to get to a place of zero limits, which is the zero state.”

Dr. Hew Len states that our minds have a tiny view of the world, and that view is not only incomplete but also inaccurate. I didn’t buy this concept until I picked up the book, The Wayward Mind by Guy Claxton.

In it Claxton writes of experiments that prove our brains tell us what to do before we consciously decide to do it. In one famous experiment a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet hooked people up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, which showed what was happening in their brains. It revealed that a surge of brain activity took place before the person had the conscious intention to do something, suggesting that the intention came from the unconscious, and then entered conscious awareness.

Claxton writes that Libet “discovered that the intention to move appeared about a fifth of a second before the movement began—but that a surge of activity in the brain reliably appeared about a third of a second before the intention!”

According to William Irvine, in his book, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, “Experiments such as these suggest that our choices are not formed in a conscious, rational manner. Instead, they bubble up from our unconscious mind, and when they finally reach the surface of consciousness we take ownership of them.”

And Benjamin Libet himself, the man who ran the controversial and revealing experiments, wrote in his book, Mind Time: “The unconscious appearance of an intention to act could not be controlled consciously. Only its final consummation in a motor act could be consciously controlled.” 

In other words, the urge to pick up this book may seem like it came from your conscious choice, but in reality your brain first sent a signal to pick it up and then your conscious mind followed with a stated intention, something like,“This book looks interesting. I think I’ll pick
it up.” You could have chosen to not pick up this book, which you would have rationalized in some other way, but you could not control the origin of signal itself that was nudging you to take action.

I know this is hard to believe. According to Claxton,“No intention is ever hatched in consciousness; no plan ever laid there. Intentions are premonitions; icons that flash in the corners of
consciousness to indicate what may be about to occur.”

Apparently a clear intention is nothing more than a clear  premonition.

The thing that troubles me is this: Where did the thought come from?

This is mind-blowing. Since I wrote about the 
power of intention in my book The Attractor 
Factor, and since I spoke about it in the movie 
The Secret, coming to realize intentions aren’t my 
choice at all was a shock. It appears that what I 
thought I was doing when I set an intention was 
simply verbalizing an impulse already in motion 
from my brain.

The question then becomes, what or who made my brain send the intention? In fact, I later asked Dr. Hew Len,“Who’s in charge?” He laughed and said he loved the question.

Well, what’s the answer?

I confess I was still confused about intentions. I 
lost 80 pounds by being mentally tough and 
asserting my intention to lose weight. So was 
declaring an intention or just responding to my 
brain’s signal to lose weight? Was it an inspiration 
or a memory? I wrote and asked Dr. Hew Len. He 
replied, saying:

Nothing exists at Zero, Ao Akua, no problems, 
including the need for intention.

Weight concerns are simply memories replaying, and these memories displace Zero, you. To return to Zero, you, requires Divinity erasing memories behind weight concerns.

Only two laws dictate experiences: Inspiration from Divinity and Memory stored in the Subconscious Mind, the former Brand-New and the latter Old.

Jesus is purported to have said: “Seek ye first the Kingdom (Zero) and all else will be added (Inspiration).”

Zero is the residence of you and Divinity . . . 
“from where and from whom all blessings—
Wealth, Health, and Peace—flow.”

POI, (PEACE OF I)
Dr. Hew Len

From what I could see, Dr. Hew Len was looking past intentions and going to the source—the zero state, where there are zero limits. From there you experience memory or inspiration. Concern about weight is a memory.The only thing to do is love it and forgive it and even give thanks for it. By cleaning it, you ensure that the Divine has a chance to come through with an inspiration.

What appears to be the truth is that my desire to overeat, which made me obese most of my life, was a program. It bubbles up from my unconscious. Unless I clean it, it will stay there and keep bubbling.As it keeps surfacing, I have to keep being aware of my choice: to overeat or not.This ends up being a lifelong battle. It’s no fun.Yes, you can over-ride the tendency to indulge by saying no to it. But obviously, that
takes enormous energy and diligence. In time, saying no to indulging may become a new habit. But what a hell to go through to get there!

Instead, by cleaning on the memory, it will one day disappear.Then the desire to overeat will no longer surface. Only peace will remain.

In short, intention was a limp rag compared to inspiration. As long as I kept intending to do something, I kept fighting with what is. As soon as I gave in to inspiration, life was transformed.

I still wasn’t sure if this was how the world actually worked, and I was still confused about the power of intention. So I decided to keep exploring.

I had dinner with Rhonda Byrne, the creator and producer of the hit movie The Secret. I asked her something I longed to know. I asked, “Did you create the idea for the movie, or did you receive the idea?”


I knew she had received the inspiration to create the now-famous movie trailer that caused a viral marketing epidemic. (See it at www.thesecret.tv.) She once told me that the idea for the movie teaser came to her suddenly and within a few 
seconds. She made the actual preview within 10 
minutes. Clearly she received some sort of 
inspiration that led to the making of the strongest 
movie teaser in history.

But I wanted to know if the idea for the final 
feature movie itself came from inspiration or if 
she felt she did it for some other reasons. This 
was the crux of my concern about intentions.
Were we stating intentions that made a difference 
or receiving ideas that we later called intentions? 
That’s what I asked her as we sat together at dinner.

Rhonda was quiet a long time. She looked off, 
contemplating my question, searching within 
herself for the answer. Finally, she spoke.

“I’m not sure,” she said.“The idea came to me, 
for sure. But I did the work. I created it. So I’d 
say I made it happen.”

Her answer was revealing.The idea came to her, 
which means it came to her as an inspiration. 
Since the movie is so powerful, so well done, and 
so brilliantly marketed, I can only believe it’s all 
the Divine unfolding.Yes, there was work to do, 
and Rhonda did it. But the idea itself came as an 
inspiration.

It’s interesting that after the movie had been out 
for several months and the buzz for it was 
reaching historic proportions, Rhonda sent out 
an e-mail to all the stars in it, saying the movie 
now had a life of its own. Rather than stating 
intentions, she was answering calls and seizing 
opportunities. A book was coming out. Larry King 
was doing a two-part special based on the ideas 
in the movie. An audio version was coming out. 
Sequels were in the works.

When you come from the zero state where there 
are zero limits, you don’t need intentions.You 
simply receive and act.

And miracles happen.

You can stop the inspiration, however.

Rhonda could have said no to the nudge urging her to make the movie. That seems to be where free will comes into play. When the idea to do something appears in your mind—coming from either inspiration or memory—you can choose to act on it or not, if you are aware of the impulse.

According to Jeffrey Schwartz, in his powerful book, The Mind and the Brain, your conscious will—your power to choose—can veto the impulse that started in your unconscious. In other words, you may get the impulse to pick up this book, but 
you can override that impulse if you want to do so. 
That’s free will, or, as Schwartz describes it,“free won’t.”

He writes that “in later years he [Libet] embraced the notion that free will serves as a gatekeeper for thoughts bubbling up from the brain and did not duck the moral implications of that.”

William James, the legendary psychologist, felt that free will took place after the impulse to do something and before you actually did it. Again, you can say yes, or no, to it. It takes mindfulness to see the choice. What Dr. Hew Len was teaching me was by constantly cleaning all thoughts, whether inspiration or memory, I would be better able to choose what was right in that moment.

I began to see that my weight loss came about because I chose not to obey the memory or habit that was nudging me to eat more and exercise less. By choosing not to follow those additive impulses, I was kicking in my free will or free won’t ability. In other words, the urge to overeat was a memory, not an inspiration. It came from a program, not from the Divine. I was ignoring the 
program or over-riding it.What I gathered Dr. 
Hew Len would suggest as a better approach is 
to love the program until it dissolved and all that 
remained was Divinity.

I still didn’t quite understand all of this, but I was listening and choosing to not cancel anything out because it was new. Little did I know what was in store for me next.

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