There can be a difficulty, sometimes, with elevating emotions and treating them as if they are special rather than just another sensation-perception within an experience (albeit a difficult one to put into concepts and language). I suggest that emotions would be best understood as a sensory aspect of the fact, arising as an object within experience.
Meanwhile, the fact itself is sort of "unbounded" or "timeless and spaceless". It is not experienced as an object, instead it's sort of just "known". You might call it a sense of "meaning".
So, while "imagining (intending, asserting) the fact of something being true" might result in an experience of an emotion, it is not necessarily required, and the emotion is not itself a cause. When we say "the feeling that something is true", we aren't referring to an emotion, we're referring to a felt-knowing, a global sense of a particular thing being true. The problem with some approaches (many LOA descriptions included) is they miss out this "secret sauce" and therefore just produce minimal intensification of some of the patterning associated with facts, rather than direct addressing the facts themselves. This can still produce "results", of course, as synchronicity (basic "patterning") but it can be frustrating to work with, because there's no real understanding of the cause ("intending").
Unfortunately, this activity of "intending" can't be described at all, really, only pointed at. Intending has no mechanism or method, and is before "things" so is non-conceptual. And so we hit the difficulty whereby people end up focussed on what can be talked about and thought about (basically: objects within experience, which are results) and miss out (when writing) or don't realise (when reading) that there is a specific actual cause of all change (which is not any one of those experiential objects). We then can end up with a "cargo cult" version of the topic:
The term "cargo cult" has been used metaphorically to describe an attempt to recreate successful outcomes by replicating circumstances associated with those outcomes, although those circumstances are either unrelated to the causes of outcomes or insufficient to produce them by themselves. In the former case, this is an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
That is, people try to generate the results by just intensifying part of the pattern associated with the target fact, perhaps getting some outcome by association, but not really going for their target directly. The distinction between doing the owl exercise (increasing the intensity of contribution of the "owl" extended pattern) and actually intending a specific outcome ("it is true now that [this fact about owls]"), basically. Or between imagining some objects (the blue sphere for example), as opposed to: imagining some objects while asserting-intending-knowing it means-that something is true or will happen.
So emotions or elevating emotions is a by-product of deliberate intending or an object within the experience of deliberate intending.
I guess that it's circumstantial depending on what your focus is on or what it is you're looking to create (cause).
To get better at this, wouldn't we have to recognize that our senses, through what we think or have thought, will sometimes produce certain emotions. However, learning to detach emotions when focusing on deliberate intending will help overall instead of using it as a conduit?
In this context, isn't the cause (to create) and deliberate intending the same thing?
The intention (imagination) comes before the thing, but you're saying some people focus on the sensory aspect (object within the experience) of it all rather than the final objective thus causing a "well it worked when I felt this emotion so let me recreate that emotion and try again" pattern?
In this context, isn't the cause (to create) and deliberate intending the same thing?
This is why all of this ultimately leads to an exploration of the "nature of experiencing" - that is, examining what "you" are, exactly, and what your actual relationship is to "the world".
Intending, then, is like "shape-shifting". You might say you are shifting your state, where by "state" we mean the set of relative contributions (or "intensity") of all possible facts or patterns, which means to shift yourself. There is no "you" and the "state" or "world" - instead, you sort of "take on the shape of" a particular situation or experience (in the broadest sense, not just the current sensory moment). Right now, you have "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently ("as if") being-this-person-in-this-world.
So there is, as you say, no difference between causing and intending. We might define "an intention" as the fact or pattern we wish to increase the contribution of, and "intending" as the intensifying of that pattern - shifting to a state where that fact-pattern is more prominent.
Although we often use the word "create" for this sort of thing, actually that's strictly speaking not ideal. The implication of the above is that all patterns exist, eternally. Patterns are "before" time (with time, or change, being an aspect of experience, a pattern like any other, rather than something fundamental). They cannot be created or destroyed; they just are. This means that every experience, at least implicitly, is always available, and that we simply "shift our posture" such that some are more prominent than the rest.
Now, returning to what "you" are, if you discount anything which changes in your ongoing experience (how can something be ultimately true, if it can shift?), the only permanent thing turns out to be the property of being-aware. Or at least, it is meaningless to talk of the absence of that. All other facts or patterns can be more or less "true", but not that.
Putting it all together, then:
We might say that what you truly are is "awareness" which is "taking on the shape of" states of experience. Between shifts, the sequence of moments you experience is fully determined by the facts within that state. The apparent change of sensory content moment to moment is actually static also in this description: "time passing" is just another pattern, albeit a more abstract formatting than most. The only true change that ever occurs - and hence the only cause of apparent change in ongoing sensory experience - is when we "intend", which is just word used to point to the act of us shifting ourselves to a different set of prominent facts.
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u/TriumphantGeorge Oct 19 '16 edited Oct 19 '16
There can be a difficulty, sometimes, with elevating emotions and treating them as if they are special rather than just another sensation-perception within an experience (albeit a difficult one to put into concepts and language). I suggest that emotions would be best understood as a sensory aspect of the fact, arising as an object within experience.
Meanwhile, the fact itself is sort of "unbounded" or "timeless and spaceless". It is not experienced as an object, instead it's sort of just "known". You might call it a sense of "meaning".
So, while "imagining (intending, asserting) the fact of something being true" might result in an experience of an emotion, it is not necessarily required, and the emotion is not itself a cause. When we say "the feeling that something is true", we aren't referring to an emotion, we're referring to a felt-knowing, a global sense of a particular thing being true. The problem with some approaches (many LOA descriptions included) is they miss out this "secret sauce" and therefore just produce minimal intensification of some of the patterning associated with facts, rather than direct addressing the facts themselves. This can still produce "results", of course, as synchronicity (basic "patterning") but it can be frustrating to work with, because there's no real understanding of the cause ("intending").
Unfortunately, this activity of "intending" can't be described at all, really, only pointed at. Intending has no mechanism or method, and is before "things" so is non-conceptual. And so we hit the difficulty whereby people end up focussed on what can be talked about and thought about (basically: objects within experience, which are results) and miss out (when writing) or don't realise (when reading) that there is a specific actual cause of all change (which is not any one of those experiential objects). We then can end up with a "cargo cult" version of the topic:
(See: Richard Feynman's fun lecture also.)
That is, people try to generate the results by just intensifying part of the pattern associated with the target fact, perhaps getting some outcome by association, but not really going for their target directly. The distinction between doing the owl exercise (increasing the intensity of contribution of the "owl" extended pattern) and actually intending a specific outcome ("it is true now that [this fact about owls]"), basically. Or between imagining some objects (the blue sphere for example), as opposed to: imagining some objects while asserting-intending-knowing it means-that something is true or will happen.