Intent your personal expression Your purpose in life has nothing to do with fate Imagining that fate governs your actions is a misinterpretation of your subconscious knowledge regarding your life's intentional leanings. In the future, should life-changing events appear to have no explanation, say to yourself, my purpose took hold, rather than, it must have been fate. purpose: Recall from Part 2 of the article Before Your Beginning this succinct definition of your life s Your purpose is your own unique goal that you plan to attain in this lifetime while utilizing the directional impetus coming from your personal families of intent. The goal is a Self-developmental one set by your Essence self, under the direction of your families of intent. Your inner self 1 (emissary of your Essence self) constantly seeks to remind you of this spiritual directive, particularly when you are way off track. (See Part 2 of Before Your Beginning if you need a refresher.) I reiterate that, for most of us, it is extremely unlikely that there is but one particular occupation that we must follow in order to fulfil our purpose in life. However, armed with a conscious knowledge of our own intentional drives, we become far more able to find fulfilment in whatever occupation we choose to become involved with. Moreover, with these psychological footings, we become more confident in approaching the developmental elements within our purpose namely, the challenges we aim to explore and resolve. You can think of the families of consciousness as a palette of nine main colors that you use to paint your reality. As with Picasso and his blue 2 period, you restrict your use of color to the hues and tones of one of the families, apply definition with the hues and tones of another, and occasionally make use of the remainder. Like Picasso, you explore and experiment with your chosen primary color for a time in the case of primary intent (family of alignment), for a lifetime. Page 1
Choosing your own expressions of intent Seth and Elias make the important point that when it comes to choosing your intentional leanings, your individuality comes first. What they mean is that as Consciousness begins to coalesce into your Essence self with its unique vibrational signature, the psychic structures that contribute to your physical expression are also in configuration, which includes your intentional drives. Your primary intent becomes your innate intent, which fuels the balancing and learning activities of your Essence self working within its family of belonging. Remember that your Essence self incorporates and manages many physical expressions individualized portions of itself that your ego-self regards as other lifetimes. Elias states that your Essence is not born into a particular family of intent, nor does it so much choose it; it magnates [sic] to one, "the family being the magnet. You within your individual intents are the metals being drawn to the families." 3 Or as Seth puts it, "Your individuality places you in a particular family or species of consciousness." 4 The complexities behind this process include balancing processes of the collective psyche and intent of human consciousness a subject beyond the scope of my introductory aim here. When it comes to your current personality s family of alignment, again, highly complex issues are involved, but, yes, you or more accurately, your Essence self get to choose this one. Well sort of! The decision about your current personality s psychic structure and nuances of intent are inexorably linked to the balancing of your overall Self s identity and individuality. Your Essence usually chooses one family for alignment, but it may have you align with more than one again, a complexity that we shall leave for another time. Your Essence carries out this alignment process before you are physically born. Elias states: Each individual manifest [current personality] incorporates an intent, a reason that they have manifest into this physical reality, an intent that they had focused upon before they chose to manifest within this physical reality. 5 So the choosing of families of intent is subtle in its action. If intent is all about growth and evolution through creation and experience, then choices need to be made on how this is achieved. As we are imbued with intent, we consequently always have choice, even when it comes to choosing our families of intent. During our lives, it is possible to change our allegiances to the families, although according to Elias such changes are extremely rare. When asked about the importance of knowing our families of affiliation, Elias stated that its value is in the understanding of our Selves, our personal intent, and the subsequent realities we create for ourselves. A serious warning added to this statement was that we should not overplay the importance of this knowledge. We collectively entertain belief systems at present that stimulate a need in some of us to exaggerate important concepts for self-centered (egotistical) Page 2
reasons, or to foolishly imagine that an ultimate blueprint exists to explain all of creation. Elias states: The importance should not be exaggerated to be all-consuming; for this creates more belief systems, and you shall create your cults around your belief systems of your families! 6 Colorful characters Elias informs us that each family can, tentatively, be assigned a color because each has a particular tone and resonance that we can associate with the different wavelengths of light perceived as colors. (You may perceive a color or colors when you practice Exercise 1, Touching Your Tone. If so, this could be an echo of your unique intentional tone.) We can extend this analogy between color and intent somewhat further. We know that within the seven distinct hues in the color spectrum are millions of different shades. Similarly, within the nine distinguishing hues of the families of intent there are myriad tones, or subdivisions of the originating family. Even though certain colors associate with the families of intent, thus hinting at possible familial subdivisions, we should not get carried away with a Victorian love for categorization. Whereas partitioning structures of matter can aid our understanding of physicality, it is not a reliable method for fathoming the features of our consciousness. In the subjective world of shifting vibrational boundaries, we need to dissolve our desire for division. The defining lines between the different hues of our personalities are very thin. Think of the subtlety in difference between identical twins within a conventional family. Surface, physical features may well be virtually the same, and preferences within lifestyle choices may be remarkably similar too, but distinctions certainly remain within their personalities. According to the channeled literature, our primordial psychic groupings are not absolute truths, 7 as they either do not exist or have different characteristics in other dimensions. They are, however, the guiding forces behind all choices and decisions we make in creating our individual and collective realities. Our choices, then, do have some limitations, although from our simplified physical perspective there would appear to be none. Limitations are confined only by the manner in which intent is explored through the collective psyche of humanity. Human consciousness is entering a phase of dramatic expansion and further sophistication. Another level of complexity within selfawareness awaits us. Total Self-awareness affords us the opportunity to take our individuation to new heights in terms of choosing our experiences. A contemporary coincidence Many channeled sources refer to coincidence or synchronicity. Contrary to the scientific worldview s assessment of the phenomenon as inconsequential a happening due to nothing Page 3
more than chance metaphysical teachers insist greater meaning is behind that type of occurrence. While searching a plethora of personality-profiling systems to find a contemporary approach to somewhat validate the metaphysical families of characteristics and intentional roles, I came across the Enneagram system. I took a closer look because of the coincidence of its nine basic types. Further study confirmed parallels in thinking that indicate an intuitive, deeper understanding of the concept of human intent. One example is the use of differing colors in the explanatory text, reflecting the analogy of the hues and tones of color referenced earlier. The origins of Enneagram theory are clouded by the mists of time. It is believed to have been part of a program of spiritual enlightenment passed down through several religious doctrines, primarily Sufi mysticism from Islam. George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866 1949), a spiritual teacher around the time of Carl G. Jung (1875 1961), devised a self-development system originally called the Fourth Way and later The Work, which revived interest in Enneagram theory. Present-day proponents of the enneagram system have taken up Jung s ideas on the Self and the psyche to explain the idiosyncrasies of its personality-profiling system. Like a family of intent, an enneatype doesn t so much define who you are (your personality) as it does what you are drawn to do. Like your family of alignment, your enneatype is a lifelong psychological patterning. The system even encompasses a secondary influencing feature of the personality, called a "wing," which can be equated with the subtle persuasions of your Essence s family of belonging. It may be that Gurdjieff and his forebears when formulating the Enneagram system were channeling into a vein of knowledge deep within their subconscious minds. The relative popularity of the system over the last century suggests that the families-of-consciousness metaphor to explain human intent is a more recent interpretation of the knowledge. Channeled guides categorically state that there is no such thing as a true coincidence; a coincidence, they say, emanates from your Essence self as a means by which your inner self can get your ego-self's attention. There is always a meaning associated with coincidence, although for your conscious-mind to fathom exactly what the meaning is can prove a formidable task. In this particular instance, the synchronicity I referred to suggests the greater meaning of the value of the Enneagram system. Do the families and enneatype descriptions match up? Some characteristics do in fact transfer across the systems admirably, but by no means do the groupings completely match. However, if we bear in mind the myriad combinations involved in the expression of intent, the subtlety of enunciation, the overlapping nature of their hues, and the varying of the family brought to the fore in respect to the circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find such a looseness of fit. Page 4
Again, our desire to delineate and categorize physical things does not decode too well when dealing with the non-physical psyche. Enneagram theory nonetheless remains a valiant attempt to fathom the complexity of intent when expressed through the human psyche. 8 Exercise 3. Finding Your Alignment. The aim of the exercise is to make you consciously aware of your family of alignment. When you ve repeated this exercise a few times, you should have a reasonable idea of which roles you are naturally inclined to adopt and/or what form of activity consistently brings you enjoyment and fulfillment. The notes and doodles you make will offer clues about your intentional leanings. You will need to have your work journal and pen handy for making notes and sketches. ENDNOTES: 1 Your inner self is an aspect of your Essence that is elaborated upon in later course material. For now, realize that your inner self uses a number of different methods to remind you of your purpose and keep you on its path, including feelings and emotions, impulses, and coincidental or synchronous occurrences. 2 It is interesting to note that the color blue, according to Elias, has a vibrational frequency closely associated with the tonal frequency of the Artists/Sumari intent family. Perhaps Picasso s blue period coincided with an inner impulse to express the Sumari intent within him creativity through his art to initiate change in artistic appreciation. His blue period (1901-1903) coincided with depressive interludes following the death of his friend Carlos Casagemas. 3 Ennis, M. (1996), as Elias, session 67. See www.eliasforum.org/transcripts. 4 Roberts, J., The Unknown Reality: Volume II. A Seth Book. New York: Prentice Hall Press; 1979, p. 562. 5 Ennis, M. (1995), ibid, session 59. 6 Ennis, M. (1997), ibid, session 185. 7 An absolute truth is something that remains consistent across all dimensions of Consciousness, not just applicable to the physical dimension and human consciousness. Page 5 8 For more information on the Enneagram go to https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/.