Field training students often are curious about the role of action in deliberate intending. In our view, actions follow naturally, spontaneously, and inevitably from intentions. So how we move through the world corresponds to the identity choices we’re making, wittingly or not.
The only reference to action in the Course is in the direction to “do what’s before us to do,” with a note that this may or may not have anything obvious to do with what we’ve deliberately intended.
For example, I may be deliberately intending financial success, and find that what’s before me to do, right now, in the living present, is wash the dishes. In that case, washing the dishes is the right action, because failing to do what’s before us to do invariably arises from counterintentions.
It isn’t surprising, then, from a Field training point of view, that failing to wash the dishes when washing the dishes is before us to do may move through the nonlocal concatenation of causes and effects in a way that somehow postpones financial success—or whatever other fulfillment we’ve claimed inwardly.
Action, of course, would not be central in any consciousness-as-cause model, except insofar as it contributes to one’s deliberately chosen state of consciousness relevant to the action.
In Seth/Jane Roberts’s book, The Nature of Personal Reality, Seth/Jane advises us, after making the required alteration in consciousness, to make some gesture to show ourselves that we believe in what we’re doing, meaning that we believe in the new identity.
In the case of intending financial abundance, it might mean spending a few dollars more than we may think we can afford in the faith that somehow the money will come into our reality.
There’s a similar idea in the approach Huna takes to conscious creating—Huna being Polynesian shamanism as practiced by the kahunas. They, too, regarded a gesture, some action in the world, as an important part of the creative process.
Field training doesn’t include this idea for the simple reason that, in practical terms, the idea almost entails the strategic, premeditating approach that Field training diligently avoids, holding as it does that any such approach immediately implicates us in the contradiction of believing in the very condition we’re aiming
to change through belief.
Even in Seth/Jane’s book, the essential gesture is described as having the aim of convincing us that what we’ve claimed inwardly is true.
So, the action serves as something like an anchor that gives the new belief greater credibility in what might be regarded as a kind of biofeedback reinforcement.
Field training prefers the idea that such “gestures” occur spontaneously and naturally, commensurate with the thoroughness of our alignment in the new identity.
Believing wholeheartedly that one has financial means that one believed, in the previous identity, one lacked, naturally expresses itself in the sort of actions that Seth?Jane/Huna regard as part of their “method.”
You can see in this word method the first inkling of strategy that Field training considers problematic. If our alignment is not thorough—that is, if we’re still “bilocated” in the language of Field theory, then a situation will come up that presents us with two options, each one representing one of the bilocated identities.
Often test situations come unexpectedly, and we don’t realize until later that we were tested—that is, confronted with a situation in which we had to choose, wittingly or not, to remain true to the new version of self or revert to the former identity, complete with its payoff and price.
These aren’t tests that one can pass or fail; they simply reveal in the most practical terms, who one is being, thus giving us the opportunity either to express our alignment or to deepen it in newfound resolve.
In our view, the new sense of oneself is like a stone thrown into the center of the lake of reality. From it, ripples move out in all directions, showing up as new thoughts and feelings, new actions, and new conditions—all moving effortlessly through the medium of our being-here, while we rest at the center.
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