The Buddha's teachings all start with the power of intention. Your mind is what shapes your experience. You’re not just passive recipients.

"I was giving a Dhamma talk on kamma up in the Bay Area. After the talk, a woman came up and said, “You know, this made me think, ‘Maybe my life isn’t determined by my DNA after all.’” I was surprised. She’d been going to Dhamma talks for a fair while and yet was still able to maintain the idea that somehow DNA determined everything that was going to happen in her life, everything she was going to do.

But then, it is easy to have that view in conjunction with a lot of stuff that’s taught as Dhamma these days: the idea that there’s really no self there, that things are just happening on their own, and the only way to find happiness is to get out of the way. Don’t have any desires for anything to happen differently from the way it is. Just accept things as they are and be done with it.

That’s what they say, but that’s not what the Buddha taught. His teachings all start with the power of intention. Your mind is what shapes your experience. You’re not just passive recipients. If we act as passive recipients, our lives would be like the motion of dust motes in the air, what they call Brownian motion, where things just bump up against each other. And if you were to draw a map of the motions of one dust mote through the air, it’d be a lot of random zigzags.

But as the Buddha said, our identity as a being centers around the fact that we have a need to feed. It’s a reciprocal relationship: You need to be a being in order to find food, but because you’re a being you need food. Our intentions shape what we experience, and for most of us, that’s the intention: to feed either physically or emotionally. We’re constantly on the lookout for some sort of sustenance.

But, as the Buddha said, that’s why we suffer. This doesn’t mean that intention is bad. It simply means that we have to redirect it. This is why we meditate. We’re learning how to shape our intentions, to get more control over them, so that our random moods don’t take over, and we can actually decide what we want to do with our lives.

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Power of Intention"

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