The following is quoted from Shakti Gawain's book "Creative Visualization." She outlines the process through which "intent" is formed.

"There are three elements within you which determine how successfully creative visualization will work for you in any given situation:

1. Desire. You must have a true desire to have or create that which you have chosen to visualize. By desire I don’t mean addictive, grasping desire, but a clear, strong feeling of purpose. Ask yourself “Do I truly, in my heart, desire this goal to be realized?”

2. Belief. The more you believe in your chosen goal and the possibility of attaining it, the more certain you will be to do so. Ask yourself “Do I believe that this goal can exist?” and “Do I believe that it is possible for me to realize or attain it?”

3. Acceptance. You must be willing to accept and have that which you are seeking. Sometimes we pursue goals without actually wanting to attain them; we are more comfortable with the process of pursuing. Ask yourself “Am I really willing to have this completely?”

The sum total of these three elements is what I call your intention. When you have total intention to create something---that is you deeply desire it, you completely believe that you can do it, and you are totally willing to have it---it simply cannot fail to manifest, and usually within a very short time.

The clearer and stronger your intention, the more quickly and easily your creative visualization will work. In any given situation, ask yourself about the condition of your intention. If it is weak or uncertain, it can often be strengthened by affirming:

I now have total intention to create this here and now!"

Creative visualization is the process of imaging in your mind the goal you want to achieve.

This is another poem by Michael Burkard. The poem speaks to the scapegoating by people in our culture of persons who are different. It may also suggest that the subject boy enjoys so much integrity that he has little or no shadow. We may feel the need to psychologically project our shadow stuff onto the boy who is to good to be true. Notice the first person is used in the first stanza, while the third person is used for the remainder of the poem.


THE BOY WHO HAD NO SHADOW

One thing led to another:
if I have no shadow
I will eventually be followed
by those who do have shadows.
Sooner or later they will greet me
at the river and, judging me
as peculiar, will shove me into the river
to drown.

And the boy who had no shadow was correct.
But before he was shoved into the river,
days and days before, he was asked innocent
questions by innocent bystanders:
“Does your mother have a shadow?”
“Were you conceived in the shadow?”
“Are you perhaps your own version
of your own shadow?”

And them were difficult questions
because he had no answer
---or, the boy who had no shadow
had no answer.


So they thought he was up to no good.
The questions became less innocent.
And because, by now, he was also judged
as not belonging to any crucial historical epoch,
he was shoved into the river
and kept beneath the surface by poles.

Not a particularly unique circumstance.
But the reason was unique and they knew that.
So, just to be sure, just to be sure
the boy had now shadow, they kept him down for days.

Lest the shadow which he had not,
which he had been murdered for,
escape in the river and flee.

Chuck

I played a game as a boy in which I tried to get away from my shadow; no matter how hard I tried I could not get away from it. As an adult I learned from Carl Jung that I have a shadow repressed in my unconscious that I cannot get away from. All the things I want to disown about my self are there in the shadow. Richard Strauss composed, “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (The Woman without a shadow). She descends from a God so she cannot bear a child, and, this defines her as not having a shadow. Ultimately she has to become human and bear a child or her husband will turn to stone. For our purposes to be human is to have a shadow. I soon take a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses and each of the three main characters, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Daedalus, possess significant shadow.

Roland Barthes would probably approve of Joyce’s characters as he says, “There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow, without the “dominant ideology”; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of the Woman without a Shadow). The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.” The chiaroscuro is the binary opposition of light and dark. I agree with Barthes that a text without a shadow is sterile. So much of my life is keeping pace with the moments of light and the moments of dark.