The Power of Intention

Have you ever wondered if there’s more to life than willpower—that unseen force guiding when things seem to just click effortlessly? In The Power of Intention, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer challenges the conventional idea that intention is a personal act of determination or striving. He instead presents intention as a universal energy field—an invisible force permeating all things, from acorns to galaxies, that exists beyond time and space. By learning to attune ourselves to this creative Source, we can co-create our lives rather than force outcomes through sheer effort.

Dyer’s core argument is simple but radical: Intention isn’t something you do; it’s something you connect with. To live a meaningful life, you don’t manufacture success, love, peace, or creativity—you align yourself with the energy that already sustains and expresses them naturally. This connection requires surrendering ego-driven control and returning to spiritual awareness, where your inner world mirrors the universal consciousness that birthed you.

From Willpower to Connection

For decades, many self-help books (like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich or Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits) have emphasized personal drive and discipline as the engines of achievement. But Dyer invites you to “flip the script”: rather than pushing through resistance, allow yourself to be carried by the same force that grows oceans and rotates planets. This shift from ego-driven effort to energy alignment—what he calls surrender—is the major turning point on the journey to living with purpose.

This “field of intention,” as Dyer borrows from quantum thinkers like David Bohm and Lynne McTaggart (The Field), functions like a cosmic internet. Everything and everyone is already connected to this infinite Source—what mystics call Spirit, Tao, or God. When you recognize that connection, you awaken “silent knowledge,” a term from Carlos Castaneda describing intuitive awareness beyond rational thought. This knowing reveals that life isn’t random: you are a co-creator with the universe.

The Seven Faces of Intention

Dyer translates this abstract principle into seven spiritual qualities he calls the “faces of intention”: creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, abundance, and receptivity. When you live these qualities daily, you act “in harmony” with the Source. Each one represents the vibrational frequency of the divine, and embodying them reshapes how energy flows through your relationships, your health, and your goals. In other words, what you are is what you attract.

For instance, if anger, fear, or scarcity dominate your thoughts, you disconnect from the field. But if your thoughts radiate love, generosity, and joy, life mirrors that vibration back. Dyer ties this not just to spirituality but to physics: energy attracts like energy. This principle is central both to Dyer’s metaphysical framework and to practical application—your emotions are guidance systems letting you know how aligned you are with intention.

Cleansing the Link from Ego to Spirit

If we’re all born tapped into this Source, why do we forget? Dyer blames our over-identification with ego, which manifests in six false beliefs: I am what I have, I am what I do, I am what others think of me, I am separate from others, I am separate from what is missing in my life, and I am separate from God. These distortions form barriers between us and intention. Releasing them—through meditation, humility, and a shift from competition to cooperation—restores our natural awareness of oneness.

He illustrates this with a vivid childhood image: as a small boy on a Detroit streetcar, he couldn’t reach the handles above his head, so he imagined floating up to grab them. This became a lifelong metaphor for reconnecting to intention—when life feels heavy, float upward spiritually and grab onto the trolley strap of divine flow. In surrendering control and trusting the “trolley of intention,” you’re carried naturally where you’re meant to go.

Why This Matters

To Dyer, personal peace isn’t a luxury—it’s a spiritual duty. When you choose to feel good, even in a world filled with conflict, you become a conduit for higher energy. This shift has ripple effects beyond your individual life. Drawing on research from David R. Hawkins (Power vs. Force), Dyer argues that one person aligned with love and joy can energetically counterbalance thousands who vibrate at lower frequencies of fear or anger. Thus, your connection to intention isn’t private mysticism; it’s planetary service.

Throughout the book, Dyer balances mystical insights with concrete steps—from the “five magic words” (I want to feel good!) to practices of gratitude, meditation, and kindness. Across twenty chapters, he applies intention to every aspect of life: family relationships, abundance, health, stress, authenticity, purpose, and world peace. He insists that you don’t create by changing things outside; you transform your life by changing how you see. As he often repeats, “Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.”

Ultimately, The Power of Intention is not about manifesting parking spaces or wealth—though those may follow—but about experiencing a continuous mystical union with Source. It’s a manual for aligning your everyday thoughts with the cosmic heart of creation, where serenity, trust, and joy are your natural state. In that awareness, what once felt impossible falls effortlessly into place. Dyer’s message is both simple and empowering: You were intended here by an infinite, loving universe. Live like it.

Dyer describes the creative field of intention as a vast ocean made of seven divine attributes. By embodying them, you attune yourself to the universal mind and invite its infinite creativity into your life. These aren’t abstract virtues—they are energetic frequencies that alter how you think, feel, and attract experiences.

Creativity and Kindness

Everything begins with creativity—the face of intention that brings matter into form. Just as an acorn knows how to grow into an oak, you carry a “future pull” of your potential. Living creatively means cooperating with life’s flow rather than struggling against it. From this creativity springs kindness, another essential vibration. Dyer notes research showing that acts of kindness increase serotonin in both giver and receiver (and even in witnesses). Literally, kindness heals biochemically.

Love and Beauty

Love is the third face—what Dyer calls “the energy that creates worlds.” Love dissolves hatred the way light dissolves darkness because it vibrates faster. This energy expresses itself as beauty, the fourth face, manifesting truth and harmony in all creation. He quotes Viktor Frankl and Mother Teresa to show that perceiving beauty—even in suffering—allows us to transcend our circumstances. When you look for the beautiful, you reconstruct your world to match the field’s creative rhythm.

Expansion, Abundance, and Receptivity

Life’s nature, Dyer writes, is perpetual expansion. Contraction—fear, control, or scarcity—is ego’s illusion. The fifth face, expansion, leads directly to the sixth: unlimited abundance. The universe cannot withhold itself; every sunrise proves boundless supply. To mirror that truth, train yourself to radiate abundance consciousness: focus on gratitude for what you already have and stop rehearsing lack. The final face, receptivity, completes the cycle. Spirit never discriminates—it is open to all. To receive, you must empty ego, stop judging, and learn to say “Yes” to life’s flow.

Together these seven faces form a model for living as intention itself. They describe what divine energy looks like when it takes human form. As Dyer emphasizes, “you can’t know the Creator unless you become like the Creator.” By deliberately aligning with these faces, you turn ordinary actions—cooking dinner, helping a friend—into spiritual co-creation.

Despite being born connected to the Source, most of us feel separate because of mental and emotional habits. Dyer outlines three major barriers that block this connection: negative inner dialogue, low vibrational energy, and self-importance. Each obstacle, when noticed and reversed, becomes a doorway back to the field of intention.

Taming the Inner Dialogue

Your thoughts create the world you experience. Complaining, resenting, or focusing on what’s missing keeps you aligned with lack. Dyer recommends replacing these thoughts with intention statements—e.g., instead of “I’m always stressed,” say “I intend to live in peace.” These reframed affirmations are not magical chants but energetic realignments. What you speak within becomes your point of attraction.

Raising Your Energy Frequency

Every thought or emotion has a measurable energy, as shown in David Hawkins’s Power vs. Force. High vibrations like love, forgiveness, and joy uplift both you and those around you. Dyer offers practical methods: mindful eating, time in nature, reducing exposure to violent media, practicing gratitude, and meditation. Even small upgrades in energy—replacing judgment with curiosity or annoyance with humor—begin to harmonize you with Spirit’s rhythm.

Letting Go of Self-Importance

Ego thrives on feeling superior, offended, or indispensable. Dyer, echoing Castaneda, warns that “self-importance requires one to spend life being offended.” The remedy is humility: stop needing to win, be right, or impress others. Paradoxically, letting go of control restores authentic influence. When ego dissolves, service replaces striving, and you naturally reflect the peaceful power of the Source.

By transforming these three blocks, you become “unobstructed Spirit.” You rejoin the flow of intention not by force but through awareness and surrender—a theme echoed in Buddhist mindfulness and Christian mysticism alike.

Dyer invites you to view yourself not as a finite body seeking spiritual experiences but as an infinite spiritual being having a temporary human one. When you detach from identification with form, fear—especially fear of death—dissolves. You realize you can never be separate from the Source because infinity has no boundaries.

The Active vs. Inactive Side of Infinity

Living on the inactive side means believing you’re defined by time, space, and mortality; life feels random, and death feels final. On the active side, you live consciously aware of your eternal nature. From that awareness arise what Dyer calls the eight signs of infinite living: destiny, possibility, awe, humility, generosity, knowing, passion, and belonging. Each expresses a facet of eternal consciousness—for instance, humility dissolves ego, and possibility expands creativity beyond perceived limits.

Freedom Through Eternal Awareness

When you understand your infinite nature, nothing external dictates your joy. Dyer quotes Gandhi’s insight, “Infinite patience produces immediate results”: once you trust divine timing, anxiety fades. He also offers a playful mantra: announce, “I’m complete in my incompleteness.” Accepting that life’s work is never done frees you from the stress of finishing—it shifts you into gratitude for the now, the only moment infinity ever offers.

This theme resonates deeply with Eckhart Tolle’s later teachings in The Power of Now. Both argue that enlightenment is not an escape from reality but a deep immersion in the eternal presence underlying it. For Dyer, embracing infinity transforms not only personal peace but also global consciousness: each person who awakens lessens humanity’s collective fear of death and separation.

Stress, Dyer insists, is not an external condition but a creation of the ego. When you’re aligned with intention, peace becomes your natural state. To live stress‑free is to live remembering your Source.

Rule Number 6: Don’t Take Yourself So Seriously

Borrowed from Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility, “Rule Number 6” is Dyer’s favorite antidote to anxiety. When your ego clamors for importance—cutting in line, demanding attention, competing to be right—gently laugh and say this rule aloud. Humor punctures tension instantly. Dyer recounts using it while waiting behind a slow customer at a pharmacy: transforming irritation into gratitude by seeing the person as an “angel” sent to teach patience.

Five Magic Words: I Want to Feel Good

These words are not complacent but creative—they signify choosing vibrational alignment with joy despite circumstances. Dyer reminds you that feeling good is not selfish or naïve; it’s your spiritual responsibility because only from peace can you serve others. When you affirm “I intend to feel good,” you dissolve resistance and reopen the channel to intention’s tranquility.

The Path of Least Resistance

Nature operates effortlessly: rivers flow, grass grows, without struggle. Stress emerges when we resist this flow. Dyer’s ten‑step program for tranquility emphasizes returning to joy as our natural state, monitoring thoughts of tension, observing babies as models of innate happiness, meditating, and living in gratitude. By choosing happiness first, you paradoxically attract solutions and ease. His refrain, echoing Job 22:28, summarizes it: “Decide on a matter, and it will be established for you.”

In practice, peace isn’t the absence of problems but the presence of a higher vibration that transforms how problems appear. As Thomas Merton wrote, “Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.” Dyer helps us replace insecurity with spiritual certainty: you are already the peace you seek.

To Dyer, prosperity isn’t achieved through striving—it’s realized through alignment. The universe is endlessly abundant; scarcity exists only in perception. Feeling successful therefore precedes visible success, because vibration precedes manifestation.

Changing How You Look at Things

Drawing from quantum physics, Dyer notes that observation influences reality: the way you look at a particle changes the particle itself. Likewise, shift your viewpoint from lack to plenty and your world reorganizes. Stop requesting abundance “someday,” and start affirming “I am abundance.” The creative Source responds not to begging but to being. As he writes, “The universe doesn’t know scarcity.”

The Art of Allowing

Your task is not to earn blessings but to remove resistance to their flow. Worry, guilt, and skepticism act like kinks in a hose. Allowing means trusting the intelligence of the universe by maintaining joy and detaching from outcomes. In this non‑resistant state, abundance flows as naturally as breath.

Detachment and Generosity

Because everything is energy in motion, hoarding stagnates the flow. Dyer teaches detachment not as indifference but as faith—knowing that what comes through you continues to circulate. Generosity anchors you in the same rhythm as the Source, which constantly gives without depletion. In his ten‑step plan, he urges practicing gratitude, acting “as if,” monitoring emotions as guidance toward alignment, and using meditation to re‑tune to abundance.

In essence, success is not something you achieve but something you radiate. When you merge your identity with the abundance that birthed you, material success becomes a reflection of spiritual truth rather than its substitute.

In the book’s final portrait, Dyer synthesizes his philosophy into a living example: the “Connector.” This person is ordinary in appearance but extraordinary in consciousness. Connectors live in harmony with the power of intention, experiencing synchronicity, peace, and effortless manifestation.

Traits of a Connector

Connectors refuse to entertain doubt. They think and speak from certainty—“I intend to create this, and I know it will happen.” They practice gratitude constantly, feel unity with all beings, and use intuition rather than logic to make decisions. Adversity doesn’t shake them; they see blessings in disguise. They avoid gossip, judgment, and low‑energy news, choosing instead to radiate calm. Their energy uplifts everyone nearby, causing others to feel loved and peaceful without being persuaded verbally.

Living Laws of Attraction and Kindness

For Connectors, coincidence is divine coordination. They expect cooperation from the universe because they themselves are cooperative. They are generous, creative, inquisitive, humble, and endlessly expanding. Their favorite mantra might as well be “Thank you.” When others comment on their “luck,” they smile knowingly, aware that alignment—not luck—creates flow.

Dyer’s portrait recalls Maslow’s self‑actualized person, but infused with spiritual radiance. By thinking from the end, feeling good regardless of circumstances, and embodying the seven faces of intention, Connectors show what it looks like when Spirit fully inhabits human form. The invitation is clear: this isn’t a mythical state—it’s your natural one once you remember who you really are.