322. Intended Futures

Even the best intentions can produce suffering. Even when our desires and beliefs are perfectly aligned with principles of care, consideration, and cooperation, we can suffer because of them.

Intentions are future-oriented entities. They are formed by judgments we make about how we want our future to be. When we act primarily on our intentions, we also become future-oriented. Our every moment is then consumed by thoughts and feelings about how our future will be and how it might differ from the ideal constructed by our intentions. This happens because we easily become attached to our intentions.

When we are attached, we identify with our desires, aversions, and beliefs, and when we identify, it feels necessary to seek out the things we desire, to avoid the things we hate and fear, and to confirm our beliefs. To act instead from compassion does not require us to change our intentions, but only to allow ourselves adequate distance from them. Our intentions can then exist freely as the future-oriented entities they are, while we ourselves exist wholly in the present, sensitive and responsive to what is most needed and necessary right now.

With greater awareness, our desires, aversions, and beliefs will shift, but this shift cannot itself bring an end to suffering. Regardless of the nature of our intentions, attachment remains possible, which means suffering remains possible. It is only by changing our relationship with all of our intentions — both good and bad — from one of attachment to one of liberation that awareness can overcome suffering.

Freed from our attachments, we will not act primarily from intention but from compassion. We will do so because we will see the suffering of living beings, how it arises, and how it can be stopped. We will see the action that is most needed in each and every moment, and we will bring it about through the best available means.