One of the major concerns of religion and spirituality is how to influence the future so that bad things don't happen and desired things do. In theistic religion, this is accomplished by praying to God for his aid and protection. In nature religion, it's accomplished by bringing one's fears and desires into harmony with the natural flow of life. In the various esoteric and occult spiritualities (from freemasonry to witchcraft, Hermeticism to Kabbala, A Course in Miracles to est, Religious Science to the New Age), it is accomplished by tapping the individual creative powers by which human beings construct the world of their personal experience.

This power is believed to be tapped and modulated by the thought forms we humans put out. The world you see is the world being created inside your mind by the fulfillment of your expectations. These expectations, of course, do not exist in a vacuum. They are constantly being affected by the creative power and expectations being put out by all the other people around you. The way to manage some control of what is happening is to consciously exercise your creative powers--mythologized as God the Father--by setting out a clear intention for what you would have happen. Instead of letting life happen to you, willy-nilly, in obedience and submission to the will of your culture and society, you can shape your destiny by knowing what you want, why you want it and what good will come of it if you get it and then holding a firm intention and expectation that this is what will happen. Whether there's any magic in this or not, it certainly sets up self-fulfilling prophecies and molds your choices and predilections so the desired ends come about. What is certainly true is that if you don't have any clear intention for what you want, you aren't very likely to get it.

There's a Zen story about a Master who makes fun of his students' slavish devotion to meditation by polishing a floor tile saying he's going to make it a mirror. When a visiting Master tells him that's impossible, he answers that just so meditating all day long cannot make one a buddha. But, he quickly adds, unless you do the meditation you will never become a Buddha. You have to do the work for what you want, but you must also be open to the "magic" that will finally make it happen.

New Age notions of Creative Visualization teach that you can create whatever future you want by forming a picture in mind of how things will look when you get it, holding that image faithfully but lightly, and believing that as you intended so will it be done.

The gay community got suckered into this kind of wishful thinking in the early days of the AIDS crisis. New Age gurus told the first wave of PWAs that they were sick because they didn't love themselves enough and that by looking in a mirror and telling themselves they were lovable they could invoke the power of intention to heal themselves. Those mirrors might as well have been floor tiles! Those men are dead. Though surely some of them died loving themselves and their lives as never before, transformed by the experience of focusing their intention.

But, surprise, twenty years later, AIDS is a very different disease. All those intentions that AIDS not kill did work, but not quite the way the gurus promised or the dying had hoped. In fact, the amelioration of the epidemic came from ACT UP's noisy demonstrations and gay health activists making demands of the CDC (and drug companies competing to find more profitable drugs). And yet the miracle did happen. The intentions were fulfilled. They did what they were supposed to do: create a universe in which AIDS is manageable (even if still terrible). And they did it through real things.

In this issue, White Crane considers the topic of INTENTION. I think you'll find an interesting variety of viewpoints. Some of the writers echo the notions of the practice of Creative Visualization. Most add a twist here or there to explain the practice without exactly promising the magic--at least not as magic.

Intention (and healing!), after all, isn't magical. It doesn't come in the form of deus ex machinas or sudden interruptions of natural processes. Intention just sets up the conditions for the future. In a way, intention isn't actually about the future at all. It's about understanding the present. Being clear on your intention is not about what will happen some day, it's about what you are really feeling and thinking and being conscious of right now. In that sense, investigating how you see the world and what you hope for from it is a reminder to be aware now, to live in the presence of what is coming into creation in the only time there is: the present moment.

In that experience of presence we touch the power of God. We feel it working through us. And, in that perfect present moment, when we're at one with the creative power of the universe, the future doesn't matter at all. You are in the only time there is. You are dancing the Great Dance. And it's just right.

If everybody in the world were living in that perfect, just right moment, then everybody's creative power would be focused on making the next moment just right too. And that would be the salvation of the world.

White Crane is especially pleased to present Marty Smith's short story Dream Lover. It delightfully caps the discussion with that perfect wisdom. The last months of the year of 2001have seen a dramatic change of things on Earth. The Letters column addresses the beginning of the Terrorist War with characteristically gay sensitivity and insight into the nature of fundamentalism (and I take the opportunity to share a tribute to George Harrison). Let's hold in mind the collective intention that our gay spiritual consciousness contribute to the mystical evolution of humankind.