The skeptic's approach to "Intention"

The book "The Power of Intention" by Dryer, and his televised speeches make claims about the power of one's mind to make fundamental changes in one's life. A common flaw of teachings that refer to consciousness raising, self-empowering or self-realization schemes is that the verbiage often sounds spiritual, religious or mystical. It can be lost on the very most fixated,"realist"
and "skeptical" out there. So when Dryer walks up to lighted prop in his talks or speaks about an infinite force that comes from a quantum. Quite a few smile, at least to them selves.

So, is there any way to look at Dryer and others who make similar claims or people who speak in even more psychic or spiritual terms about connection to the cosmos etc. so that a hard headed "realist" might consider that what they are saying is a metaphor at least for something that it true?

One way to look at this is to say that the abundance that is out there exists but that our failure as fixated beings is to notice it and use it. Consciousness in the sense of socially-mediated "normal", "rational" thought is an artifact of conditioning that closes off our minds from noticing subtle signs that are always there which when we become aware of them make us appear to have extraordinary perceptions and to have unnatural powers. In this sense our fixated perceptions are always subtracted from the larger field of events we choose or are conditioned not to notice. When one experiences the opening of awareness it imay feel like a spiritual or religious experience, but it may also be similar to the flood of sensations that a psychoactive drug can sometimes cause. The latter experience can induce psychosis, but in a less extreme case such experience can cause a redefinition of the filtering of inputs in which a person becomes aware of things that he did not notice before.

In this way the mind can be seen as a filter in which we truly can change the parameters. Consciousness is a product of this filtering which is absolutely necessary to prevent overload, but it is not reality. Reality is at least a consensus of what people think is out there, but if it truly is external to ourselves, we are not directly aware of it. What we call "reality" can be thought of as created by ourselves, thus we have much more control of that as attitudional habits and beliefs. It is that which the self-realization verbiage addresses.

Our development often fixates us into the false conclusion that the filtering we call reality, which is mediated by our family, social associations, societal expectations, etc., is immutable, out of our control. We can feel like a victim of it, or we can cling to it without questioning the power we might have to interact with and change it. The idea that we can change it is the message of all these lines of helping.

One can regard all manner of unscientific or pseudoscientific systems from wicca to psychic as metaphor for this interaction we can have with the filtering done by our minds. What Dryer and others emphasize is that focusing of attention and intention may really shape our destiny. It may be as simple as what we set as goals manifest fleeting signs of what we must get to achieve them, but most of us miss these "gifts" either for not forming the goal or for paying attention for the signs of their arrival. So, the search for the Holy Grail story contains the result that the path was always close by but for looking for it after we have searched far and wide.