Originally started off life as a blog post.

The notion that we have 2 parts of our brain - or our yi - is (AFAIK) mainly a Taoist one, which I hope to explore in the future. However, what is "intention" and how can we explore it?

Some notes:

1. We can think of our perception of ourself in the same way as we perceive others, i.e. actions that we perceive (our own motions, or anything in others) are echoes of intent buried deeper in the "mind". (This is basically intention vs awareness.)

2. In order to explore where this intention comes from and what it "looks like", we need to stop thinking and merely observe. Active thinking gets in the way of observing.

3. Intention is intrinsically linked to sensorial data, but usually the amount of incoming data is too huge to be able to observe fully (like watching an unfiltered packet log). Therefore, start out small - block out certain senses and concentrate on environments that focus on one sense at a time (e.g. closing your eyes while a clock ticks, or a quiet room with a moving light).

4. (Sidenote) Realising that there is no such thing as "free will" (as most people would like to define it) is the first step to creating simulative models of thought? See We Have No Free Will.