By Jennie Marlow
In my last post, A Case Against Envisioning, I explain the pitfalls of envisioning the form your future will take. In this post, I’ll give some pointers about the kind of envisioning that has practical value for you, and what visions you should avoid.
To illustrate what a useful vision might be, I’m going to take you back in time, about 2.5 million years, to a point in human history known as the Paleolithic era, when our Australopithecus ancestors started making and using stone tools. These tools were little more than cracked pebbles with an edge on one side for chopping, and a smooth side that could easily be held in the hand. This invention was clearly the product of a mind which could imagine a use for something—in this case, a cracked pebble—and then employ a method for manufacturing what it imagines.
Fast-forward 2.3 million years to the emergence of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, our early-modern human ancestors. Tool invention has undergone a revolution in diversity and sophistication, and manufacturing now extends to adornments and later, even to works of art.
At the most fundamental level, what we can see here is the evolution of the human imagination. By this time, modern humans have moved beyond the purely utilitarian to the appreciation of beauty, and we are beginning to experiment with the way in which ornamental objects convey status. Some anthropologists suggest that adornments and style, like the treatment of hair, were also ways to create unity within the tribal band and differentiate “us” from “them.”
What we value is largely a choice that happens in the imagination. If we are to put our power to envision in service of what is useful, the real question becomes, why do we value the things that are important to us? Spotted Eagle teaches us that our values are emotional. They tell us which feeling experiences we want our lives, possessions, work and relationships to give us. If our values are focused on medicating our insecurities and neediness for approval, dominance and control of the future, then we have allowed the imagination to subvert our motives. If, however, if our values are focused on the qualities he calls essence, then the imagination is placed in service of our joyfulness, creativity and ease.
The problem with most visionary thinking is that it propels far from the now-moment. The further out we go into the future, the more we live in our fantasies for an outcome and the less attention we pay to the fundamentals of a life well-lived. We stop focusing on whether or not our choices are practical. We plunge ahead toward an unsustainable goal and ignore the natural limitations presented by the material plane of impermanence. This is how pursuing our visions results in self-destructive, wasteful action.
The human can imagine his future. He can also imagine that the future can be controlled. Visions of this kind are not useful to us. However, if we use our values to guide our choices and behavior in service of our higher good, what we envision becomes less about the future and more about how we want the now-moment to feel. We can envision a now-moment, for example, that gives us a greater sense of emotional freedom and ease. We can envision a now-moment where we experience beauty and simplicity. And then we can start to seek out these experiences in small, readily achievable ways. This is what Spotted Eagle calls “a vision for essence,” where the feeling experience we seek determines our choice to actualize, create, or even decline an opportunity to take action on what we imagine.
Contributed by Jennie Marlow
No related posts.
