Vision Archives - Jennie Marlow

A Case Against the Future

February 15, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

It’s already February, so I’m scrambling to finish my plan for 2014. I can see my way clear through May or June, but after that, it starts to feel blurry and unreal. The brilliant woman I hired to help me with planning and project management barks, “What do you want to have happen? I need to see it mapped out for the year!” Okay. I used to do this for a living. Business plans used to run through my dreams and course through my veins.

Very well. I’ll make up something and have a stab at it. I’m well aware that I’m playing a dangerous game called The Future. At least I’m wise enough to know that what I envision is not what will actually happen. But why not?

Perhaps the problem lies is the way we “dream” about our futures. Possibilities imagined are not the same as potentials which can be actualized. It’s a very hard lesson to learn, especially for those of us who are recovering from the New Age. We were taught to create a clear picture of the desired result, and if we believe in it with all our might, it will be delivered to us as a “manifestation.” The uncomfortable truth is most of us are not successful if we try to create this way.

There are times when picturing a result can be quite useful. When we are making big changes, our success depends upon being able to imagine ourselves on the other side of it, that we can do this, in spite of our anxieties and insecurities. This is a universe apart from envisioning a Technicolor fantasy about how the future will turn out.

For most of us, the trap is attribution. A good thing happens, and we want more good things, so we try to figure out how the good thing came about. Or a bad thing happens, and we want to avoid more bad things. The mind analyzes its fractionalized jigsaw puzzle of what it thinks it knows, ignoring all the gaps and uncertainties, and then forms a belief which attributes the outcome to a set of causal factors. When these causal factors are imaginary, the result of a happy or morbid fantasy, the mind has a terrible time distinguishing the facts from what it makes up and believes in.

Believing in a vision for the outcome the future will take is, quite simply, a flawed strategy. Just like any plan or goal, it does not have the flexibility that being in present time demands of us. The truth is, I should have learned this long before I did.

Looking back on it now, there was one pivotal moment when I might have had this epiphany. I was sitting in a restaurant with one of the few people I know who can just “make it happen.” Many people would have called this guy a visionary. He would have scoffed at the notion.

This fellow was all business. He educated himself about the realities, and he was always well aware of the risks of failure. He never “believed” in his vision. He was far too practical and realistic for that.

On this particular day, we were discussing his business plan, and he was scribbling the financial forecast for his company’s future on a napkin. The figures seemed to flow from his pen like water from a fountain. Finally, I had to ask. “Where did you get these figures?”

He smiled and sat back. “I pulled them right out of my ass,” he said blithely. “The venture capitalists know that you can’t predict the future. They just want to see if you’ve done your homework.”

It wasn’t until very recently that I looked back on this moment and realized that this “visionary” really knew the score. He knew his predictions for the outcome were pure fantasy, and he didn’t take his vision a bit seriously beyond knowing that his next step was getting some venture capitalist to give him the money he wanted.

He got the money. He built the business. It was nothing like he had forecast. And it was wildly successful for a time, until the dot-com boom went dot-gone bust. It clearly didn’t get in his way. He went on to form other companies, and I hear about him in the business and tech sector news from time to time. I imagine he put many more forecasts on many other napkins, and none of them turned out the way he planned.

The difference being, he knew they wouldn’t. And that is why he was able to succeed.

Vision & Intention

July 6, 2013 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

In Part One of this series, Spotted Eagle discusses the Principle of Vision, describing how “vision” is different from a goal and how great visionaries see their world.

In Part Two, he discusses how limitation and uncertainty serve our creative vision.

In this post, he describes how limitation, uncertainty, purpose and essence are vital to any intention that has the potential to deliver a fulfilling outcome.

In any now-moment, the universe lays before us only certain potentials and not others, and it also gives every actualizable potential a set of natural limitations. An experienced potter understands this. She realizes that potential outcomes which can fulfill her intention to create something out of clay are not unlimited. The clay is what it is, nothing more or less. Clay, like any material, has certain characteristics that limit what can be actualized from it. This is not a problem for the artisan potter because her imagination does not resist the clay’s natural limitations. She takes these limitations and her own level of skill into account as she cultivates her vision for the finished piece.

The artisan potter also knows, before she begins her work, what purpose she intends the finished piece to serve. While she may have a very clear goal for the finished piece, she also understands that uncertainty will make its own unique and valuable contribution to what results. She won’t know until the door of the kiln opens after firing whether or not the pot is even still intact.

Unlike the artisan potter, a person who is fixed upon his goal for the future will see uncertainty as his enemy and struggle against it in fear that his desire for the outcome will not materialize the way he had imagined. He may invest a great deal of energy and become rigid, striving to achieve his goal. He may eventually achieve it, but very often he arrives at his destination exhausted, only to find the joyfulness he had hoped to receive is not only absent from the process of achieving his goal; it is also absent from the result.

Intention is integral to vision, and if it is to serve our creativity even in creating our lives, it must necessarily take into account purpose, essence, natural limitations and uncertainty: the unforeseen, unanticipated and unimagined. Only vision honors these mysteries. Only vision can dance with the uncertainty through which the evolution of any creation takes shape.

Intention that is flexible enough to respond to real-world challenges has a realistic potential to succeed and result in a fulfilling outcome. When we hold a vision for our lives, like the artisan potter, we know the purpose we intend our vision to fulfill. We know the essences we want to experience. We have made a realistic accounting of our available resources and whatever natural limitations are actually present in the now moment. When our intention is set in this way, vision serves to free the investment of our energy so that it can deliver into our lives an outcome that is in alignment with our purpose and which carries the potential to deliver an experience of the essence qualities that give the result meaning and make it fulfilling.

What is a Vision?

June 24, 2013 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

“An imaginary picture of a future outcome is not a vision; it is a fantasy, an illusion, and a very seductive one. It causes us to believe in the futures we conjure in the imagination. This is not vision. Vision is not about envisioning the future. Vision does not foretell; it does not predict the form the future will take or what the outcome of an endeavor will be. Vision is not a fantasy of an event or circumstances we can picture in our imagination. Vision is none of these things. It is not empowered by what we hope will happen in future time. Vision refers, not to fantasy we make up in the imagination, but instead to the manner in which something is seen.”

— Spotted Eagle

Vision is a very misunderstood concept in Western Culture where it seems to be confused with imagining a future result. There is a visualization method which has received a lot of attention in recent years. This method is based on a premise that, in order to create what we want, we must picture ourselves having that thing “manifested.” We must imagine the form we want the future will take, and this clear picture of the outcome then becomes the basis of a goal for achieving that outcome, often by some arbitrary date made up in the Mind. In some models, absolute belief that the outcome will come about is also required.

Belief has the unfortunate tendency to blind us to uncomfortable truths, especially to the uncertainties which are the part of every now-moment. While it is true that visionaries see potentials that others do not see, their belief is not invested in medicating their insecurities and anxiety. Perhaps this can be understood clearly when we examine what we mean when we call someone a visionary. Think of great artists and inventors, like Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. Consider great thinkers and social reformers, like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, and Sylvia and Emily Pankhurst. Call to mind the great resisters of tyranny, like Harriett Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. And finally, reflect upon the great theoretical scientists, like Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking. What can we notice about this small list of visionary thinkers? Were they engaged in fantasies about the future? Not really.

Instead, these visionaries saw their present-time world quite differently than did most people of their time. They possessed extraordinary insight and discernment. They were able to move beyond the frame of reference of their time and access a way of perceiving that propelled their awareness beyond the boundaries of then-current thinking. Through their creative lens, these visionaries saw real and tangible potentials whose actualization created enormous shifts for all of humanity. Their visions had one important thing in common: clarity about the meaning and purpose of their efforts. Their unique perspective allowed them to conceive of something which did not yet exist, and at the same time, they were aware of certain obstacles and limitations in the scope of their vision and what they themselves might be able to achieve by sharing their unique perspective.

In Part Two – Vision, Limitation & Uncertainty Spotted Eagle discusses how limitation and uncertainty serve our creative vision.