Vision is like a good novel — it is a fiction that motivates.

From Murakami on Gaza (thanks to John Hanagan on Facebook). Haruki Murakami accepted the Jerusalem Prize for Literature in 2009. This is from his acceptance speech.

“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”

What is the meaning of this metaphor? . . . Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. . . . The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories.

. . . We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong — and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.
 . . . Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.

In earlier posts, I have indicated that this blog will explore four categories: the dominator society (how we have arrived at global warming), a vision of a more mature future, the oppressive forces that block that vision, and the motivating forces that augment that vision. For the next few postings, I am going to deal with each in turn, but I start with vision.

Visions are not only end-points on a journey; they are the scenery that motivates movement along the path. By such scenery, the process can be exciting, or it can create a nemesis by which I drive myself to do the impossible. As I travel on the road to the future, a vision is the scenery that attracts me to continue going forward on the road. The most interesting scenery is multi-sensory and emotionally rich; it appeals to my vision, my hearing, my smell, my taste, my touch, and whatever else activates me. It excites me (and thus appeals both to my conscious and my unconscious minds). I pull life energy from the future to move me forward in the present.

I first became aware of the power of vision about 25 years ago. In 1987, I was in a training group, and got into a deeply painful place, overwhelmed with despair. The facilitator asked me to describe what I was experiencing as a metaphor: I felt like a small child, lying naked in a fetal position, on a bare wooden floor in an empty room without doors or windows. He then asked me to describe what I would rather have: sitting comfortably at a day-retreat center talking with a group of people in a room, with windows looking outwards to trees and water. At the time, I was not able to bridge the two images, so the facilitator asked me to explore the initial image, the painful image, each day; and to add one object of the new image to the painful image, gradually accumulating the objects of the new image into the old. After three months, I was easily able to move from one image to the other.

Several years passed as I continued to work on that vision. Then, after about five years, my life took a new direction, and I let go of the possibility of this dream of a day-retreat center. And I moved on. Another five years passed and I was at a dead end, uncertain of what now to do. It was at this time that I bought a country property, and set up my therapy practice, orientated to anger management. More years passed, and vaguely, on occasion, I had the sense of returning to the dream of 1987.

Then one day, sitting in my office, looking out the window at the trees and the river outside the sliding glass door, I realized that the office room I had created was almost identical to the image I had created in 1987 (and my practice was essentially that of a day-retreat center with my wife). I had made my vision happen even thought I had “forgotten” the dream from years previously. Such is the power of visioning.

At some point, I found a simple recipe for the power of vision. (I believe it was in a book called How To Forgive When You Don’t Know How, but I no longer have the book. In any event, it is a great book.)

1. Develop an emotionally rich, multi-sensory vision of what I want. I must be able to step into the experience as if I have it now, and be able to say: “Wow. I want this.” The vision must excite me.
2. Be impeccably honest as to my current life circumstances. If I am lazy or careless, I must recognize this, and take this into account during the achievement of my vision (otherwise I waste much time in deluding myself).
3. Hold both components, vision and honesty, available to my awareness as I move forward along the path to the goal. I make my decisions relative to these components.

That is really all it takes. A useful metaphor here is to consider myself as a ship, with sails and rudder. My sails, my unconscious mind, catches the wind, and allows me to move. My rudder, my conscious mind, steers me where I want to go. A ship with sails but no rudder is pushed wherever; a ship with rudder but no sails flounders. I need both, in integrated fashion. (Unfortunately, most people are not integrated; I will explore the power of therapy at a later time.)

So I invite the reader to consider what kind of a world do you wish to live in (as an emotionally rich, multi-sensory vision). In the next post, I will present what I want, as a starting point for discussion.