How Common Vision-Work Disguises the True Vision

We might have a vision for life. We might know where we want to be in 5, 10 or 20, or 30… years from now. We have an understanding of how we want to feel, how our lifestyle will look like, our environment, the work we are doing and the people that are around us. We have values that serve as a pillar for our vision.

On a practical level, we know our vision well. But is this all that would describe our life in the future? Can vision or life be reduced to practical terms and still be fulfilling while living it or working towards it?

And let me ask two more questions: Do we know the vision on a metaphysical level? And why is this even important? 

“Our vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes” C.G. Jung

This blog might support not losing the actual goal out of sight, feeling a deeper connection to it and making better decisions that will guide us to the vision and avoid some of the detours.

Even though the path to our vision might never be a straight line and always require some turns, loops, deadends & detours.

I mentioned above how vision work is normally done. It uses a lot of logic, labels and categories. But I believe by just focusing on that we create blindspots and lose the more important qualities out of sight.

Instead, we should tune into what I will call (capital K) Knowing. We think we know, but do we really know? Capital K Knowing doesn’t equal knowing. Knowing goes beyond our minds knowing. We can only Know when we touch our soul.

Capital K Knowing is an enigmatic way of knowing, it is in the first place felt instead of being understood.

From this place of Knowing we can be decisive, to make better decisions that are serving the vision that we have.

All the practicalities of the vision are great, but that is not all. If you find yourself in one aspect of your vision, let us say the way your work, there is a felt experience that wants to be lived by you.

We can describe it by activities, that we want to pursue, by how we want to feel, and by how this all look, but that is not all. The felt experience is hard to put into words.

It is someone describes a scent of perfume to you and they expect that you knows exactly how it smells.

Yes, we can describe it through qualities, like wooden, floral, and citrus notes. We can imagine how this smells, but the way we imagine it will be different than it might smell in reality.

The same is true for our vision. We can add certain qualities to the vision and that might be the closest we get by using logic and categories to describe it. Our mind tries to put things into categories and to find logic in it. And our mind is a great ally on the way to our vision, we should not bypass it.

The practical aspects of our vision are a great tool to use for navigation but by just focusing on that we might run into stuck places or experience a lack of meaning. 

This comes from my personal experience. I had an understanding of my vision in practical terms and how I want to feel, but I focused too much on it. What happened, was that I needed to take some detours.

E.g. I invested in a coaching accelerator to find out that the method they are using is not working for me. In hindsight, I realize that this was only slightly in alignment with my vision, but not completely. I saw how this opportunity could bring me to the lifestyle I wanted to have, to how I wanted to show up, but on a felt experience it was far off from my vision.

It was a detour, that came with great learning that I’m sharing here and one that also created wisdom and more confidence in my path. So that is to say that it still had some value, but not the value that I originally paid for. 

One of my coaches said to me that we first had to work on the energetic structure.  I didn’t exactly know what he meant by it, but it sounded important. Now I get it.

The energetic structure is projected into the felt experience of the vision. If we are connected to this structure we can make more aligned decisions, we will feel more intimacy and more novelty in life. This is the field of Knowing. 

If we focus too much on logic and literalism we will confuse it with our actual goal. Being aware of the deeper level of our vision, we open up to what is called self-organizing consciousness. This is part of nature, and what is true in nature is also true for our psyche.

A great example of this kind of intelligence is the slime mold experiment that was conducted by some scientists in Japan. Researchers place food at different stops on a subway system map of Tokyo. Then they place a fungus at the center, it spreads out to map many possible configurations and then dies to highlight the shortest routes between stops and create the most efficient overall map of the system. 

This intelligence is acting inside of us, but it needs destinations and space. Our psyche, our soul, is not talking in logic. It talks in ways that are more subtle for most of us.

Therefore the awareness of the energetic structure that we project onto the future, the felt experience, is an important way to communicate our soul to the destination and to make the most efficient decisions for us. 

There are ways to connect to it. The best way to do it is probably to imagine yourself in this felt experience, to become fully aware of what is happening inside of you, without putting any labels or judgments on it.

This can happen in meditation, or there might be certain images that when you connect to them you can feel your vision.

Another more practical way, which is probably the closest that we can get through a practical tool to the actual feeling, is to create art. Looking at your piece of art can serve as a reminder of what you want to create in life. But also here don't confuse the content of the art with the actual felt experience.

That means you can create art, that on a superficial observer level has nothing to do with your vision, it can only be perceived/felt by you. Art is transferring more than words, it gives us often a feeling that we can hardly describe. 

And that is the point of this kind of exercise, to keep a degree of abstraction, as we can’t reduce our vision only to practicalities. We want to keep the mystery through which we can connect to our soul.

Life can’t be grasped fully through logic, mystery is essential to stay connected to the presence and to our vision.