Vision | Spirituality & Health Magazine

Neuroscience

Vision
by Peggy La Cerra, Ph.D

Why are spiritual people characterized as having vision? Vision – a glimpse of an idea of how good things might be – requires a long-range perspective and a caring and compassionate attitude. And spiritual practices cultivate both. Meditative practices cultivate our internal shift from a lower-order self that is pre-occupied with our immediate self-centered needs and desires, to a higher-order self that can observe the one with immediate needs and desires, a self that can sense them, yet not be caught by them. This higher-order self arises from a broader base of encoded experience, and it incorporates more time, space, people and other living things. It has the neural informational capacity for ‘vision’. With extensive practice, one might experience ‘no self’, and ‘oneness’ with all that is. Whether or not one’s practice intentionally incorporates a focus on compassion, with the cultivation of an increasingly less egocentric perspective that comes from engaging in any kind of meditative practice, compassion grows.

Rabbi Rami's Reflections

Vision
by Rabbi Rami Shapiro

What does it mean to have a spiritual vision?

It means to envision a world at play in the game of love.

So there is only one vision? Can’t I have my own vision and live in sync with that?

There is only one spiritual vision: an ever–more just and compassionate world where all life is respected and the well being of persons and planets is the ultimate moral and ethical guide. But not everyone has a spiritual vision, and there are lots of other kinds of visions that motivate people.

One can be out for oneself or one’s family or tribe or religion or what have you?

Yes. If a person claims to have a spiritual vision that saves some and damns others, that elevates some and lowers others, that posits a zero-sum reality at the expense of nonduality, then you can be certain that whatever their vision is it isn’t spiritual.

How can I cultivate an authentically spiritual vision?

By cultivating the other spiritual attributes we have been working with these past weeks.

How can I translate my vision into a daily mission?

By living the other spiritual attributes we have been working with these past weeks.

Is this why Vision is placed last on the list rather than first? It seemed to me at the beginning that I should start with Vision and let everything proceed from that.

I am not sure we had any progression in mind with our list of attributes, but I think it is wise to work with concrete and lived attributes such as compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, hospitality and the rest in order to prepare yourself for the deep spiritual vision we are talking about. A life devoted to these other attributes will naturally reveal a unified world in a nondual field, and inevitably give rise to a shared spiritual vision. If we start with vision we might spend all our time arguing over it and never actually get to live it.

Your hope is to have this vision go viral? Have it spread across the planet?

Well, my dream might be that tens of thousands of Spiritual & Health Magazine readers take up the challenge of cultivating the attributes we have listed here, but my hope is that at least some do. I don’t know what the tipping point is to global awakening, and I don’t want to get caught up in hitting some arbitrary number. I am simply pleased to share in the experiment and see where it goes.

Best Practices

Getting Unstuck
By Raphael Cushnir

Find the Flinch: Identify the aspect of moving forward with your vision that causes you to pull up short.
Cut to the Chase: Discover your worst-case scenario in moving forward, and determine how that outcome would make you feel.

Weather the Storm: Use all your creative powers to imagine that outcome as a reality, then surf the whole cascade of emotions that comes with it.

Repeat as Necessary: Apply the above course of action whenever you get stuck again in pursuit of your goals.

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