Where does a vision come from?

Hi Reader,

A reminder: my vision for the future is “a world no longer divided by religion.” This is the context for everything I’m writing now.

If you want to support this project, there are some nice orange buttons on ​this page​ that will enable you to do so! (I’ll turn this ask into a nice P.S. at some point.)

I didn’t leave myself much time this week, so I’m currently riding the tension between getting this email written in time and trying to slow down and notice my own thrashing. It doesn’t help anyone for me to write from a place of panic as opposed to a space of calm.

So, in continued more-slowly-than-I-had-planned fashion, I’m only going to reveal a piece of this OneFire thing to you this week.

One of the ideas I keep encountering in this work I’ve been doing is the important distinction between what is known and what is unknown. When I am trying to figure something out, or make a decision, I almost always go to my “knowns.” I suspect that most people do the same. What about you?

There is nothing wrong with referring to what I know. There’s a lot of useful information in there. It’s kept me alive so far, after all.

The thing is, everything I know only gets me so far. In fact, it gets me precisely as far as I’ve already gotten. If it were able to get me more or farther, then I would already have more or be farther along.

Following me so far? This is one of those things that, for me, is obvious on the one hand but which I constantly neglect to put into practice. I’m very comfortable in my knowns, thankyouverymuch.

That’s the point, of course. That’s exactly what my not-higher-self wants. To stay safe and comfortable in the nothing-wrong zone. And it’s tricky, because there really is nothing wrong with that. Really.

At the same time, I’m doing all of this work reading, attending seminars, meditating, and getting coached. Why do all that if there’s nothing wrong? Well… I don’t really know. It’s just what I’ve committed to doing. I think there’s integrity in that, though I still have a lot to learn about integrity.

Speaking of integrity, that’s the thing that sparked this whole OneFire idea. So I was in this integrity seminar, and one of the exercises they had us do is to try to stand in a place of not-knowing. To be lost (like I said I was), confused, discombobulated, upset, thrashing (which I’m doing a bit of), and the like. The reason for this is because when standing in that place, you have a chance to see possibilities you hadn’t seen before.

So there I was, steeped in these kinds of exercises. And I’m up in the middle of the night with the baby, sitting next to her crib, holding a bottle in her mouth, helping her back to sleep.

There, in that half-awake, half-asleep, almost dreamlike space, is where I saw the vision of the possibility I’m calling OneFire—a world no longer divided by religion.

…and I’ll describe it for you next time.