Vivid Vision Quotes

I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.

On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

Let it shine, the light in you. Oh, and that's delighting me! Various colors shining through. Elated, it fills my soul with ecstasy.

In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight.

When the last days come We shall see visions More vivid than sunsets Brighter than stars We will recognize each other And see ourselves for the first time The way we really are

He had golden-brown hair, the most vivid baby-blue eyes, and a body that belonged on the cover of Men’s Health magazine. Her gaze roamed over his broad shoulders and down his chest.

I have an idea that is is what enduring love really means, Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

This is the disconcerting conclusion that emerges from Boltzmann’s work: the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. It’s a conclusion that leaves us flabbergasted: is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world in all of its minute detail? On a kind of distortion that’s produced by myopia? Is it true that, if I could see exactly and take into consideration the actual dance of millions of molecules, then the future would be “just like” the past?

Some people assume that authors write books because we have vivid imaginations and want to share our vision. Other people assume that authors write because we are bursting with stories, and therefore must scribble those stories down in moments of creative propondidty. Both groups of people are completely wrong. Authors write books for one, and only one, reason: because we like to torture people.

There is great disadvantage in seeing the past as clearly as one sees the present, carrying in the mind visions of the past as vivid as on the day they happened.

The light bounced off the water and shimmered against the buildings on the other side of the river. Joseph walked, listening to the sound of what was beneath his feet, and soon he noticed he was alone. He turned and saw Frankie had stopped beside Albert and filled her jacket pockets. Looking at the two of them, Joseph wondered for a moment if Leo had ever come down here to go mudlarking, his red hair shining in the sun. the vision seemed so vivid, but then Joseph remembered that Leo wasn't real, and the boy dissolved like smoke into the winter sky.

Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.

I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold. Who blames me? Many, no doubt: and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.

We have reason. It is the entire meaning and purpose of Shangri-La. It came to me in a vision long, long ago. I foresaw a time when man exalting in the technique of murder, would rage so hotly over the world, that every book, every treasure would be doomed to destruction. This vision was so vivid and so moving that I determined to gather together all things of beauty and culture that I could and preserve them here against the doom toward which the world is rushing. Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other. The time must come, my friend, when brutality and the lust for power must perish by its own sword. For when that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here.

Of the four men in Preston Prichard’s cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard’s letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.

Imagination is a vision with vivid pictures in the canvas of the mind.

Nobody wants a sales pitch. So instead of trying a hard sell, focus on telling a story that captivates your audience by painting a vivid picture of your vision. When you get good at storytelling, people want to be part of that story, and they’ll want to help others become part of that story too.

…that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possess; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued…; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed I wished to behold. Who blamed me? Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restless was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.

Some people assume that authors write books because we have vivid imaginations and want to share our vision. Other people assume that authors write because we are bursting with stories, and therefore must scribble those stories down in moments of creative propondidty. Both groups of people are completely wrong. Authors write books for one, and only one, reason: because we like to torture people. Now, actual torture is frowned upon in civilized society. Fortunately, the authorial community has discovered in storytelling an even more powerful—and more fulfilling—means of causing agony in others. We write stories. And by doing so, we engage in a perfectly legal method of doing all kinds of mean and terrible things to our readers. Take, for instance, the word I used above. Propondidty. There is no such word—I made it up. Why? Because it amused me to think of thousands of readers looking up a cromulent word in their dictionaries.

Vision is a difficult, precarious, and fugitive extrapolation from a very few and ambiguous moments in our earthly experience, while our idea of the negated natural goods is vivid and persistent, loaded with the memories of a lifetime, built into our nerves and muscles and therefore into our imaginations.

My little brain was teeming with a myriad of visions—dogs have very vivid fancies, as you may tell by the excitement of our dreams.

Imagine yourself successful, confident, and unafraid, then color in that happy vision with as many details as you can. Make it vivid, and reinforce it every day.

Without a vivid picture of what you want, how can you reach it?

You ought to have a vivid picture of what you want.

I can't tell you how I felt when my father died. But I was able to write Song of Solomon and imagine, not him, and not his specific interior life, but the world that he inhabited and the private or interior life of the people in it. And I can't tell you how I felt reading to my grandmother while she was turning over and over in her bed (because she was dying, and she was not comfortable), but I could try to reconstruct the world that she lived in. And I have suspected, more often than not, that I know more than she did, that I know more than my grandfather and my great-grandmother did, but I also know that I'm no wiser than they were. And whenever I have tried earnestly to diminish their vision and prove to myself that I know more, and when I have tried to speculate on their interior life and match it up with my own, I have been overwhelmed every time by the richness of theirs compared to my own. Like Frederick Douglass talking about his grandmother, and James Baldwin talking about his father, and Simone de Beauvoir talking about her mother, these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life. Which is why the images that float around them--the remains, so to speak, at hte archeological site--surface first, and they surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth.

It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which "rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future". That was Sylvia's genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.

Renga with Katie There's no better place Than in each moment with you Traveling through life Regardless of place and time, Or seasons and location, I never look back To a time without you there And wish to return We are each other's constant In an ever changing world On a pilgrimage To no place particular, Destinationless Each moment we're arriving At another sacred place Appreciating, Remembering life before You opened my eyes It's both vivid and soothing Like I'd never had vision Now I see the way, As we travel together The fog is lifted Each sight reveals each other Each step reveals another

For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui — moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs — the αχλυς ος πριν επηεν — and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing.

If you have been bold enough in your ideas, this will have two effects: It will attract and repel others. Notice I said it will attract and repel, not or. Your Vivid Vision should behave like a magnet, drawing some people in and pushing others—hopefully not too many—away. If your scope is too small, too milquetoast, or too watered down, or if everyone likes it, no one will love it. If this is the case, you have failed.

All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.

That became the signature Ice-T style - rhymes that were "topical" and "vividly optical." To me it was street-level journalism, real-life observations told in poetry. That's the vision I tried to bring to all my recordings.

And having given up on life, the Captain suddenly began to live. A great mad joy surged through him. This emotion, coming as unexpectedly as the plunge of the horse when he had broken away, was one that the Captain had never experienced. His eyes were glassy and half-open, as in delirium, but he saw suddenly as he had never seen before. The world was a kaleidoscope, and each of the multiple visions which he saw impressed itself on his mind with burning vividness. On the ground half-buried in the leaves there was a little flower, dazzling white and beautifully wrought. A thorny pine cone, the flight of a bird in the blue windy sky, a fiery shaft of sunshine in the green gloom - these the Captain saw as though for the first time in his life. He was conscious of the pure keen air and the felt the marvel of his own tense body, his labouring heart, and the miracle of blood, muscle, nerves, and bones. The Captain knew no terror now; he soared the rare level of consciousness where the mystic feels that the earth is he and that he is the earth. Clinging crabwise to the runaway horse, there was a grin of rapture on his bloody mouth.

Today the Director opened his remarks by telling us what we must always do when the author, the director, and the others who are working on a production, leave out things we need to know. We must have, first of all, an unbroken series of supposed circumstances in the midst of which our exercise is played. Secondly we must have a solid line of inner visions bound up with those circumstances, so that they will be illustrated for us. During every moment we are on the stage, during every moment of the development of the action of the play, we must be aware either of the external circumstances which surround us (the whole material setting of the production), or of an inner chain of circumstances which we ourselves have imagined in order to illustrate our parts. Out of these moments will be formed an unbroken series of images, something like a moving picture. As long as we are acting creatively, this film will unroll and be thrown on the screen of our inner vision, making vivid the circumstances among which we are moving. Moreover, these inner images create a corresponding mood, and arouse emotions, while holding us within the limits of the play.

These songs describe more vividly than one could hope to do in plain language the poet’s steady withdrawal and increasing estrangement from life, his gradual submersion in the abyss of memory. After these nostalgic longings the apocalyptic vision of Patmos bursts upon us like a mysterious visitor from another world, a vision swirled round by mists from the abyss, by the gathering clouds of insanity bred by the mother. Mythological ideas again flash forth, symbolic intimations of death and the resurrection of life.

Pre-Raphaelites they called themselves; not that they imitated the early Italian masters at all, but that in their work, as opposed to the facile abstractions of Raphael, they found a stronger realism of imagination, a more careful realism of technique, a vision at once more fervent and more vivid, an individuality more intimate and more intense. For it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the aesthetic demands of its age: there must be also about it, if it is to affect us with any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality, an individuality remote from that of ordinary men, and coming near to us only by virtue of a certain newness and wonder in the work, and through channels whose very strangeness makes us more ready to give them welcome.

I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. Laurie

Sarah smelled chocolate on Lucy's breath as she leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on the tip of her cute little nose. A vision came to her as her lips touched Lucy's skin, a sudden vivid awareness of the life they'd lead together from here on out, the hothouse intimacy of a single mother and her only child, the two of them sharing everything, breathing the same air, inflicting their moods on each other, best friends and bitter rivals, competing for attention, relying on each other for companionship and emotional support, forming the intense, convoluted, and probably unhealthy bond that for better and worse would become the center of both of their identities, fodder for years of therapy, if they could ever figure out a way to pay for it. It wasn't going to be an easy future, Sarah understood that, but it felt REAL to her -- so palpable and close at hand, so in keeping with what she knew of her own life -- that it almost seemed inevitable, the place they'd been heading all along. It was enough to make her wonder how she'd ever managed to believe in the alternate version, the one where the Prom King came and made everything better.

Yeah. Like when someone doesn’t know their vision isn’t perfect. They think they can see fine. But the moment they put those glasses on for the first time, they see everything so clearly, so vivid. They realize how much detail and beauty they’ve been missing. That’s Hetch. He’s my glasses.

Peering at myself in the mirror without my glasses, my face looked sort of blurry and moist. My glasses are the thing I hate most about my face, but there are certain good things about glasses that other people might not understand. I like to take my glasses off and look out into the distance. Everything goes hazy, as in a dream, or like a zoetrope—it's wonderful. I can't see anything that's dirty. Only big things—vivid intense colors and light are all that enters my vision. I also like to take my glasses off and look at people. The faces around me, all of them, seem kind and pretty and smiling.

Being a father, having an heir, seem to add an extra dimension to David. He had always been of vivid, animating presence in any room he entered. But now he would come from visiting the boy crackling with even greater energy and force. He had been engaged listener, ready to learn what any man might have to offer in discussion, but now there was an additional depth to his questions, a more far-reaching vision behind his decisions. He thought now beyond the span of years, and into a future that glistened ahead into centuries. It's one thing, I suppose, to have a prophet tell you that you will found a dynasty. Now, it seemed, he allowed himself to truly believe it.

Lots of people learn how to lie in childhood. Usually they begin to lie to avoid punishment or to avoid disappointing or hurting an adult. How many of us can vividly recall childhood moments where we courageously practiced the honesty we had been taught to value by our parents, only to find that they did not really mean for us to tell the truth all the time. In far too many cases children are punished in circumstances where they respond with honesty to a question posed by an adult authority figure. It is impressed on their consciousness early on, then, that telling the truth will cause pain. And so they learn that lying is a way to avoid being hurt and hurting others.

Soon thereafter, Lincoln glimpsed another “mysterious” and, he feared, “ominous” vision in his own bedroom mirror. While reclining on a lounge, he glanced up to notice a “double-image of himself in the looking-glass,” one clear, the other pallid. For a moment, it was vivid; then it vanished—at first, two Lincolns side by side, then none at all.

Thinking Out Loud So self-destructive I’m waiting for the implosion  For the Universe’s infinite wisdom to cave in my chest and abolish all my fears  To be driven so deep into the possibilities that I am blinded by the light  Until all I can do is close my eyes and be forced to once again dream genuinely Before the day of naysayers and doubts  I’m in the stairwell hiding from the people hiding from the noise  Can they see my insecurities as vividly as I do?  Do they possess that kind of vision?  Or are they so lost in their own self-turmoil that they don’t even notice I’m defeated, depleted A remnant of a dreamer gone mad A hopeless romantic who hasn’t been fed An artist starving for Life, to Live 

If you imagine big enough, you’ll meet some doubters. If you told your employees that you want to design an electric car that can go 300 miles on a single charge, go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in three seconds flat, seat seven comfortably, and look as sexy as an Aston Martin, somebody will say, “There’s no way.” That tells you you’re on the right track.

In order to live this way - free to create, free to explore - you must possess a fierce sense of personal entitlement. Creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that - merely by being here - you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own. The poet David Whyte calls this sense of creative entitlement 'the arrogance of belonging,' and claims that it is an absolutely vital privilege to cultivate if you wish to interact more vividly with life. Without this arrogance of belonging, you will never be able to take any creative risks whatsoever. Without it, you will never push yourself out of the suffocating insulation of personal safety and into the frontiers of the beautiful and unexpected. It is a divine force that will actually take you out of yourself and allow you to engage more fully with life. Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection). The arrogance of belonging pulls you out of the darkest depths of self-hatred - not by saying 'I am the greatest!' but merely by saying 'I am here!

I could not help seeing in Laurie the ghost of her younger self, the teenaged girl with a lovely, full, heart-shaped face. I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. Laurie

for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac—these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita” should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.

When she discovered a more complex truth—that she had also been culpable in her marriage, that she wasn’t always right—something remarkable happened. Her vision seemed to change. She could perceive colors more intensely. Freed from her black-and-white thinking and rigid interpretation of the past, the world appeared more vivid and vibrant. She drove her children crazy, pointing at flowers—yellow, red, purple, blue—saying, “Look at that! Look! Look!

Life’s shrouded crossing seems to jump off with a hunger to take a blood-quickening journey, a desire to search for enchantment over the next hillock. We launch our feral voyage with a primitive pulsation to explore unknown lands and a desire to become acquainted with both village people and sophisticated ancient civilizations. Along the way, we will meet friends and foes. In our lightest moments, we will make love to a beautiful mate under a canopy of stars. In the darkest hours, we will fret about how to evade danger and scheme how best to conquer our enemies. The rainbow of experiences that we endure will undoubtedly bemuse, bruise, batter, and occasionally sully us. These hard on the hide shards of experience will also reveal our polychromatous character. By undertaking vivid encounters in the wilderness, with any luck, we will discover a numinous interior world. With immersion into a myriad of life shaping experiences, an undeterred person will stumble onto a path leading to personal illumination. The passage of liberation that a crusader must inevitably endure leads to a shocking psychological transformation, a spiritual overhaul allowing the seeker to finally overcome infantile images and febrile delusions that would otherwise continue to derail their fervent urge to forge an emergent personality, acquire wisdom, and attain bliss.

If you forget to remind people that getting three years into the future necessitates first getting one year and then two years into it, they will likely overlook that obviousness and assume you’re just nuts. It’s a little bit like telling a thirteen-year-old what it’s going to be like when they turn sixteen. They can’t visualize what being a sixteen-year-old will feel or look like, since it’s too far away from their current world, and the changes they will undergo are too enormous to understand.

The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it. Far from always wanting to forget it, they suffer, on the contrary, from not being able to possess it completely enough, estranged citizens of the world, exiled from their own country. Except for vivid moments of fulfillment, all reality for them is incomplete. Their actions escape them in the form of other actions, return in unexpected guises to judge them, and disappear like the water Tantalus longed to drink, into some still undiscovered orifice. To know the whereabouts of the orifice, to control the course of the river, to understand life, at last, as destiny—these are their true aspirations. But this vision which, in the realm of consciousness at least, will reconcile them with themselves, can only appear, if it ever does appear, at the fugitive moment that is death, in which everything is consummated. In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

When Franz returned to himself, he seemed still to be in a dream. He thought himself in a sepulchre, into which a ray of sunlight in pity scarcely penetrated. He stretched forth his hand, and touched stone; he rose to his seat, and found himself lying on his bournous in a bed of dry heather, very soft and odoriferous. The vision had fled; and as if the statues had been but shadows from the tomb, they had vanished at his waking. He advanced several paces towards the point whence the light came, and to all the excitement of his dream succeeded the calmness of reality. He found that he was in a grotto, went towards the opening, and through a kind of fanlight saw a blue sea and an azure sky. The air and water were shining in the beams of the morning sun; on the shore the sailors were sitting, chatting and laughing; and at ten yards from them the boat was at anchor, undulating gracefully on the water. There for some time he enjoyed the fresh breeze which played on his brow, and listened to the dash of the waves on the beach, that left against the rocks a lace of foam as white as silver. He was for some time without reflection or thought for the divine charm which is in the things of nature, specially after a fantastic dream; then gradually this view of the outer world, so calm, so pure, so grand, reminded him of the illusiveness of his vision, and once more awakened memory. He recalled his arrival on the island, his presentation to a smuggler chief, a subterranean palace full of splendor, an excellent supper, and a spoonful of hashish. It seemed, however, even in the very face of open day, that at least a year had elapsed since all these things had passed, so deep was the impression made in his mind by the dream, and so strong a hold had it taken of his imagination. Thus every now and then he saw in fancy amid the sailors, seated on a rock, or undulating in the vessel, one of the shadows which had shared his dream with looks and kisses. Otherwise, his head was perfectly clear, and his body refreshed; he was free from the slightest headache; on the contrary, he felt a certain degree of lightness, a faculty for absorbing the pure air, and enjoying the bright sunshine more vividly than ever.

What, then, is active imagination? In practice it’s exactly what Jung did in his visions and conversations with inner figures such as Philemon, Ka, and Salome mentioned above: entering a fantasy and talking with one’s “self”—at least a part of oneself “normally” left unconscious—asking questions and receiving knowledge that one—“you”—did not know. In many ways, it’s something we engage in often already, but in a shallow, fleeting way, when we “ask ourselves” what we think or will do about a situation. More abstractly, it’s a method of consciously entering into a dialogue with the unconscious, which triggers the transcendent function, a vital shift in consciousness, brought about through the union of the conscious and unconscious minds. Unexpected insights and self-renewal are some of the results of the transcendent function. It achieves what I call that elusive “Goldilocks” condition, the “just right” of having the conscious and unconscious minds work together, rather than being at odds. In the process it produces a third state more vivid and “real” than either; in it we recognize what consciousness should be like and see our “normal” state as at best a muddling through. We’ve already seen how the transcendent function helped Jung when faced with the dilemma of having to choose between science and the humanities. Then it operated through a dream, producing the mandala-like symbol of the giant radiolarian. In the simplest sense, the transcendent function is our built-in means of growth, psychological and spiritual—it’s “transcendent” only in the sense that it “transcends” the frequent deadlock between the conscious and unconscious minds—and is a development of what Jung earlier recognized as the “prospective tendencies in man.

CONTEMPLATION is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete. Yet contemplation is not vision because it sees “without seeing” and knows “without knowing.” It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words or even in clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by “unknowing.” Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or “unknowing.

So Callie is a rake." She blushed. "I don't think so." Silence fell between them as he watched the wash of pink across her cheeks. He lifted her wounded arm in his hand, placing a soft kiss on the back of her hand. She breathed deeply at the feel of his lips on her skin, so warm and soft, and her eyes flew to his, intently focused on her. He held her gaze, and she felt a shock of liquid heat as his tongue circled one of her knuckles. He registered her surprise, smiling against her and turning her hand palm up, then setting his tongue and lips to work on the soft, sensitive spot at its center. Her breath quickened, and she closed her eyes to the sensation, unable to watch the erotic movement of his mouth across her skin. He lifted his lips from her hand and, when she opened her eyes again, it was to find him watching her, a wicked smile on his lips. Reaching out, he traced one finger along the line of her jaw, sending a shiver through her. When he spoke, his voice was thick and liquid, and it sent a shock of heat down her spine. "I shouldn't give up on that part of her just yet, Empress." She caught her breath at the endearment, which brought with it a hazy memory from long ago. He chased the vision away with the vivid present as he clasped her chin, bringing her face closer to his. "You forget, I've met the women several times... In carriages..." His lips hovered just above hers, sending a tremor of anticipation through her, "And in theatres..." She tried to close the distance between them and he pulled back just enough to drive her slightly mad. "And in bedchambers. In fact," he added, his words a caress along the sensitive skin of her lips, "I rather like the rakish side of her." And then he settled his lips upon hers, and she was lost. She was consumed by the softness of his mouth, the gentleness of the caress- so very different than the kisses they had shared before. This kiss consumed her, made her forget herself, their surroundings, everything but the magnificent pressure of his lips on hers. His thumb stroked her jaw as his mouth ate at hers, sending waves of pulsing pleasure through her. She gasped at the feeling, and he took advantage of her open lips to plunder her mouth with deep, drugging kisses that made her dizzy. She reached for him, her anchor in a sea of sensuality, wrapping her arms around his neck and plunging her fingers into his heavy, soft hair. He made a deep, satisfied sound at the feeling of her wrapped around him, and traced a path across her cheek and down the column of her throat with soft, moist kisses that sent explosions of pleasure through her.

... and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented itself, not in relation to the living world, or any effect it might have on other people, but purely in relation to himself and his own soul, and it seemed so vivid, almost a dependable certainty, stark and terrible. And from the heights of this vision everything that had once tormentingly preoccupied him seemed suddenly bathed in a cold, white light with no shadows, no perspective, no outline. His whole life seemed like a magic-lantern show that he had been staring at through glass by artificial light. Now suddenly the glass was gone, and he could see those awful daubings in the clear light of day. 'Yes, yes, here they are, these false images that I used to find so worrying, enthralling and agonizing,' he told himself, giving his imagination a free rein to run over the main pictures in the magic lantern of his life, looked anew in the cold, white daylight brought on by a clear vision of death. 'Here they are, these crudely daubed figures that used to seem so magnificent and mysterious. Honour and glory, philanthropy, love of a woman, love of Fatherland -- how grand these pictures used to seem, filled with such deep meanings! And now it all looks so simple, colourless and crude in the cold light of the morning I can feel coming upon me.

Too much bergamot in this one, too tart; no depth in this one; bring forward the orange blossom. Measuring out drops from several vials, she blended another variation, leaning heavily on her keen intuition. Inhaling, she let her mind wander, visualizing the aromatic impression. She was on the verge of discovery. An ethereal freshness with subtle spiciness, like the voluptuous scent of orange blossoms on a sunny spring morning. The hair on her arms bristled with anticipation. She inhaled again, going farther, detecting the bouquet of jasmine absolute and rose attar, rich and silky, entwined with a spicy note of carnation, adding verve and vitality, robust brilliance. It needs a splash of complexity here, a sprig of basil there, an accent of clove. Images of lovers danced in her mind, a soaring sonata thrilled in her soul. A vision intruded, no, a memory- she was dancing with Jon, resting her head on his shoulder, a salty hint of ocean, breathing in his scent, intoxicated with the musky, virile smell of his skin... Another breath and she dragged her thoughts back, delving deeper into the essence. The mystery of amber to balance the soul; the silky smoothness of sandalwood; the delicious lure of vanilla, like a lover's midnight embrace. An ache grew within her at the core of her being. And in her mind's eye, veiled visions of a moonlit night, a couple dancing barefoot on the beach, swirling silks of scarlet and gold, the sultry caress of a whisper, so vivid she trailed her fingers along the nape of her neck, remembering... Seductive, sensual, the essence of amour.

Hints for Application and Practice For every five minutes given to reading and study of the theories of Mental Science, spend fifteen minutes in the use and application of the knowledge acquired. 1. Spend one minute in every twenty-four hours in conscientiously thinking over the specification that must be observed in order to have your prayers answered. 2. Practice the steady recognition of desirable thought possession for two periods of fifteen minutes each every day. Not only time yourself each period to see how long you can keep a given conception before your mental vision, but also keep a written record of the vividness with which you experience your mental image. Remember that your mental senses are just as varied and trainable as your physical ones. 3. Spend five minutes every day between 12 noon and 1 o’clock with a mental search for new sources of wealth.

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line - that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen - that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.

That pain of wanting, the burning desire to possess what you lack, is one of the greatest allies you have. It is a force you can harness to create whatever you want in your life. When you took an honest look at your life back in the previous chapter and rated yourself as being either on the up curve or the down curve in seven different areas, you were painting a picture of where you are now. This diagram shows that as point A. Where you could be tomorrow, your vision of what’s possible for you in your life, is point B. And to the extent that there is a “wanting” gap between points A and B, there is a natural tension between those two poles. It’s like holding a magnet near a piece of iron: you can feel the pull of that magnet tugging at the iron. Wanting is exactly like that; it’s magnetic. You can palpably feel your dreams (B) tugging at your present circumstances (A). Tension is uncomfortable. That’s why it sometimes makes people uncomfortable to hear about how things could be. One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech made such a huge impact on the world and carved such a vivid place in our cultural memory is that it made the world of August 1963 very uncomfortable. John Lennon painted his vision of a more harmonious world in the song Imagine. Within the decade, he was shot to death. Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates … our world can be harsh on people who talk about an improved reality. Visions and visionaries make people uncomfortable. These are especially dramatic examples, of course, but the same principle applies to the personal dreams and goals of people we’ve never heard of. The same principle applies to everyone, including you and me. Let’s say you have a brother, or sister, or old friend with whom you had a falling out years ago. You wish you had a better relationship, that you talked more often, that you shared more personal experiences and conversations together. Between where you are today and where you can imagine being, there is a gap. Can you feel it?

Yet nothing can be more certain than this: what makes a poet a poet is the fact that he sees himself surrounded by figures who live and act before him, and into whose innermost essence he gazes. Because of the peculiar weakness of modern talent we are inclined to imagine the original aesthetic phenomenon in too complicated and abstract a manner. For the genuine poet metaphor is no rhetorical figure, but an image which takes the place of something else, something he can really see before him as a substitute for a concept. To the poet a character is not a whole composed of selected single features, but an insistently alive person whom he sees before his very eyes, and distinguished from a painter's vision of the same thing only by the fact that poet sees the figure continuing to live and act over a period of time. What allows Homer to depict things so much more vividly than all other poets? It is the fact that he looks at things so much more than they do. We talk so abstractly about poetry because we are usually all bad poets. Fundamentally the aesthetic phenomenon is simple; one only has to have the ability to watch a living play continuously and to live constantly surrounded by crowds of spirits, then one is a poet; if one feels the impulse to transform oneself and to speak out of other bodies and souls, then one is a dramatist

There appeared among our letters in 1988 a remarkably vivid account from a woman in Australia, who had been doing housework in the middle of the day when some very strange creatures had abruptly appeared in her sitting room. She observed a willowy being with dark, slanted eyes and a group of short, stocky ones in “brown shrouds,” who seemed to her to be workers, while the tall one was more of a supervisor. It proceeded to overpower her with its mind while the workers moved about in the background, doing what she could not imagine. After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what had happened to her during that missing time. Presumably, though, the creatures who put her through this ordeal know—and perhaps, also, that is something close to the secret of the ages. In any case, one wonders, looking at Lorie Barnes’s story and the story of the Australian woman, if we are not seeing the outline of a very remarkable and unsuspected structure: we are the kobolds. They are us working, somehow, in the fields of the soul. And one day, many of the living will join them down this very strange path, as we enter this other level of humanity, where what is hidden to us in this state, is the grammar of their ordinary truth.

She looked thoughtful. “Who knows? Perhaps now is the time to see through the habit. Accidents, illness, healing, they’re all more mysterious than any of us ever imagined. I believe that we have an undiscovered ability to influence what happens to us in the future, including whether we are healthy—although, again, the power has to remain with the individual patient. “There was a reason that I didn’t offer an opinion concerning how badly you were hurt. We in the medical establishment have learned that medical opinions have to be offered very carefully. Over the years the public has developed almost a worship of doctors, and when a physician says something, patients have tended to take these opinions totally to heart. The country doctors of a hundred years ago knew this, and would use this principle to actually paint an overly optimistic picture of any health situation. If the doctor said that the patient would get better, very often the patient would internalize this idea in his or her mind and actually defy all odds to recover. In later years, however, ethical considerations have prevented such distortions, and the establishment has felt that the patient is entitled to a cold scientific assessment of his or her situation. “Unfortunately when this was given, sometimes patients dropped dead right before our eyes, just because they were told their condition was terminal. We know now that we have to be very careful with these assessments, because of the power of our minds. We want to focus this power in a positive direction. The body is capable of miraculous regeneration. Body parts thought of in the past as solid forms are actually energy systems that can transform overnight. Have you read the latest research on prayer? The simple fact that this kind of spiritual visualization is being scientifically proven to work totally undermines our old physical model of healing. We’re having to work out a new model.” She paused and poured more water on the towel around my ankle, then continued, “I believe the first step in the process is to identify the fear with which the medical problem seems to be connected; this opens up the energy block in your body to conscious healing. The next step is to pull in as much energy as possible and focus it at the exact location of the block.” I was about to ask how this was done, but she stopped me. “Go ahead and raise your energy level as much as you can.” Accepting her guidance, I began to observe the beauty around me and to concentrate on a spiritual connection within, evoking a heightened sensation of love. Gradually the colors became more vivid and everything in my awareness increased in presence. I could tell that she was raising her own energy at the same time. When I felt as though my vibration had increased as much as possible, I looked at her. She smiled back at me. “Okay, now you can focus the energy on the block.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “You use the pain. That’s why it’s there, to help you focus.

Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck. But the thing cannot be done : Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral—this struggle was still confined within the same man. Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art. What troubles one, is merely that he did not always recognize his own self when confronted with truth. I like the story of his picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title—and seeing: Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy. What obsessed Tolstoy, what obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader, was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius. Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of truth. When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. What does his tussle with the ruling Greek-Catholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels? Essential truth, istina, is one of the few words in the Russian language that cannot be rhymed. It has no verbal mate, no verbal associations, it stands alone and aloof, with only a vague suggestion of the root "to stand" in the dark brilliancy of its immemorial rock. Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth's exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun ; Dostoevski, a much inferior artist, saw it as a thing of blood and tears and hysterical and topical politics and sweat; and Chekhov kept a quizzical eye upon it, while seemingly engrossed in the hazy scenery all around. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched, and found the place where the cross had once stood, or found—the image of his own self.

Knowing Chris was getting married, his fellow Team members decided that they had to send him off with a proper SEAL bachelor party. That meant getting him drunk, of course. It also meant writing all over him with permanent markers-an indelible celebration, to be sure. Fortunately, they liked him, so his face wasn’t marked up-not by them, at least; he’d torn his eyebrow and scratched his lip during training. Under his clothes, he looked quite the sight. And the words wouldn’t come off no matter how he, or I scrubbed. I pretended to be horrified, but honestly, that didn’t bother me much. I was just happy to have him with me, and very excited to be spending the rest of my life with the man I loved. It’s funny, the things you get obsessed about. Days before the wedding, I spent forty-five minutes picking out exactly the right shape of lipstick, splurging on expensive cosmetics-then forgot to take it with me the morning of the wedding. My poor sister and mom had to run to Walgreens for a substitute; they came back with five different shades, not one of which matched the one I’d picked out. Did it matter? Not at all, although I still remember the vivid marks the lipstick made when I kissed him on the cheek-marking my man. Lipstick, location, time of day-none of that mattered in the end. What did matter were our families and friends, who came in for the ceremony. Chris liked my parents, and vice versa. I truly loved his mom and dad. I have a photo from that day taped near my work area. My aunt took it. It’s become my favorite picture, an accidental shot that captured us perfectly. We stand together, beaming, with an American flag in the background. Chris is handsome and beaming; I’m beaming at him, practically glowing in my white gown. We look so young, happy, and unworried about what was to come. It’s that courage about facing the unknown, the unshakable confidence that we’d do it together, that makes the picture so precious to me. It’s a quality many wedding photos possess. Most couples struggle to make those visions realities. We would have our struggles as well.

Switching on the ground-floor lights, she checked the gas jet and the main gas plug and poured water over the smoldering, half-buried charcoal in the brazier. She stood before the upright mirror in the four-and-a-half-mat room and held up her skirts. The bloodstains made it seem as if a bold, vivid pattern was printed across the lower half of her white kimono. When she sat down before the mirror, she was conscious of the dampness and coldness of her husband’s blood in the region of her thighs, and she shivered. Then, for a long while, she lingered over her toilet preparations. She applied the rouge generously to her cheeks, and her lips too she painted heavily. This was no longer make-up to please her husband. It was make-up for the world which she would leave behind, and there was a touch of the magnificent and the spectacular in her brushwork. When she rose, the mat before the mirror was wet with blood. Reiko was not concerned about this. (...) The lieutenant was lying on his face in a sea of blood. The point protruding from his neck seemed to have grown even more prominent than before. Reiko walked heedlessly across the blood. Sitting beside the lieutenant’s corpse, she stared intently at the face, which lay on one cheek on the mat. The eyes were opened wide, as if the lieutenant’s attention had been attracted by something. She raised the head, folding it in her sleeve, wiped the blood from the lips, and bestowed a last kiss. (...) Reiko sat herself on a spot about one foot distant from the lieutenant’s body. Drawing the dagger from her sash, she examined its dully gleaming blade intently, and held it to her tongue. The taste of the polished steel was slightly sweet. Reiko did not linger. When she thought how the pain which had previously opened such a gulf between herself and her dying husband was now to become a part of her own experience, she saw before her only the joy of herself entering a realm her husband had already made his own. In her husband’s agonized face there had been something inexplicable which she was seeing for the first time. Now she would solve that riddle. Reiko sensed that at last she too would be able to taste the true bitterness and sweetness of that great moral principle in which her husband believed. What had until now been tasted only faintly through her husband’s example she was about to savor directly with her own tongue. Reiko rested the point of the blade against the base of her throat. She thrust hard. The wound was only shallow. Her head blazed, and her hands shook uncontrollably. She gave the blade a strong pull sideways. A warm substance flooded into her mouth, and everything before her eyes reddened, in a vision of spouting blood. She gathered her strength and plunged the point of the blade deep into her throat.

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

In temperament the Second Men were curiously different from the earlier species. The same factors were present, but in different proportions, and in far greater subordination to the considered will of the individual. Sexual vigour had returned. But sexual interest was strangely altered. Around the ancient core of delight in physical and mental contact with the opposite sex there now appeared a kind of innately sublimated, and no less poignant, appreciation of the unique physical and mental forms of all kinds of live things. It is difficult for less ample natures to imagine this expansion of the innate sexual interest; for to them it is not apparent that the lusty admiration which at first directs itself solely on the opposite sex is the appropriate attitude to all the beauties of flesh and spirit in beast and bird and plant. Parental interest also was strong in the new species, but it too was universalized. It had become a strong innate interest in, and a devotion to, all beings that were conceived as in need of help. In the earlier species this passionate spontaneous altruism occurred only in exceptional persons. In the new species, however, all normal men and women experienced altruism as a passion. And yet at the same time primitive parenthood had become tempered to a less possessive and more objective love, which among the First Men was less common than they themselves were pleased to believe. Assertiveness had also greatly changed. Formerly very much of a man's energy had been devoted to the assertion of himself as a private individual over against other individuals; and very much of his generosity had been at bottom selfish. But in the Second Men this competitive self-assertion, this championship of the most intimately known animal against all others, was greatly tempered. Formerly the major enterprises of society would never have been carried through had they not been able to annex to themselves the egoism of their champions. But in the Second Men the parts were reversed. Few individuals could ever trouble to exert themselves to the last ounce for merely private ends, save when those ends borrowed interest or import from some public enterprise. It was only his vision of a world-wide community of persons, and of his own function therein, that could rouse the fighting spirit in a man. Thus it was inwardly, rather than in outward physical characters, that the Second Men differed from the First. And in nothing did they differ more than in their native aptitude for cosmopolitanism. They had their tribes and nations. War was not quite unknown amongst them. But even in primitive times a man's most serious loyalty was directed toward the race as a whole; and wars were so hampered by impulses of kindliness toward the enemy that they were apt to degenerate into rather violent athletic contests, leading to an orgy of fraternization. It would not be true to say that the strongest interest of these beings was social. They were never prone to exalt the abstraction called the state, or the nation, or even the world-commonwealth. For their most characteristic factor was not mere gregariousness but something novel, namely an innate interest in personality, both in the actual diversity of persons and in the ideal of personal development. They had a remarkable power of vividly intuiting their fellows as unique persons with special needs. Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another. But the Second Men, more intensely and accurately self-conscious, were also more intensely and accurately conscious of one another. This they achieved by no unique faculty, but solely by a more ready interest in each other, a finer insight, and a more active imagination.

It’s OK to lose people because of the Vivid Vision. Those aren’t the people you want around in the first place. It’s better to know this on day one, than to spend two years trying to align and inspire them.

And that is the underlying concept of the Vivid Vision: When everyone can see what the CEO can see, they will figure out a way to make that dream for the future come true.

One of the purposes of the Vivid Vision is to create alignment on your team. At the end of the three years, you should consider how well-aligned your team became. How engaged were they? Are people more clear on their duties and responsibilities than they were before you released the Vivid Vision? How much harmony was created inside the office when projects were being planned and picked out?

When workers within an organization are making decisions with the same intuition as their leader, that is a hallmark of success. That is one of the reasons you’re training people to be leaders in the first place. Your job as the CEO is to align and inspire everyone and then get out of the way and let them run.

Again, apart from you, no one in your organization knows with any certainty what it is you intend to make of the company you lead. And they can’t build it, if they can’t see it. It’s your task to provide them with the means of seeing it. And if you don’t, we’re right back to the old tale of the blind men and the elephant.

the reason companies spend so much time managing people, holding them accountable and running a permission-based system, is because nobody knows where they’re going. They don’t even know the revenue goal or the operating budget. Everyone is doing an individual job without understanding its ultimate purpose and how that role ties into the bigger picture.

A company’s BHAG is as important as its Core Values.

When creating the Vivid Vision, don’t worry about how it is going to happen, only that it’s going to happen. It’s the CEO’s job to figure out where the organization is going. It’s the role of the leadership team to figure out how they will make the Vivid Vision happen. President Kennedy didn’t sit down and map out exactly how to put a man on the moon; he just decided that was the direction the country was headed.

He turned around and busied himself retrieving his discarded clothing from the floor, because it made him ache to look at her. She had always had an affinity for gossip. She’d always been cleverer with her words than she was careful. And she’d always been provocative—determined to bend the world to her very vivid vision of it. Before, he had found these qualities poignant. They—along with her light, her charm, her mordant wit, her laughter—made her who she was. Irrepressibly, endearingly herself. Now she just seemed reckless. Cruel.

Lord, today, help me paint a beautiful picture. Remove the distractions, clarify my inner mind, and give me a vision. Lay out the canvas, oh God, and help me bring this picture to vivid life. Amen.

He was polite; he was cool; he was enigmatic. He was every bit what they expected and wanted the storied Duke of Falconbridge to be, because it amused him to be so. In truth, his eyes were on the stairs. He waited with the patience of a cat near a mouse hole for Genevieve Eversea to arrive. He almost didn't recognize her when she did appear. Her dress was a glossy silk of midnight blue, cut very low, and the "sleeves"- really scraps of net- clung to her pale, flawless shoulders, as though she'd tumbled down through clouds to get here and brought a few sheds of sky with her. Her neck was long. Her collarbone had that smooth pristine temptation of a bank of new-fallen snow. It was interrupted only by a drop of a blue stone on a chain that pointed directly at quite confident cleavage, as if the owner knew full well it was splendid and was accustomed to exposing it. Her sleek dark hair was dressed up high and away from her face, and tiny diamanté sparks were scattered through it. Her face beneath it was revealed in delicate simplicity. A smooth, pale, high forehead, etched cheekbones. Elegant as Wedgwood, set off by that dark, dark hair and those vivid eyes. He stared. He wasn't precisely... nonplussed. Still, this particular vision of Genevieve Eversea required reconciling with the quiet girl in the morning dress, the moor pony with the determined gait. As though they were not quite the same thing, or were perhaps 'variations' of the same thing, like verb tenses. He felt a bit like a boy who needed to erase his morning lessons and begin again.

St. John would say that the natural working of the faculties is not adequate to attain to union with God, and the beginner is drawn to spiritual exercises as much by the satisfaction as by any purely spiritual motives. For the psychologist, even while he is refraining from making any judgment about the religious object, is often painfully aware that if interior experiences are viewed as if they had nothing to do with the overall dynamics of the psyche, then their recipient runs the risk of damaging his psychic balance. If temptations must be seen only as the direct working of the devil and inspirations and revelations the direct working of the Holy Spirit, then the totality of the psyche and the flow of its energy will be misunderstood. The biggest danger to the beginner experiencing sensible fervor, or any other tangible phenomenon, is that they will equate their experience purely and simply with union with God. The very combination of genuine spiritual gifts and how these graces work through the psyche creates a sense of conviction that this, indeed, is the work of God, but this conviction is often extended to deny the human dimension as if any participation by the psyche is a denial of divine origin. The beginner, then, can become impervious to psychological and spiritual advice. The sense of consolation, the feeling of completion, the visions seen, or the voices heard, the tongue spoken, or the healings witnessed, are all identified with the exclusive direct action of God as if there were no psyche that received and conditioned these inspirations. This same attitude is then carried over into daily life and how God's action is viewed in this world. If God is so immediately present, miracles must be taking place daily. God must be intervening day-by-day, even in the minor mundane affairs of the recipients of His Spirit. This does not mean that genuine miracles do not take place, nor that genuine inspirations do not play a role in daily life, but rather, if we believe that they are conceptually distinguishable from the ordinary working of consciousness, we run the risk of identifying God's action with our own perceptions, feelings and emotions. The initial conversion state, precisely because of the degree of emotional energy it is charged with, is often clung to as if the intensity of this energy is a guarantee of its spiritual character. As beginners under the vital force of these tangible experiences we take up an attitude of inner expectancy. We look to a realm beyond the arena of the ego and assume that what transpires there is supernatural. We reach and grasp for interior messages. Thus arises a real danger of misinterpreting what we perceive. What Jung says about the inability to discern between God and the unconscious at the level of empirical experience is verified here. We run the risk of confusing the spiritual with the psychic, our own perceptions with God Himself. An even greater danger is that we will erect this kind of knowledge into a whole theology of the spiritual life, and thus judge our progress by the presence of these phenomena. “The same problem can arise in a completely different context, which could be called a pseudo-Jungian Christianity. In it the realities of the psyche which Jung described are identified with the Christian faith. Thus, at one stroke a vivid sense of experience, even mysticism, if you will, arises. The numinous experience of the unconscious becomes equivalent to the workings of the Holy Spirit. Dreams and the psychological events that take place during the process of individuation are taken for the stages of the life of prayer and the ascent of the soul to God by faith. But this mysticism is no more to be identified with St. John's than the previous one of visions and revelations.

In order to construct a flawless imitation, the first step was to gather as much video data as possible with a web crawler. His ideal targets were fashionable Yoruba girls, with their brightly colored V-neck buba and iro that wrapped around their waists, hair bundled up in gele. Preferably, their videos were taken in their bedrooms with bright, stable lighting, their expressions vivid and exaggerated, so that AI could extract as many still-frame images as possible. The object data set was paired with another set of Amaka’s own face under different lighting, from multiple angles and with alternative expressions, automatically generated by his smartstream. Then, he uploaded both data sets to the cloud and got to work with a hyper-generative adversarial network. A few hours or days later, the result was a DeepMask model. By applying this “mask,” woven from algorithms, to videos, he could become the girl he had created from bits, and to the naked eye, his fake was indistinguishable from the real thing. If his Internet speed allowed, he could also swap faces in real time to spice up the fun. Of course, more fun meant more work. For real-time deception to work, he had to simultaneously translate English or Igbo into Yoruba, and use transVoice to imitate the voice of a Yoruba girl and a lip sync open-source toolkit to generate corresponding lip movement. If the person on the other end of the chat had paid for a high-quality anti-fake detector, however, the app might automatically detect anomalies in the video, marking them with red translucent square warnings

Again, the reason companies spend so much time managing people, holding them accountable and running a permission-based system, is because nobody knows where they’re going.

The third section tells the rest of the story also from the cross’s perspective, vividly elaborating its feelings as it is pierced with nails, spat upon, then cast aside. The poem concludes when the original narrator awakens. The cross charges him to hold it in awe, share the vision with others, and to follow the path to righteousness.

There was a difference between the pleasure that soothed and lulled one to sleep and pleasure that drew the self more widely and vividly into the world, and thinking of his return to Colombo now it seemed to him, as he stood there in front of the window that something vital had been lost over the course of the pervious year, the sense so strong for most of his twenties that his life could be part of some larger thing, part of some movement or vision to which he could give himself up.

Your and our sea of love! The night sea, calm and silent, With the lapping sound of waves, There my heart wanders, my heart indulgent, And floats with these waves, Into the ocean of feelings, Into the depths of emotions, And I doubt my heart’s dealings, As it creates new waves of emotions, Where I feel wet with your embrace, And the waves of life surround me from every side, And I seek you riding these waves and merge with your grace, Feeling the beauty of your beautiful face that now stares at me from every side, And then my love Irma, I let myself sink to the bottom, As your feelings, your memories, your touch pile over me, And now I can even feel your every atom, As your conscience of love sinks into me, At the bottom of the life’s sea, Where ripples and waves distract the casual seeker of love, Because the pearls lie at the bottom of the sea, Just like you, every moment sinking into me silently, in this sea of love, Where I am the waves, I am the ripples, I am the sea, And you are the motion that keeps me alive, And in this state I shall now forever be, With you and the sea of life forever in me alive, Then at the bottom as you secretly kiss me, Some mariner shall feel the joy in his heart, And so shall begin the cycle of new waves, new tides in the sea, Where now the sea, the waves, the pearl, everything is part of our heart, That beats endlessly over the surface of the sea, To inspire the true mariner of the sea seeking life and love, To him we shall bear the visions of what he can be, A lover, just like you and me, who always finds his true love, So Irma, let the sea of feelings and your memories grow over me, And let me at the bottom lie submerged, in this vivid presence of thee, Where you are the water, the sea, and everything for me, For my true world is created only when I love thee! And this is what my wish for the true mariner of life shall always be, Seeking love, seeking a wave of passion to ride, And dearing to dive into this sea, At the bottom to discover you and me, Lying in the wet embrace that spreads in all directions, Wherever a true mariner turns to see, Our reflections to discover love’s true sensations, And imagines about the wonder if he too with his lover could dwell in this sea, our sea! And see, The wonder of love and the wonder of the sea, Where life grows on the surface and at the bottom too, For I love you Irma on the surface of the sea, And at its bottom too, So let this mariner come and brave the sea of life, As we cast our spell of love in the form of waves and infinite ripples, Let him discover his own meaningful strife, And flow endlessly with these ripples, To finally tarry at the bottom of this sea, Where now his lover shall tame his weary mind, Just like you do it for me, And make me believe even your heart has a mind, a beautiful mind! That often thinks of me, And dares to plunge into the darkness of the sea, Only to seek me, And realise that at the bottom you and I are the life of the sea! Where many mariners and lovers lie in their state humbled, To flow with these waves endlessly, As we at the bottom of this sea lie passionately cuddled, Like the pearl in an oyster, forever and endlessly!

Without knowing this, without having been to the future, there would be no way to situate this vision among the other items in my memory. And since most of our thoughts are as evanescent and hard to remember as dreams, I will be unlikely to remember this vision or notice how it corresponded to an actual event in my life some time afterward. It has often been suggested that déjà vu experiences may reflect this kind of “memory of a premonition,” although neural signals of familiarity may misfire for more mundane reasons, so it would be hard to substantiate such a claim in many, or most, cases. It is the same difficulty that J. B. Priestley identified in the context of his future-influencing-present effect: How often will it occur to people to (a) record their passing thoughts and moods in detail and (b) compare those recorded thoughts and moods to later events? Almost never. Yet as we will see later, when people’s lives, thoughts, and feelings are recorded for some other purpose, such as in psychotherapy, it sometimes does—quite by accident—reveal suggestive evidence for something like the existence of a perturbing influence of future events on prior behavior. “The brain is an illusion factory,” as neurobiologist Dean Buonomano puts it.52 Humans’ ability to vividly and realistically imagine things that haven’t happened (or haven’t happened yet) poses a huge challenge to studying anomalous experiences and ESP phenomena. One of the million functions of the Swiss Army Knife in our skulls is to serve as a powerful all-purpose imaging device, a special effects studio that would put Industrial Light and Magic to shame. It is able to create from scratch, instantly, vivid images to dramatize any piece of information or idea, real or fictitious, as well as translate complex thoughts instantly into pictures. It does this not only in dreams but also in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states on the edge of sleep, and even in waking reality when we “mentally time travel” or daydream or imagine possible scenarios.

Fair warning, my place isn’t exactly a palace.” Not a palace but a waking dream. A vision I had the night Dominic told me he wanted nothing for a future. A vivid dream of a long driveway lined with Bradford pear trees that bloom white in the spring. A driveway that leads to a house on top of a hill floating in the middle of the mountains. A small house with lots of built-in bookshelves, cozy reading nooks draped with soft plush blankets and throw pillows. And behind it, a garden filled to the brim with every imaginable scent and color. I’d searched for nearly a month before I found something resembling what I dreamt of. The day I closed on it, I painted the front door blood red. And then I stocked the fridge with a rare wine. My last touch was adding my French Bulldog, Beau.

Nothing in this mountain town looked as well preserved as that box had been. The strangest thing about the place was the disjunction between the town itself—the desolate, vacant space—and the crowd of impressions that surrounded it. To me, it was almost a roar, the sheer volume of lives that had shared this space. Their absence was as vivid as their presence. It didn’t feel like my visions—not even my visions of the blast. It was more like a residue. It was the resonance of a bell, echoing long after the bell itself has stopped.

Nothing in this mountain town looked as well preserved as that box had been. The strangest thing about the place was the disjunction between the town itself—the desolate, vacant space—and the crowd of impressions that surrounded it. To me, it was almost a roar, the sheer volume of lives that had shared this space. Their absence was as vivid as their presence. It didn’t feel like my visions—not even my visions of the blast. It was more like a residue. It was the resonance of a bell, echoing long after the bell itself has stopped. I was surprised to look up and see Zoe and Kip unaffected. Both were moving warily among the rubble, and Kip kept looking over his shoulder, but it was evident that neither of them felt the same silent cacophony that was besieging me. Kip noticed me, though, and the way my hands had moved, instinctively and uselessly, to cover my ears. He moved to my side, stepping over a twisted metal beam.

I have a vivid picture of what I want.

Do you have vivid picture of your visions in your mind?

It happened as it always did, swallowing her swiftly and completely. Intense. Painful. Quick, vivid colors spun beneath her eyelids. Sounds were sharp inside her skull. Fire shot up through her bones. She may have been screaming and she wouldn’t have known. There was smoke in her nose, thick and black, and she couldn’t breathe. It stung her eyes and licked at her skin. Wood and metal crashed down as skin blistered and popped and she knew this wasn’t her, knew it was someone else, someone with a bigger body, bigger boots and darker jeans, and big ol’ hands with scars on the fingers. Men’s hands. Nails blunt and dirty with oil and grease and burning and- The cars were on fire. Paper burned and curled and rags ignited, the cement floor pockmarked by flash fires. Meat withered in her nose and she realized it was her. Him. Dancing embers blackened and burned bone. He screamed and she hoped she was not. He writhed and she really hoped she was not. He was dying, dead, and-

Sensations were completely different. Like the night she had run free as the wolf, Savannah now had the senses of a bird of prey. Her vision was sharp and clear, her eyes enormously wide. She spread her wings experimentally, then flapped them in the light drizzle. They were much bigger than she had anticipated. It delighted her, and she flapped them harder so she could create a wind, causing waves in the water standing in the patio. Are you having fun? Gregori’s voice held a hint of laughter. This is so cool, lifemate, she answered. Her rapidly beating wings lifted her into the air. The light mist was already passing overhead. The air was warm and heavy with the promise of moisture, but she soared high, reveling in her ability to do so. Gregori’s larger, stronger body dropped over hers, close and protective, guiding her in the direction of the bayou. As high up as they were, the sharp eyes of the raptor could spot the smallest of movements below. Details were vivid and clear. Even colors were different. Infrared vision, heat sensors— Savannah wasn’t certain what it was exactly, but the way she perceived the world was a different and unique experience. She dipped beneath Gregori and soared away from him, turning sideways and circling high above him. In her mind she could hear him swearing. As always he sounded arrogant, elegant, Old World, completely in command. Laughing, she caught a thermal and rode it up over the river. The male dropped down to cover her with his huge wings, fencing her in. Spoilsport! she accused him, her touch in his mind a whisper of lightness, of invitation to join in her fun. You are in a great deal of trouble, ma femme. He knew the threat was empty when he made it; he would give her the world. But why did she have to be such a little dare-devil all the time? Anyone choosing to live with you would have to have a sense of adventure, don’t you think? Her soft laughter played over his skin like music, like the gentle breeze blowing from the mountains in their homeland. Even within the bird’s body, he stirred to life, need and hunger rising to become a part of him. Relentless. Demanding. Savage in its intensity. It was more than simple lust. More than hunger. More than need. It was all of it merged together with a tenderness he had never conceived he could feel. When she was at her most outrageous, her most defiant, that was when his heart melted.

The mere fact that you picked up a book about prayer tells me you’re probably a Christian. You believe Jesus is the Son of God; and somewhere along the line, you asked Jesus to come into your heart, meaning you have a relationship with Him. Maybe you grew up in church, following the Lord from an early age. Maybe you were one of thousands at a Billy Graham crusade who went forward when the invitation was given, making a commitment to follow Christ for the rest of your life. Maybe you read a book by Rick Warren and learned about a purpose for your life through Jesus, or one of Max Lucado’s books that gave you a vivid, more personal vision of Christ’s gift of eternal life. Maybe the words of a hymn struck a chord in your heart. Maybe you became interested in Christ after observing a friend or neighbor who year after year exemplified the love of Christ in everything he ever did.

I added that establishing relative importance is especially essential when organizations have a large number of principles. In a study of over 150 hospitals led by Wharton professor Drew Carton, a compelling vision was necessary but not sufficient for strong health and financial performance. The more core principles a hospital emphasized, the less a vivid vision helped. When hospitals had more than four core values, a clear mission no longer offered any benefits for reducing heart attack readmission rates or increasing return on assets. The more principles you have, the greater the odds that employees focus on different values or interpret the same values differently. If that proved to be an issue with five to ten principles, wouldn’t it be an even greater problem with two hundred or more?

By keeping your vision in mind—imagining it vividly and regularly—you automatically teach your unconscious mind to lead you to that day. And won't

Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition. Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over. Moments once reached cannot be reached again. Lovers often sustain vivid reminders of extraordinary moments, but they are reminded at the same time of their impotence in recreating them. The appetite for novelty in lovemaking-new positions, the use of drugs, exotic surroundings, additional partners-is only a search for new moments that can live on only in recollection.

In the vision, God spoke to me and called me by name. “Mariam, you deserved to die for your sins, but I died instead of you so you will live. I set you free from your sin and shame. You are forgiven. Receive My love and forgiveness and stop striving for it. When you receive My love by faith, you will become My child.” The vision was so vivid that I could almost touch the blood dripping from His wounded head, hands, feet and side. “Repent and turn to Me, and you will be with Me in Paradise because of what I have done by My grace. I took your shame so you are free from the judgment of hell and condemnation.