The Field of Possibility emerges from the heart and contains all the creative potential, multiple options, and limitless dreams that are available to everyone and anyone as they explore a path of Visionmaking. There is always more available to be seen and imagined than we can understand or apprehend. Possibility is limitless, despite we what are told or our conditioning dictates.

The Way of Dreaming, the subject of the last post and our initial exploration of the New Year, is the way Visionmakers refer to the journey of the imagination. It is the vessel that carries us into this field of unlimited potential.

The belief among Visionmakers is that if it can be seen, it can be accomplished.

The Way of Dreaming, which springs from the full, strong, open and clear heart, is not a realm of magical thinking, or fantasy. When vision emerges from the heart and creates a universe of new possibility, those possibilities are always subject to natural law. It is not enough to simply wish our way into the future. We must support those aspirations with the discipline of Visionmaking–aligning the heart, intellect and will behind the hard work of enterprise.

The practices that enable the Visionmaker to enter the Field of Possibility are: respect, sufficiency, openness and fluency.

Respect is defined by Angeles Arrien as “the willingness to look past our fixed perspectives.” This is important. We must be able to see beyond our assumptions,certainties, opinions, even beliefs to step into the vast mystery of possibility. Without the willingness to look again, we generally perceive what we expect to perceive and nothing more. We must also be respectful when entering “sacred space,” which is how possibility is revered in Visionmaking. We enter humble, and as students.

Sufficiency, or self worth, is an allegiance to our personal power, the sum total of our knowledge, experience, resourcefulness, creativity, aptitudes, gifts, talents and character qualities. These are formidable powers and are the currency required for the journey into possibility. Possibility is a vast, creative landscape and when we immerse ourselves here, it is possible to be overwhelmed, even terrified. Without a strong connection to sufficiency, we are at risk of being blown into chaos by the magnitude and the magnificence of all that we see.

Openness means that we have entered the Field of Possibility as an “open space” and without an egoic agenda. Preconceptions and ambitions can serve to lock vision into a fixed perspective, rendering visible only what is consistent with that preconception or ambition. What lays hidden from view, as a result, is vast expanses of new territory, where infinite creative options and pathways reside.

Fluency is the ability to change or be changed. Many of us say we are open to change, when we are not. Or we are willing to change only in accordance with how and when we want to change. That is a control pattern, not fluency. It locks us out of possibility. We must be like clay and allow ourselves to be shaped and molded by what we see and experience directly. Without such fluency, we risk shutting down the Field of Possibility by becoming rigid and dogmatic.

The practices of possibility prepare us for an encounter with the unknown. This is an “initiatory journey,” a call to adventure, a passage into what Joseph Campbell termed “a zone unknown.”

© Patrick O’Neill 2009. All rights reserved.

The future enters into us

In order to transform itself within us

Long before it happens.

          -Rainer Maria Rilke

In Visionmaking, there are two powers of the intellect which require equal development and respect, cognition and imagination.  

Cognition, called The Way of Knowing, is primarily concerned with gathering knowledge and understanding of the outer world. Awareness, attention, reasoning and analysis are some of the aptitudes that form The Way of Knowing.

Imagination, or The Way of Dreaming, is concerned with the inner world-ideas, thoughts, dreams, symbols and intuitive knowledge.  These are seen as the directions of the heart that are entering consciousness that must be probed and studied to be understood.

Working together, these two powers provide the Visionmaker with the intellectual faculties to pursue a path of heart and meaning.  They are intertwined and constantly collaborating in an extraordinary conversation about the possibilities for a heart-directed journey to meaning, and how to convert those possibilities to outcomes.

The Way of Dreaming is our initial exploration in starting the New Year well.  We begin with the imagination because it is the chief agency for exploring possibilities for the future, a future which takes up its residency in the Four-Chambered Heart “long before it happens.”

“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American poet. Imagination is centrally important to Visionmaking because it allows the Visionmaker to transcend the narrow confines of current circumstances, the status quo and personal history, to explore the vast realm of possibility.  Possibility is the terra firma of the artist, explorer, scientist and inventor.

The voyage into a field of possibility is made aboard the craft of the imagination.  It is an expedition to the frontier of our dreams, that new territory of options and possibilities that would further our heart’s desire -in work and creativity, relationship, health and wellbeing and personal growth and development.  

Many of us feel constrained to dream. Perhaps, we have been convinced that the gravity field of the status quo is too powerful to escape! Perhaps we have let our disappointments, resignation and cynicism overcome our natural curiosity and excitement about the adventure of life?

A Visionmaker rejects the illusion that the status quo - and life itself - is static and preordained.  He or she carries a heart-felt conviction that possibility, intent, and enterprise are much more powerful than the fabric of the status quo.

To imagine a preferred future, a future filled with possibilities for learning, growth and positive change is an initiation point for that future to manifest. In the next entry, we will explore the requirements to enter possibility through the Way of Dreaming.

© Patrick O’Neill 2009. All rights reserved.