🛑 PUBLIC HEALTH ADVISORY: Vision Literacy

Suggestions for wise vision enactment

**Last call to join our second annual Wise Innovation Camp in Mt. Shasta 8/21-24**

tldr: Festivals, retreats, and other types of transformational spaces open wellsprings of beautiful vision that ultimately shape our reality.

But conventional approaches to vision enactment often fall short of their potential and create shitty ripples in the world along the way. How might we relate to vision with greater maturity, especially at the earliest stages that have the greatest influence over what unfolds?

We've been conducting some research and want to share a few suggestions based on early insights.

Fellow travelers,

The central inquiry at School of Wise Innovation concerns “right relationship with vision.”

How do we bring vision to life in ways that are better for all touched?

Including ourselves and relationships that matter most. Whether a tech startup, wisdom school, or changemaking organization; our intention is to empower visionaries to live, work, and create with greater harmony.

As we look out on the troubled state of the world, and reflect on personal experiences with dozens of early stage startup efforts across sectors, we’ve been turning our sights towards how we might dream better together.

Midjourney art by Andrew Dunn

For upon receiving a vision, the natural reaction for an entrepreneurially trained young person in the Modern West (myself included) is something like:

🚀 “OMG. This is it. How can I get the most capital/impact/recognition/_____ from this the fastest?!”

We got the playbook from there down to a science. This has brought an explosion of useful innovation into our lives. But has also led to the enshittification of many parts of the internet, the Earth, our communities, and even our bodies.

While it’s an exciting time of exponential technologies closing the gap between vision and reality, it’s increasingly clear that modern innovators lack commensurate wisdom to match our growing power.

Many colleagues in the wise innovation / holistic technology / regenerative systems change-y worlds are exploring alternative types of design, financing, legal structures, and organizational development to support more responsible, ethical, humane innovation. And we absolutely need all that.

🐣 But little attention has been given to the earliest stages of vision enactment.

The subtle psycho-spiritual dynamics in the very moments of vision, and all that happens in the ensuing hours, days, weeks and months. For just like a new human through gestation, newborn, and early childhood, what happens in the beginning overwhelmingly determines what unfolds.

In what seems like a natural response to an age of great unraveling, we are becoming flooded with visions for a more beautiful world. Visions are gushing through the monasteries, mountain tops, malokas, and ordinary settings to founders and funders, changemakers and activists with the capacity to act on them. Thank God 😹

🕳️ But then comes the trap! Applying conventional mindsets, worldviews, and tools to enact vision reproduces the same dynamics we seek to transcend.

A vision illiterate culture yields rampant burnout, anxiety and depression, intractable conflict, ruptured personal relationships, cringe ripples, violence, avoidable failure.

And there are very few places to learn and practice different ways. Get your vision actualization training here! Your spiritual growth there! But the integration of the two? Such that when vision strikes, we may have the awareness and embodiment to walk a different path.

What needs to happen to shift hearts, minds, and bodies such that in the very moments of experiencing vision, we balance a bias towards action with deep listening, humility, and curiosity?

As it’s the vision stage where there’s the most opportunity to change course, one vision I’ve seen for many years involves something like standing outside such places of vision–say an ayahuasca retreat center–and taking fresh visionaries gently by the hand, sitting them down and handing over a pocket-sized companion book to gently guide their way…

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🧭 Vision Guide v1.1

I’m learning that visions are seldom literal, but point to a kind of feeling tone that could express itself in a variety of forms, at some unpredictable time in the future (or not at all).

The delivery system that has been bubbling up this summer is a simple flyer, based on conversations with wisdom keepers across traditions on this subject, and inspired by many a transformational experience in which I've received some sort of vision --> fell into familiar patterns of taking things too literally, rushing to enact, and inevitably stumbling.

Here’s what I wish I had on hand before and after countless moments of vision:

PDF download link here

This vision literacy PSA is inspired by conversations with and works from Bill Plotkin, Katsi Cook, Simon Mont, Dajé Alōh, Josh Schrei, Susan Barnes, Josie Siegel, Jennifer Armburst, Belinda Liu, C.P. and many others in the School of Wise Innovation orbit.

Some qualifiers:

1. These are simply suggestions. Food for thought synthesized from some folks who know some stuff. Not meant to be absolute claims on truth. We really don’t know. We are in a long-term inquiry, fellow students collectively remembering how to do this together, and want to integrate your perspective on the matter.

2. It’s layered. Some of what’s in this flyer may require more explanation or ontological stretching. There’s much unsaid, and much that is hard to communicate because we don’t have the language. We intend to expand on our research in future writing, having outlined many chapters of what may become a book.

3. Emotions welcomed. We honor your anger in “who the fuck does this guy think he is, telling me I’m wrong?” Your sadness in “oh gosh, what have I done?” Your joy in “YES! Finally! I had a feeling!” Each is a perfectly natural response.

4. This is jedi-level work. It’s extremely hard for those of us conditioned in the dominant culture to change what is so deeply embodied, but it’s possible with practice and courage. I continue to struggle, but each time make marginal improvement. Which perhaps speaks to why traditionally the gates to vision and the integration of vision were tightly regulated processes…

Our hope is that this little dose of considerations may support visionaries in navigating their path less blindly and more skillfully. To make wiser decisions around things that may guide the next 10 years of their life and all the lives they touch–not to mention creating their karma.

This is not to polarize against decisive action, getting things done, achieving something great. It’s an integration and re-balancing of what is currently imbalanced; a re-enchantment of something that is beyond our capacity to fully understand; a restoration of reverence for great power; and a remembering of how to be in a healthy relationship with that creative power.

Appreciating Peter Limberger’s “Agentic Sages” framing (the ideal balance of high agency and high consciousness), we think River Kenna’s nuance points to something closer to the paradigm shift that is being invited:

Reflections Welcomed

What does or doesn't land in the flyer? What’s missing? How could you imagine creatively sharing something like this in transformational contexts? Feel free to leave notes in the comments or reach out.

Sharing with Visionaries

• Flyer the risk zones. Do you know anybody heading to Burning Man or a similar type of environment soon who might appreciate seeing this? Connected to any camps that might want to print a copy, or online communities that might want to discuss it?

• Forward to a friend when they tell you about the big download they had over the weekend. Friends don’t let friends blindly enact vision.

• Try it on for size. Print it out. Put it on your wall. Reflect on your approach to vision enactment.

• Reconnect with your vision. Strategist and nature guide Leslie Freeman has created a little guided audio journey to return to the vision we are holding. Get quiet and comfortable:

Findings From V1

I shared version 1.0 last month at The Borderland (Swedish Burn). Both digitally via Facebook and WhatsApp groups, and physically by printing 50 copies to tape to the inside of random porta potties + hand out when the intuition struck. Feedback was better than expected! Camp leads rejoiced. Individuals thanked me profusely throughout the week. I even had a chance to lean on it myself.

During a recent breathwork session, I received some vision and found myself in the excruciating mindfulness practice of the interplay between mental tension noodling on every detail of possible enactment, with remembering to come back to my breath, body, gratitude, surrender. Upon concluding the joureny, I made a drawing, danced it out, and have yet to share it in written or verbal form with myself or others. Making slow but steady improvement on trusting that even though I could move swiftly to actualize what I saw, that the costs of that kind of process no longer align with my values. And that something more awesome may unfold if I hold things with more spaciousness and curiosity. It feels liberating 😌

“Remember that no one receives a vision that reveals what their delivery system is. Your vision is a metaphorical, mystical, mythopoetic revelation, an experience that is unavoidably enigmatic at first. The way you discover what it wants from you, how it lives in you, the way in which it calls you to stride deeper into the world, is by pursuing your Conversation with the World.” - Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation

🌱 Towards a Vision Ecology

The metacrisis is man-made. So we have to change how man makes things.

The first note contains the song. The way you do anything is the way you do everything. Process is product. The how is the what. The means determine the ends.

As we seek to re-imagine innovation education and culture, one of the highest leverage and most challenging shifts we see is around Vision Literacy, i.e. helping people better understand and orient to the phenomenon that is vision. A critical missing piece in the conversations around conscious technology, impact business, regenerative cultures; anybody creating in service of life.

It’s a matter of public health because vision impacts the whole. It’s the headwaters of human-created reality.

Like the headwaters of a river, the health at the source impacts the entire downstream ecosystem.

The culture of HOW we are bringing to visions to life is enormously influential on the world we are experiencing.

So if we want a different world, we need to head to the source, protect and restore it.

Easy to talk about, hard to get precise beyond platitudes. But that’s what we’re going for at School of Wise Innovation. Planting seeds for the missing elements of what Bill Plotkin refers to as a “vision ecology.”

Since launching last year we’ve energized initiatives such as:

📚 Cultivators

In sensing into what Life on Earth is asking innovators to learn and practice, we sought out relevant wisdom keepers in our network and took a stab at a yearlong entrepreneurship curriculum in the form of an ̶A̶c̶c̶e̶l̶e̶r̶a̶t̶o̶r̶ ̶D̶e̶c̶e̶l̶e̶r̶a̶t̶o̶r̶ CULTIVATOR program, with each season focused on a different aspect of holistic vision enactment: ❄️ Winter on Inner Development 🌼 Spring on Collective Wayfinding ☀️ Summer on Organizational Development and 🍁 Fall TBA. Continuing education for the continuity of life.

⛰️ Initiation

We partnered with The Emerald’s Josh Schrei for a course on Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI: a deeper dive into the themes surfaced in the groundbreaking episode So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers, exploring how traditional cultures have bound power with wisdom and what they might look like in a modern context.

While producing two Wise Innovation Camps in the vision capital of Mt. Shasta to bring community into deeper relationship with nature, and training to supporting people in personal silent retreats and vision quests. Because in order to make wise decisions for the web of life, we actually have to be in relationship with it.

Key slides from Embodied Ethics course

🧙 Elder Councils

Traditionally, elders have served a critical role as respected community members responsible for transmitting knowledge, providing guidance, maintaining cultural traditions, and hearing and interpreting visions.

So we’ve created several elder councils, sitting at the feet of esteemed elders who have exemplified wise innovation: Forrest Landry, Jyoti Ma, Erika Gagnon, Tias Little, Joseph Kramer, and Tim Corcoran.

🌎 10,000 Wisdom Schools

We’ve been tracking and participating in the rise of a cosmo-local network of wisdom schools across sectors and traditions. Rooted in place, in partnership with the people and traditions of that place, and addressing the unique challenges of that place.

As an organization, we’ve been advising vision stage founders and professionals in transition, practicing what we preach through Regenerative Time and Embodied Ethics, and lent a creative hand in many recent cultural moments from TED Talks to viral memes.

While weaving an ecology of thinkers, educators, and consultants like Larry Muhlstein, Turquoise Sound, Michael Garfield, Christina Fedor, Ryan Littman-Quinn, Nicolas Michaelsen, Kristian Simsarian and many more emerging leaders lighting the ways forward (see bottom of page for all those who have taught at School of Wise Innovation).

All in service of what Summer Cultivator teacher Simon Mont describes as our grand project of:

“Harmonizing human creation with sacred creation”

Shifting culture at the vision stage is an underappreciated leverage point that deserves more attention. There is much room to grow in our understanding of what is vision and where does it come from, how various wisdom traditions understand vision, and how different types of technologies may support new ways of vision enactment.

We will be sharing more on "right relationship with vision" in the coming times. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if it calls.

With gratitude,
School of Wise Innovation

"Dreams and visions need an ecology in which to live and grow. Visions grow best when held gently over time, tended slowly, when they are distributed evenly amongst a community, when they are anchored in a body, when they can actually serve an ecology." - Josh Schrei, The Emerald (For The Intuitives Part I)

Midjourney art by Andrew Dunn