Many visions are doomed from the outset becausee those who articulate them, whether consciously or not, are coming from a place of powerlessness. If we believe that someone else has created our present reality, what is the basis for believing that we can create a different reality in the future? In terms of the theory of the U, the problem with most attempts to formulate visions is that they occur "too far up the left side of the U". When this happens, people formulate visions that are disconnected from a shared understanding of present reality and a sense of shared responsibility for that reality. If people are still externalising their problems, they create, in a sense, "externalised visions", which amount to a kind of change strategy for fixing problems which they have not yet seen their part in creating. Onlly when people begin to see from within the forces that shape their reality and to see their part in how those forces might evolve does vision become powerful. Everything else is just a vague hope.

    Then someone asked me, How did you come up with the pattern language? How did you get the actual material?
    I said, "Well, it was not so very different from any other kind of science. My colleagues and I made observations, looked to see what worked, studied it, tried to distill out the essentials, and wrote them down"
    "But", I went on, "we did do one thing differently. We assumed from the beginning that everything was based on the real nature of human feeling and -- this is the unusual part -- that human feeling is mostly the same, mostly the same from person to person, mostly the same in every person. Of course, there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they are talking about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyncratic part is really only about ten percent of the feelings which we feel. Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same thing. So from the very beginning, when we made the pattern language, we concentrated on that part of human experience and feeling where our feeling is all the same. That is what the pattern language is -- a record of that stuff in us, which belongs to the ninety percent of our feeling where our feelings are all the same".

All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it, and matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its structure and arrangement.

All matter/space has some degree of "self" in it, and this self, or anyway some aspect of the personal, is something which infuses all matter/space and everything we know as matter but now think to be mechanical.

The emerging whole manifests locally. It manifests in particular communities, groups, and, ultimately, in us as individuals.

Serving the emerging whole means paying attention to what's right here within my awareness, what's completely local, and surrendering to what's being asked of me now.

So we have a new axiom: What is most systemic is most local. The deepest systems we enact are woven into the fabric of everyday life, down to the most minute detail.

This is so important for us to understand. We, every one of us, may be able to change the world, but only as we experience more and more of the whole in the present. this is the 'evolving consciousness' that Bohm said was necessary to appreciate the implicate order. Now I see that it's also the cultivation of awareness to 'see the absolute in the manifest', as the buddhists would say.

Serving the emerging whole means paying attention to what's right here within my awareness, what's completely local, and surrendering to what's being asked of me now.

What we're calling 'presencing' is possible because of this womb, where the absolute and the manifest interact. I think a buddhist would say that presencing can arise to the extent that we develop the capacity, individually and collectively, to extend our conscious awareness in both domains.

When your practice has led you to experiences that you can't understand, you need a better theory. Otherwise, if you try to understand these transcendent experiences with 'profane' or, we might say, 'materialistic' ways of thinking, your cultivation will be set back.