Discernment: Discovering a Vision for the Future

There are many obstacles to purposeful change, like thinking that our own viewpoint is the only valid one. The more we build our awareness of our unique strengths and perspectives, the more focused we can become on the present and we can learn to ‘deconstruct’ our prejudices. We can now look to the future and begin to reconstruct our vision of it. The awareness we call discernment is less concerned with trying to impose some meaning on our perception of the world than it is with allowing our perceptions to speak to us (as much as possible) without our accustomed filters and frames. Discernment brings us progressively closer to a perception of universal ideals.

Ideals are not some nebulous points of wishful thinking that inspire Utopian dreaming. Rather, ideals are real principles that are implicit in the way the universe itself unfolds. Ideals are at once physical (we find them in the physical sciences) and mental (they drive the evolution of consciousness). Beyond that, ideals are, at the core, spiritual principles. Discernment, therefore, requires not only mental intelligence (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ), but also spiritual intelligence (SQ). Spiritual awareness is a factor too-often ignored in the discernment of ideals. The consequence of ignoring spiritual intelligence is that our vision presents us with a purposeless world.

True discernment, on the other hand, allows us to perceive what Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man) called the ‘within’ of things. It allows us to appreciate that the quantum leaps forward that we observe in the history of the evolution of our planet are not really random: they are moving in a direction. We can see that all things are moving toward greater complexity, higher organization, greater diversity, and higher consciousness. We can see that, when we align our change efforts with these universal principles, we move forward — and more importantly, we become part of the energy that drives that evolution itself forward. When our efforts become misaligned, we risk expending our life forces into the void of evolutionary dead-ends.

Because these universal ideals lie at the core of all purpose and because they are fundamentally spiritual in nature, I have chosen to capitalize the ‘I’ on the term 'Ideals' for our use. Discernment of universal Ideals, then, is what grounds all values, and makes quantum change possible. Values based on universal Ideals transcend our limited understanding and our cultural frames. Discernment allows us to take the difficult but necessary step of breaking system-bound rules in obedience to higher values. Navigating change using the sextant of discernment and the stars that are the universal Ideals is always risky, because it is so easy to go off-course. In a future discussion, I’ll consider how we can keep our vision and values aligned with the universal Ideals.

I feel pulled forward by a force that is, at the same time, part of me and beyond me. It is destiny calling: the destiny I share with the universe itself. I’m not just a passive observer in this theater of evolutionary history, I discern that power at work within me. When my awareness is unclouded, my life vision appears to me very clearly and brightly, and a myriad of voices all around me echo its call. It ‘feels’ right. I’m at once serene and ‘in the flow’. My life surfboard seems balanced and shooting forward on the power of the wave that I did not create and cannot control.

When anxiety arises and stress comes; when going forward is a struggle and I feel blinded; then I must intuit that my vision is being clouded by my weaknesses. It’s then time to take another look at what's going on both inside and outside me: to find out what has taken my awareness off my Ideals and caused my vision to start to blur. This is what I call ‘AFGE’: Another Fun Growth Experience. It is not often easy to re-align my vision with the universal Ideals. It often calls for me to relinquish my own pet viewpoint for the larger picture. Happily, the net result has always been (and will always be) renewed and expanded vision, purpose and power. Therefore, difficult as it may be, I welcome the challenge!

Discernment: Discovering a Vision for the Future - To learn more about this author, visit Les Brown's Website.

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