The Elven Star Interpretations

Mystery 5: Becoming Visionary and Purposeful

Course Introduction
Use your fifth Sabian Symbol to study the word Please
What is life’s meaning? Discovery. In order to uncover more wisdom and have a greater depth of experience it is necessary to look for answers and adventures. We can bring added focus to what is around us already, but the true seeker will always reach beyond their circle of comfort and journey forth. To step forward requires a decision about the direction, and finding that direction is the function of Vision.
Elven Star Mystery 5

Creating a Life Vision

Few people have a clear, long-term goal and perhaps that is wise, since we cannot hope to imagine the future accurately enough to know what we want in detail. Yet we can shape our track towards the future by becoming clear about two aspects of visioning.

Firstly, in a general sense, what are our deep-seated priorities? Do we value family over career, peacefulness over success, health and happiness over position, and spiritual over material? Do we have long-term aspirations to be capable as a doctor, a mother, a writer or a householder? At this general level of visioning, there is much to be gained by sharpening our definition - and doing so in written form. This is because otherwise it is not a visionary statement but usually a fluffy, ill-defined feeling without substance. Also, if we have written that we value peacefulness, then it becomes more obviously the case that a stressful job with long hours is counterproductive. people so often say that it's worth the stress now, in order to finance the peace later. Yet rarely indeed does this formula ever work. Thoughts and feelings do not speak as authentically as our actions.

Perhaps most tellingly, do we have a clear sense of what we hold sacred? What do we mean by the word sacred? Do we actively pursue a spiritual dimension to our lives in order to attain a state of sacredness or do we assume that belief is enough? It is good to ponder on the understanding that prayer and meditation are not the same thing. Lots of meditators would have much to gain by also adding prayer to their spiritual practice.

Secondly, though the distant future is all but unknowable, the immediate future is rather more easily predicted. We have an horizon of foresight - we can see quite clearly into the near future with reasonable levels of accuracy. Not in complete detail of course, but we see enough to make our intentions impactful. So we gain from becoming very specific about what we choose to occur immediately and for the foreseeable future. 

This is by no means all-embracing however and if we want surprises and adventures then we can factor them in. Yet it is very helpful to know exactly what we are aiming for - and the clear goals written down in specific detail. We know we won't get everything exactly so. yet we will significantly increase our chance of getting more of what we want.

It's also worth remembering that often it is the process not the product that motivates us. So, perhaps it's not what we get that matters, or even what we do, but who we do it with, or where we are, or the skills and knowledge we acquire through experience. Let's be clear about what is most important for us at this time.

Primary Word: Please 

Are you an assertive person?
Being assertive means that we push forward into the world with clear intention to change somebody else’s position. Our vision, of how things can be improved, is a powerful force that motivates us to impact cooperatively upon others so that we change the way things are, certainly improving our own circumstances and hopefully the other person’s as well.

Are you good at choosing and asking for what you want?
There’s nothing wrong with desire – it is craving that is unwholesome.  To get our desires fulfilled, it is necessary first to become very clear about specifically what we want. In order to be assertive we need to know what it is that we are asserting. This may involve overcoming patterns of self-denial, fears of being considered selfish, and even faulty understandings of religious dogma. Then we need to ask for it, because we all need help in one form or another. Prayer has a special way of focusing support at the highest level of being.

Are you likelier to take action than to grumble?
Grumbling is an expression of pessimism and negativity and does little or nothing to enhance our well-being. What works is taking action. We need to focus positively on the required result and speak in words that suggest an expectation of success.  Such an attitude will align our own will to succeed with those involved with us, and will strongly support the attainment of our goals.
Vision is like memory but applied to the future. Usually it is created deliberately by the imagination yet on occasion, albeit rarely, a person can receive a picture from the future without using the conscious mind to make it up. In olden days, mystics and saints were celebrated for the latter type although today the former is usually what is meant. The word itself implies that the sense of sight is central, and for the majority of people that is probably the case because we generally favour sight over the other senses. It is totally reasonable however for anyone to ‘see’ their preferred future as an auditory exercise.

One imagines that composers have a ‘vision’ for a piece of music based on auditory and kinaesthetic senses – they might know what they want it to feel like as well as the sound of it. Chefs might be more concerned with the gustatory aspects of their forward planning – and that’s what this is, a plan. Envisioning is planning, and in particular it is detailed expecting.
The quest that we are on is always the quest for self-discovery. However often we may get caught up in the details of emotional release and enquiry, in the end we come back to the main question – who am I?
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From one perspective, this is so profound and complex that it is not even easy to understand the question itself, let alone the answer. And yet it is central to whether we live with disappointment or happiness. One helpful realisation is that there could never be individual identity without others to be different from; we are who we are in relation to others. Therefore, as others change so do we, and so the whole matter of identity is ephemeral – we are exactly who we are only for now and only with this person. 
Wishing and wanting are different. We wish upon a falling star, we make a wish before blowing out birthday candles, and we even wish that we could change things that have already occurred. Wishing is fanciful. Wanting has an entirely different body state, different focus of the mind and different expectations of outcome. When we are truly convinced that we want something, then we are much more likely to set about getting it. Intention goes even further, it means that we have indeed decided to allocate sufficient time and resources and will exert effort tenaciously until we succeed.

​It is a commitment to realise our vision. Linguistic roots are suggestive of tendons, and point to straining and stretching towards fulfilment of a purpose. Whereas decision frees us to move on and vision shows what we imagine as a better situation, intention indicates that we are ready and willing to push ourselves beyond previous limits to reach out and make our claim.
Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan explains that there is no significant difference between faith and self-confidence. To grasp the implication of this, we will want to understand that at the highest reaches, we identify God as an aspect of self, as much as we identify self as an aspect of God.

​Having confidence in ourselves necessarily means that we trust whatever impulses come from our higher selves – which we simply cannot differentiate from God; and this trust in our higher self is faith.
The Sabian Images on this site are by Ruby Fumizki