Suggest edit — Pure Vision

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related:
- wiki/practices/nonviolent-communication.md
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- wiki/entities/marshall-rosenberg.md
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title: Pure Vision
type: concept
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---

# Pure Vision

A Buddhist concept Jacob brings up to gloss [[Marshall Rosenberg]]'s NVC — both name the same kind of perceptual reorientation.

## The Buddhist version

> "This is related to pure vision. The Buddhists talk about pure vision — seeing the world is perfect, and seeing it all as sort of sweetness, or seeing it all as really soulful, authentic — authenticity, or love. You could say love. I think soulful authenticity is another way you can say everything that's happening."

Pure vision is the practice / fruit of seeing every appearance as already-perfect — not in a sentimental sense, but in the sense of **already an expression of the substrate** ([[Spirit as Substrate]]) and therefore not requiring fixing to be acceptable.

The translation Jacob prefers: **soulful authenticity**. Whatever someone is doing or saying, underneath the surface presentation, there's a real soul-pattern expressing itself.

## The NVC version

[[Marshall Rosenberg]]'s framing translates the same realization into linguistic terms. With "giraffe ears" on:

> "When you put on giraffe ears, you learn to hear what everyone is always saying at all times, which is please or thank you. Please help me meet a need, or thank you, let us celebrate that a need was met."

Underneath every utterance — even sarcasm, hostility, manipulation — is one of two messages:
- **Please** (a need wanting to be met)
- **Thank you** (celebrating a met need)

This is the pure-vision claim, applied to speech: **everything is please-or-thank-you**, however disguised.

## The continuity

Jacob explicitly bridges the two:

> "Whether they're being sarcastic or not — it's just walls from what's really going on."

Sarcasm, harsh words, dismissals: walls. Pure vision (or NVC's giraffe ears) sees through the walls to the unmet need or the gratitude underneath.

## Why this isn't naive

Pure vision is sometimes mistaken for **naivety** — pretending bad things aren't bad. That's not it. The bad behavior is fully seen. The reframe is about **what's underneath the behavior**, not denying the behavior itself.

This matters for political / social application. Pure vision doesn't say "Trump's actions are fine"; it says "underneath them is an unmet need that, if met, wouldn't produce these actions." That's a clinical / strategic claim, not a moral one.

## The connection to ego

If [[Ego and Conceptual Thought as Tools|ego and conceptual thought are tools]] that can be set down, then pure vision is what becomes accessible **when they are**. The constant labeling-and-judging machinery normally obscures the soulful-authenticity layer; quieting the machinery reveals it.

## The connection to dukkha

[[Dukkha as Cognitive Dissonance|Dukkha-as-dissonance]] is the felt sense of being out of pure vision — perception running through judgmental filters, behavior interpreted as opposition rather than as need-expression.

Reducing dukkha and developing pure vision are the same project, viewed from different angles.

## The high-consciousness benchmark

Jacob points to Rosenberg as evidence the state is real and reachable:

> "[Rosenberg's] consciousness is unbelievably high. His paradigm is so high it's ridiculous. And you can watch some videos by him — you'll get he's like living in a different consciousness than most people. It's a state, and you want to be in that state. It's so beautiful, smooth, the sharp edges of the world where they don't exist."

The "smooth the sharp edges of the world where they don't exist" line is doing the load-bearing work: pure vision isn't a denial of edges, it's the recognition that some edges are **constructions** rather than features.

## Related

- [[Nonviolent Communication]] — the practical protocol
- [[Ego and Conceptual Thought as Tools]] — what's set down to access this
- [[Marshall Rosenberg]] — the exemplar
- [[Spirit as Substrate]] — what makes the metaphysical reading coherent