A vision is essentially holistic.

If one has a mental image of some new entity or some new situation that fits neatly and non-disruptively into the world as it is today, that is an idea, not a vision.

However, if one conceives a vision, ideas for new entities and situations will result.

Further, the only way to really convey a vision is to indicate it through entities and situations.

So many people cannot tell the difference between a vision and a bunch of ideas.

In form, vision and ideas are identical. They differ merely in essence.

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This confusion of vision and ideas is also why people cannot tell the difference between a religion and a set of beliefs.

Fundamentalism is religion-like ideas without redemptive vision. Fundamentalism is not the extreme of religion, but anti-religion.

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Ideas are derived from vision.

Most ideas we have and hear about are derived from the vision of life most of us casually hold and mistake for reality itself.

What is meant by vision is actually new vision, which serves as a contrast to the old vision, and highlights the difference between reality itself (which is mysterious and pregnant with surprise) and what we have made of it through vision and connected ideas and realizations intended to fend off surprise.

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If we have real conversations, sooner or later we will be surprised. And if we are surprised enough we might undergo a change of vision. If we undergo a change of vision, new ideas and new aesthetic expressions will naturally emerge.

If we keep ourselves perpetually busy with tasks and entertainments, and communicate mostly through wise-cracks, gossip, and electronic messages of 200 or fewer characters, we cannot disrupt one another, we will never undergo a change of vision, we will never have deeply new ideas rooted in new vision. We will have to painstakingly create new ideas and new situations for ourselves, one at a time. We will have to tinker our way to art. And we will not even know why none of it any longer sustains or inspires us, because we haven’t even gone far enough to know the existence of vision.

Conversation and art live together and die together.