Sometimes I feel as though this blog is crawling along one tiny step at a time, but then a dam suddenly breaks and sets off a cascade of reconsiderations. The previous entry triggered one of those avalanches, and I’m still sorting out its implications.

When I initially developed my theory of the visions, I assumed that the basic unit of the cycles was the individual vision and that what kept things moving along was the gradual loss of transcendence as each vision matured. This was adequate as a working hypothesis, but it never answered certain fundamental questions: Precisely what happens when a new vision is born? How and why did the cycle of replacement get started? And why does the same pattern recur in such similar form from one turn of the cycle to the next?

Now I’m realizing that my problems arose from trying to take the visions in isolation and that they are better seen as forming an ecosystem in which each one reflects all the others. When any vision falters, it leaves an empty environmental niche, and the system is thrown out of balance until it can respond by repairing the damage and filling the gap.

This self-maintaining quality might be compared to the ability of DNA to repair itself — an ability that marks the dividing line between non-living matter and living beings. In a similar way, the self-repairing ability of the system of visions might be seen as a crucial accomplishment that pushed us across the threshold from almost-but-not-quite-human to fully human.

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