Journal · June 2026
Vision It for Someone Else
What you choose for a stranger, you create for yourself
Jacob Cooke-Tilley · June 2026 · 5 min read
← Back to Journal
This is something I have been practising in real time. A principle I am noticing differences from as I live it, somewhere between a moral belief and a reflection in my reality.
The basic sense of it: when we encounter something, we have the option to choose the way we experience it. If something is being done unto us, we can choose anger, sadness, neutrality, or joy. That song — always look on the bright side of life — is a good way to get the spirit of it. The recognition that things will go wrong, and that it is up to us to look toward the better side of it anyway.
But this piece is about something more specific. Something I have been practising that goes further than just choosing your own emotional response.
The visioning practice
What I have been doing is actively visioning better outcomes for other people. Outcomes that are sometimes so positive, so out of reason, that they do not quite make sense in the moment. And what I have noticed is that producing those outcomes — even just in the imagination, even just for a stranger — seems to create the availability for them to actually occur.
It is almost as if the more positive outcomes you put out, the more the field has to choose from and move toward. And in doing so, positive outcomes crowd out the space where negative ones would otherwise land.
When you vision peace for someone else, you plant the seed of peace in the collective. And since we are all one, that seed is available to you too.
A small story from today
The road rage
I watched two people in road rage today. Both of them upset. It was not clear who was in the wrong. They drove away angry.
I took it upon myself to offer them both forgiveness — and to forgive myself too, for the anger and judgment that briefly arose in me as I watched it. Then I took a moment to vision something better for each of them.
For one: the relief of not being in trouble, of being able to release all the tension in their body and let it go.
For the other: an easy breath. A moment of remembering that they did not have to be anywhere at any specific time. That they were exactly where they needed to be.
Neither of those people will ever know I did that. They probably did not feel it. But I believe that visioning those two options for those two people planted the availability for the collective to choose them. And that is not a small thing.
Why it works
We are beings participating in a collective intelligence. We share many of the same experiences from different points of view. The reality we are in is, in some sense, a projection. Everything out there is still, at some level, us. When we see something in our environment, we are seeing a reflection.
So if everything is a reflection, then when we give someone outside of us the opportunity to choose a better option, we are also planting that option for ourselves. Because when that same circumstance arrives in our own life, that better option now exists in the field as a possibility. It has been seeded. And by whatever mechanism governs these things, it gets given back.
What you vision for others, you create the availability for yourself to receive. The mechanics of a reflective reality work exactly this way.
The principle
This also explains how negative loops form. When someone is consistently visioning poor outcomes for others, or holding contempt, or wishing difficulty upon people, they are seeding those outcomes in the field. And since the field reflects back to them, they encounter more of those possibilities in their own life. This is simply how a reflective system works.
The snowball
The more we vision ease, peace, harmony, and love for the people around us — strangers, rivals, people we have complicated feelings about — the more we build a reality in which those things are available to be chosen. By all of us, them and us equally.
I am you. You are me. We are we. And so we can grow together, but it starts from the individual choosing: how can I make my life better? How can I be a part of creating better outcomes for this world? Sometimes the answer is as simple as a moment in a car park, watching two people drive away upset, and spending thirty seconds visioning something gentler for them both.
Can we co-create a better reality simply by visioning it for someone else? I think the answer is yes. And I think the practice of finding out is one of the more quietly radical things any of us can do.