To people who have shifted their perspective on reality — which is the true meaning of vision — the truth revealed through the shift is so charged with significance that it often overwhelms the apparently lesser truth of facts.
The shift overturns and reorders the entire field of factuality, in a way that is hard to describe to people who have never experienced such a thing (and who remain naive realists).
The vision is experienced as a superior order of truth. Facts seem like petty little accidents that might have been otherwise, so why not just let them be otherwise for the higher purpose of effecting the shift?
What this means, unfortunately, is that men in the grip of a vision are all-too-willing to fudge or falsify facts, out of contemptuous disregard.
This willingness to steamroll “mere facts” or to tell “noble lies” has an unfortunate effect on those around them.
Why? Because the falsification appears to be an essential part of the vision. To a naive realist, who sees truth as the faithful reflection of an exterior world that just is, the reality-defying alternative perspective of the visionary and whatever lies he casually spouts are all of one piece: they’re all roughly contrary to what is real. In a way, the outright lies are comfortingly accessible compared to the weird intuitive promptings that really drive the visionary toward who knows what.
It is all “reality distortion field”.
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A more mature approach to vision would honor facts — noting those facts that remain constant through shifts (“obligatory passage points”) — as well as the stratum of truth capable of shifting and reordering facts — because this opens yet another stratum of truth: a perspective on perspectives. This stratum of truth reveals the importance of all kinds of truth as essential to having authentic relationships with other people.
When we are scrupulous with truth at all levels, we make it possible for others to share a higher sense of truth, to teach and learn and to open up more and more of life’s potential, and to create clean reality transformation fields.
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There is no difference whatsoever between respecting reality in its fullest sense and respecting one’s neighbor. They are alike.