Why are spiritual people characterized as having vision? Vision – a glimpse of an idea of how good things might be – requires a long-range perspective and a caring and compassionate attitude. And spiritual practices cultivate both. Meditative practices cultivate our internal shift from a lower-order self that is pre-occupied with our immediate self-centered needs and desires, to a higher-order self that can observe the one with immediate needs and desires, a self that can sense them, yet not be caught by them. This higher-order self arises from a broader base of encoded experience, and it incorporates more time, space, people and other living things. It has the neural informational capacity for ‘vision’. With extensive practice, one might experience ‘no self’, and ‘oneness’ with all that is. Whether or not one’s practice intentionally incorporates a focus on compassion, with the cultivation of an increasingly less egocentric perspective that comes from engaging in any kind of meditative practice, compassion grows.