The Birthright

What the Work Was Always For

We began by recalling what each volume has done, and we may end by naming what they were all for. They were for this: that without any apparatus, any device, any extraction from the world, an ordinary person might develop the internal technologies — presence, presencing, the patient drawing-out of the genius each of us was born beside — by which a fracturing species reconstitutes a whole one. Everything required, we already carry. The whole of the work is learning, deliberately and in good company, to use it.

Now that we have outlined a way to rethink the inner technology, and a way to develop it — a way that will ask, plainly, for money, for people, and for choice — we should return, just as plainly, to why. Why take the time; why think the whole of it through with such care; why set out to build an infrastructure this large. It is to forge, out of coherence, something a civilization could be built upon: a new currency, and beneath it a truer current — a coordinating device for human beings that runs not on coercion or extraction but on trust, attunement, and presence held in common.

We return to it because there is something we have not yet stated in full, and have only let stand at the edges of these pages: the depth of the situation our species is likely now in. We hear it spoken of peripherally — a forecast here, a warning there — and we have learned, understandably, to let it pass. The next volume, which carries Saturn and its hard accounting, will set it down without flinching, so that it lands with the weight it has earned. For now we say only this: what we are doing here is not a fashionable comfort for the comfortable. It is an earnest attempt to put human potential to its proper use — to open a different path, one on which human beings are still here, and still able to live well, seven generations from now.

We do not say this to frighten anyone. We know what the careful among the experts are saying, and not all of them are merely alarmists; some are only counting honestly. And it matters, when reading such counts, to notice where one is standing. It is very easy, from inside an intact and comfortable life, to look around and conclude that all is well; it is just as easy, from inside hardship, to lose heart and to dismiss a book like this as grandiose. We have tried to write past both — past the complacency that cannot see and the despair that will not hope — toward the plainer question of what simply makes sense to do.

And here is the quiet case for a work like this at all. Without the older labor of the philosopher — the patient naming of things as they are, of what they might become, and of how they could be brought there — we are left with minds inundated by more information than any age has ever had to hold, and starved of the wisdom that would order it. A mind in that condition, however well-meaning, is ungoverned: swept wherever the loudest current happens to carry it. The Coherence Thesis exists to help remedy exactly this — to return some measure of wisdom to the flood — and we hope this volume has been a part of that remedy.

We do not claim to have arrived at the final answers. We claim only to be building, in good faith, toward a stronger and more fostered humanity, a humane technology that develops people rather than consuming them, and a way forward worthy of the world that asks it of us. The work is offered, and held open to correction. What it asks of you is not belief but practice — and your yes.

⁂

The wakefulness — the awakening — of attaining a Body of Worship is our birthright; but we must choose it.

It is never ours to command, only ours to serve.

It was never ours to take, only ours to give … of the gift of being alive in a way no one else ever has been.

Love gives not but itself,

and takes but not of itself;

Love possesses not, nor would it be possessed.

Love directs the course —

will you be awake enough to follow?

Love directs the course,

and it will take you away from the life that you live,

because it was never ours to take, and only ours to give,

of the gift of the gift of the gift.

Love directs the course.