The Seven, in Brief

Listening is the gateway. To listen, in its fullest sense, is not only to hear but to discern whatever the senses relay; it is the base of all organismic understanding. Until we have learned to listen — first to ourselves — the line between the extraordinary and the ordinary stays drawn just where habit drew it.

Intimacy follows from Listening. It is in the lack of intimacy with our own inherent nature that the devolution of our values begins; and it is through intimacy that we come to see everything arising as an opportunity for our choosing.

Balance rests upon Intimacy. It is not merely the key to a good life but the foundation of life itself — the ground on which the doors of perception, and so Art, may at last be approached with the keys already in hand.

Art and Alchemy is entered once one approaches the doors of perception no longer empty-handed. Here one becomes a conscious creator rather than the unconscious inheritor of others’ creations — generating elevated states, and shaping a life as one shapes a work of art.

Embodiment is awareness brought fully, at last, into the body — the vital impetus of change met and inhabited rather than feared, so that one moves with the one constancy of the universe instead of bracing against it.

Worship is reverence and devotion for whatever gives us life — and, in the work’s understanding, a form of healing: the turning of the whole being toward the source of its own aliveness.

Providence is the seventh, which is secretly the prior six made actual — the path put into practice, a clearer sense of the world and of our place in it, carried at last into dependable action.