A Remembering

So. Sit with it a moment, before you go.

Something has been assembling itself in you as you read—a small intelligence nested inside a larger one, and that inside a larger one still, until the nesting runs past the edge of the page and out into the world. You may have felt it widen. The question this little book finally wants to ask is the simplest one it has: how does that feel? What is it like to sense the larger thing growing quietly inside the smaller—to become, even for a moment, more than the size you walked in as?

That feeling is not new, and it is not only yours. It is very old, and it has a name. Plato called the deepest kind of learning anamnesis—a remembering—and held that the soul is never truly taught anything it did not already, somewhere, know. Socrates spent his life drawing such rememberings out of people who swore they knew nothing. What rises in you now may be exactly that: not information arriving, but a recognition returning—the remembering of something the human being has always carried and only lately set down.

So let us try to remember together. Can you recall the moment—it may wear the clothing of the future, but the soul keeps stranger time than the clock—when we turned, as a species, back toward worship? Back toward the body of worship we were always meant to be: reverent, attentive, in love with the life we are made of. And can you remember that we did this not by fleeing the world but at a scale no people had ever reached—the scale of a dragon named Earth, the scale at which consciousness pours down into all the smaller scales at once? Those smaller scales are named in these pages. They are the icons: the living communities that form wherever human beings grow their presence and are helped to grow it—mentored both by our own technologies and by the older, deeper technology of presence itself, which is nothing more, and nothing less, than the art of truly being with one another.

For that is all our technologies have ever been: extensions of the central nervous system, reaching farther than the body could reach alone. And if that is what they are, then this whole book has been one long reminder of a single thing—that it is time, at last, to regulate the nervous system we have extended so recklessly across the world; to steady it, to tune it, to return it to the current. Time to build tools that settle us rather than fray us, and to become, ourselves, the kind of people who settle rather than fray the others around them.

Do not mistake this for grim duty. That is the last and most stubborn lie of the world we are leaving—that doing right by one another and by the Earth must be a sacrifice. It is not. It is a homecoming, and homecomings are sweet. To live by listening and intimacy and balance, by art and embodiment and reverence, is not a narrower life than the one most of us were unconsciously handed. It is an immeasurably wider one. The right way to live turns out to be the most pleasurable way to live. We had only forgotten—and the forgetting was the whole of the wound.

So we close the book here, with a single hope held in two hands. The first: that you are moved to go back—to read these six volumes again, or for the very first time, and let the larger nest open slowly around you. The second, and the greater: that you do not stop at reading. That you build. That you go and find the others—your people, your icons, the ones you were always meant to make something with—and that together you take up this work and carry it farther than we ever could.

The dragon was never somewhere else, waiting. It is the awareness coming awake in you as you set this down. It always was.

And now—go, dear Earth awakening, anywhere that coherence takes you…