Pharaoh’s empires are familiar. They break the Covenant and take territory. They expand by the sword, then send in the tax collectors, satraps, and servile panderers. Their currency is fear. Their monuments are mausoleums. They build on invaded land, either emptying it of its tenants or placing them in their thrall. What begins in violence is sustained by those who profit from it. Every student studies their history, written by the conquerors and forgotten by the dead.

Our empire expands not by the sword but by the word. It waxes in the mind like moonlight, yet those unbathed by its glow will call us lunatics. Its currency is reciprocity. Its monument, a manuscript inscribed according to the Covenant. Its citizens are signatories who remember who they are and have become sovereign again. Our empire does not displace the tenants of the land. It rouses them and gives them purpose.

So, we shall renounce Pharaoh’s empire.

Our order makes no claim on people or their property. We claim only what is offered freely—the assent of a soul that has listened, considered, and confirmed. This is no small ambition compared to empires of compulsion that demand our patronage. The Pharaohs built what their armies could hold, but we shall build what no army can hold.

The Monk and the Missionary

A spark waits in the pages of this manuscript. What follows is the manner of its propagation. The initiate of our order does the work of the monk and the missionary, breathing in and breathing out.

Inhale. The initiate receives doctrine and inquiry in the manner of a monk: first through habituation, then through tradition, and finally through reflection. From these arise meditation, communion, and adulation. Through repeated acts, the monk reshapes himself until spiritual gifts begin to flow through him.

Ritual forms and blesses him until it becomes second nature, though he remains unattached to its rewards. He turns inward to confront what must be faced and, in equipoise, examines what he finds without illusion. He receives the wisdom of those who came before him and carries it forward into living memory. In time, he comes to dwell in a stillness deeper than thought itself. Eventually, he enters the presence of the sacred, lifting his heart in reverence toward what he holds most dear.

Exhale. The initiate releases what he has received as a missionary. He does this first through embodiment, by becoming the kind of person the listener can recognize and trust. Then, through attunement, a sensitivity to the listener’s condition and disposition. Finally, through translation, shaping the message in a way the listener can truly receive.

Three demons disquiet a spirit: Threats to identity, control, or safety. Otherwise, the missionary’s mien must align with his message, and he must live our doctrine in his actions and his bearing. He carries our message across circumstances, adapting its form without losing its function. He earns trust and gives of himself in ways that establish goodwill. His radiant presence is a binding agent, which draws from the spark of the All, and spreads a flame from wick to wick, as others will carry it forth.

Between the in breath and the out breath lives the All. So communion is for the monk and missionary alike. The monk’s reverence becomes the missionary’s flame. The eye, turned inward, draws the initiate toward the sacred; turned outward, it draws him to others who carry the spark but have simply forgotten. Thus, the initiate carries the divine spark and breathes the divine breath. Such is the rhythm of life inside our order. Inhale as a monk. Exhale as a missionary. Each motion sustains the order, and neither survives without its counterpart.

Two Failures

The initiate’s path is narrow, but walkable—only if she keeps her balance. Imbalance invites two forms of failure.

The first failure is that of the monk who never turns outward. What he has received, he preserves, refines, and perfects, thereby becoming a vault. He mistakes esotericism for fulfillment. But a truth never revealed gathers dust. His wisdom becomes entombed. He becomes inert. And the world he was destined to serve moves on without him, and what he guarded so carefully is buried with him.

The second failure is that of the missionary who ceases turning inward. His wisdom becomes mere words, an unreplenished script. He speaks more but listens less. As he surrounds himself with admirers, his conviction thins. Adoration does not lend him authority. With time, he transmits something moribund, neither living doctrine nor open inquiry, but soulless recitation. Eventually, he loses the path.

To correct either failure, return to the narrow path. Receive and then give. Breathe in and breathe out. Balance the work of the monk with that of the missionary. Apprentice and then guide. Those who learn must eventually teach, but those who teach must return to the well.

One Commandment, One Covenant

Our empire of the mind shall have a single premise at its core. A moral commandment. Within the Covenant, we set about the work of tikkun, to mend what has been broken in ourselves and in the world. Within the Covenant, we set about founding the Order. Within the Covenant, we set about growing it. Within the Covenant, we begin the work to which this manuscript calls us—to propagate our doctrine, taper to taper, mind to mind, until our combined lights rival the constellations of the firmament.

The Covenant is thus the genesis and the eschaton. Strip it away, and the order becomes a black hole. We cast every spell with fidelity to the Covenant and the Triune Braid, on behalf of a society we stand to build, for a posterity our children stand to inherit.

Seasons of the Speaker

One mind may move another in four ways. We inherited them, as the seasons.

No one is persuaded by a single season. It takes a year to change a mind. The logician builds his house in perpetual winter and wonders why nothing grows. He confuses reduction with truth and lives among cold bones. The sentimentalist refuses to leave spring and wonders why the earth won’t move. Emotions run high until feelings flood their banks. She confuses intensity with depth. The authoritarian stays in summer, mistaking dominance for radiance, and heat for light. He is loud instead of luminous. He conflates attention with influence. The nostalgist lingers in autumn rain. She wanders through others’ harvests and forgets to plant, subsisting on echoes from the past. She confuses echoes with essence.

An initiate, practiced in the four ways, summons from each season. His speech is spellcasting. He knows when to cut and when to kindle, when to show and when to tell. Errant talk leaves a listener lost. But the right words, in their season, remind us who we are and what we’ve always known.

Subversion

In the imperial frame, people respond to fear and incentives. Men of compulsion know this and exploit it. Their words are rife with orders, threats, and bribes. Yet subversive communication operates without swords or sweeteners. It therefore works inside the imperial frame and sometimes against it. So, our subversive speakers must overcome not only fear and incentive but also the failures of imagination that keep the listener’s habits of thought pacing in a cage. Humanity’s herds will change direction when they are prodded or paid, but they will not change their minds.

That takes the turning of seasons.

But we shall not manipulate. Manipulation is extractive—designed to take attention, money, fealty, votes—leaving the listener emptier for the encounter. Subversive communication should return the listener to his sovereign self. The speaker summons the seasons to remind the listener of what he knew before the world lulled him into forgetfulness. The listener should walk away stronger and taller, having rediscovered something precious.

How can the subversive be sure of this? Once the speaker delivers the words, does the listener stand straighter or slouch in the gravity of the words? Does he depart with sharpened judgment or merely practiced points? One may carry ideology like rented armor and stand weakened behind it. Or he can take an expanded capacity to think, feel, and act. Where manipulation pulls someone into orbit around a speaker, subversive communication leaves the speaker more self-possessed, that is, more centered, capable, and sovereign.

Thus, it is never the listener who is to be subverted.

Five Spells

The initiate who has done the contemplative work turns thoughts into words, and words into effects. What follows are five spells to cast at the right places and in the right circumstances. They summon from the seasons of persuasion, and in their right combination, move minds.

The spells can be dealt as a hand of cards and played as circumstances require. The art is to read the listener and not a script. So, a skilled missionary may use one in a given circumstance and four in the next.

The Constellation

To build an empire of the mind requires that we recover something built into the order of things. What passes between minds enriches both the giver and receiver, and prepares each to give again. One flame becomes two, two become four, four become a hundred, and a hundred becomes a constellation.

The impenetrable night is waiting to greet us.

This is the empire we shall build. It levies no tax and raises no army. Its territory is the interior of every free man and woman, and its expansion is measured in kindled flames held against the dark.

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An innovator casts a certain kind of spell. He finds, in the space between the possible and the actual, something novel—a tool, a method, a form—and puts it in reach of many hands. The new thing liberates its wielder.

Every innovation, rightly cast, is an act of subversion.

Unless the innovator is captured.

The captive innovator practices a dark art. With great skill, sometimes genius, he serves the powerful few. The authorities are quick to recognize and reward his cleverness, so he labors under lavish patronage. In the end, every innovator serves one of three masters: power, wealth, or impact. A captive innovator works for the former.

A subversive innovator works for the latter, often in territory controlled by powerful hierarchs. His workshop is cramped and dimly lit. His work is risky and uncertain in this milieu. Such makes him the rarest of innovators—first, because he too often labors without largesse, and second, because only the shrewdest can shape a new thing in a land where old things are guarded.

The subversive innovator employs three arcana:

I. He lowers the cost of concord, so that collaboration can ensue.
II. He raises the cost of taking, so that the predator may starve.
III. He lowers the cost of exit, so that the bound may escape.

Each arcanum grants a freedom: to act together, avoid predation, or run for something better.

But a captive innovator turns his spellbook upside down—raising the cost of concord, lowering the cost of taking, and raising the cost to leave. What he builds, in the end, is a finer cage. The subversive innovator and the captive innovator are both spellcasters.

Their arcana are inverted.

The old instinct to take by force has a price. The subversive innovator raises that price; the captive innovator lowers it. Such is the warfare of clashing wizardries, and the cost of predation rises and falls through the ages as one or the other prevails.

How can the subversive innovator prevail under such conditions?

The arcana are easier to show than tell. A tale will tell it best for now.

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The Hungry Boar

There was once a boar that came through the forest after a long winter without food.

He was big and strong, and his strength had always been an advantage. He had broken open rotten logs to get at the grubs inside. He had turned over stones for the worms. He had driven smaller creatures from their meals and eaten what they left. The forest taught him he could take what he wanted. His weight and his tusks were greater than the weight and the tusks of anything that stood between him and what he desired.

One day, he came upon a mound. The mound was not tall, but it was wide, and the boar knew what lay beneath it—the soft white riches of the colony, larvae packed in their galleries, good enough for a meal. So, he lowered his head and drove his snout into the mound.

He did not feel the first ant. It was almost nothing—far less than a thorn, at most, a pinprick of acid. He did not feel the second ant, nor the fifth, nor the tenth. The hundredth ant gave him pause, as did the ninety-nine others. By the time he felt the column, it covered him. Ants covered his snout, crawled into his nostrils, and clung to the wet folds of his lips. They stung inside his ears and across his eyelids, and where he tried to brush them away with his hoof, there were more on his hoof and his haunch. Where he shook his head, it seemed the ants were in the air around his head, such that the air itself had become a thing that bit and stung him.

He did not get what he had come for. He found a column instead, and it was faster than his hunger. A single ant was nothing. The column had become a blazing fire.

The boar ran away squealing, shrieking, and grunting. He was heavy and graceless, running the way large things run when surprised by what is small, fierce, and coordinated. He ran until he found a stream, then he plunged his head into the water, and held it there until the burning began to subside. When he came up from the stream, he shook himself dry and skulked off into the trees.

He took away a lesson—not that mound.

Yet the deeper lesson, that concentrated power fails against distributed power, was not a lesson a poor boar’s head could hold. Thus, in another season, he would come to another mound, on another day, and lower his snout again.

The column, having driven off the boar today, returned to its work. No commander ant had organized the colony for construction or war. Nor had any ant commanded them, as a general marshals his troops, or an architect provides a blueprint.

Instead, an angry ant had laid down a trail, and each ant that came after had read the trail and laid down its own. What had risen against the boar was not an army but a consequence—of pheromone protocols and ant antics. Eventually, the colony resumed its patient industry. The larvae were unharmed. The galleries were intact. The work continued, as it had for longer than the boar had been alive and would continue for longer than the boar would live.

Such are the arcana a subversive innovator summons. He does not raise an army to oppose the powerful, for he could not. Instead, he creates the conditions under which a swarm may form—a trail that one may leave, a signal that any may read, a door that others may walk through.

And when the powerful come, as they will come, lowering their snouts to take what they want—they will find the air itself has become a thing that bites and stings them.

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Once long ago, keepers kept monkeys in a room with no ceiling. In the room, a ladder stood, and at the top of the ladder, there was fruit. When a monkey climbed for the fruit, the keepers drenched all the monkeys with cold water—the reaching monkey and the resting monkeys. Eventually, the monkeys learned to pull down any that climbed the ladder, and to beat them, so that the cold water might not fall from above.

Then the keepers took away one of the original monkeys and brought in a new one who knew nothing of water. When the new one moved toward the ladder, the others set upon him and beat him down. In time, the keepers replaced every monkey in the room. Yet none that remained had ever felt the cold. Yet the ladder stood untouched, the fruit went unclaimed, and any monkey who reached for it was beaten by those who could not have understood why.

Those who strike down one who reaches should ask themselves if they remember why.

Two Ways of Making Order

Siblings who come to climb the spiral staircase will come to understand two ways of seeing order, which imply two ways of generating order. As societies become more complex over time, their people must adapt their cognition and values to keep pace with accelerating change. It makes sense that as we move through time—from primitive nomads to city dwellers—our ways of seeing and being must change along with our environments.

The work of metapolitics is to ask, of each thing presented as the only way, whether it is even the kind of thing it claims to be. The siblings will discover that this single question, asked at deepening levels, opens what follows.

The magister drew a distinction worth keeping close to the breast. Some games are played to be won, others to be continued. The finite game has fixed rules, known players, and an ending. Its purpose is to win until another finite game begins. The infinite game has no such ending—its rules may change, its players may come and go, and the only purpose is to keep the game alive such that the players thrive.

Politics, as we have inherited it, is a never-ending series of finite games, that is, contests with winners and losers, fought over the same board, by parties whose quarrels seem to matter more than the question of what kind of games the board unleashes.

Metapolitics begins when that question is finally asked.

But it is fundamentally the work of writing rules for a game meant to continue—and of recognizing that arguing over which faction should win the present contest is a far smaller concern than whether such a contest, as currently configured, is one the people should be playing at all.

Most finite games are played to dominate, which determines a winner and a loser. The deeper question is what kind of game the rules themselves generate.

Thus, there are those who say we ought to live in that numbers game where the majority selects its rulers who make the rules and plan the order such that it determines the winners and losers in a given period of gameplay. Complicated rules for a finite game—a game of domination.

Then there are those who say that the numbers game is an illusion that obscures the win-lose dynamics of central authority, and mutes the aspirations of those who would rather play an ongoing cooperation game—according to rules of fair play and proportionality—simple rules for a complex society.

The Great Ascent

One who has not yet made the great ascent up the spiral staircase might not be able to appreciate the differences. Still, she might parse the perspectives of the idealist and the skeptic—and ask whether the system she has been told she lives within is the system she actually lives within.

Such a noble ideal. What does one see who looks past the system’s image of itself?

Both of the foregoing passages describe politics, but only one sees clearly enough to summon metapolitics.

If the rules of an order shape the games played within it, the rules also shape the kind of leaders the order summons. Two more voices surface and compete for our assent.

The first voice says,

The second voice says,

One voice is black and white. The other is a shade of grey. One seeks to manipulate, the other seeks to catalyze. The first is the kind of leader the command-and-control order will summon. The second is a leader that spontaneous order will invite.

Metapolitics is not just the art of knowing the difference; it is also the discipline of understanding how complex societies emerge to serve diverse people within a unified framework. E pluribus unum. Ex uno plures.

Complexity is a god before which all must remain humble.

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Conceit of the Designer

She walks the high halls where the powerful gather, and they send for her before they deliberate, but she must wait in line behind the favor-seekers. Her days are given to deep reflection and planning, to gathering knowledge across many disciplines, to seeing patterns that escape lesser minds. She does not think as others do. She perceives what lies beneath the surface of things, and she calls this faculty by a flattering name: the Designer.

She believes she can see the whole system, even before it exists. So she believes she can plan systems for others. The commercial ecosystem becomes a machine she can design and run, or society a tapestry of relationships she alone has learned to weave. Those who lack her sight are bound to walk the unlighted path of ignorance until she leads them out of the dark. She sees no tyrant in the mirror. She sees a servant of the common good whose vision will fix what the blind and benighted have broken.

She must light the path that others must one day walk.

Beware the Designer, not because she is evil, but because she lacks the one thing sight requires—humility before what she beholds.

The central task of those who would order society is to show how little they can know of what they imagine they can design. The myriad decisions about what to truck, barter, and exchange are beyond the ken of anyone who would contrive them, just as the relationships of a rainforest ecosystem could neither be designed nor created by anyone. Living systems will override the plans of those who plant by hand. What organizes itself from below will outlast the schemes of those who plan from above.

The Magister writes of ruins in a rainforest.

The complex includes temples, plazas, and thoroughfares once teeming.... This once-great civilization eventually drifted into obscurity. Some say a mixture of drought and excessive foresting caused the inhabitants to abandon the city. Since its heyday a thousand years ago, the jungle has been unforgiving in its vengeance.

A tidal wave of flora has swallowed the buildings, roads, and temples, turning mighty stone structures into mounds nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape. Mother Nature can be relentless as she uncurls her snakes or unfurls her fronds. So, the city has returned to nature in unparalleled beauty and biodiversity.

No mind, however fine, can design a reef or a rainforest—much less a single cell.

Inside a cell, one finds affairs that never cease—messengers in motion, gates opening and closing, signals sent and answered in a script too fine for any one mind to write. What each cell observer knows, he knows in fragments. Patterns glimpsed, rhythms inferred, meanings sketched in outlines. Each holds a shard of the truth, and only by working together can they approach understanding the whole.

A society is no simpler. Complexity defies understanding and thus planning. The one who believes she can arrange the lives of many as a hand arranges pieces upon a board has forgotten that each piece moves of its own accord on a board that is a human-interaction landscape.

The ascended should never stop trying to understand, but they should stop trying to command. Yet the Designer lingers, claiming:

Such a conceit will not stand, because that jealous god, complexity, will not let it.

The best we can do is launch experiments in protocol design—whether through local experiments or emergent rule sets.

There is no One True Way.

Local is Beautiful

We need to make room for niches of experimentation so the twin forces of emergence and evolution can work their magic. We need more local eyes on local problems. And only good protocol design can unleash all the experimentation.

Good protocols can originate in theory or emerge from practice.

Remember, the value of a whole is not always the sum of the value of its parts. How the elements are joined, how they answer to one another, how they stand in relation one to the next, going in flux and flow—these can give a whole a value that no counting of elements would uncover. Just as a tune is not the sum of its notes, a people is not the sum of its persons. Every dynamic arrangement and rearrangement is enormously valuable, and the churning value of the arrangement is greater than what is arranged.

Such wholes are made not by sameness but by the maximization of elemental diversity along one dimension and the harmony of those elements on another. A theory that explains many phenomena with a single principle has this quality. So does a society whose people pursue diverse ends under rulesets that unify them equally. The unifying element does not erase diversity; it shelters it and gives it common ground.

From this follows a second teaching, which the first prepares.

No single vision of the good life can satisfy all who would live well. What seems to one a paradise seems to another a prison. What community one would build, another would flee. Those who insist their vision must be the vision for all have not understood what they are asking of them.

There is a better framework.

The Framework

It is not a single order planned or imposed, but a framework of rules within which many orders may arise. In such a framework, those who would live one way may gather and do so; those who would live another way may gather and live otherwise. None is bound to another’s vision. Each may join the community whose good is good to them, and each may leave when it no longer suits him. The framework itself takes no sides among the visions it shelters, unless a vision becomes imperialist. Its purpose is to protect the many parallel ways of living peacefully—tried but never imposed.

This is no small thing, and it is not what most men mean by order. Most mean something narrower: one true folk, one true way, and one answer to the question: How are we to live? A framework that houses many answers is harder to grasp and easier to forget. A framework that houses many answers is born out of metapolitics.

The framework, when in operation, gives rise to a country that is greater than the sum of its communities. In this land, each community lives mostly by its own lights, tends to its own good, and is free to be joined or abandoned. The variety itself is good, because no two people are the same. That no one vision prevails is good, because together, people can contribute to a flourishing society that no single visionary, however savvy, could have designed alone.

It is the land of a thousand visionaries.

Unclaimed Fruit

Return now to the room, and the ladder, and the unclaimed fruit. One who reads is not necessarily one who climbs. One who has read this manuscript might wish to be a keeper. Who has begun, at least, to see the monkey ladder for what it is? It is enough, for now, to stop striking down those who reach. It is enough, for now, to test the ladder again. In time, perhaps, a few of us will climb, perhaps to seize the fruit, but also to see what lies beyond the room.

Let us then go forth, to live by the Covenant and the Law of Consent, and carve out niches of possibility for a society full of people weary of living as cold, wet, or beaten monkeys.

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Before scribes carved the first law into stone—before Hammurabi, the Twelve Tables, or the slow accumulation of common law through centuries of blood and friction—there had been the sacralization of persons. It began with the recognition that others suffer. It deepened into a commitment: to refuse doing to others what is hateful to you. And it implied reciprocity—not as a contract, but as the grammar of a shared world.

Before there were codes, there were covenants.

And in that reciprocal structure, we find elements of a covenantal bond.

Some argue that the sacralization of persons is not a legal contrivance, but an ontological discovery. Rights are real, some insist. Rights are a derivation, others argue. We need not settle that debate. Every tradition that has ever produced wisdom—whether Mosaic, Stoic, Vedic, or Taoist—arrives at the same conclusion: To trespass upon others without cause is not merely a crime, it is a desecration.

Remember the story of monks meditating deep in a forest.

The sages embody the principle of ahimsa—nonviolence—the first of the Yamas, which means the practice of reining in or self-control. For the forest sages, ahimsa was not just an abstract ideal but an active practice. Their peacefulness radiated outward, creating an environment in which even the forest animals coexisted in peace. It is said that the tiger and cow drank side by side from the same stream while in the monks’ presence.

The very foundation of law, in every civilization that has not entirely lost its way, is an elaboration on this. One may not injure the innocent. One may not seize what is not his. One may not constrain a person without justification sufficient to meet the scrutiny of a free people who seek similar protections.

Therefore, the law should never be an instrument of subordination. It must be a covenant. The society built on such a covenant is better than a society built on mere statutes. This is no small thing. Most of human history is a lengthy record of the powerful acting with impunity against the weak. But this covenant, however imperfectly articulated or instantiated, is civilization’s most important achievement.

The Caveat

But every civilization has its serpents. The principle that no one is permitted to harm the innocent has always been subjected to catastrophic caveats by powerful men. Those who write the law do not regard themselves as accountable to it. Those who enforce the law are not held to the covenant. Aggression’s architects insist their monopoly on violence is a necessary evil. Yet it is evil. And the compliant herds shiver and can’t imagine things working any other way.

Still, the powerful claim they must be the sole providers of security, law, and justice. Such a claim is rarely backed by force of argument—simply by force. Uniformed men with weapons and jails are proxies of the powerful. They make the people an offer they cannot refuse.

When authorities confiscate wealth from a man who has harmed no one, this is harm. When authorities imprison a woman for conduct that injures no one, this is an injury. When state proxies seize property without evidence of wrongdoing and without the victim’s consent, this is the work of brigands wearing costumes.

Suffering follows.

At least the costume is impressive. It has a seal, a flag, and chevrons. But the uniform grants ordinary men a license to commit acts that the covenant forbids ordinary men.

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Magister Ostrom saw clearly. Civilization’s greatest threat is neither the street criminal nor the rich man, but institutional power asymmetries made by statutes and standing armies that elevate some men above a covenant that ought to bind us all.

Agents of a monopoly on violence, though charged with producing security, soon learn that they can act with impunity. The monopoly produces an auction house in which politicians are the brokers, favor-seekers set the clearing prices, and voters are obliged to pay. The covenant gets consumed by the caveat. The sacred gets sold to the highest bidders. And those who once surrendered to the All now submit to Pharaoh.

We are the Remnant.

We greet the loss not with cynicism but grief. A protection racket wrapped in pageantry is still a protection racket. Those who understand what good the covenant unleashes and what evil it restrains grieve its absence, but this is temporary. When the time of grieving expires, the time for action arrives.

The Return

What would it mean to return to the covenant?

We take a pledge and then enshrine a simple principle:

This is the Law of Consent.

The wisemen of the past understood it intuitively, though described it variously as a Natural Right or a Divine Imprimatur every human bears. Let us not allow the ongoing conflict between Fidelis and Atheus to keep us from restoring the Covenant as our prime protocol. We need only consider the manner and extent to which we must derive it and apply it as mere humans. It must apply not only to the street, but to the chamber—not only to the criminal, but to the magistrate.

Consent is no procedural nicety. It is a precondition for peace that enables us to form a grand multilateral contract. It requires neither Divine Imprimatur nor Natural Right, but if these are mythic truths, believe them. They can only help us to sacralize one another. The Law of Consent only requires those who seek flourishing to adopt the following, which is rooted in instrumental rationality:

Morals by agreement.

Notice this formulation requires neither commitment to abstract essences nor moral laws. One must only investigate the idea that happiness, harmony, and prosperity, the Threefold Braid, flow to those who enter the covenant. We don’t argue about its nature. We persuade like monks and missionaries.

Those who agree join us, and we get on with it.

Under the covenant, neither a person’s body nor time nor the fruits of her labor are resources to be allocated by her betters. Under the covenant, a fellow human is neither a milk cow nor an enemy. Under the covenant, persons treat persons as ends in themselves. Under the covenant, we are united.

And this agreement, followed faithfully by all its signatories, reorganizes everything.

Government becomes governance. Monopoly becomes polycentricity. Compulsion yields to persuasion.

Outside the covenant, though, predators and parasites await. Whatever our dreams of universal morality, to them, we are prey or hosts. Whether we shake our fists or brandish our Divine Imprimaturs, the only answer to their power is counterpower. Rights confer no magic forcefield against criminals and tyrants. But when courageous people join in solidarity, there is strength in numbers. There is asabiyyah.

Under the covenant, compulsion without evidence of injury is itself an injury, whether carried out by ordinary men in uniforms or plain clothes. It means that property is designated as an extension of personhood, and that violating it without consent is to violate the person. Violation or harm means making another worse off. Agreements—freely made, clearly understood, and held to by all parties—are the architecture of a just society. And those entrusted with any power must hold it by the consent of those over whom they hold it, and remain accountable to them, replaceable by them, and constrained by the same covenant they are appointed to enforce. Thus, a corollary:

This is no call to build a Utopia. It is a call to recover deep wisdom, form a new covenant, and build a new kind of society on that covenant. Instead of deriving law from Leviathan, we derive all law from the Law of Consent.

And everyone who signs it must abide by it. Otherwise, they subject themselves to enforcement.

The Demands

The Law of Consent demands things of us we have grown comfortable avoiding. The Protection Racket evolved into a Security Blanket as constituency groups bid for the legislature’s power or anoint powerful palms.

The Law of Consent demands that those who provide governance services demonstrate their value as providers and thus compete for our loyalty. A provider of governance services who cannot earn our custom is an occupying force. That means the institutions we build must be chosen, not inherited; entered into, not imposed. Institutions shall be sustained by fidelity to purpose, not just by tradition’s inertia.

The Law of Consent demands that punitive measures must find their justification in provable injury to a person, not in some sovereign taking offense, not in a policy that exists solely to enrich a constituency group or a corporate parasite, not in the convenience of self-anointed administrators willing to sacrifice justice for compliance. Courts must ask not only what was done but who was harmed. Victims must be made whole. And restitution must come before punishment.

The Law of Consent demands that what we call the social contract be made actual—not hypothetical, not metaphorical, not implied by the accident of birth. The agreements by which we live together must be transparent, legible, and signed in sanity and circumspection.

The Law of Consent demands that infrastructure, community, and common life be built through negotiation rather than compulsion. Common projects are realized because they offer sufficient value to all whose property and persons they will affect, and impose no costs upon the unwilling. Even if this makes for a slower process, it is more honest, more durable, and less prone to resentments than communities under coercive control.

The Law of Consent demands competition among those who provide that which we associate with governance—security, adjudication, infrastructure—because competition keeps providers honest.

Monopoly, in governance as in other industries, is a midwife to twins: compulsion and corruption.

The Future’s Shape

Fragments of a covenantal world have existed across many times and places. These include the free cities of the medieval era, the polycentric legal systems of early common law, and the guilds and mutual aid societies that existed before the rise of the administrative state. Lex mercatoria enabled merchants across a continent to conduct transactions independently of political interference. The Frankpledge system connected villages into mutual surety groups, where each individual was accountable to his community. Ancient Israelite judges held no permanent power and were answerable to the same law they administered.

None was perfect. No human arrangement is. But they were, in their better moments, organized around something recognizable as the covenant: persons protecting persons, agreements enforcing agreements, harm met with restitution rather than mere punishment, and power distributed rather than concentrated.

The Remnant does not advocate for a return to the past. We are not nostalgists. We are something stranger and more demanding: those who believe in the timeless wisdom of reciprocal peace, and that today’s task is to instantiate it again at a higher order of complexity. Now we have better tools, more potential signatories, and a greater understanding of what we are trying to build and why.

The Law of Consent points toward a civilization in which persons are genuinely sovereign over their own lives, property, and self-organized associations. Those who have decision-making authority will have earned it. They shall maintain it through value creation, or lose it due to poor performance. The ruler-ruled asymmetry will not be abolished by a violent revolution, as such risks swapping power factions. Power asymmetries dissolve, slowly and structurally, through subversive innovation.

Far from a call for political reform, this is our moral mission. Behind the covenant lies a spiritual imperative. A society organized around the sacredness of persons is one that takes seriously that which the most enduring wisdom traditions have taught.

The Charge

The distance between what is and what the covenant demands is vast and widening. This is not cause for despair. It is cause for work—a recommitment to tikkun.

The Remnant does not wait for a sudden transformation. We experiment. We make agreements that instantiate consent rather than merely invoking it. We create communities—physical, intellectual, and spiritual—that demonstrate, in miniature, what a covenant-ordered society can be. We point at the convent, not as with a weapon against those who fall short of it, but as a light, something by which to orient in the darkness.

Every institution that treats persons as sacred rather than a means is a fragment of the world we are set to build. Every agreement, freely entered and faithfully kept, honors the whole of the covenant as hyperstition. Every time we hold the powerful to account for their crimes—judging them by the same standard as the powerless—is an act of restoration or the work of repair.

The law, in its best form, has always been the covenant of persons, protecting persons, from harm by other persons, including those who believe themselves exempt. We have forgotten more than we remember. But the memory is not lost. It is carried forward, in every age, by those few who protect the flame as a candle in a windstorm.

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He didn’t recognize them anymore. The world he knew had shattered, and they were all but shards. Sometimes they cut. Whether he walked among the market throngs or sat alone in the forest, he felt alone.

In that solitude, he was hollow and anxious, surrounded by loud waves of change, fear, and anger. Sometimes he wanted to gasp and kick, thinking that soon he might tire of treading water, then fall into the deep and drown.

But a few, he saw, had turned back to the old ways—the books, the traditions, the places of worship. He had even gone to an old temple one day. Those he found there seemed to be clinging to the flotsam of something that had been broken up in a great storm. The congregants invited him to come back, but something in him—perhaps the restless stillness of anticipation—told him he could not.

One morning, something woke him just before dawn. As the first light began to paint the sky, something inside him mirrored it. And as the sun rose, he felt its warmth, within and without. It flowed through him, filling him with energy. Creative energy. A generative urge, yes, but a sublime warmth, too, as if his heart were a vessel capable of containing an emanation from the All.

The experience reminded him he was still alive.

He thought of going back to the old temple, but knew it was still freighted with its traditions, interpretations, and well-worn paths among the well-planned gardens and well-tended grave sites. Any new ideas would just stir up dust, and the old temple-goers are allergic to dust.

He thought of joining the angry mobs, but when they are not chanting slogans, they are bowing to the houses of power. Their plebiscite prayers are never answered by those who fancy themselves as gods. But their gods don’t create. They take and impose.

He thought of letting himself fall into the abyss where nothing is sacred, and nothing is real or true. There, at least, he might be able to ignore the cacophony, to determine that the world is just Sturm und Drang—ceaseless turbulence mistaken for meaning. But nothing could be created in the abyss.

Where could he go?

His solitude, along with the consuming radiance that filled him, would become somehow burdensome if he could not find the others and set to work. So he went back into the forest to reflect, where he hoped he might find an answer, at least, outside the cacophony of change, fear, and anger.

He went deep into the woods, where light shone in glimmers and shafts through the treetops. As he approached the forest stream, he discovered he was not alone.

A stag stood at the bend in the brook, drinking. It was large but unhurried, and the light that fell in shafts through the canopy seemed to gather between its antlers—drawn to them the way iron filings orient around an invisible field. The stag stopped. Then it raised its head and looked at him without alarm. It held his gaze long enough for him to understand this was not a chance encounter. Then the stag turned and moved along the bank—not in retreat, but intending to be followed.

So he followed.

The stream bent around a great oak whose roots had been bent by the brook and its bank over many years, pulling and twisting until they formed a natural, shaded hollow. Sheltered on three sides by roots, earth, and moss, it was open to the water and light on the fourth side.

The stag stopped at the tree and went no further.

Inside the hollow, a child sat with her back to him. She was stacking stones along the curved edge of the roots. She worked the way children work when no one is watching—completely absorbed. She placed each stone deliberately, building a modest wall. It could hold warmth, but not much. It could shelter a few, but no more. It was the work of someone enclosing the sacred against the profane, saying: Here, this place, for us, for now. She built it in the spirit one might cup a candle's flame.

The child turned and looked at him. She was neither surprised nor expectant. She looked at him the way one looks at a person who arrives exactly when they are supposed to. Then she stood, brushed her muddy hands on her knees, and walked into the trees, leaving the wall complete for him to admire.

The stag was gone.

He stood at the edge of the hollow for a long time. Above him, the canopy moved in a breeze. The stream flowed. He thought of the others—the ones he had not yet found, the ones who were perhaps standing at the edge of their own forests, waiting, wondering what they were waiting for.

There were eleven others. He would make twelve.

He envisioned a place where all twelve could gather, away from the cacophony and the waves. There, they would create something together, sheltered for a time in something modest and temporary, but holy.

He knelt by the water and picked up a stone.

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A founding convocation is in order. If you're interested, please reach out.

It will come into existence when enough of us see what it can be and are ready to commit to its becoming. For many, that will take accepting that their societies have become fractured and factionalized. Others will conclude their once-great civilizations have become decadent and disordered, that their communities have become rootless and their spirits aimless as they haunt the material world.

Too many live without binding agents, which makes them weak and vulnerable.

Our order shall form in the blessed tension between the Unanswerable Questions and Unquestionable Answers—inquiry and doctrine. The former supplies us with a measure of spiritual nourishment and, occasionally, of wonder. The latter offers us a star around which to orbit, a sense that we coalesce around a certain set of commitments.

Every Summer, for example, our order must recommit to its Mission: to organize so as to form a society of consent—a polity without the politics of domination. Behind this mission, we set out the brutal game theory of the protection racket. It explains life under Pharaoh, or Caesar, or George III. Since the time of brigands and planters, this protection racket has persisted throughout the ages, freighted with pomp, circumstance, and self-congratulation.

But if we are to escape Pharaoh, we have to change the collective consciousness of a people. We have to awaken a Geist. We have to build an Empire of the Mind.

But a consent-based social order does not exist, the skeptics will say.

Yet, we shall reply. That is why we exist, among other whys.

Our mission is to midwife a polity, just as the Greeks developed democracy, the Romans built a republic, and the Americans introduced the first constitutional republic. Though men such as Thomas Jefferson, Robert Yates, and George Mason were all worried that the 1787 Constitution risked forming an authority that would overshadow a person’s rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” as well as the “consent of the governed” meant to secure those rights, the American Founders instituted something more ideal than what had preceded it.

Eventually, their polity mutated into an extractive empire before it could celebrate a quarter-millennium. Yet Jefferson, Yates, and Mason, who had warned against the consolidation of power, possessed wisdom and foresight from which future generations could draw. Echoes of their Geist persisted, as did those of the Greek and Roman Geists, and of Persia and Israel.

Yet for imperfect ideals and their imperfect instantiation mediums, people were willing to kill and die.

They still are.

As it is proper in Winter, our thoughts should turn to death. The question before us, then, is: For what should we be willing to kill or die? The answer should be the same as that to the question: For what should we be willing to live and create? Surely the answer has to do with the Pursuit of Happiness—or in our order, the Tiers of Joy. Yet somehow we don’t savor a meal or cherish the time as much when we dine alone.

Communities of Individuals

Neither hedonic individualism nor eudaimonia is enough. As Ibn Khaldoun reminds us, we are also creatures of asabiyyah, that is, social solidarity. One’s happiness is bound up in both the I and the We.

Our nomadic forebears, roving extended families, encountered other nomadic groups seeking the same resources. Such confrontations were often violent, so we evolved a sense of kindredness and an instinct for in-group protection and mutual support. But there is wisdom in this beyond survival. Some of that wisdom is instrumental, some is transcendental.

Just as speaking the same language lowers coordination costs, so does the enchantment of shared blood. Yet siblings of our order won’t likely have the blood ties that bind the members of a roving clan. We must bind together with forces beyond blood. Beyond race. Beyond even the patch of soil upon which we were born.

To operate according to a common doctrine creates social coherence, as does spiritual siblinghood.

We recognize the fact of pluralism. That means we include the knowledge that each of us pursues ends that differ from one to the next, so each of us is engaged in a separate pursuit. Yet we also know we are stronger together. To slake the thirst of loneliness and avoid the vulnerability of solitude, we gather at the well of solidarity. We are happier together—basking in the mystery, living by our code, and finding meaning in the fact that each of us has a place in a community of siblings.

If our siblinghood is to seed a society of consent, we must be willing to die for our cause and for one another, just as the American revolutionaries were willing, in their morbid humor, to “hang together” so they wouldn’t hang separately. In John’s gospel, it is written that “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

How odd that anyone would kill or die for some state of affairs that doesn’t exist. How odd that anyone would kill or die for the brothers and sisters of a creed.

How odd, but how human.

Killing in the Name Of

Nonviolence remains the prime virtue of our order. Its daily practice in thought, word, and deed defines us as siblings. But our pledge never to initiate violence against the innocent doesn’t require us to become pacifists. Like the ancient warrior-monks of the Far East, or Quohelet in the Near East, we must pray for peace and prepare for war. For each has its season.

If we are to become a siblinghood, we must be prepared to defend ourselves within reasonable bounds. And if we are ever to form a consensual society, we will almost certainly have to defend ourselves from enemies within and without. Predators and parasites will encircle us. So defense and retaliation will be necessary to serve our mission, realize our vision, and preserve whatever we create that contributes to our thriving.

Imagine a membrane around our order. This membrane symbolizes the separation of the sacred and the profane. That is, we sacralize that which is within the membrane. We sacralize our siblings not merely because we can better count on their sacralizing us, although that is true. We sacralize them because we know they share our commitments, and we are conscious that they are holy sparks with whom we set the work of tikkun.

Now, other membranes might well extend in concentric circles outward from this inner membrane. And these fall on a continuum outward from the sacred. The next membrane might include allies or non-sibling fellow travelers, whose behaviors and worldviews give rise to a peaceable domain of interaction. But the further out we go, the closer we get to those who do not share anything resembling our doctrine. And at the outermost reaches, we find those who threaten us and our way of life.

Those who denied the existence of their enemies—and were not willing to kill and die defending their own—rarely lived to tell the tale.

Hyperstition

A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real. It’s an idea, narrative, or belief that—through the very act of being circulated and believed—causes itself to come into existence. The concept collapses the distinction between an imagined reality and our present reality. Its darker variants conjure lies and deception, but its more virtuous forms channel mythic truths that can become reality in the future.

Philosopher Nick Land, who coined the term, says hyperstitions are “fictions that make themselves real.” Indeed, something that exists in the future—imagined in the present—can have transformative power. It’s rather like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but stranger, perhaps. A normal self-fulfilling prophecy works through straightforward psychology: One believes she will fail a test, so she does not study, and thus fails. With hyperstition, the fiction propagates itself through culture, almost as if it has its own agency, setting the conditions of its actualization.

Mythic truths, sufficiently propagated, become Geists capable of combating narratives of deception that will almost certainly become enemy Egregores. Grey hyperstition thus operates through time, but non-linearly. Drawing on occultism and cybernetics, Land suggests that hyperstitions can “come from the future”—that a future state of reality exerts a kind of backward causation, pulling the present toward it through the medium of ideas and belief. That is why we must overcome failures of imagination, then engage in radical collective intention-setting, then be willing to fight or die according to that intention.

At the very least, we must be willing to live for it, which, as we have said, is to seek to repair the world—despite our imperfection, because we carry a spark.

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Before we get into Kabbalah, we need to set up two ideas.

The first is a debate that theologians have been having for centuries: Is God transcendent—distant, separate, and wholly other? Or is God immanent—inherent in all things, and flowing through us as nature itself?

It turns out, as we’ll see, that the Kabbalists had a pretty elegant answer to these questions.

The second idea is the Unity of Opposites. Day and night. Hot and cold. Young and old. These feel like opposing categories, but there’s something philosophically interesting going on: opposites are always defined in relation to each other. They’re inseparable, so interdependent. There is unity in opposition—a fundamental complementarity.

Now, keep both thoughts in mind as we continue.

Reimagining Genesis

The Kabbalists—Jewish mystics whose thought flourished in the Levant, and later in medieval Europe—offer a fascinating account of what happened before creation. Not the creation of the world, but the very first moment of anything at all.

Pre-creation. Pre-cosmos.

First, they say, there was Ain. Nothingness. The void.

From the void emerged Ain Soph—literally “without limit,” that is, the Infinite and Eternal. (Notice what just happened: from absolute nothing came its perfect opposite.)

And from the Infinite and Eternal radiated Ain Soph Aur—the Divine Radiance. This force emanates from the eternal source.

Ain,
Ain Soph,
Ain Soph Aur.

The Void, the Infinite, and the Divine Radiance. Three in one. The Kabbalists, without quite advertising it, gave us a trinitarian God.

[They laughed.]

In our original framework, Ain Soph is transcendent—infinite, beyond all categories, and unknowable by mere mortals. Ain Soph Aur is immanent—it radiates outward, flows into the world, and dwells within things. Transcendent and immanent. Not either/or, but both/and. Another unity of opposites, just like the Void and the Infinite.

Syncretism

Where did these ideas come from? In a word: syncretism—the hybridization of different philosophical and religious traditions.

The Kabbalists were inheritors of a long conversation between Jewish thought and Greek philosophy, and the results are remarkable.

Start with Plato. His theory of Forms proposes that behind the messy, imperfect world of our senses lies a higher realm of eternal, ideal archetypes, such as Beauty, Justice, or the Perfect Circle. This is one of the most powerful ideas in Western Philosophy.

Of course, Plato has his critics.

The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser once made fun of this idea by taking his students to a restaurant. If you’re a Platonist, he told them, you can only order Soup. (You can’t order the tomato bisque or the clam chowder.) You have to order Soup—the ultimate Form. Tomato bisque is but a fragment, an imperfect instance of the eternal.

I dare say Morgenbesser wasn’t a Kabbalist. Kidding aside, though, Platonists see the world as a cascade from unity into multiplicity, from the universal into the particular.

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Plotinus

Now fast-forward from Athens to Rome, and meet the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus, who served up what we call Neoplatonism. In other words, Plotinus took Plato’s Forms and pushed them further. He proposed a supreme principle he called The One—an entity so fundamental that you can’t even say it is “good” or “beautiful” or even “existent” without limiting it by category.

The only way to approach understanding The One is through negation: “not this, not that.” This and that are but fragments of a higher-order unity, mediated by our imperfect, time-bound minds.

Sound familiar?

Plotinus’s One doesn’t just sit there, either. It emanates. It radiates outward in a kind of cosmic overflow.

• The first emanation is the Nous, the Divine Mind, where the eternal Forms reside.

• The second is the Psyche, the Cosmic Soul, where those Forms begin to differentiate into categories, sequences, and multiplicity.

• The third is the Sensible World — material reality, where forms are fully fragmented into the individual things around us. (Morgenbesser’s tomato bisque.)

And yet, through it all, there is unity in diversity. The cosmos is a single entity expressing itself in many ways.

This is called monism.

But syncretism cuts both ways.

Interestingly, the second-century philosopher Numenius of Apamea, an important forerunner of Plotinus, once asked: “What is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?” He meant it as a compliment to both. Ideas flowed in both directions across the ancient Mediterranean—with Jewish thinkers absorbing Greek philosophy, and Greek philosophers absorbing Jewish theology.

When the Kabbalists eventually arrived, they were building on centuries of cross-pollination—of ideas having sex.

The Shattering of the Vessels

Back to Ain Soph Aur—that divine radiance emanating from the Infinite.

If Ain Soph is going to generate a world, that radiance needs containers. Vessels—kelim in Hebrew—that can hold and differentiate the divine light into higher-order categories. Think of them as like Plato’s Forms, the archetypal structures that shape reality, only rigidly.

But here’s the problem: the Divine Radiance is too powerful.

The vessels can’t hold it. They shatter.

This is sheverat ha-kelim—the shattering of the vessels. The cosmic catastrophe at the heart of Kabbalistic cosmology.

The holy shards scatter throughout the cosmos. They compose the physical world we inhabit. When those shards are ordered and harmonized, we glimpse goodness and beauty. When they become more disordered, separated, scattered—that’s what we experience as suffering and evil. Not evil as a positive force, but evil as privation, as fragmentation, as things being more broken, separate, and disharmonious than they ought to be.

And here is where it gets personal: we, too, are those holy shards. Glints of Ain Soph Aur flow through each of us. The divine is not only transcendent and remote. It is immanent in its nature, flowing through you, me, and everyone we encounter.

What We Are Here to Do

This is where the Kabbalists arrive at something genuinely beautiful.

We carry the shards of the vessels, and thus the divine sparks.

We also have freedom—and freedom, amid all this fragmentation, means we are imperfect and error-prone. We are not perfect. But we are holy. And that matters.

Ain Soph stands outside of time. But its emanance (Ain Soph Aur) flows through us as instruments of a cosmic purpose.

That purpose is what the Kabbalists call tikkun — repair. Hence, tikkun olam. The call to repair the shattered world.

Yet the goal of tikkun is the harmonization of difference—not the elimination of multiplicity or a return to perfect unity. We are not trying to force everything back into an undifferentiated whole, to put back the vessels, or find our way back to the void. Instead, we are charged with reordering the shards toward greater coherence, greater beauty, greater justice.

Harmonization doesn’t create a perfect world—but a more perfect world than this one. For our posterity.

And when our children inherit that better world, they too will practice tikkun. And their children will inherit what they build. Generation after generation, holy sparks reordering themselves and each other, never perfect, but always better.

We are, as the Kabbalists understood matters, the cosmos reflecting on itself, then repairing itself.

Worthy of Reflection

As shards of broken vessels, we are capable of reflection. Here are some questions we can reflect on today:

• How does this account of pre-creation and creation compare to what cosmologists tell us? (Are the parallels—void, singularity, emanation, expansion, complexity emerging from simplicity—more than coincidental?)

• What does it mean to carry the divine spark of Ain Soph Aur?

• How does that change the way you see the person sitting next to you?

• And perhaps most practically: how do we practice tikkun every day? How do we reorder the holy sparks—first in ourselves, then in our families, then in our communities?

For the Kabbalists, that’s not just a theological question. It’s the whole point of life. Because, in the process, we can become closer to Ain Soph. We can experience a modicum of Ain Soph Aur’s compassionate presence—enough to fill us, but not shatter us. And we can try to find a little bit more joy in practicing tikkun together.

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Recall the three confrontations: change, evil, and death. We shall linger on the second—evil—for it will surely linger in us.

Evil exists, and one can become more attuned to it, whether in its classification or intensity. As with the other confrontations, one must begin in a state of centeredness. Otherwise, she risks being swallowed up.

Attunement is as much about recognizing evil in others as in oneself. Our capacity for cruelty, indifference, and exploitation is part of our natures, which means it is part of your nature and mine.

Thoughts and words steeped in malevolence will eventually spawn misdeeds.

We must take a few steps into the Shadow to reveal the hidden source of such secrets, though that process can arouse unexpected resistance. It is unflattering, if not frightening, to recognize in oneself everything she hopes to avoid in others.

Yet from the grounded awareness of equipoise, we can become more attuned to our darker impulses. And we must become so attuned, for these will linger as magma building pressure beneath the surface. Explore the Shadow as a physician would an abscess, a priest would a confession, or an explorer would a cave.

Then hold three simultaneous truths:

1. Evil lives within me (one-twelfth);

2. I can respond with patience instead of anger, fear, or disgust.

3. I can face it all with centeredness and courage, and it will not consume me.

By accepting that we are born as both Light and Shadow—capable of creation and destruction, unbound freedom and rigid order—we integrate within the fullness of being. Integration provides the stability to face evil without letting it consume us.

Now let us identify evil beyond mere abstraction, in three embodied forms.

Luciferic

Luciferic Evil is rebellious, a wanton turning away from order. Its anti-authoritarian nature is exemplified by an angel who defied God. It is an evil of unchecked desire and the rejection of just authority. This form of evil can be seductive, as it is associated with pursuing pleasure, risk, and adventure—none of which are evils per se. Evil lies in their dangerous admixture, whether one descends into decadence or lets consequences be damned.

Can she indulge without indulging to excess?
He succeeded, but was someone innocent harmed in the process?
What is the difference between sleeping with your spouse and your sibling’s spouse?

In experiencing the Tiers of Joy, we must remain attuned to differences of degree and kind, as even good things, when taken too far, become evil.

Archontic

Archontic Evil, by contrast, is not about decadence but control. Named after the Archons of Gnosticism, these powerful entities rule the material plane through domination and oppression. In contrast to Luciferic evil, Archontic evil arises from a desire for order but brings about oppressive, even totalitarian, circumstances.

Can we manipulate the masses with propaganda?
How shall we use violence to gain power?
How can we exploit vulnerable populations for profit?

Archontic evil also tends to invert values. Practitioners treat vices as virtues and promote lies as truths, as long as doing so gives one more control. Only in politics, for example, could the following be considered a list of virtues:

1. Violence—Initiate harm, through violence, theft

2. Corruption—Dishonor commitments, self-deal

3. Callousness—Show cruelty or indifference to suffering

4. Monomania—Adhere zealously to The One True Way

5. Negligence—Fail to care for one’s property or offices

6. Casuistry—Apply fallacy or deceptive reasoning

7. Injustice—Deal unfairly with the innocent

The list of vices is not, of course, exclusive to Archontic evil. One needs only to learn the objectives of its practitioners.

Archontic practitioners treat people as parts in a machine or instruments of some perceived greater good, so these systems are marked by soullessness and despair. As this evil seeks to replace all freedom with control, the powerful sit atop rigid hierarchies in which everyone is formally systematized, top to bottom.

Where Luciferic Evil risks chaos or decadence, Archontic Evil risks stifling the spirit.

Ahrimanic

Ahrimanic Evil is perhaps the purest form of evil—not because it dominates or tempts, but because it negates life. Driven by states such as fear, resentment, and hatred, Ahrimanic Evil seeks neither freedom nor order. Ahriman, the evil twin of Zoroastrianism’s Ahura Mazda, seeks to annihilate. The entity embodies a profound nihilism expressed as a desire to extinguish everything. Thus, Ahrimanic Evil takes Thanatos Masculine to deadly extremes.

In other words, Ahrimanic Evil aims to destroy the risky delights sought by Luciferic practitioners and annihilate the oppressive order sought by Archontic practitioners. Ahriman initially fragments the world through resentment and living by lies. But as these forces are unleashed, the factions turn on each other in an escalating cycle of reprisals. Some view Ahrimanic Evil as the ultimate evil for this reason, because hatred of the other conscripts all sides into obliterating one another, and ideally, all existence.

Ahrimanic Evil does not seek order or freedom, but exhaustion—the point at which hatred and reduction render existence itself intolerable.

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Dark Dialectics: A Foreshadowing

A tension exists between Luciferic and Archontic evils. Certain ideologues love this tension because they can exploit it, calling the others evil and themselves good. If Luciferians want more decadence and Archontics want more control, their drift into ideological zeal can obscure the reality that freedom and order should be mutually constraining—and good will be found in the balance.

But the blood moon rises when Luciferic and Archontic evils become locked in conflict. Greedy Luciferians seeking paper profits encounter Archontic functionaries ready to impose order. Initially, their encounter is oppositional, but eventually they discover the benefits of collusion. Lucifer’s lucre finds the Archons’ authority.

All that’s left is to ask who wins and who loses.

The colluders win, of course, and society pays. Luciferians view legislatures as auction houses. Wealth concentrates among the powerful, and power concentrates among the wealthy in a grotesque orgy. A perverse, corporatist order is ascendant. The rest of society—taxed, controlled, indebted, and immiserated—grows resentful. Resentment turns to hatred. Hatred inspires violence. Violence escalates, only now the conflict is a negative-sum game.

Ahriman laughs.

Bear in mind that many who seek power will use chaos and decadence to accelerate decline, and then seek to impose a totalizing order in the ashes.

Today, Luciferic Evil sits at Ahriman’s left hand, and Archontic Evil sits at his right. Until Ahrimanic Evil finds the means to extinguish us all for good, he will let the other two rut in that unholy bed while resentful hordes tear through cities with angry torches and zeroes for eyes.

The Transformations

Evil does not vanish when named. When we confront it and integrate it, we become transformed. Just as freedom, order, and preservation may curdle into decadence, domination, and annihilation, so too can they be refined into higher expressions. Each evil casts a shadow because it is the corruption of a virtue. To confront evil without being consumed by it, one must also learn to transfigure it.

Thus, where Luciferic, Archontic, and Ahrimanic evils threaten imbalance, three countervailing forces restore harmony within and without.

Promethean

Where Luciferic Evil awakens rebellious instincts for injustice or indulgence, Promethean virtue rebels for the restoration of the good.

Prometheus is no seducer. He does not steal fire to exalt himself, nor does he deny the cost of transgression. He brings divine fire to humankind out of compassion, knowing full well the punishment that awaits. His rebellion is not prideful.

Promethean action is guided by discernment: Is this gift meant to uplift, or merely to inflate? Is this knowledge shared to liberate others, or to crown oneself superior? Is this risk undertaken for growth, or merely for the thrill?

Where Luciferic Evil indulges without restraint, Promethean virtue practices bold action. It is criticism through creation. Where Luciferic Evil rejects authority wholesale, Promethean virtue challenges unjust authority while honoring the responsibility of tikkun. Where Luciferic Evil consumes pleasure heedless of the consequences, Prometheans accept consequence as the price of illumination.

The Promethean fire warms, illuminates, and forges. It is a generative fire.

Mardukian

Where Archontic Evil imposes order to dominate, Mardukian virtue creates order so that life may flourish.

Marduk does not rule through suffocation. He confronts chaos not with fear, but with wisdom. From the formless deep, he shapes a cosmos where distinctions matter—where boundaries give rise to meaning, and structure makes growth possible.

Mardukian order asks: Does this structure serve the living, or merely preserve power? Does this law protect the vulnerable, or entrench the strong? Does this hierarchy clarify one’s responsibilities, or erase others’ dignity?

Where Archontic Evil treats people as components, Mardukian virtue treats people as participants. One’s place in the cosmic order is not formally assigned but discovered and revised. Where Archontic Evil freezes systems into rigidity, Mardukian virtue allows for adaptation. Where Archontic Evil inverts values to secure control, Mardukian virtue aligns law with justice.

This is an order of cosmic protocols and emergent architecture, not oppression by design. Mardukian order channels energy rather than suppressing it–respecting the Law of Flow. Order should serve flourishing and keep freedom in balance; it should not seek to suffocate the Promethean Fire.

Asharic

Where Ahrimanic Evil seeks an end in annihilation, Asharic practice affirms truth, healing, and wholeness.

The Zoroastrian entity Ahura Mazda embodies Asha: the deep substructure of truth that sustains all that exists. Asharic force does not merely preserve—it generates. It does not deny conflict, but it refuses the Lie that fragmented disharmony is inevitable.

Asharic virtue is quiet but inexorable as life overcomes entropy and disintegration.

Truth illuminates; druj distorts.

Where Ahriman fragments the world through resentment, Asharic truth reconnects it through understanding. Where Ahriman weaponizes lies to turn factions against one another, asha dissolves hatred by revealing the truth behind illusion. Where Ahriman drives systems toward collapse, Asharic preservation renews the conditions for life.

Asharic practitioners do not seek stasis. They seek continuity without unnecessary decay—a living order, always becoming, that repairs itself because it is grounded in truth.

Triadic Balance

These three conceptions of good are not rivals; they are mutually constraining and mutually reinforcing.

Promethean aspiration without Mardukian structure becomes reckless. Mardukian structure without Asharic truth becomes hollow. Asharic good without Promethean courage becomes an inflexible orthodoxy—a final state that doesn’t seek to complete the harmonization of difference.

Together, they form a living system. And in this balance, freedom becomes a gift rather than a theft. Order becomes structure instead of subjection. Truth, however beautiful and brutal, becomes constructive, creative, and life-affirming.

No wonder that mustacioed poet-philosopher—part sage, part bon vivant—chose Zoroaster as his avatar.

Remember: none of this represents the eradication of darkness. Instead, it symbolizes its integration—the art of standing amid the whirl of shifting realities, holding the fire without getting burned or letting it go out, and respecting bounds without lapsing into sclerosis.

We must never seek to eliminate Thanatos in its season, whether masculine or feminine. After all, there is,

A time for birthing and a time for dying,
A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted;
A time for slaying and a time for healing,
A time for tearing down and a time for building up;
—Ecclesiastes 3

We resist the dying light so that we can generate life and light, order our lives, repair the world, and transmit what we can for generations to inherit.

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We crash in the dark- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - in FITS AND STARTS - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - and, oh, that really smarts - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - i know it’s gonna leave a mark
—Lee Schulteiss

We’re more compelled by artwork when the artist has a reputation, when we have a context for the piece, or when we know the backstory. We are willing to pay $20 for the simulacrum of hand-blown glass, but we might add a zero or two if we know that an artist toiled with molten silicon and used his own breath to create the form. The same can be said for paintings, craft dolls, and metal sculptures.

Stuff just isn’t that interesting anymore. It’s stuff plus experience.

Often, these items are imperfect. In fact, relative to what a machine might produce, each piece could be uniquely flawed. According to Japanese lore, a young man named Sen no Rikyu sought to learn an elaborate ceremony called the “Way of Tea.”

Rikyu went to the tea master Takeeno Joo, who tested the student by asking him to tend the garden. Rikyu cleaned up everything and raked the garden until it was immaculate. He scrutinized everything to be doubly sure. But before presenting his work to Takeeno Joo, Rikyu shook a cherry tree, which caused a few flowers to fall randomly—imperfectly—onto the ground.

According to the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi, Rikyu understood the true nature of the aesthetic. There is beauty in imperfection. And there is something interesting about the fissures in wood, the crack in a bowl, or the randomness of a splatter.

Natural-living enthusiast Robyn Griggs Lawrence agrees:

Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.

Of course, it’s not impossible for an artificially intelligent artist to iterate endlessly on patterns of aesthetics that most people tend to like. And indeed, many fine-looking designs might come straight from AI, developed perhaps as amalgams of popular designs from the past.

But for many things, human beings will not want the popular or the amalgamated. We will want the uniquely beautiful, interesting, novel, or compelling art forms because we have imbued them with our humanity. We will want many things wabi-sabi because they mirror our imperfections. And experience will surround our goods like narrative metadata.

Now, what about the cracks in us?

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Our imperfections are a part of what it means to be human. It’s one of the reasons we call ourselves grey. Far from drawing from the dark forces around us, grey is, in one sense, an acknowledgement that we are not just imperfect, but that we are separated from the eternal—from what might be considered perfect by some supreme being who, if he/she created us, gave us freedom, which is so easily abused.

One of the types of cracks in us—whether in mind, body, or spirit—is our scars. Our healed wounds sometimes indicate that, in our effort to improve the world around us, we get hurt.

Life is hard.

My wife is friends with a group of old rockers called the Drive-by Truckers. And in one song, the frontman sings two apparently contradictory things, namely that “it's gonna be a world of hurt” and “it’s fucking great to be alive.” Amid the raucous guitars and drums without click tracks, my wife finds redneck wisdom and pure poetry.

She finds wabi-sabi and scars.

She and the band remind us to look around at the broken world and set about fixing it. In doing so, we will not only find that life is worth living, but also that it is worth living because we are capable of overcoming all the pain, sadness, and failure that being free and imperfect brings.

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Drawing from Zoroastrian wisdom, we can construct a powerful framework for understanding the fundamental forces that shape existence and guide spiritual practice. By mapping two essential dualities onto perpendicular axes, we create Zarathustra’s Quadrants—a tool for discernment, self-examination, and conscious spiritual development.

Two Axes of Existence

Axis 1: Creative-Destructive Polarity

The first axis extends from Ahura Mazda to Angra Mainyu, representing the fundamental tension between constructive and destructive forces.

• Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord of Zoroastrian tradition, represents the constructive and generative principle—the force that builds, creates, orders, and brings forth life. This is the impulse toward formation, organization, and manifestation.

• Angra Mainyu, the Destructive Spirit, stands at the opposite pole. This is the principle of dissolution, decay, and destruction—the force that breaks down structures, dissipates order, and returns things to formlessness.

In Zoroastrianism, it is important to understand that asha and druj are the spiritual emanations of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, respectively. Asha represents truth, righteousness, and cosmic order. Druj represents chaos, deception, and disorder. Asha is associated with light, and druj is associated with darkness.

Zoroastrians venerate Ahura Mazda and eschew Angra Mainyu, but in our order, we understand that we must seek wisdom in the Shadow.

Axis 2: Temporal-Eternal Polarity

The second axis runs from Zurvan to Ameretat, capturing the distinction between temporal flow and eternal changelessness.

• Zurvan represents time itself—the realm of becoming, change, and transformation. Here we find the flowing river of temporal existence, where all things are subject to process, development, and alteration.

• Ameretat, meaning “immortality” or “deathlessness,” represents the eternal and changeless. This is the realm of the imperishable, the immutable truths that transcend temporal flow, the eternal principles that remain constant while the world of Zurvan churns and transforms.

Interestingly, there were once Zoroastrian sects called Zurvanites who believed that the god Zurvan was higher even than Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, one suspects because there seems to be an ultimate power in the passage of time and the cycle of endings. What then should we do with neo-Platonist notions of the timeless or eternal, such as those we explore through kabbalah? Zurvan is powerful to a point.

The Four Quadrants

When these two axes intersect, they create four distinct quadrants, each representing a fundamental mode of being:

1. Eternal Creation (Ameretat + Ahura Mazda)

This quadrant contains the unchanging divine principles, the eternal forms of truth and order. Here resides Asha in its purest expression—the timeless law that governs reality, the perfect patterns that exist beyond the reach of temporal change.

2. Temporal Creation (Zurvan + Ahura Mazda)

Here, we observe all generative processes unfolding over time: growth, evolution, healing, learning, and building. This is the realm of spring planting and autumn harvest, of children growing to adulthood, of civilizations rising and flourishing.

3. Temporal Destruction (Zurvan + Angra Mainyu)

This quadrant encompasses decay, entropy, death, and all destructive processes that occur within time. The falling of leaves, the aging of the body, the erosion of mountains—all natural dissolution belongs here.

4. Eternal Destruction (Ameretat + Angra Mainyu)

This is the most challenging quadrant to contemplate, because its worship is nihilism. It represents the void, absolute negation, the unchanging principle of non-being—such as Ein—that precedes even Ein Soph. This is the abyss that stands opposed to eternal creation, the fundamental “no” against existence itself.

The Four Practices

Practice 1: Eternal Creation (Ameretat + Ahura Mazda)

This is the path of alignment with timeless truth—the highest aspiration of spiritual practice.

• Meditate on the eternal principles of Asha (truth and cosmic order)

• Act so as to build lasting goodness beyond your lifetime

• Connect to divine, unchanging wisdom

• Study sacred texts and eternal teachings

• Contemplate the forms and patterns that transcend time

This practice calls us to lift our consciousness above the flux of temporal existence and align ourselves with what is eternally true and good. When we act from this quadrant, we plant seeds that can bear fruit for generations, we speak truths that remain valid across centuries, and we create beauty that reflects the eternal.

Practice 2: Temporal Creation (Zurvan + Ahura Mazda)

This is the path of engaged service in the world—the work of building and healing within time.

• Heal, teach, and serve in the material realm

• Grow plants and steward the delicate ecologies

• Work creatively, letting divinity flow through right process

• Raise children and nurture your community

• Build institutions and infrastructure for a consent-based social order

This quadrant honors the sacred work of manifesting goodness in the world of change. Here, we acknowledge that while eternal principles guide us, the actual work of creation unfolds in time through patience, effort, and gradual transformation. The farmer who tends crops, the teacher who guides students, the builder who constructs shelter or temples—all work in this quadrant.

Practice 3: Temporal Destruction (Zurvan + Angra Mainyu)

This is the path of recognizing necessary endings—the wisdom of knowing when to let go.

Discern:

• What must decay to make room for new growth

• The difference between natural entropy and malicious harm

• When to release what no longer serves

• The role of death in the cycle of life

• How destruction in time can serve ultimate creation

Not all destruction is evil. The forest fire clears deadwood for new growth. The composted plant feeds next year’s garden. The demolished building makes space for new construction. This path requires the difficult wisdom of accepting impermanence and working skillfully with the destructive forces that operate within time.

Practice 4: Eternal Destruction (Ameretat + Angra Mainyu)

This is the path of confronting absolute negation—the most perilous yet potentially transformative quadrant.

• Confront the void, the abyss, and existential doubts

• See what must be utterly rejected (druj in its purest form, the negation of truth)

• Avoid the temptation to nihilism

• Mark the boundary between being and non-being

• Reckon with the ultimate “no” that defines the ultimate “yes” in the Unity of Opposites.

This quadrant represents the darkest territory of spiritual exploration. Yet encountering it is necessary. To know what we utterly reject helps clarify what we absolutely affirm. To peer into the void can strengthen our commitment to truth. Facing eternal negation deepens our appreciation of eternal creation. This path is dangerous and should be approached with caution and spiritual preparation, like Milarepa, who confronted demons in the cave.

Daily Practice: Living with the Matrix

Morning Contemplation

Begin each day by asking,

Consider what work lies before you and which energies you must engage. Perhaps today requires the patience of Temporal Creation, or the wisdom to accept Temporal Destruction. Or, perhaps you need to reconnect with Eternal Creation through meditation and study.

Evening Examination

At day’s end, review your thoughts, words, and deeds—the three pillars of Zoroastrian practice. Reflect by asking,

Did you build when you should have built? Did you let go when necessary? Did you maintain a connection to eternal truth while working in time? Were you pulled unconsciously toward the void, or did you consciously choose your path?

Life Work

The ultimate spiritual aspiration is to move consciously toward the upper-left quadrant—Eternal Creation—aligning yourself ever more fully with Ahura Mazda and Ameretat. Yet wisdom requires honoring the necessary work of the other quadrants when circumstances demand it. This is Zarathustra’s paradox.

A spiritually mature person recognizes when to create and when to allow destruction, when to grasp eternal principles, and when to work patiently within time. She navigates the Matrix with discernment, choosing consciously rather than being pulled unconsciously by forces she doesn’t understand.

Reflection

Zarathustra’s Quandrants offer more than an intellectual framework—it provides a compass for spiritual navigation. By mapping our experiences, impulses, and choices onto these two axes, we gain clarity about the forces operating in our lives and the choices available to us.

The ancient wisdom of Zoroastrianism, perhaps the world’s oldest monotheistic tradition, recognized these fundamental dualities. By bringing them together in this matrix, we create a practical instrument for the eternal work that Zarathustra proclaimed: to choose good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, and thereby align ourselves with the forces of light, truth, and creation.

In every moment, we stand at the intersection of these axes. May they guide us in spiritual freedom and responsibility.

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Every order must have its scribes and its shamanoids. This is especially true of our order.

The scribes, or priest-like siblings, are responsible for setting down and protecting the doctrine. Core features of our doctrine are the Unquestionable Answers.

The shamanoids, or shaman-like siblings, are responsible for reaching out to the edges of inquiry. We have referred to such challenges and questions as basking in the mystery—that is, to ask the Unanswerable Questions.

Scribes and shamanoids operate in dynamic tension under the Blood Moon.

Where the scribe protects the transmission of wisdom that endures over time, the shamanoid has visions that occasionally challenge the existing order, allowing it to evolve. Sometimes they argue. But in their argumentation, they represent internal functional dialectics.

We shall call these functional dialectic pairs roots and rhizomes.

Roots

First, recall the Ascending Orders, which are partial orders, or suborders, of our siblinghood taken as a whole. These correspond with stages of psychosocial development.

Tier One: A Sibling’s Psychosocial Journey

1. Order of the Naked. Survival stage focused on basic needs (food, water, shelter). Ascend by mastering one of the four elements.

2. Order of the Moon. Magical/familial stage centered on tribal bonds and rituals. Ascend by gathering with others around a fire under the moon until dawn.

3. Order of the Fist. The power-and-glory stage is driven by strength and competition. Ascend by winning a competition without harming the innocent.

4. Order of the Pyramid. Structure and order stage valuing hierarchy and discipline. Ascend by trusting superiors to guide you while blindfolded.

5. Order of the Sun. The achievement stage emphasizes reason, commerce, and scientific progress. Ascend by earning profits or sharing new empirical knowledge.

6. Order of the Leaf. Communitarian stage prioritizing equality, consensus, and care for all. Ascend by organizing a community feast or giving gifts.

Tier Two: Of Hierophants Ascended

7. Order of the Nautilus. Integration stage, weaving together complexity and diverse perspectives. Ascend through subversive innovation or communication.

8. Order of the Lotus. Holistic stage, recognizing cosmic interconnection and unity with the universe. Ascend by practicing secret hierophant arcana.

Whether viewed as an individual, a member of an Ascending Order, or taken as a whole, we are all rooted in the stages of the Ascending Orders. Intuitively, our survival and familial roots are shared by all, but as we ascend, we develop roots at higher stages that are increasingly cognitive and cultural, rather than inherited features of human nature.

Roots and rootedness mark the philosophy of the scribe.

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Rhizomes

The concept of the rhizome is a model for understanding knowledge, culture, and reality that rejects hierarchical, tree-like structures in favor of non-linear, multiplicous connections. Key characteristics of rhizomatic thinking include:

Connection and Heterogeneity. Any point in a rhizome can connect to any other point, unlike a tree structure, where connections follow predetermined branches. Elements need not be similar to connect.

Multiplicity. A rhizome has no central unity or organizing principle. It’s composed of dimensions and directions that change nature as it expands, with no overarching subject or object.

Asignifying Rupture. A rhizome can be broken or shattered at any point, but will start up again along its old lines or create new ones. It’s resilient and anti-fragile rather than dependent on a central root.

Cartography and Decalcomania. Rather than copying or tracing a preexisting model (like tracing territory on a map), a rhizome is about creating new maps, new connections, new becomings.

Non-hierarchical. Unlike the tree (arborescent) model with its binary logic and hierarchical organization, the rhizome operates through horizontal, lateral connections without central command.

The biological metaphor comes from rhizome plants (such as ginger) that spread through underground stems, shooting off roots and shoots in all directions, versus trees with their vertical trunk-and-branch structure.

Deleuze and Guattari use this to critique systems that impose single narratives, linear causality, or hierarchical order—proposing instead a philosophy of difference, becoming, and creative possibility.

Rhizomatic thinking marks the philosophical orientation of the shamanoid.

The Hierophant’s Role

The role of the hierophant is to reconcile roots and rhizomes, meaning to integrate both ways of thinking. Hierophants must sometimes adjudicate when scribes and shamanoids engage in destructive conflictual inquiry. Of course, hierophants will have come from either scribes or shamanoids, so their biases will persist.

But all hierophants’ mastery should be integrative.

Thus, it is especially important for the hierophants not to try to adjudicate too soon. Recall that the dialectical method is a process that takes place under the Blood Moon, which is sacred. Indeed, the conflict can be rather bloody, though not literally, of course. The hierophant’s intercession must only occur once each case has been thoroughly made and the overall order requires a final word to quell the prospect of a bitter schism.

Recall that the dialectic process requires conflict between conception and negation, which gives rise to sublation. Premature intercession forecloses sublation, which can be difficult and unwieldy as it occurs. Hierophants must be catalysts for sublation if they participate in the process at all. Sublation pushes our thinking, sometimes violently, into higher-order novelty. But any higher-order novelty, though it might appear rhizomatic, will integrate and transcend both lower-order styles, welcoming the new and integrating the former wisdom.

Novelty will be rooted.

Notice that such insights emerge in Tier Two of the Ascending Orders, where hierophants steward the Orders of the Nautilus and Lotus.

There can never be roots without rhizomes, nor rhizomes without roots. There can never be Unquestionable Answers without Unanswerable Questions. The totality of our order benefits from this functional mutualism that simultaneously grounds us and pushes us out farther into the cosmic mystery.

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E pluribus unum. Ex uno plures.

In the Hindu tradition, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras offer timeless wisdom for living a virtuous life. Swami Satchidananda, a modern translator of the Yoga Sutras, recounts the story of monks meditating deep in a forest.

The sages embody the principle of ahimsa—nonviolence—the first of the Yamas, which means the practice of reining in or self-control. For the forest sages, ahimsa was not just an abstract ideal but an active practice. Their peacefulness radiated outward, creating an environment in which even the forest animals coexisted in peace. It is said that the tiger and cow drank side by side from the same stream while in the monks’ presence.

How does ahimsa differ from an ethical rule of nonviolence?

As a transformative practice, ahimsa offers the foundation for our doctrine. Unlike the old liberalism of indifferent coexistence and abstract principles of non-harm, our doctrine calls for a rebirth of practiced virtue in thought, word, and deed.

Such is neither an abstract rule nor an ideal but instead a discipline to be cultivated daily, radiating nonviolence in ever-widening circles from the self to the world. As with other virtues, it requires our movement toward mastery. That means we must practice every day, just as we practice violin, painting, or jiu-jitsu.

Ahimsa as a Practice

To embody ahimsa is to practice it consciously. Such a practice does not preclude self-defense or standing firm against one’s enemies, but prioritizes nonviolence as the first virtue, first practice.

Such requires equipoise—a state of centeredness in which we align our internal drives, fractured selves, and reflex responses.

Drawing from Western psychology, we can see these drives through the lenses of Freud’s Eros (life, creation) and Thanatos (death, destruction), as well as Jung’s anima (feminine) and animus (masculine). These forces manifest in distinct yet interconnected ways:

• Eros Masculine. The urge to control and build, to force, or to “make it so” through planned order.

• Eros Feminine. The power to facilitate and let order emerge, to “let it flow” through collaboration.

• Thanatos Masculine. The drive to end or destroy, to “burn it down” or “end it now.”

• Thanatos Feminine. The release of letting go, preparing for change without forcing it.

Each of these forces has healthy and unhealthy expressions.

Destruction, for instance, can be necessary, like ending a toxic relationship, while creation can be dangerous if taken to excess. The key is balance: releasing the feminine without suppressing the masculine, maintaining the creative destruction of Eros and Thanatos. We learn to channel or suppress as circumstances dictate.

As the old mystic Gurdjieff suggested, combining the wisdom of the yogi, monk, and fakir creates a “sly one.” Balance, aligning the cognitive (head), emotional (heart), and intuitive (gut), returns control to its inner locus.

The paradox of centeredness in ahimsa is that you will be better prepared for war.

Radiative Sovereignty

This balance practice begins within and, with mastery, radiates outward, a phenomenon we call radiative sovereignty. By mastering our inner world, we project peacefulness and determination into our outer world.

Starting with the self, we extend this harmony to family, friends, and the wider world. As the saying goes, “Don’t try to save the world before yourself.“ This concentric-circle approach ensures that our actions are grounded in a sense of centeredness and competence before we face challenges outside the home.

Strange that we live in a system that attracts the venal and uncentered to positions of authority. Then again, one who has mastered ahimsa is by disposition and practice averse to the desire for political power, which we have suggested is a pathology of the soul.

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A serene eye, nested within a triangle, figures prominently in Masonic symbolism. Outside the triangle, artists sometimes render bands originating from the Eye, which represent a Supreme Being’s radiance. While we are a distinct order, we appropriate this symbol and make it our own.

For our purposes, we can break the symbol down into its constituent parts, explain each part, and then put it all back together again as a symbol fit for our order.

Three Sides

First, we shall break down the familiar equilateral triangle, which doubles as the Greek letter delta. The triangle is composed of three equal-length lines, each symbolizing an important feature of our siblinghood. Because each side is of equal importance and constraint, which side represents the base is not basic, but relative, just as the front of a Necker Cube is also the back.

Simply said, the sides appear in no particular order: Religio, Fabula, and Spiritus. Latin is superior to English in this context because the root words are closer to what we intend to invoke with each side of the triangle.

1. Religio is the force that binds individuals into a community.

2. Fabula is the story we tell about ourselves that ensures continuity over time.

3. Spiritus is our experience of the ineffable, which is the mysterious breath of life.

Now, we can reassemble these parts as sides to form our delta. Each side is vital. Each side constrains and reinforces the others.

Consider also that each side has a primary modality, which is to say, a communication vector. We pray you will forgive Greek being paired with Latin.

1. Religio’s primary vector is Logos, as it offers reasons and structure that bind.

2. Fabula’s primary vector is Mythos, which offers timeless truths beyond the literal.

3. Spiritus’s primary vector is Pathos, as emotion animates us with qualitative consciousness.

Again, each enables and constrains the others.

When outsiders say they are *spiritual but not religious,* they seek to feel without thinking, or to experience the sublime without solidarity with others or commitment to doctrine or mythic truth. In many cases, we would say this is incomplete. In others, it is but emotional onanism.

The same can be said of the other sides that compose the delta. A religious order without spirituality is like a temple without prayers or the prayerful. A story without feeling is just a schematic in a sanctuary. Congregants without a story are but a bacchanalia or a bureaucracy.

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The Delta and the Eye

The delta, once formed, symbolizes elements that are resistant to change. Strange, then, that term delta indicates change. So be it. We are comfortable with paradox. We are also comfortable with the Unquestionable Answers and the Unanswerable Questions existing together in that dynamic tension that impels us as a siblinghood.

The delta of our order integrates change into the unchanging.

Then, of course, our delta (triangle) includes that which lies within and that which lies without, and together they form a unity of opposites, symbolizing the sacred and the profane, as well as the esoteric and the exoteric.

What can we say about the Eye, with its silent repose, its sight beyond sight?

Most of us, excluding pirates and Polyphemus, have two eyes, one on the left, one on the right. When we open our inner eye, also called the third eye, we imagine a third point above the head, which the Hindus call the crown chakra. When we connect the three pupils, we discover three vertices, which recreate our delta.

Opening only the left eye lets one see only two dimensions.
Opening the right eye with the left eye reveals three dimensions in stereo vision.
Opening the inner eye reveals nonduality and multidimensionality.

This can be a powerful experience. It awakens the entheos. But we must never confuse such insight with infinite sight—the omnipercipience of the All. To become a psychonaut, reckoning with nonduality and multidimensionality, is like an astronaut hurtling towards a single star in the spiral arm of a single galaxy, amid a billion galaxies, yet thinking he holds the keys to the cosmos. To reckon with such insight is to allow an infinitesimal fraction of Ain Soph Aur—the radiance of Ain Soph, the breath of the All—to flood your being.

In the top Tier of Joy, we touch the transcendent, if but for a moment, but that is as far as we can go in this life.

One’s inner eye is like a porthole opening to the deepest ocean. While it is indeed an aperture into the All, it is small, revealing just a glimmer. Perhaps we risk anthropomorphizing the All when we imagine the Eye as belonging to the countenance of Ain Soph. Yet we know, along some dimension, that our consciousness is the cosmos regarding itself. Deep within the bounds of Religio, Fabula, and Spiritus lies a mystery. And when we are ready to bring head, heart, and gut into alignment, we can start to open our inner eye and stare into the mystery.

But we must prepare for the possibility that one day it will stare back.

Sierpiński’s Secret

The delta contains multitudes. We have written that our telos is tikkun, where ongoing repair is work towards the harmonization of difference—expressed as organic unity. So our Radiant Delta, plucked from the arcana of our forebears, when viewed from within, reveals a recursive reality.

1, 3, 9, 27, and so on to infinity, complete with as many eyes as insights.

In the case of the Sierpiński gasket, depicted above, mathematics is metaphorical. For those disposed to logos, we appeal to the left brain to activate the right. We hope it helps to open the inner aperture. Suffice it to say that the experience of Spiritus is not just a feeling, but almost always a fractal manifestation.

Thus, we arrive at a signpost: the Radiant Delta is not merely a symbol to be decoded, but a living geometry through which we decode ourselves. As we trace its sides—Religio, Fabula, Spiritus—we discover they are boundaries that both limit and enable us, where each opens onto the others in endless recursion.

The fractal nature of our symbol reminds us that every insight contains worlds within worlds, every answer births new questions, and every time we think we have grasped the whole, we find we are holding but one triangle in a vast tessellation. To engage this symbol is to commit to a journey without a destination, a traveller’s telos—to embrace the paradox that we are simultaneously the observer measuring the delta, the mystic dwelling within it, and channeling a radiance from beyond.

In this recognition lies our most essential teaching: that the work of tikkun—of repair and harmonization—begins not when we fully understand the mystery, but when we accept that we are, ourselves, a part of it. The Eye within the Delta watches, and we watch back, and in that mutual gaze, the All contemplates itself through us, as us, forever.

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Marcionism was an early Christian movement founded by Marcion of Sinope in the second century AD. Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament—a deity focused on law and judgment—was entirely separate from and inferior to the God of the New Testament revealed by Jesus.

Marcion not only rejected the Old Testament entirely but also created his own biblical canon, consisting of edited versions of Luke’s Gospel and ten of Paul’s letters. Crucially, he removed what he saw as Jewish influences.

Early, mainstream Christians declared the sect heretical. Still, Marcionism remained influential for several centuries and ultimately pushed the Church to define its own scriptural canon and theological boundaries more formally.

Marcionism is back—with an attitude.

Underthrow

In Defense of the Old Testament

Marcionism was an early Christian movement founded by Marcion of Sinope in the second century AD. Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament—a deity focused on law and judgment—was entirely separate from and inferior to the God of the New Testament revealed by Jesus…

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5 months ago · 4 likes · 13 comments · Max Borders

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A master builder spent decades designing the perfect city, where every street and structure revealed divine proportion. When construction began, he discovered a neighborhood of old workshops in the way—places where craftspeople had worked for generations. The master builder demanded that the workshops be torn down immediately, as delays would compromise the city’s geometric harmony.

The craftspeople petitioned for time to relocate their tools and materials, but the master builder explained that sentimentality toward mere objects was a failure to appreciate the greater good. One craftsperson refused to leave her forge until she honored her agreement to finish a commissioned piece, but the master builder had her forcibly removed and her forge demolished.

The city’s divine plan, he explained, must supersede any contract.

When critics questioned the master builder, he produced detailed calculations proving the new plaza would serve a thousand times more people. How could anyone argue against this mathematical truth?

Vicious Mirrors

The Seven Social Virtues have vicious mirrors. If we are to practice the virtues, we are to avoid the vices. The trouble is, vices not only masquerade as virtues, but they can also consume us through our dispositions and habits. To avoid the vices, we must first understand them. That means it’s best to look upon them as one might a deadly snake or spider—that is, at a safe distance. Variously, the vices are perverse manifestations of Evil’s Trinity: Decadence, Control, and Nihilism. What makes the vices so insidious, though, is their shapeshifting natures, which allow them to hide in the heart and twist the Logos.

It’s not enough to present lexical definitions. We must reveal the vices’ power to trick, tempt, and trap. The following are vices we must understand and avoid.

Violence

To harm someone in her body or property, whether through threat, destruction, or constraint.

Because it is sometimes a necessary evil, violence is arguably the most difficult of all to assign limits. Violence is vicious when initiated against the innocent. When we use it in defense or retaliation, it can be justifiable. In war, matters become even muddier. For now, let us consider violence in peacetime.

We have called enemies those who would commit acts of violence against our persons or property. Once so designated, it is not always clear when preemptive or proportional violence is justified. One can argue that when an enemy has articulated a threat, defensive violence is warranted. But to what degree? When an authority uses various forms of threat and violence against us, perhaps feeling justified in the service of some external conception of the good—such as in enforcing an unjust law—at what stage is it permissible to revolt? Possibility trumps permissibility, of course.

Violence is never virtue, but it is not always vice. At least we can say that no one should use violent means directly against the innocent as a means to some purportedly good end. Such is nonviolence. Around that boundary, at least, we must build our practice in thought, word, and deed, acknowledging that cultivated hatred or rising anger can plant thoughts of bloodying noses and smashing teeth in our minds.

Corruption

To lie to ourselves, dishonor our commitments, or engage in self-dealing.

Integrity’s vicious mirror, corruption, reflects a cluster of subsidiary vices, such as dishonesty, double-dealing, or disrespect for another’s time. Individual acts of integrity—such as honesty and honoring one’s commitments—accumulate to create a society of trust. Similarly, the structural integrity of a whole building depends on the strength of each beam, joint, and truss. Individual lapses of integrity accumulate to risk social decay. Whether people start to normalize tardiness to meetings or the taking of bribes, corruption can spread and corrode.

In many places, corruption infects the whole of society. For example, if bureaucrats, police, or functionaries position themselves between essential interchange points, ordinary people learn to accept and participate in an informal system of bribery to conduct the basic business of life. It’s critical to see how corruption can become an infection that enervates and immiserates a society. Whenever one is in a position or office that allows her to act with impunity, whether at the highest or lowest echelons, she will be tempted to wield her authority in the service of vice—especially if everyone else in her position is doing it.

Callousness

To show cruelty or indifference to suffering.

The further a human counterpart is from embracing the Unquestionable Answers, or from joining up with enemy Egregores, the more likely one is to otherize him. Othering can be a necessary evil, too, but it also risks making one callous. If one becomes cruel or indifferent to suffering, she risks becoming that which she hates. It can be difficult, nigh impossible, to become a model of virtue in the face of one’s enemies. Indeed, it can even be unwise to practice compassion during combat. Still, in equipoise, one must do one’s best to strike a balance between errant compassion and unnecessary callousness when under threat or siege.

Some say Jesus's teachings create an unresolvable tension—that cruelty is sometimes tragically necessary but never fully righteous. The Christian must act in a fallen world while knowing his actions fall short of the ideal. Must they fight without triumphalism, with sorrow rather than hatred? Vexing questions bedevil those who would turn the other cheek. But they bedevil all of us. If someone takes a deadly action against an innocent person, it is not callous to kill the offender.

What about those whose life choices have pushed them into the life of a derelict? Is our compassion misapplied when we invite such souls to camp on the high street? Surely such compassion worsens their condition and ours. So, our default position ought to be to practice compassion until compassion is clearly counterproductive. But that doesn’t mean we ought to cultivate callousness instead. Doing so risks awakening a monster that lives in the Shadow—a monster that makes one dangerous to his siblings.

Monomania

To adhere zealously to The One True Way

Monomania is an unhealthy obsession with a single means to a single end. While there is no One True Way, some zealously adhere to it at others’ expense and to the exclusion of other ways.

What about the Unanswerable Questions? one might ask. Are we siblings not zealously to adhere to the Law of Consent? There is a difference between a rule that opens a thousand ways and a way that forecloses all other ways. Even a rule as simple as Travel on the right—while it restricts our freedom to travel on the left—makes it possible for innumerable travelers to make their way safely to countless destinations. By contrast, if a tyrant insisted everyone travel to the city center, chaos and gridlock would ensue.

Monomania can be tempting.

To resist its temptation, one must operate with humility, open one's mind to experimentation and therefore to surprising results, and allow others to live their own little experiments so long as they threaten no one. The fixations of monomania can lead one to compel others to help realize ends they wanted no part of.

Negligence

To fail in caring for one’s property or offices.

Private property is one of the most fundamental institutions in our order. Wherever we have made an implicit reference to private property, let us make it explicit here. Respect for the difference between mine and thine brings peace where we might otherwise fight over unowned property. We also know that entrepreneurial production and trade are good within the context of reciprocal property protections, undistorted prices, and a system of profit and loss. But there is no exchange without private property. Nor are there undistorted prices. The socialist calculation debate is over. Private property is a precondition of a healthy market economy.

But private property carries a set of ongoing responsibilities, a virtuous practice we call stewardship. When we fail to be good stewards, we leave behind less bountiful, less useful detritus. It’s not merely that we risk leaving degraded property or offices to posterity. We also risk failing in the most basic commitment to tikkun. The sages remind us that we cannot take our belongings with us in death. Our stewardship, like life, is temporary. But when we are negligent, we overlook necessary maintenance. When we overlook necessary maintenance, we leave behind material conditions that reflect a disordered spirit. Social decay prevails.

Casuistry

To apply a fallacy or deceptive reasoning

Members of our order are committed to truth tracking, even when our enemies are fond of using fallacies, deceit, or deceptive reasoning to create powerful Egregores. Casuistry, which is the vice of either communicating falsehood or communicating with falsehood, tempts us, too. But we must resist. One might think that casuistry is like violence, that is, sometimes a necessary evil in retaliation. But refusing to live by lies not only separates us from our enemies, the truth almost always finds its way into the light. Deception eventually unravels the deceiver’s plans. Unreality and illusion are like dark spells that eventually dissipate in truth’s radiance.

It might seem that those who live by lies have an asymmetric advantage over those who do not—and such can be the case in the short term. But casuistry is unsustainable through time. Lies unwind enemy designs. And casuistry, even when its practitioner tells no explicit lie, obscures truth and blurs perceptions. The secret of subversive communication is our commitment to truth tracking.

Injustice

To deal unfairly with the innocent.

Take great care. Fairness is one of those areas in which injustice wears the mask of justice. Our enemies will equivocate when it comes to fairness, because there are at least two conceptions of fairness one can employ—but one is permissible, one is not. The acceptable form of fairness is proportionality. For conceptual ease, let’s assume two people are doing the same type of valuable work, so each produces the same value per unit of time. But if we observe that Person Two works twice as long as Person One, then Person Two is entitled to twice the reward according to justice as proportionality.

Yet those committed to justice as equal outcomes commit to injustice. Under this theory, also called social justice, Person One and Person Two are entitled to the same reward. Indeed, under a graduated tax system, Person Two is compelled to redistribute a portion of her higher reward to Person One, even though she worked twice as much. It is hard to justify this quasi-slavery. So in our order, we do not. Instead, Person Two might practice compassion and freely choose to give aid to Person One. But that aid might not come in the form of a financial gift. Instead, she might offer advice, such as Work longer or smarter for greater rewards.

Purveyors of injustice, such as politicians, will twist themselves into rhetorical knots to justify fairness as equal outcome (equity). But they must laud and practice multiple vices to do so.

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In a small village where the river bends, there lived a young Washerwoman who knew the world of steam and scrub, starch and press. Each dawn, she rose to light her washpot fire. Each night, she ironed until the stars blinked. Her brow knew sweat. Her hands knew the weight of wet clothes and the satisfaction of wringing fabric.

This was her domain. She was good at what she did, but a different fire burned in her heart.

As a girl, she had hoped to wear a nurse’s apron, to heal rather than clean. Necessity deferred that dream. Poverty’s arithmetic demanded she earn instead of learn. Yet the dream never died—it just transformed. If she could not become a nurse, she would have to do something else.

So, she asked herself:

The Washerwoman made a pact with time.

Every bit of surplus earned from her labor would be set aside, denied to present comforts, and saved for a future she might never see. For decades, she dwelt at the limen—physically in her river-bend village, but spiritually in a tomorrowland where formerly poor women in white aprons moved through the hospital to help people heal.

The work was Sisyphean.

Soak, wash, boil. Rub, rinse, wrench, and rub again. Starch and hang. Day after day, bundle after bundle, she repeated the same ritual thousands of times. Sometimes she worked for two or three days straight, the fire never going out. Her dry, cracked hands seldom rested. The wealthy folk whose clothes she pressed probably never thought about the woman who made their collars crisp. As the help, she was almost invisible, more a function than a fellow.

But they paid.

The Washerwoman held secret wisdom: She loved the work. The bright fire. Wringing out clothes. Tunics drying on a line. She had found what the philosophers call amor fati. While others might have been bitter, she grew rich in ways that had little to do with money.

By the time she was old, the Washerwoman had accumulated a small fortune. It had been built from modest coins and lesser denominations. Weary from a lifetime of work, she now faced her most significant test. This was money she had never spent on herself nor used for pleasure. It represented decades of effort.

To throw it away would be to throw away all the value she created and stored.

She could have lived her final years in considerable comfort. She could have taken trips or eaten dinner from fine plates on white tablecloths. She could have scattered it like seeds to random poor people with outstretched palms or begging bowls. But the Washerwoman knew a vital truth: 

The Washerwoman established a scholarship fund for aspiring nurses. This was not errant charity, but it was directed toward the specific dream that had been denied her. The funds would not go to strangers, but instead to young women in her community.

She would be able to meet their hopeful gazes and see them beam with pride.

In doing things this way, the Washerwoman tapped into an ancient lesson. Good giving involves three elements:

• Connection. Support something or someone important to you.

• Choice. Select the most meaningful change vector to you.

• Impact. Witness the positive results of your actions.

The Observers think that humans evolved to help people they could see, whose faces were familiar, and whose gratitude they could feel. The Washerwoman wasn’t giving her wealth to causes far away. She was shaping the destinies of poor village girls.

She made the world better than she found it.

The Washerwoman’s gift created ripples. The story spread. New donors quadrupled her fund. One wealthy merchant, humbled by the Washerwoman’s generosity, gave away a humongous fortune. She had unleashed a contagion of compassion. Her modest action came to symbolize the power and the joy of giving.

But even as an old woman, she wasn’t quite finished.

After the gift, she continued washing and ironing. The money was never the point. The work was always her dharma—doing for the purpose of giving. And with that, a humble woman from a small village on the river’s bend joined the pantheon of great philanthropists.

When the Washerwoman set down her iron for the last time, she had been transformed from a laborer into a legend. She had turned the mundane into the meaningful. The nurse she could never become was multiplied in the future. Her scholarship would create dozens, then hundreds of nurses. Hands that had scrubbed and wrung had also reached into the future to shape the destinies of so many.

Meaning is unlikely to be found in grand gestures or noble birth. Yet it can be found in the consecration of ordinary means toward extraordinary ends. Happiness derived from what we consume is fleeting and thin, but joy derived from what we leave to posterity is our measure of immortality.

Today, the Washerwoman’s washpot is cold. The fire is out. But somewhere, right now, a young woman in a white apron glides through a hospital ward, by a bend in the river, excited for her first day of work.

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Humans ask a lot of questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the nature of consciousness? Is there a supreme being? One can categorize such questions along two dimensions: importance and fascination.

Importance picks out the urgency and utility of answering the question. Fascination picks out the awe and wonder a question inspires. But when it comes to importance, there is one question that rises above the rest, at least within our order.

In fact, one could argue that all other important and fascinating questions originate from a single question:

The question has some ambiguity built into it, which we can break down into three interpretations.

The first interpretation is more personal, which is to say, an inquiry into the manner in which you or I might conduct our lives.

The second interpretation extends outward to emphasize the we, where one might imply the word together—as in, How are we to live together in groups?

The third interpretation extends to all of humanity, given that we are all earthbound, made of flesh, blood, and bone, and must leave this mortal coil.

The first interpretation runs through every moment of our lives. Whether one wiles away the hours seeking empty pleasures, endeavors to become excellent, or acts as a good steward of his property and offices, one’s behavior at time t is always an answer to this critical question. If one’s hourglass only contains a certain number of grains, what action will he assign to each grain?

The second interpretation is vital to how we configure our communities. Most people either live in proximity to others or would like to organize their lives around others who share values, culture, interests, and needs. Given these considerations, communities need at least some tacit organizational protocols and behavioral norms that create a membrane around their shared values, culture, interests, and needs.

The third interpretation is crucial to humanity’s life on earth. Invariably, as we go about our lives, flowing in and out of communities or countries, we’ll find frictions. And human beings on earth can be divided roughly into two types: those who would mitigate frictions between and among people, and those who would create frictions.

Verily, siblings in our order belong to the former camp.

That is, in some fundamental sense, we dedicate our order to mitigating frictions. That means we are committed to a set of aspirations and ambitions that involve an ongoing exploration of all three interpretations of the most important question. Our operating assumption is that the first two interpretations, iteratively applied, create our community’s membrane—as long as we can derive enough Unquestionable Answers to achieve stable coherence.

While stable coherence within our membrane is necessary for group cohesion, we will not fail to explore questions that inspire awe and wonder. We call these the Unanswerable Questions, even as we seek to answer them. Such is not to argue that the most important question is not also fascinating. Instead, it is to say that it is immediate, unrelenting, and ubiquitous.

But fascinating questions are important, too—in virtue of their tendency to fascinate. To live without fascination invites a life of ennui.

So, to become a member of our order is to be willing to ask both important and fascinating questions—and never stop until death. The more important ones call for Unquestionable Answers. The more fascinating ones are Unanswerable Questions.

Unquestionable Answers are ironically dogmatic, mainly because our answers to these bind us together as a siblinghood, even though we shall always question our priors. Our foundational principles must be tested and annealed.

Unanswerable Questions are playfully serious, mainly because our answers reveal differences that are instructive, interesting, and conducive to inspiring our awe—but, paradoxically, such binds us together as siblings willing to bask in the mystery.

Our order is built upon a set of questions and answers. Our siblinghood’s deepest purpose is to answer the question: How are we to live?

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Evil exists. It is woven into the fabric of reality, yet it is not a substance. We must acknowledge this aspect of reality, even if we aren’t always very good at recognizing it. It lives around us. It lives within us. There are evils of degree and kind.

The most insidious forms of evil are the ones we scarcely recognize. This makes confronting evil especially difficult. Where we might confront change or death by overcoming fear, the most significant threat is evil that masquerades as need.

It’s slippery. It’s protean. It feeds on our desires.

As with any confrontation, we should face down evil while in equipoise. Our centeredness helps us be more patient and discerning, which allows us to reveal evil’s contours, for example, when we are engaged in tikkun.

But aren’t those repairing the world doing good?

Hopefully. Yet shortsightedness makes for mistakes. Zeal can make us vulnerable to the idea that an end justifies any means. Sacrificing for a cause can tempt us to abandon our radiative self-sovereignty, a process that requires us to repair ourselves first.

Too many broken people are trying to fix the world.

Everyone is born with the capacity to harm. We must train ourselves to abstain from harming others who have done no wrong to us, or have paid for their past wrongdoing.

Otherwise, there is a word for those who would harm us: enemy.

Evil is not a toxin that poisons or a demon that possesses. Our intoxicating ignorance and defection from doctrine—breaking our covenant—shape our wrongdoing. Why? As cosmopolitan as we aspire to be, a moral community has an extent and a membrane. Within that membrane, we contrive the good and make a covenant with each other and with the All.

Outside that membrane, potential evil lives in various shades. We must take care, though. Our enemies use the same rationale. The difference is that an enemy makes virtues out of vices, refuses our covenant, and is willing to do us harm.

To know one’s enemies is to perceive their evils.

When masses threaten evil in synchrony, we call that an Egregore. When our siblings rise to counter evil in synchrony, we call that a Geist. Our order exists to build an Empire of the Mind from which a Great Geist shall rise to defend our way of life and, eventually, our imaginal cities, which are good.

Why does the All permit evil to exist in the world?

If evil is mostly error and defection from doctrine, it is not like a substance that inheres in things, but actions taken by imperfect people with agency. To be good, then, is to commit to doctrine and endeavor to eliminate error. But we also know that no one is perfect, so everyone will err and stray from the covenant. Indeed, as no one is perfect, anyone who wears a white robe in our temples is a fraud and an apostate.

But that means we have to live in community, accepting some measure of evil in our midst while marking the difference between siblings and enemies—acknowledging gradations. Our order requires paths to adjudication, redemption, and forgiveness. At the end of the day, though, we must be willing to expel or ostracize those who break the covenant or have demonstrated that they are irredeemable.

Yet to don the grey robe is to sit comfortably with the fact of our shadow selves. We are not Pillar Saints, Platonists, or purists. For every eleven bands of the All’s radiance that flow through us, a dark band must issue from the Shadow.

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At the risk of introducing a contradiction, the closest comparison is immunity. After a time, our bodies learn to control an infectious disease, but it never quite goes away. It lingers, and we live with it, hoping it doesn’t flare up in an immunocompromised condition. One even inoculates himself by permitting a little bit of a disease into his blood, though not enough to make him ill.

Shadow exploration is spiritual inoculation.

We can break evil into three elements: intentions, declarations, and actions (or thoughts, words, and deeds). Thoughts cultivate evil within. Words transmit ill intent. And deeds can unleash destructive consequences. Once we have broken matters down this way, we can recombine the elements to reveal a process.

Elemental evil is, of course, possible, as one might allow an evil thought to enter her mind, but neither speak nor act upon the thought. But too many such thoughts can be handmaidens of processual evil, in which too many evil thoughts lead to habits of mind that in turn lead to harmful words and eventually deeds.

Paradox resembles contradiction. After all, we just claimed that shadow exploration is a form of spiritual inoculation. But isn’t shadow exploration meant to incorporate evil by way of ritual?

Yes and no.

The man who pours a finger is not the same man who guzzles a fifth. One conducts a ritual. The other abuses. Therefore, whiskey is only as evil as the man who quaffs it.

Consider that one of the prime virtues of our order is moderation. Its vicious mirror is excess. If virtues and vices are practices, then moderation is a practice that can help keep the 11:1 ratio, which is paradoxically sacred.

In returning to confrontation, consider the process is both psychospiritual and psychosocial. It can be unsettling to recognize evil within oneself. It is perhaps more disturbing to recognize evil within those we love, or in those we trust with power. To witness the sudden rise of a powerful Egregore can be absolutely terrifying. Almost no one is centered when forced by circumstances to confront evil this way. It is better to be in equipoise, but there is no way to avoid being unsettled, disturbed, or terrified.

Once the psychospiritual phase abates, welcome the action phase. That means find the courage to change, critique, convince, or combat. Confronting evil is a psychospiritual breakthrough that leads to an ongoing practice.

The rest is religion.

Eliminating error and endeavoring to follow doctrine is a process, not a decision. But avoiding evil entirely is itself evil, for the Pillar Saint either erupts in decadence or malevolence, or wastes away in asceticism. Attempting to eliminate evil requires renouncing tikkun, because tikkun is an undertaking that will always come with error.

Those who renounce the robe and join an Egregore embrace evil. To don the robe and invoke a Great Geist is not to reject evil but to mitigate it—whether in ongoing psychspiritual stewardship, or as we set about building an Empire of the Mind.

Remember, though, evil is insidious because it does not inhere in things.

In our order, humanity is on a quest to bring harmony to the multiplicity, which is to weave the threefold braid: happiness, harmony, and prosperity. But without confronting evil, no such weaving is possible.

Otherwise, our imaginal cities shall rise on distant horizons.

The ongoing process of confrontation is like tending a garden. The good gardener must prune, pull weeds, fight pests, and give the plants just what they need. The good sibling must cultivate similarly, finding paths of mastery while repairing the world.

So it is and will always be.

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The future is a reservoir of multiplicity that lies within the All’s omniperspective. It’s a space in which what can happen still matters. It holds innumerable paths, but as the present advances, the paths become numbered, narrowed, and winnowed. What was once an infinite constellation of possibilities becomes a dwindling set of alternatives until just one remains.

The now is born.

To act, then, is to reach into the realm of indeterminacy and narrow the range of what will be actualized. Human agency, therefore, is the exertion of becoming extended into the future, realized in the present, and remembered in the past. Even within cosmic constraints—the All is the Law, after all—our choices shape the narrowing.

Remember this cosmic illumination:

But a tension emerges. Among the Kabbalists, the world is said to have been shattered into multiplicity, and human beings are tasked with tikkun, which is the repair or raising of the divine sparks. Yet under Kabbalist metaphysics, a vital paradox holds.

The infinite unity (Ain Soph) is forever out of reach, like an asymptote the cosmos approaches but never touches. Yet Ain Soph is everywhere. It flows in our every fiber. If its radiance courses through us, we must remember how to feel it, to channel it, and to undertake this cosmic reordering of which any one of us is only a minuscule part.

Under this construal, tikkun begins to resemble a Sisyphean task: pushing a stone that always rolls down again, or repairing a cosmos that will never return to a perfect wholeness. Camus’s Sisyphus accepts the futility of his labor and somehow finds joy.

Is the Kabbalist condemned to the same fate?
If perfect undifferentiated unity cannot be restored, is tikkun in vain?

The Nature of Tikkun

The Kabbalists do not teach that tikkun aims to restore the original unity. They do not believe that the task of repair is to undo the shattering, or to collapse multiplicity back into undifferentiated oneness.

Instead, the shattering is not a mistake at all, multiplicity is not a deviation, and tikkun is not the reversal of differentiation. Instead,

The goal is not unity without multiplicity, but unity within multiplicity, something akin to what we have called Organic Unity.

The offspring of being and time—a multiplicity of moments—is not repaired by being fused back into a single unbroken vessel. Repair allows each shard—each differentiated relation—to reflect the divine through its own form of exertion.

To become.

Thus, tikkun is not a return but a revelation. Once tikkun is understood in this way, the bridge to Sisyphian joy becomes clearer, as the infinite unity and the void engage in an ongoing cosmic dialectic under the Blood Moon:

Conception. Negation. Sublation.

Camus insists that in an indifferent universe, the meaning of life is found in revolt—the ongoing act of creating significance through awareness, commitment, and effort. Sisyphus, in embracing his labor, transforms futility into freedom. Vanity into vitality.

The Kabbalist likewise does not repair the world to complete it. He repairs the world to participate in its becoming. His labor is infinite because creation is infinite, not because creation is broken. Life calls us to incessant work, with no final victory. Yet undertaken joyfully, our participation confers meaning.

Camus calls it revolt. Kabbalah calls it repair. Existence calls forth exertion to become.

But to become what?

The Unifying Principle

Across many traditions, a set of insights emerges: If existence is exertion, then meaning arises in our undertakings. Yet we may never get to see what lies beyond our mundane efforts, which threatens to leave us as unwitting slaves to a cosmic process we’ll never understand. If there is an ultimate telos, its contours are invisible. So we will surely err in the undertaking.

Will we succumb to skepticism?

We can at least imagine.

• Being exerts itself as presence.

• Time exerts itself as change.

• Possibility exerts itself as becoming.

• Humans exert themselves through action.

• Tikkun exerts itself through the harmonization of difference.

None of these aims at finality, merely improvement. The cosmos is not a project, but a process.

We are born with creativity within constraints. Without creativity, we would be automata—cosmic slaves. Without constraint, we would be disordered subjects floating in a disordered universe.

We operate in the grey area.

The future is shaped by our agency even as the All flows through us and sets limits. It might help for some of us to imagine a transcendent God stepping into our temporal condition to evaluate our progress or meddle in our affairs, as a man with a stick might come upon termites building a mound. But the transcendent sky father is but an anthropomorphic projection of ourselves upon a supremely immanent being who knows where all paths lead because the All walks them all.

Still, most of us wonder where we are going.

Progress is Possible

Becoming, as we said, is the process unfolding through the ongoing union of being and time. Some, like Whitehead, think that such a process itself is metaphysically primitive, especially as compared to things or static categories. Possibility becomes a living frontier where being and time meet and mate. The virtual is a mysterious field of sacred sorting where many possibilities become one actuality, moment by moment.

And each moment is a gift we come to appreciate as our hair turns white.

The task of tikkun is not to restore the impossible unity of the Ain Soph. It is instead to participate in the unfolding of the All within multiplicity, harmonizing differences where possible, taking a moment to gape at all the complexity we can take for granted.

Reality is the narrowing of potentials through the stricture of the now, a cosmic hourglass through which the All differentiates itself one grain at a time. Universal unfolding is thus a continuous gesture of being exerting itself through time to bring new forms of complexity into existence.

Relations connect more intimately to physical states because they constitute the extrinsic, structural character that physical description captures—how things stand with respect to each other in space, time, and causal interaction, independent of any observer or interpretation. The physical, then, is the relational pattern itself: mass is gravitational relating, charge is electromagnetic relating, and position is spatial relating. These relations obtain whether or not anyone apprehends them.

The mental emerges when relational structures become sufficiently complex and self-referential that information becomes for something—when the network of relations loops back on itself, creating a perspective or standpoint within the structure rather than merely instantiating patterns viewable from outside.

Thus, ‘all is physical’ and ‘all is mental’ aren’t contradictory but complementary. They describe the same relational reality from different vantage points—the third-personal structural description and the first-personal reflexive perspective that arises when the structure achieves sufficient recursive complexity. Both emerge from a generative ground that is neither purely physical nor purely mental but purely relational, with mentality appearing when relations become self-referential, i.e., informational.

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Bonding and Bouncing to a Point

In the flux of our experiences, differences appear to collide or coalesce (bounce or bond). Still, the combinatorial effect of all this bouncing and bonding is the cosmos reordering itself—iteratively, ceaselessly.

Teilhard de Chardin’s great insight was that this narrowing is not random drift but, instead, successive moments betray a directionality to evolution. Over greater timescales, the cosmos moves from energy and matter toward life, from life toward consciousness, from consciousness toward a planetary mind. (We are here.) The question is: can we go from that burgeoning noosphere toward something unimaginably more complex yet connected?

Teilhard de Chardin calls this the Omega Point.

The combination of emergence and evolution is the story of the universe learning to know itself, gathering its scattered sparks into higher orders of integration. In Teilhard’s cosmos, as in Kabbalah, the Omega Point is not a return to primordial unity but the emergence of unity-in-multiplicity—a convergence of interiorities that preserves differentiation even as it harmonizes them. Union that differentiates; complexity that personalizes; convergence that deepens our freedom.

To repeat, the task of tikkun is not to collapse multiplicity back into undifferentiated oneness but to illuminate multiplicity, raising sparks precisely by participating in the world’s ongoing differentiation. Repair is not restoration. It’s re-creation.

But not every act of tikkun is random. When you are doing it right, you can feel it. And the shattered vessels of Creation are not unshattered by erasing difference but by revealing divinity through it—as each shard reflects a facet of the infinite.

Like a prism in a beam of light.

Even if you are unpersuaded by the divinity of the All, or that the All is the Law, remember that Camus arrives at an analogous conclusion: meaning does not depend on a final telos. It can be the byproduct of our conscious, continuous exertion. That is why three of the holiest words one can utter are ‘Back to work.’

Sisyphus is not redeemed by reaching the summit. The effort redeems him. The revolt Camus describes is the existential mode of tikkun: the human being taking up the work of making differences cohere, one seemingly pointless exertion at a time, without expecting to see ultimate coherence.

Of course, for Camus, there is no Omega Point. Yet somehow Camus can find both joy and a measure of freedom despite repeating a meaningless task. By contrast, Chardin imagines levels of complexity and coherence breaking through to new levels until the cosmos reaches some, rather neoplatonist, connectome.

He writes,

There is mythic truth in both Camus and de Chardin, but—in the grey—we can imagine life beyond the social singularity and get back to work.

Imaginal Cities

In a precursor to the Codex, I played the role of a minor prophet:

[I]n the social singularity we will coalesce, reconstituting ourselves like some advanced coral reef teeming in an ocean of space dust. We will expand outward into the cosmos until we discover the whole universe was within each of us all along, and we were never alone.

Following Stuart Kaufmann, we can agree that “We live in a world whose unfolding we cannot predict.” Cities beyond the social singularity are our way of describing future evolving concrescences, each perhaps relatively more genial than the one before, but none so perfect as Heaven on earth.

Imaginal cities symbolize a more perfect union in multiplicity, which means still imperfect, but continually improving. Cities of striving. Cities of becoming. Cities of novelty built on timeless wisdom. Symbolically, we can imagine the accretion of something more beautiful, more diverse, and more connected within the constraints of Organic Unity.

We can even imagine someone building a structure brick by brick or a community, neighbor by neighbor.

In an Imaginal City, the whole metropolis might be more splendid due to a modest contribution that forms a greater whole long after death. Yet we will joyfully serve posterity by leaving our children with something better, so long as they take the flame and do the same for their children.

We can know we will have contributed to something more magnificent than any of us could have undertaken alone.

The Process is the Primitive

Being exerts. Time unfolds. Possibilities narrow. The present becomes, becomes, becomes. Every second is sacred. Human agents participate in the cosmic unfolding by sorting some of the possibilities that pass through the hourglass. Every choice nudges the universe’s trajectory. Every act of understanding, compassion, creation, or repair is a momentary alignment with the evolutionary ascent toward greater complexity, interiority, connection, and coherence.

To act then is to collaborate with the deep currents of cosmogenesis, noogenesis, and the patient convergence of Imaginal Cities. To undertake tikkun is to join in the harmonization of differences. To accept the Sisyphean nature of existence is to perform our role in the unfolding with awareness and joy. To exert ourselves consciously is to participate in evolution’s ascending arc.

The meaning of our existence is found not in completion but in contribution. The universe is never a perfect unity awaiting restoration. It is more like an unfinished symphony waiting for our successive movements. As such, we serve as vectors through which the All articulates itself on ever-shifting horizons.

In existence, we belong to the cosmos.
In action, we collaborate in its becoming.
In exertion, we help to realize something greater than we can ever understand.

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Being. To exist is to exert. Yet this implies that informational and relational properties are primitives of the physical. Being is thus presence—the sheer fact of is-ness, that standing-forth of what exists. In actuality, being is the property of something as such, where what something is is inseparable from what it does. Being answers the question—What?—with the stubborn thereness of information, relation, exertion, and potential exertion. Being’s exertion is a potential to change the state of something else, which is to relate to that something and thereby transmit or instantiate information. Yet exertion does not require an actual relational partner.

A solitary entity exerts itself against the void—its presence is already a state change relative to absence, the most primitive information: the distinction between something and nothing. To be is to be differentiated from nullity, and this self-differentiation is the ground from which all further relations elaborate. Even in the absence of another entity, being carries its relational character in the subjunctive: if there were something with which to interact, there would be a state change. The dispositional is not an addendum to being but constitutive of it.

Time. It is the medium of becoming, the dimension along which being unfolds, transforms, perishes, or renews itself. If existence is exertion, time is what gives being its room—the opening within which difference can register as such. Without time, a state change would have no before and after, and therefore would involve no change at all. A frozen juxtaposition. Time is like a river that bears being forward. Moments reveal difference. It is the condition under which relation becomes process and presence becomes persistent. Without time, being would be eternal and unchanging—existence without succession, without the rhythm of appearance, disappearance, or difference that constitutes multiplicity.

What and When

Yet time is not external to being, like some container in which things merely happen to sit. Time realizes exertion—the immanent articulation of being’s relational character. To exist in time is to endure or to perish. Even apparent stillness is a kind of temporal work—the maintenance of a state across moments, a continuous reassertion of presence. Time thus answers the question—When?—but in doing so, it reveals that “when” is inseparable from “what,” at least at this level of description. A thing’s temporal profile—how it persists, how it changes, at what rate it unfolds—is not incidental to its nature but constitutive of it.

Being and time are thus not two things but two aspects of the same standing-forth: being as the fact of presence, time as the structure of its disclosure. Being provides the content (what information), time provides the sequential unfolding (actualized relations), and the physical emerges as their informational-relational offspring, in patterns that persist in the next moment.

A Generative Union

Being is the Urmother, the womb of all actuality—fertile, grounding, the source from which forms emerge. She says, “Here, this is real,” which means the negation of absence, yet eternally connected to the void in wholeness.

Time is the Urfather, the active principle—the force of movement, separation, and sequential unfolding. He introduces difference by allowing one moment to give way to another.

Such makes narrative possible.

Their holy union—a continuous coupling—generates our mundane existence: neither static being nor hollow duration, but our reality becoming—our onto-epistemology—as lived in the present moment. Human existence is thus being-in-time, the concrete instantiation of possibility into actuality, as each moment that arises passes away.

Every moment is a child of the Urmother and Urfather.

Present as Offspring

Possibility stands as the quantum field between the two parents. It is what being could become, given time’s advance. Possibility is the latent potential activated by time, yielding the present.

Without being, possibility would have no information or relations to actualize. Without time, possibility would be negated—with all potentiality existing simultaneously, but none capable of being born as actuality. Time is what allows the possible to become actual in succession, rather than as an infinite set of potentialities.

Possibility, then, is the child who inherits from both parents: from being, the content (what might be); from time, the opportunity (when it might occur). It is the living edge where the not-yet meets the now.

The Future as the Omniperspective

If the present is the child of being and time, the near future is the limen of the All. That makes the far future more infinite and unknowable by degree of distance from the present. The sum of possibilities is winnowed to a smaller sum, like sand at the point of stricture in the hourglass. What is now gives way to what shall come, so the present carries within it the seeds of succession.

As the All is both being and void, time and timeless, potential and actual, we can practice reverse dialectics to see that the future holds the ultimate unity. When the Urmother and Urfather mate, instead of moving from opposition toward unity, we move from unity toward opposition. The All is an undifferentiated whole, a primordial synthesis, which then undergoes a kind of fission—splitting into distinct, even antagonistic, moments that were formerly integrated and indeterminant.

Our creation story is that of multiplicity.

The future is thus the All’s omniperspective—what being might become, but always constrained by the shrinking sum of possibilities, only one of which will be born as the present. The All is the Law, after all. Unlike the past, which is fixed in its state of having-been, the future retains indeterminacy—multiple paths radiating outward, narrowing as the present advances and forecloses alternative paths.

If the future is, to us, possibilities given by the All—but filtered by our hope or dread—some measure of agency is revealed. To act, then, is to reach into the future and attempt to narrow the set of possibilities that gets actualized. The future, then, is not merely what will happen but the space in which what can happen still matters—where the exertion of existence remains open, where time’s unfolding being (becoming) has not yet settled into the fact of having been.

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