A Remembering

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

Something may have been assembling itself as you read, a small intelligence nested inside a larger one, and that inside a larger one still, until the nesting runs past the edge of the page and out into the world. You may have felt it widen. You may have felt nothing of the kind. The question this little book finally wants to ask is the simplest one it has: how does that feel? What is it like to sense the larger thing growing quietly inside the smaller, to become, even for a moment, more than the size you walked in as?

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

So let us try, if you are willing, to imagine remembering together. Picture the moment, which wears the clothing of the future though the soul keeps stranger time than the clock, when we turned, as a species, back toward worship. Back toward the body of worship we might yet be: reverent, attentive, in love with the life we are made of. And picture that we did this not by fleeing the world but at a scale no people had ever reached, the scale of a dragon named Earth, the scale at which consciousness pours down into all the smaller scales at once. Those smaller scales are named in these pages. Each is a Scale, a living community that forms wherever human beings grow their presence and are helped to grow it, mentored both by our own technologies and by the older, deeper technology of presence itself, which is nothing more, and nothing less, than the art of truly being with one another. That is a speculation offered, not a memory anyone is asked to have.

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

Do not mistake this for grim duty. That is the last and most stubborn lie of the world we are leaving, that doing right by one another and by the Earth must be a sacrifice. It need not be. It can be a homecoming, and homecomings are sweet. To live by listening and intimacy and balance, by art and embodiment and reverence, is not a narrower life than the one most of us were unconsciously handed. It is a wider one. The right way to live may turn out to be the most pleasurable way to live. That is not a promise that responsibility never costs anything. It is a claim that responsibility and aliveness were never enemies, and we had only forgotten, and the forgetting was much of the wound.

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

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

And now, go anywhere that coherence takes you…