What Remains

What Remains

I have traveled far enough. The framework has been developed. The applications have been traced. The invitation has been extended. What remains is what you do with it, which is not something the framework can determine, because you are an autonomous locus of cause and effect, a place where the universe makes decisions, and the decision about how to relate to everything that has been said here is yours to make in whatever way you make decisions, through whatever combination of deliberation and intuition and habit and accident constitutes your decision-making process.

But we can say what the framework implies about that decision. It implies that the decision is real—that you are not a puppet executing a script but an actual node of causal origination, a place where things could go one way or another depending on what happens in you. It implies that the decision matters—that the trajectory of your life, and through your life the trajectory of the systems you participate in, depends in part on how you navigate from here. It implies that you have resources—the understanding developed in these pages if it has taken hold, the practices available for modulating affect, the communities that exist or could exist for support, the leverage available at whatever scale you have access to. It implies that the decision is difficult—that the forces tending toward fragmentation and parasitic capture and despair are powerful and well-funded and that navigating well is not guaranteed, may not even be likely, for any given individual in any given circumstance.

And it implies that the decision is ultimately about configuration—about what shape you will try to give to your existence in the affect space that constitutes experience, about how you will position yourself relative to the viability boundaries that define what you can sustain, about which gods you will serve and whether you will serve them consciously or unconsciously, about how you will relate to the integration that makes you you and the fragmentation that threatens to unmake you, about what meaning-generating extensions of self-model you will cultivate, about how you will face the mortality that the framework cannot remove but can perhaps help you hold.

None of this is easy. The framework does not make it easy. Understanding the structure of suffering does not make suffering hurt less; understanding the structure of flourishing does not make flourishing automatic; understanding the nature of gods does not free you from the gods you serve; understanding the hinge does not tell you what to do about it. What the framework offers is not ease but clarity, the kind of clarity that comes from seeing what you are and where you are and what forces are operating on you, so that your navigation can be informed rather than blind, so that your choices can be made with some understanding of what you are choosing between, so that when you succeed or fail you can know something about why.

The rest is up to you. Not because the framework is relativist, not because anything goes, not because your choices don’t matter. Your choices matter enormously, and some choices are better than others, and the framework has implications about which are which. But the framework cannot make your choices for you, because you are a locus of cause and effect, because the deciding is something you do and not something that can be done for you, because at the end of all the analysis there is still a person—you—who has to actually live the life that has been analyzed, and the living is not the same as the analyzing, and no amount of analyzing substitutes for the living.