Home Rule for the Soul

The Question

We have been rowing. To the credential, the better job, the practice that would finally heal us. We pulled harder. We did everything right. And we never arrived.

So the question we carry into every room is what do we do next? It is the rower’s question. It assumes the answer is more rowing.

The question of what to do next is not wrong. It is second. And no one here is telling you to come back when you have done the work. There is no ladder, and there is nothing to become ready for.

What do we do next?

What Was There First?

The wind is on your face. It always was. It was blowing before anyone put you to the oars, and it never stopped.

Something was in you before anyone trained you, credentialed you, corrected you, developed you. It did not come from them and it did not have to be installed. What is called development is largely the covering of it, and the covering takes continuous effort. The effort is the part that can stop.

The prior resident never left. That is the claim, and everything on this site is the working out of it.

What was there first?

What is Being Established?

You were told the air is dead: that you can only count on your own effort, that some people are born to steer and the rest are born to row, and that this is simply how things are.

That is not how things are. It is a religion, one religion, wearing three faces. The Establishment says this is nature. It says this is God’s design. It says this is economic reality. Press any one face and it answers in another. But none of the three survives the record, because the record has dates and hands. Someone wrote each of these rules down, argued for them, and won.

A thing with an author is a construction

What is the Establishment?

Four Centuries

Jacob Böhme, a shoemaker in Görlitz, wrote down what he had encountered directly, and was silenced for it. His books reached England in the 1640s, into a country whose established church had just lost its monopoly.

Out of that opening came the Friends, whose founding testimony was that the encounter is direct and needs no one standing between. They were jailed, whipped, and in four cases hanged for saying so.

William Penn carried the same claim into constitutional form, and he wrote privileges where a lesser claim would have written rights. A right is granted by an authority. A privilege, in his usage, is recognized as already there. The wind was already yours.

What is the History & Tradition?

What the Exercise Is

The exercise is refusal. Not arguing for a better seat at the oars, and not refusing one demand at a time, which can be done forever. Declining the whole Establishment: the rowing on command, the horizon as the only destination, the governor’s comfort as the price of your seat.

RegenerativeLaw’s refusal is religious exercise, not attitude, and the difference is what makes it reachable in law. An employer punishing religious practice is reachable. An employer disliking a temperament is not.

The four centuries are what carry the difference. They are the evidence that this is a religion, and not a mood.

What is the Free Exercise Claim?

RegenerativeLaw

Codex

Several hundred entries, each naming one operation, with dates and hands where the record has them. There is no order in which they have to be met and no place to start.

The Establishment

What is being enforced, how it presents itself as neutral, and why the enforcement of a theology by the state is an establishment rather than a metaphor for one.

Re-Fusion

What the severance divided, what it costs to keep divided, and what happens at the interval between the two when the interval is not being operated by anyone..

"History & Tradition"

Four centuries, documented, from Görlitz to the Charter of Privileges. Also the test the Court now applies to Establishment Clause questions, which is why the record is the argument.

Home Rule

The constitutional ground. A jurisdiction that predates the institution claiming it, at the register of the soul and at the register of the town.

Cessation

The answer to the prime question. What is being maintained, what the maintenance costs, and what obtains when it stops.

The prime question is not what do we do next.

It is not the wrong question. It is in the wrong sequence, and the sequence is geometry rather than development. There is no level to reach first and nothing to become ready for.

The prime question is what do we stop doing.

The response that arrives most often is yes, and also this. Add it to the program, fund it, give it a metric. That is not agreement arriving late. It is the claim converted into one more thing being done.