momentan · the four domains

Soul

The meaning domain — inner life, beauty, and connection.

MIND is epistemic: read the right things in the right order and you understand reality. This one can't work that way, because you cannot read meditation, or grief, or love. So every unit here has two arms — a text and a practice — and the practice is the one that isn't optional.

There is no completion score anywhere on this site. That is the whole design.

  1. 0

    The Predicament

    why any of this is a live problem

    Mortality, suffering, meaning, and the self that's asking. Everything else on this path is a response to this page — read it first and the rest stops looking like a reading list.

    4 units · 4 practices

  2. 1

    The Traditions

    two arcs, one page

    East and West have been working on this for two and a half thousand years. This is the good-life slice only — epistemology and philosophy of mind live in MIND. Read across the frictions rather than flattening them into wellness: Frankl against Camus, Stoic control against Taoist non-action, Buddhist no-self against Christian union.

    6 units · 6 practices

  3. 2

    Getting Out of Your Head

    the direct methods

    Both senses intended: leaving the ego, and going a little wild. Everything here is a method for changing consciousness directly rather than by argument. The measure that matters is altered traits, not altered states.

    5 units · 5 practices

  4. 3

    Connection

    the deepest source, and a skill

    Relationships live in Soul rather than Human because what makes them matter is meaning, not logistics. Frankl: meaning is love and work. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, running since 1938: close relationships are the single best predictor of a good life. Every unit here leads with the practice — that is what keeps this page from being self-help.

    5 units · 5 practices

  5. 4

    Beauty as a Way of Knowing

    what argument can't reach

    Art gets at things propositions can't hold. This page treats attention as the skill and beauty as the teacher. Music's transcendent side lives here — the physics of sound is MIND's problem, and it's already built.

    5 units · 5 practices

  6. 5

    Your Own Rule of Life

    the page that turns a reading list into a life

    Regula means trellis, not regulation — a structure a living thing grows on. Benedict's Rule has kept people balanced for fifteen hundred years, and it is portable and entirely securalisable. This page assembles everything above into one page of your own, and then makes you live it for a season.

    5 units · 5 practices

How to use it

Start at page 0 and let it land before going looking for answers. After that the pages are not strictly sequential — The Traditions and Getting Out of Your Head reward being read together, and Your Own Rule of Life only makes sense once you have practices worth putting in it.

The tally at the top is the only progress there is: days running, practices kept, what you're reading, and how long since something stopped you. Reflections are counted here and written in Lifeboard — the public path shouldn't be a diary.

Sibling to MIND, the understanding domain.