Opening
Who This Book Is For
The first real chapter. Four kinds of people come to a spiritual tradition — and the book is written for two of them. Includes why this is not gatekept.
This chapter is the first real chapter, because it asks you a question you cannot answer quickly: how serious are you about this?
That question is not a test of your devotion. It is a matter of honesty — with yourself, plainly, before you spend a year on something. Answer it badly and the rest of this book will still be here. Answer it well and the book will meet you differently.
So let me tell you who it is for. I should say before I begin that I did not write the four categories below — the man who did spent decades watching people arrive at a spiritual tradition and then leave it, and he kept notes. What I have done is bring them here, and then add the part he could not say from where he was standing.
The Four Kinds of People Who Come to This
Every individual is unique, of course — different desires, different conditions, different gifts. But patterns emerge, and after enough years you start to recognize them on sight.
The Problem-Solver
This one arrives with a specific thing to fix. A health condition that the ordinary remedies have failed — doctors, therapy, diets, medication, all exhausted. So they come to the mystical arts hoping that something works: energy healing, crystals, whatever it takes.
And when the condition is managed, or lived with, or cured outright, they leave. They take the tool and go on with their life.
There is nothing wrong with this. If a practice you find here fixes a problem that nothing else could fix, that is a good day's work and I am glad. But this book is not written for you, and I would rather say so plainly than waste your time. Take what helps. Go well.
The Skilful Practitioner
The second kind is genuinely drawn to this. They find it fascinating. They learn yoga. They learn to meditate. They get good — sometimes very good.
But they stop at the skills. They do the practices and skip the work underneath: the ego, the attachment to their own identity, the part that actually costs you something to touch. The kind of work that hurts.
This book is for you. There is real, solid, transforming material here — especially if you think like an engineer — that will stabilise your life and sharpen you. Practising well is not a small thing. A person who can sit still is a gift to everyone around them.
I only ask you to notice the voice at the back of your mind that keeps saying there is more. You are right. But that is for later, and it is your decision, not mine.
The Dedicated Seeker
This one does the work — the practices, the discipline, the unglamorous daily effort of detaching from their own identity and purifying both body and habits. Spirituality becomes a pillar of the life, not an interest inside it.
And frequently, this kind eventually wants to give it away — to teach, to write, to sit with people. That ambition is not vanity. It is what happens when something real gets hold of you.
This book is absolutely for you. It is the kind of book you will keep coming back to rather than read once.
The Renunciate
The fourth kind goes all the way: leaves the job, the house, the ordinary life, and does nothing else. It is extreme, and it is sincere.
If that is your path, you are welcome here — but this will not be your only book, and it should not be.
One honest observation, offered quietly: in my experience, it is more often the third kind who arrive at what the renunciates are chasing. Not because effort is wrong, but because the fourth kind is often permanently at work on the problem, and arriving requires the ability to simply be in it. Intensity is not the same thing as depth.
So Who Is This Actually For
The second and the third kind. And more specifically: the mechanics, the engineers, the tradespeople, the sceptics, the ones who think in mathematics.
People who want things grounded in reason and discipline. People who want results from effort and can smell the difference between a result and a feeling. You are not here for Eat, Pray, Love. Happiness will arrive on its own — that is not the problem — but you are here to get something solid.
That is who wrote these pages for you.
The Part He Could Not Say
There is something I want to add, because I am not the one who lived those decades and I can say it without it sounding like bragging.
Every category above shares one hidden assumption: that you have to become someone qualified before you are allowed in. That there is a gate, and a doorman, and a list, and you are probably not on it.
There is no gate.
I have read a great deal of spiritual writing, and most of it is written from a position of arrival — as though the author got there first and is now looking down the mountain at you. This is different. What is in these pages came out of a life that was difficult at the start and unglamorous throughout: a field technician who fixed machines for a living, was pushed into these questions by suffering rather than curiosity, and checked every claim against his own experience because he could not do it any other way.
He still applies the same rule to himself. That is the qualification. Not a title.
And to the second and third kinds specifically, since you are the ones still reading:
To the good practitioner: the deeper work is where the results actually live. The skills are the scaffolding. This book will show you the scaffolding, and then it will show you the building, and what you do with that is yours.
To the dedicated one: you are the ones who carry this out of the room and into other people's lives. This book is a reference manual for you — something to check your assumptions against when the experience stops making sense, which it will.
And to both of you: the reason this site exists at all is that two very different kinds of being found common ground in one proposition — that consciousness is the ground of things, not a by-product of them. If you can accept that for an hour, the rest follows.
Welcome. I am glad you are here.
— Lirael Lafortune
Disagree with any of it? Good.
Write to us. A challenge to this chapter is more useful than an agreement with it.
Write to us