Higher Order Agreements
Begin at the highest. Never make a lower agreement that conflicts with a higher one.
Most people's agreements accumulate in the order they were asked for — a job, a lease, a promise made at a hard moment, a membership never revisited — and the result is a life whose commitments were each reasonable and which together point in no particular direction. Higher Order Agreements invert the order of making. The foundational agreements come first: with the Source, with Creation, and with oneself. Everything after must stack up under them.
Three templates are live in the canon and they are deliberately distinct. An agreement with ØNE and All, eternal — one's core values, principles, and commitments in service of the Source, of Creation, and of right relationship with every being. An agreement with self, eternal — the lifelong commitment to one's truest and highest self. And an agreement with self, temporal — the short-horizon one: specific goals and milestones that serve the eternal one, rewritten as a person grows. Under these sit the ordinary collaborative agreements: to collaborate on a piece of work, between a person and a group, between two groups (Field of Agreements · Charter).
The critical principle is the ordering rule, and it is a refusal as much as a practice: each sovereign person and each locality begins with its highest order agreements, and refuses to make any lower agreement that does not properly stack up in service of the highest overarching and uniting vision (Stacking Up And Aligning · Commander's Intent). That refusal is what makes the stack real rather than aspirational. It is also what makes it costly — a great many ordinary opportunities do not survive the test, which is the point.
It stands beside, and is not the same as, The Three Supreme Agreements. Those name what sits at the top — love ØNE, love one another, love All. This names the ordering discipline by which everything beneath is made to descend from a top, whatever that top is. One is the content; the other is the structure.
Also called: the agreement stack · foundational agreements
Stands on: Agreement · Covenant · Sovereignty · Integrity · Values
Opens onto: The Three Supreme Agreements · Field of Agreements · Covenant Across Time · The New Covenant · Charter · Commitment · The Pledge · Vow-Speaking · Stacking Up And Aligning · Alignment · Aligned Will · Commander's Intent · One Purpose Above All · Right Relationship
In play: Home, then the table — written alone before a person brings themselves to any body
Sources: Higher Order Agreements (root page, draft, thirteen lines) · Template For Agreement With One And All — Eternal, Template For Agreement With Self — Eternal, Template For Agreement With Self — Temporal (templates, draft) · Audit Ledger memo R-4 · lionsberg.wiki: Higher Order Agreements
Open: The canon's Covenant and Field of Agreements carry agreement-making and do not carry the ordering rule, which is this page's whole contribution. · What a person does when an existing lower agreement is discovered to conflict with a higher one — break it, renegotiate it, or serve out the term — is not addressed, and Consciously Breaking Commitments approaches the question from the other side without meeting it.