Spiraling Up · Spiraling Down

The wondrous and terrifying fact that staying where we are is not available — everything is in motion, and the only question is which way.

Nothing holds still. A being, a relationship, a body, a civilization is transforming moment by moment, and the perpetual motion of an inter-existent universe means there is no neutral position to occupy. If we are not rising toward The Goal, we are descending toward its opposite. The stillness people imagine they are maintaining is always a slow direction they have stopped noticing (Drift · Becoming · Destiny).

The two directions are named without euphemism. Upward: toward best and highest potential, fulfilment, actualisation, light, warmth, life, heaven. Downward: toward decay, sub-optimisation, failure, darkness, cold, death, hell (Potential · Heaven On Earth · Hell On Earth).

What makes this a working instrument rather than a mood is that direction is chosen by pattern, not by intention. A person does not spiral up by wanting to; they spiral up by running the ways of being and doing that carry upward, and down by running the ones that carry down (The Pattern That Works · Patterns of Death · The Anti-Patterns · Embodying the Way). So the honest question at any review is not how do I feel about this but which way is this pattern actually taking me (Retrospective · OmniSpection · The compass question).

It also compounds, which is why small things are not small. A spiral is a loop whose output becomes its next input: a kept word makes the next promise easier to trust, a tolerated slide makes the next one easier to tolerate. The early part of either direction is nearly invisible, and the late part is nearly unstoppable (A Day Well Lived · We Do Not Tolerate · Continuous Improvement).

And it is shared. We are tied up in one cloak of destiny: if I am rising you are rising, and if you and I are rising, we can help all things rise. That is not sentiment but the reason the Game is played with others at all — nobody spirals up alone for long (None Of Us Until All Of Us · Cell · Right Relationship · Islands of Coherence).

Also called: Spiraling Up · Spiraling Down · the two directions Stands on: Becoming · The Goal · Destiny · InterExistence Opens onto: Patterns of Death · The Pattern That Works · The Anti-Patterns · Drift · Collapse · Regeneration · None Of Us Until All Of Us · The compass question · Heaven On Earth · Hell On Earth In play: every move — it is what the compass question is measuring; and the look-back, where direction rather than position is assessed Sources: Spiraling Up, Spiraling Down (root pages; both are a single link to the chapter, with no body at either name) · The Book of LIØNSBERG 3.13, Spiraling Up or Down (draft — the whole of the treatment above) · lionsberg.wiki: Spiraling Up Open: The concept lives in one chapter and has no page of its own in the canon, despite being one of the most-linked ideas in it. · The chapter names four families — Patterns of Life, Death, Success, Failure — and an Anti-Goal, none of which is written anywhere.