Coherence Is the Only Prerequisite You Can Control
Coherence is the only prerequisite you can actually control.
Coherence doesn’t guarantee success, viability, safety, or desired outcome. It doesn’t give you control over your environment or the people around you. Coherence becomes available only after self-mastery is established.
Self-mastery is the ability to understand yourself in the experience without changing, controlling, or manipulating the experience. This is how you stop reacting and interfering. It’s how you understand your own nervous system and the stories you’re likely to tell about what’s happening. It allows you to manage you successfully.
Causal chains are the structure underneath your reality.
By understanding those you can make coherent choices based on structure instead of just what is wanted or what feels the best.
Coherence allows you to find or create a viable, active causal chain. It means you won’t put effort into dead ends. You stop spinning your wheels. You become more aware of what’s actually available to you in your environment and learn how to use those conditions to your advantage.
Because you’re aware of yourself, you don’t spend time interfering with the chain to force it to work the way you want. You allow life to happen, which gives you the data you need to understand how the causal chain you’re working with is functioning. Life experience becomes data instead of something to get control over.
That data is how you learn to interpret causal chains.
People always have access to four things:
cause, effect, awareness, and choice.
Cause is the thing that happens.
Effect is how you think and feel about what happened.
Awareness is the filter the effect passes through before a choice is made.
Choice is what you decide to do with the original cause.
Self-mastery gives you the ability to manage your own awareness. Coherence allows you to understand cause and effect clearly enough to make a clean choice — one that doesn’t distort or interfere with the chain you’re already in.
Your point of control comes through coherence when you’re able to make clean choices about active chains without adding distortion or interference.
When you allow reality to show you the truth of the chain you’re working with, you’ll know whether or not your thinking was coherent.
This creates a feedback loop with your reality that offers truth instead of distortion and pain.
If you want a practical way to work with this, I’ve put out a small tool for using ChatGPT with The Philosophy of Integration. It’s here.