Intellectual lineage
Questions we met on our own path.
These sources did not create Alchemy of Grace, and we do not adopt any of their systems wholesale. Their work illuminates questions we came to through our own calling.
Scripture
The King James and Geneva Bibles, on calling, covenant, stewardship and the difference between a text and the notes written around it.
Tao Te Ching
On not forcing, on water, and on leading without domination.
Alfred Korzybski
The map is not the territory. When they disagree, correct the map.
Immanuel Kant
The one who knows takes part in what is known. Every classification has an author.
Arthur Schopenhauer
What moves beneath the words. We check what we say against what we actually do.
Robert M. Pirsig
Quality as care. The machine has to serve the life, and it has to run.
Albert Camus
Refusal that keeps its limits. We refuse the lie without becoming it.
Daniel Quinn
Tribe as people making a living together, and the old idea that civilization is not the only way to live.
James Joyce
A river that runs from ending into beginning. The record marks the river.
Joseph Campbell
The call, the threshold and the return, and the gift that is carried back.
Haudenosaunee, A Basic Call to Consciousness
The address of the Haudenosaunee to the Western world, presented at Geneva in 1977 and published by Akwesasne Notes, on a civilization that treats the living world as a resource. Read it in their words. Nobody here speaks for them, and they did not create Alchemy of Grace.
How we use them
Each is a lens, and each lens is tested against the others and against one question: does this take care of life? Nothing here is quoted until its source has been checked. Where a teaching belongs to a particular people, we say so only when the lineage is known.