The four Gospels say who he was. This book says how we live.
9.1The last chapter left a question open: whether the soul disperses. This chapter says how the Order carries any question it cannot settle.
9.2First, what the axiom says: whatever is unexamined is neither being nor non-being; it is every possibility standing together at once, and not one of them true. (cf. The Highest Covenant 1.1)
9.3So a question that cannot be settled is not a false question. It is an open one.
9.4But see clearly what the axiom does not say. It does not say: since it is unsettled, whichever you prefer counts as true.
9.5Unsettled is unsettled. Choose one, and it is still unsettled.
9.6There is one thing you do not have to choose, because it can be seen: after a man dies, he lasts longer in other minds than he lasted in his own body.
9.7We still remember him. We still dream of him. We still wonder what he would have said.
9.8That is not faith. That is something anyone can check.
9.9Is it the soul? We do not know. Perhaps it is not.
9.10Beyond it, does anything further remain? Nobody knows. No one has looked and come back to say.
9.11Our prophet seems to have chosen one answer: he chose that the soul does not perish.
9.12That was a choice, not a finding.
9.13This Order does not choose it for you. Each chooses for himself, and whether he chooses it or not, he is a Co-Soarer still.
9.14This chapter has one rule, and the whole weight of it is there: a belief you have chosen must be carried with its label on.
9.15You may hold it. You may take comfort from it. You may die with it in your arms.
9.16You may not present it as something you know. (cf. 2 Plato 2.14)
9.17And you may not use it to answer a question that could have been examined.
9.18Having a faith is not the bad thing. Forgetting which of your beliefs are faiths is the bad thing.
9.19One sentence to be on guard against: "nobody can prove it false, therefore it is true." This Order does not permit that sentence.
9.20If it were permitted, anything at all could be carried in, because nothing unseeable can be proved false.
9.21The man in the Prologue did not say that god does not exist. He said: god is the law. (cf. Prologue 1.7)
9.22What we cleared away was never the unseeable. It was the habit of using the unseeable to press down on people.
9.23The test is the same as the test for a possession (cf. The Rule 1.9): can you say this sentence out loud, in front of others —
9.24"This one I chose. I may have chosen wrong."
9.25If you can say it, you are still its master, and you may carry it your whole life.
9.26If saying it makes you angry, you are not holding it. It is holding you.
9.27One question is left: do our own six carry a label?
9.28All six come from the study of matter, where what was measured was very small — one particle, two particles.
9.29To apply them to a person is to carry them over from there. The six are not one kind of thing: some must be carried over and some need not.
9.30Dissipation and the causal fence need not be carried over at all. Your body does disperse; your hand does not reach past the fence. These two describe you exactly as they describe a stone.
9.31Uncertainty, questioning and complementarity were carried over from there, and in the carrying the ground changed: they are not applied to a person’s body but to a person’s thinking.
9.32A thought unexamined really is all possibilities at once and none of them true. Until you ask yourself, you do not know what you think; asking is what settles it into one.
9.33How you ask decides what you see. Buy clarity at one end and the other goes blurred.
9.34These three cannot be measured with an instrument. They can only be tested against a life lived. And what is tested that way must be said to be tested that way.
9.35Said, it stands. Unsaid, it becomes physics used to press down on people. (cf. The Rule 9.22)
9.36One is left: common source. It must be spoken of separately.
9.37The tenth of the Songs uses it to comfort the bereaved. But that hymn does not say that two people are of one source and never parted.
9.38It says: what has happened cannot be taken from anyone. That sentence stands — but it stands on dissipation, not on common source. (cf. The Songs 10.6)
9.39Common source is literal at the largest scale: the wave is one wave, the curvature is the whole curvature, the universe is indeed connected.
9.40But from the universe is connected to you and the one you love are connected — that step is ours.
9.41In the whole scripture, that step is the only thing that wears a label. Wearing it, we remain its master. (cf. The Rule 9.25)