The seventh of the Seven Coils gives the practitioner one task: give the work away. It says to publish what you have learned, release what you have made into the common store, and claim nothing for it. It does not say how. This entry offers some practical notes, drawn from the Keepers' own mistakes.
The occasion is a welcome development. In recent years a number of practitioners outside the Order have begun publishing their working notes in the open, in some cases the notes of thirty years or more, as freely readable collections. Whatever one makes of any particular collection, the gesture is the right one, and it raises the question of how to do it well.
The Work, Not the Record
The Nightside Record draws the essential line. When you give your work away, give the work: the method you developed, the insight you reached, the text you wrote. Draw it from your record, but do not hand over the record itself unless you truly wish to.
A record is raw material. It is long, private, repetitive, and full of people who did not agree to appear in it. What another practitioner can use is what you have refined out of it.
Eight Notes
- Wait. Do not publish a working the week you perform it. Let at least a year of review notes gather under the entry. What seemed a discovery in the first month is often a commonplace by the twelfth, and occasionally the reverse.
- Describe the method so that it can be repeated. State what you did, in order, plainly enough that a stranger could do the same and compare. A method that cannot be repeated cannot be tested, and one that cannot be tested is only a story.
- Leave the failures in. Say how often it did nothing. Say what you tried first that did not work. The reader will learn more from this than from the successes, and will trust the successes more for it.
- Take every person out. Remove names, places, and any detail by which someone could be identified, including people who would not mind. The privacy of persons is not the secrecy of teaching, and it is not yours to waive on another's behalf.
- Keep observation and interpretation apart in public, as in private. Tell the reader what happened, and then, separately and under its own heading, what you think it means. Let them disagree with the second without having to doubt the first.
- Claim nothing. No rank, no lineage, no title, and no authority from the Order or from anyone else. If the work is good, it does not need them. If it is not, they will not help.
- Use a plain format. Plain text can be read on any device and will outlast every platform. If you publish somewhere that could vanish or change its terms, keep a copy elsewhere, and say that others may copy it too.
- Say what the reader may do with it. The Order uses the CC0 dedication, and the License page gives a two-line notice that anyone may reuse. You are free to choose other terms. We hope you will not need to.
Then Let It Go
The sign of the seventh coil is that you have released what you made, and that you do not need to know what anyone does with it. This is harder than the publishing. Most of what is given away is met with silence. Some of it is misread. A little of it is taken up, altered, and passed on without your name, and you may never hear of it.
All three outcomes are the gift working as intended. And now and then something does come back: a correction, an improvement, a use you had not imagined. The Shed Skin says of the gap in the Open Ring that it is what passes out of the work into the world, and what may enter from the world into the work. We have always attended more to the first half of that sentence than to the second. We are beginning to think the second deserves a text of its own.