Part Three: The Instruments

Parts One and Two set down what is given and what presses on it. This part is the workbench. It is organized by the question a disciple is actually asking, not by the volume that happens to hold the answer. There are six benches. Under each, the instruments the corpus has built are laid out on cards. Every card says four things: when to reach for it, what it asks, what it prevents, and where it lives. A card is not a summary of a volume. It is enough to use the instrument and enough to find its source.

Two cautions come before the first bench. The first is that every one of these instruments is for the person holding it before it is for anyone else. The corpus attaches that warning to nearly all of them, and Part Two gave it a name. A diagnosis run on someone else is where the danger sits. The second is that an instrument is not the knowing. The essay on direct access ends by telling its reader to stop reading and go into the inner room, and that instruction covers this part of the book as well. A tool can find the problem. It cannot be what the problem was missing.