The Common Books
Thirty-four books arranged across nine volumes. Their people disagree, invent, inherit, fail and try again. I want the stories read as stories, with room for their contradictions and difficult endings.
Where I started
I was interested in how to live long before I had any business writing about it.
I grew up in the foster system. By my teens I was carrying rather more anger, pain and confusion than I knew what to do with. At sixteen I hitch-hiked across Europe to Rhodes, partly because I wanted a different life and partly because staying where I was seemed a remarkably poor idea.
I spent several years in Greece, working, making friends and meeting people whose lives were very different from mine. I returned to England on my twenty-first birthday with stories, questions and a great deal still unresolved.
That was the beginning of a long interest in what people believe, how they behave, the ways they hurt one another, and the surprising things they are capable of doing for each other.
The fuller account of those early years, and the work they eventually led to, is on my Nine Realms Institute About page.
Martin Rothery
The work before the philosophy
For thirty-eight years, people have been my most difficult and interesting subject.
My working life has taken me through therapeutic practice, psychology, hypnosis, philosophy, consciousness and all sorts of territory that refuses to stay inside tidy academic divisions. I developed Sanomentology from practical work with people. The Nine Realms came later, giving the wider work a home and a more extensive map.
Alongside that I kept writing. Fiction gave me somewhere to follow an idea into places a manual could never reach. A character can be mistaken. A story can leave you angry, uncertain or unconvinced, and still make you think more carefully about your own life.
One question kept returning. We devote an enormous amount of attention to what we want from life. We are far less consistent about asking what our lives do to the people around us, and what carries on after we have gone.
Why the Continuance exists
What do we pass on, deliberately or otherwise, and how much responsibility are we willing to take for it?
That question sits behind The Continuance. It reaches into our choices, relationships, institutions, habits, stories and the world other people inherit from us. It also makes room for meaning, loss, memory, repair and the ordinary business of being alive.
I wanted a body of work large enough to explore those questions honestly, including the places where I remain uncertain. The books are the beginning. The ideas should be tested in life, discussed, criticised and, where necessary, changed.
The writing
Stories, arguments and practices belong together.
The philosophy
The Book of the Continuance brings the central ideas into direct discussion. The Living Tradition Framework makes clear what can be questioned and developed.
Living with it
The Practice Book, the annual observances and the 52-week Membership Year offer ways to put the ideas under pressure in everyday life. Participation is a choice.
The books are published by Logres Publishing. They're contemporary work with an identifiable author. There is no claim of an ancient, undiscovered lineage behind them.
Whose philosophy?
I began The Continuance. Its future should involve more minds than mine.
Being its founder makes me responsible for what I have written. It doesn't make me infallible or give me authority over anyone else's conscience. You may agree with some of the philosophy, reject other parts, or find something important I have missed.
I hope people will take it seriously enough to argue with it, put it into practice and contribute better ideas. New interpretations and contributions should be credited honestly. Nobody should need access to me, or pay for a higher standing, to take part.
The Continuance is open to development. People may eventually form different communities and traditions around it. For now, it begins as a philosophy that people can read, examine and decide what to make of.
Where to begin
You don't have to start by agreeing with me.
Read the introduction. Explore the books. Try one of the practices, or challenge an idea you think is wrong. Then decide whether anything here is useful enough to carry into your own life.