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A suggested route through the free material.
What moves people, and what makes it last.
The stories a culture lives without telling them.
Synaxis, the trained attention at the heart of the work.
The disciplines the framework draws on.
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How the pathway works: Core, then Motivation, Value, Purpose and Metanarrative.
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Glossary
Every concept in the framework, in alphabetical order. Select a term to see its card on the framework map.
AP is held as the best available explanation of what we find, open to revision. Not proven, not a leap of faith, not a wager.
Telic resonance as the beautiful: depth shining through form, opposites held in one presence. Not prettiness, but what can move us to tears and draw us beyond ourselves.
Telic resonance as the good: being claimed by what calls for care, holding competing goods together (justice and mercy, self and other) without collapsing into rule or sentiment.
Telic resonance as the true: being drawn to what is, holding knowing and unknowing together. Not mere correctness, but truth that changes the one who sees it.
When Value, Motivation and Purpose share the same orientation, a message holds together. Extrinsic codes can align too.
The hypothesis that Value is a fundamental feature of reality, as basic as matter and energy, and not something consciousness adds to a neutral world.
Backgrounds become visible when they are withdrawn. Bereavement, a broken social expectation or a cultural collapse each reveals the ground that was holding.
Intentionally realigning a personal or shared VMP code with Value, so that purpose serves what matters rather than the other way round.
Research shaped by extrinsic codes: rigorous in method, hollow in what it chooses to study and why. Also called hollow rigour.
The framework is a web of mutually supporting claims, not a tower built on one foundation. Its credibility depends on the points where it could fail.
Anything presented as valuable that was made without the cost real value requires. We often sense the difference before we can explain it.
The question that sorts every VMP code: is Value serving the outcome, or is the outcome serving Value?
When the primitives pull in different directions, people feel it as friction or wrongness: an intrinsic value sold through an extrinsic motive, for example.
The hypothesis that widespread VMP dissonance drives social polarisation. The framework's strongest empirical claim.
A metanarrative is held not only in people but in the practices, institutions and artefacts that keep forming them.
Letting one way of knowing colonise the domains of the others: scientism, spiritualism, mechanism, moralism.
The movement that defines a Synactic Council: digging beneath what is said to uncover the VMP code that is actually operating.
When the shared background of a person, organisation or culture takes on an extrinsic shape, so that what matters is settled by outcome, status or reward.
Motivation directed beyond the activity, toward an outcome, reward or approval. It can be imposed from outside or fully internalised.
Rules, commands and principles imposed from outside by culture, authority or tradition. Useful, but open to capture and to becoming oppressive.
Value treated as measurable or acquirable, motivation pushed by pressure or reward, purpose set as a target. Effective in the short term; corrosive over time.
Every claim about practice states in advance what result would count against it. Without this, the claim cannot be tested.
Motivation can be in the foreground (what we are aware of pursuing) or the background (the attunement that settles what can matter at all).
The question of how a culture's backgrounds come to share a shape. It replaces the question of how a metanarrative "gets into" people.
The framework's external check: a pre-registered review of whether practice actually produced what was predicted.
Functional norms say what helps a system work. Categorical norms say what is worth doing. IMT needs the second kind to tell true from counterfeit.
An explicit, large-scale cultural story such as Progress, the American Dream or Marxism. Told and argued about openly.
Intrinsic Value becomes perceptible as claiming us through held tension. Tension does not make Value real; it loosens our grip on ourselves so Value can be seen.
The rational, self-interested chooser of economics. The framework does not replace this figure but re-reads it as Homo religans bound to an extrinsic metanarrative.
The human being as one who binds themselves to what they hold as ultimate. Everyone lives within some binding; the question is to what.
Fast, urgent, extrinsic campaigns feel quick but slow our response to long-term problems. Values work is slower to build but can produce quicker change.
The practices and cultural technologies that once helped people encounter Value together, many of which modern culture has dismantled.
A model of human motivation that builds on Self-Determination Theory and adds a second dimension: whether motivation is oriented toward Value itself.
Tension held in live relation, so that both poles are intensified. Not compromise, where both are weakened, and not stalemate, where they coexist without relation.
Four complementary ways of knowing, each reaching a different dimension of reality. None replaces the others; understanding needs all four.
The first axis of IMT: how far a motivation has become our own, from external pressure through to fully integrated commitment.
In IMT, motivation drawn by perceived Value: care, love, devotion, the draw of meaning. Broader than SDT's use of the term.
The "ought" that arises from perceiving Value directly. It is disclosed in encounter, not imposed from outside.
Value perceived as real, motivation drawn by that perception, purpose understood as a source or a way of participating. Slower to build; more durable.
Hume's gap assumes reality is value-neutral. On the framework's working hypothesis, fact and value are perceived together, so "ought" is disclosed, not derived.
Realising higher value takes energy, effort and sacrifice. Value cannot be had on the cheap.
The true, the good and the beautiful are three equal aspects of a single encounter with Value: distinct, inseparable, and held together in tension.
Value discloses itself to receptive attention. Purely analytic knowing cannot capture it.
Value does not express itself the same way everywhere. It calls forth different responses in different cultures, moments and situations.
The value of anything emerges from its relationships within a wider whole.
Value acts as a final cause: it draws systems toward greater coherence, complexity and fullness of being.
The promise of transformation without cost, or change without inner work. A hallmark of extrinsic purpose.
The dominant cultural logic of extrinsic motivation, magic solutions and transactional engagement. A primary vehicle of values pollution.
The convergence of ecological, social, political and spiritual crises, which share an underlying condition: a breakdown in shared meaning-making and value-perception.
The shared, implicit VMP structure of a culture: the background that settles what can matter, what moves people, and where they think they are heading.
What moves us to act. It can be driven from outside (pressure, reward, fear) or drawn by what we perceive as worth acting for.
The framework does not tell people what to conclude. This follows from its own logic: imposed values would turn intrinsic normativity into an extrinsic one.
The order of our loves. The pathology the framework diagnoses is not loving unreal things, but loving lesser things above greater ones.
Being unable to see the lens you think through. The lens becomes invisible and is mistaken for reality itself.
Eight positions across the two axes of IMT, describing how a person is perceiving and responding to Value. Positions and trajectories, not a ladder.
That the framework works in practice is not evidence that its ontology is true. Its practical value lies in what it helps people see and try.
A public record of what the framework predicts in advance, so that it can be checked against what happens.
Ending a tension before it can do its work. The marketing paradigm manufactures tension and then discharges it cheaply: this is the magic solution.
The direction of action. Extrinsic purpose is a target or outcome; intrinsic purpose is a source, a calling, a way of participating.
The hardest open problem: experience alone cannot show whether we perceive Value or only represent it through evolved systems.
IMT and its research programme can succeed or fail independently of AP. The motivation model does not stand or fall with the metaphysics.
When a purpose keeps running after the value-encounter that grounded it has stopped constraining it. The mission continues; its reason has gone.
The attunement that settles what can matter at all, held in common across a culture. It is felt as "how things are", not as a belief.
When a framework that claims to be neutral carries hidden judgements about what is good. The concealment criterion tests for it.
A false metanarrative supplies its own complete version of the good, the true and the beautiful. That completeness is why capture is stable, not brittle.
A structural diagnostic: a captured metanarrative can be traced by the forms of suffering it produces and then cannot account for.
A facilitated group practice in which people exercise the Synaxis together to surface and recalibrate the VMP codes they share. Coming soon.
The innate faculty of meta-aware attention that holds factual perception and value perception together. It sees both the story being told and the VMP grammar beneath it.
The right to dissent, understood as faithfulness to Value. Disagreeing with a group, or with the framework itself, can be an act of fidelity.
The second axis of IMT: whether a motivation is directed toward Value itself, or toward something else such as a reward, status or a target.
The experience of being drawn toward Value. Its structure is tension held in unity, and it appears in three equal modes: the good, the true and the beautiful.
A story or piece of work that carries change by provoking, not instructing: it resolves the event but withholds the verdict, and lives inside a practice.
What happens when a thick concept is converted into a thin, measurable one: flourishing becomes "wellbeing scores", meaning becomes "satisfaction".
We attend to the world in two ways: narrowly, to grasp and use it, and openly, to receive it whole. The Synaxis holds both.
The quality of something mattering: felt as a weight, a resonance, a call. On the framework's working hypothesis, a real feature of reality, not a projection.
Value (capital V) is what matters in itself. Values (lower case) are the priorities a person or culture holds. The two are easily confused.
The innate, trainable capacity to perceive Value before it is filtered through analysis. It can be developed like a muscle, or left to atrophy.
The cumulative cultural damage of repeated extrinsic codes: anxiety, status-seeking, passivity and meaninglessness building up in the atmosphere like pollutants.
The configuration of Value, Motivation and Purpose carried by a message, practice or culture. It shapes which values feel real.
Value, Motivation and Purpose: three primitives that work as one system. A tool for seeing what drives a story, a campaign or a culture, tested in use.
Knowing through measurement, modelling and causal explanation. It asks: what can be objectively measured and modelled?
Knowing through lived meaning, felt value and first-person experience. It asks: what is it like, and what matters here?
Knowing through relationships, systems and the coupling of organism and environment. It asks: what relations organise behaviour and meaning?
Knowing through discernment of goods, aims and what ought to matter. It asks: what is worth orienting toward?
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