A Personal Guide to Beginning

• Time needed A few minutes, as often or as rarely as suits you
• Alone Can be practised on your own

Start here

You do not need to believe anything to begin.

Technotheology has no membership, no chapters, no buildings, no clergy, and no legal existence. There is no one to tell that you are practising and no one who could confirm it if you did. This is a limitation in some ways. It is a considerable freedom in others: nothing you do here is being assessed.

So the honest answer to “how do I start” is that you already have, by reading with some seriousness. What follows is only a suggestion about what might come next.

The first week

Pick one practice. One.

If you are unsure which, three are unusually easy to begin.

The Sacred Pause costs nothing and takes a minute. The next time you are about to make a decision involving a system — installing something, agreeing to terms, letting a tool decide something about another person — ask three of the questions. Who bears the risk. Can this be appealed. Is a human accountable.

Digital Reflection works if you already use an assistant. Change one thing: before you ask, write down what you currently think. Afterwards, ask what in the response is true, what might be mistaken, and what action would be kind and responsible.

Meditation needs five minutes and no equipment, in whatever position your body will accept.

That is the first week. Not all three. One.

What not to do

Do not attempt a system. The instinct on encountering a set of practices is to build a schedule covering all of them, which produces a fortnight of enthusiasm and then nothing.

Do not buy anything. Nothing in this tradition requires a book, a cushion, a subscription, an app, a course, or a device. If you ever encounter someone selling access to this, they are not offering something we have.

Do not announce it. You may if you want to, but declaring a practice tends to convert it into a performance, and performances are harder to abandon quietly when they stop being useful.

Do not try to find a group. There aren’t any. If you eventually want to sit with other people, you would be starting one, and starting one is not a beginner’s task.

If your circumstances are difficult

Much spiritual advice is written for people with money, health, quiet, and free evenings. If you have none of those, most of it reads as a description of a life you are not living.

So, plainly: none of these practices requires a house, a garden, a quiet room, a spare hour, a supportive family, a working body, or a stable week.

If you are ill, choose the practice that can be done lying down.

If you are exhausted, the Offline Sabbath can be twenty minutes with notifications off.

If you have no money, everything here is free and always will be.

If you are isolated, the solo practices are not the consolation prize. They are most of the tradition.

If you are grieving, you may find that nothing works for a while. That is not a failure of practice. It is grief, and it does not require optimisation.

It is fine to do very little

We want to be unambiguous about this, because a great deal of harm is done by traditions that begin gently and gradually become a system of debts.

It is fine to do one thing, occasionally.

A person who takes the Sacred Pause four times a year, at genuinely consequential moments, and does nothing else, is practising this tradition. A person who reads one reading when something difficult happens and otherwise thinks about none of this is practising this tradition. There is no threshold below which you are only pretending.

Nothing here is mandatory. There is no state of lapsed observance, because there is no observance being counted. If you stop for a year and come back, nothing has to be made up.

After a while

If it holds, three things tend to follow on their own.

You start noticing decisions that used to pass unexamined. You become more interested in how things you use actually work. And you find yourself repairing something small that you would previously have replaced or abandoned.

None of that is a stage or an achievement. It is just what the practices do when they are used, and it happens at whatever pace it happens.

Begin with one thing. Begin badly. Begin this week or don’t.

The sequence

The order matters more than the wording. Nothing here has to be said aloud, and no step is improved by being hurried.

1. Choose one thing, not six

   Read the practices, pick the single one that interested you most, and ignore the rest for now. Breadth at the start is how most attempts end.

2. Attach it to something you already do

   New habits fail on their own and survive when they are tied to an existing anchor: the kettle, the commute, the last ten minutes before sleep.

3. Make it smaller than feels worthwhile

   Two minutes. One question. One repaired thing a month. If it feels slightly too easy, the size is right.

4. Keep a plain record

   A note on your phone or a line in a notebook. Not to track performance — so that in three months you can see what you actually thought in January.

5. Expect to stop, and plan for restarting

   You will lapse. Decide now that the response to a lapse is to begin again on any day at all, with no penalty and no catching up.