Interior orientation is the capacity to maintain a vertical direction without the continuous reinforcement of a traditional environment. In earlier ages that reinforcement was present in law, in cult, in hierarchy, and in the ordinary forms of life. Those supports are no longer available as living forces. The differentiated individual must therefore generate and maintain the orientation from an interior center that does not depend on their return.
The age offers many substitute orientations: political identities, aesthetic subcultures, therapeutic frameworks, and various forms of collective belonging. Each of these substitutes is horizontal in character. It provides a temporary sense of direction while leaving the man inside the same plane of dissolution. The higher type refuses the substitutes. He continues to orient himself according to the permanent measure even when that orientation has no visible counterpart in the surrounding world.
Young men who feel the absence of external supports often seek a group or a doctrine that will supply what is missing. The search is understandable. It is also a delay. The residual possibility described yesterday is realized only by the man who is willing to stand without the group and without the restored doctrine. Interior orientation is not isolation for its own sake. It is the refusal to make the vertical depend on conditions that the cycle has already withdrawn.
Strengthen the interior axis through the continued application of the measure already established. The applications are the practical means by which the orientation is maintained. When the external world offers no confirmation, the applications themselves become the confirmation. The man who continues them is already oriented. He does not need to wait for a more favorable landscape.