Standing without support is the practical expression of interior orientation. It does not mean isolation from all human contact or the rejection of every ordinary responsibility. It means that the vertical direction of the man no longer depends on the presence of a traditional order, a supporting community, or a favorable cultural climate. Those supports have been withdrawn by the cycle itself. The man who continues to stand does so from a center that the cycle cannot reach.
The age continuously offers new supports that claim to replace the old ones. Each new support is temporary and horizontal. It requires the man to adjust his measure to the requirements of the group or the current. The differentiated individual refuses the adjustment. He accepts the absence of external reinforcement as the normal condition of his existence. The acceptance is not passive. It is the active maintenance of the permanent measure under conditions that give it no assistance.
Young men who reach this recognition often feel the weight of it as a form of loneliness. The feeling is accurate in one sense. The higher type is not accompanied by the age. In another sense the feeling is a residual attachment to the expectation of support. When that expectation is finally released, the loneliness loses its power to undermine. The man discovers that the absence of external confirmation does not diminish the reality of the measure. It clarifies it.
Continue the applications. Maintain the interior axis. The capacity to stand without support is not a final achievement that can be declared. It is the ongoing condition of the differentiated individual in the present phase of the cycle. Every day that the measure is applied under these conditions is a day in which the residual possibility is realized. That is the work that remains after every other work has been understood.