Residual preparation continues after every collective preparation for higher life has been abandoned. The residual man continues to prepare himself according to the permanent measure even though the age offers no confirming horizon and no shared discipline. The preparation itself remains intact. Only the collective structures that once organized it have disappeared.
Young men who still sense the need for preparation often look for residual schools or residual methods that will organize it from outside. Most of those methods have already been reshaped by the horizontal forces that dominate the age. The residual path does not wait for external organization. It continues the preparation from the interior center that remains available.
This solitary preparation is the residual form of the older traditional discipline that once ordered both the individual and the higher functions of a civilization. The man who keeps preparing already performs the residual act. That act does not require a collective horizon to remain real.
Prepare residually. Do not wait for the age to restore conditions in which higher preparation is publicly organized. The residual act is to keep the permanent criteria effective in a world that systematically abandons every vertical discipline. That effectiveness is the continuity of the higher type.