Preparation for what follows is not prediction. The man does not claim to know whether the next phase of the cycle will be a further descent, a temporary stabilization, or the beginning of a new crystallization of higher forms. He prepares the qualities that would be required in any of those cases: clarity, detachment, the capacity for hierarchical order within himself, the refusal of both collapse and of false restoration.
This preparation is concrete. It appears in the formation of character, in the mastery of certain disciplines of body and mind, in the accumulation of knowledge that is not dependent on the current structures of education, in the cultivation of a style of life that can survive the loss of the supports the age still provides. The preparation is quiet. It does not advertise itself as a program for the future.
The age itself offers no such preparation. Its educational and cultural institutions form men for the present dissolution or for an imagined progressive future that is only a continuation of the same forces. The differentiated individual therefore works outside those institutions even when he must pass through them. He takes what is useful and discards the rest. The real formation is self-directed and continuous.
Readiness is the opposite of waiting. The man who waits for clearer conditions before he begins the work of formation will find that the conditions never arrive in the form he expected. The work is done now, under the pressure of the present phase. Whatever follows will meet a type that has already been tempered. That tempering is the only contribution the individual can make to a possible higher order.