
Life-Coherent Discernment and Repair
Re-Grounding Spirituality, Religion, Peace, and Geopolitical Conflict in the Protection of LifeBy Dr Bichara SahelyLength5h 25m
About this audiobook
Life-Coherent Discernment and Repair explores how spirituality, organized religion, peace, and geopolitical conflict can be re-grounded in the protection of life. Building on the life-coherent framework, it argues that the spiritual analogue of measurement is discernment: the capacity to ask what is being treated as sacred, what is being protected, what is being sacrificed, and whether the result expands or diminishes life-capacity. Drawing on Maturana, McMurtry, Galtung, Peil Kauffman, Wilber, and wider traditions of wisdom, the book identifies failure modes such as sacred insecurity, weaponized memory, redemptive violence, spiritual bypass, and peace without life-conditions. It offers a framework for those carrying the burden of healing to create more light than heat in a fragmented world.
Audiobook details
GenrePolitics and Government
Length5 hrs 25 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateMay 16, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1
2Acknowledgements
3Overview
4Executive Summary
5Part I — The Crisis of Ultimate Concern
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61. Introduction: When Ultimate Concern Becomes a Battlefield
71.1 The civilizational stakes
81.2 Why spirituality and religion cannot be left outside peace analysis
91.3 The limits of political, security, and diplomatic framings
101.4 From wicked problems to sacred failure modes
111.5 The guiding question: what is being protected, sacrificed, and worshipped?
122. From Measurement to Discernment
132.1 The relational upgrade beyond GDP
142.2 Measurement asks what counts; discernment asks what is worthy
152.3 Why better indicators are not enough
162.4 Discernment as the spiritual-political analogue of measurement
172.5 The danger of misnamed failure modes
182.6 Discernment before de-implementation
19Part II — Spirituality, Religion, and the Institutional Vessel
203. Spirituality as Life Becoming Conscious of Sacred Interdependence
213.1 Spirituality beyond private belief
223.2 Sacred interdependence and the life-ground
233.3 Awe, grief, gratitude, humility, love, and responsibility
243.4 Spirituality as embodied orientation, not escape
253.5 The test of life-capacity
264. Organized Religion as Vessel and Risk
274.1 Religion as civil commons of meaning
284.2 Ritual, memory, mourning, moral formation, and intergenerational continuity
294.3 When the vessel serves life
304.4 When the vessel demands that life serve the vessel
314.5 Prophetic religion versus captured religion
325. The Human Corpus of Crucial Distinctions
335.1 Ultimate concern and idolatry
345.2 Sacred and profane
355.3 I–Thou and I–It
365.4 Humanistic and authoritarian religion
375.5 Prophetic and priestly capture
385.6 Mystical union and prophetic responsibility
395.7 Scapegoating and reconciliation
405.8 Orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy
415.9 Cataphatic speech and apophatic humility
425.10 Faith and certainty
43Part III — Foundations of Life-Coherent Discernment
446. Maturana: Love, Language, and Legitimate Coexistence
456.1 The biology of love
466.2 Emotioning and worlds brought forth
476.3 The other as legitimate in coexistence
486.4 The failure of domination
496.5 Spirituality as an expansion of relational legitimacy
507. McMurtry: Life-Value and False Religion