The Upright

Before a builder lays a single stone, he reaches for a simple tool. A length of cord. A weight at its end. The plumb line. It does not tell him where perfection is. It tells him where true is.

This book is about the human equivalent of that line.

Not the line on a wall. The line within a person. The internal vertical that tells you when you have drifted toward an extreme, into rage, into submission, into excess, into denial, and calls you back to something more centred.

The Middle Way, as the Buddha described it. The Christ, as the central line between left and right. The Tao, the Way that encompasses all things. Maat, the ancient Egyptian principle of truth, balance, and cosmic order. Different names, the same recognition: that there is a centre, that life is most fully lived from it, and that the greatest human challenge is learning to return to it after the extremes have had their way with you.

The Upright is an account of the practice as S Y Kelake has lived it. Not from a classroom. From a night bus, a violent marriage, a terminal cancer diagnosis that should have ended everything, and thirty years of standing in a martial arts school before dawn, asking the question every builder asks:

Where is true?

Drawing on forty years of formation, three decades of martial practice, and formal studies in Forensic Psychology, this is a sustained, honest examination of what it means to find your own centre, and to build your life from it.

Who built you? What did they leave? And what will you choose to build from here?

Balance is not achieved. It is practised.

The Upright is Book Nine of the Seeking That Which Was Lost series, also available as part of The Book of Yalun, the complete unified edition of the series.

40,000 words. EPUB format. Delivered direct from Centerline Publishing Group.