Potential

Unrealized latent possibility, capability, capacity — something like the total set of all that could be realized.

Potential is the word for what is there and not yet here. A seed holds a forest; a person holds a life they have not lived; a gathering holds a body it has not yet become. None of it is guaranteed and none of it is nothing. The canon treats potential as real — as an actual feature of what exists, not as a hopeful way of speaking about an absence.

That has a hard consequence, and it is the reason the word is load-bearing. If what could be realized is real, then leaving it unrealized is a loss and not merely a non-gain. Waste is not neutral; a capacity that never comes out is a thing the world does not get, and the arithmetic of the Goal runs on the difference (Throughput · The Goal). The whole system is built to produce that difference — to raise the realized fraction of what is latent in All.

The realizing runs bottom-up. Potential is not released by an institution deciding to release it; it comes out of particular people, one at a time, doing the specific thing only they can do, in the company of others who need them to do it (Inexhaustible Individuals · Genius · Capability · Capacity). This is why the Game's instruments are shaped the way they are: a Quest big enough to require what a person has not yet used, a Cell small enough that their absence is noticed, and a zone pitched so that the stretch is real and survivable.

There is a shadow side, and it is worth naming plainly. Potential can be used as a rod — a standard nobody ever meets, held over a life to keep it dissatisfied. The canon's frame is the opposite: potential is what is being drawn out with help and delight, at the pace a living thing actually grows, not a debt owed. Becoming is the ordinary word for the process, and it has no finish line.

Also called: latent possibility · capacity not yet realized Stands on: Reality · Being · ØNE · All Opens onto: Becoming · Throughput · Capability · Capacity · Genius · Inexhaustible Individuals · The Zone Of Optimum Development · Waste · Abundance · Pillar I — Sacred Ontology and Metaphysics In play: the door, where a newcomer is asked what they would do if it were possible; and every season, where the question is what capacity has come out that was not out before Sources: Potential (root page, draft — the definition and the bottom-up self-realization argument) · Throughput, Waste (root pages) · lionsberg.wiki: Potential Open: The root page runs potential straight through to Throughput of the Goal and equates that Goal with the best possible future and the highest intention and greatest good; whether those three are one thing or three is asserted rather than shown. · A high-traffic name carrying a short page: the canon leans on potential far more often than it has written it.