Architecture is not experienced in a specific order like a written work, in which every letter and word attains its intended meaning through a linear relationship with time. We can freely engage each element, usually physically and visually, in any temporal order. The PARTS of G¡a presence the architecture of the profession like a carousel. We begin the textual presentation as if we could jump on anywhere. But we do not; we jump on ‘just here’. We take up discussion of architecture in context of the work that needs to happen.

To respond to the natural need to find a way forward we must strike down the hold on our evolution that the profession has created through its responses over the past century. As the carousel of influences and effects spins, changes in all aspects of our cultures and change in the environment, the biosphere and the climate accelerate, making it harder to find an opening to jump on. Historicity, narrative, pop culture and socio-political intensity did not work. Post-modernism was not it. Some of us hung on for a wild ride. But the effort was deflected. The profession remains stuck, although there is very important practical theory in postmodernism that has not yet been properly understood.

G¡a questions that original value of a professional architect’s service is to provide for buildings and the execution of their realization. The profession of architecture names its members as ‘of good character’. G¡a questions what this might actually be, and to whom or what it is, and that if character can evolve infinitely, what is ‘good character’? Good character implies the ‘greater good’ that has cultural breadth in one dimension, and individual growth or evolution in the other. The ‘greater good’ of architecture includes all creatures and all life in any way that it may exist, as well as the wholeness created by all together, and our role in it in light of how we aspire to health, wellbeing and evolution. ‘Greater good’ is a function of every individual. Harmony with individual growth, with inner feeling and what we are as humans within our environment, is where I jump up onto the carousel ‘to suppose’ a starting point of this work.

Architects belong to the only profession that is responsible for the world as a whole in terms of the wellbeing of people who dwell in it (i.e. not just its scientific and technical measurables). Cultural change can be influenced and supported, but we cannot design that. The inclusion of maximal factors to provide for architecture in practice has been claimed by architects for millennia. The means to include all is more than any individual or team can do. How can the architect include ALL?

PART.I.Goal

The aims and objects of life conceived in terms of worldly ends are almost meaningless.

I.0.1 Supposition

Addressing architectural practice with spiritual practice can inspire the basis of a profession of architecture to provide effective transformational outcomes according to our human role in dwelling. G¡a contributes to architectural practice by demonstrating this in architecture’s Verknüpfung1 with spirituality. Conscious awareness of this Verknüpfung is not necessary for architecture to exist. G¡a develops the supposition of the Verknüpfung of architecture with spirituality, as a path, or a goal at infinity, which architectural practice serves. We will verify this by showing that architectural practice is as essential to dwelling as spirituality. Architecture will continue to exist if spirituality is ignored, even as architecture is essential to human dwelling in the world. However, the profession of architecture will continue to be a shadow of itself without the redevelopment of this intimate factor.

The relationship of architectural practice with spirituality may seem obvious to some of us and impossible nonsense to others. I find a deep peace in engaging this as a feeling of need that is being attended to. Facing that need by providing the utility of form for knowledge of transformative aspiration is at the root of this project.

The support for this goal is a superordinate program.2 That program is architecture, and the value of architect’s work is there. The structure is the forms and lines of connection and energy that are given measure to manifest materially at loci. This may not be most efficient approach according to technological or engineering values. Architects fully respect and engage such things, but never stop short with those parameters. Architecture’s ‘rightness’ takes efficiency to another level.

This project contributes to developing a more fully formed practice of architecture through revealing and making functional the essential characteristics of architectural practice via this Verknüpfung as its fulcrum. As architects we know about ‘the program’. Here, we are taking the understanding of ‘program’ to the level of architectural practice as a superordinate program.

I.0.2 Aspiring a Goal of Life in Dwelling

Spirituality is action on the intention to aspire a goal of life; that goal is the evolution of conscious awareness. It is related to divinity,3 and to matters of life that we must better harmonize with and improve upon. We are naturally drawn into the future as we dwell, while holding that back will only generate its demand. Basic physical needs, such as food, shelter, health, community, culture, and expression and communication, are means for this aspiration to take form.

Growth and betterment are unlimited in evolution if we include life beyond the physical body. If this is also true for interventions in our environment, then architecture is implied. There are many levels and stages by which we recognize this, and what it may manifest through. But it is also just ‘one’ that encompasses all. The principle that humanity is one is the same, and that we are of a single Nature is also the same. The worldly effect of this aspiration on our environments is architecture.

The world is a joyful experience when we find a new type of butterfly or scale a mountain, or work out a new more subtle attribute of matter, surpass a personal best, find synergy, compassion or love with another person, or help improve the society we are a part of. We might wonder at the beauty, bounty and opportunity of Nature. Or, we feel pain when we have no water to drink or to water our crops with; when Nature appears as neediness when we are lonely, sick or suffer injustice. These are Nature acting through us.

The gorilla, the whale, the rhino, or a newt, the bees and thousands upon thousands of flowers are expunged due to destruction through human exploitation of the world, and we do not stop. We create neediness, and the utter devastation of places. Such places may even be at the heart of our cities. This is the knowledge with a negative form that is called ignorance. The knowledge we tend to prioritize is a function of ignorance. That ignorance invokes pain and suffering. Our traditions claim that we need to discover knowledge to lessen ignorance. This approach has the effect of maintaining ignorance. We build ignorance into our intentional environments.

Ignorance has an evolved form. Ignorance is our pure innocent selves that is responsive to ‘what is’. Ignorance of this kind is natural, there is a Natural way to make it serve us. Architecture can presence our awareness as what we might be — as our nascent inherent capacity that waits for us to evolve; as this kind of pure Ignorance — through what we built. We gain access to everything around us, and we may utilize it all to its highest purpose in this condition of Ignorance. It is to discover and to act on having attained higher purpose.

The possibility of this evinces that there is a goal of life. Whatever it may be, there are limitations to perception in principle and in our individual experience, in our cultural and social knowledge, and by the limitations in our human body. This is rational. But that rational truth is often turned to negate the importance or value of such a goal. We have no easy access to this goal’s origin nor to its full scope. It is beyond life, beyond Nature, and beyond what is perceptible to humanity. It is something that we can know, and as we grow to know it, we evolve and expand. We already have a lot of evidence that such a goal exists. Its challenging name is ‘nothingness’. How can architecture be nothingness?

Spirituality is implicated in dwelling in this way. Its immeasurable potential point relentlessly at architecture as the programming of our loci as material means for the experience of aspiration. Architecture is what dwelling loci presence where architects succeed in supporting humane capacity the role of humanity within Nature, which includes infinity and Nothingness. It is a twin of of spirituality. Spirituality is practice that allows us to question the current profession of architectural practice as to how it may aspire humanely, presencing our awareness.

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Note: The subtitle for PART.I is a quote. Ram Chandra (Shajahanpur). Reality at Dawn. Spiritual Hierarchy Publication Trust, Kolkata, 2010. Originally published in 1954. Accessible here.

This collection is a constellation that represents an overview of G¡a’s orientation to architecture in practice. These terms may be away from the common understanding/meaning of architecture. They may also open a door toward representing what architecture actually is to you, and you find yourself closer to your own understanding of what architecture is, or what it should be. That is my hope. If you are not a practicing architect, the definitions will orientate you to how a practicing architect perceives the issues.

The ordering of the terms can be understood in three groups. First are terms around architecture, then terms relating to spirituality, and finally, terms relating to technology and to practice. They are:

• Architect, sthāpati, architectural presencing, architecture, vastu/vāstu, and Entwurf.

• Aspiration, Verknüpfung, spirituality, Liberation, Realization and Reality, nothingness, puruśa, and prakṛti.

• Technicism, standing reserve (Ge-stell), disjunct (architectural practice), ‘idea (of) architecture’, space of differentiation, ‘pure phenomenology’, and superordinate program.

architect

Architecture may presence within anyone; the experience of architecture is to presence it. As such, everyone is an architect. Some of us who choose the responsibility of taking the part to physically alter the environment, and to know why and how to do it. The practicing architect provides for the creation of intentional (built) environments that provide for this presencing and has taken up the responsibility for the knowledge needed in preparing those environments. The practicing architect serves our conscious awareness that destines humane dwelling in terms of humanity’s role in Nature at places they prepare so that our experience there presences that destining state in awareness.

sthāpati

Sanskrit.

… the sthāpati is one who has been initiated into the application of an unique mathematical formula or mathematical order which is none other than the one that is applied to the creative activities that take place in Nature. All such creations of the sthāpati are tangible, tridimensional, measurable and charged with life. They are therefore considered as living organisms. Hence, this science of creation of manifestation is glorified and elevated to the status of a Veda— the Sthāpatya Veda. In tune with this, the sthāpati’s concepts, designs, and constructions go parallel to God’s design and construction.1

There are four architects in the Vedic system. Their antecedent is the subtle space, the founder, or ‘nature’s functionary’ named Viśwakarma. Each has their role. They are, along with the sthāpati, the sūtra-grāhin, vardhaki and takshaka. (I will reference these from the later articles.) The sthāpati is the chief or master. Most architecture schools train the sūtra-grāhin and vardhaki, who are the ‘draftsman’ and project architect.

architectural presencing

Architectural presencing occurs at an environment that was prepared by people for the individual to experience their aspiration in life. Architecture takes place in human conscious awareness, whereby conscious Mind is awakened to ‘questioning’ aspiration toward the infinite. (See more on architectural presencing in PART.I Goal.)

Architecture is a condition of our awareness in harmony with(in) Nature as a person’s own self aspiring for their evolution. These loci are prepared to resonate with us as personal experience in dwelling that rises to the inevitable questioning of one’s condition in answer to the raison d’être of life as an individual’s highest or most evolved consciousness. A locus where architecture may be presenced is a project that is prepared with a superordinate program that (...potentially) allows anyone to presence their conscious aspiration as they dwell.

A brick, an arch, or an assembly are never automatically architecture and, if they are deemed to be architecture, there is no empirical way to define exactly how that is so. It is expedient that we assert that architecture ‘does’, especially in intellectual discourses, yet we express that a built environment ‘is’ architecture. We actively make architecture present, hence, ‘presencing’ is activity. The objects that we call architecture do not ‘do’ that. We typically reflect that architecture is (also) ‘doing’, but it is we who are doing. We are presencing something in us that we are aware of.

architecture

Architecture arises from our individual lives as part of the whole. The meaningfulness of anything we experience arises out of our belonging with our brother and sisters, and to the Earth and to all else. Each of us aspires a destination, and the struggle and sweetness of advancing onward as we dwell enlivens the field of meaning that environments glow with when they are prepared such that they provide for architecture’s presencing.

The locus that allows us to presence architecture is a lived key to our amazingly inspiring asymmetrical relationship, perhaps a quantum interactivity, in dwelling in the world. Each of our selves is part of Nature. It is asymmetrical inspiration because we work in the world with what is not manifest. The capacity granted us for our role within Nature is powered by more than we can know. Our role is a function of Nature for which we are responsible through our human/e response. It is what humanity is to do here.

‘Architecture’ is commonly accepted with a very poorly defined quality of a building or place. Edifices and places are known as architecture because many people assert that they are architecture. There are many conventional grounds to the confusion of buildings as architecture, from historical qualities to high quality, and current professions’ definitions, to having been designed with an architect.

The literature, history and criticism, as well as presentations in representational media of loci defined as architecture, merely reside well within a collective iterated human experience of it as instances of architecture’s presencing. When architecture is felt by many people at a place, that place is deemed special, as architecture. We tend to transfer that sense of ‘architecture’ to the object because it is only made possible at a particular locus, with a specific form. Unity is never away from our identity so that even if I alone presence architecture in a place, it is architecture as revelation of the play of identity and unity in the ‘public sphere’ and a part of Mind.

The definition of an object as architecture, rather than an experience, is sincere if it is bestowed on those that have been experienced as such by many people over time. Architecture is, nevertheless, an experience.

vastu/vāstu

Originally sanskrit.

… the science of Vastu and Vāstu— is the science of Nishkala and Sakala. It is the science of Vishwa Brahman and Vishwakarman … It is the science of Anu and Andam. It is the science of Brahamajnānam and Pratimajnānam. It is the science of Jivātman and Paramātman. It is the science of the Unmanifest (avyakta) and the Manifest (vyakta).2

Vāstu arises not from within being human but from the source of all things that include humanity, the planet, and the universe. It is the architect’s or sthāpati’s work to give it form and measure. Vishwakarman is nature’s functionary who is connected to divine Being and oversees architecture. As Dr. Ganapathi Sthāpati stated repeatedly in his writing, ‘architecture makes the universe again in every project’. The architect bridges from the unmanifest, from the un- and immeasurable, to the seen and felt manifested form as they work, which makes the architect necessarily a ‘seer’. The practicing architect prepares such places, but anyone does the same as they presence architecture at such places.

Vāstu Shāstra, as seen from the traditional angle, would mean to be a treatise which deals with the science of Brahmjnāna [i.e. knowledge of God] and the technology of Brahma srishti — the former being expressed through the science underlying Vāstu principles and the latter, through the related technology leading into the realm of ‘spirit–centric’ (spiritual) creations.

… all built forms are Vāstus or embodied energies. But they are considered and equated to Vastus since they enclose or contain vastu, the energy. Hence they are denoted by another term prāsāda puruśa, meaning ‘embodied energy’ or ‘built space’. The traditional designers and builders have therefore, come to be called Vaastu Vedins or Sthāpatya Vedins and their technological treatises as Vaastu Vidya,Vaastu Shastra or Vaastu Tantra, where tantra is closest to today’s ‘technology’.3

Entwurf

(German). Ent: Prefix that expresses the beginning of something. (drückt in Bildungen mit Verben den Beginn von etw. aus:) Wurf: Successful (artwork), something meaningful, also successful or prospering. ‘Werfen’ also means to throw, or throwing.

(2. gelungenes [künstlerisches] Werk, etw. Bedeutendes, Erfolgreiches: mit dieser Erfindung ist ihm ein [neuer] Werk gelungen; das Werk ist kein großer Werk )

There is no single English word that represents the meaning of this German word. This is not a concept that is culturally German. We are missing such a term in English. In the case the practicing architect, it is an instance of the character, intents, and the formality of ‘an’ architecture with all the intentions and needs meshed as a singular representative mediation. It is an object–idea. Entwurf in architecture expresses a singularity of matter, knowledge and doing/action that forms a path in the service of preparations that architecture presences.

aspiration

When taken up with its full meaning, aspiration is other and arguably superior to ambition. In light of spirituality it includes hope, as well as yearning, longing and a goal. Aspiration is part of anyone. It is formed according to their attained capacity of conscious awareness. Aspiration is an automatic result of our conscious capacity. It includes anything, ranging beyond what is mensurable and material, and on toward infinity. The specific realization of aspiration in environments within the context of architecture is essential. Architecture’s superordinate program forms environments that presence aspiration.

Verknüpfung

German. A combinatory connection or link. In architecture this is at a nexus in the awareness of an individual experiencing a locus in the environment.

spirituality

Spirituality is practical activity to evolve one’s consciousness with conscious willed intent to transcend one’s current condition. Spirituality is the expression of one’s capacity to move toward their conscious potential. Every individual has taken this up in human life, and everyone has the capacity. Being in a mode of overcoming one’s current condition of self and/or to accelerate personal evolution is inclusive of all aspects of incarnate life. One may begin at any time — but one is always somewhere on the path. Spirituality is operated by anyone for the ends each individual finds appropriate. Although there are many types of practice formed from leaders’ paths that can support a wide range of people, the approach to spirituality individual.

Although spirituality is the purview and responsibility of each person, it also includes the totality of humanity and it is our responsibility to humanity. It does not oppose the material world; the opposite in fact.

Intention and will as instrumentalities of spirituality can be exteriorized to make our environment better serve our wellbeing. This is true because we can do that. The superordinate programme of architecture is applied to the environments that we change for our wellbeing in support of spirituality. As with spirituality, architecture may be felt by anyone.

Liberation

A term commonly used to denote the freedom from the necessity to (re)incarnate. This represents the Sanskrit term kailvalya. Some translators term it ‘isolation’.4 That means to clarify and consciously realize individual being from the matters of its incarnate self.

Nature’s task is done, this unselfish task which our sweet nurse, nature, had imposed upon herself. She gently took the self–forgetting soul by the hand, as it were, and showed him all the experiences in the universe, all manifestations, bringing him higher and higher through the various bodies, till his lost glory came back, and he remembered his own nature. Then the kind mother came back the same way she came, for others who also have lost their way in the trackless desert of life. And thus she is working, without beginning and without end. And thus through pleasure and pain, through good and evil, the infinite river of souls is flowing into the ocean of perfection, of self realization.5

Realization and Reality

Reality, the root cause or base of the universe, or the

vast circle of material manifestation, the direct result of maya, is unlimited.

Our only hope lies in pushing our way right across towards the centre or the root cause crossing the finer regions one after the other. That is the essence of spiritual science.

Reality is not a thing to be perceived through physical organs of sense but it can only be realized in the innermost core of the heart. We have, therefore, to go deep into it to solve our problem in life.6

Realization is generally taken as a greater step beyond Liberation.

nothingness

Definitions:

• the state of (being) nothing.

• something that is non–present, e.g. a view of humanity as suspended between infinity and nothingness.

• lack of being; nonexistence, e.g. the sound faded into nothingness.

• unconsciousness, e.g. she remembered a dizzy feeling, then nothingness.

• utter insignificance, emptiness, or worthlessness; triviality, ‘The days followed one another in an endless procession of nothingness.’

• something insignificant or without value.7

• What is really the substratum of existence? The molecule says, “I am”. The atom says, “Without us, you could not exist.” The nucleus says, “I am the one around which you electrons are rotating. I am the substrata.” And from the nucleus comes so many voices - the proton and neutron, for example. And from them come voices - particles of matter. Ultimately, if you keep going back to the sub-stratum of the universe, somewhere you will come to a particle in which there is nothingness. And that is the substratum, which is God forming the base.8

prakṛti

Sanskrit.

“Oh, Arjuna! Prakṛti and puruśa are both without any beginning and all the interplay of the senses is the result of prakṛti. In short, prakṛti is that out of which all forms of and qualities come into existence. All changes and modifications belong in the realm of matter.”

Baghvad Gita 13:199

puruśa

Sanskrit.

The term “consciousness” in English is perhaps the best term for this notion of citiśakti (power of awareness) or puruśa. The English term is derived from the Latin “scire”, “to know”, with the prefix “con”, meaning “along with” or “together with”. The term “conscire”, suggests, then, that there is something present along with what is known. The term “awareness” is the best translation for citta, since “an awareness” is from Anglo–Saxon “gewär” and German “gewahr” and refers to what is noticed, discerned, or caught sight of. Consciousness (citiśakti, puruśa) is always present simply as a bare witness, whereas the functioning of ordinary awareness (citta, cittasattva, cittavṛtti, prakṛti)involves the transactions of the subject–object world of everyday experience.10

‘pure phenomenology’ (and Enframing/Ge–stell)

Pure phenomenology is to bring the unmeasured or unspoken entity into a dimension that transmits its truth. That is generally as words or text, but it allows any other media.

The following excerpt from Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology stands for the definition of ‘pure phenomenology’. This definition includes a definition of ‘Enframing’ (Ge–stell), remembering Husserl’s assertion that ‘pure phenomenology’ can never be asserted other than in terms of something. This is a development of technology’s essence in light of ‘Enframing’ (Ge–stell).

William Lovitt, who translated this, adheres to Heidegger’s mode of using words in terms of the totality of their meaning(s), rather than contextualizing them to isolate a particular facet of meaning. Many words are made to vibrate as verb and noun at once. (‘[ ]’ are my additions.)

Thus far we have understood ‘essence’ in its current meaning. In the academic language of philosophy, ‘essence’ means what something is; in Latin, quid. Quiddatas, whatness provides the answer to the question concerning essence. For example, what pertains to all kinds of trees — oaks, beaches, birches, offers — is the same ‘treeness’. Under this inclusive genius — the ‘universal’ — fall all real and possible trees. Is then the essence of technology, Enframing, the common genus for everything technological? If that were the case in the steam turbine, the radio transmitter, and the cyclotron would each be an Enframing. But the word Enframing does not mean here [a] kind of apparatus. Still less, it doesn’t mean the general concept of such resources. The machines and apparatus are no more cases and kind of Enframing as are the man at the switchboard and the engineer in the drafting room. Each of these way indeed, belong as stockpart, available resource, or executor, within in Enframing; but Enframing is never the essence of technology in the sense of a genius.

Enframing is a way of revealing having the character of destining, namely, the way challenges forth. The revealing that brings forth (poīesis) is also a way that has the character of destining. But these ways are not things of that, arrayed beside one another, fall under the concept of revealing. Revealing is that destining which, ever suddenly and inexplicably to all thinking, apportions itself into the revealing that brings forth and that also challenges, which unlocks itself to man[’s awareness]. The challenging revealing has its origin as a destining in bringing–forth. But at the same time Enframing, in a way characteristic of a destining, blocks poīesis. Thus Enframing, as a destining of revealing, is indeed the essence of technology, but never in the sense of genius and essentia. If we pay heed to this, something astounding strikes us: It is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another what is usually understood by ‘essence’.

technicism

This word is found in the dictionary and is used accordingly. It has an important role in light of architecture, technicism is the value of technology superseding the value of architecture. This definition specifies that context.

There is a fine line between the way a place or a building is made and to rise to providing for architecture in the experience of that place. It is at this nexus that the profound magic of the architectural practice is active.

Technicism is projects that are driven by technological values, including finance and production systems and flows, that define results. It is constructional orthodoxy that is formally defined for the machinery and technology that makes them, forms them and fills them, resulting in layers of value that define a building or place. These leave the actual physical space that architects propose as a kind of apology for lost potential, justified with those technical factors that integrate financial values, and general systematic modes of providing physical comfort as founding value. The support of human beings is reduced to the needs of the body based on a catalogue of institutional quantities and systems that signify quality. This is the majority of our built world today.

Technicism will at some time not any longer be contemporary as after-technology architecture redefines architecture. Post-technicism would not have technology as its ground for architectural meaning, making the technologies of building subordinate and as the service of providing for architecture. Post-technicist profession would prioritize the value of architecture over technic. Technic in its ancient meaning will remain technology’s antecedent in a new form.

standing-reserve

This concept highlights an essential characteristic of Modernism and Machine Ages technology. This word comes from Lovitt’s translation of Heidegger. I develop this in PART.III technology.

Standing–reserve is an outcome of Enframing (Ge-stell), which is featured in ‘pure phenomenology’ above. It is a principle of how we assert human purpose in extracting and using value. This value is present in colonialism, enslavement, and permeates our form of capitalism. We now understand that in the modes of building; how the materials are got, and of course the economy, all of these imply a relationship to Nature, which includes human conscious being. As at the beginning of Modern Machine Ages technology, architecture is today on the cusp of re-comprehending how to engage within Nature. ‘To build’ comes deeply into question, again.

Modern technology in its essence […] involves a contending with everything that is. For it “sets upon” everything, imposing upon it a demand that seizes and requisitions it for use. Under the dominion of this challenging revealing, nothing is allowed to appear as it is in itself. The rule of such a way of revealing is seen when man becomes subject, when from out of his consciousness he assumes dominion over everything outside himself, when he represents and objectifies and, in objectifying, begins to take control over everything. It comes to its fulfillment when, as is increasingly the case in our time, things are not even regarded as objects, because their only important quality has become their readiness for use. Today all things are being swept together into a vast network in which their only meaning lies in their being available to serve some end that will itself also be directed toward getting everything under control. Heidegger calls this fundamentally undifferentiated supply of the available the “standing-reserve”.

Heidegger, translated by Lovitt. The Questioning Concerning Technology. Introduction by William Lovitt. p. xxix

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]. The word expresses here something more, and something more essential, than mere “stock.” The name “standing-reserve” assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric. It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.

Heidegger, translated by Lovitt. The Questioning Concerning Technology. p. 17

Bestand ordinarily denotes a store or supply as “standing by.” It carries the connotation of the verb bestehen with its dual meaning of to last and to undergo. Heidegger uses the word to characterize the manner in which everything commanded into place and ordered according to the challenging demand ruling in modern technology presences as revealed. He wishes to stress here not the permanency, but the orderability and substitutability of objects. Bestand contrasts with Gegenstand (object; that which stands over against). Objects indeed lose their character as objects when they are caught up in the “standing-reserve.”

Heidegger, translated by Lovitt. The Questioning Concerning Technology. fn p. 1711

space of differentiation

Space of differentiation is created by the need to differentiate architecture and technology. It is an essential facet of the superordinate program that architecture, in its concealed condition, demands unconcealment.

disjunct (architectural practice)

Disjunct architectural practice locates the value of practice in the measure and matter of building or of settlement. A disjunct relationship between architecture and its superordinate programme is when technology is valued as architecture’s ends, as the technicist proxy for the value that the architectural profession provides in practice.

Disjunct practice conceals that architecture takes place as experiencing a quality of awareness. Such practice values professional service according to technological and material measure of building systems and the building process and financial value. While conscious mind’s quality and individuals’ aspiration for the essential raison d’être of life is human/e purpose in dwelling, disjunct practice is its negation through technicist valuation. This concealing, nevertheless, has an essential influence on the world for humanity’s evolution to destine the unconcealing of life’s goal.

‘idea (of) architecture’

‘Idea (of) architecture’ is a term for buildings that are taken as architecture because they exhibit signs of architecture that are applied in their design. ‘Idea (of) architecture’ engages a formal and aesthetic technological ‘standing reserve’, like a catalogue, and a language of ‘architecture’. It is the technic of signs of architecture, disjunct from architectural value. This includes various forms of shelter, built shapes, details, images, materials like bricks, programmes like the kitchens or an opera, and institutions and systems representing human comfort that are present in way that signifies architecture. The categories are very broad because everything is implicated as we dwell.

Post-Modernism originated in the 1960s, and is often located at its start by Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture12, to reorientate the profession of architecture to greater meaningfulness from relatively new but established formulae such as, for example, the International Style and related modernist architecture. I agree with Robert Venturi when he said that he was never a postmodernist, and that this book is useful to postmodernism, but was not itself postmodernist.

The issue that Complexity and Contradiction responds to is that architecture had become abstracted within its own Modernist logic, was becoming elitist and unintelligible to the average person, and had become bland and mechanical. Forms that we traditionally associate with architecture such as the classical Greek and Roman styles, as well as programmatic constructional materials or components such as roof or window were abolished leaving. There is brilliant architecture in this mode, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, and hundreds of mechanical buildings around it. The Seagram building is hard to understand as different from those hundreds for many people.

There are classicist and abstract tendencies in post–modernism. The former that came up in the 1960s is typically called Post-Modernism, spelled in a number of ways. I am spelling it simply as ‘postmodernism’. Deconstructivism came about in the 1980s. Deconstruction typically eschews traditional formal assumptions, hence my preference for differentiating postmodernism as ‘abstract’ postmodernism and ‘classical’ postmodernism. Both were intended to strengthen architecture beyond context-less ‘pure’ technological built form and elitist abstract references, with a technic of language-like signifiers. Deconstructivism took a path that eschewed the past, while orientating to emotion and feelings. These are generally not subtle.

Postmodernist architecture does not necessarily result in architecture. It is a double–edged sword. While these efforts bring in meaning contextually, using antecedents rather than dogmatically ‘leaving the past behind’, it often becomes a form of technic again, nevertheless ‘Enframing’ these signs. The cultural force that conceals architecture easily overcomes that effort and architecture remains mainly concealed in the idea (of) architecture.

superordinate program

The superordinate program that is architecture is to provide for and to support human aspiration and the goal of life. This superordinate programme defines the architect’s service to ‘presence’ our aspiration to evolve spiritually as a particular condition of awareness that is linked to the locus, to support of the evolutionary force that takes place in each of us as spirituality.

It is a singular program that is super ordinate to those that we prepare our projects with, such as kitchens or public spaces, of rooms, spaces or functions, and planning and urbanism. The superordinate program does not serve each and everyone’s individual needs at that level. Those are the programs for buildings, spaces and settlements, and serve as the means for presencing architecture. The superordinate program is for the experience of presencing the state of awareness aspiring in our capacity of consciousness.

The superordinate programme exists because of our capacity through thought and that our knowledge beyond ‘all this’ reaches beyond, deep into consciousness. We might feel it, but it has no attributes and collapses into a not-point zero field of content–less faith that could be said to be devotion (bhakti). The condition of content–less awareness begins when freedom-of-choice transforms to duty and touches love and the possibility of merger with the divine. Architects in practice prepare loci with this superordinate programme to support humanity’s destining to realize our granted aspiration.

The superordinate programme pulls toward us a science that will be discovered anew and transform the practice of architecture.

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G¡a is ordered in PARTS. The PARTS are anchored in Babuji Maharaj’s chapter ‘The Goal’ in his book Reality at Dawn.12 Five statements that inspire the content and liveliness of each part are quoted from that chapter at the beginning of each PART below. These anchor our working definition of the goal of life.

Now, you might ask how I can assert a goal for human life AND then propose a definition of it. It may seem arrogant to claim both such a goal and its definition. For many of you, even the idea of a goal of life may seem preposterous or disturbing. If there is a such a goal, what responsibility might we be delinquent in?

This goal is a supposition. The work of this project can proceed with this holding the place of such a goal. It is a plausible goal, however. It can be taken as a fact, but it is not unless it is real in our own individual awareness as a truth. If we take a step back to consider what a goal of life might be, approaching that through spiritual practice, our inquisitive or aspirational nature might be brought to attention. Taken that way, the goal of life becomes a path of discovery. It is not a fact or a concealed truth or a dangerous source of power or control. We will take this goal as its discovery in life through dwelling. In the spirit of architecture and spirituality’s sibling relationship, supporting this forms architecture’s superordinate program.

The following five statements provide form for this project. The work of G¡a is brought together with these statements as ‘dimensional’ parameters that enliven each PART. The italicized text is a short statement that introduces the more descriptive outline. These are statements from the text that point us to essential components of architectural practice, with spiritual practice as the aligning principle that is juxtaposed to or aligned with parameters that form our definition of the goal of life beyond the materiality of the world.

PART.I. The Goal

The aims and objects of life conceived in terms of worldly ends are almost meaningless.

The statement challenges that architectural practice gains its meaning solely as facilitating building and the value of buildings’ 'worldly' purposes, in light of a goal that supersedes material life.

The supposition of a goal that poses spirituality as practice does not need the as yet unknown before us to be known. We acknowledge that we are on a path to get to that knowledge. That is always personally available. The Goal in Architecture supposes that the divine, cosmic or ultimate energy, or love, is within each of us. Our individual ‘light’ is luminous within our being beyond physical eyesight. It can be ‘seen’ if we ‘look within'. That light has for millennia been evoked as the sign of an infinite realm beyond life. To practice experiencing this and to know and to dive into this is spiritual practice. Increasing understanding of this is to evolve. This goal of life asserts a path of growth and evolution. It remains that there could be an ultimate aim for this.

That architectural practice is Verknüpft with spirituality gives architecture and this project its impulse and its life. PART.I locates this goal of life in the Verknüpfung of architecture and spirituality as practices. The four parts that follow function to define and express that when the capacity and potential of humanity in the world through our environments, architecture is present.

PART.II. thought

We forget that pains and miseries are only the symptoms of a disease but the disease lies elsewhere. ...

The statement challenges the position of thinking in our wellbeing. We often do not discriminate our thoughts from what, or who, we are. This addresses the serious conflicts in the profession. Architecture as sibling to spirituality informs us of thought’s role as a component of wellbeing and evolution.

Questioning conflict is thematic in PART.II. Thought is directly implicated in our conflict and in removing or in ending that conflict. The mind is our powerful tool, and knowing how to use it is essential. J. Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm engage a discussion about the mind, everyone's mind and the Mind, and that it is now caught in a stage of use, in a modified form from its original form, in which conflict is inherent. Life’s expressed form is developed from within us through thought, which is associated with all else in humanity and humanity’s role in the environment.; we are also in conflict with nature. PART.II discusses our struggle with this conflict, in light of our original striving and aspiration of a goal of life, and how this conflict is now expressly part of architectural production and its practice.

PART.III technology

The goal of life means nothing but the point we have finally to arrive at. It is in other words, the reminiscence of our homeland or the primeval state of our present solid existence, which we have finally to return to.

Technology and its sciences are challenged as the actual highest value accomplishment of our current architecture. In light of architecture’s long presence in human life, can the turn to the means of building as highest purpose of the profession really stand up to scrutiny?

The approach to conflict within humanity, and to its ending within anyone, conflict among us, and around us, is made practical through a close reading of Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. PART.II aligns our current concept of technology in architectural practice with Heidegger’s terms. The essence of technology is linked with the inner attributes of human being and humanity’s goal and evolution. This opens up this project’s functional application to the conflict inherent in technology. It also reviews and repositions phenomenology in the field of architecture.

This allows us to move the development forward with Indian Knowledge Systems of yogic practice and vāstu, linking aspirational value to architecture in practice and how it serves. The supposition of a goal in architecture is given more practical means by leveraging technology to correspond with spiritual practice in terms of the need for change to architecture’s current means by the parallel to un–modifying mind that Heidegger presents as the essence of technology.

PART.IV devotion

It is only the idea of destination which we keep alive in our minds and for that we practice devotion only as duty. Duty for duty’s sake is without doubt nishkam karma (selfless action) and to realize our goal of life is our bounden duty. ...

When we aspire to reach the ultimate union of the goal, spirituality (spiritual practice) is dependent on our will power for results. We might feel devotion toward what we put our effort into, which extends to the highest levels of love. Not every goal can bear a high level or an ultimate level of devotion. ‘To be of good character’ as a professional is to be challenged with duty. The responsibility of architects in practice, if architectural work is to support aspiration, appears to demand that selfless duty for allows the work of providing for architecture to flow properly.

PART.IV.2, PART.II and PART.III weld the need into architectural practice through the linked conflict, technology and consciousness. In PART.II and PART.III the ‘ending of time’ and the ‘jäh’ that heralds ‘the turning’ respectively, are expressed as the same ‘self–eliminative’ property of mind as the Yogasūtra does within yogic practice.

PART.IV takes up the developments of PART.II and PART.III in terms of yoga, which is part of the same traditional knowledge that includes vāstu3, and exemplifies practice. Vāstu is architectural practice. Spirituality as rajayoga (practice) is brought near architectural practice. The supposition of the Verknüpfung of architecture and spirituality is activated in PART.IV through the unitary structure of rajayoga and vāstu. The supposition of the Verknüpfung of architecture and spirituality is verified by correlating spirituality as spiritual practice (rajayoga). The goal of life challenges the role, form and values of current professional practice. PART.IV develops the integral relationship of every individual’s evolution to their locus where they are aware, presencing architecture. The practicing architect facilitates this as the program of architecture — its ‘superordinate’ program — that encompasses all others.

PART.V Profession

Now I come to the point of what our real goal of life should be. It is generally admitted that the goal must be the highest possible limit of human approach. ...

The final point of approach is where every kind of force, power activity or even stimulus disappears and a man enters a state of complete negation, Nothingness or Zero.

The profession of architecture is challenged with current practice formed as a symptomatology. That symptomatology is made up of the dysfunctions that do not require mitigation or special skills and are not directly about the output of architecture. This is a form of need for change, where the conditions that create the myriad issues are transformed.

The symptomatology is zero. When these professional dysfunctions are removed, the symptomatology—the evidence of the profession’s current 'disease'—effectively reaches zero, allowing for a clean slate. The profession is set on a trajectory that serves the zero of our pure purpose. If architecture does indeed serve the goal of life in dwelling in the world, it is implied by this symptomatology. Service at zero allows us to build a profession in harmony with life, meaning with Nature, including human capacity, and to again initiate a new transformation of techné. Beginning as human/e aspiration to know what that goal could be in practice, what will the profession of architecture become!

A symptomatology of architectural professional practice is created in three stages: PART.V.1.3. Symptomatology, PART.V.2. Discrimination and PART.V.3.Verknüpfung. The profession of architectural practice is projected as the profession as symptomatology through the medium of the current techno–profession, using its terms. Current architectural practice is used to build that symptomatological construct that expresses the necessity of unconcealing the profession. Carl Jung identified a term in alchemy called the nigredo, which is the condition that implicates its own elimination or reversal. Our current technological means and modernist technicist4 values are identified as the modification that is discarded, we give this a form and terms for action. We are revealing architecture’s superordinate program that yearns to be unconcealed in order to evolve beyond. Architecture’s superordinate program carries this impulse in its flow. The symptomatology is the means to arrive at the unmodified profession.

Updated on April 10, 2026.

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This proem is a personal introduction on this heartfelt project. I have done this for those of us seeking inspiration for new ways and for myself. This project is done as I would do it for an architectural project, which I explain below. It allows me to re-enter practice with a clear heart based on developing a paradigmatic foundation.

One of these OPA Substack articles may click with you, the next may not. I remain sanguine and understand that not every writing is always valuable to every person. I have read many great architects’ works that are truly difficult. I am an architect, so my thinking is spatial. As an architect I am good at proximities and multiple simultaneous relationships in space and time. To express such relationships through a strictly linear mode, not so much. I apologize for my limited abilities.

The whole of G¡a will connect and create for you an image of the future. Your path may differ, but the image of the future will hold.

This project of architecture straddles two areas of expertise that are almost never united on equal terms. Spirituality and architecture are ancient. Architecture has a ‘beginning’ only if human consciousness does. They are both ‘original’. Born of human consciousness, they both exist within it. Architectural and spiritual practice are twins and more than siblings. They are neither identical nor dizygotic twins. They are equals, where spirituality comes first, and is love, and architecture is its doting, loving sibling. Our consciousness is reflected in them in two realms; one inward facing and the other is outward facing. Practices and the objects of both spirituality and architecture document our highest values and the most esteemed elements of our lives.

My career has shown that this pairing is thwarted at every turn in practice. Business concerns of practicing architecture seem to be a conundrum of facilitating a livelihood in opposition to what architecture needs to be. Layers of personal experience have built up in me

• that allow questioning of this relationship

• while remembering politics and economics and other social relationships of all sorts,

• and the relationship of humanity to the Earth that it is part of;

• while understanding heroes and war …

• to catch all the fragments and the anomalies,

• to unwind layers of complexity and confusion, only to accept them as they are, and

• to approach the heart and enliven ultimate human/e values.

Unity in architecture and spirituality is possible because it is true, but our present condition has pushed that relationship toward estrangement, as crazy as that seems. It is fitting for our increasingly crazy times.

Since beginning spiritual practice, my human relationships have become more heartfelt and my relationship to nature has become more important. The need for personal harmony with my architectural practice increased. It is a natural impulse for me to attempt to unify these values. Engaging my individual responsibility to myself, and the value of my life–time is personal.

Here are key questions: Can the conflicts borne in the profession of architecture be relieved by asserting architecture as formed by Nature through humanity’s consciousness? Can a profession be based in the unity of architecture and spirituality to serve the evolution of our consciousness that we aspire?

G¡a as Architectural Project

Taking change into our hands is part of architects’2 capacity. Architects make environments, proactively being part of the change humanity makes in the world. G¡a is my response to this, as an architect, taking up the questioning needed for paradigmatic change for the profession. This architectural project applies architects’ capacity to form our professional environment to ‘house’ practice more appropriately in a professional locus, as it needs to be.

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I have taken on this project to do what a built project to provide architecture at a locus cannot. Individual projects are one instance at a time at a locus that allows intentions to be realized specific to a context. Architecture as practice exists as a very great field of knowledge that addresses community and collectives, the public sphere and egregores, and Nature. A locus of architecture has that whole within. This project forms what happens as the profession’s potential. The profession is a public locus for architecture’s superordinate program and architects who set out to provide its outcomes within Nature. This project is an architecture of the profession to be ‘realized’ in the public sphere.

A key characteristic of architectural practice is that it does not have the scientific characteristic of seeking scientific objective true results. There is no one way to make an environment. Our work is to discern a right approach and then to make it true. This tends to create an inclusive informational space and a potential for a massively expanding field of options, parameters and paths. Managing this is a key aspect of the work of a practicing architect’s genius, and it is what strikes fear into the hearts of many people.

The means to build architecture partakes of building technological responses that are formed by the science behind what they are to do. This often limits the options we see. Dogma of finance, economy and regulations that require time and power to change, often structure limitations at the very outset of a project. Every project has multiple choices that lead to multiple product and process options that are formed by many parameters. Even here, making choices in design is never a single objective right answer. It is not science to use a narrow set of data to limit and to devalue what science does not measure. That is how science works in our culture, and that is not beneficial to architecture or practicing architects.

This project is for paradigmatic change through current professional practice as it is formed as technology and building, which remains for now our path to realizing projects. But it asserts architecture’s values beyond technology. We take on suppositions to boldly include what does not initially seem to fit.

The Scope of Architectural Professional Practice

Architecture’s nominal purpose and goal is to provide architecture. What is actually architecture is today unresolved. The profession has an ongoing struggle with the value of business management and design and what being a professional means. A select small group and a few inspired projects featuring ‘new’ forms of building, process and technology of the future appear to satisfy a complacent rank and file to maintain the profession that remains grossly deficient in the scope that we claim as the profession’s. The definition of architecture in the profession and the scope of the professional’s work are deeply problematic.

Architects brave the struggle of achieving high value outcomes, while the channels of the current profession’s practical operation, appear stable and traditional. Dependence on work and values that are not exclusively architecture’s scope, but define the profession’s current mandate, presented as architecture, are mainly juxtapositional at the void where our real mandate is absent. The professional mode of practice seems to be disjunct3. The profession has become a dogmatic institution to facilitate confident assertion of competence in realizing built projects posed as architecture. Claiming that building is architecture, cushioned within a curiously banal daily process, makes practice often seem uncanny.

The narrow questioning of the profession has remained the same for a long time. The skill of proposing ever better questions about the architectural profession and practice make most professional and educational spaces and discussion panels dull, if not pathetic. This is only partly due to a lack of daring to provide answers. Multiple generations of architects have been posing similar questions challenging the Modernist Machine Ages profession and answer those with the more of the same questions to shore up a professional culture of dogged consensus.

This can go on because the essential role of architecture in humanity, and the need for what it would do, sustains the profession and keeps it vital with the Nature’s flow of the same energy in human life that makes Nature itself inexhaustible. This is power that can allow architects to feel complacent, rather than seeking growth and evolution. The suppositions posed in G¡a intend to supersede that same questioning of known flaws and anomalies.

The need to for change in the profession is gaining in intensity, however, as its fortunes sink. Repetition and doubling down on current values express that those old questions have no answers, only remediation. Little change to the issues and no fundamental change to the parameters of the profession must itself be a source of information about the problem. G¡a gets a toe hold here.

This Project

This architectural project sparkles with embedded technic and method. G¡a intends to contribute to forming ground to expand the professional mandate of architectural practice and allow a wider valuative impulse to take place. That demands that we define what that value / field must be. In a project uniting architecture with spirituality, one prepares to face the threshold where the material, the reasoned and extroverted evidence extends our touch into the unmeasurable and the immeasurable, just as any architectural project does. This is not out of reach for any of us. We are all and live daily the unmeasurable and immeasurable. The need for architecture, as in spirituality, is to include what is beyond the rational, on into subjective experience. We all have our experience together and share what is true. The experiencer becomes more important. This is the realm of spirituality.

Although many architects have no intention of expressing spirituality, it is often possible to find this in their architecture. Ruskin, or Pugin, Christopher Alexander or Louis Kahn, do their work accordingly to provide for architecture that has spirituality in its tight orbit. So, for example, the work of Rem Koolhaas is included. We do experience architecture, but it is today a profoundly undeveloped sphere of knowledge.

To ‘think’ like an architect is to allow the experience of feelings and insights to remain active and let them brush against what is done to be discovered as knowledge that is revealed as architecture, which everyone participates in together. Dwelling is superordinate to what is materially ‘constructed’ in world in this way. That is what presences as architecture. No activity of dwelling in the world can be exclusively material. There is no escape from this escape from the material into our hearts’ valuation.

Yet, we cannot work from outside dwelling. It is necessary to state the obvious — that we are alive in this life, in this form. We are in it until the end. So gaining an exterior to attain objectivity seems to be kind of nuts. G¡a shows how the objectivity of technology and its sciences is limiting, remaining within a narrow realm. Our consciousness exists at two realms; one inward facing and the other is outward facing that are necessarily included in projects of architecture. Realms and ‘worlds’ that are not material and have no sensible evidence are part of this.

A feeling is not something we can prove, and it is also not something that we can disprove. It does not mean that something does not exist, only that science cannot investigate it. Architects do. Architecture is something that we can ascertain beyond the material sensible life, with no data of measure. The realized form presences our aspiration, and architecture is a form of measure. G¡a forms a point of view that architecture is about awareness that is beyond measure and within human knowledge. This leaves us a lot of opportunity.

This project seeks to be a work of architecture at alocusof profession to be experienced by the reader. It is no philosophical work, just as it is not science. Just as science does, however, philosophical work informs our approach. This project does not reach for the ragged ends of philosophical digging in obscure corners. Heidegger’s work for example, is widely accepted and backed up by an industry of Heidegger scholarship. Your open mind is requested where questioning materialism and current technology and its sciences may seem to involve great leaps, and where novel juxtapositions of elements that are traditional or opposed occur.

Questioning the Techno-Profession

To question technology’s reign within architecture might seem for many of you to be a breach. Technology is after all the bread and butter of most architects’ business. Architecture existed long before, and it was never dependent upon technology.

How we use technology and its sciences today is a reflection of our inner human condition. Technological requirements can be a way to avoid personal experience of being human/e. This is a critical issue in architectural practice, in the structure of projects and their outcomes. It is implicated by the qualification that the architect be ‘of good character’. If we unpack that, a person’s status consciousness is not far from consideration. The means of architectural practice is foremost the architect. Removing the hindrances anyone faces in their inner life (i.e. through spiritual practice) is the same as what architects must do now to reveal the architecture that it may presence.

No matter how irrelevant or nonexistent or not-perceptible or concealed spirituality may seem, it is a formidable part of all areas of human life. No matter how irrelevant or nonexistent or not-perceptible or concealed architecture may seem, it is a formidable presence in all areas of human life.

We are always free to proceed even if science or a technologist is unable to verify spirituality and its parameters, for neither can they define architecture, life, love and feelings, all of which most clearly exist. The result of experience is as valid as any science. Critical thinking will not be lost where spirituality is in play. Moving away from dependence on technology will create the unconcealing definition of architecture and add responsibility for the professional architect that is tremendously important to humanity, to conscious wellbeing and to nature. It will provide for a huge increase in the fortunes of practicing architects.

The Goal in Architecture is a project of two commonly accepted children of consciousness as a step toward realizing their unity in practice to realize the superordinate program of architecture anew. It forms a strategic scaffold. It can be built out, verified further and developed in practice. Architectural practice can be joyous in hopeful provisory totality that absolutely includes all that may be.

As I take on contributing this work to address architecture and the profession from the point of view of architectural practice, I need to train and struggle for whatever it is. I have turned the corner toward a new stage in completing it this way.

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The project is titled,

The Goal in Architecture

The mutual claiming of one another of spirituality and architecture.

This Preface is revised, and the following articles, including the rest of the N – Series introductory articles through #17 will be revised.

This Preface introduces key points that we will be crossing over the course of G¡a. Expectations and traditions will be challenged. The terms I use are meant to be descriptive. Typical nomenclature often invokes packaged assumptions that are anachronistic. For example, architects in North America are using the term ‘design’ to imply everything that an architect might do, yet it truly is only one technique in the process of project production. To use the term this way implies a belonging to the current process, so I do not use ‘design’ like that.

You are forewarned that this will bring new concepts in combinations that may be unexpected.

The whole of The Goal in Architecture addresses the weakening architectural profession. It approaches architecture1 as serving the highest purpose of human life. It is initiated with a supposition of a Verknüpfung2 of architecture and spirituality.3 I use the following definition for Verknüpfung, a German term: connectedness and a combinatory linking operation that joins at a nexus. You and I are that nexus individually, but all of us together form that nexus within the earth’s life and its ‘nature’. This supposition is taken, similar to a hypothesis, as a way to bring spirituality into the space of the architect’s work functionally. It is developed to address the problem of making a more suitable model for the profession of architectural practice. It is for a strong profession that is representative of architecture.

I define architecture as awareness within a person of their evolving aspiration4 at a particular locus of the world that has been prepared by people, for people. From this fact, all else unfolds. Architecture is not buildings and is superordinate to building and all of the programs that may derive that building, its construction and the use of its means. Architecture is internal as our experience and is not the building. It is part of nature, including conscious intentionality in humanity’s purpose and thus serves and is served in unity with nature. It is the need to (re)discover our connection to the source of life, to love, to evolve and aspire our highest value. Value is taken here are multi-faceted and for you to expand on as your own. Architecture’s benefit to our societies has to do with the goal of life, while the fortunes of the architect are bound up today with long term anomalous conditions that form the need to re–discover practice of architecture that is superordinate to its means.

As such, architecture is an entirely distinct element, as stated in OPA moves ahead with G¡a, The Serial, from building, and originates in consciousness rather than the materiality of the world. Thus, the need to rediscover architecture at multiple levels, from the individual architect to the profession and within our cultures.

Lack of Architecture

The profession is at an end stage. Architecture in practice comprehends this. How? Current architecture in practice is structured around realizing buildings. We have ended up today with a profession that represents this as creating the architecture of concealing architecture. Buildings are called architecture, and the profession that organizes itself around this, but the results are not necessarilly nor often architecture. Architecture is not required, and how can it be? The education of professional degrees often still attempts to inculcate that requirement at a personal level, and more successfully develop it in those who natively know it. I have heard more than once the frustration of firm’s management telling a room that what new graduate architects bring to the firm is a lot of impractical unrealistic bullshit. They are often angry. The unpleasant truth of everyday experience is that a project is not architecture because an architect worked on it.

However, what we do as conscious beings always implies that architecture would be realized. This is where this project finds its footing. Whenever humans alter the environment, the potential for architecture is enlivened. If that potential is built as forms of the factors that stop it, while still calling it architecture, I call that concealed. Concealing architecture, as opposed to architecture, is my way of expressing that whatever humanity builds, our active presence means architectural potential is a priori present.

It is so difficult to differentiate that potential for architecture from its realization when our current profession imbibes so deeply in exploiting that assumption. This is core of why the profession is losing value. Defining concealing architecture is my way of expressing this potential when it is thwarted, but nevertheless represents human intent and aspiration, as failing to provide architecture.

The method of this research is based on verifying that architectural practice and spirituality (i.e. spiritual practice) are in close coherence, or Verknüpft. The study of knowledge borne in the practice of rajayoga and its antecedents, in conjunction with, phenomenology,5 architects and their work, and the form of professional practice, shows that contemporary architectural practice is a symptomatology, not merely characteristic issues to overcome in practice. It develops this symptomatology in light of the architectural profession as being a superordinate program6 of our natural environment.

Current practice as posed by Dana Cuff’s evaluative conclusions in The Practice of Architecture7 are reframed as the basis of this symptomatology. Her project is almost a generation back, yet it represents the conditions at which the profession remains stuck.

Conflict

This project approaches its intention through human conflict with endemic processes that operate negatively within humanity and against the ‘world’. While this conflict is inevitable, and our culture resolutely attributes conflict to the character of the universe, it has its inherent salutary end. G¡a builds on this as temporary outcomes on humanity’s path toward emancipation from this conflict in mind and action. When the conditions are of this conflict, there is no architecture. Our technology is a key issue to eliminating conflict as its own self-elimination … this is introduced above and is deeply engaged in PART.II of G¡a.

Heidegger’s questioning of technology develops the issue in terms of technology and a critical ‘turning’ from concealed or denied danger (i.e. conflict as normative) within the phenomenological approach. Technology, like the mind’s troublesome characteristics, are the solution to the conundrums that we face. We can link technology to the human condition. We all know when our thoughts are not under control and our wishes get the better of us, against our, hopefully present, better judgement. This is the ancient schism within us that divides intent between pleasure and doing right.

J. Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm develop a basis for anyone to work with the natural tendency of conflict to be eliminated within themselves, implicating spiritual practice as alternate knowledge of awareness. They use the term conflict, but it has many facets that all access that same need in consciousness. Study of mind over millennia has shown how evolution of conscious awareness will bring a moment where conflict is ended. J. Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm link the condition of time where interval is interiorized in mind to conflict, which divides the purpose of what we might be doing from the ends we intend. Increment and measure in our minds, programming it that way, form our ideas about science and the technology it serves. These imply monumentality, which we project onto ancient buildings, but which we have made today. Understanding as expereince to eliminate this condition is the path toward our humane nature, and onward. It is a component of architecture’s essence, and is part of how G¡a expresses the outcomes of its project.

J. Krishnamurthi is resolute that the ‘ending of time’ in this way is sudden and needs, only readiness. Process for its preparation is avoidance. Heidegger’s ‘turn’ or Die Kehre mirrors this. This project engages Heidegger’s ‘turning’ (kehre) in finding the ending of humanity’s condition in this epoch of Machine Ages architecture,8 which architecture is held conflict with, until that is put to its end. These G¡a articles will describe these elements and more to show how they link and together form the essence of the symtomatology that it develops. G¡a develops an approach to architecture through interrelating thought, technology and phenomenology in terms of the knowledge that spiritual practice as yoga can bring, to make that turn beyond technology. Rajayoga as a highly evolved practical knowledge system can function to relate spiritual practice to the practice of architecture.

Technology is a form of techné that bears the ‘wrong turn’ of our human interiorized measure. I relate these and other cross-cultural modes to provide the fullness of our technological culture that lacks a deep spiritual approach. The Technology can be ported to spirituality today, as Aristotle did it so long ago.

Knowledge of consciousness and its evolution is brought near architectural practice to explore the profession’s anachronistic state and its inherent progress. This system and all systems of spiritual growth have long histories with the issues that architectural practice faces today. This approach faces the issues that all contemporary architectural professional associations around the world share by developing the distinction between architectural value and the technology that serves it.

Results

The project is structured in five parts that are outlined in N 3.1 Defining the profession’s disjunction and a path forward in 5 PARTS.

The conclusion in PART.V uses Dana Cuff’s work. Cuff’s work stands the test of time as a register of current practice. It stands the test of time arguably because the profession has become anachronistic. She provides a clarity around various issues that make current practice difficult. Theses hurdles have become symptoms of the lack in the paradigm. Rather than a series of items of concern for the practicing architect, her work thus now serves us as a scaffold for professional practice taken as a symptomatology. Taking these problems and conflicts to stand for the characteristics of professional practice that remain unsolved for generations as a symptomatology informs the needed paradigm change. This brings G¡a to salient practical conclusions that locate us at the threshold of professionally engaging the superordinate programme that is called architecture again, and to point to ‘after–technology’ architecture.

The intent of G¡a is to facilitate a base upon which this profession that supports architectural practice as environments that are prepared to allow each of us to presence architecture.

G¡a describes our current profession as a symptomatology and implies a path toward understanding architectural practice as an original service for human spiritual growth, evolution and emancipation as the salutary result of dwelling. We discriminate what architectural value is, turning from the facile approach of expressing technological value as buildings that we call architecture. In doing so, we will transform the profession to support a public sphere of humane life, contributing to reuniting us with nature, moving beyond sustainability, mitigation, and adaptation, merging in the needs implied by the cluster of social, economic and natural crises that we face now.

Revised this modified version on 20260410. Originally published 20241010.

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There are a lot of architects who will be confident that they are verifying that what architects produce now is actually what people want. The profession has been expressly bending over backwards to appeal to the financial and technical needs of clients and builders for my life time. And before that, the profession was configured to make sense of and then to exploit our contemporary machine ages technology. The sense that the professional is exactly representing the prospective client’s wishes and needs predominates for sure. Given decades of refining the current process within the current paradigm, the market as it is seems clear. My work responds to the waning fortunes of the profession.

The caveats that create a space around this market are that we question where there are more clients,

1) with our relatively small numbers, and the shrinking value — both relative and absolute in every way you measure it — of the work that is going on that architects participate in, and

2) the ongoing disjunction between professional degree education and the firms of architects, whereby the value of the practicing architect is anchored in somethings that the business of architecture cannot value. That teaching has not gone away.

3) that very very difficult schism in our consumerist society, where our relative wealth has us imbibing a lot of things that are not very good for us. Traditionally and spiritually this engages the schism in everyone that we feel between doing things for pleasure and doing right. We are destroying the environment within and without; it is toxicity from pornography to doom scrolling, our food through the killing of ecosystems. There are a lot of people who have lost track of what is right as the knowledge of what we have to do is lost in a mire of easy pleasures, from potato chips and zero calorie cola to whatever is online. Ironically this is painful. Our pillars of rectitude are being absorbed in maniacal politics and corporate hallucination.

Not the majority of humanity, but certainly a potential quorum, are not clients of this mire. We are looking for a way to get clear of it; to get peace and stability. These would be the clients of architects if the professional practicant accords with values that counter these toxic elements in our cultures. This includes the traps of contracts, insurance, banking, and legal and regulatory complexities that have arguably grown cancerously far beyond the common sense that they are there to facilitate human wellbeing.

We are coming to the threshold of comprehending something ...

The project of G¡a by the Office for Presencing Architecture is about comprehending the re-correlation of the ‘customer’ and the product of the architectural profession according to the heart of what architecture really is. Architecture is much more than aesthetics or creativity, although all of that is part of it, as is ‘design’ and technology, and well, not so much, ‘business’. Income to support the work and lives of architects is certainly a core issue. I challenge the concept of business in the sense that the economy of finance is an arbiter of trimming the built environment down to value engineered irresponsible toxicity that represents a financial spread sheet. Architects participate in transforming those spread sheets into our environment. There is no bad architecture just as there is no bad nature or spirituality. That is simply not architecture.

I am asserting that places by which we experience architecture means places where we have valued humane aspiration that support that we are healthy, growing, and that we evolve spiritually. Architecture supports humility and the purpose of the life we have, and how we with the aspiration that makes us. We honour nature and ourselves as part of nature. That place that we have made has become a way for us to feel all that. This transcends language, and even conscious awareness, although there are languages that bear more terms for this realm than English does.

There are millions of us who know that all that we do is to support the quality of life and that the quality of life revolves around how we feel. How we feel is qualitative and can be evolved. There are enough of us who know that this qualitative aspect is our real power. Architecture is the higher quality environment that supports this, but it is not merely higher quality. It emanates from a categorically different origin than building and material amounts of stuff. Architecture emanates from consciousness and its purpose.

That is what I write of here in the G¡a series and the articles that engage things that are going on now, such as alarm at its constantly downward trending Billing Index.1 The profession as it is arguably faces its doom, and its dogmatic rigidity and claims of long experience are symptomatic.

The tone of my writing for G¡a may seem aloof to a lot of what goes on here on Substack and on other similar media. I am not breathless and agitated about some topic that is a specific pain point or response to that or just simply having enough of this or that. That is not architecture; architecture is not allopathic. Although it happens every day and is immediate (or would be, were there much architecture anywhere), its intensity does not tick with the ticking of clocks, or social media.

Architecture in not very common in most of North America. Railing against poor environments and miserable buildings is not architecture either. The devastating atmosphere in many New York subway stations, nevertheless, brings up a sense of familiarity and comfort. That is based in a feeling our own ability to make our character and will power central to a place. I take that as literal battle grounds where I have felt myself collapsing to my knees waiting for the train as weakness overwhelmed me. Yet, I still feel that I love New York city and those places are part of it. A warrior will feel at home in the battle field.

This intensity of being in places is part of every person and it is inherent in the human mind and all of our minds as we participate. It is our potential and our capacity. If channeled properly in a person and in a community and all of humanity, that potential is realized as our capacity, it happens. It happens for an architect or for a team. We have many many examples over millennia.

Over the past almost 3 years I have taken an entrepreneurial approach to practicing architecture. I am not registered where I’m living, so it’s not called architecture. Attempting to work to provide these qualities without saying it is architecture is strangely a kind of freedom. Proposing architecture without the designation is helpful for me to learn what is important about it for people all around us. I am writing as a registered architect with a North American professional degree. I am registered in more than one jurisdiction. I have been involved in the profession since my teens and was first registered in New York State 30 years ago. When I speak of not ‘being’ and architect, it is because I am not legally certified where I am sitting as I write this. I am telling you all that I am not an architect because the local architects will go after me if I say that I am an architect. I am not.

The waning fortune of the architectural profession is symptomatic of not selling what we say we are. This sentence is so devastating to the professional. The client side demands architecture even less than the professional. That is the profession's doing. We need to be nominally architects because what we would produce has been left off. We have eroded that fine point of distinction over decades of becoming technicist through subverting our calling to the business of construction. Buildings are not as magical as architecture — speaking as an architect — I feel architecture is like magic. Managing a building project does not require an architect. There are many jurisdictions where engineers are dominating the profession of architecture, while the architects cannot define why they are different forcefully enough.

We are deeply within a time where a couple of generations of architects have not received the core teaching with an intentionality to break that habits of the early machine ages that we haplessly propagate. We need not listen only to the successful architects or the corporate firms. This is a certain minority, a kind of 1%. We can struggle to enter that zero-sum game bubble, or we can make a bigger bubble.

It is my heartfelt wish that architects in a jurisdiction take up this need and join to begin to develop this as a movement and eventually a juggernaut. There is technically or legally nothing stopping any registered architect from doing anything that I am proposing. There are just very vanishingly few architects who will venture into this space. My aim may sound too extreme or too difficult. It is not because it correlates with the calling of architecture.

Everyone has the freedom to produce architecture. A profession is necessary. But not one that capitulates in production agreements against architectural value itself. It is OPA’s aim, through the work that The Goal in Architecture already did, serialized as G¡a posts, to express how the paradigm to provide for architecture is realized.

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Architects need a forceful attitude to engage with technology realistically. Most of us are good at tightly controlling technology within the scope of a project. But we do not take on technology's role with the same force that we created it and maintain it. We do not push against the barriers that technology puts up to areas it cannot enter. Like love. The architect, the client and the builders pretend that technology is human. Or rather, we project humanity on it. This is unrealistic. Technology knows nothing of love in practice. It cannot act with love. Like AI, we project a relationship on it's limited form. We have a complex proxy relationship with ourselves through technology. Nevertheless, our technology represents our human values and our culture.

The forcefulness required is the same that I use to respond to a rod of steel. That is physics. The steel is what it is, bent or not. Technology is a lot of different physics put together by people. I need to use force, willpower and commitment to bend steel. I may have to train to do it. It is necessary to accommodate for the human factors that are implemented technologically. AI acts as it does because it is derived from mimicking people, but it is no different than any technology. This is different from bending a human by force. It is just like a metal object. August Rodin cast metal sculptures. They do not love.

Architects Follow Technology

I am in BC and a native of the GVRD, so I will mention Patkau architects, for example. Their work appeals to me through their clever and complex use of form and materiality. Their work is in the same register of Modernism as Herzog & de Meuron. There are many like this who are doing good work in this form; Brooks+Scarpa, PPAG, Todd Williams Billie Tsien Architects, or much of the work on Divisare come to mind. Their amazing work pushes Modernist composition onward to its next forms to newly realize the needed form in respect of the locus and its culture. Those stand-out examples represent those who remain committed to the regime of technicist Modernism, which is almost everyone.

To assert that these architects represent work uncritical of the technicist regime may seem unfair, since we are all critical of systems that we question as we develop any project. They do not, however, question the authority of technology. The resulting environments are like a bird singing in a cage relative to architecture. The work cannot presence architecture in principle. It can only near it asymptotically. This is work for a culture that does not feel need for architecture, and as we proceed deeper into the growing absence it feels that less, and there is little pressure to question our profession. The original essential importance of architecture is concealed and it is lost on most of us.

Many architects became leaders early on in Machine Age modernizing. The profession required modernization to utilize the power of technology. Energetic evolution by architects took great strides toward harnessing new modes of production and to form the systems that we typically use now. We developed new building technology to retain the authority of the profession in presencing architecture through those technological changes because the change would have left the profession behind, much as it is being left behind now. That began to reach a consensus at the Bauhaus about 100 years ago. The acute need to engage Machine Age technology was accelerated by the World Wars and by the powerful corporations that they generated. Up until that time we were 'outside' technology, 'in' architecture. Post–war and today we, generally, are 'in' technology, and architecture is 'outside'.

Architects today get their professional standing by committing to an allegiance, which is marked by successfully passing the regime's regulatory thresholds to serve the institution. That allegiance is to the mechanism of a profession structured around technology that anyone who wants to be a 'real' architect must commit to. An architect is not regulated to produce technicist Modernist work, but we must know its values to qualify, and we have promoted integration with a construction industry largely of our making. This industry is no longer under architects' control and it arguably leads now. It sets steadily narrowing limits for architects. We talk of creativity, or its lesser cousin of innovation to keep pace with technology, but considering the most powerful firms in Canada and the international firms that churn billions, it is difficult to find them significantly creative.

Technology cannot presence architecture. This distinction has become critical as the technicist Machine Ages play out toward their end through its technocratic regulatory valuation. Although architects have been running after technology for a lifetime, by now it should be clear that that it is not going to regain its real value that way. We do remain free to provide our work as we see fit once qualified, but it is with the impressions of those limitations. We may choose otherwise, but it is difficult.

Testing the Regime

Clearly, we are not active in upcoming transformation. A century ago as we participated in creating modernist technological Machine Ages architecture and its profession and the culture of this transformation. Now architects appears complacent. AI is, in this context, an accelerant toward differentiating from technology from architecture.

Forming environments that support architecture is not dependent on any technology. The architectural value of a project and the professional are independent of technology. Knowledge for this is woefully absent.

The key is in our approach to the consciousness in a project. Working with this requires developing an approach to technology's place in the world and an approach to our own individual experience with evolving consciousness. Developing conscious control of technology in terms of its meaningfulness for the project, discriminating meaning of the project from the role of technology as its architecture, is another necessity.

The work that appeals to me has the quality of questioning the authority of technology. The majority of the early or pre–modernists were necessarily questioning technology in light of architecture. Wassily Kandinsky was a painter at the Bauhaus who questioned colour like a mathematician and like a psychologist, and he came full circle through technical psychology to esoteric values. That is a simile for the questioning of Antonio Sant'Elia of the Futurists and many other architects and movements working for the continuity of the heart of architecture through a time of radical transformation; not to save it, but to architect it. Architecture does not need saving, it is original to humanity.

After World War II this questioning of the heart of architecture came to a close. We had arrived at an institutionalized architecture of Machine Age technology. The discussion moved within a set of parameters within a dogmatically held paradigm.

The value of an architect is defined by the monetary cost of power and matter, the crux of technology. The value of a project counted by its monetary value was an easy path for technology to become dominant. Industrial repetition became a positive value. This technicist ledger of power and matter defining the value of the profession has arguably destroyed a big chunk of the architectural profession.

Some architects grasped this early after WWII, and immediately began to fight it. Complexity and Contradiction is an original approach to this fight. That approach sought to position a powerful institution of questioning vs the institution of International Style. Postmodernism became a professional style that held up history against the abolition of history that most pre–modernists advocated, which had got entrenched in the tenets of International Style architecture. The use of history was eclectic and pluralistic: a lot like the eclectic period of styles in late 19th century England as tradition began the break apart. It took on nuance that ranged from accepting history as a language and the philosophy of deconstruction, to attempting to coopt history as its caricature. Denise Scott–Brown and Robert Venturi took this on and many others ran with. I call this classicist postmodernism. Despite the radical divergence of its image from institutional modernism, it remained hamstrung in the modernist trope.

Some postmodernist architects developed methodology of control in their architecture that included methodology as form-making of architecture in the 1970s. These are abstract postmodernist architects who were gathered for the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MOMA. These architects have an approach that takes control of technology as a component of a project's formation. Whether or not Philip Johnson, the curator, did this consciously or not, this is what they have in common. If he did it consciously, he didn’t tell us.1 He focused on Constructivist architecture and other aspects that come out of the time of pre-institutionalized Modernism. ‘Style’ is a red herring. The low-level approach of taking deconstructivist architecture's imagery as the style is an unfortunate byproduct of Johnson's presentation and Wigley's strangely uninsightful approach, given his scholarship.

The quality that I am pointing to, of channeling a critical element of valuing technology against architecture, also exists in the Seagram Building. It is important to remember that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had taken up Machine Ages technology 50 years earlier. He was one of the architects whose own work formed simultaneously with forming the institutionalized modernist architecture.

Making buildings that gather context broadly to supersede the need to adjust for local context, time and place is an ideal for the building industry. It goes hand in hand with measuring the value of architecture as derivative of the cost of substance only. This was the aim: 'Technology is universal'. Mid-town Manhattan already gathers the world, so it is naturally ground for the International Style. Now, after generations of production since the arrival of that building, the Lever House and others, the architecture that it presences is less relevant to the technology of the building than to the story of its technology. It remains aware of the architect's control and the choices that give it its value in a way that the contemporary technicist architects do not.

Each of the 7 abstract postmodernists who Johnson had gathered had a one-way filtering process for technology that directly forms their architecture. They take on what pre–modernists had to do to push forward, beyond the institutional modernism they were taught. They intended to presence that social information as architectural value in the public sphere. Peter Eisenman appeared to be more technical about it.2 In some cases it expresses as protest. Some are more complex focussing in practical ideology, like Bernard Tschumi.

Frank Gehry created a regime of control using powerful technology that he developed to protect his freedom to play from the direct imposition of technology. Coop Himmelblau was expressly about protest. They took the information for a project and created a ‘psychogram’ of just a few hand drawn lines, very small, and not unlike Gehry’s work with paper and tape, but forming a different process/sequence. The steep climb out of the moment of the psychogram to building required disciplined adherence to the generating psychogram to subvert the authority of technology. It required a steady hand that would ‘expand’ the psychogram while staying true to its intent. For CHBL a fellow named Marcus Pillhofer originally did magic with it. This is a bit idealized. The process is messy. Ultimately, none of these architects went beyond the limitations of technicist Modernism either.

The abstract postmodernists – deconstructivists thanks to Johnson – created methodologies that intend to form the architecture directly. You see the difference? Classicist postmodernism was historicist, did not leverage the integrity of process with architecture and it did not question technology in light of the profession. The design process is isolated from the architectural form like the factory machinery from the chocolate bar. Except it isn't, of course; the machines touch the chocolate. The latter architects designed process that reduces the authority projected onto technology, removes it from directly forming environments, and attempts to support architecture's presencing in a non-asymptotic way. Technology is in play in abstract postmodernism.

Abstract postmodernism currently has little effect. It tends to disturb the profession by cutting at the roots of the technicist professional regime. Questioning technology’s authority in process of practice compromises the power of the hegemony and risks too much. The pressure to generate income against the lack of a market for high end (real) architectural output is the symptom. Asserting architectural value begins to create a vacuum that scares the client, and inspires only some architects. It creates economic pressure by confusingly presenting architecture instead of technology centric values that have infected the superordinate program of architecture. That infection is inescapably tied to the public sphere. The profession has been culpable in this, and the steady destruction of a market for architecture.

Rem Koolhass and OMA exemplify the meekness of the profession in their capitulation in the face of this danger. They are not meek. Their capacity was abundant, with often radical solutions, but they had to 'fine tune' to do business. It appears as cynicism winning the day. Coop Himmelblau as the architects of the billion euro ECB Headquarters in Frankfurt is a slippery but inspiring conundrum. Housing an essentially technocratic institution in abstract post-modern architecture is an oxmoron. Coop Himmelblau becomes the (wealthy) hypocrite loser. The project remains important for its aspiration, but it is also cynical. Architecture is not likely ever cynical.

Johnson was able to sniff out a key thread and to spin it. Those 7 architects Johnson gathered were put into a featured role that made them more present than otherwise. It made them iconic. It was a message to the future that is not yet here. The revaluation that abstract postmodernism points to a component of a future profession. Johnson might have felt a kind of glee at setting up that exhibition at MOMA. It’s like concealing a computer virus in plain sight, while not knowing when it would actually blow up the works, or if we would get to it at all under these terms. The infection is inherent, he just injected more.

The need of the day is to grab hold of technology and to wrench it out of the driver's seat. Do we fear that it may get angry? It is but a thing that we made. Architect's professional pledge to support technology is under pressure here. This need to question technology forms the meaning of presencing architecture now, as it did for the abstract postmodernists. A reckoning with technology is pending across all cultures and is globally meaningful. It is this that architecture must express now. But that is only a first step. Architects' coming positive role, beyond freeing itself this way, is reconciliation with nature and spirituality. That is what I mainly write about.

Consciousness in the heart of nature.

Dissolving the hegemonic regime of technology is the threshold (not yet the door or the vestibule) to our desperately needed new approach to nature. Architecture is the only profession that holds the body of knowledge required for this. Questioning technology with humane values, basically writing the code of our environment architecture that technology cannot, which nature leaves to humanity, will be the next step — after the one we have not yet taken.

Architecture is human aspiration. That is the core value of human intelligence: evolution. Technology is also human intelligence. We are in a time of radical transformation from a circular relationship with ourselves to one with nature. It won't happen without architecture, but it might happen without the architectural profession as it is. Some of our greatest minds and hearts are muted; hamstrung, one could say. Most willingly so.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was active at the beginning of Machine Ages architecture, before the WWI and II and before the advent of the institution of Modernism, engaging the role of technology in architecture. The Seagram Building is connected to that, with ancient Rome and the ancient techné, and control of technological force that abstract postmodernism initiated anew. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe spoke of the purity of Modernism. His purity includes experiment and discovery. Study the sections and details of the Seagram Building and you see bronze that is not clearly structurally necessary at all. To get purity and simplicity he took technology and held it there, just so.

Architects are uniquely positioned to be far ahead of current currents, as always. The profession created current building technology. We can move on from it too. We must. The balance is tipping the other way now, away from Machine Ages technology and its sciences. Cynicsim is capitulation if we are already concealing architecture in a proxy, even if it appears to be presencing architecturally. We are resting on laurels that have long ago wilted, grown dry and weak. Who will step up?

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We further examine the idea thatour attempts to resolve things by technological cause and effect can paradoxically reinforce them, by creating a self-referential loop. We do the same for the paradigm of the profession, and we have created a hyper-conservative culture. Finally, the article touches uponarchitectural concepts of monumentality, sublimityand bignessas architectural expressions intertwined with interiorized time and its ending.

Do we think that thought has size? Although it may seem strange that thought might have size, we do literally attempt measure of thought quantitatively in a struggle to ascertain how the brain works and its functioning. To give objective quantity to mind follows from engaging thought intervals in mind. Science does not clearly discriminate between measure of brain and mind. This is related to this discussion on human thinking that intends time in increments. We try to add measure, but it is not clearly measure of brain discriminated from mind, objectively. Relative valuation using increments is very much what we do in fulfilling our work in the world for environments. Nature measures through humanity. We give measure to the environments that we dwell in. We give measure to environments to fit them to our intentions. We gain the opportunity for aspiration in dwelling through conscious awareness of which our measure–giving is part.

Time is the world, giving distance. We interiorize time that is borne in nature for its purposes in manifesting the world. Scientifically, time exists in space as factors of measure, size and scale intertwined. We have generated value as time in mind, which we hold psychologically, socially and culturally, using our capacity to act in nature. We give measure to the brain physically and psychologically from the outside, and 'inwardly' as how our thinking is shaped and its valuative process. Time is not merely brought within thought conditions. It is thought structuring the contents of awareness. Architecture is measured work that includes aspiration.

‘I’

There is a direct relationship between the 'I'–ness, or intentionality and ego, and the interiorization of time. If we think in measure, what is gained and lost? For Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm this critical aspect includes describing its condition as “to think I am something”. We think ‘what I am’, ‘what is’ and what may otherwise be, where these may be and in what time interval.

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The letter entitled Reimagining Continuing Education letter reflects the state of affairs to me, even if it is inadvertent. The text takes on issues in continuing education, a topic that is superficially plain and logical, and is not really in need of presentation in such a magazine. It is certainly not new and is hardly a ‘reimagining’ at all, actually. It is not controversial beyond the level of perhaps stubborn bureaucrats troubling each other with differing approaches. It is unfortunately not controversial. It needs to be. The letter points to a core aspect of architectural practice is already weakened and needed, that the writer(s) wants removed.

What I am paying attention to is how the letter sets up an essential part of professional activity and to dismiss it. This article takes this as an opportunity to capture the value of architecture that is concealed in practice. This turns the letter to means to define a catalyst for advancing toward the profession's future and countering it malaise. It is a lack and an absence, and it is also 'concealing', a term that I use in my writing under the heading of The Goal in Architecture or G¡a here on Substack.

The letter makes its assertion, claiming a "compelling argument", that certain “[il]legitimate [non-]profession-specific” “unstructured continuing education requirements” should not be included. The dismissal of the core of the value of architectural practice in light of continuing education is revealed for a moment in this letter. In doing this the letter voices continuing support for the colonization of architecture by technology. The difficult to measure, or so-called '“unstructured” component, is what architects actually deal with as their work. In this letter we have the concealed grounds for architecture and its means bubbling to the surface born in a set of non-sequiturs that I will distill.

Part of the letter is quoted below, with selected statements italicized. The part that I quote has three true statements that contradict each other. My commentary, focused on the italicized text, follows.

Regulating educational requirements is a tough challenge, certainly, for any organization. "The broader the range of issues to be accommodated, the greater the difficulty to regulate," is a familiar axiom. In our profession, regulating education should be premised on the fact that architects process information and come to understand their craft in unique ways. Visual literacy, for instance, is core to an architect's formal education and professional skill set. The accreditation process for evaluating architecture university programs in Canada, as one example, requires an exhibition of ideas and concepts as a principal component. This is how we communicate, learn, and grow as architects. Yet, ironically, attendance at such an exhibition would be ruled invalid as counting towards provincial continuing education requirements, because its inherent value cannot be readily quantified.

A sizable amount of regulation focusing on professional development is also premised on the notion that one can somehow quantify reading, and accurately corroborate the time taken to research a topic, author a book, or publish an article. In contrast, travel-which most architects view as an important way of coming to understand architecture is only deemed valid by regulators if it can be corroborated by a tour guide receipt. A mode of regulation that would more accurately reflect lived experience would not be driven by administrative expediency, and would assign value beyond that which can be easily quantified.

Activities cited in the "unstructured learning" category-aside from association meetings and committee work—are, on the whole, largely impossible to regulate with specificity, and in most cases, fail to credibly validate either currency or knowledge. Elimination of these activities would be a positive first step, and serve to focus attention on legitimate profession-specific requirements. A compelling argument can be made that compliance with unstructured continuing education requirements achieves nothing but increased workloads for regulators, ill will of individual members, and no credible validation of whether the individual in question is up-to-date or not. Structured professional development, on the other hand, can and should be monitored in a comprehensive and straightforward manner.

The accreditation process for evaluating architecture university programs in Canada, as one example, requires an exhibition of ideas and concepts as a principal component.

"An exhibition" of ideas and concepts and visual ideas by students point to a core component of professional architects’ education that bears the core value of architectural practice. The architectural project and the review of it as participation in the public sphere, hence a multifaceted use of the word ‘exhibition’, is essential ground for anyone gaining a professional degree. An example of this public quality is that anyone could walk into the AA off Bedford Square in London, straight into a raucous crowd in a crowded room to view projects of Zaha Hadid’s studio. Maybe there are more controls on access now, but I could and did join such publics when I visited London through the 1990s and the early part of this millennium.

Yet, ironically, attendance at such an exhibition would be ruled invalid as counting towards provincial continuing education requirements, because its inherent value cannot be readily quantified.

This is an amazing turn where the student or architect exhibiting certain capacity in particular qualities is defined as merely visiting an exhibition. The term ‘exhibition’ is used to include this, as I noted. It is obvious that there is a big of difference to its use here, with minimal value, compared to the full potential of exhibition. The most important difference being that a viewer of an exhibition is not using their skills with something at stake to actively make and exhibit their decisions and skills at executing their planning.

This is where I question if there was an error in editing. Nevertheless, the letter continues in a way that makes this intent plausible.

A mode of regulation that would more accurately reflect lived experience would not be driven by administrative expediency, and would assign value beyond that which can be easily quantified.

This is the big ask of us. It can reflect that there is a dire need for the value that architects bring to our environment as a practicality that is lived. But we need to re-evolve, or begin again to evolve, what values architects' output supports. This is almost greenfield territory now. Questioning this matter that is not ‘easily quantified’ will show how we are remiss as a profession. We need to define what the values we look to serve are, including at a paradigmatic level and how to assess these fairly and consistently. Although the quoted sentence turns from the first definition of the ineffable and beautiful core of architecture in practice, one can root for the third assertion as being what we need to do, which we have needed to do for a couple generations now.

However, the letter turns with a radical statement.

Elimination of these activities would be a positive first step, and serve to focus attention on legitimate profession-specific requirements. A compelling argument can be made that compliance with unstructured continuing education requirements achieves nothing but increased workloads for regulators, ill will of individual members, and no credible validation of whether the individual in question is up-to-date or not.

There is a compelling argument that the remaining "legitimate profession–specific requirements" are not at all architecture. These commonly supplied by a great many non-architect professionals and businesses. The building technology, technological nature of fees, contracts and integration with the trades included in making the environments that architects plan, define our income and our financial value in practice, but they cripple the profession of architecture if they define practice. Thus, this letter becomes banal in the worst way. It is banality as Hana Arendt described it; that evil is banal. It is banal in this way because it asserts in a perfectly reasoned tone that we not be architects at all.

We maintain our value as architects because we develop "these activities" in their undefined but (for many of us) obligatory way into our practice, out of the education we get. Many of us bring that innately, feeling that this is truly what architecture is about when we begin our careers and choose the architectural profession. To state that a compelling argument to ignore or exclude this can be made is necessary only because this is like a guilty practicality. It is akin saying, 'We should be honest in life, but who can be honest these days, while so many of us are already dishonest?' We know that the real spirit of architecture is in the unmeasurable and unremunerated concealed core of practice. But the professional gets paid for the box (i.e. the building technology), not the apples in it. Many boxes are sold empty.

To call the attempt at bringing real core values of architecture into continuing education “[il]legitimate [non-]profession-specific” “unstructured continuing education requirements” is preposterous, actually. It is to go a step further, and to attempt to legitimize selling empty apple boxes by arguing that farming apples is ridiculous because so many of the boxes are sold empty now.

At this point the letter then turns the screw again by expressing continuing education as having a narrow function of being up-to-date. Continuing education is most certainly important as the utility of keeping pace with change and for maintaining functions that we may not be individually involved in for periods at time. But the higher value is to create a community of evolution for the professional. This fulfills the term ‘continuing education’ in the fullest sense. Continuing education should include future-orientated R & D on multiple levels, not just the results of R &D in technology. Development in architecture beyond the technological evolution has been facilitated through professional degree programs. It is often spurred by architects who teach in order that their research can proceed at all. The cost of architect’s work as borne as a function of the construction value of a project makes research of the fullness of architecture difficult. Developmental work for the profession that extends to the very paradigm of professional values happens through practice. This is not simply a cost issue, although we are not definitively remunerated for it now. We do not fund this because we conceal that value in the profession's technological structure, leaving “[il]legitimate [non-]profession-specific” “unstructured” architectural values not remunerated.

Continuing education can actually bear those unmeasurable architctural values that we must nevertheless either answer to or be deficient in, that are not directly part of measurable technological activity in practice now. Even beyond that, continuing education must join and enhance ‘advocacy’ to go beyond mere promotion to becoming the expression of architects and architecture’s ancient and essential role in the wellbeing of life and the public sphere. If advocacy were merely promotion, we could use that word.

The component of practice that is dismissed as "these activities" by the writer or editor of this letter bear the service and values of architectural practice that belong solely to the profession of architecture. This letter is an exemplary moment from within the dogmatic POV of our current professional culture of architecture’s value become a chimeric quality that so many of us dismiss. This is literally happening in the letter. This stated effort to regulate continuing education explicitly vanishes architectural value. Dismissing the essential component of providing architecture in the world cannot be rational. The letter perpetuates a series of non-sequiturs, again offering them as if they are new. It is blind habit and not new at all.

It could hardly be clearer how then current techno-profession is negligent in its support of architectural value. "These activities" that this letter devalues as illegitimate and non-professional are the core of the profession; they are its raison d’étre. “These activities”, these unmeasured attributes of life that we as architects are to give measure to. To make it clear, it is the making of measure, not the building, that we provide. “These activities” can be brought adjacent the regulated techno-bureaucratic professional paradigm to determine the crux of our serious issues in the profession.

Our public sphere still claims and recognizes that architecture exists in principle, for which I am grateful, even if what is claimed to be architecture is most often not. So we are safe because the term ‘architecture’ is still culturally meaningful. We are lucky that no one else is doing it.

The unmeasurable heart of architecture is concealed in the current technological context that professions in all nations propagate. If our profession wields the problem properly, architects' fortunes would rise along with the quality of the life and the world. We are all passing through this the moment; architecture is about this because this is how aspiration in human conscious life is clarified.

This question lies at the heart of movement toward a complete renewal of the profession. As a global issue, facing it will be widely beneficial. Who wants to step up?

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All of us work to solve issues within a paradigm that we feel to be true, that we were raised to understand, and which comes up through hundreds of years of evolving culture and technology. What we have been working on for 100+ years is not a complete picture, maybe it never is. For example, Newton considered himself to be primarily an alchemist. How are those values and avenues are actually valuable? They contributed to the scientific facts and approaches that he founded.

Colonizing cultures, such as the British in India, have created histories that are sometimes ignorant, but were often targeted at undermining values that did not support British power and wealth making intentions and veneration for their own culture. The truth in modern history was often hijacked by the concurrent colonizing activities of European entities.

The approach that I am developing here is a way to connect with conscious awareness and values that sprout from humanity to find our way to more advanced awareness of reality and to bring that into the sphere of practice.

This project is targeted to address architectural practice through technology via how we think. The relationship of how we think and spirituality is part of this. In one sense this can seem academic, but if you are working with your mind, and challenging the values that you tend to automatically use as part of how you work, then it is practical. These articles intend produce content to be acted on through questioning, creative process and professional practice.

Krishnamurthi expresses that in giving up psychological–time and its effects that limit the mind, the only possibility is doing it at once with no process. We have discussed what the 'ending of time means.1 Supposing that this is true, I am taking a look at the implications to develop what those limitations are, and steps toward what it is that is released in terms of architecture, architectural practice and its programme.

Achieving ‘the ending of time’ as a goal is an effect of spiritual practice. It is a profound and profoundly personal experience. It is circumstantial to the individual. Architecture is also presenced only in each of us individually, but we know that we experience it together. Architecture is not only personal, even as it only occurs personally. We are generally ready to accept this, but less so for spirituality, although it is of the same essential human need.

If architecture is necessary to dwelling but not thought psychological time, it is also not what is achieved in ‘the ending of time’. It is a prior and an a priori condition— before and after — always available in anyone. This is also the nature of spirituality. Even as it exists now, architecture's presencing its absence, if it is concealed, is always part of the environment. The absence of psychological time is more ‘real’. Spiritual practice and architecture can exist because this is true. Psychological time is a critical limit to our current human condition. Ending (psychological) time is a transition that transforms architecture in dwelling that is inherent within us and is, therefore, component to practice. We will get to better describing this 'revealed' of architecture as this project proceeds. But I have been referring to it often and in many ways.

The purposefulness that the (always) pending 'ending of time' implies creates an enigmatic relationship between architectural practice and our current construction, design and planning business. It relates to my use of the term aspiration as core to architecture’s presencing. Architects feel that all the time as a strange incompatibility with the wider components and partners of our work. It is expressed in our constant reassertion of the compatibility and integration of architectural services with AEC components over decades. Who are we trying to convince? What does this evince?

In seeking to provide architecture, the architect developing a project partakes in questioning the immeasurable aspects of the people, the object, and the environment, even if unaware of it. That enigmatic aspect takes place beyond the scope of construction and the technical support services and functions of making projects physically real. This timelessness and measurelessness is an impulse for our tasks that form environments. Architects present professionally accordingly, while we confront that concealed and concealing demand every day.

We function as architects even as many people do not experience it. The solid technical reality of the built object or environment is seemingly across the fictitious ‘gap’ from architecture that I developed in article #7 Practical Approach 2/3. This gap is a limit that is sanctioned by modern cultures. Architecture seems to produce and maintain this gap where proceeding with the mandate to serve with industry production. While our societies expect this, it does not serve to produce architecture — even as architecture may presence. (Confusing? Read on.) This is not exclusive to architecture. It broadly marks this period, and each profession forms it accordingly. It is revealingly concealed in current professional architectural practice.

'I' and Desire

The discussion in The Ending of Time includes the ‘I’ of the individual that is in conflict with what is wished (to be) as constructs about oneself. This is one way to name what we try to clear up on our path in life. Our identity includes these. They may be essential to identity. Some of this is what we call desires. We often feel them as our expression of freedom. They may seem to be needs and well earned, and they often include unnecessary stuff. Desires are so flexible that they have the characteristic of seeming effectively infinite; an infinity that becomes infinitely limiting.

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Psychological time is then an artifact of ego based thought’s creation. In order to stop psychological time, ideas of how to do it come up. As soon as there is a process or steps of any kind, structures of time and increment are again brought “inward” into the self. “Every method implies time”, Krishnamurti asserts,1 so that the only way to stop time within our being is to stop thinking (with) it, just like we let certain thoughts go by ignoring them. Mentated time can vanish, as it has no grounds other than the thought of it, reflecting ideas about time. I am developing this as a contribution to architectural practice. This is also part of spiritual practice.

The two discussants consider psychological time as a general condition of Being where the brain is not just each brain strictly in terms of each person. Although we are quite different in our individual identities within the oneness of our one brain, with the one mind, they consider the human brain is one that we all use that is developing or evolving according to its implementation. This is core to human unity in its natural form within conscious life.

The sense of separateness that comes through individuality itself is a form of interiorized interval includes time.

Krishnamurthi: Is time the factor? Time — as ‘I need knowledge in order to do this or that’? The same principle applied inwardly? Is time the factor?

Dr. David Bohm: I can’t see that time by itself can be the only factor.

K: ... Time. Becoming — which implies time.

DB: ... time applied outwardly doesn’t cause any trouble.

K: ... — but we are discussing the idea of time, inwardly.

DB: So we have to see why time is so destructive inwardly.

K: Because I am trying to become something.

DB: Yes but most people would say this is only natural. ... what is wrong with becoming?

K: ... when I am trying to become something, it is a constant battle.

DB: ... It is not a battle if I try to improve my position outwardly.

K: Outwardly, no. ... applied inwardly it brings about a contradiction. ... between ‘what is’ and becoming ‘what should be’.

DB: Why is it a contradiction inwardly and not outwardly?

K: Inwardly it builds up a centre, doesn’t it? An egoistic centre.

DB: ... we are trying to force ourselves. When we are a certain thing that we want to be, we also want to be something else, ... and therefore we want two different things at the same time.

K: ... the origin of all this misery, confusion, conflict, struggle — what is the beginning of it? ... I’ ...?2

When identity forms an ‘I’, the greater realm of life and the universe are sliced up. According to Krishnamurthi, the strife, bigotry, hate and imbalances of every kind among humankind, are based on interiorized or psychological time. Also technology. This is an ongoing matrix of internal conflict in each of us as we maintain a number of separate images divided by time internally, supporting divisions and barriers as ideas about things. Knowing beauty and happiness is filtered through our inward measure.

All of us have to deal with it. ‘I’ tends to define our individual awareness; a certain realm of the accepted, the known and the ‘right’ and its wrong. ‘I’ and is formed in each of us originally, helping us to develop knowledge bringing each of us along to move the ignorance–knowledge relationship. Applied inwardly in the psyche ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ and what ‘I’ am and what ‘I’ am not. It is a way to proceed positively in ways that we all know. It also forms barriers, limits and veils that arise as if they are original. These divisions are commonly pushed around by learning, teaching, in training a sense of learning, improvement or overcoming. This is one way of describing what is called ‘duality’. Krishnamurthi is pointing to what we do in our own minds every day in a normative process of living. Overcoming such divisions can never happen as what ‘I’ no longer wishes to be, according to Krishnamurthi.

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Architects in practice picture a future condition of the environment, (which could be a building or small changes to a garden or a room, etc.), as we proceed with projects to make them real. This native skill and capacity is a power that we can bring to the profession itself. How we handle that has a lot to do with how we feel, how we think, and what we consider to be necessary for us to represent our values. It depends on how well we understand ourselves both individually and across humanity. At this point I am looking beyond practical structures or permits, BIM, and all such technical circumstances of production, also education, and toward the fundamental concept of what an architect in practice does as a service.

The discussion between Krishnamurti and Dr. David Bohm, as published in the book The Ending of Time1, addresses ending conflict within humanity. In their discussion they seek to refine an expression of the conflict at its root in each individual while the mind is humanity's, and each of us share in it. Krishnamurthi points to the specific long term condition of the essential human capacity of thought, where a “wrong turn” occurred at the ‘beginning’. The discussion develops about time, and that is not mentally necessary, and relates our understanding of time to conflict.

Time exists in the material world ‘outside’ the individual as temporal sequences that appear to demonstrate what we feel to be in time, such as the earth’s movement and seasons (day and night, winter and summer, celestial bodies), and ourselves as we move about, our digestion, growth. In all of nature there are cycles, oscillation, and periods. It may seem natural to expect time to be part of our mentality and that the work of the mind takes time as part of these effects. But it is not clear that time is necessary in our minds and for thought.

Krishnamurthi explains how we create a kind of ‘virtual-time’ in thought. It appeared in our thinking a long time ago reflecting factors that remain active, referring here to the cycles of the world and life that we see all around us, and now very prominently in the working of machines and even at the nano scale of our mircoprocessors. This is within our legacy via a grand inherited condition of our conscious awareness that is retained out of long habit. I can describe how we move toward practical application of this as follows:

A person has an idea about what or who they are right now, right or wrong, true or not, that is a fact. This may be a scientific fact, an invention, and a delusion. That person can also think of a condition that is different from the first idea of what they are. That other thought of what they may be, should be, or otherwise can picture, in the past, the present or the future, is conceived as what they are not. A pause or interval between the two in this constellation of the two or more conceived selves and contextual conditions seem natural and necessary if we want to change from the one to the other. It is reasoned that we need time to change.

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Desire was a token of value in the making of the projects we undertook at the GSAPP as students. The then recent Deconstructivist Architects exit at MOMA, and people representing that cultural impulse populating the school at the time, had a big influence on that. Desire represented all that we young architects … desired.

Building the profession and our relationship with nature includes our desire/s; either with desire or in an after–desire condition. This article focuses on the role desire plays as part of thought in the profession in this context.

One kind of desire is exemplified in a narrative with architectural characters. This part of the original cover image of Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. It is named 'Flagrant Délit', painted by Madelon Vriesendorp. The cover was originally uncredited, which to me represents the delirious desire of grasping at power of some of us.

Desire is a prominent component of architectural practice and in the education of architects. It is less central than it was. But books continue to be written about desire, and conferences on that theme are arranged.1 Desire holds qualitative value. Design is made to respond to the desire of the client and the occupants and participants while the architect fulfills her desire for form with a range of spaces and objects between functionality and ‘eye candy’. In practice, desire is a programmatic element of a project's Entwurft that appropriates the client’s intentions that the architect prepares.

Value of dwelling is generally expressed in terms of convenience and luxury, formed as physical quality that serves desire, primarily through architecture’s technicst proxy. The colour of the car in the advertisement is chosen with desire in mind. Desire also serves as a ‘wild card’ in the mutual play of the client and the prerogative of the practicing architect to allow for the intensive technical requirements of building, which include finance and regulations, where we manipulate needs and the variety of outlooks, and transform it all into requirements that lead to architecture. Desire allows ‘requirements’ to escape the strictly pragmatic terms of technology and materiality, and it allows for serving individualistic ends, personal ends, and implies satisfaction and satiation. Desire in this role in concealing conflict within those terms of the profession, even as it enables the practicing architect’s functionality.

By asserting desire as a form of need, real-estate, commercial and consumer product market demands become a need of business and economy that architectural professional practice then provides for. Desire has come to be a programmatic attribute, that is often codified and programmed into projects as a positive idea. The architectural profession explains this as value-adding objects of desire.

Schools of architecture define their curriculum with technical accreditation and qualifying requirements. But a way to raise up architctural projects with a valuative components is through desire. We otherwise often shy away from humane need beyond the technical attributes. Desire is not really humane, but it points toward human qualities better than mere technic. This is a concealed conflict. Desire-as-programme absorbs need related to the difference between occupying functional spaces, dwelling and what is nature or natural. We want to harmonize with nature, including our inner nature, without co-creating. We cannot avoid that we are always actually co-creating, but the systems of the Machine Age Modernist profession ignore it, and we are not listening.

Desire is an architectural programme conceived as additional to what is available to provide for feelings of fulfillment and proper actions through the means of building or otherwise preparing an intentional environment. Desire is part of architectural discourse as a spark of interest that gives the intended environment the liveliness of a well made product, but it also serves to value the cost of architectural preparation as ‘additional’. The need for aspiration and love is re–territorialized as desire in technicist architectural practice to allow it to be joined to the fulfillment of the experience of dwelling that architecture fulfills.

Desire as a programme allows the architect as the operator of the preparations of dwelling to bring the entire spectrum of world into the realm of their role and yet to be free choose their desire, embedding it in technical design services. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but the process of it necessarily causes issues. The practice of architecture and the individual architect who is practicing architecture may pre-load the essential quality of need-as-desire into their projects, where ‘need’ is then de-fanged and has the quality of being ‘optional’ in the sense that desire retains the quality of choice, turning to the freedom to choose, which is human. This is what backfires in practice. Architecture is felt as optional when it is about desire. Architecture is de-valued vis a vis concrete or material technological and procedural values (including finance and economic elements), reenforcing the issue that desire as programme seeks to circumvent, de-valuing architecture as a response to our need for wellbeing.

It is a reversal in responsibility for professionals' authority. What is desired as just reward stands for the right of freedom-of-choice that forms our choosing. Freedom-of choice is a human capacity, which is fundamental to human being, generates the need for responsibility using that capacity. Elevating desire as a necessity that poses as a right doubles what is already a natural attribute of consciousness, leaving its original nature undone. Desire as pragmatic functionality to prepare environments is in conflict with architectural presencing in practice through human capacity for intentionality and will. Such programming of desire, as a shift of quality to capital value via technology, must contradict architecture’s essence.

This is more than ignoring nature's role in our lives. The professional seeks to negotiate and becomes an aggressor in that conflict. Desire undermines the value of the profession in light of humanity and our role in nature. This is a feedback loop of affect, symptom and cause. The architect is in an essential conflict of interest with her architectural outcomes. We have the weirdly frozen unnatural world of the Jetsons.

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Rajayoga is introduced here in anticipation of diving into Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm's long discussion on conflict and 'psychological time' in thought1 to add to our discussion on thought in light of architectural practice. The points that they develop help us to develop G¡a’s approach to thought. Their discussion takes place around “psychological time”, sometimes they call it ‘inward’, linking conflict with ignorance and our spiritual evolution. They discuss how this implicates and generates the violence we commit against each other and to nature, colonialism and oppression.

Yoga as practice is proven to relate anywhere around the globe, as Buddhism’s spread throughout the west, and the practice of hatha yoga and the asanas and pranayama spreading around the globe evince.2 The Cloud of Unknowing is an easily available example of European Christian spiritual practice. It correlates with the Yogasūtra and others. The Zone book, The Movement of the Free Spirit describes western religious forces that have limited spirituality socially and politically, including examples of stamping out even Christian spiritual practices in Europe. The introductory discussion of Carl Jung’s Psychological Types is helpful in contextualizing spirituality in terms of European religious dogmatic and gnostic approaches. Rajayoga is a gnostic approach. The dogmatic Christian approach joined with the still existing (ancient) Roman government and eventually formed a culture of materialism driven by our evolutionary needs.3 The evolving human consciousness through materialism relates to our topic of the knowledge of mind through spirituality directly and evolving architecture in practice. These are some influences that I like. I will develop them more deeply in later.

The Yogasūtra of Patañjali4 is the primary textual antecedent of rajayoga. It is based in the Vedic knowledge system. The Yogasūtra is instructions on dealing with thought and mind. The Yogasūtra is orientated to supporting and generating practice of yoga. It expresses control of ‘modifications’ of mind with thinking means that is then left behind in evolving consciousness.

Freedom-of-choice is granted us. It can be a liability, but it is the core of our approach with our aspiration. Rajayoga as a practical approach to attaining a higher personal condition facilitates being able to make choices in life to support the goal of life, eventually handling our freedom perfectly. The Yogasūtra passes no judgment of any choice one may make and does not moralize. The implication is of something better coming. It describes our consciousness, its aspiration and what that implies as a set of ‘facts’ that may be verified by any of us in practice.

After describing many powers that can be attained for worldly ends whereby the modifications of mind are controlled for utilization rather than to transcend them, the Yogasūtra expresses that such power(s) are useless for meaningful attainments and ruinous to the seeker of the goal of life. This potential and its release through technology and its material power are connected with these powers. Increase of subtle ‘powers’ beyond sensible methods for manipulating matter (which appears like magic) endanger well being with disfigurement and diversions and do not solve the problem of dwelling. Of course, we do not validate powers such as becoming invisible today. It is the concept of gaining power vs developing oneself and humane capacity that are still valued.

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It is difficult to conceive of architectural practice not centred on thought. Architectural practice requires a well-trained faculty of thought. It is common for us to identify with our thinking as is if is ourselves and difficult for most of us to consider ourselves as other than our thoughts. Yet, taking a bit of leap to practicing architecture, most architects will admit that an Entwurf1 cannot come strictly out of thought, thinking is only a part of it and something else is also active.

An Entwurf can be said to be a project's architecture in essence. While that is not the whole of an architect’s work, that initial concept is like the seed and very important to its meaningfulness. Often, much is done inuitively at the start, while this part of a project can be very small. The Entwurf comes together out of effort that is not all within thought process.

I suggest that projects that are majority owned by thought are less humane, tending toward what I call concealing architecture. In such cases a project begins with a lot of calculation, perhaps based on previous projects and models abstracted from experience. We will be examining how thought is essential to the professional while it is not the essence of being an architect. Thought can be used to discriminate2 but a highly refined thinker practicing architecture may not ever achieve a work that provides for architecture.

The condition of architecture that is generated within each of us is not easily communicated other than as architecture as it presences through the formal objects that we call architecture, integrated with measure. We feel it without knowing what it is, which seems paradoxical in our time that is dominated by thought. Our thinking does not encompass this, it is beyond it.

Most of us labour with some anachronistic ideas that are taught in universities and in our places of work. They are accepted because they remain. They are not necessarily justified other than as habits or entrenched systems of value and function. This thinking is justified in part by our intentional environment and the activity formed in the environment that was formed by process and design.

Architecture existed long before our common era. Or, put more precisely, we conceive of what we understand architecture to be today as also present a very long time ago. We have written documentation older than 2000 years in which the architect’s orientation can be found to be quite similar to today’s terms. De Architectura libri decem authored by Vitruvius, most often represented by the more recent derivations by Alberti and Palladio, and the Mānasāra,3 are two examples that are often taken as coherent with current terms.

Thought has always been part of humanity and architecture, but was thought then part of architecture as it is now? It certainly had different cultural weighting. Current thought in design can seem uncanny in association with the past when it is thought to be the same then as we feel it now.

Thought is managed and controlled as an intentional mode of engagement, (i.e. broader than the individual task or project) within the individual practitioner as design in architectural practice. A specific set of choices as a design are only small expressions or symptoms of the values that thought is manifesting. In our current technicist valuation in the Machine Ages and Modernist thinking, this leads to the commonly expressed equivalency of architecture and design where architecture is taken up in terms of equivalent with technology.

The use of the word ‘design’ interchangeably with ‘architecture’ makes apparent that neither design or architecture are easy to define, since it is obvious at least that they are not the same. That these terms are commonly used interchangeably by architects, even in most scholarly work, is meaningful to this project. Discriminating the two will reveal what is collapsing the two into one. This means defining them. Defining architectural practice is what PART.I Goal was about. What is the need for and cause of equating the two? That information is the 'gap' that was discussed in article #7 Practical Approach PART.I.4.2/3. It represents what we have de-valued, concealed and subverted of humanity, what value we have got, and what our intentional environment reflects. This is our approach to gain perspective on the cultural value weighting in context of architectural practice.

We are all trained to manage and control thought in its role in architectural practice guided toward an intended outward engagement in our career (i.e. broader than tasks). In our individual interiorized life, inwardly, within ourselves, there is very often little interest in developing thought's role in terms of mind’s refinement, which is related to spiritual practice. The focus is on productive knowledge and skills. This project questions not only the narrow so-called pragmatic approach that is justified as bringing professional competence, but also the wider frame that is then opposed, such as academic approaches and ideals that we attempt in school but are often not justified in the business of professional practice. That is, the whole needs to be questioned if it has oppositional components within.

What is absent that leads to the trouble that drives questioning the values and leads to the ancient opportunity that we propose then appears? The ancient opportunity is acknowledging our capacity to better know ourselves and that this is a responsibility to evolve because it is each of us that is the maker of the outcomes of practice. This responsibility is linked to the aspiration that we come into the world with.

Might ‘design’ be revealed as thought that belongs as ‘architectural technology’ in architects’ practice and the profession ? Is 'design' a bridge over the gap that we have created? A fictitious gap? Design as knowledge–production demands ignorance. There is no knowledge production without ignorance of that knowledge to be produced. Ignorance is an aspect of human life; one that prepares us for architecture's presencing. It is initiated by ignorance.

While it is common to focus on progress, the ignorance necessary for thought to re–territorialize ‘what is’ must be considered as well. ‘Progress’ does not remove ignorance in principle. Solving individual moments of ignorance does not stop it. Knowledge–production requires a balance of ignorance and the lack of it. That implicit need for ignorance, which is there like the air around us is a resource for ‘discovery’ (as we do with internal combustion engines, but in a natural way). It also proves the existence of modes of knowing other than thought.

Spirituality, however, points to a condition of complete ignorance, or an absolute absence of ignorance. They are the same. Ignorance that drives knowledge creation definitely comes before complete absence of ignorance, while the former is not a direct process to the latter because both knowledge and ignorance are infinite. Thinking as I am referring to it is only a stage. The latter mode is concealed beyond the need of ignorance for knowledge acquisition that defines our human world now. We devalue ignorance and its place in consciousness, and yet we also elevate it. If a stage beyond is possible, it is a paradox to the thinker in the former stage.4

Architecture implies the attainment of stages beyond knowledge. Ignorance is necessary if knowledge is sought. Ignorance is an essential part of architecture through the importance given to design. But these are not the same. Spirituality may be brought to the fore through the key role of knowledge–production and its ignorance that conscious Mind brings into dwelling. What cannot be solved by thought, thinking and human-made knowledge may already be taken care of by other aspects. It may also be hindered by concealing tropes.

Thousands of years ago thought itself was already differentiated and referred to as a way to transform being human. The ancient Greeks formed what we still call philosophy. The ancients of the Indian subcontinent formulated a very extensive well tested approach to training via thought in terms of evolving Self. It is difficult to relate this to professional architectural practice. Hence the small steps of these articles.

The role of thought in spiritual practice is essential in a way that differs from philosophy. It engages as practice rather than the artifacts of thinking process, such as building, planning, urban, or managed wilderness space, or philosophical discourse. It is not analytical per se, although the activity of differentiation is engaged. It is not knowledge–production, although it is ‘learning’ in support of transformation. Spirituality is essentially transformative, rather than objective knowledge building, theory and utilization of world. We utilize our life to transform ourselves.

Spirituality and architecture as essentially harnessing mind are bound up together in a role that includes but supersedes thought, thinking and the play of knowledge and ignorance in dwelling. The practice of such harnessing would have essential characteristics which necessarily go back before our current histories and technology, as do spirituality and architecture. An approach to architectural practice in conjunction with spiritual practice allows us to engage thought in architectural practice, in the context of the human communal whole that is mind, as superordinate to the principles of its practical application of design, planning and construction. The approach to this must be sober and step by step, for thought is con—fused5 within everything, and it is fickle, mischievous and relentless.

Thought can be differentiated within mind, and mind’s attributes as defined within spirituality can be linked within architecture concisely enough to become a part of architectural practice, allowing it to supersede thought. The work being done in the two fields are different, but it can be taken like two of the sides of a coin, whereby the third side is never simultaneously visible. We always know that the other side must be there.

Architecture is within spirituality as the awareness that presences aspiration as we dwell. Spirituality is within architecture and its superordinate programme. That is not a symmetrical relationship. The conditions associated with thought and thinking at large in humanity are influential in architecture and in spirituality in the same way, although their ends differ. One serves the other.

If architecture were exterior to spirituality, then it would also be exterior to being human. Yet, if current architectural practice and its profession are taken at face value, then this exteriority is true. It also implies inhumanity. But then, if it has to be human, it is true as fiction, which is story–telling. Architecture can also presence as stories. Inhumanity is then never true, it is only a (bad) story. These stories are often about the absence of architecture. As such, there is no 'bad' architecture; architecture either is, or is not.

The inner self, the individual, identity and self-understanding are necessarily taken up together with architectural practice in this way. Spirituality and the current profession are now connected as fiction in practice. That is how the condition of the verknüpfung is contextualized now. It is a story about concealing architecture. This architecture tells of its concealing nature as architecture that is not. The story is of a lot of thought going on while misery, unreason and insanity are endemic and epidemic. This is in the places we make and how they presence architecture in its concealing technicist form. Architecture is 'true' and its value is asserted, defined and rooted in the pan-human plane in the public sphere as a realm that is at the scale of all of humanity.

Not all architecture is concealing in this way. This is a time where that is recognized as architecture. It is the livelihood of many practices.

Practice works within what is provided; it is opportunity found in paths that are formed at site at a place as context. The 'site' in this case is all of humanity. Spiritual practice is knowledge as practice, based on millennia of refinement within human evolution, to reveal (again) what is already long part of architecture and its practice.

Thought may be applied to change humanity, which seems obvious and necessary. Now it is about the concealing story and how to reveal architecture. Architectural practice serves this.

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Summary of the introduction. PART.II introduces the concept of thought in relation to architecture. Thought is considered essential to humanity but is not the entirety of the mind. The current architectural profession is overly dependent on thought, leading to a disconnect from the other components of mind. This over-reliance on thought has resulted in a slow devaluation of architects in practice and misunderstanding of what architecture is. In this context, design is often mistakenly used interchangeably with architecture, with design being a form of architectural technology. Architecture is not merely design but is integral to consciousness and well-being. There are negative outcomes, such as poor built environments and a focus on short-term material gains that do not support humane environments, with the architectural profession implicated in the exploitation of the natural world.

The text questions the role of thought in architecture and humanity's well-being, noting that despite progress, many problems remain unsolved, and the quality of life has suffered. It calls for a reevaluation of thought and its role in practice, suggesting a connection between architecture and spirituality. We can draw from the Indian Knowledge System, which describes the mind as having four components: thought (manas), intellect (buddhi), ego (ahankara), and conscious mind (chitta), and the use of thought for attaining personal evolution. The need for discrimination, distinguishing between need and desire, is emphasized to realize the essential value of architecture.

This is the beginning of PART.II. This will be a lot longer than PART.I. The path may seem to move away from architecture, but it is not. On the contrary, it is the profession that has gotten too far away from architecture, following concepts that do not harmonize with today. We are finding our way back.

In the previous articles I noted that the mind is described as having four components in the Indian Knowledge System and that this is expressed in rajayoga. Manas, buddhi, ahankara and chitta, corresponding roughly to thought, intellect, ego and conscious mind in English. Thought is distinguished as only a part of mind and consciousness. We are examining the role of thought through this orientation, linking to spiritual practice and its verküpfung with architectural practice.

PART.II is about thought. Thought and thinking have brought humanity far. Thought and thinking are ‘good’. We are going to consider thinking from a POV that we construct by applying some great research in spiritual practice, based on the goal in life, rajayoga and its broader knowledge system. To these we will add the social and cultural context that will lead us to technology's role in practice and essential value of architecture.

Thought is certainly definitive of humanity. It is broadly considered to be what makes us different from all the other creatures. Thought (manas) and the intelligence (buddhi) that we build up are a part of the whole of each of us. Thought appears to be definitive because we generally ignore or subvert the full set of components that make up mind.

The separation and the disconnect with other components of mind is well evinced through the common feeling that machine-based AI, which could not exist without human perception, is somehow equivalent to us, with many concerned that it is destined to supersede us. AI as it is being produced now is insanely dangerous, but just as a nest of deadly ants can be neutralized, we can easily end that danger. AI is completely vulnerable to human intervention. It is the people who arm themselves with it who are the danger. Not only aggressive leaders and users, but the seemingly innocent scientists and bureaucratic functionaries who blithely go on with powerful developments, isolated from their responsibility to humanity and Nature. We should rightly be wary, if not fear them. Machines can do a lot of damage, but the blame for manifestations of our thoughts, such as AI, all manner of digital tools and weapons, rules and systems, corporations, and places, is with people and people's intentions.

The displacement of the danger to the tool is a common symptom in our culture, akin to letting the 'market' define our lives and claiming that the building is architecture. It is our mind that presences these things; they are not meaningful outside of human life. The need is for discrimination, which is an essential capacity in spiritual practice. Discrimination is telling one thing from another. Discrimination will be important in the coming articles.1

It is easy to attribute the human plight to lack of even more ‘progress’. Progress appeared to be synonymous with good until that short reign began to erode in the 1960s. Much of our progress was proving to be toxic either directly, like leaded gasoline and any number of chemicals in processed food, and indirectly, like DDT's ravaging of birds.

Despite progress in yield, refrigeration, biotech and management, millions of people starve while millions of tons of rice and wheat rot in storage or are destroyed for market advantage. At least half of the food that is grown in North America and in Europe never gets eaten by people or their domestic animals. Much thinking is going on while this happens, but millions of people over a century of Machine Ages progress have not provided solutions. Markets 'mechanisms' take food spoilage with transport and storage investment as an expense in ROI calculations, including artificial scarcity. Good storage and logistics technology is, therefore, not the issue. Providing it is. Progress is now a nuanced concept.

While 'new' is no longer automatically good because harms are most often discovered after deployment of the new, we are hardly more careful that benefits are justly attained and that they are justly distributed. We avoid summing up, we look to ever shorter term gains because finance is short term and the big picture is so unpleasant and difficult, even with computed predictions and outlooks. Unity over values that are not rewarded with capital and power remains difficult. The effects on the biosphere and for the climate are signs of distress and trauma that together with the suffering of humanity at our own hand are now overwhelming.

Thought knowledge and the creativity that it supports also appears to involve much of the seemingly intractable violence and pain in humanity. For most of us, thought and thinking also have demonstrable potential for creating difficulties and liabilities. One issue solved simply leads to another. Cruelty, including the constant lack of relief for people who 'lose' in finance and the economy is common. Homelessness, the stress of work structures and media, both licit and illicit drugs, all lead to physical and mental illness. Just like in war, we number the dead while the injured vastly outnumber them. Profit via human and environmental harm is justified as wealth generation that will raise everyone's boat. Mental issues are legion for the poor and for the rich.

The role that the disaster of our built intentional environments plays this is vast. It adds to the plight of tens millions lacking basic needs for dwelling and our displaced hundreds of millions. Even the wealthy suffer from poor environments when they cannot insulate themselves. In the past year there were 120 million people displaced by war and famine This is 'only' 1 in 68 people. However, it is increasing quickly on the current curve. When added to those who remain in the dangerous circumstances, like the injured outnumber the dead, this will be far greater than 1 person of every 50.

Issues that cause these problems are concentrated in specific areas, economies and poorer nations. The wealthier communities are far less vulnerable due to the means to repair from hurricanes and displacement of pollution and wars to other places. There are places where everyone can be unhoused for their whole lives. But homelessness is increasing very rapidly in North America as the price of homes exceeds the financial capacity of the majority of economic strata in wealthy nations. The displaced are then caught in miserable public environments that are further forms quality of life depreciation. To this many jurisdictions add the injustice of laws makes existing anywhere at all a crime.

I feel that we are beginning to see that in sum we have been creating more damage than betterment over the term of the Machine Ages, and that our vaunted capacity to solve problems is deeply questionable. Given the power we have and the capacity to think through any problem, what we are living seems to defy reason. Thought and thinking, no matter how brilliant, has ambiguous implications for the quality of life. Insanity is only possible with thought. The results based on thinking and the intellect that it forms are clearly insufficient. A lack of will to do right by humanity and Nature, quantified as a lack of unity, good will, and the basic values that we call ‘humanity’ are seem to govern.

All of this may seem quite bad. Some of you may think that I am just pressing this button too hard. But it's OK, what we can do and gain is so profound that it dwarfs all this.

Thought in Architectural Practice

Caught in thought processes that do not fully accept mind, architecture, our urban, private and wilderness environments are critically limited. Under these terms, we do not get to architecture, treating it as if it is an extra, or a decoration for the wealthy, rather than about the conscious wellbeing that we need to have for a good life. Architecture is not merely an extra, but an integral part of consciousness and its wellbeing that is dependent on nurture and the generosity of (our) nature. Architecture is a form of humanity’s capacity and potential because it is aspiration.

Thought is at the interface of human welfare and the earth’s welfare, modulated through the methodologies of design, planning and the technology that we employ. Thought is currently implemented within architectural practice as part of a system to gather the matter of Nature that we then consider humanity’s property while creating intense competition among ourselves for the value of those particular items. Illness and waste is created by the thought-out exploitation of the natural world, in which practicing architects are complicit through conceiving and preparing our vast interventions in the world.

Architectural practice is implicated in forming environments around society and its cultures, politics and laws, that are bound up with issues of thought, knowledge and ignorance, and insanity. The egregiously poor quality of urban environments is part of this and is in large part due to the inability of the architectural profession to make a case for architecture. Architect's dependence on thought and thinking puts the profession in a detrimental position because of the narrow realization of mind as thought, manifested as technology and its sciences.

The lack of application of ‘sincere’ architectural intents as it defers to this orientation creates weakness of the architectural profession. This disaster of our intentional environments, the plight of millions lacking basic physical needs and homes, and the poverty of private and public spaces, and also the natural environments that we plunder needs to be addressed for an architectural profession to rightly claim ‘professionalism’ and to reclaim its leading role. Despite a generation of doubling down on Modernist Machine Age models and intensive collaborative interaction with trades and services, the profession must often be in contradiction to those in order to provide this, and to provide architecture. Architecture is strangely out of step, even uncannily, within the current social and cultural setting. This is a sign of opportunity.

A profession is founded upon administering the provision of its particular knowledge and the practice that supports to fulfill the requirements necessary to support clients’ needs. This must supersede 'common' knowledge, which typically includes the client's common knowledge. I need to be clear here: Architecture never contradicts clients' and users' values. But a professional must know and apply their service so that the client's knowledge is a a ground and a resource for those outcomes. The value of the client and the client’s values as sponsor will support the professional's functional value in practice if practice values what architecture actually is. The functional value of architectural practice needs technology for its execution, making the discrimination of architectural value essential. This can be isolated and contradictions dissolved within practical executive competency. Our path to such discrimination is long, while speed of travel is infinitely variable.

Architecture is universally understood to exist and to be of benefit, yet is left substantially undefined. Architects are lucky that the term 'architecture' is commonly meaningful. This sustains the profession even as we are not focusing on what it is very well because of the weightage and relative importance of thought the way we use it now. How does it exist widely in our cultures across humanity while being thought out so minimally that it could be satisfactorily called ‘design’, even by architectural professionals? If architectural practice is thought to be technology, design replaces architecture as thinking instead of mind’s aspiring.

The discrimination of need from desire is a component of this. Desire has no architectural value if need is not supported. Architectural presencing addresses value in a way that allows us to develop an awareness of need as knowledge of duty to reveal what is essential. The full mind as its component intentionality, discipline, and will, i.e. ego (ahankara) and consciousness (chit), come into play.

In the modern tradition, thought is the faculty that is considered to have brought humanity to the highest rank on earth and that would bring us the opposite of defects. Yet there is violence, hatred, cruelty and a lack of caring, lack of humility and paucity of love in almost every venue. Dis-ease can mean that something is not–easy, away from a status of ease, difficult, not stable, not comfortable, not well, and infection and infiltrated by wasteful use of resources. Thought is also that for humanity. Scientific discovery based on objective methodology and creating material value is a tiny slice of our responsibly in thinking, just as thinking is only a part of mind.

This project seeks alternatives as ground from which to operate, rather than the alternative(s) as solution, for now. How can thought be turned so that, even when destructive, its benefit may be clear. Might that be called wisdom? Is not a professional wise?

By definition a profession defines itself. The profession allows us wide latitude to adjust and move the parameters of architectural practice. The freedom to think gives us options. Has thought manifested as technology served well? How has it improved life and how has it not? Does thought itself bring instability, discomfort and loss of life energy? Does thought have more essential role in consciousness and our humane purpose and role in Nature? If so, how can this be realized? These questions become possible because there are options. We can address mind to realize a way forward for the profession. Mind is more than a 1:1 with thought and thinking. Thought can be examined and revalued in practice. Spiritual practice has lessons for us.

If the architectural profession is inherently divergent from currently destructive trends, then diverging from useless or destructive (use of) thought would in principle strengthen a profession to provide its essential service in opposition to values and systems that are destructive. Architecture is verknüpft with spirituality and the place of thought and thinking in spiritual practice has a concrete connection to the goal in life. It can show how life's process and Nature's process could be thought in practice and what is concealed in the outcomes that we are getting now in the technicist professional model of practice.

This Introduction’s second part follows.

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The resulting culture of the 'industrial revolution', as experts in history call it, is ongoing since roughly the past 100 years. It includes the First and Second Machine Ages, (which is the term that Rayner Banham uses for our period), we have Modernism, and many call our time the Anthropocene due to the intensity of our influence on the planet. These are not new in essence and characteristic of our antecedents. The 'industrial revolution' marks the beginning of the end of about 600 years of materialist development. Rather than a beginning, we can say that it's the end functionality of a stage of humanity's development that has become profoundly dangerous and ruinous at scale.

With the radical transformation of human activity in the Machine Ages through material and power acquisition with technological culture and the massive increase in human population, (and the corresponding extinction of wildlife), it seems clear that new impulses for how we live in the world must come. The scientific and technological transformation now in place demands more and deeper change that will match the foundational value that the thinking that Descartes represents and the isolation of science from natural philosophy. It seems that not enough people grasp that we are heading for very big change, whether we guide or intend them or not. This coming change should not be to turn away in opposition, but to evolve forward in how we take responsibility for our place in the life of our planet and beyond. It is a call for understanding humanity’s role in the world.

I picture a beach with thousands of children puttering in the sand beside each other, as children below a certain age tend to play . Allegorically, some are puttering with DNA, some are making new chemicals, some are stockpiling wealth, some are developing AI, etc. Like children we are all experimenting with our hands and minds. Unlike children, some are trying to stop the tide from coming in (e.g. CO2 sequestration, geo–engineering, protests, Greenpeace, for example), others are trying to kill each other more efficiently and effectively (i.e. automated warfare), some are trying to take over more beaches (Russia vs Ukraine/NATO, the Moon and Mars). A few are trying to get the kids to come in off the beach and some are entrapping each other in slavery. In short, in my opinion, we are not working together at an effective level while the sum of human activity has an immense and growing affect.

My own view corresponds with those who feel that we are not responding adequately to needed adjustment. The need for change is facilitated by the excesses of this activity now; the imbalance of vast uncontrolled undesirable change and ongoing damage to the life of the planet and humanity and the damage already done. We are in a battle with the activity of our lower selves that seems to sum up powerfully. We need to evolve our higher selves and to unify to be able to conquer and transcend this stage of evolution.

How we operate in the world is influenced by our awareness. There are many ways of naming its component qualities. They include our clarity that is dependent on feeling contentment, peace, courage and compassion. We can question how we can attain peace in the world without first mastering peace within ourselves and in our own lives. How can someone expect a compassionate world if they are unable to be compassionate? We can strive to make our actions higher value and we can aspire to attain inner spiritual evolution, which guides and underpins such character and behavior.

How can the architect comprehend the human sphere when all their work is on buildings? Of course our experience with each other and our cultural context grows with time, but if we are not peaceful, contented, compassionate, really, how can we provide these and the entire realm of consciousness, and understand how to prepare presencing mind in environments?

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