#10 PART.II.thought — Introduction
The Goal in Architecture PART.II.0 thought — Introduction Part 1
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.
From the G¡a definition. Discrimination. Although common usage of ‘discrimination’ often describes a gross lack of judgement or discernment that forms prejudice, it is also activity that leads to higher quality character and awareness. Prejudice is not discrimination itself, but the condition and skills of the one who uses it. The value for outcomes is formed by what is subjected to discrimination. A faculty of discrimination of values in the context of spiritual practice (e.g. ‘neti neti’, ‘not this, not this ...’) if provided adjacency to architectural practice, brings the evolutionary purpose of Mind near architectural practice. Discernment describes an ability, while discrimination is knowing, understanding and recognition, and relates to aspiration. Discrimination applied to what is evident and to what is intended in architectural practice, is on a path to ascertain the use of the world for the ‘highest’ purposes in dwelling.