#14 PART.II.thought — Conflict and ‘psychological' or 'interiorized time’ in practice

The Goal in Architecture PART.II.1.0 Time thought as increments.

This post introduces the discussion on interiorized time more directly as it relates to practice at a fundamental and personal level. By that I mean that I expect that we need to test it by how we feel about it; this approach must include how we feel personally. G¡a is a long series, with PART.II about the ground of an approach to practice that relocates and rediscovers values embedded, but also concealed, in what we do as practicing architects. Change naturally requires that we newly engage things that were not previously engaged. Bringing more range into how we create value and bringing that into our awareness as conscious choices is part of engaging the change we need. This part of it will allow me to engage technology.

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.