#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.
The two conditions of thought have no definitive claim necessarily to truth as long as the condition required for ignorance remains. To move between the initial two conditions, effort becomes necessary, and desire may appear in the gap between these two conditional thoughts as intentions about them form. This expresses a split sense of self and a separation as ‘psychological-time’ or interiorized temporal interval, and implicates conflict. Krishnamurti and Dr. David Bohm propose this as ‘interiorized’ time or “psychological time”, as a thought invention, that we have come to think that we need for an intent to become ‘real’.
For example, if, say, I feel that I am a liar, and I want to stop; I picture myself as honest. How long would be needed to become honest? The minimum is obviously instantly, ie. zero time, simultaneous with the awareness of wanting to be honest. ‘Immediately’ can be infinitely short or zero time. Krishnamurthi maintains that it is in reality absolutely no time. He intends zero time to mean a timeless condition. We form and discriminate of physical time as a duration that is constructed in thinking. This questioning expresses that thought accesses truth while on probation or that it has no claim in principle on accessing the truth. It implies a base other than this truth or thinking at all.
The tension we create between the two thoughts of what we are or suppose we are, and another that might be, are locked apart with the fictitious and arbitrary time span, that is materialized and verified by the processes we have created exterior to ourselves in collaboration with the material the world supplies us. We are giving two different positive values to two opposing conditions that would not coexist or be true at the same time. When we maintain that, in many cases indefinitely, we use up a lot of life’s capital at a high rate. It becomes the point of the action.
It is specific to an individual’s personal condition of valuation in this duality of thought positions within. That tension becomes a potential for each person to exploit as desire in their own life. It has an affect in nature through humanity's wide resonance. It is reflected through the relationships all around us and so it forms our society and its cultures. It is part of our cultural liveliness.
This is only a single thread linking spirituality to our architectural practice. But ‘the ending of time’ relates to technology. This internalized incremental form of time is returned to the world, and (im)posed on the world, mechanically. That is the manifestation of our action in the world that is reflecting interiorized time back into material form, conflicting with its original nature. Ending time, mentally, and what that requires of us, will change our approach to how we interact with the world around us and to each other. Again, it is not the whole, but it is a critical approach to understanding the change we need.
How can we escape that mental characteristic where the personal temporal world of knowledge is con—fused with the world, creating ignorance as one side in a field of conflict facing knowledge as what may be thought to be ‘what is’? It seems that it might be to simply to not use time like that. But such interiorized conflicts are thought as true and they are acted out from the very first moment of our lives. Changing it requires thought–time because that is how we are programming ourselves. This is in a cultural context with all people that is massively iterated in each of us as a personal scenarios.
Science and its iatrogenic technology is an example of making dualities, with knowledge opposing ignorance. Ignorance is always present. Materialization of our knowledge—ignorance continuum through thought-out attributes of human life contradict the function of discrimination that we have available to us in our con—fusion of our ideas with created or original purposes. We may solve problems but remain in conflict while new conflicts grow due to the iatrogenic character of our approach. G¡a is orientated to operating where this conflict can be dissolved because that is the nature of architecture.
The need that Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm discuss is then how to find a way out of this. It must be each of us individually, but as a human occurrence, it takes place in the whole of human intelligence. The intended worldly ends of their discussion is the development in more people of an inclination with means to end the conflict and suffering that we maintain among ourselves.
As a thought condition it will not be escaped through thought–time and it opposes nature. We face the same thing in trying to mitigate the harm of our iatrogenic technology with the same technology. Interiorized time demands the cessation of discrimination between nature, where life is given form and moves in space, and our mental selves that do not necessarily require time nor the kind of space or movement of the material world or our bodies. I am addressing this conflict so that a materially interactive interface can be distinguished for the project of architectural practice.
Hindering discrimination and accepting that conflict is natural and is an inevitable need implies a field of action that is not directly addressed. This field is what this project calls aspiration, and it is what is presenced as architecture. Developing discrimination to be able to transcend this is what we call spirituality.
Aspiration may appear as desire. Desire hinders the transformative evolution of spirituality. Desire is not aspiration, there is no discrimination of need. Interiorized–time is suffering that once ignited must burn what is there to be consumed. Many of our stories and movies are about this. That is not architecture, but it calls on the Verknüpfung between architecture and spirituality.
The components that architecture arise out of are heralded by this now ancient conflict. Thought and thought’s purpose have a particular role in architectural practice. This is our means in approaching the goal of life in dwelling, which architecture serves.
J. Krishnamurthi and Dr David Bohm. The Ending of Time. San Francisco : Harper & Row. 1985. A very limited preview may be seen on the Internet Archive.