#16 PART.II.thought — Releasing the Advancement of Practice.

The Goal in Architecture PART.II.3.0 Ending Thought-time and Process.

Apr 02, 2025

It is important to understand this project as one way to defeat the current approach to architecture through questioning the hegemonic thought that holds us in our current paradigm. Our professional processes for practice are deeply entrenched, magnetizing us within common assumptions and values at every turn.

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.

Desired objects often appear as re/solutions. We might feel relief from issues, but ending the need for something more is not achieved. It is symptomatic. And we continually return to conflict. Conflict implies imbalance, but it also implies aspiration.

We can connect process to desire as the way we construct to solve problems, but ultimately a personal problem is solved only when it ends. The process is about getting ready. Processes of psychological time keep intentions at the ready but un-used. Process deals with circumstantial attributes, like symptoms, creating results that are iatrogenic, generating new issues around the actual issue. Coming asymptotically near ‘the ending of time’, but never realizing it, is inevitable because process does not bring its end. There is no blame in this, it is human.

In an architectural project this is found in the programmes of practice and individual project programmes that support desire. Architecture is simulated by programmes that I am calling 'idea of architecture'.2 This is categories and catalogued form, and it is dogmatic programmes, with ratings and rankings according to formulae that feature the attributes of the conflict as Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm describe it. The ‘idea of architecture’ as built objects that are narrowly defined in increments of measure. This is forms of the notional gap before the architectural project.

The gap given form by the 'idea of architecture' functions to limit the liability of the architectural profession for its absence across the world's public sphere. It functions in the profession in this way because the profession does not differentiate between ‘idea of architecture’ and architecture’s presencing. The profession has remained orientated in such a way that its value and content is limited, and so too architecture’s cultural value. The profession is responsible for the paucity of architecture’s socially and culturally verified value and benefits because it is responsible to provide that.

The realm of the practical service of architects extends far outside the scope of the professional today — but these are not outside what architects may do every day. These are vital to the provision of architecture, while the professional mandate is silent on them. Much is simply absent, as the profession does not support their development. It is why, for example, John Ruskin was unable to define right practice and resorted to suggesting in the 7th Lamp Obedience in the 7 Lamps of Architecture3 an essentially fascist form of governing power over architects. This is the expression, outwardly, of thinking that poses time-based interval, demanding that architecture and building to be con—fused to be meaningful.

Vāstu is a language for creating architecture that describes itself significantly with proportional increments of measure and geometry, ranked and geometrically related icons and the more familiar puruśamandala. It is from before our contemporary technology, but essential attributes of architecture can be identified with it. I will be doing that in the fourth part of these articles.

Today, we express such meaningfulness with property lines, budgets, scope of work, scientific definitions, the professional attributes of responsible practice, contracts, and many technical factors for mechanical movement. These do inspire me, like the words with which a poem is composed, along with structure and materials, as the means to make architecture meaningful in our world.

The responsibility of the architect discriminating need from wishes, willfulness and desire, does not require that all programmes of use, process and building be ended, for they are in the world and join to form dwelling. Wastefulness, desires and personal issues define us too, for the time being — it is always only temporary, even if it is millennia. Architecture bears all that as its means. It is all the affects that are component to giving measure and forming the space in which the ‘end of (thought) time’ is ‘probable’ in aspiring the ending of time, which is architecture.

The environment has spatiality and materiality but it is not in definitively bounded by limits of matter. These 'means for poetry', i.e. our AEC industry and the profession's scope of practice, are now inherently against architecture because they are not aware of this in terms of professional scope. So we build conflict in light of our technological expression (outwardly) of the inward psychological time that we use. Mind freed from the conflict of psychological time is like changing the programme of the profession itself, rather than the programmes of a project, opening to the absence of an end to what architecture is at the limit of what I might build.

Nature expresses as form of ordered matter and life process. The architect engages with nature in service to that potential. Hence, architecture is not absolutely bound by its current means of coming into presence. Wow, that implies that engineering and all the technological means we use are only provisionally true. It is a vast trove of untapped information.

The attributes of the ‘I’ and its conflicted–ness built as ‘idea of architecture’ are important to differentiate more clearly so that the locus of architecture in our doings as they are today can be discriminated as symptomatic of our human role in nature. This will evolve (the programme of) professional practice.

Ignorance and the freedom–of–choice.

Humanity’s role in nature is granted, even if we don't know what it is. Thought time (psychological–time and interval) arose and became active as the technicist and scientific socio–cultural conception of being external to nature appears to be the opposite of a role in nature. It began long ago with our nature-made faculty that provides the opportunity to develop thought in freedom–of–choice. Waste and destruction are ‘allowed’ and comprehended within nature in the same sense that we have freedom–of–choice. It is necessarily humankind’s work within nature and nature’s work with humanity at our stage.

‘Garbage’ may be a strong word for much of human functionality in architecture. It certainly applies to what we put into the environment. It applies to most of our production. Garbage is necessary to our thinking as a form of resolution, like the mathematical remainder. The ignorance necessary for knowledge to exist must have its material form, and that is garbage. Desire and garbage are two poles of our contemporary mythology that we use to maintain purpose and function within parameters that have long ago become too narrow.

Intent to remove the condition that desires garbage is hardly found. Instead, an ‘infinity’ of creations within the limitations of thought knowledge are ‘found’ by chipping away at ignorance in the swirling intensity of our business. Humanity has got very busy with this as more and more material power in our capacity in nature, which has raised the cloud of mayhem that covers the sky, the ‘ground’ and everything between. From the base to the sky, and all that is between, within any and all of us, and now as thousands of garbage objects in orbit above the sky.

The attributes of conflict are unrecognized for what they are and relentlessly drive us on in ambitious material desire. Spirituality languishes and few choose it, while getting very busy. Spirituality necessarily includes the end and the ends of this, as well as the essential goal of aspiration.

Krishnamurthi: I am an ordinary man; I say, all right, you have talked marvelously of sunsets, but what has that got to do with me? Will that, or your talk, help me to get over my ugliness? My quarrels with my wife or whatever it is?
Dr. David Bohm: Yes, that is why life has no meaning for man.
K: ... Man asks, help me to get past the wrong turn. Put me on the right path. And to that one says, please don’t become anything.
...
There must be ... some relationship with ordinary man. Otherwise, what is the meaning of living? ...there is no meaning.
DB: Then people invent meaning.
K: I feel that if one pursues this we will have a marvellously ordered world.
DB: And what will we do in this world?
K: Live.
DB: But, ... we said something about creativity ...
K: Yes. And then if you have no conflict, no ‘I’, there is something else operating.4

Investigating this “something else operating” in the practice of architecture puts ‘creativity’ in architectural practice in question. Design, freedom-of-choice, and the programme of architectural practice are put into play. It also puts technology in question. I will develop the problem of technology in terms of technology in PART.III with the help of Heidegger.

Vanishing the gap.

The fictive gap between our technological process of thought time and architecture that is faced within practice every day, in the project of every edifice has this backstory. It has its characteristics, despite its being generally left undeveloped. Almost two millennia ago, at the beginning of the Piscean Age, the complexity of technology and our societies had not yet arisen. But the essence of the questioning was already available to cognition. Aristotle was at the beginning of what we are finishing now. The following translations quote the Yogasūtra in terms similar to those Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm use.5

Part IV. Liberation: Sutras 12–17:

12 That which has gone away (atita) and that which is yet to arrive (anagata), both remain in existence along with their identities.
13 They [the characteristics] are either manifest of unmanifest [subtle].
14 The principle underlying the objectivity of an object or the objective world (vastu) lies in the one thing only, that is, perpetual change.
15 Whereas vastu remains the same the ways of the vastu and of the individualized minds [citta] are different and move away from each other.
16 The vastu is not subservient to an individual mind because this has no validity; if this be so, what then [what is one to do]?
17 The vastu remains known or remains unknown, depending on the mind's passion for it.

Translation: PY Despande

12 The Past and the Future exist in their own nature, qualities having different ways.
13 They are manifested or fine ['subtle' or not in form], being of the nature of the Gunas.6
14 The unity in things is from the unity in changes.
15 Since perception and desire vary with regard to the same object, mind and object are of different nature.
16 The object cannot be said to be dependent on a single mind. There being no proof of its existence, it would then become nonexistent.
17 Things are known or unknown to the mind, being dependent on the coloring which they give to the mind.

Translation: Swami Vivekananda

An architect works with need coloured according to what is known and what is unknown to the people involved. Architecture is present in conjunction with mind and with nature. Architecture is not present as process — it is simply present in awareness, potentially. ‘The ending of time’ is spirituality and essential to spirituality in the same way that architecture is potentially present at any place. ‘The ending of time’ is on the path that is defined as the goal of life. Architectural presencing is in synchrony with aspiration as dwelling. Aspiration’s ultimate is life’s goal. Ending time is spirituality pulling into the future from the potential of aspiring life's goal, which architects serve in practice.

If the intent is for architecture as the built object, the fictive gap is present as 'idea of architecture' that we live as we mine ignorance for knowledge, “since perception and desire vary with regard to the same object”. Psychological time and the conflict with aspiration are concealed as the 'idea of architecture' measure. The fictive gap is bondage, even as increase power and capital valuation (wealth) appears to free us. While wealth ‘sponsors’ the architect, that valuation is tends to function as destruction and erasure. We may or may not 'build' conflict, but architecture is never conflict. Wealth need not be destructive and erasure. Built conflict with an emblematic 'idea of architecture' can still, nevertheless, presence architecture as an element like beams and arches.

Mind is freed up of a burden when psychological time ends so that a barrier inverts to its opposite. Ending time is to give up a barrier in the awareness. Ending thought–time as proposed by Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm cannot be arrived at by process. Everything still exists before and after, and the potential is unchanged. But the view changes as awareness changes.

After the ending of time dwelling goes on.7 New forms of shelter and new practice for wellbeing in dwelling not yet even conceived await humanity in after–conflict environments. Architecture presences where we dwell as the role of humanity in the world. Ending inward time, which is reflected outwardly in technology, releases us toward our human/e future.