#4 Finding the place of spirituality in how we make the environment that we need.

The Goal in Architecture PART.I Goal — 2

This is another step toward the place of spirituality in providing for architecture in the environments where we live.

Spirituality

This chapter expresses spirituality from a point of view that works for the development of the profession of architecture. It extends from the previous chapters of PART.I. Spirituality is defined as practical engagement of the potential for personal evolution that each individual may take up in aspiration for their ultimate condition of being. Spirituality is a path that exists in principle, it may take the form of a methodology or practice, and it can only be known in everybody’s personal (intimate) experience. One may stop at any time on that path, but each of us must always somewhere on it.

Spirituality may not have a definable content for a person who has no awareness or personal experience of where they might be on the path, nor is another person’s experience directly transferable other than as hints and pointers. Any living person has capacity for this attainment. Everyone is subject to the same laws of Nature, of being human, and the divine.¹

In seeking to understand how spirituality works in our environments, the lack of it is important. That lack is nuanced between individual experience and the lived experience through the whole of our public sphere. The discovery of what spirituality is personally unfolds. My own experience is many stages of realizing that some perception or idea was always there and that I saw it other to what often seems to be a sudden appearance as a jerk toward feeling freed of something.

I and many people very often blunder in denying the existence of something that they do not have or accept knowledge of. Important things that we need or that need to happen often take a very long time to achieve because of this, certainly in my life. More broadly, the colonialist debacles and the traps of enslavement that I mentioned in the previous publication serve as examples. But even these are only a small drop of evidence of that blundering that is constantly expressed at all scales. It is within every single person alive. Knowledge creation and/or its revealing is fitted to personal reasoning, and that includes denial. Denial is a key part. It can be claimed to be culturally defined and it is based in facts. Each reasoned denial must be taken on personally to function.

So such blunders are not without value. Being able to choose negativity, the flawed and to be willful are part of capacity that is granted to humanity. The forces exerted by us all around, no matter if good or harm is done, nor whether well meaning, misguided or self destructive, when traced to its ultimate ends, begins in the same aspiration for an evolving idea of a goal for good to be achieved or attained. This purpose adds to the value of our freedom to use our capacity at will. It is there, however vague this may seem at first, that anyone can put their wellbeing in play. It is in our hands.

The proof of it is that just about everybody has chosen, and can choose, to destroy, to waste and to be purposefully useless. We are here to do that. We often call it luxury. We can also call it garbage. There is nothing like that in Nature on Earth excepting in humanity. This project includes the implications of humanity, and responsibility, if any force or capacity in Nature has its role. It is the application of how we strive for our aspiration that is in question.

There is something in all of us that is powerful and active in a certain way that allows for disharmony. Striving to respond to aspiration and disharmony are not mutually exclusive. One is the chosen action, the other is about the fundamental intent of its application. Action is not possible without intent. However, intent may become effective without action.

…. not-doing

Aspiration has the peculiar quality of relinquishing a certain realm of wanting or desiring that results in what seems to be passivity. It is outlined in some writings as 'not-doing'. In the book Journey to Ixtlan, Carlos Casteneda relates lessons from Don Juan on not–doing.

“Doing is what makes that rock a rock and that bush a bush. Doing is what makes you yourself and me myself.

“If one starts talking about doing, one always ends up talking about something else. It is better to just act.

“Take that rock for instance. To look at it is doing, but to see it is not–doing.

“That rock is a rock because of all the things you know how to do to it,” he said. “I call that doing. A man of knowledge ... knows that a rock is a rock only because of doing, so if he doesn’t want a rock to be a rock all he has to do is not–doing.

“The world is the world because you know the doing involved in making is so,” he said. “If you didn’t know its doing, the world would be different.”²

Out of a different cultural context, Parthasarathi Rajagopalachariji Maharaj³ expresses the same in terms of personality and character work. He describes ‘not-doing’ in terms of dissipating lower form of the personality to expose the character.

What does ‘to do’ mean? ... when something is done, there must be a result. And that result must have been intended. ... in [some cultures] doing and working are more or less synonymous — “I am doing something” means I am working and work is supposed to be result–orientated, satisfaction– orientated, growth– orientated. ... in [other cultures] we are not so ... self-centred about work. ... when we talk of growth orientation and result orientation, you work from a self-centred basis. ... in spirituality, the work is from a centred basis — no more self–centred basis, but just centred basis...

If all of us understand that our individual centres are nothing but the ultimate centre and, therefore when we work in a centred manner ... it cannot be self–centred in the sense of this self...

That I am in a bus doesn’t make me a bus. That I am in a plane, doesn’t make me a plane. That I am in a body, doesn’t make me my body. ... doing something and really doing something — there seems to be a big difference.

... It means to not do. ‘To do’ means to let the body do, and isolate the soul from the sphere of experience, and plunge it into its immensity of its own ... so the soul must activate and withdraw. Like I put on the switch for the light, and go away. I don’t keep my finger pressed on the switch ...

The soul has a purpose when it is in this body. Too make it work, without itself working. ... to make things happen without doing.⁴

Our awareness, with which we engage 'on purpose' is an infinitely thin layer between knowledge that we call super-consciousness and the more familiar subconscious. Both of these are infinitely vast and both of them are hard to examine, but they can be known, each in their own way. We identify with that layer between. We orientate our activities to that, yet we exist far beyond that. Not-doing allows that Nature, including our Nature that is within us, and all other Nature, to take place as what it needs to be and increasing the scope of action. There is a relationship to this with our conscious intention as well as our unconscious intentions. Each of us is influenced and influences accordingly. Just as the heart beats automatically, there is also so much else going on. Sometimes we do not notice what we are actively doing, like when driving a car fades into the background if other thoughts and images take priority, driving almost always proceeds without incident.

Spirituality and architecture have existed for a very long time. They both have a place in our evolution over many eras and through many cultures. The former is apparent or invisible within anyone's conscious awareness, although it is knowledge that we all carry with us always. The latter is commonly accepted, but in practice it is most often concealing. Yet even in concealing, it can presence architecture.

A simple example to extend this to the space of accepting unmeasurable and unknown personal realms is running, an activity that we all know, one way or another. I do not need to sprint 100 meters in under 10 seconds to understand running. Most people know what it is to run by experience of it at a personal level, and all people accept it by supposition, even if they cannot run. Running is human. If one cannot run, or has never run, a feeling of negativity toward running may arise, especially if it is a self-inflicted limitation or where there is denial or non-acceptance of inability. We can hardly be opposed to the capacity to run as a human function. We can see it anytime. We could see spirituality with some practice, if it is not already evident. If it is not a simple question of feeling it, but of overcoming adamant opposition, the work is of another quality.

We can suppose that spirituality is felt by everybody, even those who do not know it consciously. It is there in compassion and love. If it is a supreme value in life, human nature being what it is, what can or will not be accepted can feel like denial or denied, even if denial is self-imposed.

The components of life that make spirituality real and active are often strongly opposed. This is often with great fervor, which is the capacity and energy of aspiration transferred to oppose with equivalent force. We can tap into our full aspirational capacity even to oppose it. In the architectural profession we have entrenched systems of technology and how the profession deploys services. These generally oppose architecture as aspiration that does not intend to bear the unmeasured and absented qualities of consciousness dwelling.

Architecture predates today’s technology by millennia, is ubiquitously accepted as a thing. This is our opening to develop an approach that questions current values with its ancient sibling spirituality.

The yearning of aspiration can be appreciated through living in the world. The line between what is natural and what is man-made is interwoven with what humankind is ultimately capable of and with what each of us can appreciate in our experience. That is not narrow nor is it fully mensurable, although it has clarity of place and purpose. When mundane purpose in living evolves beyond itself, this human capacity to aspire beyond starts to be experienced. It becomes true, but it is no longer wholly mensurable, as a mystery that seems accessible and appealing. Spirituality appears at this stage in the quest for growth of wellbeing. What is a limit in traditional materialist Modern Machine Ages terms, becomes change for anyone when they pass through a certain degree of human aspiration toward transformative evolution. There is opposition because it can only be an individual’s own experience and can only be asserted on individual authority.

At times many individuals and congregations or their representatives act in unity, which at scale becomes demonstrably effective as wide spread conditions and events. There are words for that realm such as egregore and the public sphere. Hundreds, thousands or millions of people express an experience that then shifts the world. This is not fully accessible to objective science. While many of its characteristics are, this is also a definitively subjective personal experience. It is inclusive of all aspects of life and all that may be beyond human life, according to anyone’s experience as it may in each individual case be known. Although the purview of each person, it is not independent of any other, and engages the totality of humanity. The reality of it is based in individuals' experience of aspiration toward their goal of life.

Architecture is this same thing as the environments of our civilization. Architecture does not exist without that realm of human unity - its oneness. To say that this is what gives it meaningfulness is too little. It is more than meaningfulness. It has that essential relationship with qualities outlined as spirituality. It is why I am alive.

1. This is an applied definition. See the earlier chapter Defining some terms that support G¡a for the definition of spirituality.

2. Carlos Castaneda. Journey to Ixtlan. 1991 (1972). pp. 188–189.

3. https://beta.heartfulness.org/en/chariji

4. Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari, Revealing the Personality. 2009 (1993). pp. 164-173.