#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.
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