#9 Practical Approach — Rajayoga

The Goal in Architecture PART.I Goal — 4.4 A Spiritual Practice — Sahaj Marg/Heartfulness

Dec 21, 2024

This is an additional article about spiritual practice.

The resulting culture of the 'industrial revolution', as experts in history call it, is ongoing since roughly the past 100 years. It includes the First and Second Machine Ages, (which is the term that Rayner Banham uses for our period), we have Modernism, and many call our time the Anthropocene due to the intensity of our influence on the planet. These are not new in essence and characteristic of our antecedents. The 'industrial revolution' marks the beginning of the end of about 600 years of materialist development. Rather than a beginning, we can say that it's the end functionality of a stage of humanity's development that has become profoundly dangerous and ruinous at scale.

With the radical transformation of human activity in the Machine Ages through material and power acquisition with technological culture and the massive increase in human population, (and the corresponding extinction of wildlife), it seems clear that new impulses for how we live in the world must come. The scientific and technological transformation now in place demands more and deeper change that will match the foundational value that the thinking that Descartes represents and the isolation of science from natural philosophy. It seems that not enough people grasp that we are heading for very big change, whether we guide or intend them or not. This coming change should not be to turn away in opposition, but to evolve forward in how we take responsibility for our place in the life of our planet and beyond. It is a call for understanding humanity’s role in the world.

I picture a beach with thousands of children puttering in the sand beside each other, as children below a certain age tend to play . Allegorically, some are puttering with DNA, some are making new chemicals, some are stockpiling wealth, some are developing AI, etc. Like children we are all experimenting with our hands and minds. Unlike children, some are trying to stop the tide from coming in (e.g. CO2 sequestration, geo–engineering, protests, Greenpeace, for example), others are trying to kill each other more efficiently and effectively (i.e. automated warfare), some are trying to take over more beaches (Russia vs Ukraine/NATO, the Moon and Mars). A few are trying to get the kids to come in off the beach and some are entrapping each other in slavery. In short, in my opinion, we are not working together at an effective level while the sum of human activity has an immense and growing affect.

My own view corresponds with those who feel that we are not responding adequately to needed adjustment. The need for change is facilitated by the excesses of this activity now; the imbalance of vast uncontrolled undesirable change and ongoing damage to the life of the planet and humanity and the damage already done. We are in a battle with the activity of our lower selves that seems to sum up powerfully. We need to evolve our higher selves and to unify to be able to conquer and transcend this stage of evolution.

How we operate in the world is influenced by our awareness. There are many ways of naming its component qualities. They include our clarity that is dependent on feeling contentment, peace, courage and compassion. We can question how we can attain peace in the world without first mastering peace within ourselves and in our own lives. How can someone expect a compassionate world if they are unable to be compassionate? We can strive to make our actions higher value and we can aspire to attain inner spiritual evolution, which guides and underpins such character and behavior.

Therefore, how can the architect comprehend the human sphere when all their work is on buildings? Of course our experience with each other and our cultural context grows with time, but if we are not peaceful, contented, compassionate, really, how can we provide these and the entire realm of consciousness, and understand how to prepare presencing mind in environments?

Spiritual practices are constantly renewed to be accessible and to retain a level that fits what people can bear at the beginning of their transformative path. Influence by those who aspire and attain greater knowledge have influence specifically and generally, the mean or average level of individuals will rise. Theoretically the whole of humanity will rise in quality as well, yet we have a problem. That rise, as evinced in architecture is concealed, inverted and impacted. The architectural profession bears (and suffers) these qualities too.

The influence of the Vedic approach to spirituality is already part of the renewal that we need in our inner being, our awareness, and evolving our oneness in our public sphere. This is a facet of the body of knowledge sometimes called the Indian Knowledge System. It includes medicine and philosophy, architecture and music; it includes everything that a culture is made up of.

Swami Vivekananda’s arrival at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 is often cited as marking the beginning of the impulse toward spirituality. Zen, Theravan and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as yoga in many forms have been represented in North America and Europe since the mid 1800s, when the first translations of Sanskrit writings were propagated by Emerson, Husserl and others. There are many well known interactions broad influence, such as the Beatles with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and with Ravi Shankar, who was a musician imbibing the same knowledge system through music.

TheYoga Sutra of Panañjali1 is an original text that describes yoga. Rajayoga is concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana) and samadhi of the ashtanga. Swami Vivekananda is said to have coined term and published his book under that name in 1896.2 These are taken up in Heartfulness, centred in the heart, where that practice properly prepares the chakras or energetic cores that humanity bears. The lower functions follow, and the evolution and development of higher capacity is enabled.

The Heartfulness organization and Sahaj Marg practice is also part of that knowledge system. That practice was given formal identity with the founding of the Sri Ram Chandra Mission by Sri Ram Chandra of Shajahanpur and named after his Master Shri Ram Chandra of Fateghar in 1945. That organization has evolved through its second President Rev Parthasarathi Rajagopapachri and is now the Heartfulness movement with Kamlesh D. Patel. That organization has been associated with the United Nations Department of Global Communications (UN DGC) since 12 December 2005. It has been registered as a charitable non-profit organization in Canada since 1971, the first outside India, and is now present as such in well over 100 countries.

The chart below maps the spectrum of the knowledge system context of the Heartfulness practice.

A diagram mapping all of yoga by Kamlesh D. Patel. Only Shat Sampati is expanded here, and within that, only Shama and Dama. This understanding is current, but its elements are older than the pyramids. I suppose that with enough latitude of language for expression, and available mastery in the branches, more of this could be expanded. Heartfulness is rajayoga and begins with Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi.

We can describe three facets of the practice, each with a hint of the links to architectural practice.

Practice

The use of our skills to organize those skills to attain more: to make our life into our means. If our practice as architects takes this up, then it takes on qualities that ennoble all the work and the world that the work influences.

Heartfulness practice includes meditation (dhyana), cleaning or rejuvenation that removes burdensome attachment and samskaras, and prayer, in a context that intends the development of continuous remembrance of the condition that corresponds to samadhi, called sahaj samadhi. Transmission aids the practicant through the regulatory practice of meditation through the prescribed practice to supersede the regular human condition where evolutionary discipline continues through the guide toward the goal of life. This implies a super–ordinate program for architecture. This is what the architect must do, based on who they are and becoming, and what the environment is destined as.

Transmission

We are a movement in a continuum of life. The essential feeling is joy. Feel and imbibe the love all around us as our raison d'etré.

In spiritual practice pranahuti is the energy or life of the soul, which we often refer to as 'the heart'. It means to be given energy, like food, for the soul. It is the life in life. It is infinite. In spiritual life it is the source at that the base of our life as it is the source of the universe. It is too subtle to feel, but we can feel its reverberation in us, like the sun's light turns to heat when it interacts with our body or other bodies, while it retains its higher form in our heart. Heartfulness offers transmission in its practice.

Transmission can include any act of moving information between our human selves; also in realms and with subtlety that we cannot (yet) know with our awareness at whatever stage we are at. Architecture presences in us where our experience in a place meets our aspiration, felt as awareness. This forms the field of conscious humanity around us within each one of us. The knowledge of humanity is an egregore that happens and its action in the public sphere. Transmission from the source is reflected in religions, but it is an active component of spiritual evolution in practices, and it forms in environments as architecture.

Guidance

Having a guide is essential. We need a worthy guide. Saying that the guide is 'worthy' is not redundant. Expressing the guide's worthiness is to join the continuum, and to honour the legacy and the gift we have got. The gift is our life. We are essentially part of humanity which has its great legacy. That is why the traditional cultures of North America all revere their ancestors. It is not redundant to say it. It is not only the person, but the presencing of it that each of us is, building the ground for the future. If we forget we do not act according to our responsibility and with respect for life. If we forget, we are also not able to act appropriately with any other life. Our guide is, therefore, always worthy.

Spirituality requires the development of humility. All of us have had teachers given to us. Few have sought out teachers and guidance beyond professional and career learning. Even in our careers, not many people will take the effort and time to seek out and go to selected people who they feel will be able to teach and guide them to a higher level.

We inherently understand the power of such guidance. So we often fear the danger of wrong guidance and being mislead. Spiritual guidance is often shunned for fear of bad consequences, but it is most often rejected due to egotism.

We are in a crisis of expertise and knowledge in much of humanity. The characteristics of leadership in relationship to authority and individual autonomy and responsibility is at the base of it. This has a big influence on the architectural profession as its actual architectural value is concealed and not spoken for.

The Qualities of Mind

The Vedic knowledge system refers to the mind’s with 4 components. With thinking (manas), intellect (buddhi) and ego (ahankara) we paint the canvas of our consciousness (chitta). Our consciousness defines how we live and what we do in life. Making our life work for us purely, without the smoke of a poor fire, and as the pure glow of hot coals, is what spiritual practice is for creating.

A prayer that is given by the guide for all of us is that

all brothers and sisters develop right thinking,

right understanding,

and an honest approach to life.

May everyone develop the real faith.

Right thinking is manas, right understanding is buddhi, an honest approach to life has to do with ego and humility — ahankara — and the refinement of intentions, and the healthy chitta has faith.

I will develop these terms and concepts that over the next months' worth of articles.

How this is relevant to architectural practice.

People are the makers of all that we do. Architecture is relevant to anything that people do. We do it for people. Architecture is the experience that we have in a place. Everyone can know architecture, and everyone has a Self to know to make life the path to the goal. Self aspires and we all feel that when some place is made in a way that we may presence this. So, spiritual practice is made to know that Self, to work through it, for it and with it.

Architecture presences because it is meaningful in humanity. Most of us do things for ourselves. We have loved ones and eventually some of us love all. Practicing architecture always resonates through all of us, it is most valuable to love all people in practice. Spiritual practice is about a goal and that goal resonates in love. What better way to find out what the architect who practices to provide that our environments are properly formed needs to do?

This concludes the PART.I. The series is set up. This is a whole of a beginning. There assumptions and assertions that may seem to come out of the blue. Some of this is clear, some will demand questions. It is a situation put up against the profession of architecture as we know it and it is meant to infiltrate. The energy or vibrations of difference and balance put the process or project in gear, in context, ... in motion, like the runner who tilts forward to take the next step.