PART.I Goal.2 — Architecture, Wrongs Being Done, and Aspiration
The Goal in Architecture — The outline of the relationship architecture and spirituality have as practices.
Defining Spiritual Practice.
This is an overview on how spirituality as practice may influence architectural practice. We want to understand what will spark movement to evolve the profession again. We begin by diving deeper into spiritual practice, how technology embodies the same issues that we turn to our benefit in spiritual practice, and then the coupling and decoupling of contemporary technological value and its myth of garbage, in architectural practice.
Spirituality is to take action for personal transformational evolution of conscious awareness to realize one’s potential and developing the essential aspirational intent to attain it. Each individual may take up their spiritual aspiration using methods or practice. Discovery of what is spirituality unfolds personally and results can only be known in everybody’s personal (intimate or ‘inward’) experience. We develop our perception and sensitivity as our consciousness evolves. A person’s advancement is not transferable, but their experience can be helpfully communicated.
Spirituality may not have any definable content for a person who is not aware of it or is not aware of personal experience with it. Yet, many of us are devoted despite a lack of experience or material evidence. Anyone alive has capacity for this transformational evolution as they live. Spirituality exists in human life in principle. It is a path that is the same for all in principle, but our individual contexts of dwelling make the path appear in infinite ways and never identical. From one point of view, we are the path. We may be stopped, but each of us is always somewhere on that path. Knowledge creation or knowledge revealing fits to each person’s stage and condition on the path. Anyone can put their wellbeing in play and aspire to attain. However vague this may seem at first, with sincere intent, success is hard to avoid.
Nevertheless, important change that we need, or that needs to happen, may take a long time to achieve. It can be dismaying when we hear of sudden great change, with blessings pouring down immediately for someone. It means that the necessary work was already done, not that there was none. I, and many people, have blundered in denying the existence of something when we do not have or accept experiences, or do not accept knowledge that is communicated. Just about everybody has chosen, and can choose, to destroy, to waste and to be purposefully useless. I don’t expect that I will get many complaints by saying everyone has done wrong things and has a lot to deal with that classes as being wrong. My own experience has been of many stages of realizing perceptions that in retrospect often seem to always have been there. Our world as we make it reflects this.
Our powerful scientific knowledge and technology empowers humanity. But that still includes a lot of tragedy and pain. It is core to the philosophies that create colonialist debacles and all manner of humanity’s harm to itself, environmental boondoggles and more that I mentioned in the previous articles. Vast blundering is concealed in technologically enhanced social and personal cultural benefits and expectations at all scales.
Our role in Nature presences as our particular human conscious awareness and its inherent aspiration. Nature brought human life into being and is our keeper. Nature cannot be wrong. Being here is right. Everyone is subject to the same laws of Nature, of being animal, human, humane and divine. We are an evolutionary consciousness in the balancing force of Nature’s human form.
We live in environments that we prepare, which can seem closed off and complete in themselves. But we are always still part of Nature. In seeking to understand how spirituality is part of how we make and live in our environments, we realize our amazing freedom. Lack of engagement with spirituality is as important as the modes of practice and related activities to partake in it.
Technology and Aspiration in Architecture
How our aspiration is applied in striving is in question in this project. If that seems abstract, just reflect on your feeling of wanting something, not to have something, but to feel accomplishment, to feel you did well, to love someone, and more like that. The force exerted through our ability to choose, no matter if for good or harm, nor whether well meaning, misguided or self-destructive, when traced to its ultimate beginnings, has the same aspiration. Unless that aspiration turns a corner to become an end, it retains its purpose. This purpose is to know the value of our freedom to use our capacity at will. There is a feeling of right when there is not harm in doing that. How our aspiration is handled in practice is relevant within each of us and how we treat our environment.
Our myth of garbage entrenches that we do not have control of the potential of our freedom within our technology. That is a value that is adopted in Modern architecture and in our professional associations when we adopt our current technology to administer and to build. We produce a lot of sad remains.
Technology is not a wrong. Its current form depends on the myth of garbage, and that is wrong thinking, wrong understanding, and hubristic exploitation, extraction, and manipulation of Nature’s benevolent gifts, which is dishonesty.
There is something in all of us that is powerful and active in a certain way that allows striving to respond to aspiration and disharmony at once. They are not mutually exclusive. And we can differentiate the essence of technology from current habits. I will go into detail on how technology is not dependent on these ‘wrongs’ in essence in PART.III technology.
The architectural profession suffers from error. Not that there is error, that is not the issue. Error is natural. It suffers from how we value technology and how that is used in the preparation of architecture. The force exerted through our choice of this technology with its myth is for good and harm, it is well meaning, but misguided and self-destructive, and when traced to its ultimate beginnings, it is the same aspiration that drives us. That is how that valuation comes to be related to spirituality. Architects have united with building technology formed around problems to solve. Yearning for release from that burden of error is created. The actual aspiration of architecture is beyond problem solving.
The current profession works in the downside of our potential and merely supports the need for change, rather than change itself, aspiring in attraction to the beauty of sought ends. Rather than seeking that environments support the goal in life, we move ever nearer end of our current approach of making and solving problems. Our current problem solving architectural profession is asymptotic to where we need to go, beyond the end of today’s approach.
We struggle to realize something that responds to the yearning that aspiration creates in the current profession. The architectural profession may change its grounds that create and maintain those problems, a paradigmatic change that ends the problems, to provide for the experience we aspire. Architecture is transformational in this way. It changes the ground that causes a problem, removing the energetic supply for the problem.
Architecture is the presencing of our aspiration, not of problems solved. This is the very program that is architecture. Architecture is part of Nature in this way, as a part of consciousness, and wants to be in tune with Nature in essence. Architecture is response to awakened yearning that we have often called beauty. The goal of life is there at the end of that. I am happy to think of that as infinitely far away. On the way, error becomes a path of evolutionary and joyous transformation.
Preparing such environments implies a profoundly more valuable profession of architecture. The profession of architecture can support us in a much more profound way, with great discoveries of humane life, as part of and eagerly awaited influence in Nature.
…. not-doing
Practical action in support of (our) aspiration has the peculiar quality of giving up a certain realm of neediness and desire. This is sometimes called 'not-doing'. In the book Journey to Ixtlan, Carlos Castaneda retells lessons on 'not–doing' from Don Juan:
“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.”1
Not-doing is about stopping habitual ways of seeing the world. In practice(s) for spiritual attainment is surrender to leave off making you as you were. Reaching a this threshold is to ‘surrender’ to allowing natural transformational evolution of our condition.
Out of a different cultural context, Parthasarathi Rajagopalachariji Maharaj2 expresses the same in terms of personality and character work. He describes ‘not-doing’ in terms of dissipating the lower form of the personality to expose character.
What does ‘to do’ mean? [...] when something is done, there must be a result. And that result must have been intended. [... I]n [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 [i.e. the Goal] 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. [... D]oing something and really doing something — there seems to be a big difference.
[...]‘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. To make it work, without itself working. [...] to make things happen without doing.3
Awareness, which is engaged ‘on purpose’, is a vanishingly thin layer of consciousness between what we call the super-conscious and the more familiar subconscious. The super- and subconscious are hard to examine. They have effectively infinite realms of affect. We tend only to notice where we are actively pointing our awareness. We identify with that awareness between so much that we feel that we are our consciousness. But, we exist far beyond that.
The heart beats automatically while there is so much else going on. Driving a car may fade away completely behind other thoughts and images. We remain safe. Within us, our conscious intention is bound up with our not-consciousness of the sub- and superconscious, operating and as waiting capacity beyond our awareness. Spirituality is awakening from a reverie of ‘doing’ to find ourselves where we really are.
Not-doing allows that Nature, including our human Nature and personal character, and all other imperceptible Nature, to take place as what it needs to, and the sub- and superconsciousness to increase our scope of action.
Concealing Architecture
Spirituality is here, invisible, within everyone. It can be felt and knowledge derived, perhaps as wisdom, can be communicated. Architecture is commonly accepted, but in practice it is rare today, and it is rare to be able to discriminate it among the objects of power and hubris of our time.
A simple allegory is to extend this to running. Running is 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 running as human, like we do architecture, even if they cannot run. If one cannot run or has never run, a feeling of negativity toward running or toward those who run may arise, especially if it is a self-inflicted denial, non-acceptance of the ability or lack of training and expectation. We can hardly deny that we have the capacity to run as a human function.
Not many people deny that there is such a thing as architecture. But it is clear that we deny its value, even practicing architects do. Architecture concealed in its technological means will seem absent. Its concealing forms are easily taken for architecture. I use the term ‘concealing’ if the experience of architecture at a building or environment is absent. Measure as building is the concealing form of architecture, and has come to ‘be’ valued as architecture. Architecture, however, is not building.
In the same way that a person is always on the path in spirituality, architecture is always potential. When it does not presence, that potential is still there. It remains what could have been. Architecture is then concealing, and the practice that prepared it is not providing that the architectural value may be presenced. It appears that most architects do not validate the difference between architecture as potential and its presencing. I can dimension architectural practice with two dimensions of practicing architecture; discriminating between building and architectural value and concealing and presencing architecture.
We easily engage spirituality with some practice if it is just a question of feeling it. Engaging spirituality is orders of magnitude more difficult when the components of life that make spirituality real and active are opposed. Such opposition is often with great fervor, and a lot of reasons, which is the energy of aspiration reversed with equivalent force. I will daringly proceed with the supposition that spirituality is felt by everybody, even by those who do not know it consciously and oppose it. It may be found where compassion and love are felt or thought of. If it is a supreme value in life, human nature being what it is, what is not accepted can feel like denial or that it is being denied, even if denial is self-imposed.
Locating ourselves on architecture's trajectory.
Architecture predates today’s technology by millennia. This is our opening. Architecture is on a different trajectory than technology. 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 individual experience. That is broad and it is not fully mensurable, although architecture has clarity of place and purpose for unmeasurable and as yet unknown, undiscovered and undeveloped personal realms.
When mundane purpose in living evolves beyond itself, this human capacity to aspire beyond then starts to be experienced. It becomes true, even though it is never fully perceptible, as an accessible and appealing mystery to enter. Spirituality appears at this stage in the quest for growth as 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 their transformative evolution. We will develop an approach to this through questioning architecture’s current values through its ancient sibling, spirituality.
When many individuals and congregations or their representatives act in unity, which at scale becomes demonstrably effective as wide spread conditions and events. Millions of people, and often far fewer, express an experience that then shifts the world. There are facets of that realm of unity such as egregore, which is less material, and the public sphere that is nearer to the physical public realm. It is awareness inclusive of all aspects of life according to anyone’s personal experience, accepting unmeasurable and variously imperceptible as yet unknown realms. We are looking at this; the nuance between our lived intentions and what we do, the experience of our actions and how the public sphere is formed and its influence on us is not part of that. That nuance is facts. Although the purview of each person, it is not independent of anyone, and engages the totality of humanity, the reality of it is in experiencing aspiration toward the goal of life.
Like a loving sibling, architecture always wants to support spirituality. Architecture exists in oneness of the human realm. To say that this is what gives it meaningfulness is too little. Meaningfulness is not an end. It is an essential relationship with spirituality at the heart of why ‘I’ am alive. The yearning of aspiration can be appreciated through living in the world. Architecture is our environment reflecting this and reflected in awareness.
Carlos Castaneda. Journey to Ixtlan. 1991 (1972). pp. 188–189.
https://beta.heartfulness.org/en/chariji
Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari, Revealing the Personality. 2009 (1993). pp. 164-173.