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book:book-2-the-process-of-creating-lifeBook 2: The Process of Creating Life
Second volume of The Nature of Order, referenced in this chapter for experimental statistical results.
Extracted from this book
Claims (10)
- Buildings and objects with living structure enlarge our capacity for relatedness; those without deaden it, even in nature.Practical consequence for architecture and urbanism.
- Non-living structures damage our ability to feel relatedness and can make us insane.The harm of the modern built environment.
- Numinous places give a direct relationship between self and place, connecting us to all things and the universe.Description of the core spiritual experience in architecture.
- The feeling of relatedness with a dewdrop is more fundamental than cognitive similarity; it is an essential connection.Direct appeal to reader's experience.
- The I is at once the most personal, intimate thing and a single universal entity — it is personal-of-you and of-me but there is only one of it.The three qualities of the I: personal, one, suffused with relatedness.
- The relatedness felt by traditional people is literally true, not a poetic fiction; they were aware of a factual entanglement with the world.Rehabilitates animistic and premodern worldviews as reporting genuine reality.
- The relatedness we experience with living things is not a psychological illusion but a real, actual material connection between self and matter.Central thesis of the chapter: the feeling of connection is literal and fundamental.
- The self and the tree are entangled; the connection is a real, non-mental entity that exists in the same substance.The core of the relatedness argument.
- The task of every artist and builder is to mobilize the living I in things, thereby awakening the self and connecting to the ultimate.The ultimate purpose of making.
- There is only one I, a personal universal presence that underlies all living structure and manifests as the feeling of relatedness.Alexander's core metaphysical proposal introduced in §8.
Findings (3)
- Alexander also experienced his I expanding toward the red cushion.The author reports the same phenomenon as McClung: his I felt larger and extended toward the red cushion.
- Bill McClung's I extended beyond his body toward the red cushion.During the cushion experiment, Bill McClung reported that his sense of I extended beyond his body and included or moved toward the red cushion.
- Mirror experiment cross-cultural agreement: people consistently choose the same objects as resembling their eternal self.In the mirror-of-the-self experiments, people from the same culture and even different cultures agree to a significant extent on which objects embody their eternal self.
Hypotheses (1)
- There must be some relation between the ultimate nature of a living center and the nature of the I.The hypothesis that the deepest aspect of centers is identical with the I-like presence.
Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count
Chapters (2)
chapter
- Chapter 6 of Volume 3 of The Nature of Order, showing how the fundamental process generates engineering structure and positive space.
- Chapter 3 of Book 4 'The Luminous Ground', presenting the concept of the I and the reality of relatedness between self and world.