Book 3: A Vision of a Living World

Third volume of The Nature of Order, referenced in the chapter.

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 (1)

chapter

The Existence Of An I
cites
Chapter 3 of Book 4 'The Luminous Ground', presenting the concept of the I and the reality of relatedness between self and world.