A Profoundly Eloquent Glimpse of Life's Depth...

books:


	• The Luminous Ground: The Nature of Order, Book 4 Christopher Alexander CES Publishing, 2003 - 356 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

Feeling and Valuing Existence

This book is a free, original expression of nonduality, or non-separation, which is to say nothing is separate from existence. If you love art, architecture, color, light, inner light, incorporation of the tears and sadness of "the cares of the world," living a natural and open life, this book will show you how that love meets up with the truth of your existence.

How can you "feel" non-separation or nonduality? By knowing that you exist. This is your sense of "I" that Alexander speaks of throughout this book. Or call it "I Am." Since everyone can know that they exist, their most fundamental nature is this "I" or "I Am." Valuing that you exist, valuing this "I" brings a sense of unity with all people, their creations, their appreciations, their failures, sadness and tears. It brings a sense of union with humanity.

This feeling of existence is the crux of this book. It's not just feeling existence, but valuing existence. It almost sounds silly: "valuing existence." Such valuing leads to wonder that never ends and all works being done as a gift of existence to existence, or to God. It makes you focus on existence so that you create something that communicates multiple layers of meaning, the totality of existence, in a building or an artwork.

Religion, art, physics, quantum theory, and mostly the "I," the true you, come together in this unusual, delightful, beautiful to hold and read, art book full of vibrant color photographs, pictures, and illustrations.

If there is another edition or another volume, perhaps some of the more direct teachings of nonduality can be included. For example, the words of the great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi turn one toward a disposition most favorable for the understanding, absorbing, and integrating of Alexander's confessions about art and existence: "Existence or Consciousness is the only reality. If you enquire 'Who am I?' the mind will return to its source (or where it issued from). The thought which arose will also submerge. As you practice like this more and more, the power of the mind to remain as its source is increased."

Jerry Katz
One: Essential Writings on Nonduality

for more information click here

A Profoundly Eloquent Glimpse of Life's Depth...

*** Original review: May 20, 2004 ***

Those who know me know that I am not prone to making either quick judgements or vacuous statements, so my friends (at least) will know that both the title of this mini-review and the few words that follow are far from whimsical: Alexander's Nature of Order, and in particular this fourth volume which I have recently received and simply cannot put down, are in my humble opinion, destined to rank as one of this *world's* great literary/philosophical achievements. What Alexander has produced is nothing short of a brilliant vision for the transcendent reality that lies beneath and beyond conventional categories. I write this as a Ph.D. physicist, with two graduate-level mathematical physics texts under my belt (both on complex systems), and semi-pro photographer with 30 years of experience of trying to capture "beauty" in nature. Alexander's work has provided a tentative -- but oh so deep -- glimpse of an answer to my own philosophical struggles as scientist and artist: physics and art are but two sides of a vastly richer coin, and are merely pointers to an infinitely rich *life* that pervades this universe; indeed, the life that *is* this universe. Every human being who has ever sincerely pondered the question "Why?" when looking up at the sky, while admiring a pretty flower, or looking into a mirror, can do no better than to curl up by a fireplace with a hot cup of tea, open up volume four of this incredible set of books and start using the musings lovingly offered here to look within for answers. Truly a remarkable achievement. I have never met Christopher Alexander, but can honestly say that I have been deeply touched by this preternaturally wise soul.

***** Musings added Sep 1, 2005 *******

Having now read the entire opus (I-IV), and currently on my 3rd reading of volume I, I am fully convinced that Alexander's Nature of Order is an absolutely stunning achievement of the highest caliber. I also concur with a quote that appears on the inner flap of the books, to the effect that while very few (if any) philosophical/conceptual works (and their authors) are likely to be remembered 500 years hence, there is a strong possibility that Alexander's Opus WILL be remembered as a precursor to what our present day (only partially overlapping fields of) "science" & "art" will have evolved to in 500 years (a unified, wholistic body of "Sci-Art" in which the schism between objective & subjective / inner & outer no longer exists).

What Alexander presents in these books is a tentative first stab at a magnificent new CONCEPT; not a mathematical or physical theory (though rudiments of what might go into a more formal description are also discussed). Although many of Alexander's ideas are quite subtle and require thoughtful reflection to fully comprehend and integrate into (ironically) a whole (new worldview), the basic thesis is original and profound: EVERYTHING that exists contains "life", and the degree (lesser or greater) to which life is manifest in "X" can be *objectively* determined by probing one's *subjective* (inner) world. Nature is seen, in this view, simply as the totality of life, continually unfolding; and beauty (as generated by local life-forms such as humans), as a resonance between outwardly objective forms and (the very deepest) subjective inner feelings.

Western science's longstanding divide between "what's out there in the world" and "what is in here, in our hearts and souls" is exchanged for a new worldview in which our understanding of the cosmos is predicated on an active unity between objectivity and subjectivity; between dispassionate form and intensely personal beauty; between "eye" and "I"; between the deepest inner feeling and continually unfolding outer life. If this sounds radical (and perhaps even a bit strange), that is because it IS radical; Alexander is proposing a sweeping idea that is both revolutionary and (only in hindsight, after having read his extraordinary Opus) obvious! For it really cannot be any other way! Every thinking -- no, every FEELING -- creature who wants to know our cosmos and his/her unique role in it needs to read these books. They are truly remarkable! The next great strides in art and science will be made (simultaneously) when, one day, an EINSTein-Alexander appears and uses the ideas expressed in these books to develop (using a mathematics not yet created) a rigorous new theory of "Sci-Art-Beauty-Life". These are ostensibly books on "architecture"; but they far -- FAR -- transcend that field; they speak, collectively, about everything that exists.

for more information click here

Borrowed spiritual wisdom

Alexander's Pattern Language series was/is a great accomplishment. It made the mysteries of good architectural design accessible to everyone. It attempted to liberate home- and town-building from the arrogant priesthood of professional architects and exposed the bankrupt values behind so much of contemporary building. It offered a deeply human alternative much more in tune with the way we really live.

Not surprisingly it did very little to change professional practices. Even the few architects who are sympathetic to his viewpoint largely dismiss his ideas and methods as economically impractical, except for wealthy clients who can afford the time and money needed to build a home with such individual attention to every idiosyncratic detail. The one area Alexander has had a major influence on is computer program design -- there economic factors are not a constraint and his notions about recursive patterns and sequences have been taken seriously and had a lasting effect.

Having made hardly a dent in his chosen profession, Alexander now appears to have turned his attention elsewhere - to the future and to his own posterity. In The Nature of Order, and especially in the final Book 4, he babbles on and on about his Holy Grail - an "astounding" new world view that will supposedly revolutionize civilization (and vindicate Alexander as a Prophet crying in the modern Wilderness), in which Science and Art, object and subject, ornament and function, beauty and practicality will at last be seen as One Living Whole, inextricably bound together in mystical union like the interwoven threads of the Turkish prayer rugs he is so enamored of. Then and only then will buildings express the True Self and Blaze with Spirit and Inner Light and Centers and Beings and "I-stuff", blah, blah, blah.

The art history illustrations are lovely (by comparison, most of Alexander's own paintings and drawings look rather second-rate), but the half-baked metaphysical ramblings, dressed up as pseudo-science, are very tedious, overly intellectual, and hardly new. The 2500-year-old Buddhist canon and many other spiritual traditions, like Sufism, Taoism, the Hindu Upanishads or Native American and Aboriginal religious cosmologies, have all expressed this vision far more eloquently and effectively. Alexander gives these venerable traditions barely a nod of acknowledgment, except as visual evidence supporting his own vague and untestable theories - since they make no claims to Scientific Truth, as Alexander does relentlessly, he just ignores or co-opts their immense contributions.

Give Alexander credit for his emphasis on personal feeling, but educating our feeling to make ever more accurate side-by-side discriminations between "degrees of life" can take us only so far as an aesthetic method. Being an artist is more a matter of life-long discipline and *practice* - above all, learning how to cultivate the right state of mind - natural and open, free from fixed concepts, beyond even the most refined intellectual judgments of good and bad, beautiful and ugly. It's not something to rattle on about for page after repetitive page, it's something to do - to discover how to do through doing, through direct experience. In my own work, books like John Daido Loori's Zen and Creativity and Chogyam Trungpa's Dharma Art, or Suzuki Roshi's Not Always So have been much more helpful and to the point.

for more information click here

wisdom through patience

I'm not an architect, though I do paint a bit and presume to teach. A friend from Ohio undertook one of Alexander's architectural courses, 20 years ago, and posted me notes on Alexander's colour theory. I've used them ever since. But the articulation of this guru's understanding of the experience world & how we process it & make art in and for it, has become keener, more subtle & concise over the years. This is a very, very profound teaching without any messianic overdrive. Indeed, its the patience and humility of Alexander's process of discovering essential rules & roles for making art, that are most profound and the enduring feature of his presentation. And the book's own look exemplifies his quest for the beautiful.I'm not so taken with the reproductions of his own painting, however. I can't quibble with the twentieth century masters he reproduces as evidence for enduring beauty. A fabulous book!

for more information click here

The foundations of modern scientific thought, four centuries old, are firmly rooted in a conception that the universe is a machinelike entity, a play of baubles, -machines, trinkets. Quantum mechanics and biology have begun to change this way of thinking, but even to this day, our real daily experience of ourselves as we actually are, has no clear place in science. No wonder that a machinelike world-view has supported the deadly architecture of the last century.

Alexander breaks away completely from the one-sided mechanical model; he shows us conclusively that the emergence of every act from a larger wholeness must change our understanding completely, and leads inevitably to the fact that a spiritual, emotional, and personal basis must underlie every act of building.

In the middle of the book comes the linchpin of the work; an 86-page chapter on color, which lavishly illustrates and dramatically conveys the way that consciousness and spirit make their appearance in the world.

Throughout this fourth and final book, is a new cosmology uniting matter and consciousness: self inextricably joined to the substrate of matter, present in all matter, and providing wholeness with its underpinnings.

The book provides a path for those contemporary scientists who are beginning to see consciousness as the underpinning of matter, and thus as a proper object of scientific study. It will change, forever, our conception of what buildings are.

"I believe he is likely to be remembered most of all, in the end, for having produced the first credible proof of the existence of God . . ."-Eric Buck, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky

Christopher Alexander is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, architect, builder and author of many books and technical papers. He is the winner of the first medal for research ever awarded by the American Institute of Architects, and after 40 years of teaching is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

for more information click here