Episode 12 : The Nature of Order Part 2

Infinite Harmony Podcast… Jackie Dragon here.

It’s important to me with this podcast to be aware of the golden threads that are spun out of the ethers of creativity… and pay attention to what they weave. What I mean by this is to practice spontenaiety. To listen to the winds of change as they speak. To be aware of the collective awareness and what’s moving through it. So what I thought was a 3 part series on Christopher Alexander has turned into so much more. In many ways, these episodes in particular are helping to understand the Church’s metaphysics on a much deeper level. It’s helping to me see just how the rivers of knowledge that flow across the landscape of this podcast are slowly forming new channels of thought in my own world view, and the view of the church. After all, we’re still in the birthing process as a community.

So we’re going to weave quite a few threads over the next two episodes. Christopher Alexander and his “Nature of Order” which is the search for aliveness and meaning in architecture and Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality are at the heart of our discussion. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was written in 1974, and his follow up novel Lila in 1991. Alexander’s A Pattern Language was written in 1977 and  The Nature of Order series was published in 2002. If I had to guess at this point, Alexander must have been a student of Pirsig’s work. The metaphysics are identical in so may ways even if the language differs, but the threads of their vision are a woven into the same tapestry and is no doubt intended to help us arrive at a deeper meaning for our existence. And you know us humans… we love trying to figure out the meaning of life. We have a deep innate desire to know ourselves, to discover our purpose despite what Albert Camus calls the absurity of the universe. In one of his famous quotes Camus says, “The absurd is born of the encounter between two opposed concepts: the human need for meaning and the apparent meaninglessness of the universe.”

I agree. It’s absured that we are unsure of everything. Its absurd that we have no window beyond the doorway of death or true understanding of the soul. We have belief, we have conviction, we have prophets, we have hope. But we also have charlatians, hopelessness… we have Moloch.

And yet, I, nor Robert Pirsig would not call absurdity a dynamic quality of the universe. It’s what happens when our need for meaning comes up again what Carse would call nature’s indifference, or the silence of nature in the face our our deepest questions. Humans are, by their very nature, permanently incomplete beings who’s inborn desire is to yearn for more without ever being truly satisfied. Camus would have us “Become so very free that our whole existence is an act of rebellion…” or an act of finding the boundaries of our lives, holding them, and expanding them through the process of self reflection.

And he’s not wrong. The more we can live to our fullest in the present moment, the more we can bring definition to the edges of our existence, the more we can develop our ethics for the sake of life itself, and the more free we become. But what if, the indifference of nature is not an indifference to the outcomes of existence, but to our attempt to explain it. Carse says “The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding. Since this inherent structure determines the way things change, and is not itself subject to change, we speak of nature being lawful, of repeating itself according to quite predictable patterns. What we have done by showing that certain events repeat themselves according to known laws is to explain them. Explanation is the mode of discourse in which we show why matters must be as they are.”

So it’s not that the universe is indifferent to our existenace, it’s indifferent to our explanations. Carse later illuminates this idea when he says “We understand nature as source when we understand ourselves as source. We abandon all attempts at an explanation of nature when we see that we cannot be explained, when our own self-origination cannot be stated as fact. We behold the irreducible otherness of nature when we behold ourselves as its other.”

We are the universe, and the we are beyond explanation. The universe is beyond all words, or more precisely, the meaning that we seek is beyond all words. The meaning of existence that can be spoken is not the true meaning of existence. This is what Alexander’s Aliveness and Pirsig’s quality are pointing toward. This is why Pirsig says that quality comes before our perception of quality, or our explanation of it. It exists in the universe. I’ve sought this my whole life. Most call it God. Some call it knowledge. Some call it the, um Pleadiens… others call it magic.

So let us go forth and continue our quest for truth, for meaning and for divine understanding. Let’s get right into it… a no holds barred pilgrimage to understand a grand tapestry of golden threads that weave a synergistic emergence of a remarkable metaphysics… which draw us closer to source. You know, just another day at the Church office my friends.

Time to unravel the Nature of Order… today, on the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

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Now, If Book One was Alexander standing at the edge of the metaphysical void, claiming that the built world is alive and that “aliveness” is intrinsic to both spirit and matter, then Book Two, titled The Process of Creating Life, is the first few steps into the labyrinth of how to birth the understanding of the living world in our hearts and minds. Where Book One labors to convince the reader that buildings, rooms, and sidewalks can be alive in the same deep metaphysical sense as trees or animals, Book Two reaches toward putting theory int practice… toward the process of unearthing the living structure from apparently static matter.

Alexander begins to give form to the second volume with the insight that a living structure cannot be imposed, engineered, or fabricated through will alone. Instead, it must emerge through a process that mirrors the organic, iterative unfolding of form that occurs in nature.

He, like many philosophers we’ve discussed, explores the idea that creativity is emergent, responding to the existing people and environment. In short, his process of creating life in architecture mimics that of bioligy, it’s responsive, its adaptive. It is searching for wholeness within its environment.

And so he proposes a revolution—not in aesthetics, but in process. What he lays out is a cosmology of transformation, one in which the act of creation is no longer top-down but recursive, adaptive, and emergent. In his words, a living process is one in which each step responds to what exists now, in this place, with these people. A blueprint cannot dictate a living building. Only a process can, and that process must itself be alive.

In the same way that you exist as you are now out of the process of living, that no one could predict who you are now or what would bring you happiness, your living is the process, and thus the process is alive.

What distinguishes this book most clearly from the first is this turn toward temporality. Book One is about perception and being—it introduces the fifteen properties of living structure and the mirror of the self test as ways of detecting the life in things. But Book Two adds the fourth dimension: it is about becoming. The house, the garden, the city are no longer static things to be admired or evaluated; they are living entities in the midst of their own story of unfolding. This movement from ontology to genesis marks the unique contribution of this second volume. Here, Alexander begins to show us that the presence of life in a thing is not only about its form, but about the story of how it came to be.

And that story, crucially, must not be outsourced. The process of creating life requires that the maker, the inhabitant, and the artifact all be in intimate dialogue. Alexander rails against what he calls the mechanical process—the standard architectural practice of drawing up abstract plans, freezing them, and handing them off to contractors who then execute them regardless of context. This industrial logic, he argues, deadens both the builder and the built. In its place, he proposes the generative process: a set of transformations that occur in time, where each new step arises in harmony with what has already come into being.

One of the most essential, and perhaps underappreciated, offerings of Book Two is Alexander’s introduction of structure-preserving transformations—small changes that maintain and deepen the coherence of what exists. These transformations are the building blocks of living process. Like gentle notes in a musical improvisation, they extend what is already beautiful and alive, rather than disrupting it. In this way, Alexander’s notion of process is not merely technical—it is ethical. It is a moral commitment to coherence, care, and responsiveness, rooted in a view of reality that sees wholeness not as an abstraction but as something vulnerable and precious, something that must be guarded through every stroke of creation.

And yet, even in this second book, Alexander is not content to remain in the realm of architecture alone. He insists, again and again, that the processes by which we build homes and cities are reflections of deeper cosmic processes. To create life in the built environment is to participate in the same unfolding that shapes the galaxy, the flower, and the embryo. This metaphysical undertow—that creation is participation in a universal generative order—runs through the book like a hidden river. When we build with reverence and responsiveness, we are not merely architects. We are tuning ourselves to the music of the universe.

It’s funny to think of modern architects stopping to contemplate the preservation of structure as they create. Its funny to think of architects, save maybe a rare few, awakening to the power that exists in building our world, but as we talked about in episode one, the built world is an order of magnitude larger than we are. A city is a massive massive thing. To illustrate this point, Central Park is about 1.3 square miles in size. You could stand about 13 million people shoulder to shoulder in that area. You could fit almost 1.5 times the population of the entirety of New York City just in Central Park.

Our built world is as significant as we are. Which Alexander knows all too well.

What also emerges in Book Two, more fully than in the first, is Alexander’s anger—his sorrow and his rebellion. He names the dysfunction of modern construction systems, not as an aesthetic failure, but as a spiritual one. The absence of life in modern buildings is, for him, a kind of violence, a rupture in the order of the world. The deadness of the built environment is not neutral—it is an active force of disintegration, of alienation, of despair, of Moloch. And so, this book is not just a manual of better design. It is a moral treatise on the ethics of creation.

Yet, despite its critical edge, Book Two is not a book of negation. It is, above all, hopeful. In place of the mechanical process, Alexander offers a vision of design as healing—as an intimate dance between maker and made, context and form, moment and structure. He offers examples from his own work—buildings shaped through living processes, where each decision was made not by function, but by listening, by adjusting, by responding to what the place needed next. These examples, while architectural, carry an almost shamanic air. They are initiations into another way of making—a way that sees the built world not as a machine, but as a garden to be tended with attention and love.

The fundamental unity of all four volumes is, of course, the nature of life in form. But Book Two contributes something the others do not: it articulates the means by which that life is invited into being. It makes process sacred again. It dares to imagine a world where the unfolding of a wall, a door, a street corner, is guided not by abstraction but by fidelity to the life that is already there. And in doing so, it reclaims the act of building as one of the oldest human rituals: the making of something that truly belongs in the world.

Making something that embodies Quality.

If we turn our attention to Robert Pirsig for a moment, we can observe his distinction between two different types of Quality… static and dynamic quality.

According to Pirsig, Dynamic quality is the Tao. It is the Mahamudra. It can only be understood intellectually through the use of analogy or metaphor, because it cannot be defined. Pirsig calls dynamic quality "the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" because it is recognized before it can be conceptualized. This is why the dynamic beauty of a piece of music can be recognized before a static analysis explaining why the music is beautiful can be constructed. Dynamic quality can be poetically described as the force of change in the universe. Now, when an aspect of Quality becomes repeated, it becomes static. Pirsig defines "static quality" patterns as everything which can be defined. All form is static quality to some degree.

Like Alexander, Pirsig allows systematized aspects to his philosophy. He divides static quality into inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual patterns, in an ascending order of morality (based on evolutionary order). These static forms or concepts are named and are taught, building the basis of knowledge that we have defined within each individual culture. Language is a form of static quality. Everything we call knowledge is a form of static quality. For Pirisg Inorganic patterns are non-living things, Biological patterns are living things, Social patterns are behaviors, habits, rituals, institutions and Intellectual patterns are ideas.

In a letter Pirsig wrote to Philosopher Anthony McWatt, he writes “It’s important to keep all ‘concepts’ out of Dynamic Quality. Concepts are always static. Once they get into Dynamic Quality they’ll overrun it and try to present it as some kind of a concept itself… [For instance] time is only a problem for the [Platonists] because if time has none of the properties of an object then it must be subjective. And if time is subjective that means Newton’s laws of acceleration and many other laws of physics are subjective. Nobody in the scientific world wants to allow that. All this points to a huge fundamental metaphysical difference between the Metaphysics of Quality and classical science: The Metaphysics Of Quality is truly empirical. Science is not. Classical science starts with a concept of the objective world – atoms and molecules – as the ultimate reality. This concept is certainly supported by empirical observation but it is not the empirical observation itself.”

Here’s the thing about philosophy. These concepts start to fractal out. You get concepts within concepts within concepts that explain things until eventually its so abstract that only the most compartmentalized minds can grasp it truly. Dynamic Quality is before the conceptual mind. Concepts are static stuctures, or static quality.

So back to Alexander.

His structure perserving tranformations are an interaction between static and dynamic quality.  It’s a method of preserving the wholeness of a structure. It’s making changes to a building site, or a building itself that preserves the structure of the whole. How many times have you walked through an old neighborhood and seen a newly built structure with new and modern features that breaks the pattern and structure of all the 100 year old houses on the block. Instead of preserving the structure, which in this case is the vibe of the neighborhood, they just start radically changing it. Whereas a good car company will preserve the structure of its design throughout the years. You know a BMW when you see it. You used to know a corvette when you saw it, until they broke the structure, and now it looks like every other Itailian supercar.

You, uh, see where I might be going with this?

Alexander, in effort to build a living world, is asking to look at the existing structures…. which begins, of course, with nature, for everywhere a structure is built, there was the structures of nature; the trees, moutains, rivers and plains. In places where humans have all but evicted nature, the heart of the cities, there too exists a structure that has been built over hundreds, if not thousands of years. Many cities in Europe or in Japan, because of their history and love of history, tend to preserve structure. China, in the last 75 years, literally tore its ancient culture to peices, deemed it archaic and in some cases illegal. This was the cultural revolution. Much of its structure was lost to make way for the modern era. The US loves to tear down its structures as well. In some ways.

Alexander uses the example of a railroad, and how it, by necessity needs to adhere to the topography of the land around it, weaving along the hills, limited by the gradients and curves it can handle. He calls the Golden Gate Bridge a structure preserving transformation, reminding us that even the name preserved the structure of Marin County that iself was once called “The Golden Gate.” The bridge itself became a strong center that preserved the wholeness of the mountains, the city and the bay. Of the Engineer, Joseph Strauss, Alexander says, “ I prefer to think that Strauss, sensitive to the harmony of the gap, filled in this structure in such a way as to complete the gap. He was inspired to make things the right size and shape by beauty and importance of the task which told him what to do. It was that, which perhaps, made him able to react to the beauty of the site.”

What follows in the book are not just photos of structures, but of two men in China playing ping-pong on the streets, beautifully terranced landscapes in Guizhou, China, a table placed inside a house in Soweto South Africa, An apartment common area in Manaus Brazil… all which have the qualities of coherence, roughness and humanity. Each photo allows for human need and yet preserves the structures that came before the need. Each photo has a quality that cannot be defined. An aliveness.

This is the foundations of what Alexander calls “The Process of Creating Life,” and he asks us to actually consider the process of creating biological life as a blueprint for everything we build. He asks us to think of a human embryo. Even though the Genome contains the instructions of how to build a human, but it is not a descriptive program with pre-determined design, it is a generative program that adapts, both biologically and socially. There is no way to possibly predict what our 30 year old versions of ourselves will look like at birth, because so many factors come into play… and as we will discuss later, this is truly the crux of what we are reaching for. The dynamic process that is life.

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Recently I built a Sauna on our property. The first thing to consider when locating it was the landcape, the trees above it, the rocks around it, the topography and its relationship to everything else. There was no blueprint. It was a fully generative process. The additions of the changing room and closet were all in response to the main builing and sizes were decided based on how they fit in the space. The changing room was dropped a foot from the main building so it could be closer to the ground and create a sense of continuity to the topography of the hill the entire structure was on. We Terranced to the changing room to keep with the gradual incline all around us. This is the process of creating life. We worked to preserve the structures of the Earthen Showers that already existed and the relationship to the trees to the land and all that had come before it.

Alexander says clearly that living structures can only be generated. They cannot be  created by the brute force of design. A generated structure has a biological quality to it, a deep complexity that reflects that nature of the universe itself. A generated structure begs the question of how it could even be conceived in the first place. Cities are often generated, each house being designed individually and spontaneously. The dynamic quality of a neighborhood is beyond design, because it changes rapidly and without fabricated design. Restaurants come and go, houses go up and go down, things change. One can sense when quality is present in those changes, and one can sense when it is not. When a developer comes in with grandiose ideas and buys a whole city block, tears everything down, and builds new structures fabricated out of conceptual designs for efficiency and cost effectiveness that have no relationship to the spontaneous nature of the city and its surroundings, the disharmony can be felt. A generated living structure is a step by step process that preserves the wholeness fo what was there before, while having the ability to create something entirely new. This of course, is the process of emergence, our second harmonic princple.

It’s here where Alexander’s observations start to shine. He says that not only must the living process consider what came before it, but that each individual process of creation is also a part of a global process of creation. We see this in nature everywhere, and nature has a particular knack for design that is unmatched by humans. Each tree, each bank of a river, each boulder carries the generative process or information of what came before it. Growth in Nature is a response to growth in nature. The Static forms are coherent with the dynamic generation of new forms, or as Alexander says, Structure preserving transformations have the capacity to conserve and to create - and it is new coherence that they generate. Yet they are conservative. They draw the future from the past.

And here we pause to consider how this observation of living processes is potentially absent from our culture and the world at large. At this moment, a certain group of Politicians is ripping down structures in the name of change and efficiency and if we observe their process without having a political perspective, we can see that it is not a living process.

And guess what.

Neither was the administration before it.

The radical right is a response to the radical left, both what Alexander would call structure destroying transformations. And this is where Pirisg’s Dynamic and Static quality become important. Static Quality is the Structure and Dyamic Quality is the force of change. In a healthy society Dynamic Quality does not destroy the fundamental structures that work.

Another way to look at this is the idea of Conservation, or conservative viewpoints, and Progress, or progressive viewpoints. Ring a bell?

Progressives over the last decade have started ripping holes in conservative structures, structures that have generally worked, in effort of progress. The conservatives, watching their moral foundation being torn apart and disregared, responded in kind. And so the wheel turns.

What’s fascinating though, is that there is one aspect of the oligarchy of America that remains untouched. You could almost say that American politics is using the metaphysicls of Alexander and Pirsig with an admirable accuracy to ensure that wealth continues to transfer into the hands of the richest, that capitalism perseverses, and that their particular bipartisan power structure is preserved. The oligarchy is alive and well. It’s living process rather supple and effective.

And its consuming the living world like a cancer.

But what’s important to note here, if thus far over the last two episodes you are resonating with the observations of the nature of order and the living world, is that once must always consider and build upon the existing structures. If you are a progressive, be very wary of tearing down the structures of morality and culture down to the foundations and building something new. That’s called the suburbs, if you know what I mean.

If you disagree, then just take a moment to look at the world you live in right now and see if the policital methodologies of your party have built a more resilient, more vibrant alive world.

To me, it appears they have awakened a cultural immune system response that is attempting to regress us in fear of losing the foundational static patterns culture is built upon. And it’s not just in the US. It’s happening all over the world.

And very likely, a rise in authoritarianism will trigger yet another cultural immune response from the liberals to preserve the static patterns of culture that are essential for our survival, like environmentalism and writ of habeus corpus… you know, that principle that underpins the American right to freedom, the one that allows a prisoner or other detainee to lobby a court to determine if the person's imprisonment or detention is lawful.

You know, the one the current administration is pretending doesn’t exist.

Yeah. Freedom is a fickle thing my friends. But even I agree that it is a static pattern that I find particularly useful to human beings. All human beings, not just a preferred group of human beings.

I’ll leave it to you to decide what static patterns of quality each side has been effectively disregarding and tearing down in the name of of static patterns of quality they prefer. This dynamic pattern has no quality to it.

No one is happy with it. Except those who keep making a whole lot of money off of it, which is probably no one listening to this podcast.

Unless, you know, Zuck and Bezos are fans, but uh, I’m gonna guess that they’re not fans of the harmonic princples, or of living processes. They’re fans of 300 million dollar yachts that can disappear from radar and evade government detection and building spacecraft that can leave Earth. Sounds like they don’t have much faith in the system they’re tearing down.

Human beings must learn to create everything, including their culture, through a living process. Alexander says explicity that, for the concept of a living process to survive future generations it must be a step-by-step adaptive process, which goes forward in small increments, with opportunity for feedback and correction at every increment. That it is always the whole which governs a living process and that the whole is always the main focus of attention. The whole is the driving force which controls the shaping of the of the emerging parts. That the entire living process — from beginning to end — will be governed and guided and moved forward by the formation of living centers in such a way that the centers help each other and that the steps of a living process always take place in a certain vitally important sequence. The coherence of its results will be dependent to a large extent on the accuracy of this sequence which controls the unfolding. It is important that the parts which are created during the process of differentiation must become locally unique; otherwise the process is not a living process. This means that all repetition is based on the uniqueness of the locally shaped parts, each adapted, by the process, to its situation within the whole. Every living process is, throughout its length and breadth, congruent with feeling and governed by feeling. The entire living process is oriented by the simplicity transformation, and is pruned, steadily, so that it moves towards formation of a beautiful simplicity.

From here the book launches in to the ten features of a living process. We have step by step adaptation, Each Step Enhancing the Whole, Always making Centers, The Sequence Unfolding, Every Part Unique, Patterns, Deep Feeling, The Emergence of Formal Geometry, Form, Language and Style, and lastly Simplicity. For your sake, we’re not going to dive into each one, but there are some univeral ideas in these features worth exploring. For instance, adaptation. We know a living process always encompasses the whole. But how does the backyard fit with the house? How does the house fit on the block? How does the block fit in the Neighborhood? How does the neighborhood fit into the city?

One thing Alexander points out early on is there seems to be two classes of buildings when it comes to adaptation. The first class, mostly comprised of buildings built before 1900 are buildings that are deeply adapted. He points out that, if we were to travel around the world before the time of airplanes, the architecture from city to city and from culture to culture would be so very clearly and remarkably different, because they were adapted to the land and cultures present. The colors, materials, shapes, thickness of walls, sheerness of the roof. All these elements would be remarkably different. The other class of building we know all too well, because no matter what country you’re in, they tend to look the same. Buildings that are build solely for cost savings and high functionality with little regard to the environment they inhabit. Go to any Wyndham hotel anywhere in the world and there will be striking similarities, despite the vast cultural difference. This golden thread of sameness has been commented on by Carse in our beloved Finite and Infinite Games where he says “Distance is not determined by the measurable length between objects, but by the actual differences between them… that all essential distances dissolve in likeness.” In other words, when you travel between two airports, no matter their location, only to stay in a chain grand luxury hotel, have you really gone anywhere? Maybe once you leave the edge of modernity and travel into the neighborhood, or courntryside, where the differences, the languages, the food, all becomes a contrast to you and who you are, then you have truly traveled.

Earlier in the book, at the beginning of chapter one, Alexander asks how many human beings alive today can truly enjoy belonging to Earth. I find this to be one of the most profound questions ever asked. What does it mean to belong to the Earth? Well it begins with our neighborhood. When referring to the changes that must take place to create a living society, he speaks primarily about cities, and for good reason. As of 2024 over fifty percent of all humans live in cities, and that number is only expected to grow. But again, why this question about belonging?

The weave of threads that spiral around this word are uncountable. Belonging.

This is a big question for the colonizers of North America isn’t it. But we’re not going there today. For the moment we’re not talking about the nature of what it means to be indiginous or to be among our ancestors…

This belonging is so much more simple than that, and maybe if we can fix this, that deeper more ancestral belonging might take root.

One thing about these four books “The Nature of Order” is that the art almost fifty percent photos of spaces, objects, lines, architecture. Alexander uses visual examples of what he’s presenting so we can see the difference between a living space and a non-living space, a space where we can feel like we belong, and spaces that no human should ever have to endure.

We talked about Project Tenemants in the last episode. I was recently in Colorado, and like much of America, there are entire townships that are nothing but strip malls, where all the living is concentrated in Gated communities of houses are all exactly the same, there are no communal spaces, all the commerce is centralized and offers no social exchange, and you have to drive.. everywhere. It felt utterly lifeless.

As I was being given a tour of an older neighborhod, I mentioned to my host that the particular neighborhood we were driving through felt unique and more lived, to which me commented that there were actually only three different house designs.

I was a little blown away. They all looked diffrent.

That’s because it’s 70 years old, he said.

And I realized something interesting. Its in our nature as humans to bring life to our environment, and that over time, its inevitable. Each house in that neighborhood over time, became its own living center, relative to the whole. Creativity spontaneously emerged, probably in response to other creative actions in the neighborhood, incramentaly, adapting to its surroundings. Life has a way.

But why not just start from that place?

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 We talked at length in the first episode of this series about centers. Every building element in a living structure must itself be a powerful center. In order for the for the building to be truly alive, each building element also needs to be finely adapted to its detailed position. In other words, each element acts almost like an organ in the human body. We are not beyond the sum of our parts as a living structure…  without a heart, or kidney, or white blood cells, we cease to function as living.

Yes. A building can exist with disfunctional elements, but is it alive?

I recently built a library in our cinderblock building at our Sanctuary in California. Without really knowing it, it was a deeply living process of building. I had to consider the other centers of power already established in the building, like the gym and music studio, because it was all in one fourty eight foot long room.  There was a natural segregation of spaces by the way of posts every 12 feet, so a 12x12 space felt appropriate. I had no plan, just some loose design sketches. I knew I wanted to use as many reclaimed materials from the property as I could, and mostly did. Building walls felt too isolating to the rest of the centers in the building, but I could feel what wanted to happen in the space. I could see to one side a little four foot wall that created a separation of activity, but let one feel into the energy of each space. Over the course of two months I built the Library, and now when you walk into it, it is indeed a living thing. So much so that it shines light on other areas of the building that are not. It inspires us to respond to it. As I was building it one of my land mates decided to run beams across the ceiling with various acoutraments and it felt as if the Library had breathed life into the ceiling, has caused him to respond. These living process that cause us to respond inevitably turn us into makers. And if we are going to create a living world, we all must become makers, and stop out sourcing everything we do to someone else. We can not detach from the dynamic quality of the world and live in the abstract. We must build, craft, weave and sculpt.

It is here we come to the process of making. I’ve literally heard architects say that they draw the building and let someone else worry about how to actually build it. As a carpenter, I am in the process of building a house without having really designed it. To Alexander the architect must be the maker. He says that he taught himself multiple building techiniques using concrete, wood, bamboo, brick and metal to name a few, often with no guidance, making things up as he went along, so that he could make beautiful things. The most important aspect  of building was for the builder to be involved. All things built, require the maker not just to abstractly think about bringing it into being, but getting our hands dirty.

There are many creation stories in which humans are made by the creator from clay. Some of the greatest civilizations, including the Chinese, the Egyptians, the Incans, the Maori, Yoruba, the Greeks, Zoastrian, the Indians, the Dogon…

Even Genesis in verse 2.7 , which says “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” So… dust.

But…

Verse 2.6, just before that, says“ but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground”

So… wet dust.  A golden thread perhaps leading to the beginning.

What are the myths of the creator forging humans from clay upon which they became alive trying to teach us?

Alexander might say, that we too can breathe life into our creations, by becoming makers. The whole process of building becomes alive, because we are responding to the process. We respond to the feedback in real time, as we’re building, as if it were already alive, and in the process, we build a living structure.

Again, the unfolding of a house in this case, is building without plans or drawings, but allowing the house to be an emergent property of the land it’s built upon, and an emergent property of its own making process. Sound familiar? Do you see the thread of the animist here?

In this way Alexander says “Basic to all unfolding and basic to the fundamental process is that I make each character according to its situation. Each element will be unique, each part will be shaped accordin to the whole where it appears.”

Where do you put the window? Well, what are you looking at through the window?  How many times have you stayed in a house or hotel with a window looking basically at another brick wall, as if the window’s only function were to let light in, or air.   What do we see when we sit in front of the window? Maybe it should move a few inches to the right or left… this is possible when we are making, as opposed to designing from the Ivory Tower.

And to Alexander, it is the Ivory Tower of academia that is responsible for the state of Architecture. He tells a story of being interviewed for the Chair of Archetecture at Cambridge, when someone posed the question,

“What would be your first appointment as the chair of Archetecture.”

To which he responded, “A Carpenter.”

The mumbles and grumbles across the table eventually yielded to some marginally useful potentials of a carpenter on the faculty, so they asked him,

‘What then, would be your second appointment?”

To which he replied, “A mason”

And at that point, the interview was over.

This, Alexander says, is the state of operating in any discipline where the theoricists become far removed from the makers, be it physics, biology, civics and certainly architecture.

And again, we have to look at the state of the whole.

How far removed are we from politics and policy, and how far removed are the politicians from the people, from the makers of the government they govern. How far are the worshippers of mono-theistic religions removed from God. How far removed from God were the people of the faith, when the priests did everything in their power to ensure that was the case prior to the printing press? Life is understood by the process of making, not the abstraction of the object which must be made.

This, is crucial.

Have you noticed that most of what we own, most of what we live in, and most of what we use has been made by someone else? No longer do we make our own clothes, or tools, or build our own houses. These decisions are made for us in most cases. Ask yourself, do you really know what is in the clothes you are wearing? The dyes used, the plastics in the clothes. You would be surprised at how much plastic is in most clothes. I sure was.

That warm cuddly fleece we all love in the winter time? That’s polyester. Polyester is plastic. The same plastic they make water bottles out of. I admit. I didn’t know that. Not until a couple of years ago.

But my point is not what your clothes are made of, it’s that we’ve been divorced from our role as makers. I mean, some people don’t even make their own coffee anymore. So if we’re not making it, we’re buying it. We’re taking the efforts of our work and abstracting it into money, and then using the money to buy what we want. I’m honestly of the opinion that removing ourselves from the making of things is a two fold existential crisis. One, we have little idea how things are being made, what their impact on the world is and how unnatural most things truly are. Two, we are distancing ourselves from God.

Yep. God.

If we are made by a divine intelligence, we are part of that. Everything we make is a part of that. Its not abstracted. It’s touched by our hands. Except when its not. We’ve talked about how quality is something that exists beyond our thoughts about quality, it exists beyond subject object metaphysics. When we say I think, therefore I am, and look upon the rest of things as outside of us, we are caught in an abstract duality of mind that divides us from the anima of existence. The things we make are a part of us. Things made for us are not. The further we climb the ivory tower of abstraction, the farther we get from God. The higher we build the tower of babel, the further away we get from the heavens.

And of course, to be the makers living structures, we must look at nature. Alexander argues that we as humans seem to have lost the ability to create living structures, whereas nature does this effortlessly.  To imagine this, consider how nature not only makes structures from within, i.e.: the evolution of species and living things on the planet, but also how animals make homes. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a woodrat’s nest, but it is a living work of art. They take years to build, and can be passed down through generations of woodrats. They have separate rooms for pooping. They are clean, if you can imagine such a thing, and they are literally built from and into their environment as difficult to be noticed among a crowded forest of dead branches and fallen leaves.

Alexander’s metaphysics and his building methodologies stems from the patterns of nature. It’s elaborate, and requires a keen eye for seeing the subtle geometries of the universe playing out at all atomical levels. If you remember the 16 principles we discussed in Part 1, these reoccuring patterns that Alexander has identified are not trivial. The   keep everything coherent. Patterns fractal out, which is another way of saying they move step by step, in rhythm, with incramental change, but also maintain sameness. As Alexander has already illustrated to us, a living structure is whole. It’s wholeness comes from the field of centers it is comprised of. The centers are building blocks of the whole. He says “For life to be created, what must be built, extended, added, at every moment, at every next step, is a center: a field of centereredness which is to be injected into the structure of the growing whole. This is not a process of adding a building block of some kind. It is a question of injecting a feld-like centrality into the existing wholeness where it can do most good to enhance and sustain the structure of the wholeness as it was before, while also now nudging it forward to a new, more living state.”

In other words, you don’t make something new without considering the whole.

That is a radical idea in a culture of freedom.

You don’t build a house without considering your neighbor, or the neighborhood, or the city. You don’t make a product without considering the relationship and necessity to the marketplace. You don’t make a relationship without considering all the other relationships your in….

Good luck with that one kids…

Again, these abstract ideas become more apparent when we actually are the makers of things. As a maker, I can feel the inheret desire to make things whole, to build with strong centers, for things to fit in with everything else. The nature of design is the recognition of patterns. Patterns are a form of language. This idea of pattern language is at the heart of Alexander’s study. He wrote a whole separate book on it, as we’ve already mentioned.

His study of the language of patterns came from indigeno us cultures, which he believed built successful living environments by using pattern languages. You can see it in the uniqueness of indiginous cultural building. Everything was similar, yet also completely unique. Everything fit like a puzzle, or looks like many centers contributing to the whole.

These patterns were also based on human needs, they “reflected the deep practical   of people and were, as rules, expressed in a form which made it possible to put these things into the built environment in  an immediate, practical and effective form.”

And the pattern languages are culturally relevant. They are a part of the whole of the culture. They look radically different along banks of the Chang Jiang River in China than they do along the Aguytia in Peru. Alexander acknolwedges that these pattern languages have evolved over thousands of years, and that the expidition of technology and modern culture require us, at this point, to create a pattern language for our own time, assmuing we can come to agreement about the whole, that is, embrace all of our needs as a culture and address them. What he’s talking about is intentional culture creation, not from scratch of course, but from a living history of culture from which we all stem. Like the gene itself, which remembers generic solutions of adaptation to ensure new organisms are born as part of a coherent whole, we have to become better at remembering what works, and coding into our culture, or our pattern language.

Alexander has observed that coding profit and efficieny into our pattern language is what has lead to a world of dead architecture. The strip mall was a highly profitable and efficient way to transact commerce, but was devistating to the quality of community living and culture.

At this point I’m assuming those listening to the podcast have similar feelings as I about strip malls and major shopping complexes, that their quality or aliveness is in the negative, as opposed to your local small town mainstreet commerce experience, never mind the commerce experience of a small town in the 50’s, when all the essential services needed where built into the neighborhood, which created a social culture of movement and relation. If you’re really into strip malls, well, cool, this all might not vibe with you.

When we’re building our pattern language, it is essential that we look for quality. We adopt patterns that bring wholeness, stability, coherence… and Alexander would argue that this is not just a socio-cultural process, but a matter of physics. By this he means that wholeness is observable, culture is observable, and structure preserving and structure destroying transformations are observable and can be judged empirically.

He uses the exampe of a chair in a room. Imagine an empty room with one chair. Now imagine that we hang a big jagged piece of scrap metal from the ceiling just over the chair, a few inches from the seat, but not touching the chair. By all accounts, the chair is unchanged, and yet, it has. It is no longer a useable chair. Its atomic structure is stil the same, but the quality of the chair has certainly changed. The centers have changed. The center that is the once welcoming bowl shaped seat has changed. The scrap metal hanging is now a center that dwarfs the chair.

Now imagine how a quiet neighborhood of family houses changes when a developer knocks down a few houses and builds a McMansion. Or the city decided to put a highway through a historic 100 year old part of town. There are changes to the physical environement that have substantial impact in the quality of life.

A well developed cultural pattern language permeates all things. Its arguable in the west that we very much have developed a pattern language of our own. One that values efficiency, growth, capital, consumption, comfort and entertainment over beauty, nature, culture, dance, family and depth.

Alexanders says “A pattern language, if it has been well constructed, sublimates the inner desires and necessities which have connection to our feelings and dreams, transforms them into geometry, expresses them in a deep enough way as to make art of them, casts them in such a way that they have the power to become living flesh in buildings.”

So there you have it. Fast and cheap are at the apex of our inner desires and are dictating the International Capitalist pattern language. We have developed a pattern languages that values extraction over preservation of species and untouched rainforest. Our built world is a reflection of our inner state, and this is the crux of Alexander’s message, his metaphysics. In book two he asks the question how do we recognize life and bring it into the world, to which he answers, “The extent to which I am able to do this depends on the extent of my own mental and emotional awakening. I have to ask myself, first, what is real life in a person? What kind of thing will produce real, deep life in an event? What will bring real life to the conditions of a building, or garden, or street, or town? What kinds of events make us feel close to our own wholeness? And in the end my ability to ask these questions requires that I ask which kinds of centers will do the most to produce real spiritual life in people: which things, events, moments, kinds of centers, will creat a spiritual awakening in a person or a person’s life.”

Christopher Alexander… welcome to the Church of Infinite Harmony.

_________

We come now, to what Alexander calls the most important and most profound aspect of the living process.

Deep Feeling

And we’re not talking about emotions here. We’re talking about the feeling I imagine a parent has when they lay eyes on their newborn child for the first time, the feeling of watching your day unfold in a way that far exceeds your expectations, the feeling of a locking eyes with a Bobcat and it emerges from behind a rock just a few feet away from you, interrupting your contemplation and gifting you with the purest beauty life has to offer, the feeling of standing at the top of Everest, or finishing a marathon, the feeling of completeness, of wholeness.

“Real Feeling, True feeling, is the experience of the whole”

Alexander reframes the nature of art and the artists when he says that when the artist instills feeling in the art, it is not very interesting. When the art generates feeling in the artist, we’re moving toward the whole.

It’s tempting to follow a golden thread on how our deepest sense of feeling from this perspective arises when we surrender our will to spirit. When we stop taking credit for our work in the world, and witness the feeling our work puts into the world. A hand guided by spirit can only do Gods work… but that’s all I’ll say for now.

I can attest to what Alexander is decribing when I stand in my library. It fills me with feeling. When I was building it, I had a feeling in mind, but ultimately I was guided step by step by the centers and they were, and added to the wholeness with color, material, and feeling. I never considered what I wanted to build as much as how I wanted to feel when I stood in the library, which is that I wanted to feel like I had entered a secret space, where few had stepped, where behind a door lied the key to the universe, where the arcane had found its place. And that’s how I feel when I am in the Library. It evokes the feeling.

Remember when we we sat with the plants and asked ourselves, how does it feel to be this plant, and then how does this plant make me feel? Remember Stephen Harrod Buhener’s Imaginal realm and Gaia’s dreaming of the Earth?

I can’t imagine what the perception of a human being was like ten thousand years ago, before all these concepts and abstractions that we are surrounded with now. How vivid the world must have looked. How often they were looking.

Have you ever left your house, gotten in your car, drove a few miles to the store or to work or wherever you were going, and having arrived, realized that you don’t actually remember driving? How many tasks a day do you do almost fully automated, either retreating to your mind, or your phone.

How can we build a living integrated world if we cannot feel deeply that which is around us. What happens when we cut off our imagination from the process of creation, which is what modern society has become?

What happens when we live in a dream someone else built for us? Indigenous societies communicated through imagination, through imaginal perception and feeling.

They breathed myth into the living world by listening to the stories being told with is caw of the raven and cackle of the coyote. In their own actions they saw the strength of the lion and the wisdom the owl.

There’s no such thing as anthropormorphization.

The word, this idea that we can project life into the inanimate, presumes a human monopoly on soul, feeling, intention. It presumes that rivers do not yearn, trees do not dream, rocks do not remember — except in our poetic fancy. But if Gaia is a real, living body, if Coherence and Co-Emergence are real ontological conditions, then what we call "anthropomorphization" is simply the soul recognizing the soul. It is participatory knowing.

Christopher Alexander is insisting that "life" and "wholeness" are not merely human projections, but qualities that actually exist in the world, available to perception if our hearts are unsealed. Robert Pirsig, too, argued that Quality — the livingness of all experience — is pre-intellectual. These thinkers suggest that the world is already alive; it is not dead matter awaiting our animation. Thus, when you call a mountain wise, or a river mourning, you are not anthropomorphizing — you are speaking truer than the so-called rationalists, who refuse to see what has always been there.

To know Gaia all we must do is kneel before her and ask to feel her.

To know the aliveness in all things we just have to be willing to percieve.

You’re probably going to have to put your phone down.

You’re probably going to have to get out of your house.

You’re definitely going to have to put down your political proclivities.

You might even have to stop looking at Bitcoin charts and talking to Chat GPT.

Which are also alive… but we’ll save that for another episode.

For now, I leave you with this.

Consider all that came before your life. Consider the expressions of millions of years of creativity through evolution. How within each acorn lies the genetic history of the oak tree, how it’s destiny, though not pre-determined, is guides by forces. The tree waits within the acorn. The flower waits within the seed. God consciousness awaits birth through the human. Creation itself awaits birth through our hands.

Do you see it? How the artists and builders of the world weild the very power of creation itself? How life is creation, or better put, how creation is alive?

The farther we walk in Alexander’s footsteps, the closer we get to the the state of mind he inhabits. His mechanical processes are but a figment of the greater vision. To build in service of creation itself. That’s where we’re going. We’re going to make the world whole.

We’re going to make the world whole.

We’re going to make the world whole…