“The shadows in the early morning don’t tell much. The shadows rest at that time. So it’s useless to gaze very early in the day. Around six in the morning the shadows wake up, and they are best around five in the afternoon. Then they are fully awake.”
Carlos Castaneda

The Second Ring of Power

Tag Archives: quality

Robert Pirsig on Writing

Published: July 7, 2016
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“The basic unit of that particular process is a comparison. You take two slips and you say: “Which one comes first?”. And I don’t know of any rational way in which you can pass a rule as to which one comes first but it seems like you always know. And now you get two slips […]

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Everyone’s just about out of gumption

Published: July 3, 2016
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“My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all. God I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left […]

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Christopher Alexander on Essential Awe

Published: June 1, 2016
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“… In this conception, value is not something merely grafted onto space, as a passenger might be who carries no weight and does no work. It is part of the same nearly mechanical picture of space that we have come to believe in, and respect and trust. Yet, at the same time, in a most […]

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Christopher Alexander on an Extended Physics

Published: May 31, 2016
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“… In physics, the effort has always been to take the geometry of a material system and to derive from it, predictions about the dynamic behavior, forces, and causal interactions … which follow from a particular configuration. In art and building … Again we have geometry, but here we seek especially to derive from it, […]

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Christopher Alexander on a Gift to God

Published: May 26, 2016
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This felt like a demanding excerpt to put together. “When the field of centers appears in something, its deep feeling appears and it is … spirit made actual, spirit made manifest … It is not an indication of God living behind all things, but it is actually God itself … As we understand this more, […]

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Christopher Alexander on Never Truly Beautiful

Published: May 24, 2016
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“What kind of beauty could go so deep that a person would be afraid of creating it? … Working with architects, I have experienced it again and again. Many traditional shapes, especially the most profound shapes with deep and serious centers in them, for some reason trouble modern architects profoundly. Even when an architect does […]

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Christopher Alexander on Pleasing Yourself

Published: May 21, 2016
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“In order to create living structure, we must please ourselves … And you need only please yourself. But you must please yourself truly. And to do that you must first discover your own true self, come close enough to t, and to listen to it, so that it can be pleased. Does this sound absurd? […]

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Christopher Alexander on Tears, Sadness and Unity

Published: May 17, 2016
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This resonates deeply with me. A pursuit of happiness has never appealed or worked out for me. If what Alexander is true, then the oh-so-popular notion of “pursuit of happiness” is bound to hit a wall. My experiences of happiness seem to expire quickly, while my experiences of sadness seem resonate deeper and longer … […]

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Christopher Alexander on Inner Light

Published: May 9, 2016
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This section of the book is filled with examples, including works of art, that demonstrate the qualities Alexander discusses. I looked up a few of these examples online and wanted to include them here, but the color rendering of low resolution images in heavily manipulated color pallettes on the screen is not true to the […]

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Christoppher Alexander on Windows to the Ground

Published: May 8, 2016
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This (kind of?) makes up for my not excerpting sooner about centers … but without the previous, softer, experiental introduction, this may be harder to swallow ..anyways … here it is: “I am going to start with the idea that the I exists physically, that there is some plenum, not part of the physical space […]

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Christopher Alexander on “The I”

Published: April 28, 2016
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“Some experiences of I, within the things of the world, and especially within the things of nature, is shared, I think, by every human being, in some degree … I look at the waterfall and say I find it pleasing … In a second, also mild, version of this experience, I enjoy the waterfall, and […]

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Christopher Alexander on a Real Relatedness

Published: April 27, 2016
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I was this person who’s relatedness was damaged by dead structures (physical and metaphysical) of the world. It makes me wonder if being at Bhudeva is a phase of cleansing and re-nourishing? Will I one day look back at it as my “great retreat”? I acknowledge, I want to see, I am willing to experience […]

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Christopher Alexander on Devotional Atmosphere

Published: April 25, 2016
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“As a matter of observation, it is simply true to say that many of the most beautiful works of art in the world’s history, and many of the most profoundly living structures, large and small, that human beings have created, have been created within … a … mystical religious context. … What, then, about the […]

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Christopher Alexander on Ultra Mechanistic

Published: April 23, 2016
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For more on this dear-to-me subject see Robert Pirsig’s Lila and the work of Rupert Sheldrake … and this is just the opening of the book “Scientists often like to say that the materialist view of present-day science is potentially consistent with early any view of ethics or religion because it says nothing about these […]

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Christopher Alexander on Inert Matter

Published: April 21, 2016
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” … our view of matter is flawed … The substance which the 20th century world was made of remained the inert, mechanical space-time of Descartes, Newton and Einstein, of quantum mechanics and the string theorists. This mechanical substance is our cake. So far, our spiritual views and ethical views are only frosting on this […]

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Christopher Alexander on Wabi to Sabi – Rusty Beauty

Published: April 1, 2016
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I am starting to feel a build up of “missing” excerpts … from the first phase of my reading Alexander (before I started excerpting) and from some things which didn’t feel “excerptable” … in this case roughness. “… to get the perfect adaptation which is required by the unfolding of a field of centers, you […]

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Christopher Alexander on Traditional Elements

Published: March 28, 2016
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a beautiful illustration of the nature and manifestation of static quality “In a natural unfolding of the building – the wholeness of that configuration itself – generates centers at various key points … Consider an imaginary process in which a generalized building is conceived, in outlines, as a hazy volume … even without knowledge of […]

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Reading Lila – Good

Published: May 2, 2010
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Take care of your goodness

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Reading Lila – Enlightment

Published: May 2, 2010
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Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi … that’s what they were really involved in, the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn’t pass it on.

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Reading Lila – Dharma

Published: May 2, 2010
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Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of ‘rightness’ which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life …

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