Christopher Alexander on Tat Tvam Asi

I have been looking forward to book 4 … and then this in its preface:

“Early in my life as an architect, as first I was confused or deceived by the teaching I received from architectural instructors. I thought that those things which are important – and perhaps the things which I aspired to make – were ‘other’, outside myself, governed by a canon of expertise which lay outside me, but to which I gave due.

Gradually the older I got, I recognized that little of that had value, and that the thing which did have true value was only that thing which lay in my own heart. Then I learned to value only that which truly activates what is in my heart … I sought, more and more, only those experiences which have the capacity, the depth, to activate the feeling that is my real feeling, in my true childish heart. And I learned, slowly, to make things which are of that nature.

This was a strange process, like coming home. As a young man I started with all my fancy ideas … Then from my teachers I learned things even more fantastic … sophisticated taste, cleverness, profundity, seriousness. I tried to make, with my own hands, things of that level of accomplishment. That took me to middle age.

Then, gradually I began to recognize that in the midst of that cleverness, which I never truly understood anyway, the one thing I could trust was a small voice, a tiny soft-and-hard vulnerable feeling, recognizable, which was something I actually knew. Slowly that knowledge grew in me.

Usually the things which embodied this knowledge were very small  … in ordinary discourse they might have seemed insignificant, like the fact that I felt comfortable when my back sank into a pillow arranged in a certain way …

Then in my later years I gradually began to recognize that this realistic voice, breaking through … was my own voice, the voice that had always been in me, since childhood …

But this knowing of myself, and what was in my own true heart, was not only childish … I also began to recognize it in very great things, in works made by artists centuries away from us in time … Somehow I began to realize that the greatest masters of their craft were those who somehow managed to release, in me, that childish heart …

I begin to realize that what I come in touch with when I go closer and closer to myself is not just ‘me’. It is something vast, existing outside myself and inside myself, as it if were a contact with the eternal, something everlasting existing before me, in me, and around me.

… Yet even though I am next to nothing in the presence of all this force, I am free there. In such a place, at such a moment, I am crushed to understand my own smallness, and then understand the immensity of what exists …

Actions and objects increase or decrease my connection to this vastness, which is in me, and which is also real. A concrete corridor without windows and with an endless line of doors is less likely to awaken it in me than a small apple tree in bloom …

It is at once enormous in extent and infinitely intimate and personal.

… The essence of the argument which I am putting before you … is that the thing we call ‘the self,’ which lies at the core of our experience, is a real thing, existing in all matter, beyond ourselves, and that in the end we must understand it, in order to make living structure in buildings. But it is also my argument that this is the nature of matter. It is not only necessary to understand it when we wish to make living structure in buildings. It is also necessary if we wish to grasp our place in the universe, our relationship to nature.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 4: The Luminous Ground