Christopher Alexander on a Real Relatedness

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 … and I am just starting to feel. Just yesterday I was talking to Judit about my expected “spring allergy month” … and how I view it as a panic response coming from somewhere deep inside. Could my allergic response be an expression of a shocking awakening and realization of the vitality and immensity of … life?

” … the relationship between people and the world which makes it appear that some parts of the world have more relationship to our own selves and others less should be understood as something real …

I wish to say that the relatedness through which I feel that my own self and the tree in the field are directly connected is the most fundamental relation that there is. I wish to say that it is in this relatedness … that I learn, feel, understand, that I am of the world … Far from being a minor cognitive resemblance between me and the tree, this relatedness that exists between us and the living things in the world occurs, I think, because of a fundamental connection between our own self and something which is in those things.

… Thus it is only in connection with these living things that I am fully real … In a place surrounded by alien living structures where I do not feel such a feeling of relatedness, my actual relatedness to the world is interrupted or destroyed. Then I myself am not as real. My reality is damaged and inhibited.

… Further, I want to draw attention to the role of buildings in maintaining the existence of this relatedness. … it is my view that our ability to experience the relatedness with nature or with buildings is damaged when we live in a world of objects and structures that are non-living structures. Thus, the modern person who ‘loves’ nature and goes to visit nature is not able to enter this relatedness with nature as easily, because the daily proximity with so many non-living structures – freeways, motels, traffic lights, office buildings – dominates our awareness, cauterizes the person and the person’s capacity to enter in this relatedness, to see it and feel it.

… If I am right, it is the presence of living structure in our built world that decides the extent of our relatedness with earth. Buildings which lack living structure not only destroy our ability to feel relatedness through them. They also inhibit, somehow and reduce the ability we have to feel relatedness at all, even in nature – places where we would otherwise feel it naturally.

… When the Hopi chief says that he looks out and sees the desert and the stars, and that he and his people are related to them, we take this, we listen to it, we love it; but it is no longer entirely real for us. We listen to it as poetry … But, of course we consider it as fiction, the thinking of primitives. It has not occurred to us, that what the Indian chief says might actually be true. Literally true. That the relation he and his people spoke about, and feel, between themselves and all things, was a relationship that is actually there, but one that we no longer see, or acknowledge, or are willing to experience, because in our cosmology it is not understandable that such a thing could be true.

… I wish to claim that there is such a thing as an ‘I,’ lying behind matter, and that all living structure (though certainly not all structure) is connected, necessarily with this ‘I.’ I shall claim too, that on examination, this relatedness will turn out to be a part of physics.

In order to sustain this claim, we must begin by grasping it as something rooted in experience … we may then go on to ask what kind of physical explanation might make sense of it. But with must start with verifiable experience.”

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