“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”
Jim Barksdale

Inside Grand Seiko

Published: December 26, 2017
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“This is the minimum requirement in making a beautiful watch: First, each individual part must be beautiful.”

 

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Christopher Alexander – Mechanistic: A Mental Toy

Published: December 26, 2017
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“The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. He ideas was: if you want to know how something works, you can find out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in … from everything else, and you invent a mechanistic model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules, and which will then replicate the behavior of the thing …

However, the crucial thing which Descartes understood very well, but which we most often forget, is that this process is only a method … [it] is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental exercise, something we do to reality, in order to understand it …

Descartes … was a religious person who would have been horrified to find out that people in the 20th century began to think that reality itself is actually like this … treating reality as if this mechanical picture really were the nature of things, as if everything really were a machine.

… [this] had two tremendous consequences, both devastating for artists. The first was that ‘I’ went out of our world … Of course, it is still there in our experience. But it isn’t part of the picture we have of how things are. So what happens? How can you make something which has no ‘I’ in it, when the whole process of making anything comes from the ‘I’? The process of trying to be an artist in a world which has no sensible notion of ‘I’ … leaves the art of building in a vacuum. You just cannot make sense of it.

The second devastating thing that happened … was that clear understanding about value went out of the world. The picture of the world we have from physics, because it is built only out of mental machines, no longer has any definite feeling of value in it: value has become sidelined as a matter of opinion, not intrinsic to the nature of the world at all.

And with these two developments, the idea of order fell apart. The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world. Yet it is just this deeper order which is our main concern.

… In the world-view initiated by Descartes … it is believed that the only statements which can be true or false are statements about mechanisms. These are the so-called ‘facts’ familiar to everyone in the 20th century.

In the world-view I am presenting, a second kind of statement is also considered capable of being trye or false. These are statements about relative degree of life, degree of harmony, or degree of wholeness – in short, statements about value. In the view I hold, these statements about relative wholeness are also factual … They play a more fundamental role than statements about mechanisms.

… Suppose I am trying to place a door in a certain wall. While I try to decide where to put it, I can make various mechanical statements of fact … it is wide enough to allow a refrigerator through it … it will resist a standard fire for one hour … it weighs 25 kilograms … people can see through [it] … All these statements are, potentially, statements of fact in the 20th-century mode.

… But if I am trying to put the door in the wall, there is also a second kind of statement … when the door is in a certain range of positions, the result is more harmonious than other positions … a pale yellow on this door has more life than a dark gray … They are thought of as statements of opinion. As a matter of principle within the 20th-century mechanistic view, statements of this kind may to be considered potentially true or false.

… As architects, builders, and artists, we are called upon constantly … to make judgements about relative harmony. If the only statements considered potentially true or false mechanistic statements of fact … then, in principle, rational discussion about building should be impossible.

… The devastating impact of this state of affairs on the progress of architecture has not, I think, been sufficiently discussed in recent decades … If we accept the 20th century idea that statements of value are … merely statements of opinion, it is in principle impossible to reach any sensible shared conclusion in the process of making the environment – only arbitrary and private conclusions. The chaos with which are familiar in the built world, must then follow as an inevitable conclusion – as indeed it has.

… Consciously or unconsciously, the architect assumes that only ‘factual’ statements (in the mechanistic sense) can be true, and therefore has it as a further (unconscious) assumption that the idea of what is good is something that you add to the factual statements – something that is … only a matter of opinion.

… Architects make different idiosyncratic choices because within the mechanistic world view it is not possible to function mentally without making some private choices of this kind.

… It … makes cooperative work, collaboration, and social agreement very difficult in principle. It has a superficial permissiveness which seems to encourage different opinions. But what is encouraged, really, is only the essential arbitrariness of ideas rooted in a mechanical view of how the world is made.

What we need is a sharable point of view, in which the many factors influencing the environment can coexist coherently, so that we can work together – not by confrontation and argument – but because we share a single holistic view of the unitary goal of life.”

 

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

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Graduality and Edges in Practice

Published: December 25, 2017
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Breathing Formula

A prerequisite for following the example in this post is an understanding of an expression such as:

4x 8-0-12-0

It is a formula for breathing, where the breath is made up of four parts: an inhale, a pause, an exhale and a pause. This particular formula indicates 4 breaths each of 8 second inhale, no pause, 12 second exhale, no pause.

Approaching An Edge

In my practice I am exploring going from one breath ratio to another in a particular asana. It is a journey and its map may look something like this:

If I try (I did) to simply jump to my destination I encounter an edge. A tension appears in my breath, If I want to overcome the tension I need to use force which generates more tension and my breath breaks. I am unable to go directly to my destination. The map now looks something like this:

My breath gives me access to part of the range, but not to all of it. So I look for a step that I can do. I start by increasing the number of breaths from 2 to 4:

When I am settled in this new capacity I can then break up those 4 breaths into 2 sets of 2 and add a short 2 second pause after the exhale in the 2nd set of breaths.

I can then introduce an additional pause after the inhale.

I can then bring all 4 breaths into my new capacity, which now includes pauses both after the inhale and exhale:

I can then again split the 4 breaths up into 2 pairs and extend the breath by extending the pauses … again starting from the pause after the exhale:

… and then extending also the pause after the inhale

… and the next step … is my destination … gradual steps brought me to what was previously an edge beyond my capacity.

I am never on the edge. I am always approaching an edge that is always moving away from me. In a way, in good practice I am always surrounded by capacities that once seemed beyond me.

… On the Way

There are also unknown gems I encounter on the way:

Skipping forward in the journey also means skipping over these gems of experience. Gradual steps bring me to them. I may not even be aware of these until I encounter them. They hold both realizations ans unasked questions. They hold wisdom that may never crystallize as understanding in my mind, they may resonate somewhere in my body or my heart. They may change for my perspective and inform my path. Like seeds, they may reside in me until the conditions are ripe for them to sprout and grow.

Taking Steps

Some steps take a short time (a few days), some take weeks, months, years … and maybe even lifetimes. It depends very much on the balance and integration of life and practice. If life throws me too often “into the red”, progress in practice may take longer. For example, I was already well established in 12-4-12-4 last year, but then life happened … and I am only now catching up with where I already was.

The key conscious indicator I have to making a step is breath itself. When I am well established in a practice there is a feeling of strength and spaciousness in the breath. There is a feeling of cofidence that I the breath is able to carry me another step forward in my exploration. I can push my body, I can push my mind, but if I try to push the breath the breath pushes back and teaches me to stop pushing.

One Posture

Things are actually much more colorful in reality where my real exploration was more like this:

In the journey I described above I chose, for the sake of simplicity, to focus on the last two breathes in the sequence. This means that in reality there is room for even more variation and gradually … there is more range of exploration … there can be different paths to explore on the way to my destination.

And there are other dimensions. Consider that in this example I’ve focused just on breath. There are dimensions of physical form (the posture itself), in attention (where focus is placed) and in recent months I’ve been learning about introducing sound. Each of these dimensions have their own gradual path of development and they are in constant interplay with each other.

What more, if I zoom out even more, this so called “destination” is just another step on a much longer exploration.

My destination is really 12 breaths of 12 second inhale, 12 second hold, 12 second exhale and a 12 second hold. That comes to a 48 second breath, repeated 12 times, that comes to an almost 10 minute stay … which is on one side of the posture which is asymmetrical which is therefore repeated on both sides … which comes to an almost 20 minute stay in one posture. That can be quite a space for exploration!

When years ago, I was first introduced to this “destination” the map I saw looked like the map above … it seemed impossible, out of my reach. Today, after years of gradual development I see a different map:

Perception itself changes during this exploration. What once seemed impossible now seems approachable.

A Practice Sequence

But even that is not the whole picture. This entire demonstration has addressed breath in one posture. But I never do a posture. My practice is a caringly assembled sequence of postures. Each posture has numerous dimensions of exploration. The sequence itself is intended as a gradual process of refinement, one posture preparing for the next … each opening doors to different potentials … gradually moving from gross to subtle.

A practice sequence can look something like this:

In a practice there are many opportunities to meet edges. Each edge can be met gradually or as a confrontation that generates tension. A practice can become a generator of tensions. Or it can be refined:

… and further refined:

The potentially wild energies of edges can be harnessed into a directed and limitless exploration.

If there is a downside to this approach it is a lack of superficial satisfactions. It can seem unexciting, even boring. There are no heroic achievements, no exhilarating drama. It requires long term, patient engagement.

Life

… and life is a sequence of practices … and endless stream of edges, often out of our control. Practice is a good space to explore edges. It gives me an opportunity to become familiar with edges, to establish habits that can serve me when life’s edges crash into me.

This post began to resonate in me a couple of months go when Eric posed a question (I’m paraphrasing): how can we design something we cannot even comprehend yet? This post is a first piece of my reflection on this question. It hints at a direction I am exploring: a living process (of unfolding wholeness) that does not require comprehension.

 

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Christopher Alexander – A World Picture

Published: December 24, 2017
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“I believe that we have in us a residue of a world-picture which is essentially mechanical in nature – what we might call the mechanist-rationalist world picture … Like an infection is has entered us, it affects our actions, it affects our morals, it affects our sense of beauty.

… This is a picture of a world made of atoms which whirl around in a mechanical fashion: a world in which it is assumed that all the universe is a blind mechanism, whirling on its way, under the impact of the ‘laws of nature.’ These laws are, essentially, those mechanistic laws which explain how the atoms and the structures made of these atoms proceed on their way … Even tough we would admit that the precise laws and mechanisms may not be known, we assume that underlying our ignorance there are some laws, not quite formulated, which do account for how things work …

I have reached the conclusion that the strange fantasies, the private in-house language about architecture, the strange nature of 20th-century gallery art, deconstructionism, postmodernism, modernism and a host of other ‘isms’, all of which affect our physical world hugely, are created because of an entanglement between the nature of architecture, the practice of architecture, and the mechanical conception of the universe.

… More precisely, I believe that the mistake and confusion in our picture of the the art of building has come from our conception of what matter is.

The present conception of matter, and the opposing one which I shall try to put in its place, may both be summarized by the nature of order. Our idea of matter is essentially governed by our idea of order … So it is the nature of order which lies at the root of the problem of architecture …

When we understand what order is,  I believe we shall better understand what matter is and then what the universe itself is.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

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Christopher Alexander – Human Feelings

Published: December 24, 2017
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“Of course there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they are talking about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyncratic part is really only about ten percent of the feelings which we feel. Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same things. So, from the very beginning, when we made the pattern language, we concentrated on that … part of human experience …”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

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