I've been rereading Christopher Alexander's The Luminous Ground, the fourth volume of his magnum opus The Nature of Order. His first three volumes are what you might call pragmatic and secular: they focus on properties of composition that might be used to create more fulfilling—literally more alive—architecture, and on how these properties might be put into practice by people trying to breathe more life into the world. The Luminous Ground, on the other hand, is explicitly a somewhat religious book: Alexander apologizes for this, and the book is his attempt to express his theories in as secular and non-mystical a way as possible, but he is nonetheless dealing with what might be called a spiritual dimension, and re-evaluating his own school of thought as a potentially religious concept.
It's important to note that I think the actual "fifteen properties" that The Nature of Order revolves around are among the most breathtaking and illuminating ideas I've ever encountered. I first encountered them on this delightfully-still-unfinished page; even incomplete, accompanied by the vaguest possible images, something about his system of thinking was utterly compelling. Furthermore, Alexander was a working architect, one who consistently tried to apply his theories to the actual buildings he made. And his work is, indeed, lovely in a way that I find hard to articulate; it is all simultaneously modest and striking, comfortable and energizing at the same time. The easiest way to put it might just be that it works, in the way that the most charming places in the town I grew up in, or the city I live now, simply give me a place that I like to call home. The difference is that, in Alexander's work, that sense of charm and livability extends to every corner of every room—because it was, in fact, created intentionally and from the ground up.
The Luminous Ground is Alexander's attempt to explain what his work seeks to achieve, and to reconcile it with our physical understanding of the universe. Because it's important to Alexander, as a mathematician and scientist, to respect all possible intellectual pursuits of reality—if anything, his argument is that science has been exploited to create an anti-intellectual atmosphere, one in which possible interpretations of the world must be rigorously tested under laboratory conditions; the ones that can't be tested are considered not only "unproven" but actively uninteresting and distasteful. Which isn't to say that he then spent any time trying to justify alternative medicine or homeopathic remedies, because his critique was not conspiratorial in nature. It was that science can breed incuriosity, and moreover is better at examining certain subject matters than others. It should not be inherently discrediting to be curious about things which science can't easily study, yet a certain STEM or anti-theistic mindset is scornful of anything that exists outside its "rationalist" purview—often to the point of dogma and irrationality.
(This is all my way of saying: please don't take my specific interest in Christopher Alexander as an endorsement of other spiritual or religious theories, or as an endorsement of science-skepticism in general.)
What Alexander posits is that there is a kind of being—the "ground"—which could be thought of as a single, unified "Self." Rather, the phenomenon which we call life, including both biological life and human consciousness, is an extension of this ground, which means that our very notion of a "self" dips into this broader kind of being. When certain experiences make us feel, not just more alive, but more like ourselves, it is because we are encountering the very thing that defines us, and feel ourselves literally expand in the process. When you find yourself in a beautiful clearing in the woods and get the sense that, somehow, the clearing is you, or that you are an extension of the clearing, it is because you and the clearing are made of the same stuff, on a level in which there is no such thing as separateness. You both belong to the same ground, so to speak.
This is obviously a little bit handwavey, and way more woo than I could ever be comfortable with. Thankfully, the same is true of Alexander, who both apologizes for the nebulousness of his articulations and searches for ways to bind this theory to more concrete studies. One of his ongoing experiments involved showing a plethora of people pictures of various works—some of which he deemed "lifelike," others of which were visually striking, award-winning, even popular, but didn't meet his definition of lifelikeness—and asking them which they felt more resembled them. Not which one they thought was more beautiful or interesting or fun: which one they thought most seemed like their sense of what they were like as a person. What he found was that, while people's interpretations of beauty or interest varied wildly, their interpretation of "self" remained shockingly constant: they would respond more to the lifelike buildings every time.
This test is still quite handwavey, but Alexander goes on—which is where his fifteen properties come into effect. He takes pains to analyze these buildings, not even as architecture, but as mathematical compositions, studying them for the various concrete patterns which define their deeper structure. And what he shows, across The Nature of Order, is that deceptively simple works of architecture contain astonishing layers of patterning, ones that turn out to mirror far more overtly ornate buildings whose designs nonetheless seem to follow the same deeper logic. (An earlier book of his studies different eras of Turkish rug design, and finds the same patterns popping up within their weaves—notably during a period where rug patterns were explicitly seen as an attempt to depict the deeper nature of God.)
Essentially, Alexander argues that it's not just some psychological trick that certain places, certain paintings, and certain musical compositions hold a profound and seemingly-universal appeal. He makes an effort to demonstrate that these works' impact transcends individual cultures, and that different cultures seem to come to the same fundamental expressions, even when their starting points are initially quite different from one another. It has nothing to do with highbrow or lowbrow, or with rural or urban mentalities, or with intellectual versus emotive manners of expression: all of these are capable of reflecting that innate sense of self, and all of them are capable of alienation from it. His emphasis on mathematical observation of hidden things lets him both formally study things which are often seen as unworthy of study, and suggest that "sophistication," in this particular sense, is an abstract concept that has next-to-nothing to do with formal or cultural sophistication. His manner is erudite, but not elitist.
When I call this a theory of the "divine," or say that it is fundamentally a spiritual and even religious notion, I don't mean that it's an argument for or against the existence of God—at least, not as "God" is conventionally interpreted. At some point, Alexander more-or-less makes clear that this is his conception of God, and that it is the whole of his conception: there is no sentient divine creature that exists beyond this "luminous ground." And it is possible to interpret all of the major religions using this conception, without doing their notions of divinity a disservice. (Personally speaking, Alexander made it far easier for me to both understand and appreciate the meanings behind various faiths, even as I disagree with other versions of "God" enough to still identify as an atheist.) If God is the name for this deeper sense of existence, this unified and universal sense of self, then you can say quite soberly that we are a reflection of God's image or that certain experiences take us closer to the divine than others. But you also, just as importantly, never have to: you can cut God out of the equation altogether, and treat this as a way of observing the world or even just mathematical and architectural patterns, without its being blasphemy in the slightest. Alexander doesn't want you to believe in the sense of devoting yourself to a faith; he wants you to believe in the sense that you find this theory leads you to interesting insights and observations, and might lend itself to practical application.
At the end of the day, he says, his only goal was pragmatic: he simply wanted to make better buildings. It just so happens that that ambition led him to certain methods of mathematical analysis, and that he reached a point where more spiritual, mystic, even divine modes of thinking were the simplest ways to explain his own theories. He stresses, over and over again, that he did not work backwards from religious conception to so-called mathematical "proof," the way that numerologists devise bizarre mathematical equations to decide when some random line in the Bible means that Jesus is coming back. Rather, at some point his architectural theories reached a point of complexity that led him to say: let's assume that there is a layer of reality, cohabitative with and not contradictory to physical reality, which speaks to us in a somewhat universal and meaningful way. Let's assume that, when the bulk of humanity responds powerfully to certain buildings, certain parts of nature, certain melodies, certain poems, that we are not deluding ourselves to think there is something significant about that shared experience. And let's take the fact that what we're physically discussing is a sense of connectedness, the mathematical fact of something's pieces operating in a way that's not only unified but blurs the line between the individual parts, and ask whether or not that's connected to the emotional experiences that people have, the ones where they refer to a sense of togetherness, an elimination of the alienated fear that they are somehow alone and apart from the whole of existence. If we work off that assumption, do the demonstrable physical properties of this work make more or less sense? And if we start to try and test that assumption, forming tests to examine them—and trying as hard as possible to deal with the fact that, if these theories say what we think they say, on some level they will have to be at least a little subjective—do the tests at least point to the possibility that there's something real there?
Ultimately, Christopher Alexander's religious beliefs matter less to me than that he makes buildings that I love, and captures a feeling that I long to capture myself—a feeling that few artists in any medium capture as reliably as he does, let alone on such a scale that you can literally walk through and live in his worlds. The fact that he posits a new conception of reality, or suggests that, because of it, the thought that we might be interconnected (or transform the world in ways that let us feel more connected with it) can be taken more literally than we usually imagine... well, that's neat, but it's nowhere near as important to me as the fact that his fifteen properties, or the process he describes of how to procedurally create large works by letting them slowly emerge, are among the most powerful creative tools I've ever discovered. His suggestion that there might be a way to conceive of God secularly, and in a way that holds consistently across different faiths, is really cool, but sometimes he talks about what makes good poetry good, or about what it means to truly love another person, in ways that open my eyes and stir my soul and help me be a better and happier person. And the only reason I'm talking about Alexander's spiritual thoughts at all is that they don't exist separately from any of his other thoughts: they are a unification of all these things, the underlying fabric that connects poetry and love and architecture and art and mathematics, and they offer a vision of spiritual living as expressed through these other things. His idea of a spiritual life is one in which your relationship with God is articulated in the everyday mundane, and becomes the thing which makes the everyday less mundane in the process.
To me, that's the only way that any true God could be. If you think that God is real, it would be insane not to try and understand every part of your life as a reflection of that divine connection. It's a pity that most of the people who try to do this seem to do so in such dogmatic and lunatic ways that they make God look like a ludicrous tyrant by relation. Look: I've done too much in life to think that a singular culture's idea of faith is the literal only way to live a good life. If you can't make room in your cosmology, the way that Alexander does, for seeing a divine presence in hand-painted Harley-Davidsons, and if you can't suggest with a straight face that sometimes the spiritual nature of the world is easier to see when you're two or three beers deep, then I'm going to suggest that the world is stranger and more wondrous than you're willing to let yourself believe. And if you're trying to argue in a divine presence, in a being so extraordinary that it transcends the rest of existence, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you can only believe in God by denying yourself access to the weirdest and most delightful corners of reality.
But that's why Alexander's luminous ground delights me so. His is a worldview that wants to embrace diversity and strangeness and complexity, and that sees possibility virtually everywhere. He suggests that things are more connected than we think—and that alienation occurs, not because some lifestyles or cultures are "less Godly" than others, but because the modern world increasingly rejects connection, atomizing societies and isolating individuals and literally reshaping our streets and homes and rooms and buildings in ways that cut us off from one another, and from the world in which we ought to be living.
There's an anecdote in his book Battle, which describes his efforts to construct a high school in Japan. Alexander's plan calls for a lake in a certain part of the campus. The school's administrators aren't so sure. What's the practical benefit of this lake, or the bridge that spans it? What utility does it serve? Why create a lake rather than a pool, or dwell too much on a body of water at all?
But they build the lake anyway, with the proviso that the administration might change its mind later. And within days of the lake's construction, a family of ducks makes its home there. They become unofficial mascots of the school, a tiny part of campus life. In time, they make the rest of the campus their home too. And of course the administration decides they can't do anything about the lake now, not when the ducks have become such an essential part of what gives this community life.
Alexander points to this and says: the ducks came here because they, too, could feel the life we gave this place. By coming here, the ducks in turn brought life to this whole campus. The students responded to the ducks in ways that gave the ducks an even broader home. And the life of the students mingles with the life of the ducks, and both of those mingle with the life of the campus as a whole; and by building a lake where we built it, we tapped into a deeper wellspring of life. That wellspring could have been proven mathematically as a part of this campus's overall design, but it didn't have to be—because all of a sudden, there were ducks.
That's Alexander's definition of God in a nutshell: Suddenly, ducks.
I'm still not sure that I believe any of what he says in The Luminous Ground. But he makes it easy to have faith.
It's important to note that I think the actual "fifteen properties" that The Nature of Order revolves around are among the most breathtaking and illuminating ideas I've ever encountered. I first encountered them on this delightfully-still-unfinished page; even incomplete, accompanied by the vaguest possible images, something about his system of thinking was utterly compelling. Furthermore, Alexander was a working architect, one who consistently tried to apply his theories to the actual buildings he made. And his work is, indeed, lovely in a way that I find hard to articulate; it is all simultaneously modest and striking, comfortable and energizing at the same time. The easiest way to put it might just be that it works, in the way that the most charming places in the town I grew up in, or the city I live now, simply give me a place that I like to call home. The difference is that, in Alexander's work, that sense of charm and livability extends to every corner of every room—because it was, in fact, created intentionally and from the ground up.
The Luminous Ground is Alexander's attempt to explain what his work seeks to achieve, and to reconcile it with our physical understanding of the universe. Because it's important to Alexander, as a mathematician and scientist, to respect all possible intellectual pursuits of reality—if anything, his argument is that science has been exploited to create an anti-intellectual atmosphere, one in which possible interpretations of the world must be rigorously tested under laboratory conditions; the ones that can't be tested are considered not only "unproven" but actively uninteresting and distasteful. Which isn't to say that he then spent any time trying to justify alternative medicine or homeopathic remedies, because his critique was not conspiratorial in nature. It was that science can breed incuriosity, and moreover is better at examining certain subject matters than others. It should not be inherently discrediting to be curious about things which science can't easily study, yet a certain STEM or anti-theistic mindset is scornful of anything that exists outside its "rationalist" purview—often to the point of dogma and irrationality.
(This is all my way of saying: please don't take my specific interest in Christopher Alexander as an endorsement of other spiritual or religious theories, or as an endorsement of science-skepticism in general.)
What Alexander posits is that there is a kind of being—the "ground"—which could be thought of as a single, unified "Self." Rather, the phenomenon which we call life, including both biological life and human consciousness, is an extension of this ground, which means that our very notion of a "self" dips into this broader kind of being. When certain experiences make us feel, not just more alive, but more like ourselves, it is because we are encountering the very thing that defines us, and feel ourselves literally expand in the process. When you find yourself in a beautiful clearing in the woods and get the sense that, somehow, the clearing is you, or that you are an extension of the clearing, it is because you and the clearing are made of the same stuff, on a level in which there is no such thing as separateness. You both belong to the same ground, so to speak.
This is obviously a little bit handwavey, and way more woo than I could ever be comfortable with. Thankfully, the same is true of Alexander, who both apologizes for the nebulousness of his articulations and searches for ways to bind this theory to more concrete studies. One of his ongoing experiments involved showing a plethora of people pictures of various works—some of which he deemed "lifelike," others of which were visually striking, award-winning, even popular, but didn't meet his definition of lifelikeness—and asking them which they felt more resembled them. Not which one they thought was more beautiful or interesting or fun: which one they thought most seemed like their sense of what they were like as a person. What he found was that, while people's interpretations of beauty or interest varied wildly, their interpretation of "self" remained shockingly constant: they would respond more to the lifelike buildings every time.
This test is still quite handwavey, but Alexander goes on—which is where his fifteen properties come into effect. He takes pains to analyze these buildings, not even as architecture, but as mathematical compositions, studying them for the various concrete patterns which define their deeper structure. And what he shows, across The Nature of Order, is that deceptively simple works of architecture contain astonishing layers of patterning, ones that turn out to mirror far more overtly ornate buildings whose designs nonetheless seem to follow the same deeper logic. (An earlier book of his studies different eras of Turkish rug design, and finds the same patterns popping up within their weaves—notably during a period where rug patterns were explicitly seen as an attempt to depict the deeper nature of God.)
Essentially, Alexander argues that it's not just some psychological trick that certain places, certain paintings, and certain musical compositions hold a profound and seemingly-universal appeal. He makes an effort to demonstrate that these works' impact transcends individual cultures, and that different cultures seem to come to the same fundamental expressions, even when their starting points are initially quite different from one another. It has nothing to do with highbrow or lowbrow, or with rural or urban mentalities, or with intellectual versus emotive manners of expression: all of these are capable of reflecting that innate sense of self, and all of them are capable of alienation from it. His emphasis on mathematical observation of hidden things lets him both formally study things which are often seen as unworthy of study, and suggest that "sophistication," in this particular sense, is an abstract concept that has next-to-nothing to do with formal or cultural sophistication. His manner is erudite, but not elitist.
When I call this a theory of the "divine," or say that it is fundamentally a spiritual and even religious notion, I don't mean that it's an argument for or against the existence of God—at least, not as "God" is conventionally interpreted. At some point, Alexander more-or-less makes clear that this is his conception of God, and that it is the whole of his conception: there is no sentient divine creature that exists beyond this "luminous ground." And it is possible to interpret all of the major religions using this conception, without doing their notions of divinity a disservice. (Personally speaking, Alexander made it far easier for me to both understand and appreciate the meanings behind various faiths, even as I disagree with other versions of "God" enough to still identify as an atheist.) If God is the name for this deeper sense of existence, this unified and universal sense of self, then you can say quite soberly that we are a reflection of God's image or that certain experiences take us closer to the divine than others. But you also, just as importantly, never have to: you can cut God out of the equation altogether, and treat this as a way of observing the world or even just mathematical and architectural patterns, without its being blasphemy in the slightest. Alexander doesn't want you to believe in the sense of devoting yourself to a faith; he wants you to believe in the sense that you find this theory leads you to interesting insights and observations, and might lend itself to practical application.
At the end of the day, he says, his only goal was pragmatic: he simply wanted to make better buildings. It just so happens that that ambition led him to certain methods of mathematical analysis, and that he reached a point where more spiritual, mystic, even divine modes of thinking were the simplest ways to explain his own theories. He stresses, over and over again, that he did not work backwards from religious conception to so-called mathematical "proof," the way that numerologists devise bizarre mathematical equations to decide when some random line in the Bible means that Jesus is coming back. Rather, at some point his architectural theories reached a point of complexity that led him to say: let's assume that there is a layer of reality, cohabitative with and not contradictory to physical reality, which speaks to us in a somewhat universal and meaningful way. Let's assume that, when the bulk of humanity responds powerfully to certain buildings, certain parts of nature, certain melodies, certain poems, that we are not deluding ourselves to think there is something significant about that shared experience. And let's take the fact that what we're physically discussing is a sense of connectedness, the mathematical fact of something's pieces operating in a way that's not only unified but blurs the line between the individual parts, and ask whether or not that's connected to the emotional experiences that people have, the ones where they refer to a sense of togetherness, an elimination of the alienated fear that they are somehow alone and apart from the whole of existence. If we work off that assumption, do the demonstrable physical properties of this work make more or less sense? And if we start to try and test that assumption, forming tests to examine them—and trying as hard as possible to deal with the fact that, if these theories say what we think they say, on some level they will have to be at least a little subjective—do the tests at least point to the possibility that there's something real there?
Ultimately, Christopher Alexander's religious beliefs matter less to me than that he makes buildings that I love, and captures a feeling that I long to capture myself—a feeling that few artists in any medium capture as reliably as he does, let alone on such a scale that you can literally walk through and live in his worlds. The fact that he posits a new conception of reality, or suggests that, because of it, the thought that we might be interconnected (or transform the world in ways that let us feel more connected with it) can be taken more literally than we usually imagine... well, that's neat, but it's nowhere near as important to me as the fact that his fifteen properties, or the process he describes of how to procedurally create large works by letting them slowly emerge, are among the most powerful creative tools I've ever discovered. His suggestion that there might be a way to conceive of God secularly, and in a way that holds consistently across different faiths, is really cool, but sometimes he talks about what makes good poetry good, or about what it means to truly love another person, in ways that open my eyes and stir my soul and help me be a better and happier person. And the only reason I'm talking about Alexander's spiritual thoughts at all is that they don't exist separately from any of his other thoughts: they are a unification of all these things, the underlying fabric that connects poetry and love and architecture and art and mathematics, and they offer a vision of spiritual living as expressed through these other things. His idea of a spiritual life is one in which your relationship with God is articulated in the everyday mundane, and becomes the thing which makes the everyday less mundane in the process.
To me, that's the only way that any true God could be. If you think that God is real, it would be insane not to try and understand every part of your life as a reflection of that divine connection. It's a pity that most of the people who try to do this seem to do so in such dogmatic and lunatic ways that they make God look like a ludicrous tyrant by relation. Look: I've done too much in life to think that a singular culture's idea of faith is the literal only way to live a good life. If you can't make room in your cosmology, the way that Alexander does, for seeing a divine presence in hand-painted Harley-Davidsons, and if you can't suggest with a straight face that sometimes the spiritual nature of the world is easier to see when you're two or three beers deep, then I'm going to suggest that the world is stranger and more wondrous than you're willing to let yourself believe. And if you're trying to argue in a divine presence, in a being so extraordinary that it transcends the rest of existence, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you can only believe in God by denying yourself access to the weirdest and most delightful corners of reality.
But that's why Alexander's luminous ground delights me so. His is a worldview that wants to embrace diversity and strangeness and complexity, and that sees possibility virtually everywhere. He suggests that things are more connected than we think—and that alienation occurs, not because some lifestyles or cultures are "less Godly" than others, but because the modern world increasingly rejects connection, atomizing societies and isolating individuals and literally reshaping our streets and homes and rooms and buildings in ways that cut us off from one another, and from the world in which we ought to be living.
There's an anecdote in his book Battle, which describes his efforts to construct a high school in Japan. Alexander's plan calls for a lake in a certain part of the campus. The school's administrators aren't so sure. What's the practical benefit of this lake, or the bridge that spans it? What utility does it serve? Why create a lake rather than a pool, or dwell too much on a body of water at all?
But they build the lake anyway, with the proviso that the administration might change its mind later. And within days of the lake's construction, a family of ducks makes its home there. They become unofficial mascots of the school, a tiny part of campus life. In time, they make the rest of the campus their home too. And of course the administration decides they can't do anything about the lake now, not when the ducks have become such an essential part of what gives this community life.
Alexander points to this and says: the ducks came here because they, too, could feel the life we gave this place. By coming here, the ducks in turn brought life to this whole campus. The students responded to the ducks in ways that gave the ducks an even broader home. And the life of the students mingles with the life of the ducks, and both of those mingle with the life of the campus as a whole; and by building a lake where we built it, we tapped into a deeper wellspring of life. That wellspring could have been proven mathematically as a part of this campus's overall design, but it didn't have to be—because all of a sudden, there were ducks.
That's Alexander's definition of God in a nutshell: Suddenly, ducks.
I'm still not sure that I believe any of what he says in The Luminous Ground. But he makes it easy to have faith.