The Chorus and the Weave: A Non-Duality Without a Ground

Imagine a chorus. Many voices are sounding together. Each voice is distinct: this one bright, that one grave, another barely a breath. Yet what you hear is not many things. You hear one music. Now notice three things about this chorus. There is no conductor standing behind the voices, coordinating them. There is no score they are reading from, no ideal composition their singing approximates. And there is no floor or datum that holds them up. There is only the singing itself, holding together.

This is my image for reality. I call the position it expresses choral non-duality. One clarification: in this image, a voice is not a singer's body. A voice is a singer's agency — the acting, expressing, and answering by which a singer takes part in the music. The voices of the chorus are the agencies of embodied minds, and what those agencies make together is the unfolding of life [7]. In one sentence: reality is not-two, everywhere — and therefore genuinely many. This essay states what exists and why no hidden ground needs to be added; diagnoses why humans keep positing such grounds in the first place; and then brings the position into conversation with the analytic idealism of Bernardo Kastrup, to show where the two agree and where they part on one decisive point: whether the one music needs a mind beneath it.

The old dilemma

Non-dual traditions, East and West, share a core insight: the division between self and world, subject and object, is not the deepest truth of experience. When attention becomes quiet and complete, the boundary softens; what remains is a single field of experiencing in which self and world both arise. I take this insight to be genuine. The question is what it costs.

Historically, non-duality has been purchased in one of two ways. The first way demotes the many. Classical Advaita Vedanta, the most rigorous non-dual system ever built, holds that only Brahman is real and that the world of distinct persons is a superimposition, ultimately unreal [5]. The person you love is, at the highest level of truth, an appearance that was never really there. The second way keeps the many but places a hidden One beneath them: a universal consciousness, a ground of being, a cosmic mind of which each of us is a temporary modification. The many are real, but only in the way waves are real — as movements of one underlying ocean.

Both strategies assume the same thing: that if reality is not-two, there must be one thing beneath the many — a substrate, a floor or datum. Choral non-duality denies the assumption. The unity of reality is not a thing under the voices. It is the singing itself, holding together.

What there is

Let me state the ontology plainly. The fundamental category of reality is the entangled multiplicity of embodied minds.

The phrase has two sides, and each does exact work. The embodied minds are the existential entities: they are what exist in the primary sense, and they are the entities that experience. Every observation, every theory, every doubt has been the act of an embodied mind. The entanglement is their shared world. It is the weave of their mutual involvement: the bodies that touch, the language that passes between them, the earth they stand on together, the history they inherit from one another. The shared world is not a container the minds sit inside, nor the stuff they are made of. It is their entanglement — and it is experienced by them. World and minds are two sides of one fabric: the minds are the threads, the world is the weaving.

Notice what this is not. It is not substance dualism. I am not saying there are two kinds of stuff, mind and world, mysteriously interacting. There is one category — entangled embodied minds — with an inner articulation: the minds that experience, and the entanglement they experience, which is nothing other than their own mutual involvement. A weave is not two substances, thread-stuff plus fabric-stuff. It is threads, woven; the fabric is how the threads are. Nor is this idealism, which would dissolve the world into the contents of one great mind. The shared world is robustly there — it is what the entanglement is — but it is not a second substance, and it is not a ground.

One question remains before the ontology is complete. What of the insentient world — the stone, the water, the star? These seem to be a third thing: mere stuff. They are not. The insentient shared world is also made up of embodied minds — for the bodies of embodied minds are what other embodied minds experience as the insentient things. My body, lived from within, is sentient through and through. That same body, encountered from without — weighed, imaged, handled — presents itself as a thing among things. "Insentient" is not the name of a second kind of being; it is the name of a mode of appearing — body as met from outside rather than lived from inside. The seemingly mindless furniture of the world is body: the bodies of embodied minds, experienced from without.

With this, the ontology is complete. There is an entangled multiplicity of embodied minds, and it exists as the non-dual fabric — minds as the threads, their entanglement as the shared world, their bodies as that world's experienced things. And the agencies of these embodied minds — the voices of the chorus — enable life to unfold. Embodied minds, entangled: that is the whole inventory [7]. Beneath the weave there is no loom.

Why we keep positing a ground

If no substrate is needed, why has almost every metaphysics posited one? Here the position offers not just a refusal but a diagnosis.

Human perception is built on figure-ground differentiation. To see anything at all is to see it as a figure against a ground: the bird against the sky, the word against the page, the melody against the silence. This is no habit we could unlearn; it is the basic operating structure of our perceptual and cognitive machinery.

Now watch this machinery turn to metaphysics. We ask: what is reality as a whole? The mind, doing the only thing it knows, treats the whole of experience as one great figure — and demands the ground against which it stands. Since no perceivable ground remains once everything perceivable has been gathered into the figure, we posit one: pure Being, Brahman, the Absolute, mind-at-large, the material substrate. The ground beneath all figures is then reported as a metaphysical discovery. It is not a discovery. It is an artifact — the shadow that our figure-ground processing casts on the question of being, as I have argued at length elsewhere [6]. We posit a ground because our cognition is built to expect one, not because reality needs one. An ontological substrate is a perceptual habit promoted to a cosmic principle.

This diagnosis converts choral non-duality's central refusal from stubbornness into insight. The substrate is not merely unnecessary; we can say exactly where the demand for it comes from, and why it feels so compelling while proving nothing. And the diagnosis yields a clean measure of parsimony: a non-duality that posits a substrate carries one entity more than the evidence contains — an entity of exactly the kind our cognitive machinery would invent whether it existed or not. A non-duality without a substrate carries nothing but what is given. It is the leaner theory, and it explains its rival's temptation.

The chorus: the entanglement unfolding

The weave is not static, and here the second metaphor takes over. In the unfolding of life — in time — the entanglement of embodied minds expresses itself as a chorus. And the mapping between ontology and metaphor is exact. The singers are the embodied minds. The voices are their agencies: the acting, speaking, making, tending, and answering by which each mind takes part in the shared world. A mind sounds by exercising its agency, and the music is life itself, unfolding through the interplay of these agencies [7]. The weave says what reality is; the chorus says how it lives.

Hear the principles in the music.

No voice has a sealed inside. The deepest error about persons is the idea that each of us is a self-contained unit that later makes contact with others. Developmental science tells a different story: newborn infants arrive already in conversation, engaging within hours in turn-taking, imitation, and mutual attunement — what researchers call primary intersubjectivity [3]. There is no initial isolation to overcome. Agency is kindled by agency: a self is brought into its distinctness by being answered — by the mother's face, by the voices that receive it. Difference is real. But difference is not duality. Duality would mean two things with sealed insides, each owing nothing to the other. There are no such things in the living world.

Embodied minds arise and subside in the entanglement. This is how the worldview holds birth and death. A new embodied mind is not inserted into the weave from outside; it arises within the entanglement, woven from inheritances it did not choose, and its agency — kindled by the agencies that receive it — adds a timbre never heard before. A new voice does not join the music from outside; it is the music, beginning again [7]. And when an embodied mind subsides, its agency ceases — but it is not deleted from the music. A note that has ended is not gone from the piece; what sounds now has the shape it has because of what sounded before. The dead persist — not in a heaven, not in a cosmic memory bank, but in the retuned agencies of everyone they shaped: in language, in gesture, in works, in the gait of their children. A voice that falls silent is not subtracted from the music; it becomes the way the music now sounds [7]. Arising and subsiding are the entanglement's own breathing. No substrate is needed to issue the living or to receive the dead.

Emptiness is composed silence. Non-dual talk of emptiness frightens people; it sounds like nothingness. The chorus dissolves the fright. A rest in music is empty of sound, but it is not nothing: it is composed, load-bearing. When choral non-duality says reality is empty, it means exactly this — empty of a floor or datum, of a substrate, of a hidden something underneath — and full of voices, relations, and world. The fullness that remains when the substrate is subtracted is choral: many embodied voices, one music, no floor or datum.

Evil is dissonance coming forth in interaction. Because the voices are many and really distinct, their interplay can clash. Evil is not a dark substance, not a cosmic principle, and not an illusion: it is the dissonance that comes forth when embodied minds interact — agency grinding against agency, from cruelty between persons to the organized violence of whole choirs [7]. This account takes harm seriously in a way substrate views struggle to: the wound is real because the voices are real, and the dissonance propagates along the entanglement it afflicts, sounding across generations. But it also locates the response. Dissonance is not ended by silencing the singers or forcing them into unison; it is resolved by retuning — by listening, by voices finding intervals they can hold together. The ethics of this worldview is therefore not imported from outside the weave, and it falls precisely on the voices — that is, on agency — for a chorus without a conductor can be retuned only by its own members. Since every voice was sung into being by others, the primordial obligation is to keep the music enterable and the harmony workable — to make room, to tune to unlike timbres, and to refuse the two great anti-musical temptations: silencing voices and compelling them into unison.

Analytic idealism, briefly and fairly

Analytic idealism, developed by Bernardo Kastrup, holds that there is exactly one fundamental entity: a universal field of subjectivity, sometimes called mind-at-large [1]. What we call matter is not a second kind of stuff; it is what mental processes look like from across a boundary — the extrinsic appearance of experience [2]. Living organisms are dissociated segments of the one field, analogous to the alters of dissociative identity disorder: distinct centers of experience, walled off from the whole, made of nothing but the one universal mind. Perception is a dashboard of dials: a compressed encoding of the world, not the world as it is [1]. Death is the dissolution of the dissociative boundary — the alter's reintegration into the field it never truly left.

The argument for all this is parsimony. Every theory must take at least one entity as fundamental. The best theory, Kastrup argues, chooses the one entity nobody can coherently doubt: subjectivity itself, the sole pre-theoretical given of nature. One irreducible, and everything else explained [1].

Where the two frameworks align

The alignments are substantial. Both frameworks refuse to treat experience as a latecomer. Mainstream physicalism starts with non-experiential matter and then faces the hopeless task of explaining how experience ignites within it. Analytic idealism and choral non-duality both decline the starting point: experience is where every explanation lives. Both take the many seriously — Kastrup does not call persons illusions; dissociation is real, and each alter is a genuine center of experience — just as, for me, the voices are real, irreducibly plural, and never fused. Neither framework asks you to believe that your grief for a particular person is a mistake. Both, moreover, deny that matter is a second kind of stuff: for Kastrup it is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes [2]; for me the insentient things are bodies — the bodies of embodied minds, experienced from without. And both understand the subject–object split as derivative rather than fundamental: for Kastrup it appears at a dissociative boundary [2]; for me, subject and object are poles within one embodied field of experiencing, functionally distinct and ontologically inseparable poles Merleau-Ponty caught in the touching hand that is itself touched [4].

Where they part

The parting can be stated in one line: analytic idealism is a non-duality with a substrate; choral non-duality is a non-duality without one.

Consider individuation. For analytic idealism, the many arise by division: the one field dissociates, and alters result. The direction of explanation runs from unity to multiplicity. Choral non-duality runs no direction at all, because there is no prior One to divide. The many arise by mutual constitution — voices sung into being by voices, minds arising within the entanglement — and the One just is that entanglement. Where idealism says the many are made of the One, I say the one is made as the many.

Consider method, and here the figure-ground diagnosis earns its keep. Mind-at-large is a theoretical posit, inferred rather than lived: no one, not even the mystic, experiences the universal field as it is beyond all dissociative boundaries, for the report of such an experience would itself be the act of a bounded, embodied being. The posit feels natural — almost forced — because it is exactly what our cognition manufactures whenever it contemplates the whole: a ground beneath all figures. Analytic idealism, on my reading, takes the deepest artifact of our perceptual machinery and installs it as the fundamental entity of reality. And the completed ontology narrows what the posit is needed for. Matter, which idealism explains as the appearance of the one field's processes, is explained here without the field: the insentient things are the bodies of the many, met from without. What remains to idealism's credit is its account of physical regularity, which my position brackets rather than answers. But an explanation purchased with an unexperienceable entity of exactly the shape our minds would invent anyway is expensive. Parsimony cuts the other way: if positing one irreducible entity is parsimonious, positing none is more so. What is given is never "one universal field." What is given is this embodied experiencing, entangled with others in a shared world. Choral non-duality stops there.

Consider death. For analytic idealism, death is the end of dissociation: the boundary dissolves and experience reintegrates into the field [1] — continuity by substrate, the pot-space rejoining the great space, as Advaita's classical image has it [5]. Choral non-duality offers no such net. The voice really subsides; there is no field waiting to receive it. What remains is the voice's work: the permanently retuned music of everyone it touched. I find this the more honest account of what grief actually knows — that the person is really gone, and really still here, as the shape of the music they made. A framework in which death costs nothing is a framework in which a life weighs nothing.

One music, two ways of listening

Analytic idealism and choral non-duality share an adversary: the picture of reality as insentient machinery in which experience is an embarrassing anomaly. Against that picture they stand together, and their disagreement should not obscure their alliance.

The disagreement itself is a pair of questions. Idealism asks me: why stop at the entangled many, when one field would unify the picture and explain more? I ask idealism: is your one field a discovery about reality, or the oldest artifact of our perception — the ground our minds paint beneath every figure — mistaken for the foundation of the world? Perhaps these are two ways of listening to the same music: one from an imagined outside, where the whole can be named as a single mind; one from within, where what is given is never the One as such but always this voice, these others, this shared and unfinished song.

What I am confident of is the refrain. Reality is not-two, everywhere — and therefore genuinely many. The many are not the refutation of the one music. They are its only mode of existence.

References

1. Bernardo Kastrup, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A Straightforward Summary of the 21st Century's Only Plausible Metaphysics (Winchester: Iff Books, 2024).

2. Bernardo Kastrup, The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality (Winchester: Iff Books, 2019).

3. Colwyn Trevarthen, "Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy: A Description of Primary Intersubjectivity," in Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication, ed. Margaret Bullowa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

5. Śaṅkara, Ātma Bodha, verse 53, on liberation as space rejoining space.

6. Ganapathy Mahalingam, The Ground Beneath All Figures: Figure-Ground Perception as the Universal Filter of Human Understanding (Fargo: Pensive Muse Books, 2026).

7. Ganapathy Mahalingam, Choral Non-Duality: A Non-Duality of the Embodied Mind, Without a Substrate (Fargo: Pensive Muse Books, 2026).

Sacrifice

 Architecture is the sacrifice of Time

Words and Architecture

After an architect is done talking, the building stands in mute silence in its materiality in a metric space. All we have are materials with their geometry and dimensions. Words do not attach themselves to buildings unless you affix them as signs on a building. We project words onto buildings with our imagination and vagaries in a futile attempt to make something stick. Words cannot stick to buildings with any integrity. Each one affixes their own words to the buildings they encounter in their own way. So the semantic world of buildings is always changing and has to be negotiated each time. Let us dwell in buildings in their silence with no words to bother us in perceiving them in a pure state.

Metaphysics in Architecture

The fundamental problem of any discussion of Metaphysics is the definition of the subject matter. The generally understood definition of Metaphysics is that it is a branch of Philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. It acquired its name from the collection of works of Aristotle that came after one of his major works called Physics. So, in one sense, Metaphysics is something that comes after Physics. This can be construed that after all the considerations of Physics are exhausted, the realm into which your discourse moves, is Metaphysics. In another sense, the word “meta” means something beyond, or something deeper, than the suffix it is attached to, such as in the term, meta-cognition. When we talk about Metaphysics in Architecture, we should articulate whether we are talking about something beyond the physical existence of the works of Architecture, or the fundamental nature that lies behind the works of Architecture.

Architecture has always been a quest for the conquest of matter by the creations of the mind for the creation of spaces and places to inhabit. The question naturally arises whether the fundamental nature of Architecture is mind, or is it just a collection of matter? Philosophers such as Henri Bergson have postulated that there is a life force, the élan vital, that courses through matter trying to obtain from it what it can. This fuses the matter with vitalism. This complicates the discussion of whether the fundamental entity is matter, or the élan vital. In biological entities that are living, it is conceivable that both these entities are needed for the organism to exist. In the case of an inert construction like a building, the building can exist as a configuration of matter alone. However, this inert construction embodies an idea, or a set of ideas, that can be argued is its fundamental nature. Architecture has been called the constructed counterform of homecoming by the architect Aldo van Eyck. In this definition, the counterform is the fundamental nature of the work of Architecture.

Why are architects constantly seeking something beyond their physical creations to establish meanings for what they have created? The seeking of the “meta” implies that the physical creation of the work of Architecture, which is a composition of building materials configured into a structure, is incomplete and needs something outside itself to justify its existence. The foundation for seeking the “meta” lies in the notion that matter must be infused with spirit in order to give it human significance. Until matter has been transformed in this way, by the infusion of spirit, it does not belong to the human realm but the realm of Nature. This notion implies that the human realm is somehow alien to the realm of Nature, even though humans are part of that realm. In order to appropriate matter into the human realm, the creations of the mind must be infused into the matter using energy. When matter is made to conform to an idea and energy is expended in the transformation by a human being, the human being appropriates the matter into the human realm.

Another aspect of the study of Metaphysics is Ontology. Ontology is concerned with being. Anything that exists, whether it is material or immaterial, is being. Architecture is a complex being that combines in its realization both the material and the immaterial. It exists as an embodiment of the immaterial in the material. Consider this scenario. An architect conceives of the form of a rectangular beam and then proceeds to “realize” that form in a natural building material such as wood. The wood initially exists as a tree. Tools are invented to cut the tree and make the tree conform to the form of the rectangular beam. This has a serendipitous byproduct in that the tools can now be used to shape other forms that the architect did not conceive of initially. In one process, the architect proceeds from an abstract “essence” to a particular entity and gives it existence. In the serendipitous byproduct, the architect proceeds by using a tool to create an “essence” from existing matter. This ontological journey, in both directions, from essence to existence, and from existence to essence, reveals the unique Metaphysics that Architecture embodies.

When you pose the question, what is the fundamental nature of a work of Architecture, the answer can be that it is an idea, or it is a configuration of matter. It is mind-stuff or just matter. If you begin by considering that Architecture is a configuration of matter that points to something beyond itself, which can be the creation of the mind, you imply that it has a meta-existence. What you are trying to establish when you discuss the Metaphysics of Architecture is twofold. The first is that you are trying to establish the fundamental nature of Architecture, whether it is a creation of the mind or it is the transformation of matter. The fact that you can transform matter in silence, using your senses and your hands, or tools you have fashioned with your hands, shows that the mind can be precluded from this fundamental nature. The second is that Architecture always refers to something beyond its physical existence, it always has a meta-existence that often gives meaning to the work of Architecture. In the twofold discussion, you bring to focus the fact that a work of Architecture is an embodiment of both mind and matter. Architecture gives an ontological presence to both of them. Whether the creations of the mind transform the matter, or whether the matter instantiates the creations of the mind, both exist in the being of Architecture.

In the Heideggarian triad of building, dwelling, and thinking, one can construe the ontological journey to existence as an evolutionary process starting with architectural thinking, which is realized in building, thereby enabling the process of dwelling. Alternatively, one can construe the ontological journey as a teleological process beginning with dwelling as the motive force, which leads to architectural thinking and eventually the building that enables one to dwell. The establishment of the being of the work of Architecture depends on this triad of activities. The fundamental nature of the work of Architecture can then be considered as the motive force of dwelling, which starts architectural thinking into motion with the goal of realizing the architectural thoughts in the material form of buildings in order to dwell. The fundamental debate of whether dwelling is the result of an architectural creation or whether it is the motive force that drives the architectural creation remains.

It is tragic that a work of Architecture must seek the “meta” aspect of its existence in order to achieve its meaning. If the work of Architecture could articulate its fundamental nature in just its material existence, which could have been created in total silence, then the motive force of dwelling could be fulfilled in a material ecology. Can the teleological process driven by a motive force of dwelling negotiate the world of matter directly and realize its goal to dwell? No amount of talking about a material creation can infuse it with anything beyond itself! Architecture should not be a prop or a proxy for verbal thinking. An Architecture of Silence is truly possible that reveals its fundamental nature directly, and thereby its metaphysics. Let us seek this Architecture of Silence!

Ode to La Ribaute (a tribute to Anselm Kiefer)

Will grass grow over my cities?

Will knowledge sprout from lead?

Can anything grow on my books?

When columns tuber the earth,

Will it be as above so below?

Can I turn to ash what books have done to me?

Can I shatter reflections to present a self-forming?

Can I wreck mirrors into a million pieces for a myriad 'me's?

What if stars fell as crystal rain?

Does the molten streak of an underground stream keep the light it catches?

Can concrete come alive in its sinews?

When does material become carnal?

Can I grow concrete in my garden?

When a slow ash falls on grit-gripping canvas,

and I struggle with the fish at hand,

Have I cast death upon you?

©Ganapathy Mahalingam, 2016-2022

Architectural Evolution as a Turing Machine Computation

    Consider this. Just as you have an infinite tape for 'memory' in a Turing machine for recording states, Architecture exists in infinite states. Just as you change the states on the tape of a Turing machine with program instructions, you change the states of Architecture with design interventions. A Turing machine halts when a solution is found that has been specified, or the program instructions call for the process to be halted. In architectural evolution the process is 'halted' perceptually at the end of each design intervention, or when a design solution has been found. The process of architectural evolution progresses as a Turing machine computation, with its constant transformation of architectural states. The crucial part of the evolution is the 'instruction set' that is embedded in the design interventions that specify how to change the architectural states and the intersubjective consensus for when the evolution has to be 'halted' perceptually to achieve the closure of a solution.

A Common World

    One of the most amazing things about OUR existence is the distributed sentience of billions of sentient beings that regulate OUR world...how do these different loci of distributed sentience keep together a coordinated COMMON world...loci of physical vantage points, loci of mental worlds, loci of agency, all need to hold everything together...even that we have a COMMON world is a miracle every moment!

A beautiful book that ponders the billions of sentient vantage points and their reconciliation into an 'objective' world is Thomas Nagel's The View From Nowhere. The diagram that Nagel comes up with is a series of concentric circles, that provide more and more inclusive 'viewpoints' as you move away from a center. The real challenge is to model both the interpenetration of the worlds of sentient beings as well as their inclusivity in each other's perceptions.

The Architectural Zoo

    The zoo was born out of the need for the 'safe spectacle' where wild things were caged apart. What does Architecture cage? Perceptual cages, experiential cages, conceptual cages, all keep the wild things in Architecture in check as 'safe spectacles.' Even our perspectives are views through one-eyed, utopian cages. A short musing will reveal that our spectacles truly rest on our noses. Should Architecture encage (sic) or engage? The architectural zoo of safe spectacles is but a way to tame the wild things in Architecture. Nature and biodiversity have always been realms of the wild. Order, and the seeking of Order, have been our quests in taming the wild. The other zoo, is when we, as seers, are the ones in cages. What is this architectural zoo, when we dwell in it as a caged self? 

A Ruin of Pregnant Bricks

     The painter Anselm Kiefer has painted bricks being sun-dried in the fields of India before they are fired in kilns. These bricks look like a pile of ruins from a long-forgotten structure. Only the bricks are not ruins. They are 'pregnant' bricks which have not yet been given a form to exist as. Nobody has yet asked these 'pregnant' bricks what they want to be. Even before they are 'born' these bricks take the form of the dying in a strange loop of existence. This beauty of a pregnant death foretells why death is inherent in all things born.

Observing the Obverse

     The crux of observing the obverse depends on making head or tail of it. If you have to take the opposite viewpoint in order to observe the obverse, then your current viewpoint is on the reverse side of the obverse. If the obverse is the principal side or the 'head' then is your normal viewpoint simply entailed? In our experience with coins, because the 'tails' side is the one with utility, indicating the monetary value of the coin, it has become the principal face instead of the 'heads' side. Are we reading the world in the same way as we read our coins? Are we always observing reversals of the obverse? Do we ever use the gaze of the other? Do we need to observe the obverse for the principal experience? On the other hand, if what we normally observe is the obverse, then we just have to be. A more intriguing option is to be the milled edge and engage both sides of the coin.

Touching with the Senses

     The central thesis of Juhani Pallasmaa in his book, The Eyes of the Skin, is that all our sensory experiences are modes of touching - how our interiority touches the exteriority that envelops us. In the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination, this touching or Phassa, is the contact that brings together the object, the sense medium and the sense consciousness, which is a prelude to becoming-in-the-world as a result of the karmic force of volition (Bhava).

Cuts Like a Knife

     When one ponders a simple operation such as cutting, one has to think about what came first: the desire to perform the operation of cutting, which necessitated the invention of a cutting implement, or, the invention of a cutting implement that made the operation of cutting possible. What implements have we yet to invent if we started with desired operations and then sought the tools or implements to perform those operations? The Greeks pondered the atomic structure of matter because they could cut through an apple! Have we invented all the tools for our desires? What will these tools reveal about the universe? What irreversible operations might these tools unleash upon the processes of the universe? What have these tools enabled that were not the desired operations that were the cause of their invention? What have we implemented? Cuts like a knife...

The Dance of the Afferent and the Efferent in Creative Media

     At the gallery talk in connection with the display of the historical collection of drawings, an interesting idea was put forth about whether drawing was a process of 'output,' or a process of 'input' for a curious activity called 'thinkering.' In meditating upon this concept, it struck me that all media used for creative activities, be it clay thrown on a potter's wheel, or the use of paint on canvas, or a musical instrument, provide for this rapidly oscillating dance of the afferent and the efferent. Our neural system is described as a "closed loop" system of sensations, decisions, and reactions that engage the world around us. This process is carried out through the activity of afferent neurons, interneurons, and efferent neurons. This oscillating dance can happen at varying speeds, in varying cadences, and with syncopated patterns. A master of a creative activity is one who is of a clear enough mind, where there is an awareness of when the activity in the bodymind is afferent, that is, when it draws in the world, when the mind mediates the world in perception, and when the body is in its efferent phase, that is, acts on the world. This dance happens in cycles, like an endless waltz, transforming the world creatively. The power of a creative medium is in how it enables the afferent and the efferent, the kinds of cadences between them, the patterns that can be created, and the ability to achieve coherence in the process. Learning how to dance like this, evokes the cosmic dancer, whom the Hindus know as Nataraja, the lord of the dance.

The Lexicality of Stimuli

     When we are presented with stimuli in the form of things, we are prompted by the lexicality of the stimuli to consume those things perceptually as words. We see a 'cup' on a 'table' before we really see the things themselves. So much so, we consume the words, instead of the things. How much of architectural stimuli lend themselves to us as words, hiding their true experience from us? Do we often achieve closure with the words and miss out on the seeing?

The Eye of the Beholder

At any given moment, the universe is being perceived by billions of sentient beings (including humans). There is no coincidence of the 'locus' (that is, the spatial location) of these perceptions. For example, no two sets of eyes of human beings see the world at the same time from the same location (except maybe, curiously through the one 'eye' of a camera transmitting 'live', an artificial device).

 

There could be a synchronicity of all the perceptions (this would assume a disengaged clock (mechanical, electronic or even atomic)) giving rise to a notion of absolute Time that goes on independent of the perceptions. There could not be...coining a new use for a word here perhaps...a 'syntopy'...a coincidence of spatial locations of the perceptions.

 

This challenges the notion that we could consider discussing a 'one common world' when all our perceptions have different spatial loci (not to mention mental loci). What do we actually share? This spatial distribution of sentience probably began with the origin of the universe...say in a Big Bang...and has continued since. How can we ever see through another's eyes (though there may be clever electronic devices that get us close)?

 

This is why, designers and architects, who work on spatial problems, use abstract representations, so that they have a realm of syntopy in which they can address a 'common world'...and perhaps why the ancients stumbled upon Geometry, as an abstract realm...which in the words of the architect, Louis Kahn...provided the common ground of agreement between men (and of course, women).