Pierre Teilhard de Chardin posits that evolution, having brought the human species to consciousness, now continues, “situated within the sphere of consciousness (and collective consciousness),” (Chardin 15). It is “in the realm of self-knowledge; in our growing capacity to situate ourselves in space and time, to the point of becoming conscious of our place and responsibility in relation to the Universe,” (16).
Ecologist Theodore Roszak notes, “As nature around us unfolds to reveal level upon level of structured intricacy, we are observing the arrival of what I would call an ecological universe where life and mind are rooted all the way back to the initial conditions that followed the Big Bang....all living things... are born out of each other, they evolve, and they are part of a continuum,” (Roszak 9)
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“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika |
Soul emphasizes connectedness. Rather than Spirit's upward growth, Soul spreads outwards, growing every direction at once. Its state of being is measured in space. It exists in the physicality where the body is, each present moment encompassing all of time.
With the internet connecting our Spirits around the globe, our bodies are left behind, our local surroundings ignored. This disorientation is the work of unchecked Ego. Ego serves a protective function: it separates us, defining us as individuals, allowing us to flourish in day-to-day life. But Ego is hungry. If that hunger is not restrained, it overwhelms, becoming gluttonous. It denies connection to the land, insisting that human can subsist on consciousness alone.
Place informs our identity. Each individual is an amalgam of information. Identity is absorbed at a subconscious level: the details of our daily lives. The gas station we pass on the way to work, wrinkles on the bank teller's face, the way coins are dropped into our hands in the grocery store. The details of our surroundings, the people we meet, and the choices we make compose our identities. We are, in fact, never entirely alone. Our lives are living histories connecting us to the web of life that encompasses the globe.
Place informs our identity. Each individual is an amalgam of information. Identity is absorbed at a subconscious level: the details of our daily lives. The gas station we pass on the way to work, wrinkles on the bank teller's face, the way coins are dropped into our hands in the grocery store. The details of our surroundings, the people we meet, and the choices we make compose our identities. We are, in fact, never entirely alone. Our lives are living histories connecting us to the web of life that encompasses the globe.
Unchecked Ego would deny this connectedness. Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes, “It has a bad habit of reducing all numinosity to a 'nothing but'. It demands facts that are observable. Proofs that are of a feeling or mystical nature do not very often sit well with the ego. That is why the ego is lonely. It... cannot fully participate in the more mysterious processes of soul...” (Estes 269). Ego cleaves to Spirit, attempting to maintain control. Fearing its own mortality, it creates further limitations. Physical and intangible walls separate us from ourselves and each other. Systemic language and building design have potential to unify, but largely serve our separation from place, peer, and body. Theodore Roszak posits that “industrial culture is built upon our alienation from the natural world, beginning with nature nearest home, which is the body itself, then working out into everything beyond the city limits,” (Roszak 3). This alienation is, in essence, a repression of Soul.
The Soul thrives in wilderness. Its urges are wild; it responds to drives animalistic. When Spirit razes the landscape, the Soul withers within. “Man is estranged from his soul, therefore from his own inner nature, by being lost in the outer world,” (Meier 303). Architecture shapes how we interact with community and landscape. Cities, constructs of the mind, dictate how and why we move through space. Architecture directs our attention towards communal gathering spaces or traffic jams, parks and gardens or private lawns. Place shapes our day-to-day lives, providing foundation for social interaction.
Designed by humans for humans, buildings can be a cloak of illusion, subsuming us in manmade fantasy, or they can be shelter, allowing us to live in peace. “Well-designed places and buildings that relate to locality and landscape and that put people before cars enhance a sense of community and rootedness,” notes Prince Charles, “We need to have distinctive and varied places to live... in order to retain our sanity, if nothing else,” (Shiva 29).
The Soul thrives in wilderness. Its urges are wild; it responds to drives animalistic. When Spirit razes the landscape, the Soul withers within. “Man is estranged from his soul, therefore from his own inner nature, by being lost in the outer world,” (Meier 303). Architecture shapes how we interact with community and landscape. Cities, constructs of the mind, dictate how and why we move through space. Architecture directs our attention towards communal gathering spaces or traffic jams, parks and gardens or private lawns. Place shapes our day-to-day lives, providing foundation for social interaction.
Designed by humans for humans, buildings can be a cloak of illusion, subsuming us in manmade fantasy, or they can be shelter, allowing us to live in peace. “Well-designed places and buildings that relate to locality and landscape and that put people before cars enhance a sense of community and rootedness,” notes Prince Charles, “We need to have distinctive and varied places to live... in order to retain our sanity, if nothing else,” (Shiva 29).
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita