All architecture depends on relatedness. Those buildings which work are the ones which create relatedness between a person and the universe.
Intensive focus on this relatedness itself can lead to a level of understanding about ourselves and about matter that could altogether change the distinction between matter and self we make today.
Inextricably, we belong in the world.
Each of us, as we are, is connected to the world. We are connected to it in a concrete way. The character of this relatedness is not invented or concocted in our minds, but actual. I seek to demonstrate that the tree which stands is entangled with my self, and I am entangled with it. This entanglement exists in a fashion which—when I understand it thoroughly—will forever change my conception of my place in the world. Once we understand it, it will change our conception of the universe and our conception of the matter of which we are made.
We are, each of us, literally connected to the tree stump and to these other things.
Every living structure is composed of thousands of pictures of the eternal self.
The I is a vastness, a something in the universe, as large as the universe itself, from which living structure draws its life.
As the build-up of centers proceeds recursively, space becomes filled, gradually, with I-like stuff, with living structure made of thousands of pictures of the living self.
Living structure is unified. It is that unity which is the aim of life. It is the unity which is created by living structure.
We must always remember that a living center is living, is a being, only according to its position in a larger whole. It must help some larger whole. And if it is a being, it is helped by smaller wholes inside it, to the side of it, and far away from it.
The being-like living center is a phenomenon, a nearly electric entity in space which gains its life by action at a distance, from the cooperation of the others all around it, from its contribution to the larger wholes with which it appears.
As we begin to see living centers as beings, not as component parts, we begin to approach the idea of pure sheet-like unity, which is achieved in the space made of beings, to recognize that beings partake in a living structure, to the extent that this structure approaches becoming an undivided whole, an the extent to which the beings—centers—help it to become an undivided whole.
Beings create unity, and by definition are part of unity. Each being—that is, each center—gets its life from the existence of the other centers around it within the unity they form together.
Underlying all matter is this plenum or substance which is entirely “I.” The self is connected to all matter; all matter is connected to the self.
The process by which a person comes in touch with wholeness—as it is in the world and as it is in the world around them, and as it is inside themselves—the more, then, that person actually discovers the meaning of their own existence, sees himself accurately in relation to phenomena, and the more that person becomes aware of the real structure which exists inside him and which links him to the universe.