Perhaps more than anyone else, Christopher Alexander has opened the door on how to be an evolutionary catalyst (or foodshed catalyst or deep revolutionary). For this I am grateful, though I am sad that so few people know his work. We need to know it; I’m certain he created it for you and me.
Alexander’s particular medium as an evolutionary catalyst is architecture—creating structures and buildings that actually give life. But what he has discovered applies to what I have been pointing to throughout this book, becoming agents of evolution. What he is showing us is timeless, universal. And essential for us.
He teaches that “the task of making, the task of building itself,” is to be understood as “a spiritual exercise, a direct attempt to come face to face with the ground of the universe.”
What Alexander has learned is that the process of catalyzing what he calls “living structure”—and this can apply to a permaculture site, a community, or a foodshed as much as to a building—is a process of infusing what we are creating with wholeness and relatedness that are contagious. This brings about healing that ripples throughout the structure and far beyond. This requires great intentionality and devotion. And discipline.
In other words, as an evolutionary catalyst, I am not the one who is creating. I am but a vehicle through which wholeness and relatedness and healing are emerging as a manifestation of God. I serve not my own vision, but the unfolding vision of living structure that is being mysteriously revealed.
Careful construction of the world … will result in a world which is practical, harmonious, functional. If this is true, astonishingly then it appears that the safest road to the creation of living structure is one in which people do what is most nearly in their hearts: that they make each part in such a way that it reflects their true feelings, that it makes them feel wholesome in themselves, and is, in this sense, related in the deepest way to their own true I.…
This is enigmatic, if not ridiculous. It means that a world constructed in the most personal and individual fashion, made by people who are searching deeply to follow the nature of their own true selves, will be—in the most public, objective, and universal sense—a world which is functional, adequate, and harmonious.
The enigma which arises, then, is that the process by which human beings create the world, in their own image, gradually creates a living world, and this is—I have come to believe—the best and most efficient way a living world can be created.
Of course, the phrase “in their own image” requires that it be the true self, and the personal search for the true self cannot be separated from this process which each person strives for. This means, then, that the making of a living world cannot be separated from each person’s search for the true self.156
This is as clear a description of what it means to be an evolutionary catalyst as I have ever found.
Near the end of The Luminous Ground, the fourth volume of The Nature of Order, there is a chapter titled “Making Wholeness Heals the Maker.” That’s worth taking in for a moment. Making wholeness heals the maker.
In chapter four, I mentioned Alexander’s A Pattern Language, published in the mid-1970s, and described how he realized that this earlier work was largely misunderstood. What he was attempting to point to was how certain elements in living structures awaken something deep within us—deep and true feelings that we did not even know we had—and he was saying that we can fashion these elements intentionally. In The Luminous Ground, he finally becomes more transparent. “Taken to its ultimate,” he says, “a living structure brings us face-to-face with God.” Yes, God.
Perhaps it’s relevant to explain that I have provisionally come to the place where I can say that the force that has guided the process of the evolution of our universe over the last fourteen billion years—whatever that force is—I consider to be an expression of God (not God per se, but a profound expression of what God is). Another way of saying this might be that through the process of evolution, God is entering the universe and ending separation. This relates closely to what Christopher Alexander has been saying in recent years. This is not God as a supernatural creator, but God as a process, God as the unfolding natural creativity in the universe. Perhaps this is as much as we can comprehend of God at our rather primitive stage of evolution.
This quality, when it appears in things, people, in a moment, in an event is god. It is not an indication of God living behind all things, but it is actually God itself. This is spirit made manifest.… We have contact with actual spirit in that thing.
And this is the ultimate aim of all making: to make a thing which does manifest spirit, which shows us feeling, which makes God visible and shows us the ultimate meaning of existence, in the actual sticks and stones of the made thing.157
What if this became the fundamental—if perhaps secret—intention or design parameter for an emerging foodshed? Or a relocalization plan? A potluck dinner? A restaurant? A business or organization or investment? A revolution? A community? A regional democracy? Or a world?
What Alexander shows us is how spirit becomes clothed in matter, how God manifests in our universe—and how we can become engaged in the process. This changes everything. Alexander is teaching us to see ourselves as evolutionary catalysts.
Once I accept that what is happening is actual spirit, it helps me to make a whole thing. Once I understand it, I can seek to do just that. I take everything I know about centers [of aliveness], feeling, and so on, and focus on my inner knowledge of what it means for spirit to appear.
This is a direct humility. Then I am close to making a gift to God.
But my acceptance is more than just humility. Somehow it helps me. If I know that I have to make spirit—I cannot fool around with that. It is a great weight, and a great joy. I keep at it. It is hard work, emotionally. I can do it at any time. But it is so much easier to ignore it, not to do it. Not doing it is easy. Doing it is hard. Concentration, attention, effort—it is all very hard.
But when I actually do it, I pay attention to what I am doing and allow myself to go only in that direction where I can say it is an emerging spirit. That cuts many things out. The inner knowledge that I carry in me, which already knows what is spirit and what is not, will let this instruction, or this knowledge, guide me quite surely toward certain kinds of things.
This brings me, then, to a last aspect of the process which produces life in things, a necessary state of mind. The core of this necessary state of mind is that you make each building in a way which is a gift to God. It belongs to God. It does not belong to you. It is made to serve God, to glorify God. It is not made to glorify you. Perhaps, if anything, it humbles you.158
Now we’re getting down to it. This is the core of our work as evolutionary catalysts in cultivating emergence.
It is very hard to allow the wholeness to unfold.159 To do it, we must pay attention, all the time, only to the wholeness which exists in what we are doing. That is hard, very hard. If we allow ourselves the luxury of paying attention to our own ideas, we shall certainly fail. The things which can and do most easily get in the way, are my own ideas, my thoughts about what to do, my desires about what the building “ought” to be, or “might” be, my striving to make it great, my concern with my own thoughts about it, or my exaggerated attention to other people’s thoughts. All this can only damage the building, because it replaces the wholeness which actually exists at any given stage with some “idea” of what it ought to be.
The reason why I must try and make the building as a gift to God is that this state of mind is the only one which reliably keeps me concentrated on what is, and keeps me away from my own vainglorious and foolish thoughts.160
Well, this is real work, difficult work. But it is the work of an evolutionary catalyst. And we may go on a long time before we realize that this is what we’re actually doing.
Sometimes, when I make something, my mind is so concentrated on it that it becomes different. It becomes a pure thing. I am not concerned with showing off, but only with making the thing itself. How can I set my mind in this egoless direction? At every step in the 10,000 steps during the making of a building, I am always, at each step, asking which of the things that I can do next is the one which will be the best gift to God.…
The trouble is, it is immensely hard work asking this question. It is a bore. It is troublesome. It is pedantic. It is too pious. I can’t be bothered with it. It is absurd to keep on asking myself this question. Besides, this question finds me out, and keeps on showing me—what I don’t want to know—that my natural inclinations are no good, that my work is too puffed up with pride, that my judgment is imperfect.
So, even just asking the question, 10,000 times, is almost impossible.161
Yes, as Christopher Alexander says, it’s almost impossible. But given the stakes we’re dealing with, it’s worth striving in this direction. And we can learn to support each other in doing this work. And perhaps we can learn to draw on the support of the angels of evolution themselves, the “Unseen Ones” who attend to emergence on this planet and beyond. And perhaps we can consider that the process Alexander describes—which we are learning as evolutionary catalysts—is one of the great gifts of humanity and that it can be carried far beyond this troubled time and even far beyond this beleaguered planet.
May we dedicate our lives to the possibility of being catalysts for what is emerging in our world.