Book 4 cliff notes
I experiment with different note taking techniques and switch with each book. This is not (yet) a collection of the key concepts of book 4 and rather my unprocessed cliff notes in raw form, structured as in the book, with a note per section of each chapter.
- Author’s note
- Preface
- Part 1
- Our present picture of the universe
- Cosmology
- The strength of the present scientific world-picture
- The weakness of the present world-picture
- The needs of architecture
- Scientific efforts to build an improved world-picture
- The continuing lack of a unifying cosmology
- Ten tacit assumptions which underlie our present picture of the universe
- Inspiration for a future physics
- The confrontation of art and science
- A fusion of self and matter
- Clues from the history of art
- The existence of an “I”
- A dewdrop
- Relatedness
- The mirror-of-the-self experiments
- The real relatedness existing underneath the skin
- The ancient and eternal truth of the relatedness
- The numinous experience
- True meaning of relatedness
- A jump to speaking about the existence of an I
- An experiment to determine the extension of the I
- The I of our experience originating with the I in things
- A hypothesis
- Mobilizing the storm
- The ten thousand beings
- Introduction
- Consider the possibility of viewing all living centers as beings
- The jewel net of Indra
- What it means for a center to be being-like
- A corner of a farmer’s field
- A shipyard
- Looking at Chartres
- Each living center is a being
- Pure unity
- The fundamental process
- The difficulty of the task
- Innocence
- The vision of Matisse and Bonnard
- In our own era
- A new vision of building: making living structure in our brutal world
- The life of the environment
- The practical matter of forging a living center
- Our present picture of the universe
- Mid-book appendix: Recapitulation of the argument
- Part 2
- The Blazing One
- The unity that speaks of I
- The faintly glowing quality which can be seen in a thing which has life
- A psychological explanation
- Possible existence of a single underlying substance
- The blazing one
- What, then, is a center?
- Though a strange model, it provides a viable explanation
- Which I-hypothesis is true?
- A non-material view of matter
- Color and Inner Light
- Introduction: A direct glimpse of the I
- Color as an essential feature of reality
- Inner light
- The unfolding which produces inner light
- The eleven color properties
- Hierarchy of colors
- Colors create light together
- Contrast of dark and light
- Mutual embedding
- Sequence of linked color pairs
- Boundaries and hairlines
- Families of color
- Color variation
- Intensity and clarity of individual colors
- Subdued brilliance
- Color depends on geometry
- Color and the field of centers
- Inner light as a glimpse of the I which lies behind the field of centers
- The hint of a transcendent unity
- Transcendent wholeness as a kind of light
- Conclusion
- The Goal of Tears
- Making Wholeness Heals the Maker
- Introduction
- The impact of making beauty on the maker’s life
- The healing process
- Making wholeness heals the maker
- Life made creates life in the maker
- The source of the healing effect
- Human growth: the movement of the self towards its origin
- Towards full knowledge of the self which can arise in us
- Drawing sadness from your most vulnerable self
- Do not ask for whom the bell tolls
- Pleasing Yourself
- Introduction
- Recapitulation of books 1 to 4 as “pleasing yourself”
- Veronica’s blue chair
- The heart-stopping quality
- The thought police
- Not pleasing yourself
- A group of architecture students who were not pleasing themselves
- A Mexicali story about the thought police
- Pleasing yourself
- The effort it took to get the stark geometry of West Dean to a state where it really pleases me
- Emil Nolde’s sunset and Paul Gauguin’s cow
- A significantly large structure
- Being modern and being true
- The childlike
- There is nothing greater
- Pure innocence and deep order — the message of St. Francis
- The Face of God
- The Blazing One
- A Modified Picture of the Universe (Conclusion to the four books)
- Epilogue: Empirical Certainty and Enduring Doubt
Notes mentioning this note
Key concepts in The Nature of Order
A list of key concepts in _The Nature of Order_, in order of appearance in the four books.