I would like to speak to you today about something not usually mentioned within the mainstream of formal, modern, professional education in architecture. Perhaps it receives passing mention in classes on the history of architecture, but is rarely assigned any fundamental role within design studio or any of the core of modern architectural education.

I would like to talk about the sacred, particularly the architect as a sacred self.

Don’t worry, I am not going to speak about religion, which I accept should be kept out of education. The reasons demanding this separation are far too complex to go into today, but I assure you my speaking of the sacred does not involve preaching any form of religious belief. What we conventionally understand as religion and the sacred are not the same. 

I refer to the sacred as a transcendental realm that is far greater than you while echoing your innermost being, thereby offering you anchors of purpose. It imparts meaning to your life, is the emotive and experiential force of great architecture, and does not require any surrender to blind faith for it can be known directly by you as tangible reality.

If we do not understand the difference between the public face of organised religion and the sacred, to keep religion out of education we wind up sanitising the sacred out of education, and consequently out of our lives. And this is a tremendous, tremendous loss, because the sacred is not some abstract entity out there, it is a core part of your very being. For you, each one of you, is inherently sacred. Let me explain what I mean by that, borrowing the words of four wise men.

Since we are all architects here, the wise man I will start with is the great architect, Louis Kahn, who said, “A great building must begin with the immeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasured.” How can one design an architecture of this kind? It seems to require conquering a paradoxical riddle: learning to know, perhaps even measure, the immeasurable. The resolution of this paradox comes from acknowledging that the immeasurable may not be something that can be delineated intellectually, but it can be discovered and known experientially.

I am sure each one of you has encountered what I have: moments of being silenced into humility and wonder by experiencing great architecture. It may have come from historical architecture such as Padmanabhapuram Palace, the Alhambra, Fatehpur Sikri or Hagia Sophia. It may have come from more modern acts of design such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga, Charles Correa’s Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya or Carlo Scarpa’s Querini Stampalia Foundation. In each of these places, the architecture emanates an aura, a term the dictionary defines as “the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place.” You would be hard pressed to understand this aura intellectually or define it in words, yet it is a tangible presence whose tangibility is demonstrated by the fact that companions who share this experience with you are similarly possessed and moved by it.

One finds the same mode governing the primordial facets that make life worthwhile: love, joy, beauty, wonder, to name but a few. You feel constrained in intellectually understanding or describing them, yet when you personally experience them, you know them as unquestionable manifest reality. There is an inner wisdom within you, far removed from the abstractions of intellectualism, embedded into you by the very fact of your birth, that intuitively recognises and knows these transcendental realms. They are immeasurable; they offer you meaning and purpose and the mystical union you strike with them reveals that both they and your inner wisdom are inherently sacred.

The second wise man I wish to cite is not an artist or architect, not a theologian, not a philosopher, but a hard-core scientist, the physicist and mathematician Brian Greene, who said in an interview:

“………..my view from the perspective of what we are as physical beings is, we are nothing but collections of particles that are fully governed by the laws of physics. Colloquially, we are bags of particles that have a particular organization that allows for certain biological functions to take place, and that’s all that we are. Now, some would say……, ‘Well, if that’s your view of who we are, then you’ve already eliminated any possibility for meaning or value and purpose. You’ve denigrated the very nature of what it means to be human.’

And my view is exactly the opposite. My view is, the very fact that collections of particles can do the kinds of things that we can do, the fact that you and I can have this conversation, the fact that an Einstein can work out the laws of general relativity, the fact that a Shakespeare can write King Lear, the fact that a Beethoven can compose the ‘Ode to Joy’ finale to the Ninth Symphony, the fact that particles governed by physical law can do all that — that, to me, is the wonder of it all. That, to me, is where it’s thrilling.

The concept of purpose doesn’t come from the universe; it comes from us human beings. The concept of value — it’s invented by us human beings. And so the fact that we’re bags of particles only accentuates how spectacular it is that we can have even this conversation about value and meaning, and it focuses our attention, in my view, in the right direction, which is inward as opposed to outward.”

What Greene points out to us is quite mind boggling. We are just a bundle of physical elements governed by physical law, yet somehow this physical collective mysteriously coheres into a consciousness that can dream, ideate, love, create, wonder, and so much more. We cannot understand how this happens; science, for all its accomplishments, has made little progress in offering an explanation. All we can do is gratefully acknowledge this gift and revel in its grace.

The third wise man I cite today is the late Irish philosopher, poet, and one-time priest, John O’Donohue. In a delightful collection titled “Walking on the Pastures of Wonder”, he points out that the creative consciousness we have been blessed with need not be thought of primarily in terms of great accomplishments of the likes of Beethoven, Einstein or Picasso. It is something each and every one of us personifies in ordinary and everyday acts of creative artistry that are so routine we cease to notice the power they represent, even though they embody a creative force that brings forth new forms of life. 

O’Donohue invokes the act of speaking whose miracle is revealed in how we coax sound and meaning out of silence. I reflected on this observation by O’Donohue, and so many other examples of everyday creative genius came spontaneously to my mind:

• I walk, and out of stillness I coax purpose
• I focus my gaze, and out of the blur of background I coax significance
• I laugh, and out of the mundane I coax joy
• I love, and out of solitude I coax community and conviviality
• I dance, and out of indifference I coax rapture
• I sing, and out of sound I coax melody
• I think, and out of chaos I coax order

Each of these everyday acts births new life into being, opening new realms of possibility. And the fact that they are everyday acts shows that this sacred and creative energy is inherent to every one of us, allowing us to find resonances with each other and the world we inhabit to jointly weave wider nets of sacred significance that we can joyfully and imaginatively share. This innate creative capacity we hold within us is so powerful and the terrain of potential it opens is so vast that most of us get overwhelmed by its power, turning away from it to grasp on to external anchors of certainty that we stumble across. O’Donohue remarks, “One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them.”

The fourth wise man I turn to is Soetsu Yanagi, the scholar of Japanese craft. He said there are two ways of making your place in the world. The first is ‘The Way of Self Power’, where you aim for self-reliance through your internal capacities. Yanagi says this is, by far, the harder of the two ways. It is the way most of us are conventionally schooled in, asked to treat the world as a frontier we must conquer by developing our own capacities, and while it is possible to do that, it is an option available only to a privileged few who have been blessed at birth with genius or the necessary character traits.

But hope is not lost to the masses not born with such privilege, for there is another, and easier, way: ‘The Way of Other Power’, in which one relies on an external power or grace. Yanagi says ‘The Way of Self Power’ is like climbing a mountain, where you have to work hard to develop the muscles of your body and acquire the skills of mountaineering. Whereas ‘The Way of Other Power’ is like a sailboat that uses the grace of the wind to fill its sails to glide forward with comparatively little effort.

Modern art and design is taught by asking students to deploy ‘The Way of Self Power.’ Whereas traditional craft operates by ‘The Way of Other Power’, and is able to achieve an average level of artistic quality that modern art or design has never equalled. The sacred core within you offers you ‘The Way of Other Power’, becoming the wind that will fill your sails and propel you through this world.

Sadly, the modern system of education is designed to make you look away from your sacred core and rely on ‘self-power’. It privileges intellectualism above other modes of learning, drives students toward validation through external references, and demands their acceptance of assessment of their competence through judgments made by others using measures uniformly applicable to all. The way the system works to suppress our inner creativity can be discerned if you look back to your childhood and how your mode of learning has changed over the years.

If you really want to see the innate capacity to learn in its true sense, go for a walk with a  pre-school child. It may be a route often traversed, yet every object, every sight, along it will be a source of wonder, a provocation to embodied exploration by touching, commenting, and incessantly asking “Why?” and “What?” Every child is born with a visible and energetic capacity to wonder. Why do we lose it later in life?

In the early years of primary education, where the pressures of standardised testing are not so prevalent, this wonder is encouraged. Modes of learning tap it through storytelling, drawing, making, and other forms of embodied exploration. The teacher is a facilitator whose task is to constructively steer this innate energy of the curious and wonder-filled child.

But by middle school, under the guise of there being a world, a reality, that one must deal with, the focus shifts from internal wonder to external reference. Art and storytelling, as modes of discovery, fall by the wayside. Focus shifts outward to a predefined syllabus, a word that acquires a weight as though it is worthy of a reverence that must never be questioned. Measures and assessment become uniform for all, the externalisation of reference toward a syllabus renders the students as passive recipients of instruction, and the teacher becomes the centre of power in the classroom. This process reaches its zenith in high school with the suffocating demands of board examinations, and, by this time, most of us succumb to a conditioning that teaches us to fear the wonder of our own presence.

There is some respite on entering architecture school, where the centrality of design studio is meant to give you space for your own creativity, offering some relief from external demands. But even well-meaning architecture schools wind up being constrained by centralised regulations that come from the same logic as the systemic deterioration I described in the middle and high school system. And it is rare that architecture school teaches you that the source of your creativity is the sacred core within you. Creativity winds up becoming an unanchored and unmapped terrain of subjectivity susceptible to easy seduction by the dominating fashions or ideologies of the time. Suffocation by external references returns, even if it was not imposed at the outset.

My appeal to you today, as you leave college to explore a wider and more complex world, is to recognise your sacred core and live a life that revels in its wonder and grace. Build on how it allows you to know the immeasurable as reality and subsequently channel it into your work. Salute how it magically empowers you to navigate a world beyond physical law. Celebrate how it reveals itself in ordinary everyday acts. Allow it to be the wind that fills your sails.

I must warn you that this is not easy, there is a great deal of hard work to be done. The modus operandi of this effort is not intellectualism, it comes from a wisdom that gradually emerges from embodied practice. Indian tradition refers to this form of practice as ‘sadhana’, and it has three components:

1. Recognise that the search for the sacred starts within you.
2. Grant yourself substantive and daily doses of quiet contemplative time so that you may hear your subtle inner voice without it being drowned by the cacophony of external distraction and temptation.  While you are doing this, remember this voice is sacred and you must therefore allow it to speak free from the exhortations or seductions of your ego.
3. Be rigorous, yet patient, in your practice, allowing it space and time to slowly build and expand your sacred presence.

As your sadhana increases your sensitivity to the sacred, you will start to notice things you did not see before because you were either not looking for them or did not have the training to see them. You will find that other people, even if they do not realise it, inherently embody the same sacred spirit as you. You will discern the sacred in nature. You will become cognizant of its qualities within materials such as wood and stone. And you can then seek to bring all these qualities into the architecture you create so that it offers new configurations, new possibilities, of the sacred.

Your empathy with the sacred spirit of those who will inhabit your architecture will compel you to offer spatial manifestations of that spirit. Your empathy with the sacred in nature and materials will compel you toward respect for and harmony with the physical and ecological world. And when this happens, you will realise that great architecture does not become great by first conceiving an idea and then communicating that idea through its spatial form. Architecture becomes great by conceiving a configuration that unleashes the spiritual potential of material reality, offering a communion with a sacred universe. There may have been a history or philosophy that affected the creation of the architecture, but that ceases to be of relevance for communion transcends communication and is beyond history, words or concepts.

You may argue that this is an idealistic and unrealistic dream for the world is captured by selfishness, ego, politics, and material greed, and therefore unreceptive to this sacred realm I speak of. To this concern, I offer four observations.

1. Your sacred core is accessible only to you. Nobody else, whatever their power may be, can touch it. If you give yourself the time and effort, nobody can interfere with how you nurture this core.
2. It is a patient process rather than a radical transformation, dependent on a continuing conversation between your inner wisdom and the outer world, where each critiques and validates the other. Just keep the conversation going.
3. Your goal is not to change the world. Stay within your circle of influence, rather than getting preoccupied with your wider circle of concern. Let your aim in each project be modest, seeking to carve out a small and quiet space for the sacred that grants it refuge to endure amidst the chaos, cacophony and crassness of the world. And persist in this quest, so that gradually others may get infected by the sacred and feel driven to do what you do.
4. Remember that you are a unique being; a person exactly like you has never existed before in history and never will. Your voice is unique, and an architecture you design will be different from what anyone else designs. Yet, your sacred core reflects a universal spirit, so when you channel your sacred spirit into your architecture you are facilitating the rebirth of the universal in a fresh form. This continued rebirth of the universal in the form of unique expressions is what life is all about, and you are a link in a sacred chain of being: a responsibility that you must come to terms with.

Moving toward a conclusion, let me place before you the famous poem titled “Fear” by Kahlil Gibran.

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has travelled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river cannot go back.

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

This poem’s metaphors define you as the river and the ocean as the sacred. I would take Gibran’s proposition a step further by saying that if the river is in touch with her authentic self she will know right from her source that she is the ocean, will hear the call of the ocean to unify with him, and her life must be a quest to heed this call, a quest from which she can never turn back. 

That is why a profession is often referred to as a calling, and if architecture is to be your calling, you must make the effort to know and hear the authentic voice that calls you. That voice will not reveal everything immediately, but your continued response to its call will eventually unveil the magic within and around you.

To persist in heeding this call, when all is not immediately apparent, requires faith. Remember Rabindranath Tagore’s definition of faith as “the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” The voice of your inner sacred core is the light that you can feel. This light will energise you in a way no other force can. And if you listen carefully, you will come to know that your inner light comes from a source that powers the universe, a sun that is not visible at the moment for it has not risen as yet. Because inner light and universal source are the same, you can be that bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark, for you know within you that the dawn will definitely come, bringing forth a unique rebirth of the universal.

I wish you well in your sacred journey. May you always feel your inner light and be energised by it. May you always hear your inner voice. May you always revel in the wonder of your own presence.

And may you always spontaneously and joyously sing in the dark because your inner light grants you the illumination to know the dawn will certainly come, not just once, but every day of your life.

Thank you