Lecture II on Virtual Spaces: From the Past to the Future
Lecture 2. Spatial Relations and Patterns (空間關係及模式)
The Timeless Way (大道之行也)
Once we have a common pattern language in our town, we shall all have
the power to make our streets and buildings live, through our most
ordinary acts. The language, like a seed, is the genetic system that
gives our millions of small acts the power to form a whole.
Within this process, every individual act of building is a process
in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process
of addition, in which preformed parts are combined to create a whole,
but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in
which the whole precedes the parts, and actually gives birth to
them, by splitting.
The Kernel of the Way
Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with
languages (渡彼岸則棄筏). The language, and the processes that stem from it, merely
release the fundamental order that is native to us. They do not
teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what
we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas
and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves (萬物皆備於我焉).