While the Sacramento King’s and their new institutional gray uniforms make them look like a basketball team that escaped from a mental hospital, instead of seeing the building as an obstacle (walkthroughs cost $100,000.00), think about the life of the building—its moods, what it displays and what it hides, its sensitivities, its relations to its neighbors. Some time ago, I was asked to speak to a group of city managers on the topic of architecture and the quality of life in the city. The meeting took place in a small room in the city’s convention center. The room itself was sick. It had no windows, and the drab acoustic ceilings pressed in from above, sandwiching the room with oppression. The door was without a handle. It had only a steel plate for the hand and was indistinguishable from a public restroom entry. No crown molding marked a difference between ceiling and walls, and between walls and floor. Painted institutional gray, its floor covered with rough nappy carpet, the space was filled with ugly brown folding chairs. The conversation in that space was interesting. It all gravitated toward power. A group of fairly ordinary people, city workers, all began talking about how they would change the architecture of the city.

 However, no one noticed the suffering of this room. So how would it be possible to trust how they would reshape the city? The room was filled either with complaints or with cheerleader promotions of the achievements of the city.  It is not surprising that in an empty space such as this the imagination of power took hold. The room was not used but used up; it felt neglected, abuse, tricked. Nevertheless, a great deal could be done to care for the soul of the room, starting with the recognition that it is hurting. What could be done? Simple things. A small table with a flower placed on it would honor the room. Anything given to the room that indicates through its presence a linking between this place and the larger World honors the room by saying that it is part of the World and not a space capsule. Anything that gives sensory experience to the room retrieves the soul from abstraction. A flower, a wooden table, a ceramic vase, a little Earth, the necessary watering of a plant—with such gestures we have located this room on Earth. Of course, if all the rooms of this convention center were suddenly supplied with tables and plants, all that was achieved through this suggestion would be lost so long as each room was not treated according to its particularity by the particularity of an individual soul.

   I receive everything in the name of God. Sensory experience is required, but imagination must be a primary ingredient. Nothing would be further off the mark than to hire a decorating firm to come in and prettify one abstraction with an additional one. The approach to the soul of the city I have in mind can best be carried forth by individuals, as a kind of ongoing therapy in daily life. First, we must have the felt recognition that the dominance of technical architecture and city design deadens the soul, and we must realize that the city is dying, in spite of its glitter and flash and $508 million publicly funded cheaply designed Japanese rendition of a Greek colosseum and self-promotion. Once we get through the denial, a response of rage follows. Homeless people from West Sacramento are camping out at the state capitol in the city of Sacramento and all of this makes us want to flee the city. Rage—felt, held, not shut off nor denied nor acted out—leads to compassion. Compassion must be nurtured to the point that one suffers with things. Compassion opens up the soul, an opening which can lead to a different perception of the city, one which ceases merely to look at the city and begins to engage the city’s invisible soul.

In order for anything to express itself, it is required to be held in a good regard. However, this regard is not a judgment of things as beautiful when it is not, or as good when it is not. The good regard is the capacity to experience the particularity of things of the World in an attitude of silence and waiting. The heart says yes there is something here to behold beyond what I think or feel about it. The heart does not strive after meaning, but rather allows the things to disclose themselves. The process is applicable in all negative situations. It enables us to change the context by which we perceive our current situation. It enables us to give it a new and different meaning. It lifts us up from being the helpless victim to the conscious chooser. By dissolving the cognitive filters that maintain the division between self and other, reality awareness is the doorway to liberation from unreality and the narrow, conflicting World of Sacramento. It reveals absolute truth, the way things officially are: inseparable, undivided, interconnected. Our very being is not separate from the reality of God and all being.

The city of Sacramento is inseparable from the soul of reality as it appears and flows through us at every moment, in the influx of our ongoing beautiful experience of life. If the dualistic egoic mind is prehumen, or subhuman, in that it is survival-oriented, reality of egoless awareness is transhuman, or suprapersonal, because it opens up a larger expanse of being or presence that is free from our ordinary, personal involvement in immediate existential situations. These two planes of existence—subhuman and transhuman—are the main focus of many Old-World traditions, which lay out a path leading from the bondage of unreality to the liberation of God’s reality and awareness.  You are looking for clues about what might have shaped your current ideas about the city of Sacramento, fears, dreams, tender places, and sore spots. So, instead of getting lost in your happy and unhappy memories on this trip down Memory Lane, you should look for the signposts that signal what your past relationships and experiences in Sacramento have to teach you. You want to discern what stands out as important danger warnings and what the welcome signs were, too. You are looking back for the relationships and experiences that taught your gut to flash “Danger, Falling Rocks!” so that you learned to keep your eyes open. You are also looking for what you learned about your ability to find the bypass signs that allow you to detour past the worst of the swamps and sinkholes.