There are many ways of looking at power, but for our purposes here, power is the capacity to act effectively, to generate significant change, to impose one’s will on one’s environment, human and otherwise. Is there something generous within ourselves? We begin to see that, as we let go resisting the feeling of generosity, there is kindness. I do, in fact, enjoy giving to others under certain circumstances. When I give to people who truly deserve it, I feel a White Squall of good feelings that arise when I express gratitude and acknowledge the gifts that others have given to me. There is nothing wrong to want to overpower another under certain conditions, such as fiercely competitive, yet still mutually respectful game of tennis. Nor is it wrong to exult in our achievements at such times. However, there is also a deeper game to be played, a game in which far more is at stake than our ego’s status. Most people’s consciousness remains restricted to a single plane of reality: dualistic perception, as fabricated by the conditioned egoic mind, which sets up a solid division between the separate self over there and everything else over there. 

 All our main patterns of self-defense—repression, resistance, denial, avoidance, withdrawal, projection, judgement, rejection, dissociation, aggression—are ways of separating ourselves from reality, standing apart from it, and substituting a mind-created unreality in its place. This tendency to fabricate our own separate reality is a way of trying to protect ourselves against other—those elements of reality that appear alien of threatening. The dualistic eg0-mind is essentially a survival mechanism, on a par with the fangs, claws, stingers, scales, shells, and quills that other animals used to protect themselves. By maintaining this unreality self-sense, the ego attempts to provide a haven of security in an impermanent World marked by continual change, unpredictability, and loss. Yet the very boundaries that create a sense of safety also leave one feeling cut off and disconnected from reality. So unless we develop beyond the defensive ego-mind, we remain subject to endless inner conflict, alienation, and suffering. One has to take more time for themselves and cultivate their inner life.

In the ancient World, the organ for perception of the world was the heart. Present perception tends to be bi-located—in the head and in the genitals—with a great cavity of repressed anxiety in between. We see not what is there but what we conceptualize, and imagination collects around sex. It is the heart, however, that is simultaneously the organ of perception and the imagination. The heart responds to beauty. It can also project beauty. Because technical architecture is said to not have a soul, a soul must be given to it.  We make a building beautiful when we stop for it, suspend the motion of thoughts, and linger with it, rather than merely using it. A glass tower is not unlike a computer. Both are media whose message is to increase efficiency. To spend time each day giving attention to a technical building where one works is a very unfamiliar gesture toward a thing designed to receive little attention, designed to focus attention on efficient work. The soul work here consists of defamiliarizing it, loosening the web of anesthesia.