A living world respects the unity of life and its sufferings and it maintains and multiplies the wholeness of life.

A deathly world dismembers and dissects life and its sufferings and it maintains and multiplies the parts that it plucks from life, without respect for the wholeness of life.

The architect Christopher Alexander has proposed that the fundamental characteristic of a living world is that it is composed of “strong centers” or, to use an alternative term much more to my liking, Alexander has proposed that a living world is composed of “strong foci”. These strong foci are themselves, in turn, composed by and through processes that Alexander calls “structure preserving transformations”, of which Alexander finds there are fifteen.