Dear Crafty,

An Exterior Architecture is the pattern of all forms of our functioning:
doing, thinking, feeling; manifested personally and in community.
It is pretty much what-we-are. This is necessary. This is how we act in life, and how the world sees us.

A conventional “Work” formulation is along the lines:
In life, externally play a role.
Internally, not identify.

This means, who-we-are becomes free within whatever what-we-are is doing.
Whether we are free, and the degree to which, is significantly governed by the quality of our Interior Architecture.

Our Exterior Architecture is also of varying quality.
Is it informed by an appropriate education, is it ethical, does it serve family, community, and the wider world?
Is it reliable, repeatable, and responsible? That is, does our Exterior Architecture honour necessity and honour sufficiency, personally and impersonally?

When our inner lives feel dry, our Exterior Architecture holds us together and keeps us going, meeting all our responsibilities in “ordinary life”, even where some of that is automatic.
In keeping going, we remain available to Help and to who-we-are.
In keeping going, during subjectively long dry periods, perhaps even for twenty-one years, is an exceptional challenge.
At the completion of which we discover that, keeping going in the dry periods, (in conventional terminology) is the centre of our work.
The work is in everyday life, allowing everyday life to be our teacher.
Which is close to a definition of The Fourth Way.

What brings together the Exterior and Interior Architectures?
The Divine Spark, what is highest in within each of us.
The Decision Exercise is how we develop a relationship between the who and the what, so that they may speak to each other.
The Master Exercise leads us to a direct experience of the who, the spark within us.

All the above is a longer expression of what it is to have a discipline.
How do we know that we have a discipline?
When we know that our discipline has us.

Until then, we keep going.

Hope this long answer is useful.

Waving good cheer from one strange country to another.

Robert Fripp
Thursday 17th. November, 2022
Bredonborough, Middle England