Threshold Conversations — Episode 27 - Emergence

I did not plan to become a Buddhist monk in Burma. I did not plan to walk into a year of monastic life. I did not plan to receive what I received there. I followed a sequence of small signs over a period of years. They led me to Asia, then to Burma, then to a particular monastery, then to a particular Sayadaw, then to a particular morning when something happened that I have never been able to explain. That morning, I walked toward a pagoda where I had sat in meditation a hundred times before. As I crossed an invisible line separating the monastery grounds from the pagoda grounds, I was startled by the sensation of what felt like thousands of volts of electricity shooting up through my feet from the ground. I jumped back. The shock ceased. I tried again. Same thing. What followed was three days of current running through me whenever I stood on the pagoda grounds. I had no framework for what was happening. I have spent decades since trying to understand what it was. This episode walks into the question that the experience pointed at. What does it mean when something arrives in our experience that does not fit any category we have? What is happening in the moments of small synchronicity that bring us into encounters we did not arrange? What is consciousness actually doing when conditions become ripe for something new to arise? The word that has come to fit my experience is emergence. Not what consciousness causes from somewhere behind the moment. What consciousness is doing, here, when the ground is prepared. In this episode: A morning at a pagoda in Burma when something arrived that did not fit any framework I had brought with me. The cultural impulse to immediately categorize what arrives, and what closure costs the encounter. Emergence — what flocks of birds, conversations, music, and transmissions all share in common. How presence shapes the field, and how the meeting at the pagoda was field meeting field. The four scales of transmission — through friends, through strangers, through the more-than-human world, through dreams. Next week: Episode 28 — Playing Our Part. Weeks of walking the Annapurna Circuit, the companions I did not choose, and what it means to be a human inside a cosmos we are participating in but did not author alone. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit conversations.metamorphity.com