I have an orientation to life, active within my own life, that I'd like to share with you today. It involves a radical embrace of the principle and existence of emergence in all things.
In the way and the teachings of Fractal Praxis, we work with Life's root patterning to enhance our own lives—canonically, to increase the "aliveness" in the systems we are a part of.
This message entails a story of my own experience and some minor entryways into the practice for yourself. As with anything, this is just the beginning. :) I suggest you follow the threads that most spark the most "aliveness" in your system. And if you do, I reckon, if you so pursue: you'll soon begin noticing the cues that are hooking you.
And since is the first newsletter I've been able to give in quite some time—this one's a bit of a doozy. 😵💫 Get in there, but take your time!
***
The Stamina to Dance with Radical Openness
I have been waiting for something to happen. Or... I have been anticipating that something would happen.
I practice radical openness in my mind and body. This makes me capable of feeling intensely. I have trained my mind to resynchronize with my body, after a childhood of dissociation and mind-body estrangement. As a result, I now can feel my needs via my body, like direct and clear feedback. This allows me navigate my life and my environments, its available choices, its opportunities and threats, by nuanced sensation paired with deep understanding: a kind of sensation so rich in information, it is capable of containing both feelings and thoughts.
In this mode, I've been anticipating (or intuiting) some manner of Bigness, or Big Transition, to be on the horizon for me, or for us collectively. And I have approached it having precisely no idea of what it is.
Like turning into a blind curve, without slowing the speed too much. I proceed radically unprotected, willing to take moments and days on their own terms. Willing to watch my bank account dwindle down beyond a comfort zone with each obliged payment, as I stay alert and active in my mode of calling in what would better meet my needs.
For many people, the"not-knowing" stress I'm capable of handling would test their faith. There's a reason why what I'm describing, sometimes known as "manifesting," is classified strictly in terms of magic. A rational person might lose their grip on a hopeful outlook and descend into fear, making reactive decisions instead of remaining responsive. Mainstream culture condition us to value conformity, planning, prediction, and certainty. To stay so vulnerable, and receptive, so curious, "so out on a limb"? Surely the world will strike you down. Many of us would flee back from that brink after too long, opting for a familiar security.
And there is nothing wrong that such proneness to flinching, to flight (and basically, to fear) is the status quo when facing our edges. This is simply what our capacity is today. But, if we are training in expectation of a more blighted and volatile future, we must expand our capacities in important ways. And if we are aiming to ensure that those futures are more alive and thriving, then we must train to embrace the patterns embodied by Life. And one of life's key strategies is embodied in the awful power of Emergence.
Training and Payoff
I began training for a lifestyle of letting intuition steer many years ago. I've taken great risks and great pains because of it. (Yet I'd still attribute the worst risks and suffering of my entire life to acts involving suppressing my intuition.)
Sure, there is the aspect of a natural proclivity: I've always been daring and independent. But there's also a training regimen here, a consequential training regimen requiring commitment and faith, yet one that any person can adopt.
It's something like: Let intuition steer. Abide intuition whole-heartedly. And let whatever happens be what it may.
After more than a decade of training in this way, I have an enormous capacity to tolerate discomfort and keen headfirst into trouble and edges, in the name of following intuition and in a deep faith in the power of the body-mind to sense-make even the most outrageous and challenging truths. My relationship with spirit became so potent because I literally centered my world around it: all of my actions, behaviors, and statements, to the best of my conscious ability to direct, were rendered in service to trusting and following my intuition. It became a simple principle, a rule, shaping all matter of my life. A principle I do not regret adopting.
This intensity of training has made me capable of undertaking marathon sprints of faith and not-knowing, boasting a stamina for facing change that would make other mortals quiver in fright.
And: the payoffs are very real. The payoffs are when it feels like you are living the best, most connected, and most meaningful or purposeful life possible.
My athletic capacity to remain with uncertainty while problem-solving (or, while a problem unknots itself through collective cognition) is actually of massive value to any company or person. The value of applying my holistic, systems-thinking intelligence to others' problems and projects is not an illusion. Eventually, I held the faith that some creature will pick up on the signal I'm putting out in this ecosystem. And they will respond to it. And thus my needs will be met. And even more great good work will unfurl into the world, in symbiosis. In regenerativity.
(And so it came to pass.)
🌓🌕🌗🌑
Then, in a spontaneous 90 minute phone call, it happens. Talks transmute into a contract—ideas firming up into the form of binding words. And I transfer my consent to devote some allocation of my embodied capacities to produce value for a visionary company (one who shall remain unnamed at this time). And just as abruptly, change up! I'll personally shift from a flow-based daily lifestyle to a much more regular/regulated one. Though the even more regulated lifestyle should still be premised intelligently on my awareness of all of my needs, in balance.
⚖️
An Emergence Based Life
Over the past 20 years, when I devoted, again and again, to my intuition, or to my own access point to great spirit aka collective intelligence aka the principle of wisdom-making within me (whatever rhetoric you prefer)...
I unlocked an experience that I will call An Emergence Based Life.
The events in my life are defined by emergence. I am in rapt, spontaneous, responsiveness to the world as it unfolds. I have learned to identify what it looks and feels like when all the pieces fall into place. I have learned to anticipate when things are bound to fully fall apart. I have learned that everything, and I mean everything, teaches. And, most significant of all, perhaps: I developed a trust that the universe was involved with me in sense-making. That we were doing it together, and needed one another. No longer did I think I was the star of my own hero's journey, but rather, the co-creator of meaning in the world, capable of including and perhaps even liberating all beings, past, present and future.
This faith became unbreakable, even stubborn. I'd honor what I was guided to—often imperfectly, but with sincere commitment every time. Losing track of my deepest-most self, aka my intuition, at any point and for any rational "reason" at all gradually became too high a price for me to pay. Beyond my will, beyond my willingness.
I was an infinite, life-transcending relationship with the Whole. And I was committed to it, devoted to it, to wherever it would take me, even to the ends of the earth.
And this commitment endowed me with the freedom and the creative power to BE with whatever might come.
Perils and Plenty on this Path
Now, if this sounds equally terrifying and enlivening, you are correct. Equally peril and plenty can and do befall me on this path. One of my biggest "crashes and burns" from following intuition is when I wrongly interpreted some vision guidance I had received—basically botching the whole potential by jumping the gun, trying to "make" something happen that wasn't ripe yet. (Such is the product of a deeply-rooted anxiety, bound to my egoic sense of self, that painfully needed still more integrating. 🐂
The way of embracing Emergence can pay off spectacularly, as I'll attest, but it doesn't always. In fact, a lot of the time I am burdened with witnessing truths that neither I, nor my counterparts, seemingly, derive much comfort or benefit from acknowledging (at least in the short term). The path can be equally beautiful as brutal.
And yet overall, the dissonance between myself and the world diminishes, and the congruence increases. This is the ultimate fruit of this practice: you reduce the perceived (and illusory) separation between yourself and the universe. That right there is much more enduringly nourishing than the ups and downs of where the path might lead you at any given moment.
And yet, the "ups" abound. Coming from an early life steeped in scarcity, it's actually the "plenty" part or "up" part of what this lifestyle unlocks that makes me quiver in fear most of all. Being accustomed to challenge and survival, I am well adapted to scarcity-related situations. But when the fruits of this radical practice of emergence get so good that the heart and mind must expand to handle it... that's when the trip of this practice comes full circle.
In the last three months, the emergences in my life are remarkably, almost suspiciously, positive.
- I now live in sweet, vibrant homestead in community—probably the sweetest place I could imagine living at this time in my life.
- My main lover has returned with renewed vigor to nurturing our relationship, embodying orientations of wisdom, repair, reciprocity, and remorse.
- The organizations I've helped birth are fully established and living independently in the world, and I am a more equipped entrepreneur than ever before in my life.
- I just obtained a paid skilled position that addresses my income needs amply, freeing up all the more power toward Fractal Praxis (my life's calling).
Photos and stories (and songs) would only do these latest events justice, to be honest. But my whole body is still swimming in all the change, and soaking in all the pleasure.
And the core characteristics of all of these things?
I did not plan for them. I could not plan for them—I wouldn't dare! Instead, I was present to the opportunity when it ripened, and I responded adeptly.
Like gleaning, forever. Picking the ripest fruit off of the healthiest trees at exactly the right time for it to feel like the whole universe is chorusing in the joy at the endless gift.
Something I really want to reinforce here: You can't just choose to feel the good parts of life a lot, and the bad parts of life a little. The growth in tolerances required by this way moves in one direction: increasing what-all are you capable of FEELING and KNOWING. The more pain you allow yourself to feel, to really go into and sit with, the more you are "carved out" by that pain like a reservoir. And therefore, the more joy you are capable of experiencing and containing, too. The more agonizing, huge, and life-transforming the truths you are willing to know? The more healing and wholeness results from your living collaboratively with truths in all areas of your life.
If you yearn to taste more joy in your life... what more would you become willing to feel?
Would you dare be willing to feel, feel so deeply what you've been through in this life... so much so that all of life could, all of a sudden, make more sense?
Release Mind Control
Rather than control your own life, as though we were "steering" its events, it can help to believe that a larger hand, one that combines your intelligence with all the intelligence of the living world, is actually handling this big ship. And all the power that's been delegated by the bigger-mind to you is simply: to respond, with art and skill, to the true signals in your environment. From this framework you know that you and the universe are working in concert—and, like a symphony orchestra, you'll get cued to jump in and perform to your exact capacity when it is called for. You don't have to plan, and you don't have to prescribe. In fact, those ways of processing the world hinder you from opening up to a real, bold, and boisterous dance with the universe.
Emergence is. It just is. The mechanics of why things happen precisely as they do will boggle our sense-making capacities for all eternity. Emergence is the name we give to all we cannot explain, and yet is theoretically explicable, that lets life continue "doing its thing."
To embrace emergence in one's life is another thing. To embrace emergence requires a conscious orientation to it, cultivated either culturally or personally, and it entails a radical commitment to "going with the flow." Ultimately, like all my favorite art forms, it is improvisational — an apt expression of the being's total capabilities contained in one irreproducible wild moment. Like these newsletters! 😜 Which are indeed always written "at once," improvised in the moment, based on what's alive in my heart and mind and body, and never planned.
In other words, it is based in the biological experience of flow state. There is no map, only an intuitive sense of the territory, plus all the accumulated knowledge and awareness that you can summon in the moment.
This way is improvisational and based in flow state, with visions providing impressionistic guidance. This is how I would summarize my way of being with Emergence.
Closing Calling-In and Invitation
May this offering be guidance to you. And, I also know: it is really up to you whether you encounter, and choose, a profound and life-changing direct relationship with reality. I trust you are capable of it, given the right supports (and cues, like these here medicinal memes). 😁 More than that, I bet you already have your own ways today of inviting magic, wonder, or synchronicity into your life. Especially if you've read this far in this beast. 😉
So my invitational challenge to you is: Are you willing to go a little bit deeper with it now? Could my account of radical success provide you with some permission for further experimentation? Let intuition steer your life-vehicle for a little while. Maybe it's for a day, for a couple hours, or even just for a minute. Just enough that you feel comfortable with. And, what feedback do you get from that experience?
To be with emergence is akin to the Buddhist wisdom of "arising and passing away." When you are truly free, you are capable of bearing witness to whatever is arising and passing away in that moment, no matter how substantial it might feel or be. In unlocking this power to be immutable in the face of all manner of storms, you inherit the power to stay steady while inundated with outrageous beauty, pleasure, and unbounded joy.
The way of being with emergence is a newly articulated teaching in Fractal Praxis—effectively "dropped" as of this penning. 🖋️ And, there is so much more to be said and done here in the near future!
I am heralding an emergence, indeed... Fractal Praxis is coming through me in bigger, clearer ways than ever, ready to be born as a much more sophisticated organism in the world. Oh, am I being worked by these visions! I imagine a vast trove of teachings ever-evolving, coupled with a wide body of practitioners who gather together in siblinghood, in circles... I imagine that these understandings catch fire in the hearts and minds of people who need something enduring, something profound, something so real and core as Life itself, to anchor them in the raucous sea and the violent waves of What is Coming.
Things shall be emerging in this very space, things that you yourselves cannot fully see yet. Prepare for Emergence. And may this teaching be timely.
But I can't call it in alone. I need your spells braided with mine. Like a barn-raising, it takes a community village to raise up what serves us, most and best. Please help me call this in. 🙏🏽📿 And may our co-creations be nothing short of astounding.
The Fractal Praxis way is about increasing aliveness by partnering with Life's core patterning (of which Emergence is one example). It is a way of life I aim to teach you, my friends. Or, better put, to guide you to. After all, any dharma (including me as teacher) can only point in the direction of the path, but you yourself must move to claim it with your feet. 👣
Move with, move on, or sit with, stay with, let affect, get inspired, spread around, and surely flow on.
Your friend in dharma,
C.
