Yeah,
I just want to explore the distinction between mechanistic and emergent shifting transformation.
I think in our culture the basic paradigm of operation as it were in life is that kind of binary mechanistic sense of operating.
It's really based on Descartes I think therefore I am.
It's linked to abstraction and the seeming difference and change we get when we enter the thinking realm.
Because we can as it were affect change through thinking quite quickly we can trigger feelings through thought like a memory.
If I invite you to think of something pleasant in your past often we have kind of favorite memories maybe from childhood with our dog or cat with a friend or a favorite place in nature.
And we can go there as it were and we can get these kind of feelings and we can merge into them quite quickly actually.
And it can produce a rosy glow,
A sense of well-being,
Humor,
Love.
And yes the opposite sometimes as it were haunted by a certain memory,
Feeling,
Thought that seemingly we don't want.
And then we try not to think of a pink pig and guess what?
So you've got this kind of fairly mechanistic immediacy to shift seemingly.
But it's based on often a pattern or what has happened or memory often.
So we kind of think our way through lives or we're thought our way through lives more to the point actually those thoughts aren't necessarily that creative.
They're often well known.
We're using templates of thought that we kind of weave together,
Construct.
And so it is we might as it were go through a bit of a state sometimes based on these more binary ways of operating black and white thinking.
Good and bad,
Right and wrong.
So we make our lives like a patchwork,
Quilt from old bits of past that we call as it were life.
But there's another way of operating and this is why we call emergent.
So moving from binary from left and right,
Up and down,
To now or rather from now this moment to gradual inclusive.
I think we're talking seed and good earth and good water that permeates that earth that kind of plumps the earth as it becomes damp and inside the seed begins to swell.
It takes in the water very gently and the temperature in the earth.
Things align the sound of a certain bird,
The company of other seeds and shoots,
A certain quality of light as that first shoot breaks through the earth to meet that lovely blue,
The welcoming warmth of the sun,
The cries of life,
The bees.
This emergent way of being is based on resonance and relationship.
It's not based on hammers and nails,
Billiard balls,
Banging away.
It's not based on strain and stress,
Despair and hope,
Force and collapse,
Depression,
Anxiety.
It's a different order of growth.
It's very gentle and soft.
It's the flower that pushes up through the tarmacadam.
Tarmacadam lumping in the middle of the road as it were,
Cracking and this amazing bud or shoot by the power of its own chi,
So to speak,
Its own quiet intention moves universes.
It's not thinking,
It's not planning,
It's not the smash and grab.
This is the nature of real transition which takes place within,
Certainly and without,
But when we think of stuck patterns in our lives where there's desperation and the will to get out because of the truckness,
This is not the foundation for real transition,
Although that's where real change can take place.
If we know the meaning of emergent change,
Emergent transition,
This is something I have experienced firsthand coming out of some very challenging emotional stuff,
Clinical depression and a few other things,
But what I learnt was this.
This emergent order is more recursive.
It spirals.
It spirals up if you like,
But when you engage with this spiraling up,
It's seemingly as if nothing happens for quite a long time and that's where most people give up because they're on that more binary wheel,
They think.
They think that if something doesn't change immediately,
Nothing is happening.
Well,
On the contrary.
I know,
For example,
In naturopathy where I've engaged in healing processes with the body,
It's taken about 12 to 18 months for real deep shifts to happen,
Shifting into natural foods and herbs,
Shifting into a change of lifestyle,
A change of relationship and relatedness.
And the body is kind of reorganizing,
Shifting,
Making those necessary broader changes based on emergence and seemingly as if by magic that shoot breaks through the tarmac,
As if nothing were different.
A sense of wellness and wholeness emerges.
So there's a kind of time lapse.
There's a period of time in which we need to engage in a sense of faith or we need to stay with it.
And one of the metaphors that comes to me is what I would call the flywheel effect.
It's when with the flywheel,
If you turn off the flywheel from the perspective of an electric flywheel,
If you turned it off at the socket,
The flywheel still continues to revolve by the sheer momentum,
Although the power source is turned off.
It's like that with emergence shifting.
And yet,
We may believe that flywheel going around signifies same old,
Same old.
Not true.
This is why so many people,
I believe,
Remain stuck because they simply do not continue.
On that emergent process,
They lose heart,
Lose faith.
This is why community is so important,
To support us when something in this loses heart.
So the flywheel effect,
So in more emergent shifting then,
Is based on when it comes to something's in us being stuck and seemingly in repetitive cyclic patterning,
Which is the other pattern of operative,
Is not the more recursive upwards spiral,
It's more the augmentative hamster wheel.
It just goes round and round.
That's your mechanistic paradigm at work,
Reactive.
Trigger,
Cause,
Trigger,
Cause.
What's the basis for this more emergent,
Gradual,
Integrated shift?
Well,
Its presence,
It's moving from that abstracted led,
Thinking led,
Thought led way of living,
Which is really the primary mode of operating.
And the challenge with that is,
It doesn't know more than it knows,
Therefore,
It's limited by that.
I think as Goethe said,
We're limited by what we know,
It gets in the way.
So if we think we're knowledgeable and educated and we think we've learned a lot in our particular field,
Well,
By and large,
That's generally where the boundary ends.
It's,
In a way,
It's a wonderful gift and a terrible curse.
We're not available to what we don't know we don't know.
And perhaps something can't bear to be thought of as limited in that way.
So it continues to operate.
It does take a certain amount of humility and vulnerability and the willingness to enter what we don't know,
Not just what we don't know we don't know,
In the public domain.
It is through community that the real shift and change,
Actually,
The real emergent change begins to facilitate itself.
It's held by the larger,
Not just by the inner.
They are indeed one of the same process.
The seed is not its own agent of change.
It's a relational,
Emergent shifting,
Transformation,
Based on a web and geshtauten of conditions.
So really,
The first element of the process of real shift is this entry into appreciating something in us,
Knows what it knows,
Up to this point.
And there's a real invitation to be befriended what it doesn't know that it doesn't know,
And to soften like that seed when it meets water,
So that after husk can split.
And there can be some form of germination.
And really it begins,
The inner transformation begins by beginning to recognize more fully the outer,
Paradoxically.
And there's a literal sense to this actually,
If we want to invite emergence,
Resonance,
Correspondence,
Availability.
These are all words from the emergent world.
Not force,
Deny,
Repress,
Grasp,
Want the next course.
This will surely work.
I've done this and I've gotten not very far but now I'm doing this new thing,
A new guru,
A new meditation course,
A new study.
Yes,
You get the affective hit,
But you don't get the integrated change,
Where the heart rests and finds its release,
Where there's a true peace and rest.
Something can rest in itself.
So the invitation,
We move from demand to invitation.
We move from thinking and thought,
From cerebral,
To my,
To I,
To this.
Sensing this contact with the ground,
Where the body meets the ground,
In the pause.
Time and space is required here,
Not a switch.
So the flywheel effect means we're going to feel the same old things for a while and yet the processing is beginning to shift.
It's quite radical.
The ground beneath you,
Mother Earth and nature await.
This is our first port of call.
This is our first journeying.
It's contact,
Touch,
Smell,
Taste,
The sound of a bird,
The sight of a flower,
As we might otherwise pass by.
Just there,
Radiating its warmth and colours,
Its beautiful smile of being.
So as there is a resting in the sensing,
Coming into grounding perhaps,
And there's a whole process here called grounded aware presence.
So grounding representing effectively the sensing,
Resting in the sensing,
Through anchoring through the ground or space.
And immediately the body senses relief.
We're creating the foundation for emergent shift,
Not mechanistic,
Empirical getting and having,
Feeling based change really,
Which is short lived.
The feeling will wear out quite quickly.
And once in this more whole sense of self,
In the self,
Resting from the self,
The body self,
We can begin to notice what's being offered in the body.
Something there in us has been there for years or decades.
And we can just learn to greet it and meet it as it is in its fullness.
Just as the earth merges with the seed into the alchemy of life.
And as that fresh green shoot emerges into the mystery of the blue.
So do those things in us that have been embryonic and patient for years and decades,
Begin to emerge into their fullness of the fresh edge.
Life begins to melt and flow.
This is emergent change and shift.
Requiring availability,
Time and space,
Allowing the same process which meets others in the same way.
Befriending judgments and labeling,
Befriending the polarities of good and bad,
Of right and wrong.
You're a part of the solution or not into a welcome acceptance.
Even accepting those parts which are not liked in the broader context of things.
You can agree to disagree.
It goes beyond likes and dislikes,
Although it entertains them as well.
It's not the determining factor anymore.
Emergent shifting is inclusive and whole.
It simply rests in itself and the shiftings and changes take place in this broader sweep of the resting in itself.
So this is the emergent shifting based on presence.
It's the alchemy of life.
It's the true peace,
The true healing.
And once healing has recognized itself to be true into its forward movement,
There's beyond healing,
Beyond the fixed maddening eye into the abundance and mystery of being,
Of relatedness,
Relationship,
Resonance,
Correspondence.
Where the flower,
The bud,
Opens into the gorgeous flower,
One wave rolls into the other.
The mighty ocean knows its own depths.
What was a problem of one wave melts into the depths of the ocean that knows its own peace and freedom to be true.
Resting here.
So really the corollary for mechanistic versus emergent shifting and transformation in a way is the ability to hold and be with endurance,
To be with discomfort,
To be with that that seemingly is not changing much even though as it were,
Effort is being made.
In the embodiment and relationship of presence,
It is a type of non-effort.
It is an allowing,
An exquisite being with,
With the hurt,
With those seeming patterns of stuckness.
We need to let them have full expression through time.
They may have taken decades to have arrived or have been there for a very long time.
They simply wish to be received in their fullness.
And for some parts of us it's almost unbearable.
But in this particular mode,
In this emergent presence mode,
Deep and significant shifting is going on.
The fresh edge,
The shoots are coming.
The seed has morphed.
We do not see the fresh shoots immediately.
And when they emerge,
Something in us knows they are of a different order.
Great relief,
Release and peace.
Begins to offer itself.
A stable and whole sense of self begins to offer itself from where there was none.
It is a new order of being.
So taking heart,
Keeping open,
Inviting openness,
Inviting a faith that the universe knows its own rightness.
That there is indeed a deeper order of things going on.
Sometimes it's as if there's one or two steps back.
Though the invitation here is to persist,
Persist in this quality of engaging with presence.
And I mean presence in its true form,
Not in this abstracted imaginary form,
Which some mental practices advocate.
Thinking it's real presence,
It's not.
Real presence is based on concrete experience and relationship in that concrete experience with space and kindness.
With vulnerability,
Humility.
With love.
Just by way of an addendum,
It's quite possible to entertain this more emergent nature of transformation through the mechanistic approach.
So something once the emergent,
As it were,
Consolidated paradigm of the fresh edge.
So it's quite possible to come from this mechanistic mind thinking it can have emergent shift and change.
That's a very kind of common trap initially.
So really the invitation is to seek someone that knows something about the experience of presence in its more emergent nature.
Maybe there are a few hallmarks here in the quality of presence that can be particularly notable.
Generally those who entertain presence aren't quick to judge or comment.
There's often more spaciousness in their character,
In their beingness,
Which is natural.
There's often playfulness and humor.
There's often a naturalness,
A non-assuming nature.
There's often the admission of not knowing.
There's often a just sitting around,
Seemingly not doing much.
It's hard to spot completely,
But there may be an absence of being right as a general habit,
The will to dominate,
Being right,
The hunger for love.
So you may notice a quality of contentment,
A composure.
This type of thing,
If you're looking to catch presence because it's more caught in a way than taught.
Something in us gets it though,
Once it's onto it.
It's like that,
Just a hint,
And just a little addendum as it were in the search.
It's the less hungry search,
It's the more fulfilled search that takes care of itself.
