This is the second and concluding post on this topic. See Part I here.
Contemplating the most elemental levels of existence, from the quantum to the atomic to the molecular level, we can say that how life organizes itself is pre-determined, arising out of all the familiar operations that we take for granted every day, as well as being completely unpredictable. The spontaneous flow of life is always confirming the most intimate character of reality, what Buddhism calls emptiness—the absence of any intrinsic nature. It is what the sacred texts and teachers of the Tibetan tradition call dharmakaya, the root nature of reality, the source-less source (if you will) of everything, the intrinsic nature of all phenomena. I am using the word flow from Neil Thiese’s Notes on Complexity, in which he points out that what Buddhists mean by emptiness is not a static condition, but a platform of infinitely dynamic potential from which all events, from the quantum to the atomic, molecular, cellular, biological, and more complex systems arise.
That nature is ‘empty,’ confirmed by the behavior of sub-atomic particles, means there is no self-sustaining independent quality of either matter or energy. At the quantum level, they are completely interchangeable. Tuning our awareness and receptivity to this level of reality in which (temporary) appearances and emptiness are equally real, requires that we interrupt and modulate the pace of our subjective process, the activity of mind, to track a deeper flow. We must slow down and look. When we align more intimately with primal effervescence, we may cultivate a deeper connection with things as they are (and are not), and how they become what they are. In other words, only by progressively settling into a deepening stillness may we come to understand the true nature of movement. Nothing is fixed. Emergence cannot be impeded.
This is simply the nature of life. Observing the self-organizing nature of living systems from the cellular to the galactic, the limitless creativity of organic life, seduces us, baffles us, mystifies us, torments us, and inspires us. We have no choice but to investigate, to throw ourselves into the unexplored, teasing it apart, to ‘know’ its nature (our nature), its ‘message,’ to unpack its meaning. Or we can also step back, soften our gaze, relinquish our need to know, and allow ourselves to relax into a completely non-judgmental, curious, unhurried, widening view of non-engagement, wu wei, not doing. To become attached to a particular emergent, tenuous, or impermanent property of life is to misinterpret the essence of emergence, a vastly complex process of auto-determination, knowing every previous manifestation of itself while instantaneously synthesizing the next emergence without needing to ‘know’ anything. It inherently knows itself. There is no seeking, no analysis, no meta-contemplation. Its expression is self-generating and entirely organic. It’s the changing dream of Being, coming true in every moment.
Unceasing change is the only principle. There is no time, and no benefit to dwelling on appearances. Radical impermanence is the only law. I say radical because even within conditions that appear to be without motion, impermanence is always operating. There is always activity, appearance and cessation burning through. Though Mahayana Buddhism asserts that there is no true substance to anything, that everything is ultimately formless, we must still, as C.W. Huntington, Jr points out, have some way of referring to what we are talking about. Even the symbol zero, implying formlessness, seduces us into imagining formlessness is a thing. Yet ultimately, there is nothing other than the appearance of form, like an afterimage. Like the Tao, form and formlessness are wedded in a way that makes them indistinguishable, ineffable. At this level, there are no values to be assigned to phenomena. Everything, including you and me, is simultaneously real and apparition.
This is also dharmakaya, the ground of reality. Emergence at the heart of human biology is expressed in the neurochemical ground, in the transition from form to formlessness and back again, at the nexus of conception and manifestation, arising from and returning to nothing whatsoever. The methods of modern science may reveal its mechanics. But beyond all mechanics, it is the true home of consciousness and connection, where life continues in full communion. It is beneath intellect, beneath seeking, beneath arrival or non-arrival. In the most subtle recess of relationship, where categorization confounds or does not apply, the absolute belonging of no body and no-self, we give ourselves to interbeing, to perpetual emergence, with no agenda, no grasping, no past, and no future.
Within the closed ecosystem of earth, any possible phenomenal emergence is a passing manifestation of spontaneous invention. Beneath this ongoing dynamic of arising and cessation is a deeper reality, beneath cause and effect, in which nothing is gained or lost. All accounts balance. There is no linearity, no progression nor any apparent reason, only an unwavering equality of apparent polarities bound by mysterious attraction. Only a self-sustaining consciousness exists, a spontaneous internal intelligence based on innumerable, impossibly complex systems processing information in nano-moments, having no goal, no direction and no imperative other than to continue. There is no chaos here, no determinism and no breaking of boundaries because no actual boundaries exist.
Neither right nor wrong exist in this realm, nor do good or evil, as the unceasing momentum of emergence resists any value arbitrarily assigned to any single event. In absolute terms, any categorization of phenomena has no relevance. And to whom would it be relevant? It is only we humans who believe in rational absolutism, who have taken rationality to its self-terminating apotheosis. What lies beyond rationality is difficult for conventional consciousness to grasp and flies in the face of anthropocentrism because every valence we place on thought or action, all form, arises solely from a need to make life safer and more predictable. By hovering at the nexus of materiality and apparition, we approach the lucidity of waking from the dream of samsara. We enter a quality of freedom infused with compassionate intent, bodhichitta, the ethical and moral engine for all action. To withdraw from the imperative of compassionate intent is to violate the mandate of life and descend into meaninglessness, nihilism. In today’s world, there’s far too much of that going on.
Emergence, the self-generating intelligent adaptive response to a continuously changing environment is constantly happening at all levels of being. In the realm of emergence, any concept of a fixed presence, such as identity, or self, becomes irrelevant, which again illustrates the principle of radical impermanence. The only reality is process. Paradoxically, emergence as a sanctuary of rapid and unending change naturally includes the omnipresence of cessation, where safety is upended, where all reification goes to die. At the emergent edge of life, we belong to ourselves, to each other and to something vastly greater. We do not belong to each other as micro-disturbances on the surface of life; that is the limited realm of psychology. We belong to each other as entities on a common journey. The existential struggle of the moment is to recover a mindfulness of how we belong to each other. What the totality of earth systems is doing because it cannot do otherwise, is reflecting our errors, showing us what we have lost and what we yet stand to lose by failing to ask the right questions.
We are made and remade in realms of spirit and myth. Through emergence, we realize our true relationship and intra-dependence within the entire field of creation, what in Buddhist philosophy is called dependent origination. In seeing through the narratives that separate us, we become available to a greater sphere of belonging. If we dwelt only on the surface, we would miss the vast ocean sustaining all and to which all belongs. Still, the recovery of belonging comes at great cost. The transition of consciousness underway is about erotic embodiment, re-inhabiting our earth bodies, our animal bodies, remembering our more-than-human origins and what we owe the earth and the more-than-human world. It means recovering our bodies, communicating, and restoring the foundations of relationship—changing the politics of bodies altogether, all while remembering that every phenomenon, as real as it appears to be, is also apparition.
The somatic experience of emergence is happening so fast we struggle to process it all. Trauma at the human level is expressed as conflicting intentions, inhibited or constrained movement within the human system, translated as psychological conflict and inhibited expression. The influence of hormones and neurotransmitters are in conflict as they mediate incoming stimuli at the autonomic level, the lizard brain. Over time, without resolution, a positive feedback loop is created. The sensitivity of the system increases, rendering us increasingly reactive to triggering stimuli, with all the attending memory and feelings. In emergent mind, the material of conflict becomes more accessible; the resolution of conflict dials down our sensitivity to a lower baseline.
We can all sense the acceleration of change, making the processing of deliverance from accumulated social, historical, and environmental trauma ever more difficult. The depth of multiple traumas such as war, racism, genocide, pollution, poverty, persecution, and displacement open to full awareness. The impact of fractured communities and cultures, complicity with the extractive economy, rises even as measures to centralize the power and privilege of the few become ever more extreme. The violence at the center of the neoliberal era of recolonization and the ongoing assault on our capacity for critical thought are ever more apparent. Unwinding from that violence requires all the presence, courage, and vision we can muster.
The vestiges of emotional solitude are tenacious. Isolation and alienation are routine features of post-modern life. Most of us carry memories of exclusion or marginalization, striking deeply into our psychosomatic experience. Beneath that we cling to our identities, reverting to the prime directives of modernity, seeking results, mastery, accumulation, as if a separate self exists in any ultimate sense. We each have varying skillsets for seeking and creating fields of intimacy to meet our needs. But without the maturity that direct experience as eco-beings may bring, many of us do not routinely experience union at all. Buddhist theory says our attachment to a separate self is the fundamental source of suffering--even as the narratives of modernity suggest our true salvation lies in more of the same. Loneliness, the deepest wound of all, is dependent on this very principle.
One could spend all day detailing the minutiae of persistently depressive longing for belonging, the pandemic of modern alienation, dislocation, and dissociation from the natural world. In both a material and a spiritual sense, the creeping and persistent sense of homelessness deepens with the daily degradation of the commons. The effect is subtle, pervasive, and increasingly corrosive. All of which makes it increasingly important to decelerate, to find refuge in the slower rhythms of emergence, refining the integrity of our presence, continuously dropping the reflexive grasping of the all-consuming self-improvement project. There is nothing to improve, and no one to do it.
While belonging may imply gaining something, part of the greater process requires us also to acknowledge loss. Loss is so pervasive we are barely grasping its full dimensions. Loss is becoming a foundational reality of the post-modern psyche. If we are unable to acknowledge it, we are unable to grieve. If we are unable to grieve, we lose touch with the living, emerging edge of life, the chalice which sustains love and continues to open us to change and possibility and renewal. If we grieve properly for all that is alive in us, maybe we can also praise what is alive right now.
What I have been suggesting through this exposition is that a deep comprehension of emergence puts us in touch with a core objective of the Buddhist path, the direct perception of the inherent integrity of impermanence, interdependence, and emptiness. These three principles, their implication for our vision and comprehension of the true conditions of life, are reflected in our acute observance of the nature of chaos, complexity, and emergence. They may be disguised from view, but they are always expressed in the heart of the mathematical equations, the philosophical constructions, and the emotional turbulence of our most troubling moments. Emergence is the raw, un-nameable realm in which life is always seeking the resolution of impermanence and unpredictability according to the realities of interdependence, and emptiness. We contact this primal principle, where possibility expands beyond measure, when we engage its timeless wisdom and compassionate intent.