mindfulness—Pause; calm acceptance—Relax; and mutuality—Open.
This is how we meet the moment: awake, loving, and spacious. But what do we do when we find this moment is changing uncontrollably? Or conversely, when the predictable, habit-driven world hardly seems to be changing at all?
The fourth meditation instruction in Insight Dialogue is Trust Emergence. With this instruction we are invited into the numinous but observable impermanence of all experience.
Trust Emergence is rooted in wisdom. That is, it supports seeing things as they are—unstable, and far more complex and fluid than the mundane glance can ever know. The dynamic quality of experience demands a robust practice; it also provides the object of that practice: change itself. Trust Emergence invites us to dive headlong into the tumbling moment by guiding us in relating to each other and to the totality of experience.
. . .
Trust refers to the faith required to leap into this seething sea of change. Emergence refers to the process by which the complex things we experience arise spontaneously from underlying contributing factors. For example, we see emergence in the way conscious thought arises from a cauldron of sensation, memory, and emotions. To Trust Emergence is to let go into the changing process we call “now,” with its uncontrolled sensations, thoughts, emotions, interactions, words, topics, energies, and insights.
To Trust Emergence is to enter practice without the bias of a goal. This does not mean we do not hope for better communication, wise relationships, or the emergence of collective intelligence, compassion, or peace. While these “background aspirations” remain, we set them aside. To Trust Emergence is not to set aside intelligence, only the frozen images, judgments, and expectations that interfere with intelligence by gumming up clear and fluid wakefulness. We expend the energy to remain in the ever-changing present.
Both Open and Trust Emergence call us to release short-term attachments and the personal agendas that hide us from each other. When we speak with others, often we are occupied with planning what we will say next and, especially in larger groups, where we can find space to insert our contribution. In the Pause of Insight Dialogue we become aware of this micro-planning; we Relax the tension behind it, Open to our partner or the group—and in that very moment let go of even these little plans, and Trust Emergence.
Most of us carry a great burden: the burden of personality, with its obligations to inform or entertain or respond to others in expected ways. Trust Emergence can lead us beyond these expectations. Trust Emergence is not an instruction to enter into stream-of-consciousness talk, but it is a doorway to deep unknowing. By telling ourselves to Trust Emergence, we are simply reminding ourselves of what is patently true: the world is spinning—from subatomic particles to galaxies, from physiology to consciousness—and we just don’t know where it is headed. We don’t even know what thought is going to come up next in our minds; five minutes of silent meditation will convince all but the most bull-headed of this truth.
The senses are our gateways to emergence. Just as the body is the terra firma of the Pause, ever-changing sensations are the simplest way to reconnect with impermanence. This can be directly experienced in the body by bringing awareness to changing bodily sensations. If we take the time to become aware of a specific sensation—where our bodies touch our chair or cushion, for example—if we attend closely enough, we will notice that this sensation is constantly changing. It is changing in obvious ways, such as the area it seems to occupy, or how pleasant or unpleasant it is, and in subtler ways. Sensory change is a physiological, biochemical, and electrical fact, and also a perception manufactured in the mind. Sensations keep arising and fading dependent upon the stimulus and the sense organ, like our skin or our ears. But this is known by consciousness, which is also constantly changing along with what arises. The knowing, “I am feeling this,” is a spontaneous, emergent result of all these things together. Here, where we contact the truth of impermanence, we can practice Trust Emergence.
To Trust Emergence in Insight Dialogue does not mean we immediately abandon habits of distrust, or give ourselves up to whomever we happen to be in practice with. As awareness of change, Trust Emergence is not about trusting people, but trusting ourselves, our capacity to meet the unknown and emerge from the experience wiser and more compassionate than we entered it.
Trust Emergence does not equate with personal irresponsibility, or with a passivity that sits back, uninvolved. In contrast, Trust Emergence is the wisdom of recognizing the truth of impermanence, and the strength and agility to meet this truth head on. When we are trusting emergence, our perceptions are more true and accurate because they do not originate in delusions of stability. The simple reminder to trust invites us to let go of illusions of control and to relax, to drop the weight of being in charge of what is beyond the grip of the rational. When we Trust Emergence, our decisions are more trustworthy because they are not directed by a grasping heart or a controlling mind.
Trust Emergence is a matter of letting go, non-clinging, freedom. We do not come to Insight Dialogue practice to reveal our conceptual knowledge and gain more knowledge, but to know the nature of the conceiving mind and to drop its impossible burdens. We enter practice expectant, alert, ready for anything and for nothing, hunters and gatherers walking in the unknown—calm, alert, patient, and ready.
