Merging & Emerging, Transcending & Including

In this episode Dr. Sally Adnams Jones and Dr. Jen Peer Rich explore transformation through the lenses of merging and emerging , and transcending and including. 

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1:39   Sally explains that every episode so far has included polarity, a pair of opposites, and/ or paradox, because we're working with duality, which we cannot escape except sometimes through altered states. So today’s episode explores states, focussing on a technique that can lead you there, which will reveal non-duality, Sally reminds listeners of Arthur Koestler’s ‘holonic theory’, that reality is made up of parts and holes, discussed in earlier episodes. And this week deals with the movement of those parts and wholes, to both merge, and emerge, and their relationship. This movement shows up not only at the quantum level, where parts are always merging and emerging, or jump in and out of existence as the material world. Sally describes the binary movement that shows up at every level. The fractal dynamic is that two parts come together to create a third, or more wholes. And this principle of emergence Sally calls Integral Taoism. Because this shows up at every level of existence. This episode looks at it how this shows up, physiologically and psychologically, as the masculine desire to emerge, and the feminine desire to merge, and how these two work together when one is healthy, and how they can also go wrong. Ken Wilber came up with the words ‘include and transcend’ as a mechanism for evolution at every level, and we can shorten that to ‘transclude’ as a mechanism for transformation. Inclusion is the merger, the communal, the horizontal expansion axis. Transcend is the emergence, the vertical ascent axis, or the masculine, or the ‘line’ as opposed to the ‘circle’, but they're operate as a pair. To stay in health, we have to do both. And as we do that, we grow. Sally then gives a practical example, on how communication itself is holonic, how parts of speech become wholes, and can build complexity. What is transformation? It is the movement towards unfolding more and more complexity, through this transclude dynamic. We are emerging and merging at every level, even subliminally.

 8:10   Jen says we are going deeper into the ‘play between parts’, and the transformation, joy, creativity and complexity that that builds. Merging is the combining of two or more things into one. She describes how ant colonies, bee hives and flocks of birds function. Merging together, they are able to accomplish things that they couldn't do on their own. On the other hand, to emerge means to become visible, and known. Collective behaviour is very complex, it's unpredictable, and yet coordinated. So nature is always merging and emerging. By merging, life becomes more efficient, more productive, and by emerging life takes on new individuated forms. From a human development perspective, a newborn baby will merge with its caregiver, which creates a sense of safety. And infants who don't merge with their caregivers lose the capacity to trust the world. With steady eye contact, they learn to trust the world. Without it, the baby creates a boundary between itself and the world, and this has a real consequence for the adult that grows up with people who are really fundamentally disconnected from the world. Safe relationships are the key to healing disassociation, through attachment therapy. Jen says she’s re-parenting her own ‘Baby Jenny self’, helping her ‘merge with the world’, and ‘emerge from the darkness’ of her early trauma. Different aspects of reality come together to shape us - social, cultural, spiritual, political, cognitive, emotional factors come together in a very emergent and complex way. And the emergence that comes through itself becomes a new opportunity for further emergence. So emerging is recursive. She quotes Philip Ball from a book called “Patterns in Nature”, that come together to creatively shape the people that we are today. 

 15:53 Sally says her core passion is how creativity itself is a model for transformation. And why the podcast is trying to articulate these principles of emergence. Transformation is at its core creative. Everything emerges from the void, the unknown, then the one becomes two, yin and yang, as a symbol of different impulses, the masculine and the feminine, emergence, and mergence. When these two come together, a third is created. And so we move into diversity. And that is the core principle of evolution. And it shows up not only over the 14 billion years, but in our lives, in our bodies, moment to moment, over the trajectory of one life. We start off merged in oceanic oneness, and over a lifetime, emergence peaks at about midlife, through learning skills and discipline, the masculine individuation, in all bodies. If we're relating well, we're still merging through the communal feminine. And then over the next part of our life, we return back to merging, and death. So, there's an arc from being merged to emergence to returning to merging. This shows up rhythmically too, over the allotted 80 years. It can show up in a weekend, if we want to merge at the Trance Dance, or drumming, or bliss out at Five Rhythms dance, maybe take a few mushrooms, lose all our separation and experience the Oneness. And then come Sunday night, we return to the idea of getting up in the morning get into the masculine of doing, and emerging through work. So there's the ‘being’ and the ‘doing’ that can show up over the life arc as an oscillation. It can also show up as an internal conflict in any moment. An introverted, agentic, independent partner may be paired with an extrovert, who wants to go out and merge with others all the time. The creative partner prefers being alone and can stimulate themselves. So there's this possibility for a conflictual dynamic. Sally says she loves people, and yet she needs to also be alone to create. So we ask, how do we show up? Or do we stand back? Sally then describes the ‘attachment versus authenticity’ conflict, as well as the ‘narcissist/empath dynamic’ - that is merged with no boundaries, and which functions as a fused, toxic unit. Neither is balanced within themselves so they fulfil parts. Health is being able to do both movements appropriately and contextually. To assert your individuality includes asserting your boundaries and your rights and your needs. And also to be able to merge means to relate well, and have intimacy with your partner.  She then compares hyper-individualistic and hyper-collectivistic countries and economies. Balancing the individual with the collective can create social democracies.

 23:56 Jen quotes Deleuze and Hanzi Freinacht who named the ‘Dividual’- an individual who is also part of the collective, constantly informed by and informing each other. Once we transcend and include, once we integrate what we've learned into what we do, as we progress in our personal, collective and ecological development, we have to first integrate what we have learned, and then we transcend. She quotes Ken Wilber on this trajectory of integration. There are levels and stages of development that are building on each other (to be explored in later episodes). And we're continually evolving, and integrating new insights as we move forward. Jen then describes a peak experience, a spiritual emergency, and her shift in awareness, being liberated from her stories, and a wonderful feeling of Oneness she had with the trees and with nature. She then got involved with a non dual community, and for a while she was high on the bliss of awakening. However, she noticed the bypassing of suffering and our humanness in this perfect state of untouched conscious awareness. States can be a kind of narcissism. Then she decided not to deny her mind, but to embrace it, to get to know her mind, and to immerse herself in the opposite expression, of graduate school. She integrated the wisdom of her mind. Now, she doesn’t choose between non-duality and duality. Both of those truths can be expressed dynamically all the time. It is the paradox, being in a universe of forms, and a universe of the formless. She transcended and included. She quotes Joy Harjo, an American poet, musician, playwright, author.

34:15   Sally says that waking up can be a peak experience, finding one’s true identity, but not letting that keep us on the yoga mat is healthy. We move from Oneness fluidly back into duality. And notice that our task is to alleviate suffering, and we get real, and we show up, grow up, and clean up (get rid of our shadows). Sally’s work focus has been on the ‘show up’ aspect. How do we create? How do we change this world? How do we co-create with evolution. This is why she focuses on the transformation symbol, the visual gestalt of the Tao, because creation includes both parts of the pair, which has a clear boundary between them, and also a pair of inter-included dots, which is a paradox. There is movement: we can synthesize, we can separate, we can oscillate. Health is moving fluidly depending on our context - we can merge on the yoga mat and experience the One identity. We can also emerge into life, as a separate being, and take responsibility for change, so we can show up. This is how we democratize enlightenment, and why peak states are so important, when we truly understand our Oneness. If we can't access a peak state, we don't believe, and we operate in separateness. The more we do the One-ness, the healthier our Two-ness is. If we only do Two-ness, we don't even believe there's a One-ness, and we can get quite ill, depressed, anxious, and lose perspective. So dipping in and out of our dual nature is super important. Sally then talks about accessing flow states, and cites Mihalyi Chikszentmihalyi. The Bhagavad Gita, too, spoke about ‘all doing must be from being’. It's the paradox. She then describes flow states as our capacity, our skill level, which meets the challenge of the moment, with equanimity. Yang is capacity, and Yin is surrender, in any individual endeavour. Too much flow, you're lost in the toxic feminine, no boundaries, no container, no agency. Toxic masculine is too much hyper individuality, too much rigidity, or penetrating with no boundaries. Flow states are the marriage of yin and yang - emergence and mergence. Our bodies can merge and emerge sexually, or at a higher order, creatively in a flow state, or through meditation, just by sitting there. The biofeedback for this is always good, at every level of the human impulse - physiologically, sexually, creatively, meditatively - this is the creative axis. We are rewarded for bringing together the opposites by feeling good. This is what changed Sally’s life. 

43:09  Jen talks about the symphony of do-be, do-be, do-be do. We're just constantly doing being doing being - and when we can, we can get into that flow state, a powerful place to exist in one’s ordinary life. Because then we’re aligned with the entire intelligence of the universe at that point. She then quotes Thomas Lloyd, and asks anyone listening: What are the places in your life where you are breaking open?