Welcome to Threshold Conversations. I’m Patrick Ryan. This is the third in a series of five episodes — a sustained inquiry into how does this universe operate, what is real, or not about this world that we inhabit, and how I came to my current understanding. As much as I can get geeky about science I am also informed experientially.
I want to begin by telling you something. I did not plan to become a Buddhist monk in Burma. I did not plan to walk into a year of monastic life. I did not plan to receive what I received there.
I followed a sequence of small signs over a period of years. They led me to Asia, then to Burma, then to a particular monastery, then to a particular Sayadaw, then to a particular morning when something happened that I have never been able to explain.
None of it was on a list I had made. Each step opened to the next when I paid attention to what was arriving. Sometimes a conversation with a stranger. Sometimes a name that came up in two unrelated places in the same week. Sometimes a feeling I could not justify but could not dismiss either. I followed the small signs without knowing what they were leading to. They led to one of the most significant experiences of my life.
I want to tell you about that experience. And then I want to talk about what I have come to understand about why such experiences happen the way they do.
I had been ordained for several months. The Sayadaw had sent me out into rural areas of Burma on a journey through monasteries and pagodas, and I had returned exhausted but changed. I had then done weeks of silence, dropping into a depth of meditation I had not known was available to me.
Inside the monastery I had my places. The pagoda site at the back of the grounds was one of them. A wooden platform where I had sat and meditated countless times. Over months it had become a kind of home inside the home.
One morning I walked toward it as I had walked toward it a hundred times before. As I crossed an invisible line separating the monastery grounds from the pagoda grounds, I was startled by the sensation of what felt like thousands of volts of electricity shooting up from the ground.
I jumped backward, landing on my feet. The shock ceased.
I stood there. Not sure if I had imagined this. I shook off the effects and moved forward once more. Again — as soon as I had walked onto the pagoda grounds — I was blasted by a feeling of current rushing into my feet from below.
Once more I stepped back. Again it stopped.
I did not know what to make of this. Fifty feet away, a couple of monks were talking, oblivious to whatever was happening. I questioned the experience from every angle I could think of. Had I hurt a nerve? But how could that explain why this took place only when I crossed a certain location?
I went forward a third time, this time looking carefully to see where I was placing my foot. Gently touching it down, I felt the sensation shoot through me. I was reminded of a time many years ago when, as an electrician, I had shocked myself with three hundred and forty-seven volt electricity. That was painful and dangerous. This was equally intense, but somehow not quite the same.
When I placed my foot firmly on the ground again, this time I allowed the current to pass through. After about four seconds I withdrew my foot and the sensation stopped. I felt a slight tingling but there was no obvious damage or lasting discomfort.
Now my curiosity took over. I summoned the trust I had committed myself to in choosing that life. With both feet I walked firmly over the invisible demarcation onto the pagoda grounds. As before, the current entered through my feet and ran up through me. As I continued to observe, I was no longer sure which way it was traveling. It just filled me up — coming from everywhere and running to everywhere at the same time.
I walked further into the pagoda area to my usual platform. The current did not stop. It ran through me steadily, never wavering. I felt as though I had become a conduit between two points — on one hand was a source, on the other a receiver, and I was in the middle.
That state continued through the day. Into the evening. I alternated between sitting and walking meditation. When I eventually decided to return to my room, I stepped off the pagoda grounds and the current stopped abruptly at the same point where it had earlier begun.
I lay on my bed, observing the residual tingling. I drifted into a strange sleep, energized and exhausted at the same time.
The next morning I joined the other monks for breakfast and looked at each of them for some indication that they might be experiencing what I had experienced. Everyone seemed natural. As always.
After breakfast I walked toward the pagoda. The current snapped to life again the moment I stepped onto the grounds. Another monk was nearby. I went over to ask if he was feeling anything unusual, but his English was not strong and he could not understand what I was asking. He could not have understood. I was struggling to understand what I was asking.
I returned to the platform and let the current run.
For three days this continued. On the fourth day I walked onto the pagoda grounds and the current was not there. Whatever had been happening had completed. I gave in to the fatigue that had been rising in me and slept on and off for the next three days while my body recovered.
I never found out what it was. But it seemed to me that I had been receiving a transmission of some kind.
Soon after, the Sayadaw summoned me. A translator monk was called to ensure I would understand. He told me that my time with them had led to this moment, that this had been an auspicious time, and that I was free now to carry on with my journey. I understood, without him saying so, that he was acknowledging I had now received what I had come for. The transmission. He did not explain what it was, and I knew no words were going to. That would be something for me to realize over time.
So what was that?
I want to be straight with you. I do not know.
What I can tell you is what it was not. It was not like being shocked by electricity. I had been an electrician. I knew what that felt like. This was not that. It was not like the deep meditation states I had been spending months in. I knew what those felt like. This was not that either. I had read a lot of philosophy and contemplative literature. I had plenty of categories I could have reached for. None of them fit.
Something was meeting me at that pagoda that did not fit any framework I had brought with me.
And this is the moment I want to walk into with you.
What we usually do when something does not fit is try to make it fit. We rush to put it on a map. We reach for a framework. We translate the unfamiliar into something familiar so we know how to feel about it.
Above us — and we feel reverent or afraid.
Below us — and we feel benevolent or dismissive.
At our level — and we feel curious.
Where we place it tells us how to feel about it. The placement gives us our emotional posture.
But the moment we have placed it, we are no longer meeting it. We are meeting our category for it.
What I learned at the pagoda — slowly, over the years that followed — is that some encounters cannot be ranked or categorized. The current was not a higher consciousness condescending to me. It was not a lower form of energy I needed to interpret. It was not at my level either. It was something I had no framework for, and the right response was not to find one.
The right response was to stay in the meeting without resolving it.
That is harder than it sounds.
I want to give you a word for what I am pointing at. The word is emergence.
Think about a flock of birds turning together in flight. No single bird is directing the turn. But the pattern arises when the conditions of relationship are right. Watch what happens. It is genuinely beautiful. And it is not being produced by any one bird telling the others what to do.
Think about a conversation between two people that finds its own current. Neither person plans where it goes. But something emerges from the conditions of attention both of them are holding. You have probably had conversations like this. They go places you could not have predicted. They land in places that change you.
Think about a group of musicians who are really listening to each other. What they create is not in any single player. It arises from the responsiveness between them. The music is more than any one of them is producing.
In each case, what emerges does so on its own terms when the ground is prepared. It cannot be forced. It cannot be predicted. The active work is in the preparation and the attention. The arrival is its own.
The transmission at the pagoda emerged. I did not summon it. The Sayadaw did not arrange it. It arrived because the conditions had been ripening for a long time — the year of monastic life, the journey through rural Burma, the weeks of silence that preceded it. At a certain moment what had been ripening became present, in a form I could not have predicted or produced.
That is what emergence is. It is what shows up when the ground is ready.
Here is something I want to add to this, because it matters.
Consciousness does not seem to be all-or-nothing. It expresses across a continuum.
A tree expresses one way. A bee expresses another. A human expresses very actively. An asteroid may express so minimally that we can barely recognize it. Other forms, including possibly forms we have no framework for, may express in ways our cognition does not yet capture.
Capacity is inherent. Expression varies.
This matters because emergence happens across all of it. Not just in human conversations. Not just in human experiences. The flock turning is consciousness emerging at that locus, in that pattern. The forest finding its own rhythm of growth is consciousness emerging at that scale, in that form. The transmission at the pagoda was consciousness emerging at a higher concentration, in a form I did not have language for.
Different scales. Different intensities. The same thing happening — consciousness occurring as itself, everywhere, all the time.
This connects back to what I said in Episode 26 about field.
The pagoda was a field. Years of practice by countless monks had built it. The accumulated quality of what had happened there for generations was held in the place itself. When I crossed onto the pagoda grounds, I was crossing into a region of higher field intensity. Whatever I was attuning to on those three days was the field of that locus, intensifying in response to whatever I had brought to it through the year of practice that preceded.
I do not need a complete explanation to recognize that what was happening was field meeting field. The locus had been built by centuries of practice. I had been built by months of practice. The meeting of those two fields was the transmission.
This does not explain everything. But it places what happened inside something larger than just me having a strange experience. It was a meeting between what I had become and what that place had become. Both of us, in our way, were the ripening that allowed the emergence to occur.
Now I want to widen this further, because the practice is not only about dramatic experiences.
A transmission can arrive in a conversation with an old friend who, mid-sentence, says something that lands in you with a weight neither of you anticipated. Some part of you is rearranged by the words. Neither of you produced that. It emerged from the conditions of what was actually being attended to between you.
A transmission can arrive in a passing exchange with a stranger. The brief comment that opens something. The look across a counter that lingers slightly longer than felt accidental. Whatever was communicated did not come from the speaker alone or the receiver alone. It arose because both were briefly present.
A transmission can arrive in an encounter with a being from the more-than-human world. The bird that pauses on a branch and meets your eye. The animal you cross paths with whose presence shifts something you were not expecting to have shifted. The tree that holds a stillness you find yourself drawn into.
A transmission can arrive in dreams whose meaning is not literal but unmistakable. In synchronicities small enough that you almost dismissed them. In moments of recognition that arrive without reasoning.
All of these are forms of emergence. Some are dramatic. Most are subtle. They arrive when the conditions are met. The conditions are presence, attention, and the willingness to receive what does not fit.
The practice the pagoda story models is the same practice the smaller transmissions ask of us. The willingness to stay in the meeting. The refusal to rush to category. The trust that what is arriving is real even when it cannot yet be named. The patience to let the meaning unfold over time rather than insisting on resolution in the moment.
This is what I mean when I say the right posture toward emergence is something like wonder held without grasping. The wonder is real. The encounter is real. But the rush to fix it into a known framework — to call it spiritual, or unexplained, or significant, or coincidence — collapses the encounter into closure.
The Sayadaw did not explain what the transmission was. He did not need to. The meaning was unfolding inside me, and would continue to unfold for years. To explain would have been to end the unfolding prematurely.
This is why I find myself, decades later, still in conversation with what happened at the pagoda. The encounter is not finished. It continues to give. Because I did not collapse it into a framework when it happened, the meeting remains open.
For this week, one invitation.
Notice the next moment in your experience that does not quite fit. The conversation that turns and lands somewhere unexpected. The synchronicity small enough that you almost dismissed it. The encounter with an animal or a place that shifted something you were not expecting to have shifted. The phrase from a stranger that has been quietly working on you. The dream whose meaning you have not been able to find but cannot quite let go of.
Notice the move to immediately categorize it. That was just a coincidence. That was just my imagination. That was just a passing thing. The word just is the move that ends the encounter.
And then ask yourself, quietly, what becomes possible if you do not make the move. If you let the moment remain unfit. If you trust that something is arriving whose meaning you cannot yet name and may not need to.
The emergence is happening. Consciousness is unfolding through your life as itself. The signs that are arriving are part of the field you are inside. The willingness to stay open, without forcing meaning, is what allows what is becoming to keep becoming.
That is what the pagoda taught me, eventually, over decades. Not the dramatic content of the experience itself, though that was significant. The deeper teaching was the practice that made the experience possible. And that continues to make smaller versions possible, every day, when I am paying attention.
Next week we walk further. If we are not the sole authors of our lives, and we are not running someone else’s program, and what is most alive in us emerges out of conditions we are participating in but not controlling — then what does it mean to be a human inside this kind of cosmos?
I will tell you about weeks of walking in the Himalayas, when each fellow traveler became a teacher I had not chosen — and what that taught me about being an agent in something I did not author solely on my own.
Episode 28 is called Playing Our Part.
Thank you for listening to Threshold Conversations. Until next time… keep your spine unsupported. And keep walking toward the light.
