In trying to understand this experience, I have encountered many ways to describe it and work with it. In this paper, I'd like to present some of the paradigms I have found useful, with their corresponding courses of action (or non-action). I'll zoom out from my own experience and explore how these paradigms interact with a larger range of what I'm tentatively calling spiritual emergence/y. What I Mean by Spiritual Emergence/y By spiritual emergence/y, I mean any experience t

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside! Rumi1 Living in New York City was its own kind of spiritual practice; a maximalist, ecstatic, tantric whirl that I had no preliminaries for. My outer world never stopped moving; between bedbugs, the art scene, landlords who didn't speak my language, commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan to work under the table to make rent, and trying to write

Pain can make you want to die, can make you want to leave and shut the door behind you. My pain makes me die and makes me live. It is my resurrection, my initiation—a great unfolding in my master plan. It opens my eyes to other people, to their profound joys and sorrows. What happens when you die? They ask. Well, what happens when you live? Don’t tell me I’ll get through this and that one day it’ll be all right. I am here, now, and it is not wrong. Setting Out On the Path of