Emergence speaks to the transversality of a world that is always becoming.
Instead of just being,
The world is a-becoming.
It is not still or stable,
It is emerging,
In that sense.
While in Hamburg,
I wrote a piece about my fascination,
My morbid,
Horrible relationship with gum,
Discarded gum.
And one of the reasons why I cannot stand Europe,
Or many cities in the global industrial north,
Is that its pavements and streets are littered with gum.
And I have it,
I have a thing for gum.
I cannot stand,
I cannot stand the sight of it.
I cringe,
I break down,
I cannot stand gum.
Gum is my kryptonite.
There's a phobia.
We're touching a phobia here.
I wouldn't call it a phobia,
But it's,
I'll just go with kryptonite.
It's the best way to,
It's my kryptonite.
And I think maybe kryptonites are stronger than phobias.
Maybe,
Maybe not,
But one being fictional,
It is my kryptonite.
And so I often walk in this very strange way when I'm on the streets in Europe,
And people walking alongside me,
Because I'm trying to avoid them,
Which is almost impossible,
But no one looks down.
I'm the only one looking down.
Everyone is like,
Oh,
Look at the sights.
I'm like,
Nope.
You know,
So I,
I cannot stand them,
And I cannot pull my eyes away from them,
Right,
Because I need to see it.
I have a spider sense of some kind that warns me when I'm about to step on one,
For real,
Right.
I've many times paused midway.
I'm like,
Ah,
I see what you're doing.
And I,
Yeah,
I cannot stand gum.
I've left my shoes somewhere.
I stepped on gum somewhere in Lagos,
Nigeria,
And I just left my shoe there.
I just hopped out of my shoe.
That was the end of that shoe,
Right.
So it's a,
It's a fascinating thing.
And I bring that up to say,
I wasn't even sure where I was bringing that up.
I've tripped stuff so far.
Emergence.
Emergence,
Yes.
I brought it up to say that those journeys amid,
Amidst gum,
Littered gum,
Taught me about the ways that bodies are held by seemingly invisible things like morality,
Cultural norms,
Standards,
A neurotypical way of seeing the world.
We are kind of conditioned to see the world in ways and in different ways,
Right.
This is what I call morality,
Brother,
That morality is not a divine imposition of an already established story.
It is how bodies hold each other,
Police each other,
You know,
Often incarcerate each other in imminent networks of becoming.
I hope I'm making some sense.
A lot of our activism happens within those webs of relations,
Right.
We want to do good with the world.
We want to make a change.
We throw our trash out in a good way.
We're delineating,
Differentiating plastic from metal,
All of that.
But something often happens when morality cannot hold the gravity of desire,
Brother,
And that's when ethics erupts.
So I differentiate between morality and ethics.
Morality is ethics captured.
Ethics is the erotic desirous emergence of the planet,
Of the world.
It's constantly becoming,
It's like a river.
It's just flowing.
It's what Gilles Deleuze called bodies without organs,
Right.
It's bodies that have no set boundaries,
Organs just floating.
It's Brownian physics.
So it's just this flow,
But sometimes ethics,
In order to do things,
It needs to create machines.
And so it creates the morality machine.
It comes together and it creates bodies and eyes and tongues and lips and stuff like that.
But every body,
Every body is a moral structure and ethics is the constancy of eruption that haunts those moral structures.
I hope that makes some sense.
It does.
It's interesting that we're talking about ethics when only moments ago we were talking about truth.
I'm not sure if there is a bridge to be made there,
But nonetheless,
It is interesting.
And the dynamic nature of it all is kind of fascinating.
The question from this place here,
Being someone that often reflects on meditation and has taught people meditation,
The concept of presence.
Yeah,
I think we sometimes collapse presence into just being in the moment.
And that is quite a fascination of mine that,
Yeah,
We collapse presence into,
Hey,
Just being in the moment,
But the presence in and of itself actually,
For me,
Is also the presence of,
Can you feel a presence?
It's like there's a presence.
So the two are often misnomered amongst each other,
I find.
And it's interesting because as you're speaking about the ethics and the emergence,
There's a,
It almost sounds like presence is a foolish attempt in terms of,
But I know it not to be the case.
So I'd invite you to help me reconcile that.
Because yeah,
If everything is in a constant state of becoming,
The idea of presence being embracing the being,
Do you get where the rub is?
Presence is partial.
Presence is,
One might call it a distraction.
Presence is a distraction.
Where is Amrit?
Is Amrit the fully allocatable outline on my screen?
Or is it not already true that you have already deposited cells,
Millions of cells,
Just to arrive where you are in this conversation with me,
Right?
So that instead of a dot,
And we are very,
Very cultivated in thinking of the world as a dot matrix kind of situation.
Instead of a dot that is,
That is Newtonian and locatable,
I think of lines,
Brother,
Lines,
Not dots,
But lines,
Right?
So presence for me then is,
Presence already involves absence.
And presence can never fully be itself if it's not also embracing its absence.
Have you ever heard of this riddle called Theseus's ship?
The ship of Theseus?
No,
Tell me.
Theseus is the Greek hero,
Famously killed the Minotaur.
Yeah,
Theseus is,
In some quarters,
Considered the father or the grandfather of democracy.
In Greek mythology,
When Theseus dies,
His ship with which he used to sail to the island of Crete to kill the Minotaur is immortalized,
Right?
And people would take this ship to embark on a ritualistic voyage to do some sacrifices and rituals,
And they would come back to Athens.
Now,
A riddle emerges from this vocation,
And this becomes quite popular in the Middle Ages.
It's that if you take every part of the ship of Theseus,
Every time it arrives to shore,
If you take one part and replace it,
One other part and replace it with a new part,
One other part and replace it,
If you get to replace all the parts,
Is that still the ship of Theseus?
That's the question.
Hope you're thoroughly enjoying this moment from a full-length podcast we've got here on The Inspired Evolution.
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