Working With and Cultivating Emergent Human Capacities

A simple framework that has been supportive for me

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I had 3 different people reach out to me to discuss cultivating emergent human capacities in the span of a few days. 

I figured this would be a good opportunity to share some thoughts on my experience with these. Below you’ll find a general framework that reflects what I’ve found most supportive.

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Emergent capacities, special abilities, siddhis…all these refer to extra-ordinary capacities relative to the predominant human experience. 

Examples include things like nonlocal intuition, psychic abilities, self-healing, clairvoyance, telepathy, the ability to perceive energy and information from objects around you…and many more. 

I believe that these capacities are innate to all humans. We’ve just forgotten how to access them which is reinforced by the fact that most of us don’t live in cultures that widely accept or support their cultivation.

Creating Conditions For New Potentials To Emerge

Some people seem to be born and maintain these abilities in their formative years. Because they have a direct experience that hasn’t been conditioned out of them, they have less difficulty embracing them.

For everyone else, emergent capacities coming online and the capacity to cultivate them seems to correlate with the right conditions.

Creating conducive conditions all starts with awareness.

I define awareness as the ability to see absolute reality clearly. Absolute reality refers to the most fundamental nature of things that underlies material reality.

In this image, the big expanding circle represents absolute reality. Although it’s depicted as a circle, absolute reality is unlimited and constantly expanding.

The small circle represents your conscious awareness. You can think of this as the ability to see the true nature of things which informs your understanding.

In this example, you can see how your awareness is much smaller than total reality. This translates as what you perceive is really only a sliver of the true nature of things. Even though it’s only a sliver of truth, you mistake it for the true nature of things because that’s all you can see.

A great example of this is the earth being flat vs. round. The earth has always been round, but for a period of time, due to our awareness, many humans thought it was flat.

As awareness expands, we increase our capacity to see a greater depth of absolute reality.

We see things like:

• Why we behave and react to life the way we do 

• Inner material in our subconscious that have been covertly influencing us

• A deep understanding of why things happen in our life

• The interconnectedness of everything

• A deeper understanding of why reality behaves the way it does

• A deeper understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of.

During this process, you realize that most of the ideas you’ve been told about the way the world works are a reflection of the predominant experience vs. a reflection of absolute reality.

Because the experience of and capacity to understand reality is based on awareness, you recognize that most of the concepts about how reality works are a derivative of a limited perspective.

With this understanding, you recognize that awareness is the most fundamental input to experience. The more we aware of absolute reality, the more we can align to it.

When you come to this understanding, what you find interesting changes.

When you see you’ve been operating on a very small little corner of the chess board, becoming a better mover of chess pieces in that little area is not as interesting as expanding the board and seeing what else is in the game room.

This redirects your energy to working on awareness.

Moving Beyond Legacy Constructs

At some point in this process you realize that many of the things you thought were true are actually just conditioned concepts derived from the predominant experience.

Relative to what is possible for a human life, you can see how these concepts are quite limiting.

Moreover, as you reflect on your past, you likely see how your reality tended to conform to the concepts you held in mind.

Whether this is merely due to the degree that our beliefs direct our actions, or whether it’s more a fundamental property of the information in your consciousness creating the reality you experience is up for debate.

This realization is a huge and often mind-blowing milestone in the consciousness journey.

In my experience, this revelation opens you up to experience and experiment with new possibilities that existed outside your previous reality paradigm. This includes things like emergent capacities you might have previously considered bullshit.

I believe this state of openness is in incredibly supportive for the unfolding and cultivation of emergent capacities.

Otherwise skepticism and attachments to your beliefs will just get in the way. I believe reality is a reflection of what you believe is true at the deepest levels, including at the subconscious level. 

• If you think you need to work hard to make a lot of money, you will

• If you think you need 8 hours of sleep to feel good, you will

• If you think your consciousness is limited to your body, it will be

• If you think your intelligence is limited to the intellect, it will be

So if you think all of this is bullshit, that’s fine. You just will have a very limited experience relative to what is possible.

This is the paradox for people who think they are too intelligent to believe in this stuff. 

They are too smart for their own good…literally. This lack of openness is really just a defense mechanism for the ego and actually constrains their experience. 

The challenge with many of our beliefs is that they exist beyond our conscious awareness at the subconscious level. So we may say we’re open to something, but deep down there may be a lot of conflicting information in our subconscious.

I believe this lack of coherence what we consciously tell ourselves we believe and the information in our subconscious is a big part of what’s actually going on with manifestation that many people tend to leave out.

Emergence and Cultivation

Once you’re in an open state, there’s really two ways for emergent abilities to come online. The first is a natural emergence and the second is an intentional cultivation. 

In my own experience, every emergent capacity I’ve worked with came about naturally.

One day in the midst of my activities something happened that opened me up to a new possibility. Because I was open and recognized that my consciousness was a conditioned consciousness, I explored it vs. dismissed it.

An example of this is when one day an idea came to me in meditation to begin to query the stillness and receive information. This initial experiment gradually expanded to a concerted effort to develop a reliable connection to information beyond the intellect and what I have been exposed to. I consider this a deep form of intuition.

Another example is when I was working with a healer and she coached me to begin to talk to my body and give it instructions. This caused my body to change in front of my eyes. Again, this prompted further experimentation and exploration, culminating in far more agency to use my consciousness for healing than I previously understood.

I wasn’t really actively seeking these abilities. I just sort of stumbled on them as I pursued spiritual evolution and had a holy shit moment.

Once I sensed an emergent potential, this served as a catalyst for ongoing experimentation. With an open mind, I’d start experimenting with things and then verify with how things unfolded. Gradually my understanding about what was possible shifted alongside the my comprehension of how the constructs we hold in mind fundamentally impact our experience.

During my ongoing experimentation, I’d practice and start to learn nuances of working with an emergence just like I would with any skill. An example of this was recognizing how important discernment is when dealing with various sources of information in your awareness. I treated discernment like I would anything else and eventually my ability to discern improved.

In each case, initial experimentation blossomed into active cultivation when my explorations resonated.

I think this is a really important concept. 

I notice a lot of people think you just wake up one day and can magically wield some new capacity. Maybe some people do. But in my experience, it’s more of an emergence followed by an intentional experimentation and cultivation just like you would with any other skill. 

You can break the whole thing down in a simple sequence:

Create supportive conditions -> Notice emergence -> Experiment -> Intentionally cultivate

Is Focusing On Special Abilities Useful?

A lot of people believe that working with these abilities is bad; that it can be like black magic or something.

This is a polarized view that is likely conditioned and fails to account for context. 

I have a belief that whatever arises in my experience is there for a reason. This includes new potentials that were previously not available to me.

I’m not actively directing my energy to seek these out, but if it shows up, I trust it’s for me to explore. 

Showing up can take many forms. For me it has mostly been stumbling into a direct experience, but there have also been times where a new potential has been appearing again and again through life unfolding around me. When this happens, I pay attention. I know life is trying to communicate with me and this can also serve as a cue to explore something. Another example of “showing up” is a friend who had someone tell him that he had access to a potential he was not aware of. This could serve as an experimentation cue.

Many wisdom teachings acknowledge the emergence of special abilities that come with spiritual evolution. Most traditions broadly discourage the direct pursuit of them. 

The reason for this is that the desire to obtain special powers usually emanates from the ego who wants to use them to improve its position. Paradoxically, this context actually blocks their emergence as well as distracts from the deepening of greater levels of realization. 

So people spend all this time trying to get special powers instead of focusing on the more fundamental input of conscious expansion. Through conscious expansion, emergent capacities come online naturally alongside other innate properties such as inner wisdom, open-heartedness, and altruism. 

In what seems like an intelligent design, once the heart is open and you desire to naturally serve others, emergent capacities seem to become more readily available. I don’t think having a complete open heart is necessary for the onset, but it does seem supportive. In this context, the automatic inclination is to use emergent abilities in a way that contributes to the world around you.

I’m sure there are plenty of examples of people using this stuff in nefarious ways. I don’t really give much energy or attention to that. 

It’s my experience that emergent capacities are there support your ability to contribute to the highest good of all beings. This is why they tend to come online when working towards this is authentically your deepest desire.

So if I were to sum it all up:

• Emergent capacities are very much real and available to all humans

• They are blocked by our lack of awareness and conditioned concepts 

• Through expanding awareness we can see the hollowness of many conditioned ideas

• This creates an openness to explore and embrace new possibilities

• With this openness and continued focus on consciousness evolution, you create supportive conditions for these to emerge

• You can trust that anything that emerges is there for a reason

• When you sense an emergence, it can serve as a catalyst for experimentation

• Ongoing experimentation and cultivation can refine a capacity just like any other skill

• As this happens, it seems most advisable to continue to work on the primary input of consciousness expansion alongside cultivating an emergence instead of getting lost in obtaining a special ability

• Emergent capacities arise in order to support our highest contribution

• In this context, we can embrace them wholeheartedly

Cheers,

-Scott

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If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏