An Architecture of Connection - PART 8: Inside the Architecture: From Fog to Form
Previously on The Architecture of Connection…
We were chasing a horse through the mountains.
In Part 7, I recounted the surreal moment when I received a phone call from the mayor of Tehran’s office—an invitation that led me, to a dam in Karaj where I stumbled through a one-woman film shoot, trying to keep up with one of Iran’s most enigmatic political figures.
But this story was never just about politics or film.
Even then, something else was moving—beneath the logistics, beneath the chase. Threads I couldn’t yet name were already pulling at me, weaving something beyond coincidence.
Read the previous post by following the link below.
It’s easy to brush off stories like this as coincidence or a playful weaving of memory. But there’s another possibility, one I’m more and more inclined to believe. That our collective consciousness is situated in a field of connection. That there is a structure under-girding the chaos within which we feel all the separation and isolation. And that sometimes, if we’re paying attention, that field reaches out. Not to give us what we want, but to remind us: we’re in it. Of it. Moving with it.
I didn’t understand it then, but now I think I was inside this architecture, this place made of subtler things. A field made of warp and weft, “taar o pood” as the Sufis call it. Crystalline, as one of my teachers, a healer and threshold guide aptly named Paige, describes it. I’ve only just begun to find words for my experiences with Karbaschi, but I think the story was never outside this place. I was being moved within it all along.
This collective consciousness appears as a crystalline weave of potential, as we enter and sit within it. It is made of “threads”—what the Sufis call “reesmaan”—that shimmer in and out of coherence, waiting for us to pluck them out. These threads are our tools for creating attunement, to recover what we all seem to be searching for, to fill in the gaps, the lack.
In this view, the “thread” or “reesmaan” isn’t fate. It's not just possibilities. We don’t live in a statistical model. The threads represent authorship—the act of choosing which filament to follow into form.
Meeting Karbaschi, and all that followed was a series of moments when I stepped behind the curtain, past reason, past the need for certainty, even clarity, past the weight of expectation and plucked threads that seemed, not just unlikely, but impossible, just moments before.
Well… okay. That’s actually not true. The truth is even weirder than that.
I remember one late night on the fourth floor of the Mission Control Center in Houston. It was just a few weeks before coming face to face with Karbaschi. As a computer programmer at NASA, our deliverables were due one month before each launch and that night, I was working late to meet the deadline. It was around 11 pm. I was stuck fixing a particularly intractable bug and felt exhausted. I walked into an empty bathroom right next door to the large coding pen.
Maybe I just needed some inspiration, a boost of energy, something to remind me there was hope at the end of every dark tunnel. Out of nowhere, I started an imaginary conversation with Gholam Hossein Karbaschi. Back in those days, his name was synonymous with hope and change—for getting the impossible done. I don’t remember what the imaginary conversation was about but I do know it ended with “come on Banafsheh, you’ve been here for so long, you’re pretending to talk to the mayor of Tehran. It’s time to go home.”
I recalled this imagined moment right before I walked up to him on the plane. I wasn’t able to put the pieces together into a comprehensible narrative, I certainly didn’t have access to this language, but I noticed that this story had begun long before that fateful page from my brother. The field had been tugging on me and I had started plucking the threads towards the eventual meeting months in advance.
As the poet Shafiei Kadkani says “That warp and weft, once filthy, in yesterday’s barren garden—Now it brings forth buds. Behold!”1 Threads that once lay dormant were suddenly blooming.
The threads and their container, the Crystalline Architecture of Connection, aren’t just random luck. They aren’t just hustle. They are something more solid, moving through us, around us. And they are held by a container, a logic we don’t have to make sense of to engage with.
I still don’t know what to call the whole getup. But I know it’s real. I’ve been living in it off and on, since my initiation with Karbaschi.
So I’ll call it what Paige calls it, the field. The field is the backdrop. The threads are what move through it, and through us. Coherence is what allows us to sense them, choose among them, and act in alignment.
Now, on good days, when I am in a state of semi-coherence, because are we ever in full conference?, I notice the connections, the threads, the architecture. Coherence by the way is the quality of internal alignment between one’s thoughts, emotions, actions, and values. It’s the felt sense that what we are doing flows from what we truly believe and who we deeply are.
Those days, I see how life can bend itself into alignment, and I start watching for the smallest shifts. Not as proof, but as practice.
If I have some help from teachers, or folks who also see the field, or my books of prose or poetry, I can even, just maybe create the shift and step behind the curtain. And when I do, I can sometimes hear the spirit of my dad telling me from the other side to go ahead, to throw myself in with abandon, to relish the strangeness, and take that risk, “why the hell not baba jaan… zendegeeto bokon, lezzateto bebar (just live your best life and enjoy it)!”
I’ll be writing more about the Field—about coherence, how we perform it to feel safe, and how we might reclaim relational sovereignty in its place.
Tomorrow, I’ll turn to something heavier: the current Iran-Israel conflict.
بنگر جوانهها را آن ارجمندها را
کان تار و پود چركين باغ عقيم ديروز
اينك جوانه آورد
Shafiei Kadkani, Mohammad-Reza. Az Boodan va Soroodan [از بودن و سرودن]. Tehran: Nashr-e Toos, 1356 [1977].