We are both chaotic and orderly creatures (though some might object to "creature" since it invokes "creation" and "creator" and in no possible sense can they yield to their imaginative thrust that there is a God). Chaotic and orderly we are, whether you think of us as creatures or no. We are forever "falling to pieces" and "pulling ourselves together."
This habitual mode of dissolution and resolution may be a major prompt for the belief in various forms of reincarnation. The final act in our "strutting and fretting" on this present stage will be and is dissolution. Our anticipation is that it will be immediately followed by our coming back together again but in other realms: fire or light or the lull of infinitely lapping waves on a distant shore or the same-o-same-o with perhaps more sensitive and open awareness.
Chaos and order. Some of us prefer one over the other. You know the extremes and may even be a living embodiment of one -- either resenting the fact that your chaotic endeavoring inevitably falls into a routine, or that your orderly approach to life is only an approach, never culminating in the supreme orgasm and splendor of everything staying in its place.
Depending on your language, we are re-presentations of the cosmos, or made in the image of God. As we go, so goes the cosmos. As we are, so is God. (As above, so below. As within, so without.) It is quite easy to to infer that the observed cosmos is both chaotic and orderly, but quite another step to infer that the unseen Source is also both chaotic and orderly.
The Buddhists say form is emptiness and emptiness is form. My mind resonates well with that. There is something quite heartening about it. But I don't think it works well to say order is chaos and chaos is order. I think order and chaos fit on the form side of the equation, that order and chaos are correlates of form. One has, in one instance, form in order, and in the other, form in chaos.
So if you believe in God (and I believe that God believes in us more than we believe in Him), then only that aspect of God which is form would be chaotic and orderly. That leaves the aspect of God which is emptiness. And that opens to an entirely different discussion.
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My husband firmly believes that I am an incarnation of entropy. Unfortunately however, I find it not to be a comfortable state of existence, and so my life seems to be an eternal attempt to bring order to my chaos (and to find chaos in my order). Needless to say, I resonate with this posting. And true enough, where I find peace when I go looking is not in either, but in spaciousness (or its lack there of, emptiness)…elusive though it may be.
ReplyDeleteThank you as always.
Tania
Tania, one of the things I like about you is your ruthless intellectual and heartful honesty. Love to you. George
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