Being With Chaos

Ernst Haeckel: Ascomycetes. In: Art Forms of Nature (Kunstformen der Natur), 1904

‘To be’ is to be connected,” said Alfred Korzybski. Without the opening
towards the unknown, there’s no freedom.
Basarab Nicolescu

I Chaos: Myth

Khaos was one of the first Gods in the Greek Pantheon and preceded the beginning of the universe. Her domain was the lower atmosphere that wraps around the earth.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Her name means “vast chasm” or “void”, as Khaos stood between earth and sky like a large gap of nothingness, or a gap of invisible things (whichever one is the case). Khaos of old did not cause confusion: Khaos was known as formless existence. It did not reign; it simply was.

In Jewish mysticism, we could liken her to the realm of Ain Soph (”infinite”, “boundless”) - wrapping around all that is, including Spirit and Matter, Air and Earth, and all the stages of manifestation in between. Khaos and the Ain Soph are today’s quantum foam of omnipotentiality.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Khaos was the mother of other forms of ether - subtleness of mist and day, darkness, heaven and night.⠀⠀⠀⠀

Khaos was the goddess of air and fate.⠀⠀⠀

Within her, she carried the primordial soup - all the elements, the star stuff which makes up life on earth today.

Yet, chaos unsettles us like nothing else: Roman poet Ovid later described her as disorganized, and is thus often held responsible for twisting her meaning for us modern people into something disordered, cacophonous, meaningless, and difficult to bear.

Chaos requires us to pay a lot of attention.

And after Chaos comes Gaia:

Chaos is creative.

Berndnaut Smilde: Nimbus, often interpreted “[..] as a sign of loss or becoming [..]”

II Chaos: Dispersing and Focusing Energy

the alternative to being well
is to be in touch
Báyò Akómoláfé

Chaos is the inaugural soup: It harbors all the pieces that compose us.

We are elementals with consciousness,
consciousness as the ability to perceive and to create order (kosmos, mythological counterpart to khaos).

How are we being in a world known as chaos:
How are we informed by it, and how do we relate to it?

Because we are order-oriented, meaning-making beings, chaos often feels uncomfortable to us - unsettled, unnatural, unwise. Chaos can feel threatening and ungrounding, violently intruding and disregulating, and its effect on our perception of reality is confusion.

Confusion is the experience of dispersing energy: Attention flowing from a center point into too many different, sometimes opposing directions. We can observe this daily in our communications; interpretations of reality diverge sometimes vastly, the gap between them seemingly ever-increasing, as if we are not made from the same soup.

Existing in a state of confusion is not sustainable in the long term. The dispersion of energy will lead to the individual and the collective feeling drained, depleted, exhausted. Their attention has gone off into too many directions, trying to follow a line of thought, belief, or bias in order to arrive at the opposite of confusion, but this is not its path.

Clarity is the experience of focusing energy. It is a state of mind that is felt as simultaneously calming and energizing.

It is a common misperception that more information leads to internal clarity.

Instead, many of the important issues do not lead to a clear `Yes or No, Good or Bad’ answer.

Clarity is an internal state that requires us to pull our energy back: We need to reclaim what we once gave away without reciprocity.

The real revolution is when we step back into our own power.

In order to do that, we need to heal our capacity to receive.

Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field (1977), Quemado, New Mexico

Read below on Field Theory, Mutual Causality in the shape of Jung’s Enantiodromia, on splitting and surrender in our current environment.