In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness.” (Old Testament / Genesis)
In daily language, “chaos” means disarray, irregularity, tumult, and disorganization. The word originates from the Greek term “Khaos,” which means emptiness, abyss, vast void, and chasm. In Ancient Greek, chaos indicated the opposite of order, a sea where the contradictions vanish, the objects dissolve, and everything liquefies into a homogenous mass of fluid. The very first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word “chaos” is a process that is not linear, where everything becomes tangled and results in disaster.
In Ancient Greek mythology, Khaos is depicted as a primordial deity. Khaos preceded the order of the Cosmos. “According to the ancient Greeks, chaos prevails in the universe before all else. Uranus pulverizing the stars and moving the planets in a certain order symbolized the order, namely the cosmos.” This myth refers to a continuous cycle of transformation. Both chaos and order are transitory. This is a balancing, yet at the same time dynamic and variable, process. An individual’s part in this process is to first organize his or her own home, to create a small-scale cosmos in there. This is the inception of sagacity. Chaos exists in order and order is in chaos, because everything changes! No one has ever found something that didn’t change in this universe.
Our universe started evolving and expanding fourteen billion years ago, following the Big Bang. “Chaos” was arranged by the light. “The place and role of our planet in this galaxy and the universe is observed by the scientists, and they’ve found indications about the secret harmony of the universe. Observations revealed that chaos transforms into order, that matter and energy is identical, and that chaos follows a path that is preplanned. An explosion of light in the dark of time: That’s what the root and cosmogony of the universe is. Humanity is searching for the truth and the creative force of God with their pursuit of information. The search for truth is actually to search for, and try to depict, the self-universe within humanity under the leadership of intelligence and science. The universe is not stagnant; it has a dynamic structure, and it’s ever growing. It’s cooling down, becoming thinner and refined, and turning simple structures into more complex ones. It’s transforming the ‘plain’ into the ‘complex’. The history of the universe is the history of the matter that is ever-building.”
The most important of the mottos from esoteric teaching is to liberate oneself from the idea of contrasts and move into a complementary state of mind. Instead of becoming involved with the contrasts, individuals are encouraged to acknowledge and accept that things coexist within the body of the one and only truth. “The bi-polar model enables anyone and everyone to place themselves somewhere in the current reality.” The Latin term, “Ordo ab Chao” literally means “From Chaos to Order.” Phrases like “the order that chaos brings,” “the order that emerges from the chaos,” or simply, “from chaos to order” fail to clarify the subtle relationship between chaos and order. Chaos is a state of orderliness that we cannot perceive, and the part we can actually perceive is called the cosmos. This is a statement we can use for a structure that is perceived as static and orderly from an external perspective, but it contains all the existing chaos within itself. There’s no end to this process. This is a dynamic kind of equilibrium, representing the unity of the universe, like the snake that eats its own tail. It’s the formula of the harmonious, dynamic, eternal balance of the universe from chaos to order.
“Have you ever seen a spherical cloud or a conical mountain?” asked Mandelbrot. The formation of the Earth was not a battle between chaos and order, but rather a continuous transformation of singularity into plurality. It represents “the Order” emerging from “the Chaos.” Existence has evolved through the duality of the worlds into which it was incarnated. It has mastered itself and attained a higher level of consciousness as an absolute entity. Chaos theory tells us that even chaos itself has an order within its disarray. It’s in the nature of life for chaos and order to coexist. “Everything in the life of a human being is for the order within the chaos to reappear and for discovering the Unity of the Divine. There’s nothing that shouldn’t.” According to Escher, “What we observe is the incomprehensible formation of order from the impossible, the emergence of chaos from the order, and order from the chaos.” Chaos and order are the two extreme values of the oscillation. Its rhythm changes like a beating heart, and then it returns to its original condition. There is unity in their separation, and separation in their unity. There is chaos in order and order in chaos. Existence is the unity of equilibrium and imbalance, stability and variation, order and disorder. Ultimate order and ultimate chaos both mean annihilation.
“Chaos and order” is a struggle of desires that never ceases in the micro-scale. In Rene Guenon’s words, “Every individual has a dual nature. Only a ‘real human being’ is capable of realizing and balancing this duality. This ability makes them children of the earth and the heavens.” Duality is the law of the universe and the greatest battle within a human being. Unity is attained only when this duality reaches a point of dynamic order, namely balance. This is true for both the micro- and macro-scales, meaning both the universe and the human, who is a small-scale projection of it. When its mind and intelligence is liberated from slavery, humanity will walk the path of truth in order to make necessary reforms, to illuminate their lives and their community. Together with intelligence and science, “liberal” communities, which are free from the pressure of ignorance and bigotry, will continue to demolish dogmas as they have in the past.
Chaos, existence, deformation, and evolution are all about theorizing the dynamic systems. There exists a strict resistance to change, as we can see in our individual lives. Change is a killjoy, and gaining momentum for it requires effort from the masses. There will always be someone wanting to stop the process absolutely. Change, especially when it’s aiming to demolish the dogmas and bring enlightenment, disturbs the existing regime. Again, from an individual perspective, the dogmas that are hardest to destroy are the ones humanity creates for itself. Just as Albert Einstein said, “It’s harder to crack prejudice than an atom.” A humanity that is free from soft spots and monomania would be a utopia. A humanity free from prejudices and the “obey” culture, without dogmas, which can control its ambitions and its own emotions, which is able to act as individuals, and which is modest, temperate and virtuous will be able to create chaos from the order when necessary. The hardest of conditions will remind them of the great competition and success they had in the past and show them the hidden opportunities in hardships. An enlightened individual is strong. They never concede to despair. The masters interpret the relationship between chaos and order with these words:
“There is an order, even in places the human mind perceives as chaos.”
“Chaos and order are ends of the same notion, just like the two ends of a pendulum. It should not be forgotten that there’s no permanent chaos or order, because everything ‘lives and changes!’ ”
“There is a universe in every chaos, a secret order in every disorder, a constant law in every variant.”
Bibliography:
Res. Assoc. Berkay Camgöz, Fractals of Chaos and the Nature, http://www.ekolojimagazin.com/?id=121&s=magazin
Ali Nezih Bilge, A Study of the Universe and The Truth, http://www.historicalsense.com/Archive/e_h_arastirilmasi1.htm
