Spiritual Chaos?

Chaos stirs. Its fragment signs, millinery filigrees, and guttural moans are everywhere -- in the collapsing nation-state, in the ferocious world market, in the damaged matrix of the biosphere, in your communications devices, and even in the plain old ordinary sense that nothing is plain, old, or ordinary any more.

Paradoxically, it was science, that last bastion of reason and order, that planted chaos anew in our heads. The new field (actually, a set of related and overlapping interdisciplinary fields) arrived with revolutionary fervor. Chaos science glimpsed the shadow of an abstract dance within apparently random turbulence, a movement in virtual phase space which sketched the flux of dripping faucets, heartbeats, and smoke. Suggesting the infinitely nested grooves of nature, fractals like the Mandelbrot set revealed a realm of mathematical objects that were both holistic and perpetually fractured. Kinda like us. Indeed, some of us recognized these Paisley arabesques from our most intimate forays into psychedelic chaos, and brazenly claimed them as sigils of the endlessly exfoliating plateaus of chemical wisdom. The florid rainbow colors that the PhDs used to represent the widely disparate behaviors of numbers in computer-generated fractal sets were just a tie-dyed bonus.

As the engines of postmodern perception, computers not only helped birth the new science, but produced a fundamental mutation in scientific style: away from reductionist and strictly causal explanations toward global modeling, experimental mathematics, and large-scale simulations of complex systems. Chaos thus allowed a careful reintroduction of the intuitions that had guided vitalists and other entelechy geeks for centuries as they waged a losing battle against mechanism and tight-assed reductionism. Everything became a complex system, a dissipative structure, manifesting the subtle magic of emergence: population dynamics, planetary orbits, the beloved marketplace, your brain. A digital whiff of spirit.

Many of us outside the labs fell in love with emergent behavior as well, and found our lover everywhere. A small publishing industry was born in the wake of James Gleick's Chaos, and chaos threatened to usurp quantum physics as the science of choice for speculative acid ramblers and mystical pseudo-scientists everywhere. Rationalists rightly cringed, but those of us who spelunk the spongy clefts between the brain's left and right hemispheres just smiled and drank it in.

A few dullards insisted that all this pop cult hoopla would have been nipped in the bud if James Yorke had followed the advise of more sober colleagues in 1975 and not named the curious mathematical behavior he had discovered after Hesiod's Goddess of the watery void. After all, chaos means disorder, and chaos science concerned itself with determinist disorder -- that is, disorder according to plan. This is science after all, which for all its visions and and machines and mathematical monsters, still boils down to control.

But if we let ourselves fall backwards through that watery void of myth, a bungie jump into the ravenous dark, we find that the question of whether chaos is order or disorder, an amorphous horror or a secret informing structure, lies at the very beginnings of culture. When humans first found themselves encased inside a fabricated world-view somehow set apart from the buzzing matrix of nature, they took a number of very different mythic snapshots of the bountiful chaos they were leaving behind.

Ancient Mesopotamia provides our first polaroid. In the Enuma elish, Marduk, the patron hero of the ascendent city-state of Babylon, kills Tiamat, the old goddess of primal chaos. With her corpse he arranges the heavens, fixing the stars and constellations. Then he proclaims himself king and creates humans so the gods don't have to work anymore. Marduk represents the phallic thrust of the emergent State, with its grid-works and scripts, monarch worship and freshly-chiselled tablets of divine Law. From this point on, the State would demonize the ancient matrix from which it emerged, and which always threatens to engulf it again in waves of atavism and anarchy.

Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks all acknowledged the primal dragon of Chaos even as the gods of their civilizations felt compelled to kill the beast. Christianity tried to erase the goddess altogether. That's why the Church decided that God created the world ex nihilo, from nothing at all. But you can still smell the briny spew of the primal goddess in the formless, watery void that opens Genesis and distinctly echoes the older Babylonian myth.

From that point on, all those forces fueled by Chaos -- useless inertia, frenzied turbulence, feminine magic, the primal body-without-organs -- could be found only in the demonic shadows of Church and State. For today's chaos magicians, who continue the work of the great Austin Osman Spare in stripping away the barnacles of booklearning from the raw, atavistic heart of primal magic, the Paleolithic path lies through the outer dark. Don't be fooled by peaceful Pagan eco-feminists: Tiamat fought Marduk with venomous serpents, mad dogs, and scorpion-men, and our reborn Goddess is as much Cthulhu as Earth Mom.

The dragon of Chaos wore a far more honorable face in the East, where it was known as the Tao. For ancient sages like Chuang-Tzu, the subtle order of natural chaos was rich and bountiful compared to the bankrupt legalism and moralistic strictures of Confucian civilization -- which paradoxically produced the very disorder it wanted to suppress. The Taoists felt that only by tearing down the State of things -- including ordinary consciousness -- could we return to the golden age, the mixed-up harmony symbolized by the wonton (which derives from Mr. Hun-tun, Chuang-Tzu's lord of chaos). If these anarchic dreams could not be realized in society -- as Lao Tzu hoped to do -- than at least they could be realized in the body, through spiritual and physical practices that would open up the spontaneous chaos within.

Taoism's this-worldly embrace of natural chaos fed into the buddha-killing antics and instant samadhi of Zen Buddhism, the first nondualistic Eastern path to be embraced by Western hipsters. In Beat Zen and the later "holy madness" strains of yogic nondualism, mental and moral distinctions were suspect, and the total range of mind and life were open to the tantric embrace. But while crazy gurus like Chogyam Trungpa and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh wrote mind-blasting works of chaos wisdom, the communities that grew around them often degenerated into manipulative and authoritarian hippie bummers.

Around the same time, the avant-garde freaks of the psychedelic counterculture scoured through the world's wisdom traditions while making mince-meat of all received truths. Rather than disguise the half-baked absurdity of trying to discover spiritual truths in the age of Saran-Wrap, space flights, and macrame, a few freaks began to proclaim that the whole glorious postmodern mess was itself the goofball revelation. The Principia Discordia, the Illuminatus! trilogy, and Dr. Tim's inspired starseed technovisions all laid down this eclectic, hilarious, and skeptical anti-doctrine of bohemian chaos. This anarchic spiritual style went on to influence the Church of the Subgenius, the Pagan hardwiring of fringe computer culture, and today's more focussed and informed shamanic revival.

Chaos has many faces, but they are all masks, and it is we who have fashioned them - Source

I thought of the Greek pantheon and the theogony of Hesiod, when I read this.

Thanks for posting.

A cat with 6 legs swims no better than a cat with 3.

<---- Fractal Avitar of my own creation. Love that math art.

Whoa man I left a banana in the fridge!

"Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here...." -Tom Robbins


The Eternal Philosophy of Chaos

by Timothy Leary

For several thousand years it has seemed obvious that the basic nature of the universe is extreme complexity, inexplicable disorder; that mysterious, tangled magnificence popularly known as Chaos. The poetic Hindus believed the universe was a dreamy dance of illusion (maya).

The paradoxical, psycho-logical Buddhists spoke of a void too complex; maybe a trillion times too complex; to be grasped by the human A-B-C-1-2-3 wordprocessing system (mind).

Chinese poet-philosopher Lao Tse sardonically reminded us that the tao is forever changing complexities at light speed, elusive and inaccessible to our fingers and thumbs laboriously tapping letters on our alphanumeric keyboards and mind-operating systems.

Socrates, that proud, self-reliant Athenian democrat, indiscreetly blurted out the dangerous secret when he said, "The aim of human life is to know thy selves. "This is surely the most subversive T-shirt flaunted over the centuries by humanists, the most confrontational bumper sticker on their neuro-auto-mobiles.

Individualistic thinking is the original sin of the Judeo-Christian-lslamic bibles and sabotages attempts by the authorities to order Chaos.

The first rule of every law-and-order system is to trivialize-demonize the dangerous concepts of Self, Individual Aims, and Personal Knowledge. Thinking for Yourselves is heretical, treasonous, blasphemous. Only devils and satans do it. Creative thinking, committed out loud, becomes a capital crime. It was "Three Strikes and You're Out" for several hundred thousand Protestant dissenters during the Inquisitions of the Roman papacy; not to forget the witch burnings performed by the Protestants when they took charge of the Chaos-control department.

It was all very simple to the law-and-order controllers. There are the immortal gods and goddesses up there in that Gated Community on Olympus Drive. And then there is us; meaningless mortals, slaving around down here in the low-rent flatlands.

The concept of individuals with choice and identity seemed total folly, the ultimate nightmare; not just of authoritarian bureaucrats, but of common sense liberals. Chaos must be controlled!

The standard way to tame and domesticate the impossible complexity that surrounds us is to invent a few "tooth-fairy" gods, the more infantile the better, and to lay down a few childish rules: Honor your father and your mother, etc. The rules are simple and logical. You passively obey. You pray. You sacrifice. You work. You believe.

And then, Praise the Bored, let there be no terrorizing notions about individuals hanging around this meaningless, disordered universe trying to figure how to design themselves some individual selves.

Chaos Engineering

The first Chaos engineers may have been the Hindu sages who designed a method for operating the brain, called yoga. The Buddhists produced one of the great hands-on do-it-yourself manuals for operating the brain: The Tibetan Book of the Dying. Chinese Taoists developed the teaching of going with the flow; not clinging to idea-structures, but changing and evolving.

The message was: Be cool. Don't panic. Chaos is good. Chaos creates infinite possibilities.

The wacko Socratic idea of Do It Yourself (D.I.Y.), which created modern democracy, was a practical, common sense, sassy Athenian version of the Hindu-Buddhist-Taoist yogas. And remember where this foolishness got India, Tibet, and China ? Know Where!

The most dangerous idea is this crazed, megalomaniac notion of KNOW! which defines the serf-human being as a thinker. Outrageous impudence! The slave is encouraged to become a philosopher. The serf strives to be a psychologist. A potential yogic sage!

This heresy predicts why later atheist evolutionists like Linnaeus and Darwin defined our superchimp species as Femina (Homo) Sapiens Sapiens.

The Chaos Without

For centuries there existed a fanatic taboo against scientific understanding. Why? Because of the fear of Chaos. The facts about our (apparently) insignificant place in the galactic dance are so insulting to the control freaks who try (so manfully and diligently and seriously) to manage Chaos that they forbade any intelligent attempts to look out there and dig the glorious complexity.

At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.

Galileo got busted and Bruno was burned at the stake for showing that the Sun did not circle the Earth. Religious and political Chaos-phobes naturally want the nice, tidy, comfy universe to cuddle around them.

In the last century science has developed technical extensions of the human sensorium that specify the truly spooky nature of the complexities we inhabit.

Stellar astronomy describes a universe of fantastic multiplicity: a hundred billion tiny star systems in our tiny galaxy, a hundred billion galaxies in our teeny universe.

The Chaos Within

In the last decades of the twentieth century, scientists began to study the complexity within the human brain.

Talk about Chaos! It turns out that the brain is a galactic network of a hundred billion neurons. Each neuron is an information system as complex as a mainframe computer. Each neuron is connected to ten thousand other neurons. Each of us is equipped with a universe of neurocomplexity that is inscrutable to our alphanumeric minds.

This brain power is at once the most humiliating fact about our current ignorance, and the most thrilling prospect of our potential divinity; once we start learning how to operate our brains.

Humanism: The Navigational Game Plan

Chaos theory allows us to appreciate our assignment: the understanding, enjoyment, and celebration of the delightful nature of the whole universe; including the totally mad paradoxes within our brains.

Activating the so-called right brain eliminates one of the last taboos against understanding Chaos and provides a hands-on scientific basis for the philosophy of Humanism; encouraging us to team up with others to design our own personal versions of Chaos.

A Do-lt-Yourself Religion

Since God #1 appears to be held hostage back there by the bloodthirsty Persian Ayatollah, by the telegenic Polish Pope, and the Moral Majority, there's only one logical alternative. You "steer" your own course. You and your dear friends start your own religion. The Temple, of course, is your body. Your minds write the theology. And the Holy Spirit emanates from that infinitely mysterious intersection between your brain and the brains of your crew.

The attainment of even the suburbs of Paradise involves good navigation and planning on your part. Hell is a series of redeemable errors. A detour caused by failure to check the trip maps. A losing streak.

Reward yourself for making choices that lead to friendship and pleasure. Build a cybernetic cycle of positive feedback. Only from a state of free selfhood can any truly compassionate signals be sent to others.

The Administration of a Personal State

The management and piloting of a singularity leads to a very busy career. Once the individual has established herself as a religion, a country, a corporation, an information network, and a neurological universe, it is necessary to maintain personal equivalents of all the departments and operations of the bureaucracies that perform these duties.

This means forming private alliances; formulating personal political platforms; conducting one's own domestic and foreign relations; establishing trade policies, defense and security programs, educational and recreational events.

On the upside, one is free from dependence on bureaucracies, an inestimable boon. (Free agents can, of course, make temporary deals with organizations and officials thereof.) And if countries have histories and mythic origins, why shouldn't you ?

The Personal Mythology

Search and research your very own genetic memory banks, the Old Testaments of your DNA-RNA, including, if you like, past incarnations, Jungian archetypes, and funky preincarnations in any future you can imagine. Write your very own Newest Testament, remembering that voluntary martyrdom is tacky, and crucifixions, like nuclear war, can ruin your day.

You and your friends can do anything that the great religions and empires and racial groups have done in the name of their god. And you're certain to do it better because well, look at their track records. There's no way your Personal State could produce the persecutions and massacres and bigotries of the past and present. There's only one of you, and even with the help of your friends the amount of damage individuals can do is insignificant compared with that of a collective.

http://erg.ucd.ie/arupa/references/chaos.html

PRINCIPIA CHAOTICA

Chaos Magic for the Pandaemeon

In Chaos Magic, beliefs are not seen as ends in themselves, but as tools for creating desired effects. To fully realize this is to face a terrible freedom in which Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted, which is to say that everything is possible, there are no certainties, and the consequences can be ghastly. Laughter seems to be the only defence against the realisation that one does not even have a real self.

The purpose of Chaos Rituals is to create beliefs by acting as though such beliefs were true. In Chaos Rituals you Fake it till you Make it, to obtain the power that a belief can provide. Afterwards, if you have any sense, you will laugh it off, and seek the requisite beliefs for whatever you want to do next, as Chaos moves you.

Thus Chaoism proclaims the Death and Rebirth of the Gods. Our subconscious creativity and parapsychological powers are more than adequate to create or destroy any god or self or demon or other "spritual" entity that we may choose to invest or disinvest belief in, at least for ourselves and sometimes others as well. The frequently awesome results attaining by creating gods by act of ritually behaving as though they exist should not lead the Chaos magician into the abyss of attributing ultimate reality to anything. That is the transcendentalist mistake,, which leads to the narrowing of the spectrum of the self. The real awesomeness lies in the range of things we can discover ourselves capable of, even if we may temporarily have to believe the effects are due to something else, in order to be able to create them. The gods are dead. Long live the gods.

Magic appeals to those with a great deal of hubris and a fertile imagination coupled with a strong suspicion that both reality and human condition have a game like quality. The game is open ended, and plays itself for amusement. Players can make up their own rules to some extent, and cheat by using parapsychology if desired.

A magician is one who has sold his soul for the chance of participating more fully in reality. Only when nothing is true, and the idea of a true self is abandoned, does everything become permitted. There is some accuracy in the Faust myth, but he failed to take it to its logical conclusion.

It takes only the acceptance of a single belief to make someone a magician. It is the meta-belief that belief is a tool for achieving effects. This effect is often far easier to observe in others than in oneself. It is usually quite easy to see how other people, and indeed entire cultures, are both enabled and disabled by the beliefs they hold. Beliefs tend to lead to activities which tend to reconfirm belief in a circle they call virtuous rather than vicious, even if the results are not amusing. The first stage of seeing through the game can be a shocking enlightenment that leads either to a weary cynicism or Buddhism. The second stage of actually applying the insight to oneself can destroy the illusion of the soul and create a magician. The realisation that belief is a tool rather than an end in itself has immense consequences if fully accepted. Within the limits set by physical possibility, and these limits are wider and more malleable than most people believe, one can make real any beliefs one chooses, including contradictionary beliefs. The Magician is not striving for any particular limited identity goal, rather he wants the meta-identity of being able to be anything.

So welcome to the Kali Yuga of the Pandaemonaeon wherein nothing is true and everything is permissable. For in these post-absolutist days it is better to build upon the shifting sands than the rock which will confound you on the day it shatters. Philosophers have become no more than the keepers of useful sarcasms, for the secret is out that there is no secret of the universe. All is Chaos and evolution is going nowhere in particular. It is pure chance which rules the universe and thus, and only thus, is life good. We are born accidentally into a random world where only seeming causes lead to apparent effects, and very little is predetermined, thank Chaos. As everything is arbitrary and accidental then perhaps these words are too small and pejorative, rather we should perhaps say that life, the universe and everything is spontaneously creative and magical.

Relishing stochastic reality we can revel exclusively in magical definitions of existence. The roads of excess may yet lead to the place of wisdom, and many indeterminate things can happen on the way to thermodynamic equilibrium. It is vain to seek solid ground on which to stand. Solidity is an illusion, as is the foot which stands on it, and the self which thinks it owns either is the most transparent illusion of all.

The heavy vessels of faith are holed and sinking along with all lifeboats and ingenious rafts. So will you shop at the supermarket of sensation and let your consumer preferences define your true self? Or will you in a bold and lighthearted fashion, thieve from both for the fun of it? For belief is a tool for achieving whatever one chooses to consider important or pleasurable, and sensation has no other purpose than sensation. Thus help yourself to them without paying the price. Sacrifice Truth for Freedom at every opportunity. The greatest fun, freedom and achievement lies not being yourself. There is little merit in simply being whomsoever you were destined to be by accident of birth and circumstance. Hell is the condition of having no alternatives.

Reject then the obscenities of contrived uniformity, order and purpose. Turn and face the tidal wave of Chaos from which philosophers have been fleeing in terror for millennia. Leap in and come out surfing its crest, sporting amidst the limitless weirdness and mystery in all things, for those who reject false certainties. Thank Chaos we shall never exhaust it. Create, destroy, enjoy, IO CHAOS!

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* Origin: ChaosBox: Nothing is true -> all is permitted... (2:243/2)

[Note: The author of this is unknown to me. This article was lifted from the A Pagan Files List with the understanding (explictly stated on the site) that these files were copyright free and anyone was free to use them, provided they were not for profit.]

http://www.spiralnature.com/magick/chaos/principiachao.html

Willful Paradigm Shifting

By: Psyche

There is a reason chaotes are hesitant to define exactly what it means to be a chaote or if they do, why asking 5 chaotes, will get you at least 6 different answers. The reason is quite simple really, each understands that whatever definition they offer it will have its limitations, as it is based on individual experience and understanding. It suits the individual's paradigm, and each understands that this will not necessarily match another's, despite having a similar belief system.

What is this nonsense about 'Nothing is true; everything is permitted' (Hassan I Sabbah)? It means exactly what it says. Nothing we perceive is true, it is a facet of whatever is 'out there', outside the self - if there is even anything out there at all. However, everything is permitted, you can believe whatever you want, the Universe does not care enough to argue, and if it does, it does so in a way you can understand that another might not see. You can believe rocks and sticks are one and the same - fantastic, no-one else really cares.

It seems universal enough among chaotes that it seems safe to say that wilful paradigm shifting is a popular pastime. What this means is that a chaote will adopt one paradigm as long as it suits hir, and changes it when it no longer fits hir understanding of things, or to utilize a different one on a whim, or that is more useful in one's endeavours. Therefore, a chaote can be a Bible-thumping Christian one day, and a tree-hugging Wiccan the next, with (if they are doing it right) no issues of conflicting belief. The belief is complete, and should attained by decent research if one is going to attain any level of success.

The benefits of having a reality kaleidoscope are numerous. One of them is open-mindedness. Ever been frustrated by someone you met who just did not get something you were talking about? Like the Christian fundamentalist who believes in resurrection, but who sees no evidence for reincarnation? Well, if one is successful and adept at shifting one's paradigm at will one can enter this view, and then enter it from one who believes in reincarnation, and see both sides of the argument, this should work for any case. Of course, one may have a tendency to believe one thing more than another, and this remains part of one's personal belief system, that part of one's paradigm that is most difficult to change or annihilate.

Annihilating beliefs that one holds as seemingly absolute realities can be difficult to shake. There are many methods of dissolving these through a process called 'deconstruction'. Deconstruction rids oneself of any particular beliefs one holds on to and cannot seem to shake through simpler methods of paradigm shifting (which also uses a form of deconstruction) as it is more personal than a belief in a particular God/dess, or disbelief in one. Generally, what happens when one deconstructs a belief is that a new one forms. Deconstruction and reconstruction and construction (lather, rinse, repeat), is an on-going cycle in one's life, and especially so for chaotes, as they often consciously changes the unconscious and conscious minds.

And there you have some basic understandings and reasoning behind them. Read others. Read conflicting ones. Know that there is truth in all of them, especially those that do not make any sense. It may not be your truth at the time and indeed may never be, but does that make it any less real? Are you comfortable with that?

EOF

[This file is Copyleft. Licensed for free non-profit distribution providing that the file is left completely in tact, from the title to EOF. If you'd like to make any modifications, please contact the author at psyche at spiralnature dot com.]

http://www.spiralnature.com/magick/chaos/paradigmshift.html

I'm actually a little surprised by peoples reactions to Chaos...to me, it simply determins that everything is non-determined, i think its sweet, i quite like it.

Cheers for posting all this stuff catch22 read any Robert Anton Wilson?

Cheers. I've read some of RAW's work but I find his interviews, straight talk, more interesting personally. I was immediately drawn to his concept/strategy known as 'Guerilla Ontology'. For anyone unfamiliar with GO here is a quick wiki description...

Guerrilla ontology

Guerrilla ontology is a practice described by Robert Anton Wilson as a method of dealing with people with extremely fixed worldviews, such as religious fundamentalists and economic materialists.

In The Illuminati Papers, Wilson defines Guerilla Ontology as: "The basic technique of all my books. Ontology is the study of being; the guerilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?'"

The goal of guerilla ontology is to expose individuals to radically new ideas, thoughts, and words, in order to invoke cognitive dissonance and to cause a degree of discomfort as the individuals find their rigid belief systems challenged by new concepts.

The ultimate goal of guerilla ontology is to promote positive brain change and new ways of experiencing and adapting to reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_ontology


Also I have always preferred reading material that is neither fiction or non-fiction but a blend of both, not being sure what is "real" and what is not being the appropriate mindset to be in when reading anything including non-fiction in my opinion. Nothing should get into the gray matter that hasnt been put through a filter.