(continued)
CHAOS AND HIGHER ORDER
When you know yourself only through content, you will also think
you
know what is good or bad for you. You differentiate between events
that are
good for me and those that are bad. This is a fragmented
perception of
the wholeness of life in which everything is interconnected, in
which every
event has its necessary place and function within the totality. The
totality,
whoever, is more than the surface appearance of things, more than
the sum
total of its parts, more than whatever your life or the world
contains.
Behind the sometimes seemingly random or even chaotic
succession
of events in our lives as well as in the world lies concealed the
unfolding of a
higher order and purpose. This is beautifully expressed in the Zen
saying
The snow falls, each flake in its appropriate place. We can
never
understand this higher order through thinking about it because
whatever we
think about is content; whereas, the higher order emanates from the
formless
realm of consciousness, from universal intelligence. But we can
glimpse it,
and more than that, align ourselves with it, which means be
conscious
participants in the unfolding of that higher purpose.
When we go into a forest that has not been interfered with by man,
our
thinking mind will see only disorder and chaos all around us. It
won't even
be able to differentiate between life (good) and death (bad)
anymore since
everywhere new life grows out of rotting and decaying matter. Only
if we are
still enough inside and the noise of thinking subsides can we
become aware
that there is a hidden harmony here, a sacredness, a higher order
in which
everything has its perfect place and could not be other than what
it is and the
way it is.
The mind is comfortable in a landscaped park because it has
been
planned through thought; it has not grown organically. There is an
order here
that the mind can understand. In the forest, there is an
incomprehensible
order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental
categories of
god and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can
sense it
when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try
to
understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of he sacredness
of the
forest. As soon as you sense that hidden harmony, that sacredness,
you
realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that,
you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can
help you become realigned with the wholeness of life.
GOOD AND BAD
At some point in their lives, most people become aware that there
is
not only birth, growth, success, good health, pleasure, and
winning, but also
loss, failure, sickness, old age, decay, pain and death.
Conventionally these
are labeled good and bad, order and disorder. The meaning of
people's
lives is usually associated with what they term the good, but the
good is
continually threatened by collapse, breakdown, disorder; threatened
by
meaninglessness and the bad, when explanations fail and life
ceases to
make sense. Sooner or later, disorder will irrupt into everyone's
life no
matter how many insurance policies he or she has. It may come in
the form
of loss or accident, sickness, disability, old age, death. However,
the
irruption of disorder into a person's life, and the resultant
collapse of a
mentally defined meaning, can become the opening into a higher
order.
The wisdom of this world is folly with God, says the Bible.3 What
is
the wisdom of this world? The movement of thought, and meaning that
is
defined exclusively by thought.
Thinking isolates a situation or event and calls it good or bad, as
if it
had a separate existence. Through excessive reliance on thinking,
reality
becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but it seems
very real
while you are trapped in it. And yet the universe is an indivisible
whole in
which all things are interconnected, in which nothing exists in
isolation.
The deeper interconnectedness of all things and events implies that
the
mental labels of good and bad are ultimately illusory. They
always imply
a limited perspective and so are true only relatively and
temporarily. This is
illustrated in the story of a wise man who won an expensive car in
a lottery.
His family and friends were very happy for him and came to
celebrate. Isn't
it great! they said. You are so lucky. The man smiled and said
Maybe.
For a few weeks he enjoyed driving the car. Then one day a drunken
driver
crashed into his new car at an intersection and he ended up in the
hospital,
with multiple injuries. His family and friends came to see him and
said,
That was really unfortunate. Again the man smiled and said,
Maybe.
While he was still in the hospital, one night there was a landslide
and his
house fell into the sea. Again his friends came the next day and
said,
Weren't you lucky to have been here in hospital. Again he said,
Maybe.
The wise man's maybe signifies a refusal to judge anything
that
happens. Instead of judging what is, he accepts it and so enters
into
conscious alignment with the higher order. He knows that often it
is
impossible for the mind to understand what place or purpose a
seemingly
random event has in the tapestry of the whole. But there are no
random
events, nor are there events or things that exist by and for
themselves, in
isolation. The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside
stars,
and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite
and connected
with the whole in incomprehensible ways. If you wanted to trace
back the
cause of any event, you would have to go back all the way to the
beginning
of creation. The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word cosmos means
order.
But this is not an order the human mind can ever comprehend,
although it
can sometimes glimpse it.
~ A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle
