Chaos and Order

Challenging a Familiar Paradigm

The great problem of our time is that we don't understand what is happening to the world.... Our values are shifting, everything loses its certainty.... Who is the awe-inspiring guest who knocks at our door portentously?

— C. G. Jung (1975), p. 590.

The problem of love is the most important in human life. Also the most important is the most difficult to talk about.... But no doubt such a discussion belongs to our age of reorientation.

— C. G. Jung (1973), pp. 38–39.

This book arises from a desire to challenge an all-too-familiar paradigm in our times — that chaos gives rise to order — and to show that chaos is a harbinger of eros, and not of order. When chaos and eros are twinned in this fashion, they challenge our reigning paradigms of control and domination over the world, and introduce a more complex and subtle way of knowing and being, one that is perhaps nearer to our felt experience. In particular this book illustrates that chaos linked with eros invites us into the epiphanies of love and its shadows, invites us into reveries on the mysteries of, and obstacles to, our loving and being loved, and resituates us within the larger fabric of creation. A key point in my work is to show that in our contemporary world, chaos is a vocation, calling us into the unus mundus, into a world of synchronicities, where the desire of spirit for matter is witnessed.

We live in an age of breakdown, breakdown of the order we have constructed in the West. During this century, we have been witnessing the gradual eclipse of a worldview, and the birthing of another zeitgeist that is slowly making its presence felt. The limitations of causal, linear, ego-conscious thinking — limitations well documented in the sciences during this century, in quantum, field, string, and chaos theories, and in depth psychology by the symptom, the dream, synchronicity, and some levels of the transferential relationship in therapy — invite us to take note of the irrational, unpredictable, unrepeatable, and nonlinear.

As the physicists Bentov (1977), Wolf (1994), Goswami (1995), and the Jungian scholar and analyst von Franz (1992) indicate, physics and depth psychology invite us into a new synthesis, for matter acts as if it has consciousness, and consciousness itself appears to reach deeply into the structure of matter. In all likelihood, these two poles constitute a unitary reality. The breakdown of our prevailing worldview might be seen then as an invitation into chaos, and into love, those fateful places that undo us so, into those cracks between the worlds where new life emerges. The call into chaos and into love is the call into that place where spirit and matter seek expression through us, and unite and dissolve into an ungraspable mystery, allowing us to approach more intimately the wholeness of ourselves and things.

Most of the ancient Mystery traditions involved an initiation or preparation for the embodied soul to be able to withstand, or suffer, a cosmological disclosure, and to witness a divine revelation. Today we might speak of this as an experience of the Self, an experience of the ego's relation to its eternal source, the archetypal experience of the fenestra aeternitatis, the window onto eternity that simultaneously allows the divine into time-bound reality. In such experiences, often imaged as an unspeakable secret inviting, even demanding, silence, the human being seems to participate in, and be transformed by the same kind of cosmogonic love that holds the universe together — the planets in their orbits and the stars in their constellations. In such experiences, humankind is resituated within the larger fabric of creation that embraces and contains the individual as a part. In such experiences, so-called psychological projections are dissolved, and the soul is liberated into a cosmology of relations fulfilling the divine destiny to unite once again the unknowable mysteries of spirit and matter as different faces of a transpersonal whole.

Could it be that the chaos of our world, losing its way in breakdowns on all levels from the personal to the political, from the cultural to the geophysical, signals that moment of deadly peril where collective consciousness seeks its own destruction and dissolution, in order to birth a relation to this complex Mystery, a connection that we can only approach, that we can only forge, with an attitude born of a willingness to suffer, and of a love that can only emerge from our grief?

Love is a high achievement. Rilke (1954) writes of love "being difficult ... the work for which all other work is but preparation" (p. 54). And the poet, H. D. (1988) similarly says, "yet to sing love, love must first shatter us" (p. 33). The central claim of Robert Romanyshyn's (1999) recent book, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation, is that we grieve because we have dared to love, and by grace we can love again because we have allowed ourselves the time to grieve. The author Isabel Allende (1994), in her wrenching account of her daughter Paula's death, recorded within the context of her own (Isabel's) stirring life story — a piece of writing in which she sought to keep her sanity during the long days and nights of Paula's slow and silent withdrawal behind the veil — writes:

Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars (p. 314).

In the same way that the heavenly bodies of star and planet and swirling, unformed, chaotic gases find their home within the vast reaches of the dark night of the cosmos, so too certain mythologies image Eros/Aphrodite as birthing out of the silver egg of unformed, dark chaos, or the Indian goddess Vak emerging out of the chaotic, dark, watery depths, with a golden jar of amrita in hand, singing creation into being from her heart. These stories impress upon us the union of the mighty primordial forces of chaos and eros, both in the natural and psychological terrains.

In the West, we have tended to emphasize chaos's relation with order, from the Genesis story through psychological fiction to contemporary theories of chaos in the physical sciences. In my work, I show that chaos can be viewed as guardian and intimate companion of divine and chthonic love, not the matrix out of which order is created. When we make order out of chaos, we kill eros as part of the divine creation, and annihilate our love affair with the world. Our contemporary ecological and environmental crises mirror in no small way the devastating effects of a heritage based on order, which perhaps is bound more with our power needs to control, and which ignores the soul's desire for the chaos of creativity and feeling.

The move from an order/power-based consciousness to a chaos/love-based awareness can also be seen as a move from a hierarchically ordered universe that excludes its unwanted shadows, to a soul-making cosmos based on mutual regard and participation. Archetypally, this shift can be imaged as a move away from what Jung (1959) describes as the archetype of the Hostile Brothers of the Christian Aeon, to the coniunctio depicted, for example, in the image of the mystical and reciprocal connection of the adept/soror, or brother/sister relationship of the alchemical traditions. Astrologically, the move is from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. C. G. Jung (1975) speaks of an evolving consciousness that can endure opposites, and face its shadows, as the achievement of the Holy Spirit, meaning a "restitution of the original oneness of the unconscious on the level of consciousness" (p. 135).

It is both notable and grievous that chaos retained its connection with order, but lost its more vital relationship with love. Surely this is no accident. I suggest in this book that love is dangerous and so is chaos. Each evokes the image of the numinous Other, our highest spiritual longings, and our deepest earthly yearnings, and still more profoundly, the urge to unite these cosmic and human vibrations of spirit and matter within the cells and souls of our bodies. These realities of chaos/eros may even be missed completely because we tend to either disparage the idea, or we don't allow ourselves to long for the dark complexities that make up their realms. We reduce the body to biological drives and split off spirituality into ethereal realms. What is avoided in such a reductive splitting, perhaps out of an ancient terror, is the tremendum of the daimonic powers of sexuality, the numinosity of the chthonic realms, and the fundamental Otherness to the ego of these archetypal powers.

Yet if we continue to refuse to confront the dangers of Otherness, we perpetuate the split in consciousness that marks these times as hanging so precariously in the balance. Then the secrets demanding silence continue to come in the back door of our culture as violations of relationships and rapes of the soul, rather than as disclosures of the unapproachable and dark mysterious beauty of love.

* * *

It might be argued that there is danger in apparently dismissing and devaluing order. This is not my intention. When the landscape of order retains its cosmological connection, I have no trouble with its usage. In such usage, for example, we might speak of an apparent acausal orderedness underlying unpredictable synchronistic phenomena. Such orderedness unites psyche and matter in a numinous revelation of meaning that presents itself to us from quite beyond our conscious knowledge.

Or, we might speak of the Tao as a holistically ordered interconnectedness of all being, a state in which one's psychological disposition is in an acausal mirror symmetry with events in the outside world. Jung (1970) describes this as "bringing heaven and earth into harmony" (§604). Richard Wilhelm's famous Rainmaker story, often referred to by Jung, is an example. In this story, a Rainmaker in a Chinese village brought rain, not by any magic, but by taking on the disturbed and inharmonious conditions of the village. When he managed to recover his own harmony in meditation, "Naturally, the rain came."

Another objection that might be raised concerns the relation of order and meaning. They are not, however, the same. Jung (1975, p. 494, and von Franz, 1974, p. 165) distinguishes them. For example, something could be constructed in an orderly arranged patterning, like a fly, but its meaningfulness in terms of the total context might be less apparent. The same might be said of my book. I am depending on at least a certain orderly presentation — a theme to be worked, chapters that discretely amplify different aspects of my central theme — to achieve a coherence that will allow it to be read. But how significant is my text? Does it mean anything? There could be a wide divergence of views about that. I myself am not precisely sure about its meaning. I am mostly wanting to explore a theme that stirs me profoundly, and to invite the reader to reflect on my theme, to participate in its textures and nuances, its images and range of affects, and to allow the words and language to evoke my topic as much as anything I might "say" about it. So in this respect, I might say that this piece of writing, this essai (attempt) has meaning for me. Whether I achieve that to any degree for others is quite another matter.

Although order and meaning are not equivalent, it remains true that Jung heavily emphasizes meaning. Meaning is his myth. He (1969a) writes, for example, "a psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning" (§497). Jung, in fact, ascribes cosmological meaning to humankind's consciousness, in its purpose of reflecting the world. He says this gives humans a raison d'être of significant proportions, for without meaning — that he claims, arguably, only the human creature is capable of — the world dissolves in meaninglessness.

Now whether we agree with this point of view, or not, meaning, in this context, is not merely an abstraction. It is more of a contemplation, a reflection, a wonder-ing, like the word theoria in its original sense, endowing us with a cosmic purpose. In fact, Jung is implying here that consciousness is a second field of creation, comparable, if not equal, to God's. He (1975) writes in a letter:

Nobody seems to have noticed that without a reflecting psyche the world might as well not exist, and that, in consequence, consciousness is a second world-creator, and also that the cosmogonic myths do not describe the absolute beginning of the world but rather the dawning of consciousness as the second Creation (p. 487).

Similarly, von Franz (1974) writes of the West African divinity, Fa, as the god who discloses the meaning of one's life to individuals one at a time (p. 267). Or we might describe Eros as the god who is behind the individuation process, in which the mystery and meaning, meaning-as-mystery, of one's life becomes increasingly apparent. We all know, too, accounts of spirit guides, etheric doubles, guardian angels, daimonic presences of one kind or another (richly described in antiquity) who enrich our lives and bring a numinous presence beyond the everyday, or into the everyday.

But like so much of our language, concepts such as order and meaning in patriarchal culture have dried up and lost their souls, and only retained their personas. Order too often smacks of an impersonal imposition in a negative sense, or a doctrinaire attitude without regard for the exigencies of an individual's life; or perhaps order masks itself as intellectualism divorced from the subtleties of spirit, or the passion of feeling.

In like manner, meaning can get blind overusage, especially in the field of psychology, and begin to break with the complexities of felt, bodily experience. It can become a construction of the ego's desire to appropriate the unconscious for its own ends, so that perhaps it can feel safe and on top and in control of feeling states, such as despair and meaninglessness. Hillman (1972), in lamenting what the scientific worldview has done to our words, writes: "This contemporary representative of the Enlightenment ... would reduce language by stripping away all ambiguities, emotional undertones, and historical associations to make each word mean one thing and one thing only" (p. 210).

Early on in this century T. S. Eliot complained that too often we have the experience but miss the meaning. Today, I think, the obverse is closer to the truth: we have the meaning — pre-packaged in digestable bites as it were, so evidenced by all the how-to books in pop psychology and pop culture — and miss the experience. Where then is the chaos in the experience, and the eros?

It is such impoverished, one-sided usages that I am referring to when I wish to resituate chaos's relation with love, rather than with order. For our rationally ordered consciousness, invaluable at times, has not made us more wise or more connected with our feelings (in the sense of consciously achieved value judgments), and for all our ego attainments, substantial as they are, we stand on the brink of planetary annihilation, with a brokenness in the hearts and souls of many people.

Chaos/Eros: Love and Its Shadows

Love is something, more than anything else, we all long for. The word "love" already evokes life's moist possibilities, compared with order's more deadly, dry presence. To love and be loved is arguably the only thing that most of us would rather not exit this life without knowing. In my experience as a therapist, most people come into therapy in search of love, no matter what the presenting problem. Fame, fortune, and even mediocrity may come and go, but love participates in the substance of the universe itself, and is eternal. Love ceases not. Once you have loved and been loved, it can never be taken away; not even at death, such is the imprint in the cells of our souls. Love is that eternal landscape that takes us beyond life, beyond death, even beyond rebirth.

Most near-death experiences (NDEs) reveal love to be one of the most exquisitely beautiful and deeply compelling worlds that comes forward to greet us, and toward which we travel in making that difficult transition. People commonly report about NDEs that they are generally asked two questions about their earthly experiences: What did you learn? And did you love? And the lives of most people who return from NDEs are transformed by the numinosity and deep mystery that lies at the heart of love's compassionate embrace. It is an ecstasy that often becomes a guiding influence in their vocational and personal lives.