I was thinking about chaos for quite a while during the last few months, and I talked about it a lot in person with several people, but I never got around to actually writing an article, so it’s about time I remedied that.

When people think about chaos, they usually fall into two groups. The first group imagines chaos in terms of putting a frog into the blender and pressing the “bzzt” button. Basically, you have a frog that’s an orderly organized system, you introduce randomizing force into the system and you get a frog milkshake: a disorderly, chaotic system. It doesn’t improve the frog, in any case. The second group imagines chaos in terms of what Von Clausewitz would call “the fog of war” – you have too many forces interacting, and the slightest variations in the initial conditions can produce vastly different outcomes. An example of such a system is weather, and this is the reason why it’s impossible to make a good weather forecast even with the best computers; the weather is a chaotic system with a very large number of variables, and it would be bad even if it had far less variables.

Based on those two examples, it’s obvious that chaos isn’t seen as a good thing; it’s either a non-intelligent, random application of forces that either kills you or makes a terrible destructive mess, or it clouds your ability to understand complex systems and predict the future. In both cases, order is the opposite of chaos, and is preferable.

In religious philosophy, chaos is usually seen as the opposite of logos, which is an order-inducing, intelligent spiritual force identified with God. In this imagery, chaos is seen as satanic destruction, or a Dionysian force at best, along the lines of drunken debauchery and madness, opposed by the Apollonian force of reason, order and self-possessed approach to life. Again, chaos is seen as a bad thing, and its opposite as a good thing. Similar imagery exists in Hinduism, where Kali is the force of chaos, and Shiva is a force of yoga – control, self-possession and transcendence.

But all of that might merely reflect the human desire for control and predictability in a world that doesn’t necessarily care whether they live or die.

If we step away from the human perspective for a while, and think from a position of self-realization of brahman, we see that I Am beyond name or form. I Am the totality of existence, reality, consciousness and bliss. I Am beyond limitations and duality, in Me there is no up different from down, no left different from right, and light is not defined through contrast with darkness.

In short, God is Chaos. God is the ultimate reality that is unbound by limitation of any kind, the limitless potential that is and can be anything, and this world is its polar opposite – it’s defined through limitations, through rules, through contrast; essentially, the more you have of this world, the more you have obstacles to God, because God is freedom, and freedom doesn’t work well if you have all those rules and limitations in the way. You can try to manifest God in this world by intuitively following a path where God is more present – usually through greater consciousness, reality and loving-kindness, but that is to God what a reflection of the Moon on a clear body of water is to the Moon. When you look at things this way, this world of Order is basically telling God that He can’t be both A and NOT A at once, it’s trying to limit things and impose order in ways that are inherently incompatible with the very nature of God. Suddenly, this no longer looks like a juxtaposition between the Dionysian chaos and the Apollonian order; rather, it looks like a juxtaposition between creative freedom and rule-based fascism, where order is not a good thing. What if the chaos of God doesn’t shred the frog in the blender; what if it shreds your limitations, your inability to get past blaming yourself for your sins in some static frame of mind where you oscillate between fucking up and self-destruction? What if chaos of God allows you to see many apparently contradictory sides of a situation, to see yourself as both the villain and the victim, and simultaneously as the transcendental, higher reality that is within both, and yet untouched by either, except as the eternal witness of space, time, name and form? What if this holy, transcendental chaos is the only thing that can save you from the quagmire of order, from the infernal rules that demand a pound of flesh for transgressions that arise naturally in the environment that is inherently opposed to the nature of God? That’s the other way of looking at Shiva – He is not an Apollonian deity of order, He is the destroyer of limitations in a dance of Chaos, God as the freedom from limitations that make this world appear real to the deluded.

What if the only way to know true freedom is to embrace Chaos in a dance that defies limitation, that defies static principles and ideas, that allows song to become a bird to become light that is beyond, and up and down are meaningless; what if we need to stop thinking in terms of fruit in a bowl on a table, where all three are distinct and separate, and embrace the idea that the entire scene is rendered and exists only as a structure in a computer’s memory, or, to be quite specific, within the mind of God? You can think of things as distinct and separate all you want, but all those distinct and separate things you perceive on your monitor start looking very similar when you inspect your computer’s memory with a hex editor, and yes, up and down are meaningless.