Life is mundane between the chaos and chaotic between the mundane. We seek chaos to escape the mundane, in order to return to the mundane. The chaos is the seemingly uninvited emotions, for which order is required to ameliorate them.
In a world governed by 5-star review systems, extreme opinions and generally ego-centric behaviour, there is a propensity to neglect the mundanity and seek out a five-star experience or lambast a 1 star experience. When we spend much of our time in a state ranging from 2-4 stars, we seldom seek to write home about it. Yet it has always taken a journey to achieve this disposition.
Those that are determined to follow a certain path without taking a step back to observe their decision are ignorantly following through with a decision they made long ago in order to maintain some control over their life. The human disposition to control life is laughable and can result in real heartache when it leads you to a cliff edge. Life is chaos and free flowing. Control breeds expectations. When things do not pan out as intended, the wise among us choose to learn from it and move on, the egomaniacal control freak within us believes they know better or hopes for a better outcome and seek to force a resolution through because they refuse to be beaten. We must decide for ourselves which path to choose.
Many seek to put their faith in god, because they understand that they have no control, yet many have no understanding of god and the symbiotic nature in which we must do our work and have faith that god is doing its work.
We are just animals with an unknown depth of consciousness, able to somewhat communicate our emotions to one another through language. We have evolved into this species through our own collective will we call evolution and merely trying to make sense of this preposterous and irrational manifestation. We seek to have control though understanding ourselves through binary systems, without giving credence to our true chaotic nature. With an awareness of the quantum field, a fundamental backdrop of reality, our entire perspective should have evolved to an acceptance of randomness rather than seeking to understand it in our traditional binary model. While knowledge is power, acceptance is freedom. With acceptance, we no longer seek happiness, nor do we suffer in sadness, we accept our experience as experience. We cannot observe both sides of the coin at once, but we can accept that there is another side, when we are faced with only one side.
Life is chaos. Religion, the economy, the legal system etc. contain a set of principles to maintain order through control of large population, but it cannot prevent chaos. The order settles the mind by limiting it to the confines of the ideology. Step outside this and you are in a larger arena full of ever evolving ideologies, clashing with each other moment by moment. A beautiful and unpredictable dance.
We project mathematical models and scientific theories into minute parts of the cosmos, yet they do not align with other theories. We are all observing the same world, but seeking to label it in different ways. These labels are becoming more sophisticated with time, yet further removed from truth.
Desire & Control
In much simplified Freudian terms, you have the ID which are your internal desires, and the superego, which is your moral conscience i.e. how you interact with wider society. Finally, you have the ego, which acts as a negotiator between these processes. If everyone followed the whims of their ID, the world would be a depraved mass of chaos in which this society wouldn’t exist and debauchery would ensue. Whereas if everyone maintained the social order dictated by their superego, it would be tantamount to living as robots, which would probably feel extremely depressing due to the lack of exploring our inner desires. Some feel oppressed by the state and become anarchists and some are grateful o the state for bringing order to the masses. Why can't there be room for both?
Personal
In the west there is a social pressure to fit in to this box of the ‘ideal person’, but no one is box shaped. Creativity, sexual fantasies and other personal interests are kept locked away, through fear that they would upset the balance of society or your position in society. Conversely, the hedonists among us, whose sole purpose is to indulge to no end at any cost, with no real consideration for the wider society wake up one day and wonder why they have been abandoned.
Out of the comfort comes discomfort and vice versa. An endless cycle but not one to despair of. The more your embrace it the more you can enjoy the ride, because once you acknowledge that you are in a ‘chaotic place’ you know there is a counterbalance. You were not born into a vacuum, you have previously experienced joy or happiness. Acknowledging this means that the work to return can start - something that the psychotherapist Carl Jung referred to as shadow work. I have personally experienced depression and ecstasy, perhaps of equal measure. However, you cannot experience one without the contrast of the other, much like a sine wave. The only place we can truly experience either is outside our comfort zone and in a place where expectation does not exist. Everyone craves some level of control. Some want to control others, some want to control the weather, but ultimately everyone wants control over their life. This comes with a serving of neuroticism, which is a form of anxiety of losing control of a situation. You can try and implement routines and rules in order to control your life but ultimately you can’t control transport, health, other people’s emotions or your emotions. These are just some of the things that will upset your day that you can only accept as out of your control. Some people however have little control. No self-control with indulgences, no routine to ease them through the day. They are constantly exposed to chaos and disorder which can lead them to the same place of despair as the overly neurotic. A routine can provide some semblance of flow and provides comfort but should not be relied upon for your mental stability.
When we set ourselves superficial targets in life or work, we have created an expectation and we are seeking to control the outcome. If this target is not achieved there is a feeling of failure, yet when achieved there is a feeling of 'what's next?'. If you have a true desire to achieve something born out of divinity, it will not go away, no matter how few steps you take towards achieving it. There is no feeling of failure if something has not been achieved in a certain timeframe. Yet, if we are lazy about achieving it, we will feel that we are letting ourselves down.
How to find balance?
If you truly accept that you are powerless in trying to control the forces of the universe and thus your destiny, feelings, thoughts etc. there is a sense of relief in submitting to a higher power - a power beyond your sensory field and scope of understanding. When chaos arrives and begins disturbing you, then it is time to take control, in doing the work to find your way back to equanimity. You cannot escape these forces, so it is better to try and learn to observe them and make adjustments accordingly.
