Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware, pg. 24
I am going to throw a few words and phrases at you:
- Disorder
- Chaos
- Entropy
- Apoptosis
- Decay
- Disintegrate
- Death
- Dark Night of the Soul
You might react to each of these words in a common way. You might dislike them. Find them to be unpleasant. Label them as negative and determine them to be something that should be avoided. Am I right? None of these words are something that you would actively seek in a worldly experience are they?
What if I told you that all had something in common? These words that represent certain experiences are absolutely necessary in some form or another for your growth, your transformation, and your evolution. Do you buy into that? If so do these words still ring with the same negative connotation then?
Let me remind you, first of all...that words are just pointers...leading to an experience beyond the image or concept the word evokes. But in order to understand that experience from the limited mind we will have to understand the words the mind limits experience to.
Disorder, Chaos
When we think of these words we might think of a mess, something horrid beyond our control. We might imagine a disaster of some kind with things all blown out of order, scattering this way and that in random fashion. We might think of something we have no control over taking over our experience. This can lead to feelings of repulsion, fear or even panic. Needing to feel in control, safe within our little comfort zones, we may assume it is important to avoid disorder and chaos at all costs.
Yet chaos is unavoidable. Crazy mixed up things happen around us and to us all the time.
Chaos In Extreme Forms:
Our present global situation reflects chaos. Right now we are in the middle of a pandemic....and the beginning of a subsequent economic crisis. The ultimate form of chaos that can occur in the human mind also ran amuck in a neighboring province a few weekends ago leading to the violent destruction of life and complete disequilibrium.
Disorder in Lesser Forms:
Looking around my house I see what is happening to my "actual" comfort zone. It is a mess. If I do not put great effort into maintaining some form of order...it looks the way it does now. The cats shed their fur and it lands on the furniture. The dogs track their muddy paws all over the place and if I don't chase them around the house with a mop...their is disorder on my floors. People come in and drop their shoes and outer wear at the door...disorder. If I don't close all the books I have open on my desk and around me...there is more disorder.
Chaos and Disorder Are Inevitable
Sh*& happens! Even terrible, terrible sh*& and there is little to nothing we can do stop it or control it. We can exert a great deal of energy into trying to prevent it but if we are lax in that energy even a tiny bit...chaos and disorder will prevail. Why? Because it is the natural law for things to return to chaos.
Say what crazy lady?
Entropy: the Natural Law of Chaos
I want to introduce you to another word: Entropy. Entropy is disorder and chaos. According to Merriam-Webster, Entropy is the degradation of matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity....a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder. It is also a very natural and necessary component in thermodynamics. It is the natural law of things, then, to return to chaos and it requires energy expenditure to resist that chaos or disorder.
We do not "like" chaos and disorder and tend to put it on our "things to avoid " list. We work real hard to create comfort zones that will protect us from it. We seek to make changes in our external world that will limit or push away chaos and disorder. We put a great deal of energy into attempting to control the world "out there" so it doesn't interfere with the world inside our comfort zones. We depend on our worlds having order so we have a sense of order inside. Push chaos and disorder away so we can be peaceful and happy.
How is that working for you? are you able to stop the world from doing the crazy things it does? How exhausted are you from trying to build better comfort zones and pushing any idea of chaos and disorder away from you? Are you completely successful in keeping order in your comfort zone?
And what about your physical body? If you see yourself as a physical body you might be doing all you can to prevent its disintegration from illness or age. You might be fearfully and chronically trying to prevent its death. How is that working for you?
Apoptosis, Decay and Disintegration
Can you prevent aging? I assure you ...you can't. I hate to tell you this but your body is constantly changing, disintegrating and gulp...dying. I am going to introduce another word to you Apoptosis. Right now, as you read this, you have billions of cells in your body dying and they will continue to do so every hour. This is Apoptosis, a natural and "orderly" planned death of cells to balance the new cells being created in cell division . Your body is constantly disintegrating, decaying and dying. As is the natural law.
Look around you... all things are doing the same. My cat is shedding hair no longer needed. She does not have the same coat she had last year...it is completely different. The trees are just starting to bud, the buds will die off to form blossoms, these blossoms will die off to form fruit and that fruit will die off to release seed. Rodents are dying in my yard, (unfortunately partly due to my cat who will not keep a bell colour on) their bodies will, with the help of billions of bacteria and other microorganisms, disintegrate and decay into the earth and that will enrich the soil with wonderful nutrients for things to grow. The world is in a constant state of dying and renewing. It is a state of evolution. As are you.
So it all looks so random and chaotic...all of that stuff in our outer experience. But it really isn't. It is following a very natural law and this natural law was devised by Something that sees and knows the order in it, even if we can't. It helps us to shed what we do not need to gain the awareness of what we do.
Death and the Dark Night of the Soul
This brings me to the last two concepts on that list I threw at you. When we define death...we need to be good and sure we are referring only to physical matter. All the laws I spoke of so far deal only with physical matter...with form, our objective experience and I guess we can include in there ...our mental constructs, thoughts and feelings. Those are the things subject to change, disorder, chaos, entropy, apoptosis, decay, disintegration and death. They are all just objective experience.
Who we really are and what is truly important, however, is exempt from these laws.
The Dark Night of the Soul occurs when we experience the uncomfortable transformation prior to getting beyond the focus of the physical world or understanding...when we begin to lose those parts of us that we do not need but have invested so heavily in ( things that helped us to build an identity of "little me") ...when we go through all this painful change and chaos and disorder that we experience and come to realize that what we perceive to be losing was not serving us anyway...that a doorway is opening for us to walk through to a higher level of evolution. Our transcending requires change...requires some disorder and chaos, a loss of what we thought was real...so we can know what it is.
No Effort Required
The necessary death of transformation is like the shedding of an outer shell so we can be with and Be...That which was always beneath that shell, beneath the chaos...unperturbed , unchanged or unaffected by any of it. And that is awareness. It requires no effort...just a letting go , a falling into the natural order of things.
Awareness never experiences its own appearance or disappearance, its own beginning or ending, its own birth or death. (Spira, page 31)
All these words that seem like things we must avoid are actually pointers to our own evolution.
All is well.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entropy
Eckhart Tolle ( April 25, 2020) The Hidden Harmony Beneath Disorder and Chaos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsGSBybe31g
Spira, R. ( 2017) Being Aware of Being Aware. (The essence of Meditation Series) New Harbinger. Kindle Edition
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