Is the world really a chaotic place?
by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
The world seems like a chaotic, mad, crazy place.
The 1960s, for example
In the 1960s and 70s there was a popular cliché people used to say —“Stop the world, I wanna get off” —that summed up the prevailing social insecurity and confusion. The seemingly chaotic world brought to life the production of films reflecting the craziness and widespread fear of the times, including: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming; The Great Race; Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines; What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?; Catch-22; and others.
A common denominator in these types of films was mass confusion and fear, back-stabbing, unpredictability, unkindness, and frenetic energy. Humor in te movies was an attempt to keep the madness at bay by laughing in its face.
Life going in different directions
In the 1960s, billions of earthlings felt that life was tearing them in two directions at once: hope and despair. We could be here today and gone tomorrow at the push of a button. This created an existential crisis. Besides the mass confusion, the era was also a promising time of fast-paced expansion in most major segments of life. And there were technological advances from remote control to space travel, but these further destabilized the mind. The 1960s gave rise to new forms of mass media, transportation, a boom in the clothing and fashion industry, space-age weaponry, rocket science, and so on. But there was war going on at the same time. We had just stepped out of the horrors of WWII only to jump right back into a conflict with North Korea; and then when that was over, in less than a decade we were at war in Viet Nam.
Society was rapidly changing from a prevailing straight-laced conservative attitude with all sorts of behaviors and inclinations swept under the rug to one in which all pretense was being quickly eroded by protests, a call for women’s rights and human and civil rights, the sexual revolution, packaged foods with throw-away containers; the plastic revolution; a rapidly-rising recreational drug culture, the influx of spiritual ideas and practices from the East, fear of the communist “menace” and its ensuing blacklisting and charges of treason; and music that belonged to the youth and to which people over the age of 25 could hardly wrap their heads around. And there was the Cold War.
That’s a little historical context from the 1960s, an era suffering, hope, despair, conflict, and craziness. Sounds an awful lot like CHAOS. However pronounced the social and political madness was at that time, the truth is that the world has never made any sense for most people, because it appears to be a senseless, random, unstable reality where the worst thing could be right around the corner.
But let’s not get stuck in the 1960s, because all eras present a life that seems chaotic and senseless to most people.
The egoic mind sits in judgment
What makes life seem so chaotic — and do we really live in a senseless, unpredictable, alarming, unfair reality? It is only the conditioned mind that has perspective. Things are the way they are; but it is the sense of self that interprets events, words, phenomena, and actions according to purpose, unfairness, and instability. If we look more closely we find that life is actually a unified system.
The conscious mind, which is the sense of self, which may also be called the ego, egoic mind, egoic self, is that which we take ourselves to be. This is the false mind, because it is the creation of psychological conditioning by ideas of other people. It is in default mode, accepting the concepts, opinions, and beliefs of influential people and fashioning one’s world view, sense of purpose, and persona out of them. The egoic self was conditioned by the thoughts of others since the earliest age, and it is full of desires and opinions. It constantly desires to have pleasure and avoid pain. Anything that threaten o opposes this desire is upsetting and perceived to be wrong. When this desire is not met, the egoic self becomes angry, irritated, frustrated, depressed, anxious, and so on. If the world is not in perfect harmony with the self’s desires then it is perceived as chaotic.
The egoic self obscures reality
Beneath, or prior to, the egoic self is consciousness, which is the totality of all that is, a unified whole. We may say, then, that the egoic self is a veil that obscures the truth about what life really is. Consciousness only makes sense to a clear mind that is devoid of the overlay of the self. Everything is as it should be, according to this clear mind, with all of the dualistic qualities and expressions of consciousness interacting and creating on a perpetual basis. What seems like mayhem to the egoic self is a flowing system of cause and effect and equilibrium of consciousness.
The egoic self is a belief system, and as such, it believes that it is the doer, thinker, actor, and creator, when in actuality it is consciousness that has these capabilities. Consciousness is also a system of sorts, but it has no purpose or agenda, just as the ocean has no agenda to move toward the beach, crash onto the sand, erode rock formations, carry moisture to the coast, collect water from rivers, and so on. All happens as the natural course of events in a dynamic and complex reality.
Is life really chaotic? It is only the egoic self that believes so.
