One of these is primal, undifferentiated and chaotic. Call it Chaos or the primal flux of creation at a level far beyond the normal ken of human rationality. It is a sphere of impulses so instantaneous as to appear, to normal human view, as chaotic. It probably is not chaotic on its own terms -- order is a relative thing. But it looks like chaos, from the framework of "ordinary" order such as is reflected in a manager's desk trays or the quotidian affairs stuck on the refrigerator door with cure magnets shaped like watermelons. The Chaos Zone, oddly enough, can be partially analyzed. It has two subdivisions, pro- future and con- future chaos.
The second major zone is Order. Like Chaos, order has its positive side (order for better survival and greater communication) and its negative side (order serving the purposes of destruction).
There is a clear and certain division between Order and False Order, as well. False Order includes the calling into being of untrue 'facts' to support a frame of reference, of mis-estimated importances, of fatal exclusions of key realities such as justice, and so on.
False Order, Actual Order, and Chaos are something like the three witches of Mac Beth, except that one of them is on the side of the angels and the only problem is to find which.
False Order is the bugbear of the artist, the genius or the ordinarily sensitive person surrounded by intentional or obsessive alteration of facts.
Mr. Franklin Winters, who is a big frog in a small puddle and a major mercantile influence in the small town of Gator's Breath, Arkansas, is a proponent of false order. It is to his interest (he believes wrongly) to ensure that certain facts are not brought to any public light because of what the public would think about him if they were known. There is nothing inherently wrong OR right in the FACT of this cover-up mentality. Just because he used "undue influence" to procure the contracts that put his income into four figures per week, and paid handsomely for the favor of those contracts, is not in itself a right or a wrong, but simply a fact. Where moral judgment enters in is at two points: first when it is compared to agreements he has made about how it "should" be, moral codes of how he really must conduct himself in this community. Second, judgments enter in to the question when it is viewed with an eye to the breadth of survival value the action imparts. While it augments his own primary survival and the budgets of himself and his family, it has several negative consequences which more than offset the value of these positive factors:
1. The economic frame within which he is operating is falsified, which degrades the basis of his community economically, rendering it open to various viruses and bacteria of an economic sort. In short he has falsified the actual value of things, distorting his own sense of value and the community's.
2. He himself has promoted the virtue of falsification which debases the social currency of his environment in a way which is very hard to revert.
3. The torque of dual reality eventually will either ruin him or break him, by leading him into further obsessions with falsification or driving him mad through the stress of double-tonguing everything he says.
The need to rationalize will seriously reduce his ability to perceive clearly what is there to be seen around him. This will make him more reliant on fixed ideas and irrational assumptions which in turn will not bear the light of clear-eyed inspection. Thus he has ultimately betrayed the society within which he lives by poisoning it's ecology of life-transactions at all levels.
This is the promotion of False Order through a shortcoming in ethical fiber. Obviously, compassion for the frailty of man dictates that it be understood and his actual contributions to life be weighed in the balance in the formation of any judgment; and often no judgments are needed beyond the merciless ones of his own heart.
Susannah Belsop, of Twin Lips, Wisconsin, believes herself to be a Christian. She has been one ever since she discovered God after a particularly nasty and emotional series of encounters with a teen-age paramour in the wooded hills outside the reservoir while in 8th grade, which left her terrified, breathless, inflamed, and scarred.
In her view there is no room for dialog on the issue of who God is, what He wants, what he says and who his associates are (including one son and his immediate family who don't live in the same town).
She makes sure that any young children she associates with are given this Correct Information about the nature of good (endorsed by Jesus and God as she sees them) and bad (all the marketing work of one Evil Spirit who wears red long-johns). The only actual benefit of all this is that it relieves her of the dirty work of actually figuring out what good, bad, spiritual, life and other such terms ARE, if anything. And they surely are something.
Here is a wonderful fountain of False Order. It is just as insidious in its way as the ad work of the Coca-Cola men and the Pontiac promoters who defined the American Way in the Fifties, through the Sixties, and on into the present. It imposes a "reality" which is dysfunctional in terms of what it makes possible. By actually lessening the potential for causative discovery and action of those to whom it is successfully proselytized, the False Order debilitates in order to assuage. This is reminiscent of the antiquated psychiatric argument in support of electro-convulsive therapy: "Well, it makes the patient tractable". False Order induces many interesting states including Sports Hypnotism, Diet Worship, the obsessive, cross-eyed stare of the Mirrored Facepainter, and the compulsive giggle of the Socially Right Responsibility Shirker, to name a few. In any theater of life the promulgation of False Order denies possible communication and debases possible understandings because it imposes a non-genuine rationale. This suborns the intellect, disconnecting it from the heart and the hand; the miracle is that this kind of constitutional ravaging leaves anyone standing, especially in an age when mass reaction-nets of electronic speed are presented as though they were public communication lines.
False Order is routinely built up into waves of agreement by people asserting what Ain't and saying it Is, through dramatization, misconception, confusion, or highly vested interest in falsehood.
Genuine Chaos is in many ways much preferable to False Order. True order, which imposes harmony and expands communication of a genuine order, reinforces- natural affinity and increases understanding, is preferable to either. (But it is scarce; like buggy whips we have all but forgotten how to make them!)
Genuine Chaos, as mentioned, has two sides. The one side has a dark and whirling countenance, and it randomizes certainty to the extent that only confusion remains. In order to fend it off, because it is judged uncomfortable, the usual thing to do is to elect a false Order, some sort of stable information which is entirely un-thought-out, but which serves as a palisade into which the blast of hectic motion embodied in Chaos may not enter.
The other side of genuine Chaos is entirely another matter: it is the highest velocity known to exist, outstripping the speed of light without even trying. It transcends distance at the Speed of Is. It multiplies impulses and reflections of impulses like sunbeams hitting a shop window full of diamonds. Faster than the heart can calculate, the Undifferentiated Creative Wind defies all limit and defines all quality, and sweeps our entire universe over and over each time we blink, breath or swallow.
Here is true Home and the concentric source of all the theaters of hell and heaven, of harmony and confusion, of the light sweet touch of compassionate but sure creativity and the sludgy panic that governs all crime against one's kind. This is the center that powers every other face of every dynamic involvement you have. It is you-before-you-invented-Something-to-Be. It is the flame that sends one of its many, many fingers to fire the heart of your daily affairs -- a mere tiny fraction of its energy enough to power a lifetime of dreams and kindnesses. This is the true chaos of complete harmony, and it is only chaotic when you try to barrel it into the containers of Moment and Place, as it has none and transcends any.
Here is your autobiography at its headwater. Here is You.