Did you know you can turn any of the short quotes on our site into an e-card?
Simply locate the quote you'd like to send, and if it fits on our card, you'll see an option for Send as greeting on the left side of the quote.
Or, if you'd like a more classic Greeting card, you can visit our Gaia Greeting Gallery.
That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that is has occurred within us.
I never much liked the concept of inflexible structure in a system. It always made my skin crawl. I always felt like it suggested the ommittance of something rather important.
I've finaly realized that the missing "something" is the basis for all existence.
You can stay at home and be happily introspective or you can make the choice, step out, and be the Butterfly that begins the tempest that changes the world.
Me
Chaos is by it's very nature unspeakable. And yet, the best (and only kind worth mentioning) sort of human relationships are all about different ways of giving voice to the unspeakable and fashioning a private language that stills our innate restlessness.
Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
Under the right circumstances, it is not difficult to have a powerful experience of meditation, to taste the indescribable peace, bliss, rapture, and stillness of the Ground of Being-like a still forest pool, in which you sink ever more deeply, where your mind is not moving at all. It is very important to taste the inherent liberation of your own infinite depth, but that kind of experience in and of itself will not necessarily teach you how to have a liberated relationship to the chaos of your own mind and emotions. Sinking to the depths of your own self is always profoundly inspiring, but it's not enough. It is equally important to know how to stay on the surface when a storm is raging and have no relationship to the chaos. And that is what the deliberate practice of meditation is all about. For most of us, learning to do that is ultimately a source of greater confidence and soul strength than the spontaneous experience of infinite depth. And in fact, from an absolute or nondual perspective, being at the surface is no different from being at the very bottom of the pool. Even if it doesn't necessarily feel that way, in time you will come to understand that it is the same. That is the secret of freedom.
One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the
Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly
afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said
YES?
"O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of
Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift
a heavy burden from my heart!"
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON’T SOUND WELL.
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain.
Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with
injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers
imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT
TO DO?
"But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!"
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned Herself into an aspirin commercial and
left the Polyfather stranded alone with his species.
Within a change process is a period of not having the old way of thinking, while not yet integrating the new way of thinking, which is the chaos of creativity at an important juncture.
May you live in interesting times.
When the great Tao is forgotten,
goodness and piety appear.
When the body's intelligence declines,
cleverness and knowledge step forth.
When there is no peace in the family,
filial piety begins.
When the country falls into chaos,
patriotism is born.
Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm.
And what You are is the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 1st-person perspective as the great I-I, the great Self, the Witness of this page, and this room, and this universe, and everything in it, witnessing it ALL with a passionate equanimity that leaves you alone as the Unmoved Mover. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 2nd-person perspective as the Great Thou, the Great Other, before whom you bow in an infinite act of complete release and savage surrender and ecstatic submission, and receive in return the entire Kosmos as your blessing and your forgiveness and your eternal grace. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal in its 3rd-person perspective as the Great Perfection, the Holy Spirit, the Great web of Life in all its infinite perfection and dynamic chaos, its pulsating pulsars and exploding nebulae, its stars and galaxies and planets and oceans, through which runs the common blood and bears the single heart of an Eros seeking its own higher wholeness, and always finding it, and seeking yet again, and always finding it yet once more, because You always know that You are here, don't You? And so in fun and sport and play and delight, and remorse and terror and agony and respite, You throw yourself out to start to play all over again, in this, the deepest part of You that gives birth to galaxies within Your heart, lets the stars light up as the neurons in Your brain, sing songs of love and delight to the submission and surrender of Your own good night, and all of this within the space that is You, the space that You feel as Your own I-I, or this ever-present Witness of the forms of Your own play.
And in the great I-I, as You witness the Forms of Your own play as the entire Kosmos - in that very moment, which is this timeless Now, a Now that has no beginning and no end, there is simultaneously Spirit in its 1-st person and 2nd=person and 3rd-person forms, the Great I and We and It feel each other, and in that unitary seamless sizzling Now, which is this very moment before you do anything at all, it is, quite simply over.
Which means, it has, quite simply, begun.
What if the evolution of consciousness, rather than an adaptive quirk of the brain, was actually the central drama, purpose and point, of our whole show? There are, we shall see, philosophers and psychoanalysts, mystics and physicists who propose that this is the case. Inner development is an eccentric process, advancing in certain jumps, in revelatory sparks and fizzles--each person is his or her own private universe. Strengthened by suffering and crisis, consciousness does does not reach a new intensity according to any predictably linear progress that can be graphed by the tools of modern science. It follows its own wayward path.
What if this deepening of awareness takes place in the margins, in the nooks and crannies of contemporary life, like a weed flowing out of the thinnest sidewalk crack? Could it be, as the somnolent masses and the professional classes press forward in the old direction, seeking the same old rewards, that the new thing self-organizes out of chaos and noise, asserts itself in fragility and silence, then takes root and vitalizes until it suddenly manifests as established truth? If something like this was the case, we would be surprised at first-- even shocked--but then it might occur to us: Perhaps it has always happened this way.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
ENTROPY: The degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. • Order is created and controlled by intelligence. Entropy occurs in the physical world without control by intelligence. Synonyms: Chaos, Confusion, Entropy, Disarray, Disharmony, Disintegration, Disorder, Disorganization, Disruption, Incoherence, Incohesive, Jumble, Noncohesive, Nonintegration, Mess, Morass, Muddle, Slackness, Sloppiness.
Orlog, The Norns' Chant- In the midst of darkness, light; In the midst of death, life; In the midst of chaos, order. In the midst of order, chaos; In the midst of life, death; In the midst of light, darkness. Thus has it ever been, Thus is it now, and Thus shall it always be.
At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
True it is that many find some of the speech on the Internet to be offensive, and amid the din of cyberspace many hear discordant voices that they regard as indecent. The absence of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put it with such resonance at the hearing: "What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos." Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. For these reasons, I without hesitation hold that the [Communications Decency Act] is unconstitutional on its face.
What is shape without form; What is chaos without order; What is life without death; What is friendship without love; What isn't?
Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Chaos is only that instance whose repetition we have not yet discovered.
If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolute night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal . . . In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh-not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.
What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.
All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.
The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations.
Where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand; For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce, Strive here for mast'ry.
Help
Sign In
