From a seed, a tree grows. Fruit encapsulates a seed. But at the center of an apple there is no seed, no fruit, only air. From our perspective, there is nothing.
From Brian Browne Walker’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:
“Thirty spokes meet at a hollowed-out hub;
the wheel won’t work without its hole.
A vessel is moulded from solid clay;
its inner emptiness makes it useful.” (Lao Tzu, 11).
At the center of all ordered things, there is chaos. Not modern disorganized chaos, but the Greek chasm of chaos; the Middle English primordial formlessness of chaos.
Thus is the canon of Chaos Magick. Before there is something, there is nothing, and out of that nothing arises everything. Before there is God, there is the Unknown God.
For a Chaos Magician (Chaote), belief is formed from nothing. Our view of reality is a belief; based on a faith in sensory information and the ability of the brain to interpret it. Belief is faith in a distinct set of the symbols that form our reality. The paradigms--mental models based on interconnected symbols--through which we view our existence can be crossed and changed. Chaotes call this “paradigm shifting.” It is through this that Chaotes will cross religious symbols, invoking Japanese gods during a Wiccan Esbat ceremony, let’s say, or offering special prayers to the Abrahamic God in the different spokes of a Native American medicine wheel.
Paradigm shifting is especially useful for a mystic--one who seeks an understanding, awareness, or oneness with a greater reality. It allows the spiritual explorer new lenses through which can be seen the different shadows of reality, to journey down different paths--and minds!--and peer off of them into the darkness beyond.
I exist in Chaos. My body is the sensory razor that splits and categorizes it into symbols that my mind can experience. I am the Tao. I am the Everything!
“Out of silent subtle mystery emerge images.
These images coalesce into forms.
Within each form is contained the seed
And essence of life.
Thus do all things emerge and expand out
of darkness and emptiness.” (Lao Tzu, 21)
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About Me
- Guitar's Cry
- Poetic and philosophical, I roam the woods of Maine wandering and wondering.
2 comments:
Excellent post, Mike. Would you say that chaos or the way of the chaote is "emptiness" as suggested by the first Lao Tzu excerpt?
What do you think "inner emptiness" represents?
And isn't it also true that before there can be nothing, there must be something?
Thanks, Brendan!
I would say that Chaos is neither emptiness or fullness. It is nothing, but nothing is everything until distintions are made, wouldn't you say?
Inner emptiness is the absence (or, more practically, pretended absence) of preconceived notions. It is the erasing of a blackboard so that I may see it for what it is, then adding onto it again so that my inner world--now full--will be wondrous again. I believe this is the essence of meditation.
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