Humanity and Order/Chaos Harmonization

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I've been hearing the topic brought up lately, in part by how much people are bringing up Colin Wilson these days but I'm also continuously hearing Jordan Peterson mention this one as well whether in his interviews or the Maps of Meaning lectures.

The idea is simply this - there are a lot of spectrums of polarity that we feel our best when we're sitting right in the middle of. Too much order amounts to tedium, ie. doing the same exact things to the point of misery. Too much chaos, I liked Dr. Peterson's example, is getting dropped off in the jungle somewhere - literally or metaphorically, a house where any doorway could be trip-wired, any set of stairs could give way to a pit, and where any wall could be a passageway for something lurking behind the walls to get at you. In one case things are dependable to the point of stagnation, in the other next to nothing is dependable.

It seems like a really important thing for people to cerebrally get a grip on because all too often the relative pain-sensor aspect of our limbic systems which attempts to push us toward action and away from wherever we're at is craving some type of equilibrium that it couldn't get in its present environment. What seems quite true about the human desire to actualize is we seem to have at least two major categories of subjective activity - a) desire to balance/equilibrate what we have within our sphere of influence in a healthy manner, b) a desire to expand outward once we've balanced what we have to then balance that as well. The incentive for that sort of growth and encompassing greater territory I think comes from a desire we have for power. That desire for power isn't just for the sake of applying that power over other people - first and foremost it's about having more options, especially options that we like more than the ones we have.

I'll abstain from getting into the Kabbalistic side of this card's meaning too much but you can see within The Star that you have Isis Urania pouring out jugs of water. The jug of water she's pouring into the pond or lake you could interpret as either effort being poured into chaos or conscious thought being poured into (ie. intending to effect/condition) subconscious activity. Similarly you have the jug being poured onto dry land has five rivulets - the idea seems to be the basic five senses but again you can look at this as the same parallel - ie. subconscious activity pouring into conscious activity (when you think about it anything you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell has been filtered for you which is good - we wouldn't have survived well as a species otherwise) or you could see it as chaos being added to order for the sake of enriching it or affecting nuances and change. If the balance were off in this card you'd see her bulldozing grassland into the pond or pouring out the pond on the grass - neither of which is desirable. Similarly you wouldn't consider Isis Urania to be the conscious self in this picture, really she's the whole that's greater than the sum of its parts as the parts are components of her as a system.

As quick aside - if the above seems a little wishy-washy between conscious/subconscious vs. order/chaos, you may be getting a sneaking sense of this already; the symbol set in this card, like the symbol sets you'd see in any of these cards, stand for what are essentially logical operators. In their primary sense of meaning they tend toward a Jungian type of information or set of hypotheses about the human condition, but you can also see general rules and suggestions related to how human beings subjectively handle stimulus and that link as well between subjective experience and action as well as action and how it's effects reflect back on subjectivity.

I find this topic particularly interesting, as always, because while I see our culture starting to get a bit less lop-sided I still think the better we can do at cleaning up the object/subject imbalance the better the society's we'll have and the better we'll be able to manage the technologies we're coming to possess without the likelihood of dutifully blowing ourselves up based on lack of insight into our own character or slavishly being chased around by external circumstances when really the interrupt-switch can be hit whenever we want, nearly as often as we want, when duty to externalities isn't producing good outcomes.

As I read this, I wonder why different people require different amounts of order versus chaos, and how different people seek out order and chaos differently.

I'd think it's their frailties. Certain types of genetic disorder or injury from life trauma, especially if it's a biological proclivity you have toward certain problems, are very difficult to resolve entirely - maybe even impossible. It usually seems like when a person has an eccentricity in one direction or another there's something beneath the surface of their behavior which causes that to be the best state of balance they can manage.

Sometimes, and there's plenty of variation among people who don't have disorders also. Just take the risk-takers/adventure-seekers versus those who'd rather have only minor changes in their routine. In that case, the person's need for either order or chaos affects their whole personality.

Ah yeah, I've heard something about high and low monoamine oxidase (MAO) with those people - risk takers with high MAO and people who are completely content to sit around and do nothing being low MAO.