Cosmic Order, Cosmic Chaos

There's nothing right or wrong with the details of anyone's life. There's nothing wrong with wanting anything. Alchemy simply offers the opportunity to become more fully conscious of why we have what we have, and why we want what we want. We all "manifest" all the time - consciously or unconsciously. Maybe we do it through elegant, ritual intention. Maybe we do it through stray thoughts of wishing and longing. Alchemy provides a space to become more aware of our manifesting habits, so that what we magnetize into our lives serves (us, others) in the best possible way.

When we move along the tracks of life from a place of comfortable habit, it’s easiest to hold on to and move from our massive collection of un-inspected beliefs. All those beliefs create a sense of order. Even if they reflect in a person’s outer life as misery, there’s still comfort in that ordered sense of reality. A big part of alchemical practice involves creating moments in time where that order is upended into a kind of chaos.

Chaos has taken on a negative connotation these days. But in quantum terms, chaos is the opportunity when countless possibilities are present in one time and space. In China, the ideogram representing chaos is sometimes also used to represent the innocence of a child. So entering chaos involves touching down in a state of being that precedes all conditioning. In a way, this chaos is the answer to the Zen Koan “show me your original face before you were born”. It can roll mind back to before it’s most fundamental beliefs - in self and other, good and bad - to wipe the slate clean for a radically new view of reality.

We roll dice once. And when they land, mind recognizes what side lays facing up - and locks that image in place. Through some process of becoming open, those dice get tossed up into the air again. They can land and be anything. They can hang suspended in space. They can become sparrows. We need only release our fixed beliefs to invite something new. This opening doesn’t guarantee upgrades or improvements, but it dislodges a person from a fixed position in the old and stagnant. In pure quantum theory, the moment a human looks at the dice, reality must settle on one choice. But alchemy offers a slightly different idea. If a practitioner can relax their mind into a sense of surrender and openness, chaos can play itself out - offering up new choices, new beliefs - until one comes along that has a clear sense of rightness to it. This rightness is so evident that the witnessing mind doesn’t need to “choose” the new belief. It simply seeds itself as a new and more true belief, while the witnessing mind comes along for the ride.

This is where another principle of alchemy comes into play: the law of vibration. According to the Hermetic tradition (and modern science), the whole world is made of vibration. “The only difference between all manifestations of consciousness or mind, be it matter, thoughts, emotions, things or circumstance, is their corresponding rate of vibration.” Frequencies of higher and lower vibration don’t sit well together. According to alchemical tradition, the higher vibration has “directive power” over the lower frequencies. In other words, when the old has been set aside to make room for any of countless possibilities of the new, the option with the “highest vibration” has a big advantage in becoming the one which reality offers up as the best choice. By this understanding, the huntun isn’t a chaos in which anything can happen. It’s a chaos with an underlying, hidden order: at these quantum crossroads of endless possibility, the highest vibration determines the path forward.

The key then is to attune oneself to the highest possible frequency. In most alchemical and spiritual traditions, the name for this is “the Divine”. Spiritual practice offers ways to forge a deep sense of the divine - in mind, in the felt sense of the body, in your emotions - in every way possible. When that sense is rooted,  a practitioner can hold a steady invitation that it will be this Divine part (of oneself and of the world) that will step forward at points of internal huntun crossroads to offer up the best possible way forward. In this view of things, our early childhood conditioning is more likely to be of lower vibration. It’s likely to have moss and rot on it. It’s tendency is more likely to lend itself to limitation rather than freedom and expansion. By contrast, the new ways forward that seem to bubble up from the Divine point the way to greater freedom and maturity - as much as we can handle at any given moment.