From My High Horse

The Wisdom Found in Chaos

What is the meaning to be found in the midst of this current chaos?  

For the answers and, yes, there are many answers to such a question, let’s take some guidance from the ancients—the Alchemists and the Olympian Deities.  

Chaos is from where all life originated and continues to be a part of our everydayness as seen here in this simple example.  For our purposes let us look at a seed.  When a seed in planted in the earth, the prima materia, it enters into chaos.  By this we mean, chaos as the unordered energy of all potential.  The seed must die in its seed form and, by letting go of its life as a seed, it surrenders to the new life of a plant with roots, stem, and leaves. Eventually, the plant will produce a blossom which ultimately produces another seed.  In this way, the cycle of life-death-life evolves.  This example can be applied to the Axiom of Maria Phophetissa: From the one (seed) comes the two (roots and foliage) and from the two comes the three (the container of the earth with catalytic influences of air, wind, sun, and water) and from the fourth (a new plant) comes the one (another new seed).

How does this apply to us in this time of crisis?

As chaos embodies all potential, we are able to recognize its importance in the process of paradigm changes.  Some of the attributes we can mine from chaos are both its sin-concealing and wisdom-producing attributes, just to mention the two most relevant in our times.

The purpose of chaos for us is, in part, to learn the discipline of discernment, which in essential for mining deep into the chaos in search of the order that can emerge from it. 

We have all wondered and laughed at the obsession with buying toilet paper out of the fear of not having what we consider essential, forgetting that many generations of people have existed before without toilet paper.  Knowing the influence of the chakra energy systems, we recognize the location of the first chakra, the energy center for survival, life-force energy, which is located at the base of the spine, (also the location of the anus).  So, our toilet paper issues may not be such a strange obsession after all. 

During this forced time for self-reflection, we hope to enter into a place of discernment of what is essential and unique to each one of us.  Unfortunately, this opportunity has, in many lives, been usurped by the mania of acquiring more and more knowledge and ignoring or defending against Wisdom.  As we evolve in consciousness the pursuit of Wisdom becomes paramount over the accumulation of mass amounts of knowledge.  Wisdom allows and directs us toward the divine within us, promoting the experiences of co-creation. Knowledge, for the mere sake of knowing, encourages our separation from the divine.  This is a time of much-needed changes on our planet and within ourselves. We are all in agonizing labor as we give birth to what will be a new world. How timely that we can use this much-needed freeze-frame to embrace some reflections on what is essential. The inflation of the mania, that we know was being lived out throughout the world, must now give way to the deflation forced upon us by this freeze-frame, providing space for mining the meanings for each of us.

So, this time of a freeze-frame, in essence, a world-wide time out if we allow, promotes an opportunity for the self-reflection necessary to unplug from the numerous enmeshments found to our unconscious submission to external influences. Most importantly, this time out provides the opportunity to discover both the enmeshments we’ve been involved in and what is unique about our own life.

Many are obsessed with the desire to return to how things were just a few weeks ago.  Unless we each realize that a return to what was in the past is a regressive move, we are destined to continue living out polarizations, such as powerless/ powerful, have/have not, and dominion/surrender.  Remember what happened in the Bible to Lot’s wife when she did not follow the command to not look back?  She was immobilized, turned into a pillar of salt.  Our task is to look forward, being grounded in the present, not to look back.

Greek mythology instructs us through the twelve Deities found on Mount Olympus with the archetypal energies found in each of them: 

  • Hera—Family, Women, childbirth, and Marriage; 
  • Hestia—Home, Hearth, and the State; 
  • Zeus—Sky, Lightning, Thunder, Order, and Justice; 
  • Poseidon—Sea, Storms, Earthquakes, and Horses; 
  • Demeter—Harvest, Agriculture, Fertility and Sacred Law; 
  • Aphrodite—Love, Beauty, and Sexuality; 
  • Hephaestus—Fire, Metal Working, Stone Masonry, Forges, the Art of Sculpture, Technology, and Blacksmiths; 
  • Ares—War;  
  • Athena—Wisdom, Handicrafts, and War; 
  • Artemis—The Moon, chastity, Wild Animals, the Hunt, the Wilderness;
  • Apollo—Sun, Light, Oracles, Knowledge, Healing, Diseases, Music  Poetry, Songs, Dance, Archery, Herds and Flocs, and Protector of Young;
  • Hermes—Boundaries, Roads and Travelers, Commerce, Thieves, Athletes, Shepherds, Psychopomp and Divine Messenger.

Some have said that archetypes are the organs of the psyche, both the universal and the collective psyche.  If so, then it is the function of evolving consciousness to bring the influence of archetypes into the everyday awareness of individuals.  Only in this manner can we move into a relationship with these archetypal energies and move away from being possessed by them.  Extreme archetypal possession in individuals can be seen in psychotic behaviors, acting out in the realm of non-consensual realities.  On the global scale, certainly in terms of destructive climate change to our planet, this acting out has produced great harm.

  1. Let’s explore the tasks needed to be constructive both globally and individually in these tumultuous times: 
    Let us be open to the chaos, moving away from the denial that has been most dominant in our recent history. 
  2. Search out where polarizations exist, both globally and in ourselves.  
  3. Identify where these polarizations have failed to be influenced by the catalytic forces, and thus, bringing about the purification (premature loss of containment) that we are now living.  
  4. Bring conscious Wisdom, not mere knowledge, into our lives with the intention of living a more holistic life on a multifaceted planet that we can be in creation with, rather than the paradigm of domination over nature.

Pandora, the gift of the feminine given to humanity by Zeus due to his anger with Prometheus, could not conceal all the sufferings that would come into the lives of humanity.  But, she did reserve the attribute of Hope.  Now, as in no other time in our history is this attribute of Hope more important.  Not whimsical surrender to blind faith, but Hope that emerges from the Wisdom found in each individual’s role in creating the new world—a world of emerging harmony and collaboration—the perhaps the astrological Age of Aquarius.

© 2020 Lois E. Wilkins, PhD, APRN