One time, at dusk, I was contemplating the lake in Como. A constant movement of darkness and light was defining the water's surface. Defining...
What I look on the water was an everchanging Chaos of darkness and light. The visible dance of individual atoms, yet all of them together. The Absolute.
I can choose to look at a precise particle of light in a defined instant and a particular spot. In doing that, immediately, the movement disappears. As I release the tension, allowing me to do it, I only can see movement. I can't know the exact time and space when a precise particle of light is present. I cannot know if there is darkness or light in that time and space.
Do Chaos and Absolute subsist at the same time? In the same instant? Do Chance and Choice exist at the same time? That possibility has been defined in mathematical terms. Still, it remains out of our perception, barely possible to be imagined by our mind. In our limited human life, every time we meet Chance, we exercise Choice. When we exercise Choice, we exclude Chance – yet, generating chances, hence choices. That is how Chaos and Absolute – like Yin and Yang – subsist together and cannot subsist together. In a disfinite dance, Absolute generates Chaos, and Chaos generates Absolute – yet, they breathe simultaneously.
It is the limits of our mind that makes it impossible for us to perceive.
Daoism sees the point clearly. Suppose we observe from inside an event, yet we think we are separate from the whole context and the event. We tend to seek a reference point outside ourselves to express a judgment, believing the event is now somehow safe for us. We make ourselves comfortable – accepting the experience from our personal point of view. Yet, the individual subsists in the same instant within the event and outside – as an external absolute observer. Yet, there is nothing to observe, and there is no observer. Both are illusions. We can build an ego, our individuality, only when we divide the manifestation of the event, the experience, into single, separated entities – and one of those we believe it's me. At that point, we need to find an explanation for our origin and our end. Because from that point of view necessarily, there is an origin and an end for every event – separately. Of course, we fear death and our meaningless disappearance. Consequently, we imagine a god, a paradise, a nirvana, or a sequence of personal previous and future lives (possibly as a pharaoh, a king, or a great leader, but seldom as a slave, a peasant, or a worker). Instead of accepting a universal whole, constantly flowing, everchanging, powerfully made by everincreasing information in which every memory, every experience increases information in itself. A Whole – Universe (physical and metaphysical at the same time) - where Chaos is Absolute and Absolute is Chaos. Where Chance is Choice and Choice is Chance. And we are an integral part of it. We are it.
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