The Buddhists are definitely right about this: you can find eternity in the micro if you look closely enough, and you know what to look for. Painting after painting of grass (or leaves) and many of us Westerners can't but shrug. But to them these are splendid displays of the eternal laws of nature, at work in the dancing greenery right below our noses.
So here we have a dirty bowl sitting in the sink, an edge of it broken off. It is filled with sink water, and on the surface of the water is a curious landscape. At the bottom left quadrant sprawls a constellation of bubbles both large and small. The bubbles cohere together, generally with the small ones scattered around the edges of the large. The bubbles hold each other in position by the outer edges of neighboring bubbles. The largest bubbles, upon reaching the limits of their extension, suddenly pop, with many of the small outer bubbles spilling into the vacuum left behind. The bubbles themselves exist as a function of the tension generated by the inner and outer pressure of air bodies existing on either side of a thin membrane of water. Pieces of this bubble continent break apart as the larger bubbles pop, causing segments of the body to drift in various directions after being pushed away by the force of the pop. Such a continent seems to have formed after the initial force of sink water crashing down onto the water's surface.
Even more curious however is the smaller configuration of bubbles drifting around in the upper right quadrant. This configuration is being formed from the single feed of air bubbles rising up from somewhere on the bowl's bottom. As these single, more uniformly-sized bubbles rise, they push themselves in formation, forming a staggered pattern of interlocking bubbles. This configuration appears more orderly with clear, delineated rows. It seems as if order in this case arises out of the repetition of relatively uniform elements.
I'm not entirely sure this smaller configuration of bubbles is more orderly in an objective sense. Isn't this larger constellation of supposedly chaotic bubble formation just as orderly, in the sense that it formed exactly as it should have, considering the violence of the crashing water? Doesn't this smaller configuration of bubbles just appear more orderly to my brain because of its uniform, repeated elements that can be more clearly read as a pattern?
It seems the sciences themselves, up until now, have taken it upon themselves to focus on the patterns that appear most intelligible to our own pattern-recognition software, so to speak. The patterns that cohere cleanly and present themselves as intelligible designs that can be catalogued into our informational systems. That of course goes for metaphysics, political theory, history, and numerous other intellectual specialties as well.
Our own concept of chaos seems strange. Here we have this supposedly ordered world governed by pretty dependable natural laws, with these great dark clouds of unintelligible chaos somehow thrust right into the middle of it! I do realize I may be presenting a strawman argument. In the past couple of decades the sciences have slowly drifted into uncharted territories, further developing notions of chaos, and now there is a great collective sense that each of our frayed specialties must be weaved together. Now is the time to pull away from the microscope, and question the larger structure of what it is we have been looking at so closely.
Haha! I laugh at myself because at certain points I feel as if I've stumbled on some vast hidden truth, but then realize that many people around the world now collectively sense this necessity for an expanded concept of order, and a deeper investigation and questioning of the concept of chaos.
And we'd better become quite comfortable with these new conceptions! As global capitalism, spearheaded by U.S. empire continues to strain itself, we find ourselves wondering whether this coherent, but corrupted system of supposed "order" will hold much longer. I can't help but wonder anyways. It has become a bit of an obsession. But it is an obsession I'm quite comfortable with now.
Regardless, we may eventually find ourselves in a turbulent world in which the old definition of intelligible order no longer applies. And we should become quite comfortable with the new. I know I've expressed that it can be quite nice to walk in the dark. It is a bipolar world, not without its nightly horrors, but worth getting to know, not only to taste bliss as well, but to experience the transcendent: a sublime fusion of the two.
We should become well acquainted with those supposedly mysterious forces that swirl about under our rational symbolic maps of order. They've always been there. Hypnosis, dialogue therapy, psychedelic drugs, meditation...more and more of us seek to face those bucking emotions being held tight under our rational countenances. In a stable world we could control those forces and subdue them and bury them under prescription drugs and distractions. But ask any student with thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, or someone being illegally foreclosed upon, or even better, a member of the impoverished who knows these strange turbulent lands well: they are forces that cannot be ignored forever.
