Chaos always sounds bad. It makes you wonder if chaos is necessary — is it avoidable? Wouldn’t the world be a better place without chaos? I drive down the street and see garbage along the road; the car in front of me tosses a soda can out the window, and it rolls across the asphalt. A homeless person moves into one of the empty research buses parked on the university property at work. Litter blows in the wind.
I realize that entropy runs downhill — it’s the second law of thermodynamics where “there is a natural tendency of any isolated system to degenerate into a more disordered state. “
Yet, as any recycler will tell you — your garbage has value; it can be recycled. Matter changes forms but it does not disappear. It’s the Tohu wa-bohu. It may be that chaos is required before creation begins. Maybe we can call chaos “disorder” and “de-creation” so that “order” and “creation” come about from those chaotic situations. Perhaps this is a law within the constraints of a mortal telestial earth. In a higher level earth, a more elevated one — a terrestrial one — perhaps chaos and the second law of entropy have no force. Maybe there is a place of no chaos. But not in this world in which we live. Maybe as chaos increases, disorder and discord increase, and there will be a great re-mixing of the elements and ordering, creating a higher-level world. The Millennial earth.
Nibley explains the meaning of tohu wa-bohu:
“Beginning with a very old Egyptian idea, recently examined by E. A. E. Reymond, that the creation of the world was really a re-creation by ‘transforming substances’ that had already been used in the creation of other worlds, the Jewish and Christian apocryphal writers envisage a process by which the stuff of worlds is alternately organized into new stars and planets, and when these have served their time, scrapped, decontaminated, and re-used in yet more new worlds.” As we know today, this world wouldn’t exist if a star hadn’t exploded. It had to explode after it had gone through its life cycle and done all the pretty things it should do. Bam, it was blown to smithereens. That alone produced the heavy elements that are necessary to make a world like this. So as one world completes its cycle, the whole thing has to be re-cycled again into a new one, and then goes through the same process again. Newer stuff is constantly re-cycled is the tohu wabohu (which the Egyptians call the hu) of the Jewish teachers who saw the ultimate forms of matter in fire and ice. It was either complete energy as it is in the photon period when there’s nothing but light, nothing but energy. No particles have any weight, no mass whatsoever-nothing but fire or nothing but ice. Nothing moves at the completion of the cycle of entropy when everything dies down to a dead unit, nothing but a pile of ash. So it is either completely cold or it’s completely hot. According to Jewish teachings, these are the two ultimate forms of matter. “Likewise,” according to the same authority, “the world holocaust of the Stoics was merely a necessary preparation for the making of new worlds from old materials. The whole thrust of Weiss’ book is that until the early Christian Apologists [in the fourth century] we find no trace anywhere of a doctrine of creation out of nothing.”
(Nibley, Hugh. Ancient Documents and the Pearl of Great Price (Kindle Locations 4099-4112). Deseret Book Company. Kindle Edition.)
Suffering as a form of chaos
I thought about creation out of chaos and realized that suffering is chaos in a way — that through suffering something can be created — a rebirth. Somehow, suffering (chaos) (curses) brings order, creation, and a reversal of curses into blessings. I have often wondered how suffering for sins works. It’s some unknown law (like when we didn’t understand gravity or other physical laws because we didn’t have the knowledge.) Somehow, suffering reverses the curses. And Christ suffered to reverse the Fall of Adam and Eve and its fall-out of death to all. It’s that whole chaos creation theory. Adam and Eve were living a higher law in a higher earth called the garden of Eden, Paradise. God warned them about the implications of choosing the fruit of chaos, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Yet, how important that choice is for us to progress. Without the chaos, we do not seem to be able to rise above and progress in knowledge. So very odd but so very true.
The traditional view is that you repent of your sins and your iniquities. You ask God to forgive you. You stop doing them. But there is always some damage from sinning and collateral damage to committing iniquities. And sins and iniquities seem to be different. Some say that iniquities are generational problems — meaning if your great great great grandfather was an absentee father in his family, it often passes down to each generation, so of course, in everyone’s family line, there are going to be iniquities that result in your current generation. Drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. Everyone suffers some collateral damage, so to speak – or even direct damage. No one is spared the earthly experience, which includes all of the so-called iniquities of life. Of course, I have also heard (from Jordan Peterson) that not all children grow up to be the same as their parents — if your father beat you, that is no indication that you will beat your children. But it does happen often. If you call these “iniquities” and not sins, how do you get rid of them?
The experiences of your lifetime, the difficult times you face can elevate your understanding of spiritual matters if you are willing to overcome the bitterness. I know that sounds strange, but I have been thinking about this for some time. You can become the person that turns things around in your family lineage. Just by breaking the tradition of drinking, fighting, cheating, whatever it is. Someone turns it around that someone suffers in the process of overcoming these iniquities. It’s not easy to break traditions; it’s not easy to work through these things that plaque you and your family through generations. It’s hard enough to suffer your own poor choices.
But through this chaos of suffering comes creation.
Chaos (Disorder) to Creation (Order)
Chaos Recycled
“And so we have in the Pistis Sophia, continuing the Egyptian teachings, the picture of a constant remixing (kerasmos) [it uses the Greek word kerasmos, mixing up all the time] going on in the universe in which old, worn-out, contaminated substances, the refuge [or garbage] of worn-out worlds and kingdoms, is first thrown out on the scrap-heap and returned to chaos as dead matter [what do you do with it then?] then melted down in a dissolving fire for many years, by which all impurities are removed from it, and by which it is ‘improved,’ and is ready to be ‘poured from one kind of body into another.’ This whole process by which the souls as well as substances are ‘thrown back into the mixing,’ is under the supervision of Melchizedek, the great reprocessor, purifier, and preparer of worlds. He takes over the refuge of a defunct world or souls, and under his supervision the five great Archons [they are the five principles; they are always talking about the five principles; this is Egyptian too] process it…each one specializing in particular elements, which they thus recombine in unique and original combinations, so that no new world or soul is exactly like any other.” Well, they get it going by going into something like a spiral nebula. “In this full blown pleniarism there is no waste and no shortage: ‘If there were any superfluous or any lacking, the whole body would suffer, for the worlds counterpoise one another like elements of a single organism.’ The worlds go on forever: ‘They come and come and cease not, they ever increase and are multiplied, yet are not brought to an end nor do they decrease.'” Well they took that answer to the three questions: Is the universe expanding so slowly that gravity will finally take hold and draw it back together into
(Nibley, Hugh. Ancient Documents and the Pearl of Great Price (Kindle Locations 4113-4126). Deseret Book Company. Kindle Edition.)
