Willful Randomness?

[Terrence McKenna]     I think of the Divine Imagination as the class of all things both possible and beautiful in a kind of reverse Platonism. The attractor is at the bottom of a very deep well into which all phenomena are cascading and being brought into a kind of compressed state. This is happening in the biological realm through the career of the evolution of life. It’s simultaneously happening in the world as we experience it within our culture, in what we call history. History is the track in the snow left by creativity wandering in the Divine Imagination. In the history departments of modern universities, it is taught that this track in the snow is going nowhere. The technical term is trendlessly fluctuating. We’re told that history is a trendlessly fluctuating process: it goes here, it goes there. We just wander around. It’s called a random walk in information theory.
    This is all very interesting, for we’ve begun to see, through the marvel of the new mathematics, that random walks are not random at all — that a sufficiently long random walk becomes a fractal structure of extraordinary depth and beauty. Chaos is not something that degrades information and is somehow the enemy of order, but rather it is something that is the birthplace of order.
— Ralph Abraham, Terrence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Trialogues at the Edge of the West, “Creativity and Imagination,” p. 9.

     The psyche knows how to heal, but it hurts. Sometimes the healing hurts more than the initial injury, but if you survive it, you’ll be stronger, because you’ve found a larger base. Every commitment is a narrowing, and when your commitment fails, you have to get back to a larger base and have the strength to hold it.
      Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
     Then, when looking back at your life, you will see the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.

     The dark night of the soul
     Comes just before revelation.

     When everything is lost,
    And all seems darkness,
    then comes the new life
    and all that is needed.
— Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion, Diane K. Osbon (sel. & ed.), pp. 38-39.

     When we talk about scientific truth — just as when we talk about God — we are in trouble, because truth has different meanings. William James said, and it’s valid, “Truth is what works.”
     The idea of truth with a capital “T” — that there is something called Truth that’s beyond the range of the relativity of the human mind trying to think — is what I call “the error of the found truth.” The trouble with all of these damned preachers is the error of the found truth. When they get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said, you know you’ve got a faker. When people think that they, or their guru, have The Truth — “This is It!” — they are what Nietzsche calls “epileptics of the concept”: people who have gotten an idea that’s driven them crazy.
     Thinking you’ve got The Truth is a form of madness, as are pronouncements about absolute beauty, because one can easily see that there is no such thing. Beauty is always relevant to something. That quote from Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn — “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” — it is a nice poetic thought, but what does it mean? Speaking of platitudes, I like Robert Bly’s extrapolation of Descartes: “I think, therefore I am. The stone doesn’t think, therefore it isn’t.”

      Ideals are dangerous.
     Don’t take them seriously.
     You can get by on a few.

      A human being in action cannot represent perfection. You always represent one side of a duality that is itself perfection. The moment you take action, you are imperfect: you have decided to act that way instead of that other way. That’s why people who think they are perfect are so ridiculous. They’re in a bad position with respect to themselves.
     It is a basic thought in India — it also turns up in China — that life itself is a sin, in this sense of its being imperfect. To live, you’re killing and eating something, aren’t you? You can reduce what you eat to fallen leaves if you want, but you’re still eating life. You are taking the common good, you might say, and focusing it in your direction. And that is a decision on one side rather than on the other. So, decide to be imperfect, reconcile yourself to that, and go ahead. That’s “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”
— Joseph Campbell, Ibid., pp. 134-135.