Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@newbuddhist.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take up to 48 hours. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Life creates order
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
You may have heard that impermanence creates suffering. That because of the nature of continuous change, we find that that which we wish for is taken away from us, and that which we wish not to have is given to us.
But what also happens is life creates order, and things fitting together, and life also maintains organisms. So in a way life keeps suffering at bay, until it becomes old and can no longer fulfil its function.
2
Comments
Order often gets a bad rap because of the harmful ways it can express itself socially. But order is also taking the randomness of nature and turning it into food crops that feed us. Or harnessing the wind for a sail or electric power.
Most of the universe moves in ways that don't promote life. But in the extremely rare set of conditions where life has arisen life itself has the ability to maintain and sustain itself.
I don't think impermanence makes us suffer. Our wanting things to be different makes us suffer. Impermanence is what gives us life and the possibility of awakening.
Does life create order or does order create life?
A completely chaotic universe is a dead universe. A completely ordered universe is a dead universe.
I think chaos is order misunderstood as all things have a cause.
I iz dead and don't exist? I knew it!
In between death and a lot of emptiness (not that it can be measured) there is a something. Iz it me, mechanics of the quantum type … or just …
So you should view this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/monkeymind/2018/03/like-a-bubble-in-a-stream-a-zen-teacher-offers-a-paraphrase-of-the-diamond-sutra.html
The order of physics and geological processes is not order on a more macro scale. Life replicates itself, it creates structures like a beehive or a birds nest. It creates more of itself, a few penguins will create a colony of penguins who huddle together against the cold.
I suppose both at some level. I would phrase it as order creates and sustains life and life creates and maintains order.
I think we're talking about degrees here. The level of order and chaos matters.
Are these beings actually creating order though or are they following natural order as instinct?
Perhaps life and order are also different ways to see the same thing.
What came first, the tool or the art?
I think chaos is when things appear random, not when they are random. Everything still depends on conditions even if we lack the ability to trace the effects from all causes.
Chaos and order are two ways to see the same information but in the absolute sense there is no opposition. Just complimentary aspects of the same process.
Brief: Indeed, life creates order for life is orderly chaos.
One might say that life is chaos channeled so as to appear orderly.
Life is what makes sense and purpose of the chaos.
Embrace the chaos, it is a function of life as life is a function of chaos.
Beautiful either way.
Peace to all
Life’s ability to sustain itself and temporarily hold impermanence at bay is far more interesting than order vs chaos, in my mind.
Without entropy seeds would have to painstakingly placed where they are to sprout rather than just distribute far and wide by wind or by other entropic process.
I sometimes ponder if identity is just another name for negentropy or the conscious obscuration of entropy.
Is it not the vibratory energy of existence that allows life to arise where ever conditions are conducive enough to allow for it, just as the eventual decline of that vibratory energy brings about conditions that will no longer allow life to exist.
While we might anthropomorphically marvel at the tenacity of life here on earth, its infinitesimally small representation, when compared to the rest of existence, clearly says something else.
**
@jeroen.... So in a way life keeps suffering at bay, until it becomes old and can no longer fulfil its function........
only if one thinks that attachments, birth, disease & death are not part of the equation.
**
Yes, but these are part of the package, you get them included automatically. Its still to your benefit to receive the gift called ’life’.
I'm not sure what you mean. Impermanence is never held at bay and life depends on it. It could be you're equating impermanence to suffering but it is our aversion to impermanence that makes us suffer.
Life may recognize order, harmonize with order and/or use order to create but I don't think life creates order. Order being simply the way things go.
Well consider a lifeless world such as the moon — cratered with random-seeming debris from impacts, chaos at work. Then look at the Earth, large parts of it covered with grasslands and forests, teeming with life feeding on other life, creating structures and patterns in various places. Some even visible from space, like the Great Barrier Reef.
The conditions were right for life as we know it to grow on Earth. The conditions on the moon are not ripe for life, however, not long ago, China did plant cotton on the moon and it grew two leafs before dying after two weeks. Order still dictates on the moon. If the conditions are right, stuff happens and if not we stay hidden.
The zen story about the cup of tea comes to mind…