THE CREATIVE POWER OF CHAOS

Lorie Eve Dechar, M.Ac.

delivered at the Tri-State College of Acupuncture Graduation Ceremony,
June 4, 2004

For the past four years that I’ve taught at Tri-State College, I’ve had the opportunity to witness an amazing transformation. The first year, I had my doubts that it would happen, but gradually I began to see that I could trust the process. Out of the blue, I would notice the insight of a student’s question or the new way her fingers held the needle and I understood that a change has taken place. I saw that despite the confusion, anxiety and despair, over time, acupuncture students become acupuncture practitioners and then, they graduate!

Tonight, we are at another moment of transformation, as you all prepare to complete your time as apprentices and move out into the world as healers in your own right. I invite you all to take a moment to notice how you are feeling right now, at this special time that will never come again. Just feel what’s going on in your body, your mind and your spirit. If you are feeling excited, exhausted, terrified, uncertain, relieved... that’s great. If you’re feeling like you don’t know up from down or what’s going to happen next... congratulations! You are on the right track.

If we look closely at processes of transformation, we see that without confusion and chaos, there can be no change. Whether the change is birth, death, falling in love or healing... chaos is part of the process. So, in this evening’s address, I am going to focus on the positive aspects of confusion and the creative power of chaos.

The Chinese character for chaos is huntun. The character is described as a picture of a wave of water almost completely covering a village.

The character is made up of two parts. The graphic on the left, shui, is a picture of a breaking wave, flecks of foam flying off the top of the wave. The graphic on the right, tun, depicts a sprouting seed shooting up through the earth, two first leaves or cotyledons forming at the tip of the stem just below the point where the plant rises up through the surface of the Earth from darkness to light. The radical, tun, is used to mean a town or village, and refers especially to the uncertain and difficult stages of early development when the hard ground must be broken and organized structures formed.

The character does not tell us whether the inundating wave is approaching or receding. In this way, it graphically communicates the uncertainty inherent in the early stages of any truly new, creative endeavor. The sprouting seed, like the village, represents the difficult beginning of a new establishment when risk is supreme and the outcome is still unknown.

Uncertainty is also expressed in the wave’s ambiguous creative/destructive aspect. It is clear that the water has the capacity to destroy the newly established structure if the wave crashes down on it. However, as it recedes, the floodwaters will leave behind a layer of nutrient rich silt that will nourish the new crops in the village fields. So, the floodwater, like original chaos, precedes differentiation and combines the opposites of destruction and creation.

This character is related to the first hexagram in the I Ching: The Book of Changes, “Difficulty at the Beginning.” According to James Legge’s commentary, this hexagram is “intended to show how a plant struggles with difficulty as it rises gradually above the surface. This difficulty, marking the first stages in the growth of the plant, is used to symbolize the struggles that mark the rise of a state out of a condition of disorder, consequent on a great revolution.”

The character expresses the risk and ambiguity inherent in any truly new beginning. Whether it is the new establishment of a village, a plant, a new worldview or the first year of a new acupuncture practice – chaos is part of the process. It is also important to note that when there is chaos, the new order emerges, not from above but from below. As we see in the character, the sprouting seed rises up from the darkness “down below,” from the unknown and unpredictable, from the earth and from the body.

New possibilities - like new life, like embryos and tadpoles - quicken in places hidden from the light, deep in the belly, under the sea or in labyrinthine caves far below the surface of the earth. “The seeds of things have mysterious workings,” wrote the Chinese sage, Chuang Tzu, “all things come out of the mysterious workings and go back into them again.”

Modern scientists and mathematicians use the word chaotic to describe apparently irregular, unpredictable systems, such as cloud turbulence or the erratic shifts of decline and growth in biological populations. Chaos Theory emerged as a dominant trend in science in the early 1970’s when high-powered computers revealed regularly repeating cycles in the apparently random disorder of certain natural phenomenon. Chaos Theory opened the way for science to identify repeating, predictable patterns in what had previously seemed impossible to predict. It is a rational method of understanding apparently irrational, erratic fluctuations in nature, of discovering reliability in something that appears to be ruled by chance.

But the scientific concept of chaos, born of the rational mind, massive computers and highly sophisticated technology, is not the same as the Taoist notion of the divine chaos or huntun. The huntun has no rules and it can never be used “for our own ends.” When Taoists spoke of chaos, they spoke of a divine mystery that exists beyond any kind of inner rhythm, regularity or rule. The huntun comes directly from Tao! It precedes any possibility of order or predictability because it is the mother from which order is born.

Webster defines chaos as the “confused, unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms; the state of things in which chance is supreme.”

Creation myths the world over describe a state of undifferentiated unity that existed long before the beginning of history, before the separation of Heaven and Earth, before the land rose from beneath the windswept waters. The ancient Greeks believed that Chaos existed from the beginning, together with Nyx, Nothingness or Night. The Gods and Goddesses of madness, of destruction and creation, of inebriation and the dance, dwell at the edges of this realm — the Hindu Kali, the Sumerian Ereshkigal and the Greek God, Dionysus. The Taoist Goddess of the huntun is Xi Wang Mu, the Goddess of the pelvic basin, the labyrinths, the volcanic steam vents beneath the sea.

From a Taoist perspective, attempting to control the energy of the huntun or to try to use its energies to implement individual human values and goals is not only incomprehensible but also dangerous, as it leads inevitably to grandiosity and madness. Honoring chaos, holding it with awe and maintaining one’s faith while surrendering to its power... these are the attitudes that allow the Taoist sage to ride the waves of the huntun; to die and to be reborn from the dark whirlwind of Tao.

These same attitudes allow us as healers to use the potent energies of chaos to move through the sometimes destabilizing energies of healing processes, to bring vitality to deadened places and to transform outmoded, inefficient mind-sets, habitual behaviors and values into new, more efficient and more potent ways of being.

So for you new practitioners and for you, the family members and friends who support them, remember that if things get a little crazy in the next few months, that’s just fine. In fact, it’s a sign that something new is trying to come to life.

Honor your fear, your confusion, your anxiety, not as something to be avoided or rushed through and away from, but as the rich, fertile soil from which the new life of an acupuncturist will be born. When you feel yourself compulsively trying to make sense of it all, come back to your body and your breath and like a seed, feel your roots in the Earth and your new leaves reaching up towards Heaven. As you move into this exciting time of endings, beginnings and transformations, I invite you to remember the words of Friedrick Nietzche: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” I look forward to witnessing the dancing stars you will all be giving birth to as you move out into the world as acupuncturists and healers.

top