Order and emergence

Most people believe that order requires control, and that it cannot result from a lack of control, or even anarchy. Nietzsche considered ‘Apollonian’ order and ‘Dionysian’ disorder polar opposites, and even Einstein, the disruptor of so much received scientific knowledge, could not accept the ‘disorderliness’ of the quantum world, famously exclaiming that ‘God does not play dice with the universe’. However, recent research, particularly in the realms of biology, quantum mechanics and chaos theory, suggest the very opposite: that order can arise spontaneously out of what we term ‘chaos’, and that ‘disorder’, or even the total breakdown of a system, is often necessary for new things to manifest or a higher kind of order to emerge.

In fact, everywhere in nature order seems to emerge out of what we would term disorder. And didn’t Mother herself describe the ideal organization for Auroville as ‘divine anarchy’?

Sri Aurobindo described a form of emergence when, in 1939, he explained how the Ashram had developed.

There has never been, at any time, a mental plan, a fixed programme or an organisation decided beforehand. The whole thing has taken birth, grown and developed as a living being by a movement of consciousness (Chit-tapas) constantly maintained, increased and fortified.

And this, Mother explained later, allows the emergence of something utterly new, utterly unpredictable in terms of what has gone before, yet exactly what is needed at that particular moment.

In the mental movement, there is the consequence of what you’ve done before – it’s not that, it’s the consciousness which CONSTANTLY sees what has to be done… It’s not at all a “formation” whose development you must look after: it’s the consciousness which, every second, follows – follows its own movement. That allows everything! It’s precisely what allows miracles, reversals, and so on – it allows everything. It’s the very opposite of human creations.

It’s a reminder that ‘truth’, as The Mother put it, “is a living, changing thing, which expresses itself every second”, and why our mind-organized attempts at constructing order are often so inadequate.

It’s probably fair to say that most of us haven’t attained this level of identification with the Becoming, and therefore we distrust that we can operate like this. It’s why we feel we need to be in control, to cultivate habits in our personal lives and establish certain parameters, through rules and regulations, in our institutions in order to achieve some degree of order, and why we struggle to preserve our idea of order from others who think differently. It’s also why we sometimes continue to cling to a long established order, even when it has shown itself to be no longer useful (think how long it took for Copernicus’s heliocentric view of our solar system to be accepted).

Yet ‘emergence’ may be more common than we think. Think how often, for example, after hours of pointless talk something emerges in a group discussion which immediately feels ‘right’, but which nobody seems to have originated. Or how, after days or weeks of beating our brains to come up with a solution to a knotty problem, it suddenly presents itself in all its wholeness, often at the moment when we least expect it. It’s an indication that there is a huge well of knowledge, wisdom, always available to us but which generally we ignore or don’t believe in because we tell ourselves “the world doesn’t work like this”.

Perhaps the early Aurovilians caught the tail of the truth that there is a deeper source of knowledge than that of the mind when they placed so much emphasis upon spontaneity of expression. However, emergence can take different forms – it can also be the sudden eruption of emotionally uncultivated feelings or the play of vital forces – and therefore requires discrimination. But if the products of emergence are often inspiring, innovative and absolutely appropriate for the situation at that particular moment, perhaps it is time we tried – if this is not a contradiction – to encourage the more positive kind to happen more often. It is, perhaps, what Kireet Joshi was referring to in 2003 when he urged the community to find ways, procedures, of helping it understand the will of the Divine at any moment.

This doesn’t mean that we should stop researching a topic as thoroughly as possible, or defending deeply-held values, but at some point it seems to require a radical surrender – of everything we have learned, our presuppositions, our fixed beliefs, above all, of our egos – to a state of ‘deep unknowing’, allied to a faith in a greater guidance, for something else to emerge.