A Human Strategy by Matt Berry, aphorism 356

356

There are many small events we think of as having beginning points and which require order.  But even such a truly “ordered beginning” would be dependent upon acquired experience, and so what is called here a “preparation” or a “beginning” is really a continuation ... an ongoing repetition whose course and destination one already knows.  Reality itself has no beginning point that the mind does not put there.  

So it is an error to believe that all must be in order before one “begins” a new stage in life.  The ambiguous truth is that nothing finds chaos “organized” like a set habit.  On the one hand, an established habit is a perception of order, not the order, and on the other hand, nothing organizes chaos as efficiently as a habit does.  We cannot sever the one observation from the other: order is one part alteration of environment and nine parts repetition-blindness.  And this is why we never really “begin.”  We are blind to the continuation and see only the points where consciousness is jerked into new contexts.

Contrary to perception, it is not chaos, but order itself, the interlocked habits and customs, that stand in the way of a great “beginning” ... a new stage in life.  

This unperceived order is too great for us to overthrow with a single decision.  We must break with the present if we expect to see the old, this event constituting the new vision.  The mind tends toward order and so daring chaos returns new sequences of thought, new patterns of behavior, higher states of consciousness, and if nothing else, then the identification of undesirable conditions.  Clarity is our goal, not our means.  An experiment is confusion subject to procedure at best, a bold guess when procedure itself is suspect.


It is indeed poignant to observe those who think they are waiting for the next orderly beginning, while existing within conditions whose outcome in consciousness is their old order.  Because they are waiting for events to clear, they will never see that their clarity is only their undisturbed presumption.



A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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