Void, Chaos, Causality! Whee!

I know there is alot of quotation and re-publishing on the blog right now but to be honest I dont care about that at all. What follows is a post at the Occult Corpus forums made by the user "Rin".Not very deep but well worth thinking about.

[ Taoism ]
Metaphysically, Taoism can be said to assert that everything that appears to exist is one of the "Ten Thousand Things" which arise by the interaction of Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang are sometimes said to be expressions or qualities of Tao (I'm sure there's a better way to word this, so please forgive my linguistic failings). Tao can be described as being beyond "existence" and "non-existence", and that any attempt to assert that it is either/or will fail (but it won't necessarily be utterly false, either). Much like dark matter in astro-physics, the Tao is inferred by its "influences" or "effects" on observable and experiential phenomena. The point I want to make with reference to the Tao in the context of this thread is its infinite potential, that it can be said to contain everything we can possibly imagine and everything we possibly cannot.

[ Buddhist Karmic Causality ]
Karma is slightly different in Buddhism than in Hinduism or Jainism. Though despite the differences it has been, historically, largely moral in nature. In Western nations that have seen a spread of Buddhism, the idea of karma is expanding to include general causality (if you place your hand in a fire, it will burn). Many people in the dialogues between Buddhist philosophy and science have made the connection between karma and Newton's third law of motion ("every action has (an equal and opposite) a reaction").

One of the implications of this is that everything that exists presently does so because it has been caused to exist. That the result of karma, multiplied across vast distances of time, space and other have brought us to where and what we find ourselves today. We're like in a seething ocean of causality where causes and conditions interpenetrate and produce countless holographic-like effects. Some of these are the Earth itself, human beings, star formations, cultures, and even the idea of selfhood. It's said that since everything is causal, nothing is permanent.

[ Chaos ]
Chaos theory tells us that chaos has to inevitably give rise to order or patterns. Although, because those patterns arise from chaos, they must inevitably return to chaos. Chaos is, therefore, like a vast ocean of potentiality where order arises like waves before subsiding back. The appearance of patterns is largely illusory because the order that arises is not wholly separate from the chaos out of which it arose and it is, by extension, connected to other systems of order. We can also observe intra-pattern chaos and order (such as in a nation whose political factions swap out and change altogether, back and forth and in between).

Chaos theory in magic can tie together the idea of the Tao as being infinite potential (you could insert a poor simile here and say that Tao is like a blank canvas) and that of Buddhist Causality (another simile could say that causality is like every possible colour of paint being made available to you, to play endlessly across a canvas). With proper awareness and trans-rational understanding**, one could look deeply into systems of chaos and get some idea of what kind of pattern will emerge and when.

And since we're all part of this vast, beginningless sea of progressive, aprogressive and entropic chaos, we can ourselves effect change in the currents in, around, and that is us. A big key in this is to stop viewing yourself as being separate and distinct from everything that happens around you, and things that appear to happen far away from you (in both time and space). Even quantum science will tell us that time and space are illusory, and that distance is largely meaningless on the quantum level of reality.