On Randomness: A Ramble

I wrote a rambling essay last night about randomness. The tl;dr is that I think that when our respective creation stories say that order was created from chaos, the real meaning is that chaos is the building block of our reality. Chaos never left, and it is the entropy / randomness that engulfs us. We are like fish in the water of the nondeterministic. See below for the full text. It kind of stops abruptly but there was easily more to write on the subject.

Entropy is an interesting thing. It is the thing that creates our reality, through "randomness". But randomness only seems random to us because we cannot see the patterns in it. We are good at pattern recognition, but not nearly as good as we think we are. We're kind of arrogant as a species and think overly highly of our cognitive faculties. I postulate that entropy is the mechanism by which our reality is literally generated, like in the Rick and Morty reality simulator episode, and also that it is not always actually random. I think it is the subtle way in which gods and other powerful energetic forces can influence aspects of reality. If reality is an entropy web stretching across the X dimensions (X being however many dimensions there actually are, because it's probably much higher than 3), then the gods' influences are like ripples in particular sectors of the web, but the alteration still ripples outwards, like traffic or like The Butterfly Effect.

We joke about divine influence when we speak of RNGesus (where RNG means "random number generator", and where "RNGesus"  is pronounced arr enn Jesus) in the course of playing some kind of RPG (role playing game, virtual or in the flesh, e.g. Dungeons & Dragons). Tarot is a randomness-based divination technique that allows either you as the shuffler or an energetic entity you're communicating with to influence a "random" process in order to provide a result of significance. Randomness pops up in a lot of oddly useful places, like computer science, where we seek to simulate randomness in order to perform useful calculations. We don't often think about entropy but it is basically chaos. As in creation stories, out of chaos order was created. But this doesn't mean what we think it means. It might actually mean that chaos is the stuff that reality is made up of! Chaos never left - it was used as a building block in service of order, but it is ever-present and able to be accessed. 

We have a little bit of chaos in each of us. I think energy as used to construct entities and humans' energy bodies (see Energy Work by Robert Bruce for more on the human energy body) is also a form of entropy, but it is animated by a force we might call the spark of the Divine or the soul. It comes up in titles like The Field, which talks about quantum physics and how the zero point field is everywhere. Kind of like The Force in Star Wars, except not as obvious and easy to manipulate. Not saying the Jedi have it easy, but in our reality the situation is far more subtle than people flying across rooms or necks being choked. Books on subjects such as the Law of Attraction purport to teach readers how to use their intention (see also, The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart, who also authored The Field) to "manifest" things in their lives. This is basically the skill of manipulating the entropy around us with our soul's proboscis. We're trying to make our own little ripples, although of course some of us enlist the assistance of myriad deities to make a slightly bigger ripple in the field, or to exert influence non-locally, that is to affect a remote location with intention alone (obviously a much more advanced and challenging skill to acquire and develop).

I could go on and on, but my ultimate point is that randomness, or entropy, is key. It is the interplay of many influences upon what "should" be truly random (i.e. equal probability of all outcomes), which leads to a strange, patterned randomness ("seeded" perhaps, like in computer programming) that certain people who act upon it can interpret to have aligned with their wills to a limited extent. It can also be used by gods or goddesses who want to grab your attention. Lots of random "bad" stuff can happen to you if you're willfully ignorant or don't correctly interpret the signs sent to you. The signs get progressively louder until you can't ignore them any longer. That's how it was for me with gender dysphoria. It was something I didn't notice was there because my childhood was kind of miserable in much more significant ways. For example, I was taught that my thoughts and feelings are not valid unless they align with my mom's (this was an implicit lesson, and one enforced through emotional bondage such as guilt, or being torn down). 

I'm not saying my mom was or is a bad person, because she isn't. She has a good heart that has been tainted with a laundry list of suffering throughout her life that has made her the way she is. The key thing though, is that that she survived. I'd say it's not a stretch to compare her life trajectory to that of Lilith fleeing from the Garden of Eden - she fled a "comfortable" living in pursuit of freedom from an intolerable home life. 

Ugh, I want to keep writing, but I also want to try the mirror exercise and then afterwards go to sleep.