Benjamin Teixeira de Aguiar by the Spirit Eugênia
It’s not always easy to articulate the existence. Huge complexities present themselves to the individual, as a continuous challenge to our cleverness. The Chaos Theory, however, has an interesting and very suggestive concept that leads us to good insights, a phenomenon called “Edge of Chaos”. The Edge of Chaos, in the Science of Complexity, constitutes the borderline between order and disorder. It’s exactly at this point – where everything seems to dissolve into nothing, where the complete system collapses and the pandemonium of confusion replaces organization – that creativity is at its highest. Like in the Quantum Vacuum, where emptiness fosters the origination of everything, where probabilities are open and anything can happen, the same happens at the “Edge of Chaos”: the absolute vagueness gives consciousness a fabulous decision making power to create and make it happen.
We have never felt ourselves so often on the Edge as nowadays, in this extremely complex human civilization, in a cauldron of cultures, of different ideological currents, of richly diverse socioeconomic, religious and political powers. You, probably, have felt like this a thousand times: seeing so many alternatives that you can’t make a choice; knowing so much about something to the point of losing the ability of coordinating your own knowledge; suffering so much pressure for excellence that you lose yourself into the most elementary functions, consumed by stress and paranoia.
But all that can be solved, dear friend. When fear is suffocating, when you do not know where else to run to, when doubt blocks basic mental processes, when anguish, despair and panic approache, it’s time to launch the heart to the Heights of Transcendence.
Aside from the intellectual mind, the human being is endowed, without too much rigor, with what we could call emotional mind, and another one, which we would call: spiritual mind. These three levels of intelligence, or dimensions of the psyche, constitute, in a propaedeutic, rudimentary simplification, the totality of the soul in its diverse perceptive-cognitive expressions. Since the beginning of humankind, it’s known how insignificant an individual is, before the greatness and cyclopean multiplicity of reality with which he interacts. Thus, it was common use to attribute to a shaman, a being endowed with special powers and psychic faculties, the role of an intermediary between the higher, celestial, world, where chaos took on significance, meaning and purpose, and the human, limited physical world, conferring some order to the disorder of the huge amount of incomprehensible data with which the community members were compelled to deal with. This fundamental anthropological reality, present in all primitive cultures, is neglected in modern societies, as if Science, Technology and the Consumption System had revoked man’s human condition. Currently, though, the situation is reaching an insurmountable tension limit. Human capacity of bearing contradictions, emptiness, the lack of meaning of the materialistic culture, is reaching the maximum saturation boundaries. Several signs have been rising, such as the uncontrollable spread of legal and illegal drugs consumption, especially in the more developed social groups.
As a community, a rescue of shamanism, in a reinvention of the primitive, into a version sophisticated by modernity, will have to happen or we’ll disappear as a civilization and as human species. This recontextualization of the primeval within the advanced would be something that Dialectics presents as the counter synthesis to the primary thesis – at first, everything was accepted in an indefinite sea of vulgar superstition and mysticism (thesis); after that, everything was denied in the name of reason, in the constitution of recent versions of materialism (antithesis); now, we need to return to the inexorable consideration of the mystic, the imponderable, the transpersonal, the archetypical, the parapsychological (which unless one wants to escape reality, is known to be part of the aggregate of phenomena perceptible to the human mind), only that this time in a thoughtful, systematic way, based on facts, logic and scientific observation. Human nature cannot be suffocated for so long without causing serious problems to the consciousness and without affecting the pathological behavior of a multitude of distressed, desperate and distraught people, massively produced by the consumption society. The time has arrived for each one of us to give a contribution to speed up the process of solving this civilizational impasse. A very dangerous cauldron of international tension is boiling over with serious, genocidal risks, like the widespread use of nuclear warfare technology and attacks – with irreversible effects – to the environment.
And what, in practical terms, can we do? Here is where the crucial matter lays. You, as an individual, can do a lot. It will be through the achievement of a minimum level of transformed people, converted to the new paradigm of perception and behavior, focused on the holistic prism of comprehension of things – a level some authors call “critical mass” –, that global society, as a whole, will be able to thrust itself into the new pattern of consciousness. You then must be aware of your personal responsibility in this planetary drama of the species’ survival. You can become a vertex of salvation of the planet, a multiplying agent of en masse consciousness raising of the peoples, starting with the ones closest to you, even if they are the only ones you can reach. Convince yourself of your position of ambassador of the Higher Realms for this great endeavor: saving the planet.
Start with your soul, with your internal objectives of inner harmonization. You are not going to contribute to the salvation of the world if you don’t save yourself in the first place, coordinating the internal chaos, in which you’re immersed, because of the Self’s continuous building process – in concatenating fragmented parts (individuation) – which embodies the whole human consciousness. Prayer, meditation, charity, self reflection, dreams analysis, therapy, listening to holy men and women who can help you move on towards your complete psychological integration. But, while you do this, allow no discouragement in relation to initiatives of external assistance, of interaction with other people, of facilitating and serving as a catalyzer in their process of self discovery and self transcendence. In doing so, you’ll become a channel of the Light, of the Celestial Powers who direct the destinies of the Globe, of the Divine Providence, ultimately. How much you do or will come to do doesn’t matter, what really matters is the quality of your intentions, because before infinity and eternity the numerical human differences are meaningless. Only how much effort you place in giving your best matters.
And, as an agent of order, in a broad sense, you’ll understand that order, according to the Science of Chaos, arises in a higher level of complexity from the disorder found in a certain time. Thus, don’t get impressed by the turmoil you see yourself into. It will also pass; and it can, if properly harnessed, thrust you, like a turbo effect, to unthinkable higher levels of peace and happiness.
(Message received on September 16, 2000.)
(Translated by Iris Souza – Revised by Marcone Vieira)