Organized Mess - Akira the Don, Alan Watts

Another way of talking about the web

Is that there are different levels of magnification

For example, supposing you take a piece of embroidery

And here it is, obviously, in front of you;

an ordered and beautiful object

And then you take out a microscope, and you look at the individual threads

At a certain point, as you turn up the microscope, you’ll get a hopeless tangle

Which doesn’t make any sense at all

The wrapped fiber that constitutes the thread is a mess

Hasn’t been organized, nobody did anything about it.

But at the level of

magnification at which you actually see it with the naked eye, it’s all been

organized

It’s all been organized

It’s all been organized

It’s all been organized

Alright, now keep turning up that microscope

Take one of those individual threads in the fiber that seems to be so chaotic,

and go into the constitution of that

And again, you’ll find fantastic order

You’ll find the most gorgeous designs of molecules

Then, keep turning it up

And again, at a certain level you’ll find chaos again

Alright, keep going

And at another level you’ll find there’s marvelous order

Now, you see, order and randomness constitute — in other words, the warp and

the woof

Where everything is in order, everything’s under control;

in randomness,

it’s all

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

But we wouldn’t know what order was

Unless we had messes

It’s the contrast of order and messes that order itself depends upon

And so in exactly the same way, it is the contrast of on and off,

there and not there — in other words, life and death, being and non-being —

that constitutes existence

Only, we pretend that the random side of things, the disorderly side of things,

could possibly win in the game of competition or I would rather call it

collaboration between the two

When you lose sight of the fact that the order-principle and the

random-principle go together

That’s exactly the same predicament as losing sight of the fact that all

individually delineated things and beings

Are connected underneath

You know, just like mountains stick out of the Earth and there’s a fundamental

Earth underneath them, so all of us, as different things, we stick out of

reality

And there’s a continuity underneath but you ignore that, you see?

That’s the thing that’s left out

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

It’s all been organized

But it’s a mess

See?

I’m just giving you many examples of the same principle