Fog and Chaos

All things strive for balance, yet thrive on imbalance.

Balance is unmoving in the right. Unmoving is death.

Imbalance is chaos in the wrong. Chaos is life.

Thus we inhabit chaos.

To deny chaos — to deny that we will lose, will suffer, will die — is the source of madness.

Thus man is mad.

The world itself is mad, for the eyes of mad man is what gives it existence.

Being ashamed, it cloaks itself in fog.

What is there? There is fog and chaos. Nothing more? Nothing more.

The fog veils the chaos, which is its offspring.

Any action that is taken will feed chaos.

Things rise and die, grow and crumble, flourish and get devoured. Everything changes, returns to itself.

The world is a bowel: It is not appropriate to look at its inner workings, and it is repulsive to lift the veil of fog to inspect the excrement. Doing so is called civilization.

From chaos man endeavors to carve knowledge, unaware that knowledge is but chaos of a higher disorder. This is called entanglement.

If there was wisdom, there would be no man.

The man who knows nothing is helplessly at the mercy of chaos.

The man who knows something is helplessly at the mercy of chaos while believing that security, safety, certainty can be obtained.

I will mould chaos into order, says man and dies.

I see what he did wrong, says his son and, after a fashion, dies as well.

The fog lies over them all.

Those who are lost in the fog roam and rave and turn the signs upside down. This is called the madness of identity.

The wise, walking on broken selves, resists the name and the judgment, taking the fog as a mercy. Then he dies. This is called the practice of spoiling the game.

Excerpted from The Way of Fog and Chaos