manifesting, prayer, possibility, chaos

what I suspect is actually happening, when we “manifest” a desire or when prayers are answered

Happy Full Moon! New here? Welcome! This is a newsletter to explore and cultivate everything growing in the rich, broad boundary between science and animism. Every new moon there’s a poem(ish thing), like Reverse Ecclesiastes. And every full moon there’s an essay. Like this one! And sometimes, we even try to make Scientific Animism happen in-person.

Now onto the post ↓

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The tree makes 10,000 seeds. Sometimes, the yard is filled with seedlings. Sometimes none take.

It’s not that God / The Universe wanted you to have this one new opportunity, and you just needed to trust and step out; give up the old thing.

It’s not that you and that one old friend happened to be in the same city at the same time, and God / The Universe brought you together.

What an impoverished view!

There were ten old friends in that city. You missed nine.

This buzzing world is throbbing with possibility. So much that we could never realize it all.

God/the Universe/the living, Chaotic Earth had 10,000 possibilities on offer, all cycling in and out of ripeness, and when you started looking, you found one. You became the good soil, and a seed grew.

And it was beautiful! It was the right possibility for you!

Just like any of the others would have been.

And yes, sometimes no seeds grow. Sometimes the baby will not come no matter how many seeds you scatter, no matter how positive your thoughts, no matter how fervent your wishes, your petitions, your manifestations.

[wait, are we the soil in which the seeds grow, or the ones doing the scattering?

yes we are]

Other possibilities, shaped like presence or like lack, would have taken you elsewhere. Other paths would have unfolded differently; taken different shapes. In the dense, brambly branches of the multiverse tree, maybe the prism-split-you did take every path. None right, none wrong, none destined, none intended or unintended. All on offer; all possible; all worthwhile.

Someone once asked me what the “source” is in Scientific Animism. I didn’t really understand the question.

But I think now I might say “chaos,” or “darkness.” Uncertainty. Mystery. The Unknown.

Not “chaos” in the destructive sense, but in the “patterns not yet perceived” sense; the “too complex to model” sense; the Chaos Theory sense. Chaos like the maybe-unmeasurable systems of cloud movements, water currents, or the interplay of multi-motivated actors in complex ecosystems.

The Art of Hosting people invented a new term for “destructive chaos” to keep it separate from this “patterns not yet perceived” kind. They call the destructive sort “chamos.” On the continuum between destructive chaos and stifling control, they suggest staying just within order, while skirting chaos:

source: is.muni.cz

It is also this sense of the unknown that Rebecca Solnit encourages us to embrace:

…the present and past are daylight, and the future is night. But in that darkness is a kind of mysterious, erotic, enveloping sense of possibility and communion. Love is made in the dark as often as not. And then to recognize that unknowability as fertile, as rich as the womb rather than the tomb in some sense. And so much for me of hope is, as I was saying, not optimism that everything will be fine, but that we don’t know what will happen.

My favorite quote about this comes from Ursula K. Le Guin’s invented religion in The Left Hand of Darkness, which she admits is largely borrowed from Taoism:

Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished!

Nature maximizes time spent on this Chaordic Path all over the place. Nested, overlapping webs of orderly reciprocal relationship at all zoom levels, but also: The random splitting and recombination of genes in sexual reproduction. The 10,000 seeds. The dizzying shapes of proteins. The dazzling configurations of planets around stars. The jumble of species in the rainforest, in the soil, in the abyss.

Maybe we should, too.

This can be scary. If chamos, destructive chaos, was part of your family as a child—or an unwanted recurring guest in your household—then anything left of the “Control” circle might feel like destruction’s doorstep. Or when the world feels out of control, then we might skew toward the right side of this spectrum. (Maybe this is why we pray or “manifest” in the first place, at least when it comes to petition-style prayer—the world feels too chaotic, and we want to believe that some Supreme Agent has it all, you know, under control.)

Or maybe you hang out at the other end of the spectrum. Maybe you grew up in an environment of stifling control (with religious authoritarian parents, say). Maybe you had—or are having!—a period of destructive chaos, and now even the “order” circle feels stifling.

Where do our human systems already walk the line between order and chaos?

Cities are one. Part of the joy of a city is the constant surprise of it; not knowing what will happen on any given walk down the street.

Libraries and coworking spaces, with their jumbles of disparate perspectives, are a smaller version.

And what about the Internet? I suppose it’s many things, all at once. Much of it feels like chamos to me anymore. Destructive chaos; fundamental breakdown. Maybe that’s partly because some people made destruction their explicit jobs. And yet there’s also joy, community, play, silliness, loads of generative disorder. Despite our devices’ attempts to make us our worst selves, maybe one can still walk The Chaordic Path through the Internet.

(And also, I remind myself: even destruction can be part of a cycle, clearing way for creative emergence.)

What sorts of chaos do you purposely seek out, or find enjoyable? What sorts do you avoid?