Chaos

When I was in high school, I spent a great deal of time reading, I had read the word "chaos" and I had heard the word used in speech, but I hadn't associated the spoken version of the word with the written. One day in school, I was reading something in front of the class and pronounced the word as "chow-os" which caused a great deal of amusement to the teacher and the other students. That was probably one reason why I spent the next four years of high school creating chaos in the schools. I don't think, at that time, I appreciated the concept of chaos in the way that Nietzshe expressed it, "You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star."

I have chaos in my soul sometimes, but I have yet to give birth to a dancing star.

My view of chaos was forever changed by reading Douglas Hofstadter's book.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Hofstadter wrote, “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order” What appears to be unordered is, in reality, only a different and strange or unknown to the observer, type of order. It may be that we are constrained by our point of observation and reference to view only the most superficial part of the true structure of the universe.