Transforming Order into Disorder into Higher Order (Like a Fucking Boss)

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” ~Georgia O’Keeffe

Make your unknown known and keep the unknown always ahead of you. Wow! What a beautiful concept.

What does this look like in practice though? Why does this strategic disposition make success irrelevant? How does one make their unknown known? Even more difficult: how does one keep the unknown always ahead of them? Let’s break it down…

Transforming order into disorder (discovering your unknown):

“Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible.” ~Rumi

Making your unknown known is no easy task. Perhaps the only task more difficult is keeping the unknown always ahead of you. But I digress.

In order to make your unknown known, there must be some type of inner (if not outer) upheaval. Some type of self-annihilation. There must be a leap of courage or a deeply penetrating question. There must be vulnerability. For this isn’t simply making the unknown known, it’s specifically making your unknown known. There is a crucial difference.

Making your unknown known is an aspect of self-overcoming. It’s making the unconscious conscious. It’s pulling back the plethora of layers—cultural, religious, political—that have been smothering your most core and essential self.

It requires the deep realization that who you were yesterday is not who you are today. You are not your beliefs—past or present. You’re not even your thoughts. You are a being that is in constant flux, a fleeting thing with unreliable memories and hidden layers of psychology.

So, making your unknown known will require a deep, penetrating disruption of who you believe you are. It will require questioning yourself to the nth degree (self-interrogation). In short: it will require you transforming order (your typical way of doing/perceiving things) into disorder (attempting an atypical way of doing/perceiving things). It will require you to take a leap of courage and stretch your comfort zone beyond the cliché.

Your typical way of perceiving yourself and reality must be challenged. You must embrace discomfort. Otherwise, the walls of your comfort zone will keep you running in the same old comforting, secure, safe order. And your unknown will always remain unknown.

Challenge those walls. Gain heroic mettle by going full-on boss-mode against everything you’ve taken for granted. Topple those neatly ordered walls into disordered adventure. In order to discover your unknown, you must take a leap of courage into the unknown.

Transforming disorder into higher order (making the unknown known):

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” ~Nietzsche

So, you’ve experienced a sacred upheaval. You’ve asked yourself the tough questions. You’ve had life-awakening soul-shocking adventures. You’ve toppled your stifling walls of comfort, security, and safety and discovered the dangerous beauty of the unknown.

Now it’s time to turn disorder into higher order. It’s time to regroup, lick your wounds, sharpen your sword. More importantly, it’s time to take what you’ve learned about your unknown and transform it into art. In short: it’s time to bring the “magic elixir” back to the tribe.

It’s time to take all the chaos and disorder experienced on the adventure and create higher order out of it. But the old, impenetrable, walled-in fortress of a comfort zone will no longer suffice.

Where before your comfort zone had rigid and invulnerable walls, now it has a flexible and vulnerable horizon. The wisdom gained from turning order into disorder (discovering your unknown) might have been hard-earned and difficult to obtain, but it was worth it. For now your comfort zone is permeable and expanding rather than impermeable and stuck.

Your own permeability, as an evolving self-overcoming being, has manifested the numinous experience of interdependence. From this sacred space, you have the power to translate your unknown (the “magic elixir”) into something palatable to the tribe. Thus making it truly known.

Transforming higher order into higher disorder (keeping the unknown always ahead of you):

“I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives… In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.” ~Richard Feynman

Life is art. Transforming order into disorder into higher order is the art of life. Keeping the whole process going is living a life well-lived. What the Greeks called “eudaimonia.”

Keeping the unknown always ahead of you is a beautiful way of saying: remain curious. Curiosity is the key to keeping the vital process of transforming order into disorder into higher order perpetually in motion.

Deep curiosity never accepts answers. It is always in search of better questions—which may come with better answers. But even these “better answers” are not accepted. Especially not as a be-all-end-all. They are embraced, taken into deep consideration, applied to the faculty of our reason, but then surrendered. As Aristotle famously stated, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

By not accepting it we create higher disorder out of higher order. We create an unsettled state, a sacred space for continual rebirth. A space where the Phoenix of our imagination can rebirth itself again and again.

When we surrender our certainty to curiosity, we keep the unknown always ahead of us. There is always a horizon to grow—evolve, self-overcome—into. There is always something bigger than us—bigger than our too-big egos—to interdependently align ourselves with. As Tony Schwartz advised, “Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides.”

In the end, all we need is enough courage to make our unknown known and enough curiosity to keep the unknown always ahead of us. It takes courage to transform order into disorder into higher order. It takes curiosity to transform higher order into higher disorder perpetually. Without courage and curiosity our creativity will always fall short. But with courage and curiosity, we keep our creativity sharp.