Now, an inalienable trait of existence is motion. Let us set aside lifeless examples, as when, say, you drop a piece of sodium metal into a glass of water and it starts darting swiftly about on the surface. All that exists shares in existence, and within it life – when an existent shows signs of life – belongs to fewer of them.
Motion implies a hidden increase, even an exponential one. A simple but effective way of putting it: when money circulates, it breeds!
But with motion comes a factor of uncertainty. For in particle physics the position or the energy of certain subatomic particles cannot be determined, either in theory or in practice, and yet matter does not fall apart, and in spite of the uncertainty order remains. Though the particles are in constant vibration and motion, the table still remains a table, and though the human body is material in composition, it does not fall apart into its constituent elements either.
This is Order, whose opposite pole is Chaos. Permit me a trivial example: the desk. A stranger sees chaos in the heaped-up books, the odds and ends and the seemingly needless things, while the owner of the desk sees order. It is as if the desk's degree of order also depended on who the observer is: does he discover the algorithm of its order, or not? And the unmistakable proof of order is that the owner finds what he needs, while a stranger feels that he himself is lost in this disorder. To him everything speaks of chaos, while the owner sees order in everything. Chaos is homogeneity, order is individuality, chaos is uniform, order is specific. They are apparently looking at the same desk, which shows itself now as order, now as disorder.
A further pair of opposites is organisation and spontaneity, or, put another way, the duality of law and play, and earth and sky, the binary code of one and zero, speak of this too. The two poles exist by presupposing each other, and though chaos would indeed be hard to reconcile with order, it is still the desk we are speaking of, which is to say that on a higher level the synthesis of the two is realised. If we find the higher ordering principle, we see the privileged place of both aspects. That is why it is important to state that duality (as a binary code or a dual character) is not identical with unity, that is, 2 ≠ 1.
Let us take light as an example. Physics says it has at once a wave nature and a particle nature. It is one, for it is light, light to the core, and yet it is twofold, because if I look at it this way it is a wave, closer to the character of energy, and if I examine it that way, in the dance of photons it shows rather its particle nature. Then it is more material, and denser than the energy-like wave nature.
The sacred permeation of the universe, the one divine power hidden behind phenomena, most resembles the intangible, ocean-like wave state of light, while the immanent aspect, which reaches everywhere and therefore seems distributed, is closer to the particle character.
In the other lamps lit from one lantern the flame of the original burns in each separately, yet in quality they are the same. (Brahma Samhita, 5.46.)
When we speak of light and of its wave and particle nature, we cannot forget the source of light either! The source of light is God, who abounds in transcendent qualities. Just as man's body heat is a radiation of wave nature, and his thoughts, let us say, are phenomena of particle nature, yet the source is man himself, perhaps it is much the same in the universe: God, consciousness and existence, light source, light wave and photon, fire, spark and warmth…