I know someone who lives in a state of chaos with nothing put away or even thrown away, and stuff scattered everywhere. She claims this is the sign of a creative person. I know someone else who is obsessive about order and must have everything in its proper place. It causes him actual discomfort to experience mess and untidiness, and if something no longer serves its purpose, he will throw it out. He thinks disorder is the sign of a disorganised and therefore unproductive mind. Unfortunately, they are husband and wife, but then marriage is often an arena for learning needed lessons.
Order and chaos are inseparable companions, partly because each implies the existence of the other but also because creation requires both. Order, which is what creation works towards establishing, can only be built out of chaos using the word in its literal sense of disorganised matter. Chaos is the raw material order requires to appear in form. Without chaos, order has nothing to work with and make structure. But chaos needs order to make something of it. It is only good as a source for order. Left to itself without order to inform it, it is a negative. Therefore, the wife in the example above is wrong. Chaos as disorder is just chaotic. But the husband is also wrong because his excessive order leaves no room for development and growth. It is a sterile thing.
Too much order stifles creativity and freedom, but too much disorder leads to chaos. On the other hand, there needs to be a little disorder in a system for it to evolve, but the point of this evolution is to lead to a higher level of order. Disorder taken on its own terms and not subject to the principle of order is the ground from which evil, decay and death arise, but as chaos, its fundamental state, it is also the ground of all creation.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."
Chaos is the formless and empty earth from which the Spirit of God forms all creation. It is the deep, the waters and the feminine principle which needs the masculine principle to organise it into order. By the same token, the masculine principle needs the feminine principle to bring to life and outer reality the unmanifested idea.
