Orderliness directly connects with divine harmony. And, like so many things, there is both an inner version and an outer version; there’s also a divine version—order—and a corresponding distortion—disorder…
In the grand scheme of things, we experience inner order when we are fully conscious. When our soul has no more unconscious material left in it…Any lack of awareness is an indication of disorder somewhere in our soul. When we’re not aware, we’re not in truth; things slip away into our unconscious and we become confused…
The disorderly mind will become frantic trying to impose a false order. Yet this only heightens our level of discomfort and disorderliness. It’s like shoving garbage under our furniture so no one will see it. But the whole place reeks of the hidden waste…
In our psyches, waste is made up of false opinions and obsolete patterns of behavior. We need to properly dispose of such thing. If they stick around, all of our actions, decisions and perceptions will end up polluted by half-truths or out-and-out errors. The result: chaos and disappointment…
So order and awareness are directly linked. Whenever we have disorder in our lives, there is something we are avoiding…This is exactly what happens when we’re not dealing with old emotional and mental baggage. It piles up and keeps new valid thoughts and feelings from finding a place to land…
On the material level, we clean our house. We might focus on our possessions or on our financial affairs or on our use of time. We may need to face and overcome a habit of procrastinating, which is a pattern of putting things off instead of dealing with them as they arise. Our object should always be to remove clutter…
Peace will always elude us if we let inner and outer disorder clutter up our lives. It won’t matter how much we pray and meditate and devote ourselves to spiritual or artistic endeavors…This applies as equally to the big stuff as to the little everyday occurrences…The outer is always related to the inner in some way…
Order requires discipline. Always. Immature people tend to refuse any form of discipline. They associate it with authority from a parent against whom a war is still being waged. This very behavior is part of the junk heap of waste material that needs our attention…
Our resistance can be surprisingly strong. When we kick over to compulsive orderliness, we create as much trouble and hardship as if we were surrounding ourselves in filth…The first step in becoming aware of this connection between orderliness and our inner landscape is to tune into how much we are disturbed by disorder; feel the tension and anxiety it creates…
Interestingly, the part of us that resists is well aware that freeing ourselves of the burden of disorder will make our inner work much easier. And that’s exactly what the resistance wants to avoid. Think about it. The disorganized person can’t concentrate; same for the compulsively orderly one…
So someone who has their act pulled together is going to be an orderly person in their outer habits. They will be clean, not just in their body, but in their handling of daily life…Making messes then comes from our unconscious negative intention—our will to stay stuck. This may be a whole new vantage point from which to view disorder.
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Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #205 Order as a Universal Principle
