Chaosophy
Healing Through Chaos
I. CHAOS AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
CHAOSOPHY
An Imaginal Perspective on the Nature of Reality,
Consciousness, Experience, and Perception
by Iona Miller, ©1993
CHAOSOPHY
An Imaginal Perspective on the Nature of Reality,
Consciousness, Experience, and Perception
by Iona Miller, ©1993
CHAOS THEORY Chaos Theory and Complex Dynamical Systems: Consciousness and Healing, (©2001)
Chaos Consciousness and Healing, (from Dreamhealing, ©1992)
Human Dimensions of Chaos Theory, (from Dreamhealing, ©1992)
Chaos As the Universal Solvent, (©1993)
Chaos Theory and Jung's Psychological Complexes, (©1993)
Self-Organization in Biological Systems: Chaos and Antichaos, (©1993)
Dreaming and the Self-Organizing Brain: David Kahn, Stanley Krippner, and Allan Combs
Chaos Theory describes the behavior of non-linear dynamic systems, fractal geometry, and the complex, systematic behavior of nature as well as our nature, consciousness and health. It describes in eloquent equations deterministic ordered randomness, dimensionality, reflexive feedback loops, boundary conditions and integration. It is the realm of the irrational, paradoxical, of rich values and structure, self-generative and self-iterating, of self-organizing (autopoietic) emergent creativity, stretched time and folded space, inherent unpredictability, yet boundaried and geometric.
The domain of global behavior, open systems, criticality, sensitive dependence, strange attractors, fluctuations, turbulence, perturbations, thresholds, trajectories, bifurcations, phase transitions, temporal density, reiteration, synchronicity, resilience, the "butterfly effect," subquantal chaos (ZPE), dynamic geometrization, probability, relativity, disruption, coherence and stochastic resonance, synergetics and tensegrity, self-reflection, nested cycles, the breakdown of order with sudden transitions, the creative and evolutionary "edge."
Chaotic systems are apparently acausal, inherently qualitative, sustained by complex feedback loops, and disproportionately responsive.
Chaos Consciousness and Healing, (from Dreamhealing, ©1992)
Human Dimensions of Chaos Theory, (from Dreamhealing, ©1992)
Chaos As the Universal Solvent, (©1993)
Chaos Theory and Jung's Psychological Complexes, (©1993)
Self-Organization in Biological Systems: Chaos and Antichaos, (©1993)
Dreaming and the Self-Organizing Brain: David Kahn, Stanley Krippner, and Allan Combs
Chaos Theory describes the behavior of non-linear dynamic systems, fractal geometry, and the complex, systematic behavior of nature as well as our nature, consciousness and health. It describes in eloquent equations deterministic ordered randomness, dimensionality, reflexive feedback loops, boundary conditions and integration. It is the realm of the irrational, paradoxical, of rich values and structure, self-generative and self-iterating, of self-organizing (autopoietic) emergent creativity, stretched time and folded space, inherent unpredictability, yet boundaried and geometric.
The domain of global behavior, open systems, criticality, sensitive dependence, strange attractors, fluctuations, turbulence, perturbations, thresholds, trajectories, bifurcations, phase transitions, temporal density, reiteration, synchronicity, resilience, the "butterfly effect," subquantal chaos (ZPE), dynamic geometrization, probability, relativity, disruption, coherence and stochastic resonance, synergetics and tensegrity, self-reflection, nested cycles, the breakdown of order with sudden transitions, the creative and evolutionary "edge."
Chaotic systems are apparently acausal, inherently qualitative, sustained by complex feedback loops, and disproportionately responsive.
CHAOS THEORY & COMPLEX DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS
Its Emergence in Human Consciousness and Healing
Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, ©2001
Yea verily, I say unto you
A man must have chaos yet within him
to birth a dancing star. --Nietzsche
To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse. --Carl Jung, 1961
The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same.
~Carl Jung, CW 10, §177.
Chaos Theory and CDS are multidisciplinary approaches employed in divers fields from physics to sociology, from neuropsychology to engineering. Spontaneous self-organizing dynamics is the non-linear basis for a rigorous alternative to linear, reductionistic thinking. As such, it heralds a rebirth of science. Fractal Art, the result of graphically displaying the elegant mathematical descriptions of Chaos Theory, shows us the hidden infinity of forms and structures which unfurl from the infinity of possibilities that mirror and duplicate the shapes unfolding in nature within and around us. Fractals emerge from attractors. An attractor is simply the characteristic behavior of a dynamical system changing over time.
The holistic mind is a complex dynamical system, (CDS). The language of CDS and Chaos Theory is now revealing a point-of-view, or metamodel, which provides a universal language for psychology which is competent to deal with the complexities of interactive change and yet is relatively easy to communicate.
The holistic unity involves phenomenology, mind, brain, behavior, and environment. The dynamical systems' point of view extrapolates a worldview: healing emerges by immersion in the undifferentiated state of chaotic consciousness and emerges via creative self-organization. Degree of awareness is related to the magnitude of attractors. Jumps in magnitude result in jumps in awareness.
Attractors of the mind may undergo subtle bifurcations or splits among possibilities. Bifurcations occur when a system rests right between two attractors. A tiny change in the system's state can then push the system in one direction or another.
There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i: 178.
For example, the transition from one state of consciousness to another is represented as a sudden or dramatic jolt which knocks the system out of its attractor, and leads it along a trajectory toward another attractor. Shapes and patterns emerge from the mysterious infinity of chaos. This is also true of the images which can be observed in our stream of consciousness.
Sudden shifts in awareness arise from the suddeness of bifurcations in nonlinear dynamic systems. These forms reach deep inside, resonate with our spirit and foster a sense of connection. In Chaos Theory, forms emerge, dissolve, and reform through the creative process known as autopoietic self-organization. It demonstrates the unfolding of creative process itself, the emergence of form or structure from formlessness and chaos.
Strange attractors, principles or forces that interact with complexity, are hybrids with roots in both chaos and structure which influence and shape the emergent structures. Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, hidden in the most ordered and solid-seeming places.
It is found in the following dynamical processes, and more:
* In the eloquent blueprint of dynamic behavior, pure spontaneity, thresholds, beginning with the chaotic fluctuation of Zero-Point Energy (ZPE) underlying the formation of all matter/energy;
* in emergent patterns, connectivity, diversity, the self-assembly rules of nature, beginning with the structure of the atom and its particles/waves, to molecular collectives and permeating organic and inorganic matter;
* in the universal set of building rules, networks, events, coherent wholes, dimensional embedding, and the synergetic achitecture of life and biological organization from simple carbon compounds to complex cells and tissues, adaptability;
* in the guided design of organic structures, viability, from the unfolding of genetic patterns to tensegrity and cytoskeleton geometry, to microtubule assembly in nerves, to the rhythms of a beating heart and the flow of blood through it, global behavior;
* in global behavior and the dynamical system of the mind, panpsychism, psychological complexity, sentience and emergent properties, pattern recognition, genesis of intelligence, reality discrimination, raw awareness, attention, meaningfullness, perception-cognition loops, refocusing, creative inspiration, consequences, memory, self-sustenance/structure maintenance, perceptual chunking, time distortion, point of view/relativity, significance/correspondence (beliefs, concepts, attitudes, emotions, behavior), attributions, restructuring, adaptive learning, spontaneous healing;
* in the complex interactions of the neural firing patterns of our brain, and the dynamics of thought especially during dreaming, creative imagination, connectivity, even enlightenment--the biology and psychology of consciousness itself with its tightly knit fabric of subprocesses;
* in the infinite complexity of recurrence in wilderness and natural phenomena, such as the hierarchichal organization of tiers within tiers of systems within systems, and evolutionary adaptation;
* in the primordial elemental turbulence and churning complexity of white water, fire, air, and even earth as well as the quintessence, plasma;
* in the formation and motion of the planets and their path around the sun;
* in the scattering complexity of the stars and galaxies, and the moment of the Big Bang, from which the universe emerged, in the acceleration and expansion of spacetime from vacuum fluctuation. "
Wherever we look, from the Microcosm to the Macrocosm, the sub-quantal to the Cosmic, chaos or non-linear dynamics and complexity is either right in sight or hidden just below the surface. Notions of form, pattern, geometry and structure an be found at the deepest levels of both matter and the psyche. Its domain lies at the edges of knowledge where our perceptions of structure and order end.
Yet chaos reveals in its own depths, hidden degrees of order and structure that resonate with the soul and reveal to us the basic forms and structures repeated throughout nature and throughout our nature. Topology and geometrical relationships are a more fundamental way of understanding both matter and consciousness.
Chaos Theory underlies the fundamental laws of nature and natural processes, and implies a universe of evolution and constant re-creation. Structure arises in the moment and is in resonance with its environment. But in a universe of constant evolution each form eventually becomes dissonant as the evolving environment surrounding it changes. Chaos Theory restores the balance to the entropic forces which lead to the decay and death of outworn systems. It is the means of creative self-organization which arises from the undifferentiated disorder that lurks within the processes of creation.
Chaos holds infinite possibilities of new form, and these forms are eventually revealed and emerge from chaos as new structure. This is also an apt way to describe consciousness dynamics, such as thought, spontaneous behavior and creativity. Reality is neither structure nor chaos, but a process in which structure and chaos dance between form and formlessness. This is the eternal cycle of death and renewal, the dance of Shiva. When there is an intrusion or perturbation in a system, centers of dynamic activity are set in motion within the whole system which attract more and more energy toward themselves like mini-blackholes.
Such systems are known in Chaos Theory as "strange attractors." In chaotic systems, time is "stretched and folded" so that events ostensibly separated in time and space are intimately linked in a non-linear way. Under the pressure of constant evolution, each form is constantly stressed by the evolving environment toward beginning a process of its dissolution back into chaos. Periodic chaos purges the old dissonant structures that impede the flow. A dynamical view emphasizes interconnectedness and self-organization.
Self-organization creates new information in a dynamical system with the development of increasing complexity. There is growth potential in the self-control of bifurcations to novel attractors. Anyone can learn to make choices to empower their future and develop new skills, to inhabit new attractors, to explore conjectured attractors, and make informed choices concerning potential trajectories, to affirm and create self. In complex dynamics, divergent features are perceived as being as important as convergent features. There are also gradual changes in degree of awareness and the amount of energy expended in a particular process.
In general, the expansion of an attractor requires that more energy be devoted to it; increased forces increase the magnitude; shrinkage of the attractor is accompanied by the lessening of energy requirements by the system. In Chaos Theory, the notion of psychobiological stability has been considerably liberalized to include psychobiological periodic and chaotic attractors.
Ben Goertzel describes the process of transformation of consciousness in a complex dynamical system--the mind:
“Psychological structures make no sense considered statically; they have to be considered dynamically, as “attractors” of systems that change over time. There are three kinds of attractors. There are fixed-point attractors, i.e. equilibrium system behaviors, in which a system does not change over time. There are periodic attractors, i.e. cyclic system behaviors. And there are strange attractors -- a grab-bag category covering everything that is neither unchanging nor periodic. Strange attractors are often chaotic, in that, once a system is locked into a strange attractor, its behavior cannot be predicted in any detail. But, nevertheless, strange attractors need not be “random,” they can be intricately structured.”
“In chaos theory terms, the transition between one state of consciousness and another is represented as a jolt which knocks the system out of its attractor, and leads it along a trajectory toward another attractor. This model predicts that transition between states of consciousness should be a sudden and dramatic process -- very much a discrete shift rather than a continuous gradation.”
Fear of chaos manifests as ontological anxiety or existential dread, a fear of being, a feeling there is no meaning in life; since nothing makes sense, why go on? Overcoming the anxiety and depressions of contemporary life requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not. We can learn to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself.
Experience depends on the way we invest psychic energy--on the structure of attention. This, in turn is related to goals and intentions. These processes are connected to each other by the self, or the dynamic mental representation we have of the entire system of our goals. This process is complex, and the notion of complexity is related to the same concept as used by some evolutionary biologists and also described with poetic insights. Its essence in terms of the psychology of the self is that a complex person is one whose behavior and ideas cannot be easily explained, and whose development is not predictable, but is autopoetic, that is self-organizing emergent order.
Order in consciousness is experienced as flow, optimal experience, healing experience. Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. The flow state facilitates both differentiation and integration. The old alchemists used to say, “Only that which has been properly separated can be rightfully joined.”
Complexity also facilitates the integration of autonomous parts. After each episode of flow a person becomes more of a unique individual, less predictable, possessed of rarer skills. The complex self is more likely to avoid both selfishness and conformity.
“The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. . .Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.” (FLOW; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
Flow helps us to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all senses are focused on the same goal. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people and the world and cosmos in general.
THE EDGE OF CHAOS
Chaos and Order are two sides of the seamless fabric of Reality. New order emerges from the deterministic, self-organizing properties of chaos. Once known as Chaos Theory, the dynamics of systems far-from-equilibrium, the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos is now known as Complexity, or Complex Dynamic Systems (CDS). Complex, self-organizing systems, and human beings are certainly among them, are characterized as being adaptive.
The ability of a system to move in and out of chaos gives it the greatest creative advantage. Spontaneous self-organization, or autopoeisis, is a creative, emergent property of chaos, and expresses synchronicity and serendipity. The very richness of multiple levels of observable interaction, fractal reiteration, allows the system as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization. Thus some genes in a living embryo become nerve cells and other muscle tissue, or bone. Organisms constantly adapt to the environment and to each other through the self-unfolding of emergent properties--creative evolutionary adaptations. They actively try to turn what happens to their advantage.
Darwin didn't know about self-organization, matter and life's incessant drive to create order from chaos even in the face of the dissolving ubiquity of the second law of thermodynamics--entropy. Complex systems, are spontaneous, disorderly and more alive because of it. The "edge of chaos" is a special balance point in dynamical systems where components never quite synch but also never quite dissolve into total turbulence either. It is a constantly shifting zone between stagnation and anarchy and spontaneous adaptability.
There is order even in disorder. There is order, manageable chaos (fractals), and unmanageable chaos. The fractal dimension expresses the complexity of a particular fractal form.
"Fractal" comes from the Latin fractus, which means broken or fragmented. Fractals delineate a whole new way of thinking about structure and form. Magnify a fractal again and again and more detail emerges from its infinitely embedded structure. The same self-similar pattern repeats, over and over, no matter what level you care to examine. A single image is infinitely reiterated. Thus, a wealth of structure emerges from simplicity.
Tiny variations are amplified on every bounce in Chaos Theory through the phenomenon of the "butterfly effect." When changes approach the catastrophic level, bifurcation, the whole system reorganizes in a cascade. Thus chance fluctuations can be blown up into gigantic proportions, and change becomes stability. If a system is in a stable attractor state, small imbalances at a point in the system will tend to be damped out by the fluctuating of the system as a whole. If it is in such a state, small imbalances at any juncture will be maintained or amplified.
If we look at the "edge of chaos" which self-organizing systems naturally evolve toward, we find four basic principles, as outlined by Stuart Kaufmann (Sci Amer, Jan, 1993):
1) A system goes through a phase transition from order to randomness if the strength of the interaction between interconnected agents is gradually increased.
2) A system can perform the most sophisticated computation at the boundary between order and randomness. Adaptive agents can develop good solutions to extraordinarily difficult problems.
3) Complex adaptive systems tend to evolve toward the boundary between order and chaos.
4) Organisms change how strongly they interact with others in such a way that they reach the boundary between order and randomness, thereby maximizing the average fitness of the organisms.
There are certain fundamental characteristics of chaotic systems and each has its analogy and application to the nature of human consciousness and therapeutic treatment in consciousness journeys facilitating the natural healing process.
Sensitivity to initial conditions. The main feature of self-generated complexity is the presence of an iterative mechanism which transforms the information contained in the initial conditions in a deterministic way. In this sense, it is possible to view complexity as elaborated simplicity. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions means similar causes do not produce similar effects. Disease is a crisis that is presented to an organism that creates the opportunity to dissolve the old structure and evolve into a new one, better adapted to survival. We are not limited to any specific technique or practice for healing, but use a deeper understanding of the nature of the healing process itself to create whatever technique is needed for the client at whatever level we are working.
Butterfly effect. A variance so small it is almost insignificant in the beginning can create vast differences as the system evolves, making it impossible to track or predict. In the Consciousness Restructuring Process of natural healing, just as one traumatic incident may pattern a lifelong disorder, one healing therapeutic event may completely and permanently restructure the whole system from the most fundamental level. After a bifurcation there can be no return to the old situation.
Fractal Embedding. A fractal is an object that reveals more and more detail as it is increasingly magnified, like seeing the universe in a grain of sand. Self-similarity repeats its conformations from the most fundamental to the most complex level. In CRP, the disease image appears in a myriad of self-similar forms revealed through the levels of the consciousness journey. One traumatic event can shape a life; one intense therapeutic event can reshape it.
Strange Attractors. Investigation of the mechanism of turbulence led to the invention of the term strange attractor. The turbulence that is described by strange attractors is “turbulence in time” -- deterministic chaos, or temporal chaos. Graphic depictions of attractors allow us to map a dynamical system’s behavior in discreet-time or phase-space. Roughly speaking, an attractor is what the behavior of a system settles down to, or is attracted to. A system may have several attractors. Strange attractors are the core of unpredictable variation with limits. For humans this means any perturbation from conception onward can be a determining factor in structure and personality. Personality traits can be construed as strange attractors of behavior. Natural chaos allows adaptation and self-organization for evolutionary change.
Bifurcation. Amplifying a situation, intensifying it, leads to de-stabilization. This leads to a phase transition; phase instabilities or turbulence in a system lead to the possibility of bifurcations. Near bifurcation, systems present large fluctuations. Such systems “hesitate” among various possible directions of evolution. Even little fluctuations in subsystems combine through positive feedback loops, becoming strong enough to shatter any pre-existing organization. In chaos theory, this crucial moment is known as bifurcation. At this point, the disorganized system either disintegrates into chaos, or leaps to a new higher level of order or organization. Through this means, order arises spontaneously from disorder through self-organization. Healing is an ever-present potential.
The Edge of Chaos. When a system is far-from-equilibrium, the slightest flux can be amplified into structure-annihilating waves. Chaos Theory helps us think in terms of these fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, and bifurcations. Chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation. Thus, nonequilibrium, the flux of matter and energy, is a source of order. The highest mean fitness is at the phase transition between order and chaos. Complex adaptive systems adapt to and on the edge of chaos. In CRP all the action lies in going just beyond the boundary from the known and comfortable into the fear, pain, and challenge.
Chaotic Consciousness. There is a fundamental field of unstructured consciousness prior to energy or form, the bornless field. A return in the journey to this state evokes spontaneous healing and creative self-reorganization. At the quantum level, strange attractors influence the emergence of consciousness and its interactions with other fields to create the essence of self and external reality. In Bohm’s model, consciousness can be either enfolded as potential structure or a field, or it can be manifested or unfolded as structure in the space-time universe. In enfolded or potential form, it is outside of space-time reality.
Autopoietic self-organization; creativity and self-actualization. Human EEG shows significant fractal structure, suggesting the brain inherently resides in a state of self-organized criticality, where a small stimulation can set it into fluctuation where the response distribution is fractal. In CRP therapy, small changes in this process result in whole person changes in a healthier direction. This process is creative; healing is biological creativity. Freud made the discovery that when man could overcome his fears, face his pathology, and seek to comprehend it, he grew healthier. Rollo May was among the first to carry this insight further: when we willingly choose to face our being in the same manner, seeking to comprehend it, allowing awareness of its terrors, passions and transiency, we become most truly human and self-actualized.
Emergence. Central to any understanding of consciousness and the brain, emergence is a process by which order appears “spontaneously” within a system. When many elements are allowed to mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact. When the mind lets go of its rational order and enters into unstructured chaos it emerges later with a new structure.
Placebo Effect. Medicine is just beginning to use the mind-body connection for healing. By giving a dummy drug at least 30% of patients experience the same pain relief as with true painkiller. The same pain-killing “pill” can stop gastric secretion in ulcer patients, lower blood pressure or fight tumors, for instance. But this effect requires no “pill” to initiate spontaneous healing; the pill itself is meaningless. The body has the ability to produce any biochemical response once the mind has been given the appropriate suggestion, which is converted into the body’s intention to cure itself. We can bypass the deception of the sugar pill and directly to the intention, (Chopra, 1989, 1993; Weil).
Dreams/REM. Dreams are complex dynamic systems; they embody the very nature of chaos. They are uncensored messages from the twilight zone of chaos-order and communicating with us at the most basic sensory levels imaginable. Dreaming reflects a pivotal aspect of the processing of memory, and helps us form strategies for survival and adaptation. They are complex, incorporating self-image, fears, insecurities, strengths, grandiose ideas, sexual orientation, desire, jealousy, and love. Their unusual character is a result of the complex associations that are culled from memory. When the mentored recalls a dream thread, it facilitates reentering REM for the rest of the journey.
Chaos Theory and Healing
Based on his collaborations, Graywolf describes Chaos Theory and its relationship to healing in Holographic Healing (©2001). In the early sixties at MIT, a physicist-mathematician Edward Lorenz was commissioned to utilize the new computers entering into our culture in an attempt to model weather patterns in order to make possible better long-range weather forecasts. He failed, but as is often the case in science, noticed some interesting things in this failure. He noted that the factors that create weather are very complex and intricately interrelated and that systems that are this complex are extremely sensitive to even the tiniest variations in initial conditions.
A variance so small it is almost insignificant in the beginning can create vast differences as the system evolves, making it impossible to track or predict. In essence he defined the butterfly effect, one of the better known principles of Chaos Theory. It states that air perturbations caused by the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Kansas can, in the complexity of factors affecting weather, hypothetically result in a typhoon in Indochina. He in essence demonstrated that long-range weather forecasting was impossible and for this reason, his data and speculations lay dormant and obscure in a journal paper. But it is just such failures that often open the cracks to later scientific advances, and this one set the stage for Chaos Theory.
The old story about "For the want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost. And for want of the horseshoe the horse was lost . . . " is a message to pay attention to details. Perhaps, however, the real power of the story has more to do with the intricacy, interconnectedness and complexity of things and the butterfly effect.
Although obscure, a number of mathematicians and scientist from fields as diverse as biology, chemical engineering, demographics, and those studying stock market and futures price variations and trends, began exploring this chaos theory. Although operating on the fringes of science, they became convinced that this new study of non-linear dynamics had much to offer to our understanding of how many reality phenomena operate, for example stock market or futures variations. Indeed the realization gradually began to emerge that a new science was being birthed. A major step happened in 1980, when a mathematician at Bell Labs named Mandelbrot, was using computers to explore the mysteries of indeterminate or non-linear equations.
These equations do not have a discrete solution, but instead create an endless string of non-repeating numbers, or have an infinite number of solutions. Pi is an example of the first type. It is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The solution is a value of 3.1417 . . . but the numbers that follow the decimal stretch on to infinity yet never in any observable pattern.
By applying simple repeated reiterating mathematical operations to such non-linear equations, plotting the results in graphic form using the speed and patience of newer computers, he discovered that complex and beautiful geometric shapes began to emerge from the complexity of the chaos in the equations. After only a short time he felt very familiar with these patterns at deep levels of his being. They were somehow fundamentally a part of his reality both inside and out; in his own words they were “part of his subconscious.”
This elegant form of Mathematics is known as Fractal Geometry, and can be readily produced on the screens of computers. It is the mathematics of chaos or complexity. Beautiful forms unfold out of the complexity, reach into infinite depths and reveal hidden patterns that repeat and repeat in a familiarity of structure and change that resonates with the soul. The Mandlebrot set has been called the most complex mathematical structure known. This geometry eloquently unveils the depths of chaos or as it is also known, non-linear dynamics or complexity. It produces a hidden infinity of forms and structures from the infinity of possibilities in chaos that mirror and duplicate the shapes unfolding in nature about us.
In a fractal we can watch a cloud form or a tree evolve, or discover an intricacy of shape that resembles the nervous and the circulatory systems in the human body. If you focus in on a small segment, a tiny piece of a fractal pattern and journey deep within it, expand it, you eventually encounter the segment you entered, only it is not quite the one you entered but slightly changed. This depth of “almost” repetition goes on into infinity, shapes ever evolving and changing. Fractal geometry opens us to a reality of infinite beauty, depth, and complexity in which forms and shapes emerge from the mysterious infinity of chaos. These forms reach deep inside, resonate with our spirit and foster a sense of connection, belonging, and home.
One of the author's (Graywolf) own introduction to this form of mathematics came in 1983, while it was still a relatively obscure mathematical concept:
One of my clients, when I had lived in Michigan, was a mathematics professor at a local college. We had terminated therapy when I moved from Michigan to Oregon, but he had traveled west to pursue some further work with me. We chose to do this on a four day hiking journey on the trail that follows the wilderness section of the lower Rogue River. While contemplating the rugged beauty of the mountains and the wild chaotic waters of the river, he told me of a new form of mathematics that was inserting itself into academic circles. “It is the mathematics of indeterminacy,” he told me, “and deals with non linear and complex phenomena.” In our further discussions of it, he went on to predict that it would affect my work in psychology and consciousness and open the doors to understanding many of the phenomena that remained unsolved in nature and human experience. Although I did not reconnect with it for six or seven years he has proven to be correct on all counts.
However at that time neither Lorenz's, nor Mandelbrot’s nor the others’ explorations of this field really identified or fully defined the principles of chaos as a fundamental theory about how reality operates. That came in the mid-eighties. A group of graduate students in physics became interested in chaos and wanted to explore its possibilities. As is not unusual in graduate school, they received little or no support from their academic and doctoral advisors for this unorthodox quest, who suggested they get on with the business of their dissertations and learning science and physics as it was being taught at that time. As is not unusual with graduate students they declined their advisor's advice and met beyond the confines of the university working on their own. Eventually they formulated much of what is now accepted as chaos theory. They then invited their faculty to a presentation, which was so convincing and well staged that “Chaos Theory” was accepted and soon entered into academic physics.
Chaos theory is still very much in its infancy but it is sweeping throughout the scientific world, rapidly finding application not only in hard sciences, such as physics and chemical engineering, but also in economics, psychology, biology, astronomy, demographics, business management, . . . and on and on. It demonstrates the unfolding of creative process itself, the emergence of form or structure from formlessness and chaos.
Strange attractors, principals or forces that interact with complexity, hybrid something's with feet in both chaos and structure influence and shape the emergent structures In this way perhaps they reveal the faces of the creator or some may prefer the term God. In Taoist philosophy from chaos came the one, which became the two, the yin and yang from which all else is created. In Christian cannons it is said that out of the darkness (no-thingness, implicate order or chaos) God first created light (the quantum level of reality that is energy-matter). Once light had been created, the rest of the universe followed.
Chaos is found everywhere, hidden in the most ordered and solid seeming places. Wherever we look chaos or non-linear dynamics and complexity is either right in sight or hidden just below the surface. It takes over at the edges of our knowledge where our perceptions of structure and order end. Yet chaos reveals in its own depths, hidden degrees of order and structure that resonate with the soul and reveal to us the basic forms and structures repeated throughout nature. Chaos theory implies a universe of evolution and constant re-creation.
Structure arises in the moment and is in resonance with its environment. But in a universe of constant evolution each form eventually becomes dissonant as the evolving environment surrounding it changes. The changed surroundings stress the form and begin a process of its dissolution back into chaos. This latter is known in conventional science as the Law of Entropy which mathematically states that all systems and structures in the universe are tending to increasing states of disorder or chaos.
When I first encountered this law in my sophomore physical chemistry course in 1959, I was thrown into depression. My mind would not accept this inevitable grinding down of the universe. It was an unfinished gestalt for me that became completed only when I encountered Chaos Theory and it restored the balance by showing that within this disorder lurk the processes of creation. Within it, chaos holds infinite possibilities of new form, and these forms are eventually revealed and emerge from chaos as new structure. This also seems an apt way to describe consciousness dynamics such as thought, spontaneous behavior and creativity. This is, in part, how my thoughts seem to emerge and operate. Reality is neither structure nor chaos but a process in which structure and chaos dance, one revolving into the other in a constant cycle of death and renewal. Much like the dance of Shiva.
The models of disease and wellness that we have identified from the CRP, illustrate these principles at work in the human experience. For example: psychologists have long debated why the same experience can result in pathology in one individual yet strengthen another and with a third pass unnoticed. New sciences provide answers. First with respect to chaos theory and the butterfly effect, humans are indeed complex systems and except in a few instances do not operate in linear fashion.
Thus minor perturbations in initial conditions can cause considerable changes in the development of the personality or system, or on the other hand may be damped out having no effect. In other words the butterfly effect. So a minor trauma at an early age in one individual, due to other small differences in the complexity of his being and experience, may heavily affect him and result in a severe neurosis.
Another individual might experience a relatively severe trauma at an early age that has little or no effect on his development. In such complex systems there is no clear linear cause-effect chain. The systems interconnecting with other systems are far too complex A variance so small it is almost insignificant in the beginning can create vast differences as the system evolves, making it impossible to track or predict. We have noted in our explorations that the basis of every symptom of disease including psychological ones represents an attempt to resolve or heal an issue. For example from the physical side consider the symptoms of a cold. The fever and sweating, the sneezing and coughing, all force fluids throughout the organism which flushes the virus from it. The tiredness assures rest to strengthen the immune system.
Today's healing, and the structure it assumes, may define tomorrow's disease Applying this in the field of psychology, consider also the following example. Mary, a small female child, is verbally and physically abused, yelled at and struck by her uncle one evening while her parents are out. Mary is hurt and confused by this and becomes frightened. In her mind the sound becomes a roaring stream of rage and the unexpected pain shocks her. She begins avoiding him in family situations. He is tall, skinny and has a beard. She soon begins avoiding all tall skinny men with beards. By the time she is grown, she feels faint and passes out one day while riding an elevator with a tall, skinny bearded man who has just become her new boss.
Chaos theory would suggest the following. As a small child much of her mind set was unformed potential waiting to take shape. As at the quantum-chaos level, a nothingness waiting to be sensed and give form. The shock and pain of the incident with her uncle captured her full attention and awareness, and became the perception or strange attractor that helped structure some of this unformed mind-set or undifferentiated (free) consciousness into Mary's perceptions (frame of reference) about men. It became a rather rigid consciousness and emotional structure as her organism reacted to the danger and established neural circuitry to remember the threat to her safety and well being.
These type memories are strongly retained, (not necessarily remaining in awareness,) by the organism as a sensory structure or pattern of neural firings to activate and avoid similar dangers in the future. She begins avoiding him because each time she sees him this neural firing pattern activates and she becomes frightened. It is an attempt by the organism to resolve an issue and protect itself. In a large sense it is a healing of the incident with the limited resources available to a small child. As long as the abusive uncle is in her life it is probably a useful survival behavior and attitude to have. A structure arises out of the chaos in resonance with the existing environment. From this point on, any sensory input that conforms to the stored structure, a smell, the appearance of a tall bearded man, or even a background sound is enough to activate the circuitry and shape her perception of the situation.
The Child’s resolution is to flee and in the elevator this is not possible so she flees by fainting. It is embarrassing since the tall bearded man in her current world is a new vice president in her company with whom, as her boss, Mary will have many future dealings. Each time she is in his presence she feels great anxiety and so she is inclined to avoid him, but cannot do so. It is stressing Mary and she fears losing her job and high position in her company if this anxiety cannot be relieved, because her business forces her into daily contact with him. It is expected of her. She is confused and feels great pressure to act differently and does not understand this strong aversion to him. She might even develop physical illness and call in sick for work as a means of avoiding him. In actual fact, he is a well-liked and respected gentleman in every way, and revered by his colleagues.
Mary's life, however, is unraveling. Her childhood structure is no longer serving her and in fact threatens her continued well being. She is losing sleep, her appetite is off and she's losing weight. Her life is slipping into chaos and she is in crisis. But in a universe of constant evolution each form eventually becomes dissonant as the evolving environment surrounding it changes. The changed surroundings stress the form and begin a process of its dissolution back into chaos. We do have a mixed relationship with complexity or chaos.
Our white water river running experience also illustrates it. The river, as does life, presents stretches of slow and still waters interspersed with chaotic white water of varying intensity. Among other things the aeration of the water in the rapids acts to purify it. In more general terms this may parallel the role of chaos in life. Each set of rapids purifies the water but inspires fear because in the turbulence is danger, the boat could flip, we could get hung up on a rock, or tossed into the maelstrom, or perhaps even embrace death. But to get down the river we have to go through them. The idea is to stay in the current and avoid the obstacles. This is often easier said than done as the chaotic waters toss us around unpredictably and often control is wrested away from us by the hydraulics of the currents and tossing waves. Then inevitably we come out on the other side of the rapids, most often still in the raft, but occasionally not.
As we come out the calm waters welcome us and the fear recedes. We regroup, climb back in the boat if necessary, and begin rowing again. But if the calm stretch between rapids is too long, we start getting bored. In its own way the rowing on still waters is just as hard in its monotony as the challenge and fear of the rapids. We only make headway with the effort of our heavy pulling on the oars. We look forward to the next set of rapids and the excitement, and welcome its challenge. The river is the stream of consciousness that is life. It too is full of the challenges and fear of the chaos and the boredom of the stillness. Staying in the current is the journey. The periodic chaos serves to restructure our life as the rapids purify the water. It serves to purge the old dissonant structures that impede its flow from our consciousness just as the rapids eventually move the rocks that create them.
Copyright 2001, Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney; All Rights Reserved
Its Emergence in Human Consciousness and Healing
Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, ©2001
Yea verily, I say unto you
A man must have chaos yet within him
to birth a dancing star. --Nietzsche
To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse. --Carl Jung, 1961
The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same.
~Carl Jung, CW 10, §177.
Chaos Theory and CDS are multidisciplinary approaches employed in divers fields from physics to sociology, from neuropsychology to engineering. Spontaneous self-organizing dynamics is the non-linear basis for a rigorous alternative to linear, reductionistic thinking. As such, it heralds a rebirth of science. Fractal Art, the result of graphically displaying the elegant mathematical descriptions of Chaos Theory, shows us the hidden infinity of forms and structures which unfurl from the infinity of possibilities that mirror and duplicate the shapes unfolding in nature within and around us. Fractals emerge from attractors. An attractor is simply the characteristic behavior of a dynamical system changing over time.
The holistic mind is a complex dynamical system, (CDS). The language of CDS and Chaos Theory is now revealing a point-of-view, or metamodel, which provides a universal language for psychology which is competent to deal with the complexities of interactive change and yet is relatively easy to communicate.
The holistic unity involves phenomenology, mind, brain, behavior, and environment. The dynamical systems' point of view extrapolates a worldview: healing emerges by immersion in the undifferentiated state of chaotic consciousness and emerges via creative self-organization. Degree of awareness is related to the magnitude of attractors. Jumps in magnitude result in jumps in awareness.
Attractors of the mind may undergo subtle bifurcations or splits among possibilities. Bifurcations occur when a system rests right between two attractors. A tiny change in the system's state can then push the system in one direction or another.
There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i: 178.
For example, the transition from one state of consciousness to another is represented as a sudden or dramatic jolt which knocks the system out of its attractor, and leads it along a trajectory toward another attractor. Shapes and patterns emerge from the mysterious infinity of chaos. This is also true of the images which can be observed in our stream of consciousness.
Sudden shifts in awareness arise from the suddeness of bifurcations in nonlinear dynamic systems. These forms reach deep inside, resonate with our spirit and foster a sense of connection. In Chaos Theory, forms emerge, dissolve, and reform through the creative process known as autopoietic self-organization. It demonstrates the unfolding of creative process itself, the emergence of form or structure from formlessness and chaos.
Strange attractors, principles or forces that interact with complexity, are hybrids with roots in both chaos and structure which influence and shape the emergent structures. Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, hidden in the most ordered and solid-seeming places.
It is found in the following dynamical processes, and more:
* In the eloquent blueprint of dynamic behavior, pure spontaneity, thresholds, beginning with the chaotic fluctuation of Zero-Point Energy (ZPE) underlying the formation of all matter/energy;
* in emergent patterns, connectivity, diversity, the self-assembly rules of nature, beginning with the structure of the atom and its particles/waves, to molecular collectives and permeating organic and inorganic matter;
* in the universal set of building rules, networks, events, coherent wholes, dimensional embedding, and the synergetic achitecture of life and biological organization from simple carbon compounds to complex cells and tissues, adaptability;
* in the guided design of organic structures, viability, from the unfolding of genetic patterns to tensegrity and cytoskeleton geometry, to microtubule assembly in nerves, to the rhythms of a beating heart and the flow of blood through it, global behavior;
* in global behavior and the dynamical system of the mind, panpsychism, psychological complexity, sentience and emergent properties, pattern recognition, genesis of intelligence, reality discrimination, raw awareness, attention, meaningfullness, perception-cognition loops, refocusing, creative inspiration, consequences, memory, self-sustenance/structure maintenance, perceptual chunking, time distortion, point of view/relativity, significance/correspondence (beliefs, concepts, attitudes, emotions, behavior), attributions, restructuring, adaptive learning, spontaneous healing;
* in the complex interactions of the neural firing patterns of our brain, and the dynamics of thought especially during dreaming, creative imagination, connectivity, even enlightenment--the biology and psychology of consciousness itself with its tightly knit fabric of subprocesses;
* in the infinite complexity of recurrence in wilderness and natural phenomena, such as the hierarchichal organization of tiers within tiers of systems within systems, and evolutionary adaptation;
* in the primordial elemental turbulence and churning complexity of white water, fire, air, and even earth as well as the quintessence, plasma;
* in the formation and motion of the planets and their path around the sun;
* in the scattering complexity of the stars and galaxies, and the moment of the Big Bang, from which the universe emerged, in the acceleration and expansion of spacetime from vacuum fluctuation. "
Wherever we look, from the Microcosm to the Macrocosm, the sub-quantal to the Cosmic, chaos or non-linear dynamics and complexity is either right in sight or hidden just below the surface. Notions of form, pattern, geometry and structure an be found at the deepest levels of both matter and the psyche. Its domain lies at the edges of knowledge where our perceptions of structure and order end.
Yet chaos reveals in its own depths, hidden degrees of order and structure that resonate with the soul and reveal to us the basic forms and structures repeated throughout nature and throughout our nature. Topology and geometrical relationships are a more fundamental way of understanding both matter and consciousness.
Chaos Theory underlies the fundamental laws of nature and natural processes, and implies a universe of evolution and constant re-creation. Structure arises in the moment and is in resonance with its environment. But in a universe of constant evolution each form eventually becomes dissonant as the evolving environment surrounding it changes. Chaos Theory restores the balance to the entropic forces which lead to the decay and death of outworn systems. It is the means of creative self-organization which arises from the undifferentiated disorder that lurks within the processes of creation.
Chaos holds infinite possibilities of new form, and these forms are eventually revealed and emerge from chaos as new structure. This is also an apt way to describe consciousness dynamics, such as thought, spontaneous behavior and creativity. Reality is neither structure nor chaos, but a process in which structure and chaos dance between form and formlessness. This is the eternal cycle of death and renewal, the dance of Shiva. When there is an intrusion or perturbation in a system, centers of dynamic activity are set in motion within the whole system which attract more and more energy toward themselves like mini-blackholes.
Such systems are known in Chaos Theory as "strange attractors." In chaotic systems, time is "stretched and folded" so that events ostensibly separated in time and space are intimately linked in a non-linear way. Under the pressure of constant evolution, each form is constantly stressed by the evolving environment toward beginning a process of its dissolution back into chaos. Periodic chaos purges the old dissonant structures that impede the flow. A dynamical view emphasizes interconnectedness and self-organization.
Self-organization creates new information in a dynamical system with the development of increasing complexity. There is growth potential in the self-control of bifurcations to novel attractors. Anyone can learn to make choices to empower their future and develop new skills, to inhabit new attractors, to explore conjectured attractors, and make informed choices concerning potential trajectories, to affirm and create self. In complex dynamics, divergent features are perceived as being as important as convergent features. There are also gradual changes in degree of awareness and the amount of energy expended in a particular process.
In general, the expansion of an attractor requires that more energy be devoted to it; increased forces increase the magnitude; shrinkage of the attractor is accompanied by the lessening of energy requirements by the system. In Chaos Theory, the notion of psychobiological stability has been considerably liberalized to include psychobiological periodic and chaotic attractors.
Ben Goertzel describes the process of transformation of consciousness in a complex dynamical system--the mind:
“Psychological structures make no sense considered statically; they have to be considered dynamically, as “attractors” of systems that change over time. There are three kinds of attractors. There are fixed-point attractors, i.e. equilibrium system behaviors, in which a system does not change over time. There are periodic attractors, i.e. cyclic system behaviors. And there are strange attractors -- a grab-bag category covering everything that is neither unchanging nor periodic. Strange attractors are often chaotic, in that, once a system is locked into a strange attractor, its behavior cannot be predicted in any detail. But, nevertheless, strange attractors need not be “random,” they can be intricately structured.”
“In chaos theory terms, the transition between one state of consciousness and another is represented as a jolt which knocks the system out of its attractor, and leads it along a trajectory toward another attractor. This model predicts that transition between states of consciousness should be a sudden and dramatic process -- very much a discrete shift rather than a continuous gradation.”
Fear of chaos manifests as ontological anxiety or existential dread, a fear of being, a feeling there is no meaning in life; since nothing makes sense, why go on? Overcoming the anxiety and depressions of contemporary life requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not. We can learn to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself.
Experience depends on the way we invest psychic energy--on the structure of attention. This, in turn is related to goals and intentions. These processes are connected to each other by the self, or the dynamic mental representation we have of the entire system of our goals. This process is complex, and the notion of complexity is related to the same concept as used by some evolutionary biologists and also described with poetic insights. Its essence in terms of the psychology of the self is that a complex person is one whose behavior and ideas cannot be easily explained, and whose development is not predictable, but is autopoetic, that is self-organizing emergent order.
Order in consciousness is experienced as flow, optimal experience, healing experience. Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. The flow state facilitates both differentiation and integration. The old alchemists used to say, “Only that which has been properly separated can be rightfully joined.”
Complexity also facilitates the integration of autonomous parts. After each episode of flow a person becomes more of a unique individual, less predictable, possessed of rarer skills. The complex self is more likely to avoid both selfishness and conformity.
“The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. . .Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.” (FLOW; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
Flow helps us to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all senses are focused on the same goal. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people and the world and cosmos in general.
THE EDGE OF CHAOS
Chaos and Order are two sides of the seamless fabric of Reality. New order emerges from the deterministic, self-organizing properties of chaos. Once known as Chaos Theory, the dynamics of systems far-from-equilibrium, the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos is now known as Complexity, or Complex Dynamic Systems (CDS). Complex, self-organizing systems, and human beings are certainly among them, are characterized as being adaptive.
The ability of a system to move in and out of chaos gives it the greatest creative advantage. Spontaneous self-organization, or autopoeisis, is a creative, emergent property of chaos, and expresses synchronicity and serendipity. The very richness of multiple levels of observable interaction, fractal reiteration, allows the system as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization. Thus some genes in a living embryo become nerve cells and other muscle tissue, or bone. Organisms constantly adapt to the environment and to each other through the self-unfolding of emergent properties--creative evolutionary adaptations. They actively try to turn what happens to their advantage.
Darwin didn't know about self-organization, matter and life's incessant drive to create order from chaos even in the face of the dissolving ubiquity of the second law of thermodynamics--entropy. Complex systems, are spontaneous, disorderly and more alive because of it. The "edge of chaos" is a special balance point in dynamical systems where components never quite synch but also never quite dissolve into total turbulence either. It is a constantly shifting zone between stagnation and anarchy and spontaneous adaptability.
There is order even in disorder. There is order, manageable chaos (fractals), and unmanageable chaos. The fractal dimension expresses the complexity of a particular fractal form.
"Fractal" comes from the Latin fractus, which means broken or fragmented. Fractals delineate a whole new way of thinking about structure and form. Magnify a fractal again and again and more detail emerges from its infinitely embedded structure. The same self-similar pattern repeats, over and over, no matter what level you care to examine. A single image is infinitely reiterated. Thus, a wealth of structure emerges from simplicity.
Tiny variations are amplified on every bounce in Chaos Theory through the phenomenon of the "butterfly effect." When changes approach the catastrophic level, bifurcation, the whole system reorganizes in a cascade. Thus chance fluctuations can be blown up into gigantic proportions, and change becomes stability. If a system is in a stable attractor state, small imbalances at a point in the system will tend to be damped out by the fluctuating of the system as a whole. If it is in such a state, small imbalances at any juncture will be maintained or amplified.
If we look at the "edge of chaos" which self-organizing systems naturally evolve toward, we find four basic principles, as outlined by Stuart Kaufmann (Sci Amer, Jan, 1993):
1) A system goes through a phase transition from order to randomness if the strength of the interaction between interconnected agents is gradually increased.
2) A system can perform the most sophisticated computation at the boundary between order and randomness. Adaptive agents can develop good solutions to extraordinarily difficult problems.
3) Complex adaptive systems tend to evolve toward the boundary between order and chaos.
4) Organisms change how strongly they interact with others in such a way that they reach the boundary between order and randomness, thereby maximizing the average fitness of the organisms.
There are certain fundamental characteristics of chaotic systems and each has its analogy and application to the nature of human consciousness and therapeutic treatment in consciousness journeys facilitating the natural healing process.
Sensitivity to initial conditions. The main feature of self-generated complexity is the presence of an iterative mechanism which transforms the information contained in the initial conditions in a deterministic way. In this sense, it is possible to view complexity as elaborated simplicity. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions means similar causes do not produce similar effects. Disease is a crisis that is presented to an organism that creates the opportunity to dissolve the old structure and evolve into a new one, better adapted to survival. We are not limited to any specific technique or practice for healing, but use a deeper understanding of the nature of the healing process itself to create whatever technique is needed for the client at whatever level we are working.
Butterfly effect. A variance so small it is almost insignificant in the beginning can create vast differences as the system evolves, making it impossible to track or predict. In the Consciousness Restructuring Process of natural healing, just as one traumatic incident may pattern a lifelong disorder, one healing therapeutic event may completely and permanently restructure the whole system from the most fundamental level. After a bifurcation there can be no return to the old situation.
Fractal Embedding. A fractal is an object that reveals more and more detail as it is increasingly magnified, like seeing the universe in a grain of sand. Self-similarity repeats its conformations from the most fundamental to the most complex level. In CRP, the disease image appears in a myriad of self-similar forms revealed through the levels of the consciousness journey. One traumatic event can shape a life; one intense therapeutic event can reshape it.
Strange Attractors. Investigation of the mechanism of turbulence led to the invention of the term strange attractor. The turbulence that is described by strange attractors is “turbulence in time” -- deterministic chaos, or temporal chaos. Graphic depictions of attractors allow us to map a dynamical system’s behavior in discreet-time or phase-space. Roughly speaking, an attractor is what the behavior of a system settles down to, or is attracted to. A system may have several attractors. Strange attractors are the core of unpredictable variation with limits. For humans this means any perturbation from conception onward can be a determining factor in structure and personality. Personality traits can be construed as strange attractors of behavior. Natural chaos allows adaptation and self-organization for evolutionary change.
Bifurcation. Amplifying a situation, intensifying it, leads to de-stabilization. This leads to a phase transition; phase instabilities or turbulence in a system lead to the possibility of bifurcations. Near bifurcation, systems present large fluctuations. Such systems “hesitate” among various possible directions of evolution. Even little fluctuations in subsystems combine through positive feedback loops, becoming strong enough to shatter any pre-existing organization. In chaos theory, this crucial moment is known as bifurcation. At this point, the disorganized system either disintegrates into chaos, or leaps to a new higher level of order or organization. Through this means, order arises spontaneously from disorder through self-organization. Healing is an ever-present potential.
The Edge of Chaos. When a system is far-from-equilibrium, the slightest flux can be amplified into structure-annihilating waves. Chaos Theory helps us think in terms of these fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, and bifurcations. Chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation. Thus, nonequilibrium, the flux of matter and energy, is a source of order. The highest mean fitness is at the phase transition between order and chaos. Complex adaptive systems adapt to and on the edge of chaos. In CRP all the action lies in going just beyond the boundary from the known and comfortable into the fear, pain, and challenge.
Chaotic Consciousness. There is a fundamental field of unstructured consciousness prior to energy or form, the bornless field. A return in the journey to this state evokes spontaneous healing and creative self-reorganization. At the quantum level, strange attractors influence the emergence of consciousness and its interactions with other fields to create the essence of self and external reality. In Bohm’s model, consciousness can be either enfolded as potential structure or a field, or it can be manifested or unfolded as structure in the space-time universe. In enfolded or potential form, it is outside of space-time reality.
Autopoietic self-organization; creativity and self-actualization. Human EEG shows significant fractal structure, suggesting the brain inherently resides in a state of self-organized criticality, where a small stimulation can set it into fluctuation where the response distribution is fractal. In CRP therapy, small changes in this process result in whole person changes in a healthier direction. This process is creative; healing is biological creativity. Freud made the discovery that when man could overcome his fears, face his pathology, and seek to comprehend it, he grew healthier. Rollo May was among the first to carry this insight further: when we willingly choose to face our being in the same manner, seeking to comprehend it, allowing awareness of its terrors, passions and transiency, we become most truly human and self-actualized.
Emergence. Central to any understanding of consciousness and the brain, emergence is a process by which order appears “spontaneously” within a system. When many elements are allowed to mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact. When the mind lets go of its rational order and enters into unstructured chaos it emerges later with a new structure.
Placebo Effect. Medicine is just beginning to use the mind-body connection for healing. By giving a dummy drug at least 30% of patients experience the same pain relief as with true painkiller. The same pain-killing “pill” can stop gastric secretion in ulcer patients, lower blood pressure or fight tumors, for instance. But this effect requires no “pill” to initiate spontaneous healing; the pill itself is meaningless. The body has the ability to produce any biochemical response once the mind has been given the appropriate suggestion, which is converted into the body’s intention to cure itself. We can bypass the deception of the sugar pill and directly to the intention, (Chopra, 1989, 1993; Weil).
Dreams/REM. Dreams are complex dynamic systems; they embody the very nature of chaos. They are uncensored messages from the twilight zone of chaos-order and communicating with us at the most basic sensory levels imaginable. Dreaming reflects a pivotal aspect of the processing of memory, and helps us form strategies for survival and adaptation. They are complex, incorporating self-image, fears, insecurities, strengths, grandiose ideas, sexual orientation, desire, jealousy, and love. Their unusual character is a result of the complex associations that are culled from memory. When the mentored recalls a dream thread, it facilitates reentering REM for the rest of the journey.
Chaos Theory and Healing
Based on his collaborations, Graywolf describes Chaos Theory and its relationship to healing in Holographic Healing (©2001). In the early sixties at MIT, a physicist-mathematician Edward Lorenz was commissioned to utilize the new computers entering into our culture in an attempt to model weather patterns in order to make possible better long-range weather forecasts. He failed, but as is often the case in science, noticed some interesting things in this failure. He noted that the factors that create weather are very complex and intricately interrelated and that systems that are this complex are extremely sensitive to even the tiniest variations in initial conditions.
A variance so small it is almost insignificant in the beginning can create vast differences as the system evolves, making it impossible to track or predict. In essence he defined the butterfly effect, one of the better known principles of Chaos Theory. It states that air perturbations caused by the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Kansas can, in the complexity of factors affecting weather, hypothetically result in a typhoon in Indochina. He in essence demonstrated that long-range weather forecasting was impossible and for this reason, his data and speculations lay dormant and obscure in a journal paper. But it is just such failures that often open the cracks to later scientific advances, and this one set the stage for Chaos Theory.
The old story about "For the want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost. And for want of the horseshoe the horse was lost . . . " is a message to pay attention to details. Perhaps, however, the real power of the story has more to do with the intricacy, interconnectedness and complexity of things and the butterfly effect.
Although obscure, a number of mathematicians and scientist from fields as diverse as biology, chemical engineering, demographics, and those studying stock market and futures price variations and trends, began exploring this chaos theory. Although operating on the fringes of science, they became convinced that this new study of non-linear dynamics had much to offer to our understanding of how many reality phenomena operate, for example stock market or futures variations. Indeed the realization gradually began to emerge that a new science was being birthed. A major step happened in 1980, when a mathematician at Bell Labs named Mandelbrot, was using computers to explore the mysteries of indeterminate or non-linear equations.
These equations do not have a discrete solution, but instead create an endless string of non-repeating numbers, or have an infinite number of solutions. Pi is an example of the first type. It is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The solution is a value of 3.1417 . . . but the numbers that follow the decimal stretch on to infinity yet never in any observable pattern.
By applying simple repeated reiterating mathematical operations to such non-linear equations, plotting the results in graphic form using the speed and patience of newer computers, he discovered that complex and beautiful geometric shapes began to emerge from the complexity of the chaos in the equations. After only a short time he felt very familiar with these patterns at deep levels of his being. They were somehow fundamentally a part of his reality both inside and out; in his own words they were “part of his subconscious.”
This elegant form of Mathematics is known as Fractal Geometry, and can be readily produced on the screens of computers. It is the mathematics of chaos or complexity. Beautiful forms unfold out of the complexity, reach into infinite depths and reveal hidden patterns that repeat and repeat in a familiarity of structure and change that resonates with the soul. The Mandlebrot set has been called the most complex mathematical structure known. This geometry eloquently unveils the depths of chaos or as it is also known, non-linear dynamics or complexity. It produces a hidden infinity of forms and structures from the infinity of possibilities in chaos that mirror and duplicate the shapes unfolding in nature about us.
In a fractal we can watch a cloud form or a tree evolve, or discover an intricacy of shape that resembles the nervous and the circulatory systems in the human body. If you focus in on a small segment, a tiny piece of a fractal pattern and journey deep within it, expand it, you eventually encounter the segment you entered, only it is not quite the one you entered but slightly changed. This depth of “almost” repetition goes on into infinity, shapes ever evolving and changing. Fractal geometry opens us to a reality of infinite beauty, depth, and complexity in which forms and shapes emerge from the mysterious infinity of chaos. These forms reach deep inside, resonate with our spirit and foster a sense of connection, belonging, and home.
One of the author's (Graywolf) own introduction to this form of mathematics came in 1983, while it was still a relatively obscure mathematical concept:
One of my clients, when I had lived in Michigan, was a mathematics professor at a local college. We had terminated therapy when I moved from Michigan to Oregon, but he had traveled west to pursue some further work with me. We chose to do this on a four day hiking journey on the trail that follows the wilderness section of the lower Rogue River. While contemplating the rugged beauty of the mountains and the wild chaotic waters of the river, he told me of a new form of mathematics that was inserting itself into academic circles. “It is the mathematics of indeterminacy,” he told me, “and deals with non linear and complex phenomena.” In our further discussions of it, he went on to predict that it would affect my work in psychology and consciousness and open the doors to understanding many of the phenomena that remained unsolved in nature and human experience. Although I did not reconnect with it for six or seven years he has proven to be correct on all counts.
However at that time neither Lorenz's, nor Mandelbrot’s nor the others’ explorations of this field really identified or fully defined the principles of chaos as a fundamental theory about how reality operates. That came in the mid-eighties. A group of graduate students in physics became interested in chaos and wanted to explore its possibilities. As is not unusual in graduate school, they received little or no support from their academic and doctoral advisors for this unorthodox quest, who suggested they get on with the business of their dissertations and learning science and physics as it was being taught at that time. As is not unusual with graduate students they declined their advisor's advice and met beyond the confines of the university working on their own. Eventually they formulated much of what is now accepted as chaos theory. They then invited their faculty to a presentation, which was so convincing and well staged that “Chaos Theory” was accepted and soon entered into academic physics.
Chaos theory is still very much in its infancy but it is sweeping throughout the scientific world, rapidly finding application not only in hard sciences, such as physics and chemical engineering, but also in economics, psychology, biology, astronomy, demographics, business management, . . . and on and on. It demonstrates the unfolding of creative process itself, the emergence of form or structure from formlessness and chaos.
Strange attractors, principals or forces that interact with complexity, hybrid something's with feet in both chaos and structure influence and shape the emergent structures In this way perhaps they reveal the faces of the creator or some may prefer the term God. In Taoist philosophy from chaos came the one, which became the two, the yin and yang from which all else is created. In Christian cannons it is said that out of the darkness (no-thingness, implicate order or chaos) God first created light (the quantum level of reality that is energy-matter). Once light had been created, the rest of the universe followed.
Chaos is found everywhere, hidden in the most ordered and solid seeming places. Wherever we look chaos or non-linear dynamics and complexity is either right in sight or hidden just below the surface. It takes over at the edges of our knowledge where our perceptions of structure and order end. Yet chaos reveals in its own depths, hidden degrees of order and structure that resonate with the soul and reveal to us the basic forms and structures repeated throughout nature. Chaos theory implies a universe of evolution and constant re-creation.
Structure arises in the moment and is in resonance with its environment. But in a universe of constant evolution each form eventually becomes dissonant as the evolving environment surrounding it changes. The changed surroundings stress the form and begin a process of its dissolution back into chaos. This latter is known in conventional science as the Law of Entropy which mathematically states that all systems and structures in the universe are tending to increasing states of disorder or chaos.
When I first encountered this law in my sophomore physical chemistry course in 1959, I was thrown into depression. My mind would not accept this inevitable grinding down of the universe. It was an unfinished gestalt for me that became completed only when I encountered Chaos Theory and it restored the balance by showing that within this disorder lurk the processes of creation. Within it, chaos holds infinite possibilities of new form, and these forms are eventually revealed and emerge from chaos as new structure. This also seems an apt way to describe consciousness dynamics such as thought, spontaneous behavior and creativity. This is, in part, how my thoughts seem to emerge and operate. Reality is neither structure nor chaos but a process in which structure and chaos dance, one revolving into the other in a constant cycle of death and renewal. Much like the dance of Shiva.
The models of disease and wellness that we have identified from the CRP, illustrate these principles at work in the human experience. For example: psychologists have long debated why the same experience can result in pathology in one individual yet strengthen another and with a third pass unnoticed. New sciences provide answers. First with respect to chaos theory and the butterfly effect, humans are indeed complex systems and except in a few instances do not operate in linear fashion.
Thus minor perturbations in initial conditions can cause considerable changes in the development of the personality or system, or on the other hand may be damped out having no effect. In other words the butterfly effect. So a minor trauma at an early age in one individual, due to other small differences in the complexity of his being and experience, may heavily affect him and result in a severe neurosis.
Another individual might experience a relatively severe trauma at an early age that has little or no effect on his development. In such complex systems there is no clear linear cause-effect chain. The systems interconnecting with other systems are far too complex A variance so small it is almost insignificant in the beginning can create vast differences as the system evolves, making it impossible to track or predict. We have noted in our explorations that the basis of every symptom of disease including psychological ones represents an attempt to resolve or heal an issue. For example from the physical side consider the symptoms of a cold. The fever and sweating, the sneezing and coughing, all force fluids throughout the organism which flushes the virus from it. The tiredness assures rest to strengthen the immune system.
Today's healing, and the structure it assumes, may define tomorrow's disease Applying this in the field of psychology, consider also the following example. Mary, a small female child, is verbally and physically abused, yelled at and struck by her uncle one evening while her parents are out. Mary is hurt and confused by this and becomes frightened. In her mind the sound becomes a roaring stream of rage and the unexpected pain shocks her. She begins avoiding him in family situations. He is tall, skinny and has a beard. She soon begins avoiding all tall skinny men with beards. By the time she is grown, she feels faint and passes out one day while riding an elevator with a tall, skinny bearded man who has just become her new boss.
Chaos theory would suggest the following. As a small child much of her mind set was unformed potential waiting to take shape. As at the quantum-chaos level, a nothingness waiting to be sensed and give form. The shock and pain of the incident with her uncle captured her full attention and awareness, and became the perception or strange attractor that helped structure some of this unformed mind-set or undifferentiated (free) consciousness into Mary's perceptions (frame of reference) about men. It became a rather rigid consciousness and emotional structure as her organism reacted to the danger and established neural circuitry to remember the threat to her safety and well being.
These type memories are strongly retained, (not necessarily remaining in awareness,) by the organism as a sensory structure or pattern of neural firings to activate and avoid similar dangers in the future. She begins avoiding him because each time she sees him this neural firing pattern activates and she becomes frightened. It is an attempt by the organism to resolve an issue and protect itself. In a large sense it is a healing of the incident with the limited resources available to a small child. As long as the abusive uncle is in her life it is probably a useful survival behavior and attitude to have. A structure arises out of the chaos in resonance with the existing environment. From this point on, any sensory input that conforms to the stored structure, a smell, the appearance of a tall bearded man, or even a background sound is enough to activate the circuitry and shape her perception of the situation.
The Child’s resolution is to flee and in the elevator this is not possible so she flees by fainting. It is embarrassing since the tall bearded man in her current world is a new vice president in her company with whom, as her boss, Mary will have many future dealings. Each time she is in his presence she feels great anxiety and so she is inclined to avoid him, but cannot do so. It is stressing Mary and she fears losing her job and high position in her company if this anxiety cannot be relieved, because her business forces her into daily contact with him. It is expected of her. She is confused and feels great pressure to act differently and does not understand this strong aversion to him. She might even develop physical illness and call in sick for work as a means of avoiding him. In actual fact, he is a well-liked and respected gentleman in every way, and revered by his colleagues.
Mary's life, however, is unraveling. Her childhood structure is no longer serving her and in fact threatens her continued well being. She is losing sleep, her appetite is off and she's losing weight. Her life is slipping into chaos and she is in crisis. But in a universe of constant evolution each form eventually becomes dissonant as the evolving environment surrounding it changes. The changed surroundings stress the form and begin a process of its dissolution back into chaos. We do have a mixed relationship with complexity or chaos.
Our white water river running experience also illustrates it. The river, as does life, presents stretches of slow and still waters interspersed with chaotic white water of varying intensity. Among other things the aeration of the water in the rapids acts to purify it. In more general terms this may parallel the role of chaos in life. Each set of rapids purifies the water but inspires fear because in the turbulence is danger, the boat could flip, we could get hung up on a rock, or tossed into the maelstrom, or perhaps even embrace death. But to get down the river we have to go through them. The idea is to stay in the current and avoid the obstacles. This is often easier said than done as the chaotic waters toss us around unpredictably and often control is wrested away from us by the hydraulics of the currents and tossing waves. Then inevitably we come out on the other side of the rapids, most often still in the raft, but occasionally not.
As we come out the calm waters welcome us and the fear recedes. We regroup, climb back in the boat if necessary, and begin rowing again. But if the calm stretch between rapids is too long, we start getting bored. In its own way the rowing on still waters is just as hard in its monotony as the challenge and fear of the rapids. We only make headway with the effort of our heavy pulling on the oars. We look forward to the next set of rapids and the excitement, and welcome its challenge. The river is the stream of consciousness that is life. It too is full of the challenges and fear of the chaos and the boredom of the stillness. Staying in the current is the journey. The periodic chaos serves to restructure our life as the rapids purify the water. It serves to purge the old dissonant structures that impede its flow from our consciousness just as the rapids eventually move the rocks that create them.
Copyright 2001, Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney; All Rights Reserved
I. CHAOS AND POST-POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
CHAOSOPHY An Imaginal Perspective on the Nature of Reality,
Consciousness, Experience, and Perception
by Iona Miller, ©1993
ABSTRACT: Our notions about ourselves and the nature of the world (worldview) around us are filtered through our prejudices about "the way things work". We never apprehend reality directly--only our world-simulation which is congealed from the convergence of our sensory input channels and the information-creating processes of chaotic neural activity. The brain filters and creates reality. Brains are chaotic systems which create internal perceptual patterns that substitute directly for sensory stimuli. These stimuli are evoked potentials or evoked fields--standing waves in the brain.
Imagination has the ability to induce real-time changes in the psychophysical being. Imagination embodies the power of transformation. It may be accessed through obvious imagery, such as dreams, vision, and other sensory analogs, or viewed directly in symptoms, behavior patterns, emotional patterns, mental concepts, and spiritual beliefs. The imaginal process is our primary experience and it permeates and conditions all facets of human life. During experiential psychotherapy, the sensory-motor cortex system is influenced through imagination. Psyche affects substance at the most fundamental level, through chaotic neural activity.
Imagination is not a talent of some men, but is the health of every man. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
In answer to the introductory question of what is consciousness, it is this flickering process that combines corollary discharge with the messages on all the sensory lines. These sensory lines at once carry fresh input and are shaped by previous experience. Like them, consciousness bears the imprint of both the recent past and the expectation of future action, real or imagined, that will shortly involve the most intimate reaches of the brain and body. --Walter J. Freeman, MACHINERY OF THE MIND
"Chaosophy" is a natural philosophy emerging from the implications of research in complex dynamic systems. It is a radical re-visioning of our notions about the way things work in the universe. Our notions about the nature of our existence are conditioned by our understanding or comprehension of state-of-the-art scientific awareness as well as cultural and spiritual experience. Chaos is being investigated in many different phenomena, and is a major influence in developing a new paradigm.
Some of the most promising results are coming from consciousness studies and experiential psychotherapy. There are many psychological and philosophical implications to chaos theory which reflect on our apprehension of the nature of our existence. It is helping us create an integrated view of psyche, soul, and nature. Chaos theory reflects on the age old questions of determinism, stability and change, creativity, free will, and the underlying nature of spacetime. It is well established now that most movements in nature, ranging from the orbits of planets to behavioral adjustments in life, are essentially chaotic.
Since the Enlightenment, the western mind has had trouble comprehending the nature of reality. We adopted a cause and effect, mechanistic notion of reality (the clockwork universe) which fit well with our level of observation. Therefore, it felt intuitively correct. But now we can observe the infinitely small and cosmic levels of dynamics, and find a counter-intuitive challenge to our causal philosophy, in quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Einstein taught us that "all is relative" to the point of view or orientation of the observer. Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time.
Quantum mechanics introduced the uncertainty principle, mandating participation rather than observation. And chaos theory means dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. This pretty much undermines the old scientific perspective of cause-and-effect predictability, repeatability, and objectivity. Yet, our biology still seems to condition our philosophy.
Neurologist Walter Freeman has suggested that, "the physiological basis for our human conception of cause and effect lies in the mechanism of reafference; namely, that each intended action is accompanied by a motor command ("cause") and expected consequence ("effect") so that the notion of causality lies at the most fundamental level of our capacity for acting and knowing. This trait results in the replacement of sensory stimuli by self-organized activity patterns that are contingent on past experience, present motivational state, and expectancy of future action."
But he goes on to say that, "the intuition of causality is essential for human understanding and action but it cannot validly be applied to the process by which intuition emerges." Intuition is an informational source which is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Reality seems to depend on how you look at it. Embracing the true nature of reality, embracing the darkness and chaos leads to new intuitive perceptions which accord with an expanded perspective--new images.
The healing capacity of images is well known. When we become that chaos, our old notions and forms are de-structured. Intuition makes a quantum leap, and what seemed counter-intuitive now seems to "make sense," viscerally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Through imagination, we can "see through" to a deeper level of reality. It all depends on how one looks at it.
VIRTUAL REALITY CHECK
Mystics have always spoken of the illusory nature of consensus reality--ordinary consciousness--and so does quantum physics. Mind and matter are not separate, not two separate worlds. Matter embodies imagination; it mandates participation, not objective observation. We are learning to "see through" the three great illusions of time, space, and the separate ego. There is no objective point of observation in the universe. Solid physical existence is a complex illusion. All is mind-stuff, an intangible, mythically or archetypally structured, virtual reality.
Charles Tart, the "altered states" expert, notes that "we already live in a variety of internally generated virtual realities...We live 'inside' a world simulation machine. We almost always forget that our 'perception' is a simulation, not reality itself..."
We clearly experience the outer world indirectly through electrochemical changes in various receptor organs, which process raw neurological information. But consciousness is more than those electrochemical processes in the nervous system. Identified with our ego (self simulation) it is no more than that. But there is a deeper current of microstates which conditions our perception of reality. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed.
We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. It's not only a case of "we are the world"; we are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness. Our decisions about what is "real" in the world and ourselves is influenced by the virtual reality created by our world simulation process, according to Tart (1990).
We can experience a sense of an internal psychological self beyond our bodily components--primal self image--and alterations in this image affect us in the real world. When the image changes creatively, so do behaviors, feelings, conceptualizations, and beliefs. Our self-simulation is a dynamic image which unfolds through a myriad of forms and patterns, microstates woven into a unified perception of consciousness. Like fractal patterns emerging on the computer screen, no process-oriented therapist can fail to notice the aesthetic beauty of the unfolding process of the creative imagination.
Experiential psychotherapy facilitates the participating, rather than observing self. Therapy is an art, and as such, it yields esthetic and physical pleasure as by-products. When the therapist joins with the participant, rather than remaining "objective observer", a co-creative shared reality emerges. This shared reality is more than mutual hypnosis, or shared subjectivity. It is a virtual world that is essentially an artistic, expressive form--a "living form." Art embodies imagination.
A work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and it expresses human feeling. A work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality--the logic of consciousness itself. Process work is experience set-off from the general flow of life experience. It is AN EXPERIENCE which stands out and presents itself as having some kind of unity. These states can occur spontaneously, but are facilitated through therapy. Other examples are sudden illumination, esthetic appreciation, opening to nature, simple recognition to dramatic realization, awe.
An experience always has aesthetic appeal. They are self-consciously recognized as being our own personal experiences where we are reflectively aware of our awareness. Not all awareness is heightened awareness. To know is one thing and to be is another. This is the gulf which experiential therapy bridges. Inviting someone deeper into their process--inviting them to become the image--means a temporary disidentification from personality and ego. "Me-experiencing-this" is superseded by the sense that "I AM" an incredibly wide variety of consciousness states in dynamic flux. Alienation and duality of self are suspended in favor of complex connectedness.
The creative state is conducive to the evolution of novel relations and new meaning. This is expressed as a response of delight, distress, or surprise. Immersion in this fluid flux of consciousness is virtual experience--imaginal, yes, but nonetheless real. It is poetic, metaphorical, epistemological. These images are the basis of "how we know what we know." They define us, and whatever they are, we are essentially that. Becoming them, we consciously realize experientially, "I AM THAT." The image "matters" as it is embodied. When we have a therapeutic experience, it involves a degree of realization of "what it is like" to apprehend this given, to undergo this happening. It may not be actual experience, but it is influential experience.
Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both information content and the rate of information processing. Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the therapeutic process. It is knowing by living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy--it always is happening in the "now." Knowledge about natural phenomena, the way nature and ourselves work, can help us attune to deeper resources.
Natural science deals with man as one phenomena among others in a natural world. We now see the influence and beauty of chaotic dynamics as it unfolds in the natural world and our own physiology and psychology. Embracing that, following nature's lead, we learn to cooperate with our own transformative process--through chaotic dynamics--through the mystification of science. The therapeutic art is designed to elicit a full response: sensuous, intellectual, and emotional, not separated but interfused. It has an air of intimacy, of immediacy.
The fullness of presentation matches the fullness of response--yielding a sense of lived experience--personal experience. Like art, experiential therapy is inherently humanistic--concerned with human feelings and values. It helps us embody those values, and the nature of beauty. Beauty is an emotional value which affects our volitional and appreciative nature. It is not inherent in any thing, but is our own pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing or event. It is neither intrinsic nor objectified. It is the first-hand experience of a state of consciousness. It may not be in the eye only, but beauty is in the beholder. Yet the beholder doesn't stand on the outside looking in, but becomes the object of contemplation.
When the focus of contemplation is the self, a complex feedback loop manifests of self contemplating self manifesting self, contemplating self. Beauty as a state of consciousness is described in the Qabala and Hermetic Philosophy as the sphere Tiphareth, on the Tree of Life. In psychological terms it implies transcendence of the realm of personality and intimate knowledge of the transpersonal self. It corresponds with healing, creativity, genius, and bliss states or unitive experiences. The direct path to this sphere on the Tree of Life is called "ART", and concerns itself with the paradoxical melding of the opposites. Art had its origin in magic. It is the path of transcendence from personality to Self, through the Middle Way. Art is the explication of the transformative process.
Through art, common experience is transformed to archetypal, timeless experience. Art is nature transformed. Art shapes our perception of things outside ourselves, and embodies the workings of inner life. Archetype, ritual, myth, and dream are other manifestations of this same parataxic mode, as is expressive therapy. It is characterized by the production of images who meaning is not clear or categorical (Gowan, 1975).
In parataxic mode, symbols or images are used in a private or idiosyncratic manner. Through art, they can be shared with others, expressing feeling and transmitting understanding. In contrast, in the creative mode (Tiphareth) meaning is more or less fully cognized symbolically, with ego present. In complex dynamics, the opposites to be wed are order and chaos. Order is "in-formation," the form within. Interesting transforms happen at the threshold of chaos. In therapeutic terms, this chaotic consciousness is where ego death is consummated and new order subsequently emerges.
The dynamic union of chaos and order is symbolic of our human process of transformation: old outworn forms break down (ego death), and that chaos is fertile ground for creative rebirth, rejuvenation. This Royal Wedding means nothing less than finding the lost soul--the alienated part of oneself which we normally call "Not-I."
THE HOMUNCULUS
In the ancient art of alchemy (another analog of the transformation process), the soul is depicted as a homunculus, or "small man." It was symbolically equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone, and the Elixer or Universal Medicine. This homunculus personified the unconscious as an Inner Man, a hermaphroditic being, a spirit in the bottle, a "brain child." Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, rending himself with his own teeth, like the Urobouros serpent which bites its tail and gives birth to itself.
Both homunculus and uroborous are symbols of paradox. What an image of the dynamics of chaos and order, as it appears in experiential psychotherapy. The image typically appears before dissolution of the center into its unconscious element--the undifferentiated consciousness of the ground state. The liquid form of the philosopher's stone is the called the "universal solvent," and chaos is certainly that. As such, it reflects the self--the prima materia, the massa confusa of the original chaotic state.
Consciousness occurs in a continuum accompanying the flow of matter and energy in and through brains. Our apprehension of all of our experience is conditioned by our input channels, the sensory and extrasensory (or metaphorical) systems. Intuition is one such meta-sensory channel. Walter Freeman believes that perception begins with an internally generated neural process that prepares the organism to seek future stimuli in the outside world.
Between the experience and the input that triggers the experience, something is "added" to conscious experience by the transformational processes that lead from sense organ to brain. Invariant stimulus from the environment (physical space) arrives as information in sensory space and finally proceeds to cerebral space as meaningful input. Experience is synchronized cerebral, sensory, and physical (survival) space-times.
Meaning is a function of the level of arousal at which it is experienced. The symbolic interpretation of one's own central nervous system activity, the integration of information to systemic meaning depends on the level of arousal. Higher levels of arousal, and thus more complete withdrawl from physical space-time into cerebral space-time, narrow the field of attention and deepen the experience of meaning (Fischer, 1969).
Meaning results from integration of information within the systemic context of a self-referential, self-organizing system. The brain interprets this input, along with its own creative addition of (virtual) information, and creates a simulation of perceived reality. It is a convergence of the body sense of muscles and joints, the viscera, and the outward-looking senses. Nerve signals from all over the body are sent to the thalamus, which has sections made up of neurons assigned to each body area. These signals are passed on to the neurons in the somatosensory cortex which contains the brain's own map of the body. Our experience and expectations are geared to our perceptions, which have a wide range of subjective interpretation.
Consciousness is intimately linked with the sensory-motor cortex (parietal lobe). The sensory cortex is typically "mapped" onto the brain as a small, distorted human figure called the "homunculus." Though they are analogous, the homunculus of alchemy (the soul) is not equivalent to the homunculus in the brain. Rather than the elusive "seat of the soul," the sensory homunculus is part of the "hardwired brain," a skin-map in the cortex. Yet it is implicated in the somatic part of spiritual experience.
Each part of the sensory system is assigned a particular region in proportion to other parts. Both sensory and motor cortices have about the same layout of corresponding points. The body is reflected in the cortex. [insert homunculus/brain diagram here] A specific sensory to motor ratio is the reflection of the subjective and objective facets of our nature. With eyes closed we can experience the universe inside ourselves in sensory imagination, that is, subjectively. With eyes open we can change "what there is" outside ourselves through voluntary motor performance, that is, objectively. These experiential and experimental facets are implicit in the nature of self-referential, self-organizing systems.
Self-reference implies that the universe exists subjectively, that is, in reference to the self; self-organization, or goal seeking, refers to the ability to rearrange the outside universe (Fischer, 1967). There is the complementary notion in the medieval consciousness science of alchemy. In alchemy, the homunculus is sort of the primal test-tube baby to be created through a dynamic process in the Hermetically-sealed retort vessel.
Paracelsus alleged that the entity could be created from semen that is gently heated in the vessel for 40 days, then "magnetized." It feeds daily on the hidden mysteries of nature. Some of the ancient philosophers were said to have been begotten by this process. Jungian psychology reads this process as the creation of a renewal of spirit which takes place in the psyche when psychic contents are prevented from "leaking out" and being lost. "Heating" is symbolic of amplifying or intensifying the transformative process.
In terms of chaos theory, "magnetizing" the entity might insinuate the formation of a strange attractor as the complex core of the system. An attractor describes a temporary stability far from equilibrium. We can conceive of it as a polarization of gray matter. The homunculus is the archetype of the magical child. It is thus an embryonic symbol of rebirth, or re-creation of self by Self. In alchemy, the homunculus is generated by a succession of transformations through the four elements to reach its essential nature. The elements may be corresponded with the four arenas of human life: physical-earth; emotional-water; mental-air; spiritual-fire. T
he homunculus mapped on the sensory cortex gives us access to this transformational system through the imagination. This phenomenon has been dealt with in yoga as kundalini, the serpent power. When it is activated there is a stimulus spreading along the sensory cortex of both hemispheres of the brain. Stimulus may be induced electrically, mechanically, or imaginally. When induced through imagination, the experience is virtual in nature, yet just as "real," in terms of psychophysical results. A (real or imagined) stimulus moves along the cortex, setting up acoustical standing waves in the cerebral ventricles (Bentov, 1977).
Vibrations that arise in the ventricles are conducted to the gray matter of the cortex which lines the fissure between the two hemispheres. These vibrations stimulate and eventually "polarize" the cortex in such a way that it tends to conduct a signal along the homunculus, usually beginning from the toes upward. This creates a stimulus-loop, unlike the normal input-output of normal signal processing. When nerve cells interact, there is the seed of a bodily action within each pattern that arises through chaotic dynamics. Self-stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain may be created by circulating a current along the sensory cortex.
When body motion is involved, there is cross-talk onto the similarly-mapped motor cortex. Standing waves can be induced mechanically through resonance by pulsating a magnetic field around the head at frequencies of 4-7 Hz (Theta), or through the auditory channel by eliciting frequency following response. Areas of stress in the body may produce symptomatic responses when stimulated through the homunculus. It usually appears as localized pain. Severity is proportional to the degree of stress encountered. Participants in process work report paradoxical sensations of hot-cold, and pleasure-pain.
Pain and temperature are intimately related, and initiate experiences of suffering and comfort, chills and thrills. "Heat and cold" are the archetypal guardians residing in the brain stem. These signals are processed in the amygdala of the limbic forebrain (frontolimbic system). Pleasure and pain are mediated by the ergotrophic (sympathetic nervous system) and trophotrophic (parasympathetic) systems of arousal, and their neurotransmitters, noradrenelin and serotonin. At their extremes, they paradoxically convert into their opposite. Arousal and involvement with the outer world (action) is mediated by the ergotrophic system; tranquility and the inner world (contemplation, relaxation)) by the trophotropic system.
Sympathetic nervous system activity involves goal-orientation, increased tone of striated muscles, cortical desynchronization, excitement of smooth muscles of the eye, heart, and vascular system, goose-flesh, inhibition of gastrointestinal activity, increase in adrenomedullary secretions, and rise in blood sugar. Parasympathetic activity is characterized as satiety, decreased respiration, cortical synchonization (alpha, theta), inhibitory effects on smooth muscles of eye, heart, and vascular system, muscular relaxation, increased visceral activity, and fall in blood sugar.
Hyperarousal can be symbolized as a Plenum; hypoarousal as a Void. When the sensory cortex is overwhelmed, it paradoxically switches to void-consciousness. Paradoxes provide the dynamic for transcendental experiences and the attainment of creative consciousness. The shift takes place as we move from a sense of "I" or ego toward the transpersonal self, or no-boundaries condition.
Pain and anxiety arise from an inability to verify the state of arousal through cortical interpretive models or voluntary motor activity. But in the bliss state, there is no separate "I" left to become anxious, feel pain, or "freak out." It is characterized by oneness with everything. The paradox of the ergotrophic and trophotropic systems is that they not only represent the guardians or obstacles of spiritual paths, but they are also the paths themselves. Increased trophotrophic arousal represents a perception-meditation continuum which culminates in samadhi, while increasing ergotropic arousal represents a perception-hallucination continuum which culminates in ecstasy (Fischer, 1971).
Jung described a "full void" he called the pleroma as a source of Everything--a sense of vastness, of emptiness that is nevertheless ordering. In complex dynamics, ordering does not come from a single "somewhere" but from everywhere and nowhere--from the void that is full. The sensory/motor ratio may be increased either by enhancing the sensory component (overloading the nervous system with drumming, dancing, sweating, music, mental or physical stress), or by inhibiting the motor component.
The paradoxical shift happens because of sensory input overload coupled with motor activity impairment. In this meditative-like state, the brain produces endorphins and enkephalins which block pain perception and create feelings of well-being. The electronic signal is converted into a chemical messenger, forming the material basis of emotions (Pert, 1988).
NEUROPEPTIDES
Neuropeptides and their receptors are the key to understanding how mind and body are interconnected and how emotions can be manifested throughout the body. It makes more sense to speak of an integrated entity, since this information network is based in chaotic dynamics, and chaotic systems are holistic. An interesting feature of peptides is that they grow directly off the DNA which stores the information to make our brains and bodies.
The brain's cells create neuropeptides. About 60 neuropeptides have been identified so far. There are receptor sites for them in the body as well as the brain. They are intimately linked with the function of the immune system and the biochemistry of emotions. They float within the body, attaching to receptors which sort out the information exchange in the body. Receptors are concentrated within the limbic system of the brain which mediates emotion, and other nodal points like the back horn of the spinal cord, (brain stem). This is the first synapse in the brain where touch-sensory information is processed.
All senses enter the brain through a nodal point for neuropeptide receptors. Most signals enter through the old brain, or "reptilian" brain, the serpent which lies sleeping within. Chemically speaking, neuropeptides mediate our drives, bringing us to a state of consciousness and to alterations in those states (mood state). They integrate brain and body. The agents of the immune system (monocytes) are mobile cells which have receptors for every neuropeptide. Receptor sites also create neuropeptides. Immune cells make the same chemicals which control mood in the brain. Emotion-affecting biochemicals control the routing and migration of monocytes. The immune system distinguishes between self and non-self, preserving the integrity of the organism.
Neuropeptides are signaling molecules. They signal receptors. Biochemist Candace Pert, who discovered endorphins, postulates that "receptors have both a wave-like and a particulate character, and it is important to note that INFORMATION CAN BE STORED IN THE FORM OF TIME SPENT IN DIFFERENT STATES." The molecular substance of all receptors of all species is the same, down to the simplest of animals, demonstrating the simplicity and unity of life. So, there are 60 or so signal molecules for enlivening emotions or flowing energy. Pert notes: "The identical molecular components for information flow are conserved throughout evolution."
Mind is information flow with a physical substrate. The brain, glands, and immune system are joined in a bi-directional network of communication where the information carriers are neuropeptides. Mind holds the network of bodily parts together. Pert maintains that, "it is possible now to conceive of mind and consciousness as an emanation of emotional information processing, and as such, mind and consciousness would appear to be independent of brain and body." Walter Freeman says, "a conscious "willed" action begins as a self-organized pattern of neural activity in the limbic system."
FREE WILL AND GOAL-SEEKING BEHAVIOR
Just prior to his death in 1961, Jung was asked about his idea of God during an interview. Jung's reply accents the chaotic elements of life. His answer was that, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse." We find this sentiment echoed in alchemy, where the transformation of God is also the secret and essential meaning of alchemy.
The prima materia to be transformed into the Philosopher's Stone via the alchemical process is sometimes identified explicitly with God. Both seem to be saying that God manifests in our lives through chaotic intervention that is much like a fluctuation, state change, or bifurcation. As we participate in the recycling of consciousness, we become identified with God and the I-Thou (subject-object) dichotomy is transcended. This transcendental notion is reflected in physics: the observer is the observed. We identify "God" or evolutionary dynamics as the prime agent of chaos--chaotic dynamics in action.
This is a naturalistic or pantheistic philosophy wherein God is identical with the holomovement (Bohm) of the universe. Consciousness is a more subtle form of matter. In physics, the Uncertainty Principle speaks of the fundamental nature of indeterminacy. Chaos theory reveals the determinacy within the most apparently random influences. Therefore, the naturalist point-of-view or natural philosophy must imply "indeterminate-determinacy" or "determinate-indeterminacy."
This paradox appears convoluted enough to reflect the nature of reality--a chaotic world of probabilities. It is deterministic in principle, yet virtually random in practice. This paradox once again raises the question of the plenum/void. In quantum mechanics the vacuum state contains no real matter or light, yet has in it (through the uncertainty principle) all possible matter and light in the form of so-called 'virtual particles' or 'zero-point' fluctuations.
The state of pure consciousness is also said to contain all possibilities, to be a state of pure potentiality in the sense that it is empty but lively (Gowan, 1980). We encounter phenomena analogous to "indeterminate-determinacy" in consciousness journeys. We cannot predict just how the imagery will unfold, but it does conform to certain archetypal patterns and forms. These patterns appear to be self-organizing, self-generating, and self-iterating. They are chronic, having a tendency to recur over time, as one form of iteration. Experientially, we can move through the dialogical experiences (I-Thou) of the symbolic or archetypal layers of the psyche into the clear light of the void which is All and No-Thing (Unitive).
This is the ground state of consciousness. Only from this unstructured state can we "formulate" and express our True Will, in alignment with the whole, rather than personality's desires. For centuries philosophers have conjectured over the amount of "play" in the web-work of fate, and to what degree we control our own destinies.
Jung commented on the limitations of normal human will--the will of the ego--and its limitations in "On the Nature of the Psyche": The will cannot transgress the bounds of the psychic sphere: it cannot coerce the instinct, nor has it power over the spirit, in so far as we understand by this something more than the intellect. Spirit and instinct are by nature autonomous and both limit in equal measure the applied field of the will. This autonomy of the deeper self is why we are limited in our self-mastery, and creates the impotence we feel when faced with "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
There are many things in life we can't control despite our best efforts. There are many things we wouldn't want to control if we could. The independent will of the deep self appears as "God's Will." From the transcendent perspective personal free will is a moot point, since it is subject to being "overwritten," through chaotic intervention. It is not exclusively an inner or outer reality, though it has aspects of both. Immersion in the imaginal drama of the psyche changes us in fundamental ways.
Chaotic intrusions from the outer world can also be meaningful in our spiritual life. To Jung, will was simply freely available psychic energy, which could be directed by an intervention of consciousness--a decision to apply that energy in a specific way for a purpose--intent. Its availability is determined by one's freedom from distorted or deformed patterns. Neurotic or pathological patterns keep the energy tied up, stuck, unavailable. When the energy is freed up it becomes available. If will means freedom of choice, then the question becomes "to what life purpose do we direct our will?" Does the ego learn to subordinate itself to the totality of self? Is ego free of identification with the power instinct?
Freedom of will remains a mystery. 'Will' implies intention and power to implement that intention. This determines our values and choices. Ego's perspective is too circumscribed and linear to make informed decisions. Becoming permeable, opening to the complex, non-linear input of intuition and spirituality may help. We are often forced from our course through lack of self understanding as well as external opposition.
Will is a dynamism which implies degrees of freedom within the constraints of "indeterminate - determinacy." It operates along a continuum which includes instinct, impulse, ambition, drive and compulsion. It is a form of energy that can overcome other forms of energy, such as feeling or sensation. A will turned toward self-understanding develops psychological faith in the reality of imaginal experience through self-reflection.
Psychological faith is reflected as the love of images, and confirms the reality of the soul as image-making power. The inner world is just as "real" as the outer, although different. This acknowledgement translates into an alignment with one's wholeness, beyond simplistic wishes and personalistic desires. They are real in different ways that can be recognized and experienced. One world is visible, the other invisible or virtual or implicate (enfolded). But the two apparent worlds are one. Matter is not different than consciousness--but consciousness is not limited to matter. The rational mind cooperates with the soul, once it is convinced there is something beyond itself. At this stage, will or change comes through an imaginal or meditative process.
The alchemists had an operation for the incubation of images known as the meditatio--a sort of brooding on imagery--a way of being in imagination. In terms of human biology, Walter Freeman suggests that neural activity patterns emerging by chaotic dynamics express a drive toward a goal in the form of commands to the motor and sensory systems. Sensory consequences are fed back into the limbic system through the entorhinal cortex. Sensory input converging onto the entorhinal area is channelled into the hippocampus, then returned to the entorhinal and motor cortices and finally passed on to the motor system--action.
Emergent properties within the entorhinal area condition behavior. There is spontaneous, self-organized, dynamic production of goal-oriented behavior. Freeman boldly asserts (1990) that, "Philosophical and psychological considerations suggest that the cyclical process of emergent goal-seeking, reafference, and sensory feedback constitute the basis for what we perceive as subjective consciousness."
This process leads to perception, concept formation, a "cognitive map." Consciousness is an intrinsic emergent property. Through the chaotic process of emergence, order appears "spontaneously" (or instantaneously) within a system. A willed action begins as a self-organized pattern of neural activity in the limbic system, initiating a motor command to the sympathetic system and a corollarly discharge within the somatosensory system (parasympathetic). Complex feedback (confirmation of change) from these systems constitutes integration.
This process contains the essence of our relationship to our world. Yet, this process cannot be said to "create" nor contain consciousness. Consciousness emerges from chaos. Their essence is one. Creation is instantaneous. The flow of energy washes life and consciousness into the world.
Chaos reflects the wildness and irregularity in nature, and in ourselves. Virtually random element endow chaotic systems with the freedom to explore vast ranges of consciousness and behavior patterns within the creative flow. In process work, adherence to the principles of chaosophy means that we don't try to create with the will. There is no need to do so. We simply notice and follow what is naturally happening, following nature's lead. Chaos is nature's guide, the matrix of formation of imagery, consciousness, and matter.
REFERENCES
Bentov, Itzhak, STALKING THE WILD PENDULUM, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1977.
Bohm, David, WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER, Routledge & Kegen Paul (1980).
Fischer, Roland, "Biological Models of Creativity," JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, 1967. Fischer, Roland, "A Cartography of Exalted and Meditative States," SCIENCE, 1971.
Freeman, Walter, "On the Fallacy of Assigning an Origin to Consciousness," MACHINERY OF THE MIND,
E. Roy John, Ed., Birkhausser, Boston, 1990.
Gowan, John Curtis, TRANCE, ART, AND CRETIVITY, California State University, Northridge, 1975.
Gowan, John Curtis, OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER, California State University, Northridge, 197 .
Jung, C.G., ON THE NATURE OF THE PSYCHE, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1960.
Miller, Webb, & Dickson, "A Holographic Concept of Reality," PSYCHOENERGETIC SYSTEMS, S. Krippner, Ed., Gordon and Breach, New York, London, Paris 1979, pp 231-237.
Pert, Candace, "The Material Basis of Emotions," WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, Summer 1988.
Tart, Charles, "Multiple Personality, Altered States, and Virtual Reality; The World Simulation Process Approach," DISSOCIATION, Vol. III, No. 4, Dec. 1990.
CHAOSOPHY An Imaginal Perspective on the Nature of Reality,
Consciousness, Experience, and Perception
by Iona Miller, ©1993
ABSTRACT: Our notions about ourselves and the nature of the world (worldview) around us are filtered through our prejudices about "the way things work". We never apprehend reality directly--only our world-simulation which is congealed from the convergence of our sensory input channels and the information-creating processes of chaotic neural activity. The brain filters and creates reality. Brains are chaotic systems which create internal perceptual patterns that substitute directly for sensory stimuli. These stimuli are evoked potentials or evoked fields--standing waves in the brain.
Imagination has the ability to induce real-time changes in the psychophysical being. Imagination embodies the power of transformation. It may be accessed through obvious imagery, such as dreams, vision, and other sensory analogs, or viewed directly in symptoms, behavior patterns, emotional patterns, mental concepts, and spiritual beliefs. The imaginal process is our primary experience and it permeates and conditions all facets of human life. During experiential psychotherapy, the sensory-motor cortex system is influenced through imagination. Psyche affects substance at the most fundamental level, through chaotic neural activity.
Imagination is not a talent of some men, but is the health of every man. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
In answer to the introductory question of what is consciousness, it is this flickering process that combines corollary discharge with the messages on all the sensory lines. These sensory lines at once carry fresh input and are shaped by previous experience. Like them, consciousness bears the imprint of both the recent past and the expectation of future action, real or imagined, that will shortly involve the most intimate reaches of the brain and body. --Walter J. Freeman, MACHINERY OF THE MIND
"Chaosophy" is a natural philosophy emerging from the implications of research in complex dynamic systems. It is a radical re-visioning of our notions about the way things work in the universe. Our notions about the nature of our existence are conditioned by our understanding or comprehension of state-of-the-art scientific awareness as well as cultural and spiritual experience. Chaos is being investigated in many different phenomena, and is a major influence in developing a new paradigm.
Some of the most promising results are coming from consciousness studies and experiential psychotherapy. There are many psychological and philosophical implications to chaos theory which reflect on our apprehension of the nature of our existence. It is helping us create an integrated view of psyche, soul, and nature. Chaos theory reflects on the age old questions of determinism, stability and change, creativity, free will, and the underlying nature of spacetime. It is well established now that most movements in nature, ranging from the orbits of planets to behavioral adjustments in life, are essentially chaotic.
Since the Enlightenment, the western mind has had trouble comprehending the nature of reality. We adopted a cause and effect, mechanistic notion of reality (the clockwork universe) which fit well with our level of observation. Therefore, it felt intuitively correct. But now we can observe the infinitely small and cosmic levels of dynamics, and find a counter-intuitive challenge to our causal philosophy, in quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Einstein taught us that "all is relative" to the point of view or orientation of the observer. Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time.
Quantum mechanics introduced the uncertainty principle, mandating participation rather than observation. And chaos theory means dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. This pretty much undermines the old scientific perspective of cause-and-effect predictability, repeatability, and objectivity. Yet, our biology still seems to condition our philosophy.
Neurologist Walter Freeman has suggested that, "the physiological basis for our human conception of cause and effect lies in the mechanism of reafference; namely, that each intended action is accompanied by a motor command ("cause") and expected consequence ("effect") so that the notion of causality lies at the most fundamental level of our capacity for acting and knowing. This trait results in the replacement of sensory stimuli by self-organized activity patterns that are contingent on past experience, present motivational state, and expectancy of future action."
But he goes on to say that, "the intuition of causality is essential for human understanding and action but it cannot validly be applied to the process by which intuition emerges." Intuition is an informational source which is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Reality seems to depend on how you look at it. Embracing the true nature of reality, embracing the darkness and chaos leads to new intuitive perceptions which accord with an expanded perspective--new images.
The healing capacity of images is well known. When we become that chaos, our old notions and forms are de-structured. Intuition makes a quantum leap, and what seemed counter-intuitive now seems to "make sense," viscerally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Through imagination, we can "see through" to a deeper level of reality. It all depends on how one looks at it.
VIRTUAL REALITY CHECK
Mystics have always spoken of the illusory nature of consensus reality--ordinary consciousness--and so does quantum physics. Mind and matter are not separate, not two separate worlds. Matter embodies imagination; it mandates participation, not objective observation. We are learning to "see through" the three great illusions of time, space, and the separate ego. There is no objective point of observation in the universe. Solid physical existence is a complex illusion. All is mind-stuff, an intangible, mythically or archetypally structured, virtual reality.
Charles Tart, the "altered states" expert, notes that "we already live in a variety of internally generated virtual realities...We live 'inside' a world simulation machine. We almost always forget that our 'perception' is a simulation, not reality itself..."
We clearly experience the outer world indirectly through electrochemical changes in various receptor organs, which process raw neurological information. But consciousness is more than those electrochemical processes in the nervous system. Identified with our ego (self simulation) it is no more than that. But there is a deeper current of microstates which conditions our perception of reality. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed.
We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. It's not only a case of "we are the world"; we are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness. Our decisions about what is "real" in the world and ourselves is influenced by the virtual reality created by our world simulation process, according to Tart (1990).
We can experience a sense of an internal psychological self beyond our bodily components--primal self image--and alterations in this image affect us in the real world. When the image changes creatively, so do behaviors, feelings, conceptualizations, and beliefs. Our self-simulation is a dynamic image which unfolds through a myriad of forms and patterns, microstates woven into a unified perception of consciousness. Like fractal patterns emerging on the computer screen, no process-oriented therapist can fail to notice the aesthetic beauty of the unfolding process of the creative imagination.
Experiential psychotherapy facilitates the participating, rather than observing self. Therapy is an art, and as such, it yields esthetic and physical pleasure as by-products. When the therapist joins with the participant, rather than remaining "objective observer", a co-creative shared reality emerges. This shared reality is more than mutual hypnosis, or shared subjectivity. It is a virtual world that is essentially an artistic, expressive form--a "living form." Art embodies imagination.
A work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and it expresses human feeling. A work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality--the logic of consciousness itself. Process work is experience set-off from the general flow of life experience. It is AN EXPERIENCE which stands out and presents itself as having some kind of unity. These states can occur spontaneously, but are facilitated through therapy. Other examples are sudden illumination, esthetic appreciation, opening to nature, simple recognition to dramatic realization, awe.
An experience always has aesthetic appeal. They are self-consciously recognized as being our own personal experiences where we are reflectively aware of our awareness. Not all awareness is heightened awareness. To know is one thing and to be is another. This is the gulf which experiential therapy bridges. Inviting someone deeper into their process--inviting them to become the image--means a temporary disidentification from personality and ego. "Me-experiencing-this" is superseded by the sense that "I AM" an incredibly wide variety of consciousness states in dynamic flux. Alienation and duality of self are suspended in favor of complex connectedness.
The creative state is conducive to the evolution of novel relations and new meaning. This is expressed as a response of delight, distress, or surprise. Immersion in this fluid flux of consciousness is virtual experience--imaginal, yes, but nonetheless real. It is poetic, metaphorical, epistemological. These images are the basis of "how we know what we know." They define us, and whatever they are, we are essentially that. Becoming them, we consciously realize experientially, "I AM THAT." The image "matters" as it is embodied. When we have a therapeutic experience, it involves a degree of realization of "what it is like" to apprehend this given, to undergo this happening. It may not be actual experience, but it is influential experience.
Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both information content and the rate of information processing. Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the therapeutic process. It is knowing by living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy--it always is happening in the "now." Knowledge about natural phenomena, the way nature and ourselves work, can help us attune to deeper resources.
Natural science deals with man as one phenomena among others in a natural world. We now see the influence and beauty of chaotic dynamics as it unfolds in the natural world and our own physiology and psychology. Embracing that, following nature's lead, we learn to cooperate with our own transformative process--through chaotic dynamics--through the mystification of science. The therapeutic art is designed to elicit a full response: sensuous, intellectual, and emotional, not separated but interfused. It has an air of intimacy, of immediacy.
The fullness of presentation matches the fullness of response--yielding a sense of lived experience--personal experience. Like art, experiential therapy is inherently humanistic--concerned with human feelings and values. It helps us embody those values, and the nature of beauty. Beauty is an emotional value which affects our volitional and appreciative nature. It is not inherent in any thing, but is our own pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing or event. It is neither intrinsic nor objectified. It is the first-hand experience of a state of consciousness. It may not be in the eye only, but beauty is in the beholder. Yet the beholder doesn't stand on the outside looking in, but becomes the object of contemplation.
When the focus of contemplation is the self, a complex feedback loop manifests of self contemplating self manifesting self, contemplating self. Beauty as a state of consciousness is described in the Qabala and Hermetic Philosophy as the sphere Tiphareth, on the Tree of Life. In psychological terms it implies transcendence of the realm of personality and intimate knowledge of the transpersonal self. It corresponds with healing, creativity, genius, and bliss states or unitive experiences. The direct path to this sphere on the Tree of Life is called "ART", and concerns itself with the paradoxical melding of the opposites. Art had its origin in magic. It is the path of transcendence from personality to Self, through the Middle Way. Art is the explication of the transformative process.
Through art, common experience is transformed to archetypal, timeless experience. Art is nature transformed. Art shapes our perception of things outside ourselves, and embodies the workings of inner life. Archetype, ritual, myth, and dream are other manifestations of this same parataxic mode, as is expressive therapy. It is characterized by the production of images who meaning is not clear or categorical (Gowan, 1975).
In parataxic mode, symbols or images are used in a private or idiosyncratic manner. Through art, they can be shared with others, expressing feeling and transmitting understanding. In contrast, in the creative mode (Tiphareth) meaning is more or less fully cognized symbolically, with ego present. In complex dynamics, the opposites to be wed are order and chaos. Order is "in-formation," the form within. Interesting transforms happen at the threshold of chaos. In therapeutic terms, this chaotic consciousness is where ego death is consummated and new order subsequently emerges.
The dynamic union of chaos and order is symbolic of our human process of transformation: old outworn forms break down (ego death), and that chaos is fertile ground for creative rebirth, rejuvenation. This Royal Wedding means nothing less than finding the lost soul--the alienated part of oneself which we normally call "Not-I."
THE HOMUNCULUS
In the ancient art of alchemy (another analog of the transformation process), the soul is depicted as a homunculus, or "small man." It was symbolically equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone, and the Elixer or Universal Medicine. This homunculus personified the unconscious as an Inner Man, a hermaphroditic being, a spirit in the bottle, a "brain child." Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, rending himself with his own teeth, like the Urobouros serpent which bites its tail and gives birth to itself.
Both homunculus and uroborous are symbols of paradox. What an image of the dynamics of chaos and order, as it appears in experiential psychotherapy. The image typically appears before dissolution of the center into its unconscious element--the undifferentiated consciousness of the ground state. The liquid form of the philosopher's stone is the called the "universal solvent," and chaos is certainly that. As such, it reflects the self--the prima materia, the massa confusa of the original chaotic state.
Consciousness occurs in a continuum accompanying the flow of matter and energy in and through brains. Our apprehension of all of our experience is conditioned by our input channels, the sensory and extrasensory (or metaphorical) systems. Intuition is one such meta-sensory channel. Walter Freeman believes that perception begins with an internally generated neural process that prepares the organism to seek future stimuli in the outside world.
Between the experience and the input that triggers the experience, something is "added" to conscious experience by the transformational processes that lead from sense organ to brain. Invariant stimulus from the environment (physical space) arrives as information in sensory space and finally proceeds to cerebral space as meaningful input. Experience is synchronized cerebral, sensory, and physical (survival) space-times.
Meaning is a function of the level of arousal at which it is experienced. The symbolic interpretation of one's own central nervous system activity, the integration of information to systemic meaning depends on the level of arousal. Higher levels of arousal, and thus more complete withdrawl from physical space-time into cerebral space-time, narrow the field of attention and deepen the experience of meaning (Fischer, 1969).
Meaning results from integration of information within the systemic context of a self-referential, self-organizing system. The brain interprets this input, along with its own creative addition of (virtual) information, and creates a simulation of perceived reality. It is a convergence of the body sense of muscles and joints, the viscera, and the outward-looking senses. Nerve signals from all over the body are sent to the thalamus, which has sections made up of neurons assigned to each body area. These signals are passed on to the neurons in the somatosensory cortex which contains the brain's own map of the body. Our experience and expectations are geared to our perceptions, which have a wide range of subjective interpretation.
Consciousness is intimately linked with the sensory-motor cortex (parietal lobe). The sensory cortex is typically "mapped" onto the brain as a small, distorted human figure called the "homunculus." Though they are analogous, the homunculus of alchemy (the soul) is not equivalent to the homunculus in the brain. Rather than the elusive "seat of the soul," the sensory homunculus is part of the "hardwired brain," a skin-map in the cortex. Yet it is implicated in the somatic part of spiritual experience.
Each part of the sensory system is assigned a particular region in proportion to other parts. Both sensory and motor cortices have about the same layout of corresponding points. The body is reflected in the cortex. [insert homunculus/brain diagram here] A specific sensory to motor ratio is the reflection of the subjective and objective facets of our nature. With eyes closed we can experience the universe inside ourselves in sensory imagination, that is, subjectively. With eyes open we can change "what there is" outside ourselves through voluntary motor performance, that is, objectively. These experiential and experimental facets are implicit in the nature of self-referential, self-organizing systems.
Self-reference implies that the universe exists subjectively, that is, in reference to the self; self-organization, or goal seeking, refers to the ability to rearrange the outside universe (Fischer, 1967). There is the complementary notion in the medieval consciousness science of alchemy. In alchemy, the homunculus is sort of the primal test-tube baby to be created through a dynamic process in the Hermetically-sealed retort vessel.
Paracelsus alleged that the entity could be created from semen that is gently heated in the vessel for 40 days, then "magnetized." It feeds daily on the hidden mysteries of nature. Some of the ancient philosophers were said to have been begotten by this process. Jungian psychology reads this process as the creation of a renewal of spirit which takes place in the psyche when psychic contents are prevented from "leaking out" and being lost. "Heating" is symbolic of amplifying or intensifying the transformative process.
In terms of chaos theory, "magnetizing" the entity might insinuate the formation of a strange attractor as the complex core of the system. An attractor describes a temporary stability far from equilibrium. We can conceive of it as a polarization of gray matter. The homunculus is the archetype of the magical child. It is thus an embryonic symbol of rebirth, or re-creation of self by Self. In alchemy, the homunculus is generated by a succession of transformations through the four elements to reach its essential nature. The elements may be corresponded with the four arenas of human life: physical-earth; emotional-water; mental-air; spiritual-fire. T
he homunculus mapped on the sensory cortex gives us access to this transformational system through the imagination. This phenomenon has been dealt with in yoga as kundalini, the serpent power. When it is activated there is a stimulus spreading along the sensory cortex of both hemispheres of the brain. Stimulus may be induced electrically, mechanically, or imaginally. When induced through imagination, the experience is virtual in nature, yet just as "real," in terms of psychophysical results. A (real or imagined) stimulus moves along the cortex, setting up acoustical standing waves in the cerebral ventricles (Bentov, 1977).
Vibrations that arise in the ventricles are conducted to the gray matter of the cortex which lines the fissure between the two hemispheres. These vibrations stimulate and eventually "polarize" the cortex in such a way that it tends to conduct a signal along the homunculus, usually beginning from the toes upward. This creates a stimulus-loop, unlike the normal input-output of normal signal processing. When nerve cells interact, there is the seed of a bodily action within each pattern that arises through chaotic dynamics. Self-stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain may be created by circulating a current along the sensory cortex.
When body motion is involved, there is cross-talk onto the similarly-mapped motor cortex. Standing waves can be induced mechanically through resonance by pulsating a magnetic field around the head at frequencies of 4-7 Hz (Theta), or through the auditory channel by eliciting frequency following response. Areas of stress in the body may produce symptomatic responses when stimulated through the homunculus. It usually appears as localized pain. Severity is proportional to the degree of stress encountered. Participants in process work report paradoxical sensations of hot-cold, and pleasure-pain.
Pain and temperature are intimately related, and initiate experiences of suffering and comfort, chills and thrills. "Heat and cold" are the archetypal guardians residing in the brain stem. These signals are processed in the amygdala of the limbic forebrain (frontolimbic system). Pleasure and pain are mediated by the ergotrophic (sympathetic nervous system) and trophotrophic (parasympathetic) systems of arousal, and their neurotransmitters, noradrenelin and serotonin. At their extremes, they paradoxically convert into their opposite. Arousal and involvement with the outer world (action) is mediated by the ergotrophic system; tranquility and the inner world (contemplation, relaxation)) by the trophotropic system.
Sympathetic nervous system activity involves goal-orientation, increased tone of striated muscles, cortical desynchronization, excitement of smooth muscles of the eye, heart, and vascular system, goose-flesh, inhibition of gastrointestinal activity, increase in adrenomedullary secretions, and rise in blood sugar. Parasympathetic activity is characterized as satiety, decreased respiration, cortical synchonization (alpha, theta), inhibitory effects on smooth muscles of eye, heart, and vascular system, muscular relaxation, increased visceral activity, and fall in blood sugar.
Hyperarousal can be symbolized as a Plenum; hypoarousal as a Void. When the sensory cortex is overwhelmed, it paradoxically switches to void-consciousness. Paradoxes provide the dynamic for transcendental experiences and the attainment of creative consciousness. The shift takes place as we move from a sense of "I" or ego toward the transpersonal self, or no-boundaries condition.
Pain and anxiety arise from an inability to verify the state of arousal through cortical interpretive models or voluntary motor activity. But in the bliss state, there is no separate "I" left to become anxious, feel pain, or "freak out." It is characterized by oneness with everything. The paradox of the ergotrophic and trophotropic systems is that they not only represent the guardians or obstacles of spiritual paths, but they are also the paths themselves. Increased trophotrophic arousal represents a perception-meditation continuum which culminates in samadhi, while increasing ergotropic arousal represents a perception-hallucination continuum which culminates in ecstasy (Fischer, 1971).
Jung described a "full void" he called the pleroma as a source of Everything--a sense of vastness, of emptiness that is nevertheless ordering. In complex dynamics, ordering does not come from a single "somewhere" but from everywhere and nowhere--from the void that is full. The sensory/motor ratio may be increased either by enhancing the sensory component (overloading the nervous system with drumming, dancing, sweating, music, mental or physical stress), or by inhibiting the motor component.
The paradoxical shift happens because of sensory input overload coupled with motor activity impairment. In this meditative-like state, the brain produces endorphins and enkephalins which block pain perception and create feelings of well-being. The electronic signal is converted into a chemical messenger, forming the material basis of emotions (Pert, 1988).
NEUROPEPTIDES
Neuropeptides and their receptors are the key to understanding how mind and body are interconnected and how emotions can be manifested throughout the body. It makes more sense to speak of an integrated entity, since this information network is based in chaotic dynamics, and chaotic systems are holistic. An interesting feature of peptides is that they grow directly off the DNA which stores the information to make our brains and bodies.
The brain's cells create neuropeptides. About 60 neuropeptides have been identified so far. There are receptor sites for them in the body as well as the brain. They are intimately linked with the function of the immune system and the biochemistry of emotions. They float within the body, attaching to receptors which sort out the information exchange in the body. Receptors are concentrated within the limbic system of the brain which mediates emotion, and other nodal points like the back horn of the spinal cord, (brain stem). This is the first synapse in the brain where touch-sensory information is processed.
All senses enter the brain through a nodal point for neuropeptide receptors. Most signals enter through the old brain, or "reptilian" brain, the serpent which lies sleeping within. Chemically speaking, neuropeptides mediate our drives, bringing us to a state of consciousness and to alterations in those states (mood state). They integrate brain and body. The agents of the immune system (monocytes) are mobile cells which have receptors for every neuropeptide. Receptor sites also create neuropeptides. Immune cells make the same chemicals which control mood in the brain. Emotion-affecting biochemicals control the routing and migration of monocytes. The immune system distinguishes between self and non-self, preserving the integrity of the organism.
Neuropeptides are signaling molecules. They signal receptors. Biochemist Candace Pert, who discovered endorphins, postulates that "receptors have both a wave-like and a particulate character, and it is important to note that INFORMATION CAN BE STORED IN THE FORM OF TIME SPENT IN DIFFERENT STATES." The molecular substance of all receptors of all species is the same, down to the simplest of animals, demonstrating the simplicity and unity of life. So, there are 60 or so signal molecules for enlivening emotions or flowing energy. Pert notes: "The identical molecular components for information flow are conserved throughout evolution."
Mind is information flow with a physical substrate. The brain, glands, and immune system are joined in a bi-directional network of communication where the information carriers are neuropeptides. Mind holds the network of bodily parts together. Pert maintains that, "it is possible now to conceive of mind and consciousness as an emanation of emotional information processing, and as such, mind and consciousness would appear to be independent of brain and body." Walter Freeman says, "a conscious "willed" action begins as a self-organized pattern of neural activity in the limbic system."
FREE WILL AND GOAL-SEEKING BEHAVIOR
Just prior to his death in 1961, Jung was asked about his idea of God during an interview. Jung's reply accents the chaotic elements of life. His answer was that, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse." We find this sentiment echoed in alchemy, where the transformation of God is also the secret and essential meaning of alchemy.
The prima materia to be transformed into the Philosopher's Stone via the alchemical process is sometimes identified explicitly with God. Both seem to be saying that God manifests in our lives through chaotic intervention that is much like a fluctuation, state change, or bifurcation. As we participate in the recycling of consciousness, we become identified with God and the I-Thou (subject-object) dichotomy is transcended. This transcendental notion is reflected in physics: the observer is the observed. We identify "God" or evolutionary dynamics as the prime agent of chaos--chaotic dynamics in action.
This is a naturalistic or pantheistic philosophy wherein God is identical with the holomovement (Bohm) of the universe. Consciousness is a more subtle form of matter. In physics, the Uncertainty Principle speaks of the fundamental nature of indeterminacy. Chaos theory reveals the determinacy within the most apparently random influences. Therefore, the naturalist point-of-view or natural philosophy must imply "indeterminate-determinacy" or "determinate-indeterminacy."
This paradox appears convoluted enough to reflect the nature of reality--a chaotic world of probabilities. It is deterministic in principle, yet virtually random in practice. This paradox once again raises the question of the plenum/void. In quantum mechanics the vacuum state contains no real matter or light, yet has in it (through the uncertainty principle) all possible matter and light in the form of so-called 'virtual particles' or 'zero-point' fluctuations.
The state of pure consciousness is also said to contain all possibilities, to be a state of pure potentiality in the sense that it is empty but lively (Gowan, 1980). We encounter phenomena analogous to "indeterminate-determinacy" in consciousness journeys. We cannot predict just how the imagery will unfold, but it does conform to certain archetypal patterns and forms. These patterns appear to be self-organizing, self-generating, and self-iterating. They are chronic, having a tendency to recur over time, as one form of iteration. Experientially, we can move through the dialogical experiences (I-Thou) of the symbolic or archetypal layers of the psyche into the clear light of the void which is All and No-Thing (Unitive).
This is the ground state of consciousness. Only from this unstructured state can we "formulate" and express our True Will, in alignment with the whole, rather than personality's desires. For centuries philosophers have conjectured over the amount of "play" in the web-work of fate, and to what degree we control our own destinies.
Jung commented on the limitations of normal human will--the will of the ego--and its limitations in "On the Nature of the Psyche": The will cannot transgress the bounds of the psychic sphere: it cannot coerce the instinct, nor has it power over the spirit, in so far as we understand by this something more than the intellect. Spirit and instinct are by nature autonomous and both limit in equal measure the applied field of the will. This autonomy of the deeper self is why we are limited in our self-mastery, and creates the impotence we feel when faced with "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
There are many things in life we can't control despite our best efforts. There are many things we wouldn't want to control if we could. The independent will of the deep self appears as "God's Will." From the transcendent perspective personal free will is a moot point, since it is subject to being "overwritten," through chaotic intervention. It is not exclusively an inner or outer reality, though it has aspects of both. Immersion in the imaginal drama of the psyche changes us in fundamental ways.
Chaotic intrusions from the outer world can also be meaningful in our spiritual life. To Jung, will was simply freely available psychic energy, which could be directed by an intervention of consciousness--a decision to apply that energy in a specific way for a purpose--intent. Its availability is determined by one's freedom from distorted or deformed patterns. Neurotic or pathological patterns keep the energy tied up, stuck, unavailable. When the energy is freed up it becomes available. If will means freedom of choice, then the question becomes "to what life purpose do we direct our will?" Does the ego learn to subordinate itself to the totality of self? Is ego free of identification with the power instinct?
Freedom of will remains a mystery. 'Will' implies intention and power to implement that intention. This determines our values and choices. Ego's perspective is too circumscribed and linear to make informed decisions. Becoming permeable, opening to the complex, non-linear input of intuition and spirituality may help. We are often forced from our course through lack of self understanding as well as external opposition.
Will is a dynamism which implies degrees of freedom within the constraints of "indeterminate - determinacy." It operates along a continuum which includes instinct, impulse, ambition, drive and compulsion. It is a form of energy that can overcome other forms of energy, such as feeling or sensation. A will turned toward self-understanding develops psychological faith in the reality of imaginal experience through self-reflection.
Psychological faith is reflected as the love of images, and confirms the reality of the soul as image-making power. The inner world is just as "real" as the outer, although different. This acknowledgement translates into an alignment with one's wholeness, beyond simplistic wishes and personalistic desires. They are real in different ways that can be recognized and experienced. One world is visible, the other invisible or virtual or implicate (enfolded). But the two apparent worlds are one. Matter is not different than consciousness--but consciousness is not limited to matter. The rational mind cooperates with the soul, once it is convinced there is something beyond itself. At this stage, will or change comes through an imaginal or meditative process.
The alchemists had an operation for the incubation of images known as the meditatio--a sort of brooding on imagery--a way of being in imagination. In terms of human biology, Walter Freeman suggests that neural activity patterns emerging by chaotic dynamics express a drive toward a goal in the form of commands to the motor and sensory systems. Sensory consequences are fed back into the limbic system through the entorhinal cortex. Sensory input converging onto the entorhinal area is channelled into the hippocampus, then returned to the entorhinal and motor cortices and finally passed on to the motor system--action.
Emergent properties within the entorhinal area condition behavior. There is spontaneous, self-organized, dynamic production of goal-oriented behavior. Freeman boldly asserts (1990) that, "Philosophical and psychological considerations suggest that the cyclical process of emergent goal-seeking, reafference, and sensory feedback constitute the basis for what we perceive as subjective consciousness."
This process leads to perception, concept formation, a "cognitive map." Consciousness is an intrinsic emergent property. Through the chaotic process of emergence, order appears "spontaneously" (or instantaneously) within a system. A willed action begins as a self-organized pattern of neural activity in the limbic system, initiating a motor command to the sympathetic system and a corollarly discharge within the somatosensory system (parasympathetic). Complex feedback (confirmation of change) from these systems constitutes integration.
This process contains the essence of our relationship to our world. Yet, this process cannot be said to "create" nor contain consciousness. Consciousness emerges from chaos. Their essence is one. Creation is instantaneous. The flow of energy washes life and consciousness into the world.
Chaos reflects the wildness and irregularity in nature, and in ourselves. Virtually random element endow chaotic systems with the freedom to explore vast ranges of consciousness and behavior patterns within the creative flow. In process work, adherence to the principles of chaosophy means that we don't try to create with the will. There is no need to do so. We simply notice and follow what is naturally happening, following nature's lead. Chaos is nature's guide, the matrix of formation of imagery, consciousness, and matter.
REFERENCES
Bentov, Itzhak, STALKING THE WILD PENDULUM, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1977.
Bohm, David, WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER, Routledge & Kegen Paul (1980).
Fischer, Roland, "Biological Models of Creativity," JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, 1967. Fischer, Roland, "A Cartography of Exalted and Meditative States," SCIENCE, 1971.
Freeman, Walter, "On the Fallacy of Assigning an Origin to Consciousness," MACHINERY OF THE MIND,
E. Roy John, Ed., Birkhausser, Boston, 1990.
Gowan, John Curtis, TRANCE, ART, AND CRETIVITY, California State University, Northridge, 1975.
Gowan, John Curtis, OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER, California State University, Northridge, 197 .
Jung, C.G., ON THE NATURE OF THE PSYCHE, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1960.
Miller, Webb, & Dickson, "A Holographic Concept of Reality," PSYCHOENERGETIC SYSTEMS, S. Krippner, Ed., Gordon and Breach, New York, London, Paris 1979, pp 231-237.
Pert, Candace, "The Material Basis of Emotions," WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, Summer 1988.
Tart, Charles, "Multiple Personality, Altered States, and Virtual Reality; The World Simulation Process Approach," DISSOCIATION, Vol. III, No. 4, Dec. 1990.
Healing through Consciousness Restructuring:
Placebos, Dreams, New Science and A New Healing Paradigm
by Graywolf Fred Swinney, 2001
Almost twenty years ago in our dream-therapy group, a very remarkable event occurred. I watched a woman heal in body and mind before my eyes. It had the characteristics of the placebo effect. I contributed very little, and what little I had done was to accompany her on an imaginative inner journey.
She had adopted a very hard and cold personality as a means of coping with a long childhood experience of repeated sexual abuse by her four older brothers and father. She was driving everyone away from her, most particularly her husband. Her body symptoms were of rigidity and hardness, and reflected her mental condition. This body configuration would soon lead to fibromyalgia, rheumatism, arthritis or some other similar somatic condition.
One morning a dream had awakened her in terror. In the dream she was tied onto a cart on a track and being pulled into a spinning hub covered with razor sharp knives. She felt trapped helpless and doomed in the dream, just as she had in her childhood. She brought this dream to the group and on hearing it, I invited her to re-experience the dream, which is usual in the Gestalt practice of dream therapy. What came next was unusual in this context but consistent with my shamanic bent, and in truth response to a deep intuitive urge.
"Instead of waking up, imagine letting yourself be drawn into the knives.”
She reported being slashed with flesh and blood spattering all over, but what she noticed most was the razor-sharpness, and a deep, penetrating, black cold sensation as the blades cut into her. Giving in to this pain-cold, she next became a thick layer of black ice covering a lake, very cold, very hard and very frozen. I was fascinated because she had precisely described the personality characteristics that she wanted to change.
“Go deeper into this coldness and blackness, become it.”
She entered a black void of absolute zero, so cold that nothing, not even molecules moved. Some time passed and her body began to relax. Muscles that had been tense since I first met her two years previously began to soften and flex. Asked about her experience, she answered that as she let go deeper into the void and cold, somehow her sense of self had shifted; she experienced becoming the water beneath the ice. Her deep felt sense of self was now warmer, more fluid, and boundaryless. I invited her to stay in that consciousness; to explore and own it. When she finally opened her eyes after about ten minutes, there was a profound change in her personality and physiology.
We were both inspired by this event, which subsequently proved to be a permanent change in her and an ongoing influence in shaping her body and mind. This was the kind of healing work I aspired to, but seldom realized. The tools of psychotherapy and even the guided imagery processes that I used were frankly too shallow, unreliable, and often manipulative.
Something remarkable had happened, but how? I knew that I must find out. I continued exploring this deep process with other clients, retreat guests, and in dream workshops. We consistently got similarly remarkable results with both physical and mental diseases. At the time, however, I was struck by the realization that I was not the healer, but as with a placebo, it came from deep inside. It involved a profound shift in self-perception and was a restructuring of consciousness. The same was true in subsequent explorations; it was their own imagination and dreams that carried the clients into healing dynamics, not my intervention as a therapist who was in awe of the process. The healings proved to be both profound and permanent, and involved both somatic and mental diseases. Thus was conceived, gestated and born the Consciousness Restructuring Process, (CRP). In my attempts to understand it I have arrived at the following notions.
The CRP represents a basic “paradigm shift” for the healing arts. It requires the “new sciences” of relativity, quantum, chaos and holographic theories to understand and define how CRP restructures consciousness dynamics to bring such changes in body and mind. It also describes the mechanism by which placebos perform their mysterious healing. This fundamental shift in existential perspective puts into question the fundamental models by which we understand how reality and healing work.
Culturally and socially, we are in a major crisis-evolution and science plays a significant role in this. For 300 years, Newtonian (classical) Science and Cartesian philosophy have ruled and shaped our civilization and culture. This classic science depicts a mechanistic clockwork universe in which we stand outside of nature and objectively manipulate it through our thinking and intellect. It gave us technology to momentarily elevate and free us from the dictates of nature and provides the illusion of control, but its technology now threatens our existence. It is a model of separation and inevitable predictability; very little is more alien to healthy human process. We are very complex and evolving organisms, deeply interconnected with our environment. The principles that create the whole universe are within each of us, within each cell and atom of our body.
Einstein attacked two tenets: objectivity and absoluteness. Relativity theory demonstrated that everything is relative. There is no absolute frame of measurement anywhere in the universe. Our perceptions depend on our frame of reference.
Quantum Physics implies the universe is an interconnected web of relationships and within the harmony of this interconnection; each observer affects its constant unfolding and creates unique reality for himself. It gives us quanta, which is somehow both and yet not committed to being matter or energy. It is the essence of our mindbody level of consciousness.
David Bohm’s Holographic theory adds the notion that all reality is nothing more than shifting complex interference patterns (holographic negatives) created from waves emerging into space-time from implicate order. Pribram demonstrated that the brain’s perception of reality is a hologram based on chemo-electric currents reaching the end of a synapse, and emitting waves to interact and create holographic negatives (interference patterns) in the brain.
We are complex organisms and Chaos theory best describes this. In the new paradigm, our structure of self emerges from chaos in an environment of complex interacting systems, responsive to and shaped by that environment. What else is the moment of our conception? Eventually, the structure grows brittle, doesn’t respond to the ever evolving and changing environment and disintegrates back into chaos from which emerges new structure. At the personal level we experience this process as a life crisis or a disease, particularly if we fight the change. It is this dance of evolution that is reality and healthy, not the temporary forms and structures that we fix on, nor the chaos that we avoid. They exist only in passing. Our true health is in being, becoming, and accepting this ever evolving self.
Suddenly, the whole framework of reality is like jelly and there is nothing firm left to stand on. We find ourselves as part of a shifting, complex and self-creating reality; influencing it and being influenced by it at subtle levels, where structure is only a passing creation of continuing evolution. Transformation is the essence of reality; and reality is created from infinite potential.
How does this relate to spinning hubs of knives and healing transformations?
Nowhere are these ideas more important than in the healing arts and sciences. Natural self-healing or self-correcting process is something medical science does not understand and so hides behind the labels "placebo effect," and "spontaneous remission," but is something that new sciences permit and Consciousness Restructuring Process describes and accomplishes. This level of reality is also from whence come our dreams and is the home turf of the CRP.
Medical science offers no satisfactory operational mechanism for how spontaneous remission or the placebo effect work. Until recently, it has done little more than grudgingly admit to their existence. However, when I began the dream journey and consciousness restructuring work, I suspected that I was on the trail of understanding these phenomena. CRP seemed to work with the same inner process; restructuring the consciousness that defines self, our illness or health, our existential holographic perceptions of reality.
Healing, as are dreams, is a sensory not an intellectual process. Senses inform us when we are sick or well. Our dreams also reveal disease often before symptoms appear. Mind and intellect only deal with symbols of reality. We move beyond, "I think, therefore, I am" into a reality of becomingness. "I am and I know this through my senses."
In this journey process one experiences a level and sense-image of the diseased self, for example being very black, hard, rigid and cold. Openings, doorways in this sensory image invite even deeper imaginative delving into the conscious dynamics that feed and maintain the illness. This deep illness image, when experienced, spontaneously self-destructs into chaotic or unbound consciousness. Since an image, thought or vision represents a specific neural firing sequence, chaos would be subjectively experienced as a nothingness, for example, a deep black coldness where nothing moves The new sensory self-image that emerges from or is found in this chaotic consciousness, is a new easeful structure that replaces the disease, for example a deep felt sense of warmth, flow and boundarylessness.
Fundamental to CRP is that it works in REM with sensory elements of our dreams. Dreams alone are healing. Deprive people of REM - let them sleep, but prevent dreaming - and after a week, hallucinations and other mental/emotional problems appear. Within a couple of weeks, the immune system weakens and somatic illness follows.
REM is fundamental to all known life forms and is now known to be the best state for forming new neural pathways. It also produces the most chaotic brain wave dynamics yet measured. The CRP consciousness shift is experienced in REM and we create new neural pathways through the experience of a shifting sense of self. In this way our perceptions and experience of personal reality or the fundamental existential self-hologram changes. This changed perception reflects changes in the brain’s synaptic firing structure that also change our body and brain chemistries through the pituitary and pineal glands to ultimately affect how our cells and mind operate. Placebos create the same type of perceptual and neuro-chemical changes, and I believe utilize sleep time REM to do so.
Shamans are masters of consciousness dynamics and altering consciousness. CRP blends shamanic technique and Gestalt dream work using imagination to reach these healing consciousness dynamics. This shaman/therapist approach bridges both world-views, and is the essence of, and even more than both. The premise that science and spirituality/mysticism are separate is faulty. The CRP brings them together in an elegant fashion.
The CRP teaches a new way of flowing through life. It provides the experience of doing so in a virtual reality experience of wakeful REM, and directly alters reality perception and empowers the client. Those who practice this technique are referred to as mentors rather than therapists, because the essence of their role is more like a placebo, helping the mentored bring out their own best potential.
This work is being offered through Asklepia Foundation and the Institute for Applied Consciousness Science, a tax-exempt and non-profit corporation. It trains and certifies mentors in the CRP and consciousness engineering, and offers healing opportunity at Asklepia Retreat in Southern Oregon. Further information is available at: http://www.asklepia.org or Phone: 541-476-0492.
Graywolf is a chemical engineer, a psychotherapist and is recognized internationally by aboriginal tribes and fellow scientists as a practicing shaman. He is a founding member of the Association for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Social Sciences, founded Asklepia Retreat, Asklepia Foundation and the Institute for Applied Consciousness Science. He has contributed chapters to several books and journals and has written two of his own, Dream Healing with Iona Miller and just recently finished Holographic Healing available through the foundation.
Placebos, Dreams, New Science and A New Healing Paradigm
by Graywolf Fred Swinney, 2001
Almost twenty years ago in our dream-therapy group, a very remarkable event occurred. I watched a woman heal in body and mind before my eyes. It had the characteristics of the placebo effect. I contributed very little, and what little I had done was to accompany her on an imaginative inner journey.
She had adopted a very hard and cold personality as a means of coping with a long childhood experience of repeated sexual abuse by her four older brothers and father. She was driving everyone away from her, most particularly her husband. Her body symptoms were of rigidity and hardness, and reflected her mental condition. This body configuration would soon lead to fibromyalgia, rheumatism, arthritis or some other similar somatic condition.
One morning a dream had awakened her in terror. In the dream she was tied onto a cart on a track and being pulled into a spinning hub covered with razor sharp knives. She felt trapped helpless and doomed in the dream, just as she had in her childhood. She brought this dream to the group and on hearing it, I invited her to re-experience the dream, which is usual in the Gestalt practice of dream therapy. What came next was unusual in this context but consistent with my shamanic bent, and in truth response to a deep intuitive urge.
"Instead of waking up, imagine letting yourself be drawn into the knives.”
She reported being slashed with flesh and blood spattering all over, but what she noticed most was the razor-sharpness, and a deep, penetrating, black cold sensation as the blades cut into her. Giving in to this pain-cold, she next became a thick layer of black ice covering a lake, very cold, very hard and very frozen. I was fascinated because she had precisely described the personality characteristics that she wanted to change.
“Go deeper into this coldness and blackness, become it.”
She entered a black void of absolute zero, so cold that nothing, not even molecules moved. Some time passed and her body began to relax. Muscles that had been tense since I first met her two years previously began to soften and flex. Asked about her experience, she answered that as she let go deeper into the void and cold, somehow her sense of self had shifted; she experienced becoming the water beneath the ice. Her deep felt sense of self was now warmer, more fluid, and boundaryless. I invited her to stay in that consciousness; to explore and own it. When she finally opened her eyes after about ten minutes, there was a profound change in her personality and physiology.
We were both inspired by this event, which subsequently proved to be a permanent change in her and an ongoing influence in shaping her body and mind. This was the kind of healing work I aspired to, but seldom realized. The tools of psychotherapy and even the guided imagery processes that I used were frankly too shallow, unreliable, and often manipulative.
Something remarkable had happened, but how? I knew that I must find out. I continued exploring this deep process with other clients, retreat guests, and in dream workshops. We consistently got similarly remarkable results with both physical and mental diseases. At the time, however, I was struck by the realization that I was not the healer, but as with a placebo, it came from deep inside. It involved a profound shift in self-perception and was a restructuring of consciousness. The same was true in subsequent explorations; it was their own imagination and dreams that carried the clients into healing dynamics, not my intervention as a therapist who was in awe of the process. The healings proved to be both profound and permanent, and involved both somatic and mental diseases. Thus was conceived, gestated and born the Consciousness Restructuring Process, (CRP). In my attempts to understand it I have arrived at the following notions.
The CRP represents a basic “paradigm shift” for the healing arts. It requires the “new sciences” of relativity, quantum, chaos and holographic theories to understand and define how CRP restructures consciousness dynamics to bring such changes in body and mind. It also describes the mechanism by which placebos perform their mysterious healing. This fundamental shift in existential perspective puts into question the fundamental models by which we understand how reality and healing work.
Culturally and socially, we are in a major crisis-evolution and science plays a significant role in this. For 300 years, Newtonian (classical) Science and Cartesian philosophy have ruled and shaped our civilization and culture. This classic science depicts a mechanistic clockwork universe in which we stand outside of nature and objectively manipulate it through our thinking and intellect. It gave us technology to momentarily elevate and free us from the dictates of nature and provides the illusion of control, but its technology now threatens our existence. It is a model of separation and inevitable predictability; very little is more alien to healthy human process. We are very complex and evolving organisms, deeply interconnected with our environment. The principles that create the whole universe are within each of us, within each cell and atom of our body.
Einstein attacked two tenets: objectivity and absoluteness. Relativity theory demonstrated that everything is relative. There is no absolute frame of measurement anywhere in the universe. Our perceptions depend on our frame of reference.
Quantum Physics implies the universe is an interconnected web of relationships and within the harmony of this interconnection; each observer affects its constant unfolding and creates unique reality for himself. It gives us quanta, which is somehow both and yet not committed to being matter or energy. It is the essence of our mindbody level of consciousness.
David Bohm’s Holographic theory adds the notion that all reality is nothing more than shifting complex interference patterns (holographic negatives) created from waves emerging into space-time from implicate order. Pribram demonstrated that the brain’s perception of reality is a hologram based on chemo-electric currents reaching the end of a synapse, and emitting waves to interact and create holographic negatives (interference patterns) in the brain.
We are complex organisms and Chaos theory best describes this. In the new paradigm, our structure of self emerges from chaos in an environment of complex interacting systems, responsive to and shaped by that environment. What else is the moment of our conception? Eventually, the structure grows brittle, doesn’t respond to the ever evolving and changing environment and disintegrates back into chaos from which emerges new structure. At the personal level we experience this process as a life crisis or a disease, particularly if we fight the change. It is this dance of evolution that is reality and healthy, not the temporary forms and structures that we fix on, nor the chaos that we avoid. They exist only in passing. Our true health is in being, becoming, and accepting this ever evolving self.
Suddenly, the whole framework of reality is like jelly and there is nothing firm left to stand on. We find ourselves as part of a shifting, complex and self-creating reality; influencing it and being influenced by it at subtle levels, where structure is only a passing creation of continuing evolution. Transformation is the essence of reality; and reality is created from infinite potential.
How does this relate to spinning hubs of knives and healing transformations?
Nowhere are these ideas more important than in the healing arts and sciences. Natural self-healing or self-correcting process is something medical science does not understand and so hides behind the labels "placebo effect," and "spontaneous remission," but is something that new sciences permit and Consciousness Restructuring Process describes and accomplishes. This level of reality is also from whence come our dreams and is the home turf of the CRP.
Medical science offers no satisfactory operational mechanism for how spontaneous remission or the placebo effect work. Until recently, it has done little more than grudgingly admit to their existence. However, when I began the dream journey and consciousness restructuring work, I suspected that I was on the trail of understanding these phenomena. CRP seemed to work with the same inner process; restructuring the consciousness that defines self, our illness or health, our existential holographic perceptions of reality.
Healing, as are dreams, is a sensory not an intellectual process. Senses inform us when we are sick or well. Our dreams also reveal disease often before symptoms appear. Mind and intellect only deal with symbols of reality. We move beyond, "I think, therefore, I am" into a reality of becomingness. "I am and I know this through my senses."
In this journey process one experiences a level and sense-image of the diseased self, for example being very black, hard, rigid and cold. Openings, doorways in this sensory image invite even deeper imaginative delving into the conscious dynamics that feed and maintain the illness. This deep illness image, when experienced, spontaneously self-destructs into chaotic or unbound consciousness. Since an image, thought or vision represents a specific neural firing sequence, chaos would be subjectively experienced as a nothingness, for example, a deep black coldness where nothing moves The new sensory self-image that emerges from or is found in this chaotic consciousness, is a new easeful structure that replaces the disease, for example a deep felt sense of warmth, flow and boundarylessness.
Fundamental to CRP is that it works in REM with sensory elements of our dreams. Dreams alone are healing. Deprive people of REM - let them sleep, but prevent dreaming - and after a week, hallucinations and other mental/emotional problems appear. Within a couple of weeks, the immune system weakens and somatic illness follows.
REM is fundamental to all known life forms and is now known to be the best state for forming new neural pathways. It also produces the most chaotic brain wave dynamics yet measured. The CRP consciousness shift is experienced in REM and we create new neural pathways through the experience of a shifting sense of self. In this way our perceptions and experience of personal reality or the fundamental existential self-hologram changes. This changed perception reflects changes in the brain’s synaptic firing structure that also change our body and brain chemistries through the pituitary and pineal glands to ultimately affect how our cells and mind operate. Placebos create the same type of perceptual and neuro-chemical changes, and I believe utilize sleep time REM to do so.
Shamans are masters of consciousness dynamics and altering consciousness. CRP blends shamanic technique and Gestalt dream work using imagination to reach these healing consciousness dynamics. This shaman/therapist approach bridges both world-views, and is the essence of, and even more than both. The premise that science and spirituality/mysticism are separate is faulty. The CRP brings them together in an elegant fashion.
The CRP teaches a new way of flowing through life. It provides the experience of doing so in a virtual reality experience of wakeful REM, and directly alters reality perception and empowers the client. Those who practice this technique are referred to as mentors rather than therapists, because the essence of their role is more like a placebo, helping the mentored bring out their own best potential.
This work is being offered through Asklepia Foundation and the Institute for Applied Consciousness Science, a tax-exempt and non-profit corporation. It trains and certifies mentors in the CRP and consciousness engineering, and offers healing opportunity at Asklepia Retreat in Southern Oregon. Further information is available at: http://www.asklepia.org or Phone: 541-476-0492.
Graywolf is a chemical engineer, a psychotherapist and is recognized internationally by aboriginal tribes and fellow scientists as a practicing shaman. He is a founding member of the Association for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Social Sciences, founded Asklepia Retreat, Asklepia Foundation and the Institute for Applied Consciousness Science. He has contributed chapters to several books and journals and has written two of his own, Dream Healing with Iona Miller and just recently finished Holographic Healing available through the foundation.
Copyright © 2010-2013 Iona Miller, All Rights Reserved.
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This site may contains some copyrighted material which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site may contains some copyrighted material which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.