DREAMHEALING
A Non-interpretive, Experiential Approach to Dream Journeys
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/dreams.html
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/dreams.html
Edward John Poynter - A visit to Aesclepius
EVERYTHING DREAMS
PSYCHE IS MULTIDIMENSIONAL
Some dreams relate to the events of our daily lives. Others represent memories, and some seem to foreshadow the future. Some have mythic and cultural implications, while others transcend human experience. The specific symbolism of the dream can be amplified by collective mythic and cultural references.
DREAMS HAPPEN NOW
Dream are always happening now, in sleep and even waking awareness as our active fantasy life. They present an immediate experience; dream images appear dynamically as live figures. Like paintings or poems, they make us open and receptive to the present, and enable us to see and hear things in a different way.
DREAMS ARE ALIVE & ENLIVEN US
Images and dreams change dynamically, coming into relationship with one another. Living dream images have body and intent. We can know their inherent intelligence and interact with it in sleep and waking life.
PSYCHE IS MULTIDIMENSIONAL
Some dreams relate to the events of our daily lives. Others represent memories, and some seem to foreshadow the future. Some have mythic and cultural implications, while others transcend human experience. The specific symbolism of the dream can be amplified by collective mythic and cultural references.
DREAMS HAPPEN NOW
Dream are always happening now, in sleep and even waking awareness as our active fantasy life. They present an immediate experience; dream images appear dynamically as live figures. Like paintings or poems, they make us open and receptive to the present, and enable us to see and hear things in a different way.
DREAMS ARE ALIVE & ENLIVEN US
Images and dreams change dynamically, coming into relationship with one another. Living dream images have body and intent. We can know their inherent intelligence and interact with it in sleep and waking life.
“Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.”
~Carl Jung
"The dream may serve to unite all the people in a common action and the dream life is a factor that promotes this communion ... Very often dreams reveal a relationship with someone or something which, on a conscious level, we are not absolutely aware. Dreams create social ties and new social behaviors just like, sometimes, destroy old social qualms. Anyway the dream is not an asocial phenomenon. Dreams affirm the impossible". (The World of Dreams;
Marie-Louise von Franz)
~Carl Jung
"The dream may serve to unite all the people in a common action and the dream life is a factor that promotes this communion ... Very often dreams reveal a relationship with someone or something which, on a conscious level, we are not absolutely aware. Dreams create social ties and new social behaviors just like, sometimes, destroy old social qualms. Anyway the dream is not an asocial phenomenon. Dreams affirm the impossible". (The World of Dreams;
Marie-Louise von Franz)
Interpretive theories of dreams are called 'Dream Work.' But often they don't 'work,' because interpretive glosses of symbols don't get to the heart of the matter and actually stop the process. That is why it is 'work,' not 'healing.' Symbols are portals to deeper dimensions and do not require outside interpretation but call for deepening. Ancient Asklepian dreamhealing was non-interpretive and led to emergent healing that activates the spontaneous healing of placebo effect through dream journeys. Dreamhealing uses images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect. Chaos-oriented consciousness journeys suggest these states reflect dynamical aspects suggested by chaos theory. More than an experiential process, this is a philosophy of treatment--"Chaosophy."
Dreamhealing - http://dreamhealing.iwarp.com/
Dreamhealing: CHAOS & the Creative Consciousness Process
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD, by Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION PART I: THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESS
Chapter 1: Chaos Consciousness and Healing
Chapter 2: Dreamhealing - The Heart of Dreams
Chapter 3: Human Dimensions of Chaos Theory
Chapter 4: Ego and Healing - A Model of Consciousness
Chapter 5: Speculations on a New Paradigm
PART II: DREAMHEALING -
THE HEALING HEART OF DREAMS
Chapter 6: The Shaman/Therapist - Imagination, Creativity & Vision
Chapter 7: The Dream Journey as Heroic Quest
Chapter 8: The Dream Guide - Navigating the Stream of Consciousness
Chapter 9: Dream Journey Guidelines - The Practice of Dreamhealing
Chapter 10: Case Studies in Creativity
Bibliography
Index
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD, by Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION PART I: THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESS
Chapter 1: Chaos Consciousness and Healing
Chapter 2: Dreamhealing - The Heart of Dreams
Chapter 3: Human Dimensions of Chaos Theory
Chapter 4: Ego and Healing - A Model of Consciousness
Chapter 5: Speculations on a New Paradigm
PART II: DREAMHEALING -
THE HEALING HEART OF DREAMS
Chapter 6: The Shaman/Therapist - Imagination, Creativity & Vision
Chapter 7: The Dream Journey as Heroic Quest
Chapter 8: The Dream Guide - Navigating the Stream of Consciousness
Chapter 9: Dream Journey Guidelines - The Practice of Dreamhealing
Chapter 10: Case Studies in Creativity
Bibliography
Index
The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach. -- Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
We also . live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams ~Carl Jung, The Red Book.
The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium. -- Jung, Man and His Symbols
The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.
One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight.
The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not. ~ Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 233.
The archetype in dream symbolism
The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero. P. 68 A remarkable instance of this can be found in the Eleusinian mysteries, which were finally suppressed in the beginning of the seventh century of the Christian era. They expressed, together with the Delphic oracle, the essence and spirit of ancient Greece. On a much greater scale, the Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth of ancient Egypt. P. 68
It is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times, the basic mythological ideas were "invented" by a clever old philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward "believed" by a credulous and uncritical people. P. 69
But the very word "invent" is derived from the Latin invenire, and means "to find" and hence to find something by "seeking" it. P. 69
Goethe's Faust aptly says: "Im Anfang wr die Tat [in the beginning was the deed]." "Deeds" were never invented, they were done; thoughts, on the other hand, are a relatively late discovery of man. First he was moved to deeds by unconscious factors; it was only a long time afterward that he began to reflect upon the causes that had moved him; and it took it him a very long time indeed to arrive at the preposterous idea that he must have moved himself . . . his mind being unable to identify any other motivating force than his own. P. 70
. . . inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by consciousness and is not under its control. In the mythology of earlier times, these forces were called mana, or spirits, demons, and gods. They are as active today as ever. If they go against us, then we say that it is just bad luck, or that certain people are against us. The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon "powers" that are beyond our control. P. 71
We also . live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams ~Carl Jung, The Red Book.
The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium. -- Jung, Man and His Symbols
The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.
One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight.
The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not. ~ Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 233.
The archetype in dream symbolism
The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero. P. 68 A remarkable instance of this can be found in the Eleusinian mysteries, which were finally suppressed in the beginning of the seventh century of the Christian era. They expressed, together with the Delphic oracle, the essence and spirit of ancient Greece. On a much greater scale, the Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth of ancient Egypt. P. 68
It is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times, the basic mythological ideas were "invented" by a clever old philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward "believed" by a credulous and uncritical people. P. 69
But the very word "invent" is derived from the Latin invenire, and means "to find" and hence to find something by "seeking" it. P. 69
Goethe's Faust aptly says: "Im Anfang wr die Tat [in the beginning was the deed]." "Deeds" were never invented, they were done; thoughts, on the other hand, are a relatively late discovery of man. First he was moved to deeds by unconscious factors; it was only a long time afterward that he began to reflect upon the causes that had moved him; and it took it him a very long time indeed to arrive at the preposterous idea that he must have moved himself . . . his mind being unable to identify any other motivating force than his own. P. 70
. . . inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by consciousness and is not under its control. In the mythology of earlier times, these forces were called mana, or spirits, demons, and gods. They are as active today as ever. If they go against us, then we say that it is just bad luck, or that certain people are against us. The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon "powers" that are beyond our control. P. 71
[Post-Jungian] Dream work is ancient, it’s long tradition evidenced in the temples of Asclepius in Greece where individuals went to be healed through their dreams. Dreams have been an important aspect of many spiritual traditions, and even Freud considered the study of dreams to be his most important work. There are many methods of dream analysis. When working with dreams, it can be helpful to intentionally assess them from various aspects, including mythical, archetypal, alchemical, and collective, and to pay attention to which resonate most strongly emotionally and elicit even a physical response in order to begin to understand what insights are being gifted through your unconscious.
In The Dream and the Underworld, archetypal psychologist and post-Jungian James Hillman prefers to allow the dream and dream symbols to remain what they are, and not to analyze and interpret them but to simply interact with them and see what comes about. However, Hillman’s method of seeing focuses far more on an artistic view than from a therapeutic or results-oriented standpoint. As such, when it comes to dreams and symbols, he stays with the process and activity itself instead of seeking an outcome or solution. He values the description over interpretation, the animating and making a thing come alive rather than suffocating it with a contrived explanation from outside the dream. He thrives on visiting the dream in its own realm of power, the underworld, and in honoring it by allowing it to be its own entity there instead of trying to make it come alive in our ordinary world of thinking.
Hillman’s goal, as was Jung’s, is to get ever closer to the characters and activity in the dream realm, but as opposed to Jung who then turned to amplification in order to find meaning and interpretation at the level of the waking ego, Hillman chooses not to bring the dream element back into waking life and force it to match up with symbols or meanings we already hold. In fact, Hillman claims that to bring the dream out of the underworld actually betrays the dream. Hillman advocates finding wordplays, asking questions of the objects themselves, and then allowing them to live out their own soul-like existence without comparison or contrast to external references. He chides us in our desire to analyze, our wish to know, and speaks of “letting our desire die away into its images (p. 201).
I find Hillman’s technique enjoyable and rewarding as an activity, like reading a good book or watching a movie with a plot and characters that take place in front of your eyes. It is mentally stimulating, interesting, creative, and even insightful on its own terms. However, as a thinking/intuitive type, analysis and interpretation come as naturally as breathing to me, and I simply can’t conceive of doing dream work without some aspect of interpretation. If I truly believe that the unconscious is trying to communicate through dreams, and that there is a message in store that can help lead to my individuation, I must also adopt some of Jung’s (and many others) methods, in order to draw some conclusions. Otherwise, I simply recognize events or aspects of my life much later and don’t benefit from the learning aspect of my dreams as Jung purported.
Jung stresses the value of compensation in dreams, describing it as a means of “balancing and comparing different data or points of view so as to produce an adjustment or a rectification” (1960, p. 75). Robert Sardello (1995) sums up Hillman’s approach as metaphorical as contrasted to Jung’s approach, which is symbolic. However, he reminds us, “dreams are not metaphors for something else, but a different reality, a metaphorical reality” (p. 110). Robert Hoss (2005) claims compensation appears “in order to reveal misconceptions and inappropriate myths that have bound us in conflict, to provide an alternative path or reversal in our thinking about the dream, and to lead us in the direction of transformation and release” (p. 115).
Though Jung believed virtually every dream was compensatory, Hillman dismisses the compensation theory because, according to him, dreams are made partial, one-sided and imbalanced and therefore require the dreamer to turn to the dayworld aspects of ego to find the missing elements in order to find meaning (1979).
Jung asserts, “A dream…is a product of the total psyche. Hence, we may expect to find in dreams everything that has ever been of significance in the life of humanity” (1960, p. 65). Here, Jung refers to the archetypal quality of dreams, the idea that universal patterns, which are the building blocks of the collective unconscious, also make up our dreams. Robert Johnson insists “we incarnate the archetypes with our physical lives” (p. 62) and that we must research mythology and seek to understand the characteristics of the archetype, once identified, in order to understand its role in our lives. The archetypal aspect must be connected to a personal perspective or it is pointless, Johnson goes on, because “every symbol in your dream has a special, individual connotation that belongs to you alone…even when a symbol has a collective or universal meaning, it still has a personal coloration for you and can be fully explained only from within you” (p. 63).
Regardless of which dream method you adopt, there is usually not one “right” translation. Dreams hold knowledge and insight for us on many levels—often at the same time.
Some References
Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper & Row.
Hoss, R. J. (2005). Dream language: Self-understanding through image and color. Ashland, OR: Innersource.net.
Johnson, R. A. (1986). Inner work: Using dreams & active imagination for personal growth. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
Jung, C. G. (1960). Dreams (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). New York: Routledge.
Sardello, R. (1995). Love and the soul: Creating a future for earth. New York: HarperCollins.
- See more at: http://www.depthinsights.com/blog/working-with-dreams-depth-psychology-techniques-of-carl-gustav-jung-and-james-hillman/#sthash.jBMXq510.dpuf
In The Dream and the Underworld, archetypal psychologist and post-Jungian James Hillman prefers to allow the dream and dream symbols to remain what they are, and not to analyze and interpret them but to simply interact with them and see what comes about. However, Hillman’s method of seeing focuses far more on an artistic view than from a therapeutic or results-oriented standpoint. As such, when it comes to dreams and symbols, he stays with the process and activity itself instead of seeking an outcome or solution. He values the description over interpretation, the animating and making a thing come alive rather than suffocating it with a contrived explanation from outside the dream. He thrives on visiting the dream in its own realm of power, the underworld, and in honoring it by allowing it to be its own entity there instead of trying to make it come alive in our ordinary world of thinking.
Hillman’s goal, as was Jung’s, is to get ever closer to the characters and activity in the dream realm, but as opposed to Jung who then turned to amplification in order to find meaning and interpretation at the level of the waking ego, Hillman chooses not to bring the dream element back into waking life and force it to match up with symbols or meanings we already hold. In fact, Hillman claims that to bring the dream out of the underworld actually betrays the dream. Hillman advocates finding wordplays, asking questions of the objects themselves, and then allowing them to live out their own soul-like existence without comparison or contrast to external references. He chides us in our desire to analyze, our wish to know, and speaks of “letting our desire die away into its images (p. 201).
I find Hillman’s technique enjoyable and rewarding as an activity, like reading a good book or watching a movie with a plot and characters that take place in front of your eyes. It is mentally stimulating, interesting, creative, and even insightful on its own terms. However, as a thinking/intuitive type, analysis and interpretation come as naturally as breathing to me, and I simply can’t conceive of doing dream work without some aspect of interpretation. If I truly believe that the unconscious is trying to communicate through dreams, and that there is a message in store that can help lead to my individuation, I must also adopt some of Jung’s (and many others) methods, in order to draw some conclusions. Otherwise, I simply recognize events or aspects of my life much later and don’t benefit from the learning aspect of my dreams as Jung purported.
Jung stresses the value of compensation in dreams, describing it as a means of “balancing and comparing different data or points of view so as to produce an adjustment or a rectification” (1960, p. 75). Robert Sardello (1995) sums up Hillman’s approach as metaphorical as contrasted to Jung’s approach, which is symbolic. However, he reminds us, “dreams are not metaphors for something else, but a different reality, a metaphorical reality” (p. 110). Robert Hoss (2005) claims compensation appears “in order to reveal misconceptions and inappropriate myths that have bound us in conflict, to provide an alternative path or reversal in our thinking about the dream, and to lead us in the direction of transformation and release” (p. 115).
Though Jung believed virtually every dream was compensatory, Hillman dismisses the compensation theory because, according to him, dreams are made partial, one-sided and imbalanced and therefore require the dreamer to turn to the dayworld aspects of ego to find the missing elements in order to find meaning (1979).
Jung asserts, “A dream…is a product of the total psyche. Hence, we may expect to find in dreams everything that has ever been of significance in the life of humanity” (1960, p. 65). Here, Jung refers to the archetypal quality of dreams, the idea that universal patterns, which are the building blocks of the collective unconscious, also make up our dreams. Robert Johnson insists “we incarnate the archetypes with our physical lives” (p. 62) and that we must research mythology and seek to understand the characteristics of the archetype, once identified, in order to understand its role in our lives. The archetypal aspect must be connected to a personal perspective or it is pointless, Johnson goes on, because “every symbol in your dream has a special, individual connotation that belongs to you alone…even when a symbol has a collective or universal meaning, it still has a personal coloration for you and can be fully explained only from within you” (p. 63).
Regardless of which dream method you adopt, there is usually not one “right” translation. Dreams hold knowledge and insight for us on many levels—often at the same time.
Some References
Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper & Row.
Hoss, R. J. (2005). Dream language: Self-understanding through image and color. Ashland, OR: Innersource.net.
Johnson, R. A. (1986). Inner work: Using dreams & active imagination for personal growth. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
Jung, C. G. (1960). Dreams (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). New York: Routledge.
Sardello, R. (1995). Love and the soul: Creating a future for earth. New York: HarperCollins.
- See more at: http://www.depthinsights.com/blog/working-with-dreams-depth-psychology-techniques-of-carl-gustav-jung-and-james-hillman/#sthash.jBMXq510.dpuf
Chaos & Emergent Healing
CHAPTER 1: CHAOS CONSCIOUSNESS AND HEALING
ABSTRACT: Experiential therapy sessions have shown that as consciousness journeys deeper and deeper into the psyche, it eventually encounters a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images. Those emerging from this non-ordinary state of consciousness report an increased sense of well-being ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. We known that research has shown that imagery can affect the immune system. Imagery journeys in the autonomous stream of consciousness may activate psychosomatic healing forces, such as the placebo effect.
Science thus brings us to the threshold of the ego and there leaves us to ourselves. --Max Plank
...the attractor does not consist of a simple point, curve or higher dimensional manifold, but contains an infinite complex of manifolds. --Edward Lorenz
CHAOS IN DAILY LIFE
Both the shamanic view and modern depth psychology embrace an integrated view of psyche, soul, and nature. Sometimes this worldview is easier to achieve as an abstract thought than as an on-going perspective about life itself. Try as we might, we are so ingrained with the old mechanical-materialistic fantasy that we find our thoughts and attitudes slipping back toward causal models, perpetually denying the true nature of reality as we experience it. We have been conditioned since birth towards a conformist, orderly behavior that is deemed good for society, but is the death-knell of individuality. Much of the distortion in our worldview comes from our outmoded view of who we are, in terms of consciousness, awareness and perception.
Consensus reality doesn't represent any universal truth -- so-called "normal" consciousness is more of a cultural trance state (Tart, 1992). Integrating the new science of chaos theory can help us expand our understanding of reality. It impacts our sense of self as well as our concept of "how things work" in the universe. Allowing chaos back into our lives in a positive way also fosters the healing process. We have observed in experiential therapy that clients naturally gravitate in their inner journeys to a de-structured place. While there, they report feelings of rejuvenation and well-being. There are certain primary characteristics of chaos and chaotic systems (complex dynamic systems):
CHAOS IS:
1) deterministic
2) paradoxical
3) self-generative
4) self-iterating
5) self-organizing
6) intrinsically unpredictable
7) yet boundaried
8) and geometric
9) and sustained by complex feedback loops
CHAOTIC SYSTEMS ARE:
1) sensitive to initial conditions
2) disproportionately responsive to stimuli
3) translatable from micro- to macroscopic proportions
4) attractor centered
5) shuffled time/space
6) apparently acausal (actually enfolded; implicate/explicate)
7) qualitative
8) global phenomena
9) flexible/creative
Each of these aspects can be literally or metaphorically illustrated by a consciousness state, particularly if we include dreamlife. In fact, they are all present within each and every one of us when we turn our attention inward. We have observed many dream journeys to which these descriptors could apply.
For example, the quality of shuffled time/space is seen in the precognitive or prophetic dream. An attractor-centered dream might focus around a specific psychological complex, which acts like a magnetic center [strange attractor] for emotional conflict. Chaotic systems are also complex, as are dreams. They represent systems that are far-from-equilibrium. Jung contended that dreams help maintain psychic balance.
The scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality as presently understood. Old psychological models have placed emphasis on order, and the overcoming of chaos. Yet chaos has a perhaps unrecognized value, in our psyche and physiology. Just as a healthy heart sometime goes into a chaotic pattern, turbulence and chaos help us break down old, outmoded structures in personality.
Even the deterioration of mental illness is quite purposeful in that it is the individual's attempt at healing and finding a new emergent order. Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities. It has been said that "any supreme insight is a metaphor." It has also been said that "the better the idea, the more likely it is to have been extremely vague." While this may not hold true in all cases, it is true that there is a certain quality of ambiguity in chaos and chaos consciousness which must simply be tolerated.
For example, this description of imaginative consciousness and "turbulence" from artist Naum Gabo in OF DIVERS ARTS: The artist's mind is a turbulent sea full of all kinds of impressions, responses and experiences as well as feelings and emotions. Some experts on art assert that the artist does not really have more of these emotions and feelings and impressions than the ordinary man who is not an artist. This may be true or false, but what they apparently fail to see and assert is that in the artist these feelings and responses are in a more agitated state. He is more concerned with them, and the urge to express these experiences is more intense in him than it is in the ordinary man. And that, I suppose, is the reason why the artist's mind is not only more turbulent but sometimes, alas, troublesome also...
The chaos of our human lives is re-iterated from the subatomic through the cosmic level. Chaos is the matrix of creation. It provides a bridge for unfolding "heaven on earth", a means of manifesting and grounding spiritual energy, that is not only creative but healing. A state-of-the-art empirical foundation is essential for any well-grounded philosophy of life and a realistic self-concept. We create limited subjective fantasies about ourselves and the nature of the universe all the time. Usually we do not examine our a priori beliefs which condition those notions. We grasp our beliefs as though they were the most precious of gemstones, rather than just models or constructs. The true nature of perception dictates that we experience only a simulation of ourselves and the world-at-large (Tart, 1992).
From our worldview come symbols and images which a small part of our brain, and an even smaller part of our mind and consciousness clings to, attempting to structure reality out of chaos. By clutching these beliefs, we then limit our experience of reality to that defined by them. For the most part, these underlying beliefs are rooted in notions about the nature of reality which are derived from 17th century physics and philosophy. The old mechanistic view asserts that mind and matter are separate. Newton's discoveries bolstered the notion that reality is a universe consisting of separate objects interacting with one another according to fixed laws of cause and effect. The laws are learned through objective observation and measurement. Causal laws fit with our direct experience of the universe and are therefore supported as feeling "right" by intuition.
Einstein said our language requires coordinates. Since we live in a culture which is mostly based on this science and its technology, we generally accept these notions as a given, as axioms too basic to be questioned. We may know about the irrational, counter-intuitive concepts of quantum mechanics, yet it hardly seems to affect us. Our beliefs are still largely rooted in cause-and-effect. From these axioms we also construct our ego and personality which is a collection of secondary beliefs about what we are and how we can relate to and control our surroundings. It seems to work.
Using this system of thought and belief, we are able to control much of the physical world around us. That is, until catastrophic chaos intervenes in our lives. It may come in the form of natural disaster, random victimization, the bifurcation of a love triangle [paramour as strange attractor], or a crisis in transition from one phase of life to another. Sometimes the intrusion is a spontaneous unusual psychic or spiritual experience which can neither be integrated nor assimilated into daily life. It also will not be ignored. It may come, therefore, in the form of a recurrent dream, or other means of hailing the conscious mind from the subconscious.
Spiritual emergencies, ranging from addiction to near-death-experiences, call for a breaking down of the old system to the primal or fundamental (or chaotic) level. Disintegration is the direction of these processes, which create opportunities for us to "get it back together' at a healthier, more enriched, enlarged level, with a new primal self-image. As powerful as the scientific approach seems to be, it leaves many phenomena unexplained. There are strategic holes in the fortress of classical scientific doctrine. For example, objective observation and the principles of cause and effect.
In 1938 Einstein wrote, "Physical concepts are free creatures of the human mind and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." Quantum mechanics further attacks the principles of objectivity and seperativity. The implications of this theory take us into a strange reality in which we not only influence reality but actually create it from our minds and expectations. Realities exist as possibilities which come into being through our consciousness and intentionality.
To put it in other terms, apparently the universe exists only within the context of our relationship to it. John Wheeler, a physicist from Princeton University, writes, "May the universe be 'brought into being' by the participation of those who participate?...The vital act is the act of participation. 'Participator' is the given incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term 'observer' of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics says."
Henry Pierce Strapp, another quantum physicist, states that the world is "Not a structure built out of existing analyzable entities, but rather a web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationship to the whole."
In the field of medical science, there are many cases of healing which conventional or classical medicine or psychology cannot explain. These gaps have been labeled placebo and spontaneous remission. Yet, this does no more than hide our ignorance behind words. There is, however, a striking parallel between healing and the new physics. As in the new physics, healing too occurs in a realm of connectivity and mutual creation. Healer and "healee" are not separate objective entities following fixed laws with the former manipulating the physical components of the latter. They are partners in a process of creating a universe in which mind and body are no longer separate. They establish a flow in harmonious accord with each other and the rest of creation, a state of ease rather than dis-ease.
The emergent healing paradigm helps us evolve out of the body/mind or nature/spirit split instilled by our culture during the era of mechanistic science and the industrial revolution. We now live in an information society. Information theory describes the fundamental quality of information as an agent of change. Great minds have been moving in these systems-theory directions for some time, but there seems to be a lag-time in the psyche of the general population. Even though some may comprehend it mentally, it rarely transforms into a truly transformative, deep knowledge on all levels of awareness, much less what it could mean in terms of mental health.
Chaos theory gives us a visual mathematical language for charting strange attractors in dynamical systems. They can be applied within an individual psyche or to interactive relationships. This technology has already been applied to human behavior. Order and chaos in the emotional realm have been studied by mathematicians and psychiatrists. Their studies produced models of a person's chaotic or unstable behavior in comparison to their stable behavior. Stable behavior can be imagined as being like the sky, unstable behavior like mountains, with little pockets or "caves" of serenity within them. These little sanctuaries could be fostered through therapy. Stability can be increased through therapy within a broader landscape of chaos and pathology. It may also lead to new ways to individualize psychotherapy, like dreamhealing. [see DREAMHEALING: THE HEART OF DREAMS, Miller and Swinney, 1991].
Even mental illness may relate to the phenomena of strange attractors in the brain or emotional field. Some researchers believe, for example, that a number of mental disorders, such as manic-depressive illness and schizophrenia, occur when biological regulatory systems cease to operate at their normal, fixed point and change suddenly to another stable but abnormal point. In chaos theory, when an attractor disappears due to sudden catastrophic change, the system becomes structureless and experiences a term of "transient chaos" before another attractor is found.
The primal image is the attractor and it forms based on the organism's interaction with the "Not-I" or environment. An individual's personal myth or my theme might be conceived as an activated chaotic attractor. In another phase of life, the focus could change to others. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an uncontrollable fashion. The ego can suffer greatly from this jerking around by the deep forces within, especially if it doesn't have enough information about its purpose to derive meaning from the experience. For some, the disruption leads to a nervous breakdown or psychotic break, while for others it opens the doors into a new freedom and expanded sense of self.
Chaos is part of a greater structure/process, for want of a better title, called evolution. Order emerges spontaneously from chaos, and order tends to degenerate into chaos when forms are obsolete. Chaos is also the root of the creative process. In chaos, the search for information is open. As soon as you think you "know" something, you close down the search for new information and solutions. There are many questions which arise within the model of human development based on chaos theory.
We can conjecture why certain attractors or complexes form. We really don't know why some may become prominent and others fade into the background. But we do know that when two or more are competing for divergent behavior and attitudes, the resulting psychic split can be painful, setting up a deep conflict which is not be easy to resolve. If it is extreme, it leads to psychological fragmentation. Free choice may be a factor, but our choices are limited by our attitudes about what we believe is possible for us. The only solution is to dive to the deepest levels, seeking evolutionary transformation -- a quantum leap in consciousness that can contain opposites within paradox. The first step in understanding how these attractors affect us has to do with our personal filters, our distorted experiences of raw archetypal energy.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHAOS
In our studies of healing, and an attempt to synthesize them into a consistent ideal, we have developed a model. Consciousness may be viewed as a field interacting with other fields. In physics, a field is a medium of connectivity, an extent of space within which lines of force (magnetic and electrical) are in operation. It is also called a field of force. When two fields, like electricity and magnetism, interact they create electromagnetic waves which include all forms of radiant energy from light and radio waves, to gamma and cosmic rays.
Electromagnetism is magnetism developed by electricity. EM fields interact with the smallest units of matter energetically exciting the components of the fundamental geometry of space in fields which are in a constant state of fluctuation. The consciousness field is not limited to the conscious awareness of human beings, as in the Jungian concept. Rather, it is the creative dynamic matrix behind all life and inorganic manifestation. It is self-generating. Consciousness begets consciousness. It is self-iterating (or repeating--chronic), and self-organizing. When consciousness interacts with the space/time field or electromagnetic (EM) fields, then individual consciousness emerges.
Since the consciousness field represents all potential, its qualitative nature must be paradoxical for it encompasses the opposites. Still, once it begins interacting with other fields and begins to "make psyche matter," certain boundary conditions are imposed. The determinism of a chaotic system guides the growth and maturation process. The original site interaction of consciousness with time/space creates not only the material basis, but the organism's strange attractor, which we refer to as the "primal image." It is the blueprint of the entity. Jungian psychologists are exploring the possible relationships between strange attractors and archetypes or complexes [see PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES].
In our view these attractors or complexes are secondary formations, even though the concept of a primal guiding image shares much with the Jungian concept of self. They are merely similar. This view is neither archetypal nor complex-oriented. Rather than limiting exploration piecemeal to a few select archetypes or specific complexes, it approaches the individual as a whole, not as a collection of fragmented parts. Human beings reflect the qualities of chaotic systems. As living creatures we are sensitive to the initial conditions of our genetics and conception.
We can easily respond disproportionately to stimuli. A child's actual brain chemistry and neural patterns can be changed by childhood trauma. This creates a rigid structure through the process of conditioning. The trauma may come from an insignificant incident such as parents yelling, for the child perceives them as gigantic, all-mighty gods essential for survival. Needless to say, severe trauma inflicts an even deeper imprint or distortion of the personality. Seeds of change (for good or bad) planted in our lives can quickly grow later to transformations of vast proportion.
For example, any choice point we face in life where we leave an alternate "road not taken," leads to a wide variety of different life experiences and opportunities. We are attractor-centered, whether we conceive of that primal attractor as divinity, the higher self, the core self, the Jungian self, the Gestalt self, or that deepest sense of self--our primal self image (including its unconscious aspects). As an attractor, it contains an infinite complex of forms and images. Elsewhere, we have delved into this more deeply [see EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING, Miller and Swinney, 1991].
Our consciousness is capable of experiencing shuffled space/time. It happens during dreams, deja-vu, precognition, and other psychic experiences. We also experience apparently acausal phenomena, termed synchronicity by Jung. Physicist David Bohm calls enfolded information "implicate" when it is enfolded in a latent state of potential. It is called "explicate" when it is unfolded or actualized (observable). Our entire lives are encoded in the initial moment of conception, yet the details of that unfolding potential are inherently unpredictable. Our lives are the explication of the initial conditions present at conception. That initial blueprint is subject to many perturbations along the way.
Chaotic systems are qualitative. Even physics proves it is impossible for us to comprehend anything but subjective perceptions. When it comes to human life, quality is generally valued over quantity faced with impairment. We adapt to changing circumstances in our environment because we are flexible and creative. Because of this we have covered the globe with civilization. Our physical bodies and our societies are sustained by complex feedback loops. Our moods are controlled by excititory and inhibitory brain hormones. The political process is part of the social feedback system. The consciousness field is that which relates us to the entire universe. It may be viewed as chaos, or energy in a primal chaotic state, prior to any solidification into matter. It is a field of energy, not a "thing." It is able to take on infinite forms, including images.
Time is also a field. Consciousness may intersect with time at a 90 degree angle, in which case a linear flow seems to emerge. Or, it may fold over in a contiguous way, producing a "bending" or folding of space. In far-from-equilibrium conditions, this folding or kneading would create layers of time/space that are simply connected, like pieces of layered pastry dough. Points in time widely separated in the linear sense, become intimately juxtaposed. In this model, consciousness would have the ability to "pop" around in time. The site interaction with other fields by consciousness is what we view as the intrusion of the strange attractor. Where two fields interact, that is the strange attractor, which then attracts and forms the consciousness around it.
The other field, whatever it is interacting with, attracts the energy around it too. And this is what we create our experience from. The strange attractor is the intersection of the fields. We can view it linearly, or in non-linear fashion. This is speculation, on the touching of fields creating reality at a profound level. When consciousness intersects with other fields it seems to create matter, or the illusion of matter, and we can manipulate that, change forms, etc. Consciousness evolution equals the process of chaos moving into structure, dissolving back into chaos, and reconstituting into structure. It requires a breaking up or dissolving of old forms back into the primal state.
For some reason in dreamhealing sessions, each new structure that comes out of the primal chaos seems to be an evolution beyond, or a superior structure, or a better structure than the previous one that went into the chaos. Now we don't know why this should be, but it does seem to be that way consistently. We can speculate that this generalizes to the whole process of evolution. In any event, it has been observed specifically in dream journeys which move deep into the psyche. Of course, it pre-supposes that the journey gets to the depth where chaotic consciousness is experienced to begin with. Whenever we begin with a structure (the currently defined personality), we commit it back to the chaos (the primal chaotic state of consciousness).
The new structure, the new image that emerges is always better, always more healed, more whole, evolved beyond the old structure that was so limiting. Rigidities seem to dissolve and reform in that state of consciousness, like a modern equivalent of the old alchemical maxim--"solve et coagula." This may relate to a deeper, unknown law of chaos. What is known is that we observe it repeatedly in the dreamhealing process. If you take any portion of a fractal and expand it, you find it is self-similar. This reveals a harmony with shamanic law--that organization repeats itself at all levels of organization. Patterns repeat at all levels of organization. It is much like finding the universe in a grain of sand. Evolution in consciousness comes with a quantum shift in awareness. That quantum shift occurs during the period in which the evolving structure is in chaos.
So if you are in a dreamhealing process, experiencing for example, the multiple consciousness of the Earth Mother as decay, you may follow that to the point of total disintegration. Since you are identified with that state of consciousness at the time, your personal awareness dives down into the chaos, journeying to the most fundamental or primal state of consciousness--chaos. That is when the shift in primal image of self becomes possible, because it is totally de-structured. During that period of chaos is when it (and you with it) are changed from this to that, in a non-linear state.
From that, you can see that you can consign your bound-up rigid energies (whether it is fear, pain, or whatever) to their primal state so that the transformation of that energy frees it to take on a new quality. Again, this is an alchemical notion: "Only that which has been separated can be properly joined." Consciousness healing takes place in quantum shifts. The old model of psychological integration changed and integrated a little piece at a time, building toward a "strong coping ego." The personal experience of the quantum shift is in the imagery of dreams and dream journeys. It appears spontaneously.
For example, here is how one client described the journey to the inner healer in a self-guided session: First the dream: I am in a sunny field of green grass. I see an old college friend coming toward me across the field. His name is Mark. I'm also trying to set up a screen to watch a movie on. The screen is two pieces of painted green wood. With the dream in my mind, I choose to become the dream. I am the field of grass. I notice how close to the earth I am, indeed, how I am the earth. I feel an aliveness as grass that I have forgotten as myself. I take in the sunlight to nourish me. I feel drawn into the roots of the grass. I have a sense of the rootedness of the grass, so I let myself go into the earth through the roots. This leads me into a series of colors and textures which I discover as the journey continues underground. I let myself go on, and I arrive eventually at the center of the earth, where a vibrant orange lava surrounds me and penetrates me with its heat. With this main sensation in my body, I find myself settling into the flow and resting, taking in the heat all around me. The journey has come to a momentary ending, but the ending brings movement and flow into my awareness. I have found a place of transformational energy. From the bright green field, I've come to rest in a warm, embracing lava-energy deep inside me. I have contacted the inner healer, the healing state of my dream.
The real healing IS this quantum shift in mental, emotional, even physical structure. The approach is one of wholeness and following the image.
The dreamhealing process is aimed at addressing this very profound level from the beginning. Progress comes unpredictably in quantum leaps in consciousness. Carl Simonton's work using imagery with cancer patients touches on this. The use of imagery with the intent of bringing about healing seems to mobilize forces deep within us that were formerly unaccessible. Nature as structure is reflected at all levels of organization just like fractal math shows.
If you look at a tiny piece of a fractal, the whole structure is reflected within it, much like a hologram. This is because it is self-similar and self-iterative. Any tiny piece reflects the whole. It is much the same in holography where a tiny piece of the negative can produce the whole image, though the detail may be fuzzier. This happens in human systems also. Applying Transactional Analysis to corporations shows that if you look at the pathology of the organization, it is related to the pathology of the individuals within that organization--and very often most to the founder or director. And vice versa.
We re-encounter the "holographic notion" in shamanism. The worldview is that we are reflections of the great Mother Earth. What happens to us is reflected in Gaea in the rocks and the trees, etc. At any level of organization nature repeats herself. As you watch the cycles of nature, you observe that things go into life and death and rebirth, as energy changes form. If that is happening all around you, what is to make you think you are any different than that. You are part of nature, unlike in the "civilized" or "scientific" views which set us apart. If you are truly not separate, you can expect, quite naturally, to go through the same cycle yourself, in consciousness as well as in biology. Further, you can trust that and embrace that flow of life, death, and rebirth.
Mystics and scientists show us that "change is stability. This is very much part of the shamanic perspective. We find that, in therapy, people get into "earth consciousness" and they perceive that they are healing the earth as well as themselves. This idea may be subjective, but not necessarily grandiose or delusional. It is unusual and perhaps unpredictable from their presenting problem. For example, in one experience a woman became a throbbing like the heartbeat of the entire planet. She felt the healing within herself as that of the planet. From the shaman's perspective, the healing of any component contributes to the healing of the whole, though it may be difficult to substantiate for the rational mind. To some extent this view becomes less subjective if we look at fractal theory in which any change in a part also changes the whole.
As further evidence of dream's chaotic nature, a case can be made that dreams are holograms. In using dream symbols for healing work, it seems that "all roads lead to Rome." A person can enter the dream through any of the symbolic doorways and derive a very different experience of consciousness along the way. Still, following the symbols deeper and deeper one arrives at that healing, primal level. As long as the image is followed back faithfully, the connection can be made from any beginning point in any dream, old or new. That is one reason we never need to go back to a particular dream symbol that has not been worked, but can pick up the process entering through a fresh dream image.
The deeper mind always presents the best departure point for current conflicts and turmoil, that which seeks healing. The part is contained within the whole, but the whole is also contained in each part, according to the holographic model of reality. Therefore, by changing the part, therapy changes the whole. So philosophically, it makes sense to approach the whole person, rather than the part which contains less-detailed information.
If the therapist chooses the part to work on, it is limited. Psyche has many options to choose from its deeper wisdom. Small changes in therapy can translate into exponential changes over time, since chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions. They quickly pump up small changes to larger changes in awareness. Part of the overall healing model is that WE ARE NOT SEPARATE. And, to the extent that we can embrace that model, it becomes more of a reality in the most profound sense.
CHANGE IS STABILITY
The difference between inanimate and animate life (or consciousness) is only a reflection of the interaction of the conscious field with the time field, or based on the level of observation. Inert matter is alive with subatomic activity. If you look closely enough, or remove the time-bound aspects, the similarity is there. Inanimate objects have a capacity to reconstitute just as organic systems do. Any definition of the difference between animate and inanimate existence is time-bound within a given period of time. Because of the conservation of energy, our constituents will participate in many animate and inanimate processes over the aeons.
For example, all the elements within our bodies were cooked in the crucible of some ancient star, which exploded in a supernova millennia ago. When you remove the dimension of time, the definitions "star" and "human" do not hold. We share the same essence. Maybe this is why mystic/magician Aleister Crowley said "Every man and every woman is a star." The similarity of archetypes (pervasive patterns which seem to repeat in nature and the psyche) may be a function of genetic structure.
Genetics provides a sense of universality amongst all humankind of senses and experiences of structure. Jung proposed a psychoid nature, (beyond and independent of human experiences), for archetypes. In the deepest sense, these archetypal energies are trans-human, transpersonal. Nevertheless, out of chaotic systems, we see self-similar, though not identical, patterns emerging. This is a property of chaotic systems. Our perceptions of these forms, our sensory patterns, may simply create archetypes out of them. There is that deeper structure of forms that arises spontaneously from chaos.
The limitations of our perceptions and senses, based on genetics, conditions what "archetypes" we tend to perceive and live out. Perhaps Jung mistook human perception of archetypes for those being "common" archetypes; whereas chaos may not be bound to that. A tree, for example, has the ability to experience its existence in its own way, at least from the shamanic perspective of animism. We can speculate about trees, or rocks, or fish with their different perceptual apparatus. They naturally will experience different perceptions of so-called archetypes based on their forms of "perception." They may also "notice" and create archetypes of their own out of persistent patterns. But, these will be very different from the kind of perceptions our intellect and genetic organs are capable of focusing on. Therefore, an archetype may be a function of genetic commonality.
Strange attractors in this view are based on the genetic structure that attracts the conscious energy around it. Out of chaotic systems we see self-similar patterns emerging. Our perceptions create archetypes by adding words and concepts. When it comes to creating a human being, one of the first things that is created out of that consciousness field interaction with EM fields, gravity and time, is the genetic structure which is the blueprint around which our physical structure evolves [see EMBRYONIC HOLOGRAPHY, Miller and Webb, 1973].
Our physical structure, as dictated by DNA, in turn determines emotional structure, sensory structure, and perceptual structure. Our sensory apparatus arises out of the genetic structure. The strange attractor is that touching of fields which then forms the physical and psychic structure. The relationships of our physical and emotional structure come out of their interaction, that interface, or nexus point.
Chaos may also be related to certain forms of divination, based on so-called chance, such as the I Ching, Tarot, or the Rune Stones. Divinatory procedures help us extract personal meaning from the chaotic jumble of divinatory elements. They mirror our subconscious and environment at that specific moment of observation. The structure of divinatory instruments also reveals much about the nature of the human psyche. There may be an infinite number of archetypes in the universe, but a select number are most influential in the lives of humanity. These are what get encoded into our divinatory systems as most relevant.
For example, let's examine a just a couple of rune stones, relevant to our theme: "Disruption" and "Odin." The rune for disruption seems like an ancient statement of the laws of chaos -- disruption is where evolution comes from. Disruption is what heralds and brings about change and growth. Dynamic change is actually a more stable condition than the inertia of the status quo. Nature reveals this lesson to us daily, personally and in complex dynamic systems. Without disruption there is no change. "Odin," the blank rune, is NOTHING, and at the same time ALL. When you draw "Odin," you have essentially drawn all the runes and none of the runes. That blankness is the crucible of all and the matrix of creativity. This seems to relate to chaos, also. "Odin" and chaos are also qualitatively the same.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHAOS
At all levels -- personal, societal, and so-forth -- we come back to the idea that chaos/order reflects the same structure and problems. All the structures we are, have or experience are constantly in a balance between chaos and structure (order). Moving in and out of that, bathing in that chaos and emerging again, that is our re-creation. One of the main implications of that for our history as a species, as a culture, is that we are moving into a place of intense chaos in our political systems, our social systems, and our financial systems. In reality it always has been that way.
There isn't much new about the so-called New World Order. That is part of the point -- we are moving into a new order which is unpredictable since it is not logically thought out. It is really nothing new, but we have been enculturated to worship order (through the primary religion of science), and to fear or distrust chaos. Even anarchy doesn't have to imply lawlessness if each individual is consciously self-governing (autarchy).
The so-called "Aquarian Conspiracy," popularized by Marilyn Ferguson, can be seen as an introduction of social chaos to break up old forms of thought in an iconoclastic way to make way for rebirth on many levels. So, there is a message of hope for positive change even though things seem chaotic and are becoming more so. It is part of a larger order of evolution. There is going to be a quantum-shift and the new emergent structure hopefully is better.
If we trust nature and trust ourselves, we realize this is true. If we re-embraced chaos within our culture, like the old nature religions of ancient times, what qualities would it have? How would this new paradigm--chaos is okay, and even "good"--impact the individual? Another aspect of modern life is that with the population explosion there is naturally increasing stress. How do we learn to live with that? Behaviorists have shown that packing too many rats into a small area leads to increased competition, aggression, and unpredictability. Stress also leads to unpredictability in human behavior. We may need to find new, creative methods of decreasing population density so that stresses are held to a level where quality of life is still attainable. This may come through birth control, or territorial expansion into space, or combined with other solutions as-yet-unknown. But we had better take action.
This decade determines whether twice as many, or three times as many people inhabit the planet as it can sustain. Patriarchy suppressed the old chaos cultures, but the return of the Feminine to social importance may herald a new era of co-existence between chaos and order in our culture. The truth is we always have been a chaos culture, but in a state of extreme denial. We tend to see ourselves as ordered, responsible, reliable. This "control fantasy" probably springs from neurotic roots. It may feel safer, but is not necessarily true. Scientific notions of chaos may be difficult for some people to grasp, but not the notion of chaos pervading their daily life--we see it everywhere.
Lorenz tells us that an attractor contains an infinite complex of manifolds. It is a complex interaction of fields which forms the attractor and which forms the complex around the structure. It is not a "thing" at the center of a bunch of orbits. Rather, it is a complex infinity of interaction. Field interaction may be the strange attractor. This may be hard to understand -- but not the first-hand experience of chaos in our lives affecting our fixations, fascinations, attention, and intentions. Some of us think that science started out with things we could perceive and that it is getting further and further from things we can grasp with our senses.
The limits of our observation have been extended down to the void, and out into the far-reaches of the cosmos. As we got into quantum mechanics, physics no longer described our daily experience, so there is difficulty in understanding it, even for the experts. Understanding or comprehending laws or principles, doesn't really tell us what things are. Chaos doesn't imply a complexity beyond human understanding and everyday experience.
Because we all perceive the inherent chaos in our mortal lives, we understand it at a deeper level -- even more than quantum mechanics, relativity, or even Newtonian physics. We understand how chaos could be fundamental in reality. Chaos not only relates to the cosmic level of the physical universe and the subatomic world, its effects are obvious on the human levels of perception, experience, and understanding. We may not get the mathematics of chaos, but we get the gist of its fundamental role in our lives. No one can deny it exists! Chaos need not be part of the mystification of reality and nature by science. We understand it at a deep, personal, profound level. Physicist Joseph Ford has said that, "to accept the future we must renounce much of the past..."
This helps us move toward an evolutionary inclusion of chaos science into our worldview, displacing the outdated mechanistic-materialistic notions. This is not a petty rebellion against the established order, but a quantum leap in awareness which brings our concept of "I" and "Not-I" closer to reality. Everything is of one fabric, seamless and whole. Basically, this involves a "letting go" or "emptying" which frees one up to move into the future. We need to empty ourselves before we can be re-filled. Devolution (regression), revolution, and evolution are three different, related processes. We are not dealing with a revolution in science from chaos theory. The tone is evolutionary.
Chaos theory is not overthrowing any old notion, but extending and opening up what was formerly incomprehensible and often incompatible. Mandelbrot [who discovered them] has said that "nobody is indifferent to fractals," and that seems to be true. Because they are based on chaos, they are a deep expression of chaos. The surprise is that they are so beautiful. We see our own essence reflected in them, and they become expressions of ourselves. That is our relationship to fractals. Of course we are not indifferent to them because they reflect ourselves, and all we perceive around us. Their referent is the dynamics of our everyday life and the world about us.
We are in a constant battle to hold form and structure (survival) and keep chaos at bay (disintegration). Our bodies and mental processes are based on fractal anatomy or fractal architecture. There is an inherent fascination in that linking. Chaos is the foundation of health in the body, as well as creativity and flexibility. It is healthy to be chaotic sometimes, both mentally and physically. The healthy heart needs to go into that chaoticness and come back out again to remain healthy. We need to do the same with our mentality; it is how we learn and grow. In both the body and the mind dis-ease = too much order = being stuck.
Studies of pre-schoolers have shown that they thrive and learn better in a less-structured environment where they can be loud and enthusiastic without the characteristic repression of traditional school. This does not mean an environment that is devoid of structure, but one that minimizes repression and encourages exploration and challenges. Why do we fear chaos so much both in the world and within ourselves? In both religion and government there seems to be a mandate for control--to get away from chaos and cleave to law and order. Sometimes, there seems a certain sort of desperation in it, indicating acute fear over loss of control.
The compulsion to control generally arises from trauma in situations where we feel helpless and hopeless. We try to compensate by rigidly maintaining order in any domain which we can rule over. For example, a disgruntled housewife who was abused as a child may not be able to control her drinking husband or her wild children, but her house MUST remain immaculate at all times. Ernest Rossi, Jungian psychologist, has said that "chaos is often seen in terms of the limitations it implies, such as lack of predictability." We are afraid of that non-predictability. This is the fundamental basis of science which, in essence, functions as the prevailing religion of our times. We virtually all "believe" it. Both science and religion are heroic defenses against chaos.
We are afraid of chaos, and yet what a dull world it would be if everything was predictable. We would have dull relationships if we could totally predict one another. What a dull life if we could see our entire developmental progress predetermined and predictable; not to mention, knowing the hour of our death. We live in a world governed by deterministic laws. But reality also involves randomness, fluctuation, and irreversible processes. In terms of the human psyche, this bears directly on the concepts of choice and free will. There is a fairly direct flow from consciousness to action which involves perception, awareness, attention, free will, purpose, goals, intention, resolution, creativity, choice, and decision. All these lead us toward irrevocable action and perhaps the results of action: karma, or natural consequences.
Fractal images are new models of creative process. Chaos is really the seat of creativity -- the basis from which all of our creativity comes. Einstein would frequently daydream, letting his mind go into the state of chaos, and ultimately came the idea of relativity. Also, there was Newton sitting idly under the tree, and suddenly the apple falls on his head. From that incident he got his notion of gravity. Only small fluctuations in mental processes are required initially to amplify over time into major changes or re-visioning of reality.
Chaos doesn't have to be frightening. It can be very beautiful. It is where we create the new structure, the new order. We have been brainwashed out of that by both the religion of science and conventional religion, the patriarchal, left-brain approach to life. They are all defenses against that lifestyle that is in harmony with nature. It is the place of no thoughts, random neural firing patterns, the empty mind, or "beginner's mind." Another reason we fear chaos may be that essentially chaos equals death, i.e. death is a return to chaos.
Decay [entropy] is the process of becoming chaotic again. Structure decays into non-structure. It touches on our mortality issues. The return to death happens on many levels. If you simply watch your breathing you can notice a "little death" at the bottom of the breath. Each time we make a change in our thinking, we have the death of the old concept for a new idea. When we go into therapy, there is the death of parts of ourselves, part of our ego, so we can heal. There is no real need to be so afraid of either ego-death or physical death. It rarely changes the dynamics of the process.
Sleep equals dreams, and even sleep is a form of death, of going into chaos. This may be why we need to sleep. We become unconscious, we become blank, and our mind has no pattern. Then, out of that arise the dreams, which help us to heal. We move between the delta activity and rapid eye movement (REM), indicating dream activity. We are constantly moving into the structure of our dreams, which are healing and balancing, and then into the chaos of deeper sleep where there is no structure to the mind, and back again. This may be why dreams are so healing, since they are tied to that chaos. The same may be true of the healing power of sexual love, and the "little death" of orgasm.
THE QUALITATIVE vs. THE QUANTITATIVE
Throughout the centuries the rational mind has developed the language of mathematics as a way of conceptualizing order in the world. It is a way of approaching reality from a quantitative perspective. This ultimately lead to a society based in technology which is dehumanizing ("we are cogs in the great machine"). The qualitative aspect was secondary, so for centuries people hardly stopped to consider whether they liked their job or loved their spouse--it was just the way things were. Now quality of life and lifestyles are important issues for many people who are operating above the gross survival level, or merely existing.
Once again the bastions of science are crumbling in regard to this aspect of existence. Consider the statement of Sir James Jeans: The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter - not, of course, our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms, out of which our individual minds have grown, exist as thoughts. And Arthur Eddington: I assert that the nature of all reality is spiritual, not material nor a dualism of matter and spirit. The hypothesis that its nature can be, to any degree, material does not enter into my reckoning, because as we now understand matter, the putting together of the adjective "material" and the noun "nature" does not make any sense.
Our quantitative consciousness came from the fact that we learned how to count. It worked well for everything from keeping count of herding animals to the rise and fall of rivers in ancient times. It fit a materialistic world, which functioned based on the concept of scarcity of goods, and an "I'll-get-mine-first" mentality.
But the development of numbers and the ability to count may have been one of the most destructive things we have ever done in the development of our culture. Its value is paradoxical--both good and bad. It caused us to focus on quantity rather than quality. We have chaos and chaos always seems to go full circle into structure and through decay back into chaos. Coming into structure is the process of counting, its is a process of number, the process of ordering, the process of thinking, the process of manipulating nature until we reach a point of order. This is reflected in the consciousness model which begins with the universal collective consciousness, moving into increasing ego structure and body ego structure.
We hit a point of order and then we move into a process of decay. This is just a part of natural order, part of the karmic cycle, part of the consciousness style. Counting, numbering is a human invention. Numbers, even though they describe or symbolize universal dynamics are not fundamental in the cosmos. They are not archetypal in the Jungian sense, of existing apart from humanity.
Numbers, rather than BEING numbers, ARISE from archetypes, as ordering processes. In our model of the ego [see EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING, Swinney and Miller, 1991], they are the behavioral, thinking, emotional pattern side of the belief system, rather than on the deep imagery side. They are a function more of the intellect, emerging from the belief system. It has to do with the archetypal theme of the loss of innocence--the Garden of Eden story.
Our belief is that numbers are a way of understanding or ordering reality. We started out in the Garden as beings of emotion, open to our intuition and extrasensory perceptions. In the Garden, we were basically in a state of chaos. "The Fall" implied the arrival of the age of intellect, mind, thinking, and language. And mathematics is simply a form of language, information transfer, which addresses its own structure.
Therefore, numbers are no more archetypal than letters or words. This doesn't mean they lack a mystical dimension--just ask a Qabalist. Numbers are a different way of expressing ideas--a different translation. Numbers are a function of the space/time continuum, not really a function of chaos itself, or an archetype itself. They are a function of our intellect. Zero and infinity are just different symbols for chaos. The two different faces of chaos that we see are really one and the same thing. They are non-ideas. You get infinity when you divide anything by zero. Zero is inherently a part of zero, one and the same thing. They are just ways of describing a chaotic thing you can't really grasp.
Jungian, Robin Robertson says, "we think the world is filled with matter and energy (with "stuff"), but it is equally filled with "structure," and that structure is dependent on emptiness, nothingness. Magician and mystic, Aleister Crowley reflected the same thought as "Infinite space is the goddess Nuit", who represents all and nothing., as primordial matrix. The truth is there is no end to infinity even though we try to quantify it.
ABSTRACT: Experiential therapy sessions have shown that as consciousness journeys deeper and deeper into the psyche, it eventually encounters a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images. Those emerging from this non-ordinary state of consciousness report an increased sense of well-being ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. We known that research has shown that imagery can affect the immune system. Imagery journeys in the autonomous stream of consciousness may activate psychosomatic healing forces, such as the placebo effect.
Science thus brings us to the threshold of the ego and there leaves us to ourselves. --Max Plank
...the attractor does not consist of a simple point, curve or higher dimensional manifold, but contains an infinite complex of manifolds. --Edward Lorenz
CHAOS IN DAILY LIFE
Both the shamanic view and modern depth psychology embrace an integrated view of psyche, soul, and nature. Sometimes this worldview is easier to achieve as an abstract thought than as an on-going perspective about life itself. Try as we might, we are so ingrained with the old mechanical-materialistic fantasy that we find our thoughts and attitudes slipping back toward causal models, perpetually denying the true nature of reality as we experience it. We have been conditioned since birth towards a conformist, orderly behavior that is deemed good for society, but is the death-knell of individuality. Much of the distortion in our worldview comes from our outmoded view of who we are, in terms of consciousness, awareness and perception.
Consensus reality doesn't represent any universal truth -- so-called "normal" consciousness is more of a cultural trance state (Tart, 1992). Integrating the new science of chaos theory can help us expand our understanding of reality. It impacts our sense of self as well as our concept of "how things work" in the universe. Allowing chaos back into our lives in a positive way also fosters the healing process. We have observed in experiential therapy that clients naturally gravitate in their inner journeys to a de-structured place. While there, they report feelings of rejuvenation and well-being. There are certain primary characteristics of chaos and chaotic systems (complex dynamic systems):
CHAOS IS:
1) deterministic
2) paradoxical
3) self-generative
4) self-iterating
5) self-organizing
6) intrinsically unpredictable
7) yet boundaried
8) and geometric
9) and sustained by complex feedback loops
CHAOTIC SYSTEMS ARE:
1) sensitive to initial conditions
2) disproportionately responsive to stimuli
3) translatable from micro- to macroscopic proportions
4) attractor centered
5) shuffled time/space
6) apparently acausal (actually enfolded; implicate/explicate)
7) qualitative
8) global phenomena
9) flexible/creative
Each of these aspects can be literally or metaphorically illustrated by a consciousness state, particularly if we include dreamlife. In fact, they are all present within each and every one of us when we turn our attention inward. We have observed many dream journeys to which these descriptors could apply.
For example, the quality of shuffled time/space is seen in the precognitive or prophetic dream. An attractor-centered dream might focus around a specific psychological complex, which acts like a magnetic center [strange attractor] for emotional conflict. Chaotic systems are also complex, as are dreams. They represent systems that are far-from-equilibrium. Jung contended that dreams help maintain psychic balance.
The scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality as presently understood. Old psychological models have placed emphasis on order, and the overcoming of chaos. Yet chaos has a perhaps unrecognized value, in our psyche and physiology. Just as a healthy heart sometime goes into a chaotic pattern, turbulence and chaos help us break down old, outmoded structures in personality.
Even the deterioration of mental illness is quite purposeful in that it is the individual's attempt at healing and finding a new emergent order. Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities. It has been said that "any supreme insight is a metaphor." It has also been said that "the better the idea, the more likely it is to have been extremely vague." While this may not hold true in all cases, it is true that there is a certain quality of ambiguity in chaos and chaos consciousness which must simply be tolerated.
For example, this description of imaginative consciousness and "turbulence" from artist Naum Gabo in OF DIVERS ARTS: The artist's mind is a turbulent sea full of all kinds of impressions, responses and experiences as well as feelings and emotions. Some experts on art assert that the artist does not really have more of these emotions and feelings and impressions than the ordinary man who is not an artist. This may be true or false, but what they apparently fail to see and assert is that in the artist these feelings and responses are in a more agitated state. He is more concerned with them, and the urge to express these experiences is more intense in him than it is in the ordinary man. And that, I suppose, is the reason why the artist's mind is not only more turbulent but sometimes, alas, troublesome also...
The chaos of our human lives is re-iterated from the subatomic through the cosmic level. Chaos is the matrix of creation. It provides a bridge for unfolding "heaven on earth", a means of manifesting and grounding spiritual energy, that is not only creative but healing. A state-of-the-art empirical foundation is essential for any well-grounded philosophy of life and a realistic self-concept. We create limited subjective fantasies about ourselves and the nature of the universe all the time. Usually we do not examine our a priori beliefs which condition those notions. We grasp our beliefs as though they were the most precious of gemstones, rather than just models or constructs. The true nature of perception dictates that we experience only a simulation of ourselves and the world-at-large (Tart, 1992).
From our worldview come symbols and images which a small part of our brain, and an even smaller part of our mind and consciousness clings to, attempting to structure reality out of chaos. By clutching these beliefs, we then limit our experience of reality to that defined by them. For the most part, these underlying beliefs are rooted in notions about the nature of reality which are derived from 17th century physics and philosophy. The old mechanistic view asserts that mind and matter are separate. Newton's discoveries bolstered the notion that reality is a universe consisting of separate objects interacting with one another according to fixed laws of cause and effect. The laws are learned through objective observation and measurement. Causal laws fit with our direct experience of the universe and are therefore supported as feeling "right" by intuition.
Einstein said our language requires coordinates. Since we live in a culture which is mostly based on this science and its technology, we generally accept these notions as a given, as axioms too basic to be questioned. We may know about the irrational, counter-intuitive concepts of quantum mechanics, yet it hardly seems to affect us. Our beliefs are still largely rooted in cause-and-effect. From these axioms we also construct our ego and personality which is a collection of secondary beliefs about what we are and how we can relate to and control our surroundings. It seems to work.
Using this system of thought and belief, we are able to control much of the physical world around us. That is, until catastrophic chaos intervenes in our lives. It may come in the form of natural disaster, random victimization, the bifurcation of a love triangle [paramour as strange attractor], or a crisis in transition from one phase of life to another. Sometimes the intrusion is a spontaneous unusual psychic or spiritual experience which can neither be integrated nor assimilated into daily life. It also will not be ignored. It may come, therefore, in the form of a recurrent dream, or other means of hailing the conscious mind from the subconscious.
Spiritual emergencies, ranging from addiction to near-death-experiences, call for a breaking down of the old system to the primal or fundamental (or chaotic) level. Disintegration is the direction of these processes, which create opportunities for us to "get it back together' at a healthier, more enriched, enlarged level, with a new primal self-image. As powerful as the scientific approach seems to be, it leaves many phenomena unexplained. There are strategic holes in the fortress of classical scientific doctrine. For example, objective observation and the principles of cause and effect.
In 1938 Einstein wrote, "Physical concepts are free creatures of the human mind and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." Quantum mechanics further attacks the principles of objectivity and seperativity. The implications of this theory take us into a strange reality in which we not only influence reality but actually create it from our minds and expectations. Realities exist as possibilities which come into being through our consciousness and intentionality.
To put it in other terms, apparently the universe exists only within the context of our relationship to it. John Wheeler, a physicist from Princeton University, writes, "May the universe be 'brought into being' by the participation of those who participate?...The vital act is the act of participation. 'Participator' is the given incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term 'observer' of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics says."
Henry Pierce Strapp, another quantum physicist, states that the world is "Not a structure built out of existing analyzable entities, but rather a web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationship to the whole."
In the field of medical science, there are many cases of healing which conventional or classical medicine or psychology cannot explain. These gaps have been labeled placebo and spontaneous remission. Yet, this does no more than hide our ignorance behind words. There is, however, a striking parallel between healing and the new physics. As in the new physics, healing too occurs in a realm of connectivity and mutual creation. Healer and "healee" are not separate objective entities following fixed laws with the former manipulating the physical components of the latter. They are partners in a process of creating a universe in which mind and body are no longer separate. They establish a flow in harmonious accord with each other and the rest of creation, a state of ease rather than dis-ease.
The emergent healing paradigm helps us evolve out of the body/mind or nature/spirit split instilled by our culture during the era of mechanistic science and the industrial revolution. We now live in an information society. Information theory describes the fundamental quality of information as an agent of change. Great minds have been moving in these systems-theory directions for some time, but there seems to be a lag-time in the psyche of the general population. Even though some may comprehend it mentally, it rarely transforms into a truly transformative, deep knowledge on all levels of awareness, much less what it could mean in terms of mental health.
Chaos theory gives us a visual mathematical language for charting strange attractors in dynamical systems. They can be applied within an individual psyche or to interactive relationships. This technology has already been applied to human behavior. Order and chaos in the emotional realm have been studied by mathematicians and psychiatrists. Their studies produced models of a person's chaotic or unstable behavior in comparison to their stable behavior. Stable behavior can be imagined as being like the sky, unstable behavior like mountains, with little pockets or "caves" of serenity within them. These little sanctuaries could be fostered through therapy. Stability can be increased through therapy within a broader landscape of chaos and pathology. It may also lead to new ways to individualize psychotherapy, like dreamhealing. [see DREAMHEALING: THE HEART OF DREAMS, Miller and Swinney, 1991].
Even mental illness may relate to the phenomena of strange attractors in the brain or emotional field. Some researchers believe, for example, that a number of mental disorders, such as manic-depressive illness and schizophrenia, occur when biological regulatory systems cease to operate at their normal, fixed point and change suddenly to another stable but abnormal point. In chaos theory, when an attractor disappears due to sudden catastrophic change, the system becomes structureless and experiences a term of "transient chaos" before another attractor is found.
The primal image is the attractor and it forms based on the organism's interaction with the "Not-I" or environment. An individual's personal myth or my theme might be conceived as an activated chaotic attractor. In another phase of life, the focus could change to others. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an uncontrollable fashion. The ego can suffer greatly from this jerking around by the deep forces within, especially if it doesn't have enough information about its purpose to derive meaning from the experience. For some, the disruption leads to a nervous breakdown or psychotic break, while for others it opens the doors into a new freedom and expanded sense of self.
Chaos is part of a greater structure/process, for want of a better title, called evolution. Order emerges spontaneously from chaos, and order tends to degenerate into chaos when forms are obsolete. Chaos is also the root of the creative process. In chaos, the search for information is open. As soon as you think you "know" something, you close down the search for new information and solutions. There are many questions which arise within the model of human development based on chaos theory.
We can conjecture why certain attractors or complexes form. We really don't know why some may become prominent and others fade into the background. But we do know that when two or more are competing for divergent behavior and attitudes, the resulting psychic split can be painful, setting up a deep conflict which is not be easy to resolve. If it is extreme, it leads to psychological fragmentation. Free choice may be a factor, but our choices are limited by our attitudes about what we believe is possible for us. The only solution is to dive to the deepest levels, seeking evolutionary transformation -- a quantum leap in consciousness that can contain opposites within paradox. The first step in understanding how these attractors affect us has to do with our personal filters, our distorted experiences of raw archetypal energy.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHAOS
In our studies of healing, and an attempt to synthesize them into a consistent ideal, we have developed a model. Consciousness may be viewed as a field interacting with other fields. In physics, a field is a medium of connectivity, an extent of space within which lines of force (magnetic and electrical) are in operation. It is also called a field of force. When two fields, like electricity and magnetism, interact they create electromagnetic waves which include all forms of radiant energy from light and radio waves, to gamma and cosmic rays.
Electromagnetism is magnetism developed by electricity. EM fields interact with the smallest units of matter energetically exciting the components of the fundamental geometry of space in fields which are in a constant state of fluctuation. The consciousness field is not limited to the conscious awareness of human beings, as in the Jungian concept. Rather, it is the creative dynamic matrix behind all life and inorganic manifestation. It is self-generating. Consciousness begets consciousness. It is self-iterating (or repeating--chronic), and self-organizing. When consciousness interacts with the space/time field or electromagnetic (EM) fields, then individual consciousness emerges.
Since the consciousness field represents all potential, its qualitative nature must be paradoxical for it encompasses the opposites. Still, once it begins interacting with other fields and begins to "make psyche matter," certain boundary conditions are imposed. The determinism of a chaotic system guides the growth and maturation process. The original site interaction of consciousness with time/space creates not only the material basis, but the organism's strange attractor, which we refer to as the "primal image." It is the blueprint of the entity. Jungian psychologists are exploring the possible relationships between strange attractors and archetypes or complexes [see PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES].
In our view these attractors or complexes are secondary formations, even though the concept of a primal guiding image shares much with the Jungian concept of self. They are merely similar. This view is neither archetypal nor complex-oriented. Rather than limiting exploration piecemeal to a few select archetypes or specific complexes, it approaches the individual as a whole, not as a collection of fragmented parts. Human beings reflect the qualities of chaotic systems. As living creatures we are sensitive to the initial conditions of our genetics and conception.
We can easily respond disproportionately to stimuli. A child's actual brain chemistry and neural patterns can be changed by childhood trauma. This creates a rigid structure through the process of conditioning. The trauma may come from an insignificant incident such as parents yelling, for the child perceives them as gigantic, all-mighty gods essential for survival. Needless to say, severe trauma inflicts an even deeper imprint or distortion of the personality. Seeds of change (for good or bad) planted in our lives can quickly grow later to transformations of vast proportion.
For example, any choice point we face in life where we leave an alternate "road not taken," leads to a wide variety of different life experiences and opportunities. We are attractor-centered, whether we conceive of that primal attractor as divinity, the higher self, the core self, the Jungian self, the Gestalt self, or that deepest sense of self--our primal self image (including its unconscious aspects). As an attractor, it contains an infinite complex of forms and images. Elsewhere, we have delved into this more deeply [see EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING, Miller and Swinney, 1991].
Our consciousness is capable of experiencing shuffled space/time. It happens during dreams, deja-vu, precognition, and other psychic experiences. We also experience apparently acausal phenomena, termed synchronicity by Jung. Physicist David Bohm calls enfolded information "implicate" when it is enfolded in a latent state of potential. It is called "explicate" when it is unfolded or actualized (observable). Our entire lives are encoded in the initial moment of conception, yet the details of that unfolding potential are inherently unpredictable. Our lives are the explication of the initial conditions present at conception. That initial blueprint is subject to many perturbations along the way.
Chaotic systems are qualitative. Even physics proves it is impossible for us to comprehend anything but subjective perceptions. When it comes to human life, quality is generally valued over quantity faced with impairment. We adapt to changing circumstances in our environment because we are flexible and creative. Because of this we have covered the globe with civilization. Our physical bodies and our societies are sustained by complex feedback loops. Our moods are controlled by excititory and inhibitory brain hormones. The political process is part of the social feedback system. The consciousness field is that which relates us to the entire universe. It may be viewed as chaos, or energy in a primal chaotic state, prior to any solidification into matter. It is a field of energy, not a "thing." It is able to take on infinite forms, including images.
Time is also a field. Consciousness may intersect with time at a 90 degree angle, in which case a linear flow seems to emerge. Or, it may fold over in a contiguous way, producing a "bending" or folding of space. In far-from-equilibrium conditions, this folding or kneading would create layers of time/space that are simply connected, like pieces of layered pastry dough. Points in time widely separated in the linear sense, become intimately juxtaposed. In this model, consciousness would have the ability to "pop" around in time. The site interaction with other fields by consciousness is what we view as the intrusion of the strange attractor. Where two fields interact, that is the strange attractor, which then attracts and forms the consciousness around it.
The other field, whatever it is interacting with, attracts the energy around it too. And this is what we create our experience from. The strange attractor is the intersection of the fields. We can view it linearly, or in non-linear fashion. This is speculation, on the touching of fields creating reality at a profound level. When consciousness intersects with other fields it seems to create matter, or the illusion of matter, and we can manipulate that, change forms, etc. Consciousness evolution equals the process of chaos moving into structure, dissolving back into chaos, and reconstituting into structure. It requires a breaking up or dissolving of old forms back into the primal state.
For some reason in dreamhealing sessions, each new structure that comes out of the primal chaos seems to be an evolution beyond, or a superior structure, or a better structure than the previous one that went into the chaos. Now we don't know why this should be, but it does seem to be that way consistently. We can speculate that this generalizes to the whole process of evolution. In any event, it has been observed specifically in dream journeys which move deep into the psyche. Of course, it pre-supposes that the journey gets to the depth where chaotic consciousness is experienced to begin with. Whenever we begin with a structure (the currently defined personality), we commit it back to the chaos (the primal chaotic state of consciousness).
The new structure, the new image that emerges is always better, always more healed, more whole, evolved beyond the old structure that was so limiting. Rigidities seem to dissolve and reform in that state of consciousness, like a modern equivalent of the old alchemical maxim--"solve et coagula." This may relate to a deeper, unknown law of chaos. What is known is that we observe it repeatedly in the dreamhealing process. If you take any portion of a fractal and expand it, you find it is self-similar. This reveals a harmony with shamanic law--that organization repeats itself at all levels of organization. Patterns repeat at all levels of organization. It is much like finding the universe in a grain of sand. Evolution in consciousness comes with a quantum shift in awareness. That quantum shift occurs during the period in which the evolving structure is in chaos.
So if you are in a dreamhealing process, experiencing for example, the multiple consciousness of the Earth Mother as decay, you may follow that to the point of total disintegration. Since you are identified with that state of consciousness at the time, your personal awareness dives down into the chaos, journeying to the most fundamental or primal state of consciousness--chaos. That is when the shift in primal image of self becomes possible, because it is totally de-structured. During that period of chaos is when it (and you with it) are changed from this to that, in a non-linear state.
From that, you can see that you can consign your bound-up rigid energies (whether it is fear, pain, or whatever) to their primal state so that the transformation of that energy frees it to take on a new quality. Again, this is an alchemical notion: "Only that which has been separated can be properly joined." Consciousness healing takes place in quantum shifts. The old model of psychological integration changed and integrated a little piece at a time, building toward a "strong coping ego." The personal experience of the quantum shift is in the imagery of dreams and dream journeys. It appears spontaneously.
For example, here is how one client described the journey to the inner healer in a self-guided session: First the dream: I am in a sunny field of green grass. I see an old college friend coming toward me across the field. His name is Mark. I'm also trying to set up a screen to watch a movie on. The screen is two pieces of painted green wood. With the dream in my mind, I choose to become the dream. I am the field of grass. I notice how close to the earth I am, indeed, how I am the earth. I feel an aliveness as grass that I have forgotten as myself. I take in the sunlight to nourish me. I feel drawn into the roots of the grass. I have a sense of the rootedness of the grass, so I let myself go into the earth through the roots. This leads me into a series of colors and textures which I discover as the journey continues underground. I let myself go on, and I arrive eventually at the center of the earth, where a vibrant orange lava surrounds me and penetrates me with its heat. With this main sensation in my body, I find myself settling into the flow and resting, taking in the heat all around me. The journey has come to a momentary ending, but the ending brings movement and flow into my awareness. I have found a place of transformational energy. From the bright green field, I've come to rest in a warm, embracing lava-energy deep inside me. I have contacted the inner healer, the healing state of my dream.
The real healing IS this quantum shift in mental, emotional, even physical structure. The approach is one of wholeness and following the image.
The dreamhealing process is aimed at addressing this very profound level from the beginning. Progress comes unpredictably in quantum leaps in consciousness. Carl Simonton's work using imagery with cancer patients touches on this. The use of imagery with the intent of bringing about healing seems to mobilize forces deep within us that were formerly unaccessible. Nature as structure is reflected at all levels of organization just like fractal math shows.
If you look at a tiny piece of a fractal, the whole structure is reflected within it, much like a hologram. This is because it is self-similar and self-iterative. Any tiny piece reflects the whole. It is much the same in holography where a tiny piece of the negative can produce the whole image, though the detail may be fuzzier. This happens in human systems also. Applying Transactional Analysis to corporations shows that if you look at the pathology of the organization, it is related to the pathology of the individuals within that organization--and very often most to the founder or director. And vice versa.
We re-encounter the "holographic notion" in shamanism. The worldview is that we are reflections of the great Mother Earth. What happens to us is reflected in Gaea in the rocks and the trees, etc. At any level of organization nature repeats herself. As you watch the cycles of nature, you observe that things go into life and death and rebirth, as energy changes form. If that is happening all around you, what is to make you think you are any different than that. You are part of nature, unlike in the "civilized" or "scientific" views which set us apart. If you are truly not separate, you can expect, quite naturally, to go through the same cycle yourself, in consciousness as well as in biology. Further, you can trust that and embrace that flow of life, death, and rebirth.
Mystics and scientists show us that "change is stability. This is very much part of the shamanic perspective. We find that, in therapy, people get into "earth consciousness" and they perceive that they are healing the earth as well as themselves. This idea may be subjective, but not necessarily grandiose or delusional. It is unusual and perhaps unpredictable from their presenting problem. For example, in one experience a woman became a throbbing like the heartbeat of the entire planet. She felt the healing within herself as that of the planet. From the shaman's perspective, the healing of any component contributes to the healing of the whole, though it may be difficult to substantiate for the rational mind. To some extent this view becomes less subjective if we look at fractal theory in which any change in a part also changes the whole.
As further evidence of dream's chaotic nature, a case can be made that dreams are holograms. In using dream symbols for healing work, it seems that "all roads lead to Rome." A person can enter the dream through any of the symbolic doorways and derive a very different experience of consciousness along the way. Still, following the symbols deeper and deeper one arrives at that healing, primal level. As long as the image is followed back faithfully, the connection can be made from any beginning point in any dream, old or new. That is one reason we never need to go back to a particular dream symbol that has not been worked, but can pick up the process entering through a fresh dream image.
The deeper mind always presents the best departure point for current conflicts and turmoil, that which seeks healing. The part is contained within the whole, but the whole is also contained in each part, according to the holographic model of reality. Therefore, by changing the part, therapy changes the whole. So philosophically, it makes sense to approach the whole person, rather than the part which contains less-detailed information.
If the therapist chooses the part to work on, it is limited. Psyche has many options to choose from its deeper wisdom. Small changes in therapy can translate into exponential changes over time, since chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions. They quickly pump up small changes to larger changes in awareness. Part of the overall healing model is that WE ARE NOT SEPARATE. And, to the extent that we can embrace that model, it becomes more of a reality in the most profound sense.
CHANGE IS STABILITY
The difference between inanimate and animate life (or consciousness) is only a reflection of the interaction of the conscious field with the time field, or based on the level of observation. Inert matter is alive with subatomic activity. If you look closely enough, or remove the time-bound aspects, the similarity is there. Inanimate objects have a capacity to reconstitute just as organic systems do. Any definition of the difference between animate and inanimate existence is time-bound within a given period of time. Because of the conservation of energy, our constituents will participate in many animate and inanimate processes over the aeons.
For example, all the elements within our bodies were cooked in the crucible of some ancient star, which exploded in a supernova millennia ago. When you remove the dimension of time, the definitions "star" and "human" do not hold. We share the same essence. Maybe this is why mystic/magician Aleister Crowley said "Every man and every woman is a star." The similarity of archetypes (pervasive patterns which seem to repeat in nature and the psyche) may be a function of genetic structure.
Genetics provides a sense of universality amongst all humankind of senses and experiences of structure. Jung proposed a psychoid nature, (beyond and independent of human experiences), for archetypes. In the deepest sense, these archetypal energies are trans-human, transpersonal. Nevertheless, out of chaotic systems, we see self-similar, though not identical, patterns emerging. This is a property of chaotic systems. Our perceptions of these forms, our sensory patterns, may simply create archetypes out of them. There is that deeper structure of forms that arises spontaneously from chaos.
The limitations of our perceptions and senses, based on genetics, conditions what "archetypes" we tend to perceive and live out. Perhaps Jung mistook human perception of archetypes for those being "common" archetypes; whereas chaos may not be bound to that. A tree, for example, has the ability to experience its existence in its own way, at least from the shamanic perspective of animism. We can speculate about trees, or rocks, or fish with their different perceptual apparatus. They naturally will experience different perceptions of so-called archetypes based on their forms of "perception." They may also "notice" and create archetypes of their own out of persistent patterns. But, these will be very different from the kind of perceptions our intellect and genetic organs are capable of focusing on. Therefore, an archetype may be a function of genetic commonality.
Strange attractors in this view are based on the genetic structure that attracts the conscious energy around it. Out of chaotic systems we see self-similar patterns emerging. Our perceptions create archetypes by adding words and concepts. When it comes to creating a human being, one of the first things that is created out of that consciousness field interaction with EM fields, gravity and time, is the genetic structure which is the blueprint around which our physical structure evolves [see EMBRYONIC HOLOGRAPHY, Miller and Webb, 1973].
Our physical structure, as dictated by DNA, in turn determines emotional structure, sensory structure, and perceptual structure. Our sensory apparatus arises out of the genetic structure. The strange attractor is that touching of fields which then forms the physical and psychic structure. The relationships of our physical and emotional structure come out of their interaction, that interface, or nexus point.
Chaos may also be related to certain forms of divination, based on so-called chance, such as the I Ching, Tarot, or the Rune Stones. Divinatory procedures help us extract personal meaning from the chaotic jumble of divinatory elements. They mirror our subconscious and environment at that specific moment of observation. The structure of divinatory instruments also reveals much about the nature of the human psyche. There may be an infinite number of archetypes in the universe, but a select number are most influential in the lives of humanity. These are what get encoded into our divinatory systems as most relevant.
For example, let's examine a just a couple of rune stones, relevant to our theme: "Disruption" and "Odin." The rune for disruption seems like an ancient statement of the laws of chaos -- disruption is where evolution comes from. Disruption is what heralds and brings about change and growth. Dynamic change is actually a more stable condition than the inertia of the status quo. Nature reveals this lesson to us daily, personally and in complex dynamic systems. Without disruption there is no change. "Odin," the blank rune, is NOTHING, and at the same time ALL. When you draw "Odin," you have essentially drawn all the runes and none of the runes. That blankness is the crucible of all and the matrix of creativity. This seems to relate to chaos, also. "Odin" and chaos are also qualitatively the same.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHAOS
At all levels -- personal, societal, and so-forth -- we come back to the idea that chaos/order reflects the same structure and problems. All the structures we are, have or experience are constantly in a balance between chaos and structure (order). Moving in and out of that, bathing in that chaos and emerging again, that is our re-creation. One of the main implications of that for our history as a species, as a culture, is that we are moving into a place of intense chaos in our political systems, our social systems, and our financial systems. In reality it always has been that way.
There isn't much new about the so-called New World Order. That is part of the point -- we are moving into a new order which is unpredictable since it is not logically thought out. It is really nothing new, but we have been enculturated to worship order (through the primary religion of science), and to fear or distrust chaos. Even anarchy doesn't have to imply lawlessness if each individual is consciously self-governing (autarchy).
The so-called "Aquarian Conspiracy," popularized by Marilyn Ferguson, can be seen as an introduction of social chaos to break up old forms of thought in an iconoclastic way to make way for rebirth on many levels. So, there is a message of hope for positive change even though things seem chaotic and are becoming more so. It is part of a larger order of evolution. There is going to be a quantum-shift and the new emergent structure hopefully is better.
If we trust nature and trust ourselves, we realize this is true. If we re-embraced chaos within our culture, like the old nature religions of ancient times, what qualities would it have? How would this new paradigm--chaos is okay, and even "good"--impact the individual? Another aspect of modern life is that with the population explosion there is naturally increasing stress. How do we learn to live with that? Behaviorists have shown that packing too many rats into a small area leads to increased competition, aggression, and unpredictability. Stress also leads to unpredictability in human behavior. We may need to find new, creative methods of decreasing population density so that stresses are held to a level where quality of life is still attainable. This may come through birth control, or territorial expansion into space, or combined with other solutions as-yet-unknown. But we had better take action.
This decade determines whether twice as many, or three times as many people inhabit the planet as it can sustain. Patriarchy suppressed the old chaos cultures, but the return of the Feminine to social importance may herald a new era of co-existence between chaos and order in our culture. The truth is we always have been a chaos culture, but in a state of extreme denial. We tend to see ourselves as ordered, responsible, reliable. This "control fantasy" probably springs from neurotic roots. It may feel safer, but is not necessarily true. Scientific notions of chaos may be difficult for some people to grasp, but not the notion of chaos pervading their daily life--we see it everywhere.
Lorenz tells us that an attractor contains an infinite complex of manifolds. It is a complex interaction of fields which forms the attractor and which forms the complex around the structure. It is not a "thing" at the center of a bunch of orbits. Rather, it is a complex infinity of interaction. Field interaction may be the strange attractor. This may be hard to understand -- but not the first-hand experience of chaos in our lives affecting our fixations, fascinations, attention, and intentions. Some of us think that science started out with things we could perceive and that it is getting further and further from things we can grasp with our senses.
The limits of our observation have been extended down to the void, and out into the far-reaches of the cosmos. As we got into quantum mechanics, physics no longer described our daily experience, so there is difficulty in understanding it, even for the experts. Understanding or comprehending laws or principles, doesn't really tell us what things are. Chaos doesn't imply a complexity beyond human understanding and everyday experience.
Because we all perceive the inherent chaos in our mortal lives, we understand it at a deeper level -- even more than quantum mechanics, relativity, or even Newtonian physics. We understand how chaos could be fundamental in reality. Chaos not only relates to the cosmic level of the physical universe and the subatomic world, its effects are obvious on the human levels of perception, experience, and understanding. We may not get the mathematics of chaos, but we get the gist of its fundamental role in our lives. No one can deny it exists! Chaos need not be part of the mystification of reality and nature by science. We understand it at a deep, personal, profound level. Physicist Joseph Ford has said that, "to accept the future we must renounce much of the past..."
This helps us move toward an evolutionary inclusion of chaos science into our worldview, displacing the outdated mechanistic-materialistic notions. This is not a petty rebellion against the established order, but a quantum leap in awareness which brings our concept of "I" and "Not-I" closer to reality. Everything is of one fabric, seamless and whole. Basically, this involves a "letting go" or "emptying" which frees one up to move into the future. We need to empty ourselves before we can be re-filled. Devolution (regression), revolution, and evolution are three different, related processes. We are not dealing with a revolution in science from chaos theory. The tone is evolutionary.
Chaos theory is not overthrowing any old notion, but extending and opening up what was formerly incomprehensible and often incompatible. Mandelbrot [who discovered them] has said that "nobody is indifferent to fractals," and that seems to be true. Because they are based on chaos, they are a deep expression of chaos. The surprise is that they are so beautiful. We see our own essence reflected in them, and they become expressions of ourselves. That is our relationship to fractals. Of course we are not indifferent to them because they reflect ourselves, and all we perceive around us. Their referent is the dynamics of our everyday life and the world about us.
We are in a constant battle to hold form and structure (survival) and keep chaos at bay (disintegration). Our bodies and mental processes are based on fractal anatomy or fractal architecture. There is an inherent fascination in that linking. Chaos is the foundation of health in the body, as well as creativity and flexibility. It is healthy to be chaotic sometimes, both mentally and physically. The healthy heart needs to go into that chaoticness and come back out again to remain healthy. We need to do the same with our mentality; it is how we learn and grow. In both the body and the mind dis-ease = too much order = being stuck.
Studies of pre-schoolers have shown that they thrive and learn better in a less-structured environment where they can be loud and enthusiastic without the characteristic repression of traditional school. This does not mean an environment that is devoid of structure, but one that minimizes repression and encourages exploration and challenges. Why do we fear chaos so much both in the world and within ourselves? In both religion and government there seems to be a mandate for control--to get away from chaos and cleave to law and order. Sometimes, there seems a certain sort of desperation in it, indicating acute fear over loss of control.
The compulsion to control generally arises from trauma in situations where we feel helpless and hopeless. We try to compensate by rigidly maintaining order in any domain which we can rule over. For example, a disgruntled housewife who was abused as a child may not be able to control her drinking husband or her wild children, but her house MUST remain immaculate at all times. Ernest Rossi, Jungian psychologist, has said that "chaos is often seen in terms of the limitations it implies, such as lack of predictability." We are afraid of that non-predictability. This is the fundamental basis of science which, in essence, functions as the prevailing religion of our times. We virtually all "believe" it. Both science and religion are heroic defenses against chaos.
We are afraid of chaos, and yet what a dull world it would be if everything was predictable. We would have dull relationships if we could totally predict one another. What a dull life if we could see our entire developmental progress predetermined and predictable; not to mention, knowing the hour of our death. We live in a world governed by deterministic laws. But reality also involves randomness, fluctuation, and irreversible processes. In terms of the human psyche, this bears directly on the concepts of choice and free will. There is a fairly direct flow from consciousness to action which involves perception, awareness, attention, free will, purpose, goals, intention, resolution, creativity, choice, and decision. All these lead us toward irrevocable action and perhaps the results of action: karma, or natural consequences.
Fractal images are new models of creative process. Chaos is really the seat of creativity -- the basis from which all of our creativity comes. Einstein would frequently daydream, letting his mind go into the state of chaos, and ultimately came the idea of relativity. Also, there was Newton sitting idly under the tree, and suddenly the apple falls on his head. From that incident he got his notion of gravity. Only small fluctuations in mental processes are required initially to amplify over time into major changes or re-visioning of reality.
Chaos doesn't have to be frightening. It can be very beautiful. It is where we create the new structure, the new order. We have been brainwashed out of that by both the religion of science and conventional religion, the patriarchal, left-brain approach to life. They are all defenses against that lifestyle that is in harmony with nature. It is the place of no thoughts, random neural firing patterns, the empty mind, or "beginner's mind." Another reason we fear chaos may be that essentially chaos equals death, i.e. death is a return to chaos.
Decay [entropy] is the process of becoming chaotic again. Structure decays into non-structure. It touches on our mortality issues. The return to death happens on many levels. If you simply watch your breathing you can notice a "little death" at the bottom of the breath. Each time we make a change in our thinking, we have the death of the old concept for a new idea. When we go into therapy, there is the death of parts of ourselves, part of our ego, so we can heal. There is no real need to be so afraid of either ego-death or physical death. It rarely changes the dynamics of the process.
Sleep equals dreams, and even sleep is a form of death, of going into chaos. This may be why we need to sleep. We become unconscious, we become blank, and our mind has no pattern. Then, out of that arise the dreams, which help us to heal. We move between the delta activity and rapid eye movement (REM), indicating dream activity. We are constantly moving into the structure of our dreams, which are healing and balancing, and then into the chaos of deeper sleep where there is no structure to the mind, and back again. This may be why dreams are so healing, since they are tied to that chaos. The same may be true of the healing power of sexual love, and the "little death" of orgasm.
THE QUALITATIVE vs. THE QUANTITATIVE
Throughout the centuries the rational mind has developed the language of mathematics as a way of conceptualizing order in the world. It is a way of approaching reality from a quantitative perspective. This ultimately lead to a society based in technology which is dehumanizing ("we are cogs in the great machine"). The qualitative aspect was secondary, so for centuries people hardly stopped to consider whether they liked their job or loved their spouse--it was just the way things were. Now quality of life and lifestyles are important issues for many people who are operating above the gross survival level, or merely existing.
Once again the bastions of science are crumbling in regard to this aspect of existence. Consider the statement of Sir James Jeans: The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter - not, of course, our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms, out of which our individual minds have grown, exist as thoughts. And Arthur Eddington: I assert that the nature of all reality is spiritual, not material nor a dualism of matter and spirit. The hypothesis that its nature can be, to any degree, material does not enter into my reckoning, because as we now understand matter, the putting together of the adjective "material" and the noun "nature" does not make any sense.
Our quantitative consciousness came from the fact that we learned how to count. It worked well for everything from keeping count of herding animals to the rise and fall of rivers in ancient times. It fit a materialistic world, which functioned based on the concept of scarcity of goods, and an "I'll-get-mine-first" mentality.
But the development of numbers and the ability to count may have been one of the most destructive things we have ever done in the development of our culture. Its value is paradoxical--both good and bad. It caused us to focus on quantity rather than quality. We have chaos and chaos always seems to go full circle into structure and through decay back into chaos. Coming into structure is the process of counting, its is a process of number, the process of ordering, the process of thinking, the process of manipulating nature until we reach a point of order. This is reflected in the consciousness model which begins with the universal collective consciousness, moving into increasing ego structure and body ego structure.
We hit a point of order and then we move into a process of decay. This is just a part of natural order, part of the karmic cycle, part of the consciousness style. Counting, numbering is a human invention. Numbers, even though they describe or symbolize universal dynamics are not fundamental in the cosmos. They are not archetypal in the Jungian sense, of existing apart from humanity.
Numbers, rather than BEING numbers, ARISE from archetypes, as ordering processes. In our model of the ego [see EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING, Swinney and Miller, 1991], they are the behavioral, thinking, emotional pattern side of the belief system, rather than on the deep imagery side. They are a function more of the intellect, emerging from the belief system. It has to do with the archetypal theme of the loss of innocence--the Garden of Eden story.
Our belief is that numbers are a way of understanding or ordering reality. We started out in the Garden as beings of emotion, open to our intuition and extrasensory perceptions. In the Garden, we were basically in a state of chaos. "The Fall" implied the arrival of the age of intellect, mind, thinking, and language. And mathematics is simply a form of language, information transfer, which addresses its own structure.
Therefore, numbers are no more archetypal than letters or words. This doesn't mean they lack a mystical dimension--just ask a Qabalist. Numbers are a different way of expressing ideas--a different translation. Numbers are a function of the space/time continuum, not really a function of chaos itself, or an archetype itself. They are a function of our intellect. Zero and infinity are just different symbols for chaos. The two different faces of chaos that we see are really one and the same thing. They are non-ideas. You get infinity when you divide anything by zero. Zero is inherently a part of zero, one and the same thing. They are just ways of describing a chaotic thing you can't really grasp.
Jungian, Robin Robertson says, "we think the world is filled with matter and energy (with "stuff"), but it is equally filled with "structure," and that structure is dependent on emptiness, nothingness. Magician and mystic, Aleister Crowley reflected the same thought as "Infinite space is the goddess Nuit", who represents all and nothing., as primordial matrix. The truth is there is no end to infinity even though we try to quantify it.
Chapter 2: DREAMHEALING: THE HEART OF DREAMS
...Why are the [dreams] not understandable?...The answer must be that the dream is a natural occurrence, and that nature shows no inclination to offer her fruits gratis or according to human expectations. -- C.G. Jung
The paranormal dream that seems to transcend time and space remains no less controversial today than it was in the days of Cicero, the great Roman orator... --Stanley Krippner
According to Joseph Campbell, "Dream is the personalized myth. Myth is the depersonalized dream."
With the popularization of his work, and more recently that of David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner, many people are becoming more aware of the importance of myth and dream in our daily lives. Awareness of personal mythology is enriching and adds to our self-knowledge. It gives us a deeper meaning to our lives, now that the major myths of our culture and religions no longer form the glue to bind our psychic life and profane experience together. The growing awareness of the value of myth, dreams, and ritual has produced a resurgence of interest in ancient practices and ceremonies to express our modern selves and invoke the aid of higher forces for our pursuits.
Myth, dream, and ritual meet in sacred psychology. This infintely expanded and extraordinary consciousness introduces us to a culture of the depths, a larger framework of reality. It is transformative. This experience is substantively real, and has consequences in daily life. It is the source of poetry, music, science, and art which we can tap for inspiration, sanctuary, or healing.
Jean Houston cites some physical changes which result from engaging in sacred psychology in THE SEARCH FOR THE BELOVED, pg. 33, (1987): "Part of the work of sacred psychology is to reeducate the brain and nervous system for reception of this nested reality. As you do this work regularly, you may notice some curious physiological phenomena such as energy rushes or perhaps signficant mood changes. Such occurences often indicate a change in your brain and nervous system, the creation of new electrochemical connections, and more dentdritic growth than usual. These changes provide the necessary increase in complexity in your biological equipment, permitting you clearer access to larger realities without going into overload and feeling blown out. Thus this work deconditions you from old habit structures of mind and body and reeducates and refines your biological structures."
For many reasons--spiritual hunger, curiosity, and our natural tendency toward structure and ritual in our lives--people are tuning into the wisdom of ancient cultures and healing traditions. It is within this fabric of mythic awareness that dreamhealing is practiced. Sacred psychology helps us promote growth and transformation. We learn to orchestrate and integrate different states of consciousness, build greater sensory awareness, tap the vast riches of the imaginal realm, incorporate multiple realities, and recognize our spiritual genesis.
DREAMHEALING
The history of dreams is longer than that of humanity itself. Science now tells us that dream may reflect a fundamental aspect of mammalian memory processing. Crucial information acquired during the waking state may be reprocessed during sleep. Humans have always sought to understand the meaning of dreams, and indeed science verifies that they are meaningful. Throughout the centuries there have been many approaches to the dream. Some of these approaches focused on the individual, others on society at large.
The shamanic practice of travelling in dreamtime through non-ordinary states of consciousness is perhaps our oldest lore about dreamlife. Through their dream journeys, shamans garnered the personal power and knowledge to help and heal the members of their societies. The ancient Egyptians believed that dreams possessed oracular power. In the Bible, for example, Joseph elucidates Pharoah's dreams and averts seven years of famine. Possibly the first recorded "dreamwork" was known as Egyptian "temple sleep," in which the participants entered a trance state. Hypnotic in nature, it probably was the prototype of practices re-iterated in Greece in the Asklepian dream healing temples.
Modern dreamwork employs various techniques, but trance is common to all the experiential methods. Mostly "natural trance" is employed rather than formal induction. Natural trance is induced simply by focusing inward, taking a few deep breaths, and relaxing the body. Modern dreamwork draws together these two threads of our heritage (dream and trance) in the relationship between therapist and client. This type of work creates a co-consciousness of the dreamworld shared by both participants. In the early 1900s, Freud proposed that dreams were the "royal road" to the unconscious. He rediscovered an ancient truth known to many cultures who valued dreams as inspirational, curative, or alternative realities. Together, therapist and client create a shared reality, an altered state of consciousness, using the dream as a doorway to enter on a journey into the unknown depths of the imagination.
Allan Hobson of Harvard Medical School had maintained for years that dreams were just responses to random nerve firings in the primitive brain, without purpose or meaning. He has recently revised his theories, acknowledging the deep psychological significance of dreams. The sense or plot of dream results from order that is imposed on the chaos of neural signals, according to Hobson's current view. "That order is a function of our own personal view of the world, our remote memories." In other words, he is saying, the individual's emotional vocabulary could be relevant to dreams, and that brain stem activation may simply function to switch from one dream episode to another. Jonathan Winson (SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Nov. 1990) has suggested that theta rhythm "reflected a neural process whereby information essential to the survival of a species--gathered during the day--was reprocessed into memory during REM sleep."
Theta rhythm has been linked to spatial memory and survival behavior that is not genetically encoded, a response to changing environmental information. Theta is also sometimes associated with meditation states and the regeneration of body tissue. Today our culture is learning more and more respect for the nightly dramas that are so much a part of the fabric of our lives. This has not always been the case. Over the centuries the dream has been feared and maligned, ignored or distorted. Some have dreaded its portentous message, while others refused the notions it contained any meaning at all.
Dreams present us with a seemingly chaotic jumble of imagery which all agree is difficult to grasp with the rational mind. In primitive times, people took it for granted that dreams were related to the world of the supernatural beings in which they believed. Dreams served a special service: they predicted the future. As humans evolved out of their more intuitive-instinctual relationship with nature and became more rationally-oriented, dreams came to be interpreted in many ways.
The phenomena always remains the same, but theories come and theories go. The extraordinary variations in the concept of dreams and in the impressions they produced on the dreamer made it difficult to formulate a coherent conception of them. The value and reliability of information processed as dreams has gone through as many changes as our culture. To Aristotle, arguably the grandfather of logical thought, the dream constituted a problem of psychology. He alleged that the dream is of daemonic origin, not god-sent.
The ancient Greeks believed that nature is daemonic, not divine; that is to say, the dream is not a supernatural revelation, but is subject to the laws of the human spirit, which of course has a kinship with the divine. The dream is defined as the psychic activity of the sleeper, inasmuch as he is asleep. Aristotle knew that a dream converts the slightest sensation perceived in sleep into intense sensations.
The dream exaggerates and distorts. Nevertheless, he concluded that dreams might easily betray to the physician the first indications of an incipient physical change which had escaped observation by daytime consciousness. We shut our focus on the inner world of visions, hunches, etc. because we have to tune ourselves into the physical world. In that action we filter out much valuable input.
Earlier Greeks realized the inherent healing power within dreams and deified this force as the Olympian god, Apollo, and his son the healer Asklepios (known later in Rome as Aesculapius). When the potions and practices of medicine failed, one sought healing in the sacred dream. There were many dream temples throughout the countryside devoted to this very mission. Here one could end one's pilgrimage with purifications in the sacred spring in hopes that the god Asklepios would visit on his nightly sojourn. Priests attended these temples and the worshippers, but never interfered with the pure healing energy of the god by offering their own rational interpretations.
This ancient approach to the dream grounds modern non-interpretive, experiential dreamwork in a rich cultural heritage. Because they have an archetypal quality, these images emerge again and again through the centuries and their dynamic is as relevant for us today as it ever was. There is an archetypal timeless quality, something which transcends both space and time, to both dreams and dreamhealing. None of this means that there is no value in dream analysis or interpretation, but the dream's power is not limited to that. It is the ego, not the larger self, which forms and desires interpretation to give "meaning" to a dream. On the other hand, the meaning of dreams is inherent in the experience, much like the purpose of being IS being.
There are many ways the dream symbols help us gain conscious self-knowledge. However, in the last century perhaps too much emphasis was put on the rational side. So today, a lot of people who are interested in growth and healing, emphasize feeling and the heart over the head. They seem to wish to reject anything mental or especially intellectual. Again, this seems one-sided. The mind has its rightful place as an ally. It takes heart and mind to be whole. The proper role of the rational mind in dreamhealing is to surrender to the autonomous flow of the stream of consciousness, and to suspend any analysis of dream material until after the dreamjourney has revealed its unique qualities. After that, the mind may integrate the gut reactions with "what it knows."
It matters little if we take the Freudian approach and reduce most of the dream material to repressed sexuality and instinct, or grasp a broader concept of our movement toward the higher self, as the Jungians allege. We can even form Gestalt relationships with various dream aspects and become involved with our myriad of inner parts. There are several systems for accessing a feeling-identification with dream images, but they rarely lead to whole healing of the psyche and body. Some people feel they really "get" a dream when they experience the moment of "a-ha" or integration. The problem here is that stops the process of relating to the dream image by substituting some sort of intellectual inner "click" which may or may not be "right."
Dreams have many levels of reality, so no single interpretation can encompass that. A myriad of interpretations contain useful self-knowledge. Even a single dream can continue to unfold over the years since it contains an unfathomable depth of information. Beyond the symbols, beyond the "click," beyond "a-ha" is a healing state. It is a gift from your dream in the form of a healing state--a place which is without dialogue, which is about vision, which is about healing inside, and which is beyond mere psychological understanding. This is Mystery. So much of our time and energy is invested in building up models allowing us to formulate our ego view of the world of relationships and preferences.
Where the most profound healing comes in is in the holistic (body/mind) experience of the dream. When you re-enter a dream in therapy, both the conscious mind and subconscious cooperate in a new and wonderful way that you may never have experienced before. Unpleasant seeming dream imagery often transforms into a peaceful, healing place, if you allow the imagery to take your consciousness down into deeper, less structured awareness. The healing comes from simply "being there." This is a far cry from the scientific understanding of dreams.
However, Freud was not wrong when he postulated that the dream was the result of the conflict or cooperation of psychic forces. The process that underlies dreams, when studied, can elucidate the nature of these psychic forces. One of the main focuses in modern dreamhealing is on actualizing the healing power within dreams and other visionary consciousness states. There are many things you can do with a dream. One popular pastime now is the development of lucid dreaming, where you become conscious within the dream and direct your activities as in waking life. This may produce an increased sense of personal power and control.
However, there is a chance that this is an invasive intrusion on natural corrective forces by an over-active ego. The point of dreamwork is not to take the ego into the dreamworld. We need to bring the dream images into our conscious awareness and waking life. Since the dream state arises from beyond the ego, anything can happen, and natural laws of physical reality do not apply. Unbounded by any physical limits and laws, dream realities broaden awareness so that we can begin to experience our full range of humanness. Virtually anything is possible in the dream reality -- death, rebirth, time travel, out-of-body journeys, enhanced physical or mental powers, even extraordinary effects like healing and balancing. Yet, there is a voice in most of us that wants to discount the dream experience as a less important, inconsequential reality than our waking experience.
For example, a parent tells a child, "Go back to sleep; it was only a dream!", after the child has just awakened from a terrifying dream and still experiences the physiological consequences, which are very real. Disregarding the nightmare is one way to ignore the power of the dream as if it did not have impact or validity in the conscious awareness and experience of the child. The truth is that the experience of a nightmare is just as threatening and dreadful as any waking situation that evokes extreme fear and bodily contraction. In fact, the nightmare may usher in an even stiffer fright because it may be drawing on the fantastic and other-worldly aspects of the psyche. What is important to observe is that, in both cases, the fear experience causes bodily feelings and reactions.
Our natural reaction to a fearful situation like a nightmare is to turn away and avoid the experience entirely. This avoidance (a version of "out of sight, out of mind") sets our system off-balance and triggers the fight/flight syndrome. To re-establish the balance and harmony, it is usually necessary to stop avoiding the fear and turn around and move toward it, accepting it and owning it as a valid part of our reality. The monsters of our dreams are only alienated parts of ourselves, vying for attention. If we can embrace the fear, we no longer need to run away, and we can experience the peace that comes from having "let go" of the fear. Pain, either physical or emotional, is a marker that indicates where healing is needed within us; but we usually surround our pain with fear to protect us from experiencing it.
The fear is usually a base for our anger, or any of the other numerous denial and avoidance strategies we use. The nightmare makes us a gift of the fear and its underlying pain. It leads us to the inner places that need healing, and provides the healing as we experience expansion within of our "stuck", blocked, lifeless parts. At the heart of our approach is the notion that because dreams affect us on our primary experience level -- the body -- and can stir intense multi-sensual feelings and reactions in us, dreams can be used to enter a bodily place of dis-ease and restore the natural flow and balance to that place. In honoring the dream we draw from the ancient healing tradition of the past, and the best of modern psychotherapeutic technique.
The ancient word for therapy, therapeuin, originally meant "service to the gods." In this case therapy facilitates the healing process of the Greek god Asklepios. He was god of both dreams and healing. The content of the dreams -- the characters, the inanimate objects, the activities, the feelings, the colors -- can all be doorways into the infinite inner territory of our myriad inner selves. They are states of consciousness that facilitate healing on mental, physical and spiritual levels. If we can go deeply into the experience of a dream such as the nightmare, for example, we can bring a healing to the dis-ease that caused the nightmare.
Dreams and nightmares are a unique way to move our awareness into our inner feelings and bodily places of flow and blockage. With a remembered dream, we already have in our grasp a good start at an inner resolution of the process. Borrowing from C.G. Jung, we propose the idea that dream symbols arise from the psychic energies that create us and bind us together with all other life forces, the collective unconscious.
However, moving beyond analytical and interpretive methods of treating dreams, it is possible for us to experience directly the timeless and dimensionless primal force that creates dreams. To do so we have to use dreamhealing to travel beyond the symbols to their very source. We call these experiences dream journeys, in the old shamanic sense. The therapist functions as a guide to take the client deeper than the surface symbolism. Symbols are merely a means of capturing our attention -- of attracting, appeasing, or scarring our ego's conscious waking awareness.
Any illness or disease, as the name itself suggests, has at its source a state of dis-ease or out-of-balance energies. Like the shamans of old, Jung noted that the onset of any serious disease was reflected in dreamlife. In addition to leading to the source of our dis-ease, dreams and nightmares also have within them the potential for expansive experiences which can heal and bring us back to a state of balance and health. They are both diagnostic and prescriptive, in that sense. They reveal both problem and solution, if we only learn how to attend to their clarion call. On the surface and analytical level, dream symbols usually relate to the ego's particular concerns.
Some "big dreams" carry a more mysterious, archetypal or collective value. However, each symbol is actually of equal value. They are doorways opening into the formless, chaotic energy underneath it which gave rise to it. Interpreting the symbol gives us a more detailed description and picture of the doorway, but does not give us the experience of going beyond that doorway and exploring experientially what is on the other side over the threshold in those primal energies.
Dreamhealing centers around the idea that by going into and then past the experience of the symbols, we can experience the consciousness that created them. This creative state is a source of healing and re-creation. Some symbols offer access to memories of the past, some reveal future events, others can lead us to our inner healer -- the part of us that can provide the energy we need to restore balance and harmony within ourselves.
Much work has been done lately with imagery and healing, usually importing symbols or images into the client's visualization. The healing tale or teaching tale is used in both spiritual and secular counseling. The "imported metaphor" is part of the stock-in-trade repertoire of Ericksonian hypnosis. The results are inherently stronger when the individual produces their own imagery while the therapist unobtrusively helps the client avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgent fantasy.
The client is guided to stick with the metaphors that arise from within to describe what his state of being and experience is like. You can experiment with this yourself, simply by asking yourself a few simple questions: What would you like to have happen? When it isn't happening, how do you know its not? And where do you feel that in your body? And what's it like? By this means you create your own metaphor for your personal experience, whether it comes from dreamlife or some problem, or a childhood trauma.
The therapist functions solely as a guide to the inner realms, since it is familiar territory to the practitioner. We can use the well-known map analogy, noting that the map can only be a partial representation or symbol of the actual terrain. For example, looking at any map of the countryside we can see lines that mark rivers, hills, and other topological features; however, to walk through an actual old growth forest with a compass, climb the hills and pitch camp under the protective canopy of the trees, and listen to one of those rivers imprints a much deeper impression of the forest than the map ever could. It is a full experience of what is behind the map.
Trying to experience the terrain through the map is like interpreting the symbol, while the experience of going into and beyond the symbols is as ever-changing and alive as an excursion deep into the forest and the mysteries of nature. Another example of the distinction is the difference between reading a recipe and tasting the dish. The savor certainly isn't the same.
A dream guide, like a river guide, takes the person through the turbulent (chaotic) waters of the psyche, past the rocks and boulders of their fear, to find the safe passage where the river flows easily into the calm beyond the rapids. The therapist's approach evolves in the moment to keep pace with the flow of the client's process deep in the heart of the dream. Consequently, the client has an active part in the healing process and learns psychological self-care. Flowing with the experience through the progression of multi-sensory images provides the pathway to healing. The experience of finding an inner healing state is invaluable, as it teaches firsthand that the healer is within.
The outer healers are only representations or mirrors of what is already inside. The healing process and myth are deeply engrained in our lives, as individuals and societies. Each culture evolves its own variations on health and disease, and those able to aid in recovery from physical and mental distress. The problem with the old western healing paradigm is that the perception is that healing comes from without. In our culture now we are developing many alternatives to mechanistic medical and psychological practices. One of those alternatives is awareness of personal mythology. Jung suggested that each individual life is based on a particular myth. By discovering that myth, we can live it consciously and adapt ourselves to our destiny, thus harmonizing inner and outer experience, and allowing our true individuality to emerge.
But mythic living doesn't necessarily mean living one myth, since the patterns of all god/dess forms are within us. The myth does not provide us with a blueprint for daily living concerning what we should or ought to do. Instead, it helps us in the process of discovering who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. They spark our sense of discovery and urge us to question and go deeper. There is a chaotic assortment of mythical images within each of us, but sometimes certain themes emerge and assert their priority on a life.
So, an individual life seems to strongly parallel a specific myth theme. One way this can manifest is through an uncanny series of synchronistic events, wherein a particular myth becomes the paradigmatic model of a life. The quest for actualization of this myth motivates a variation on the age-old journey of the hero. What's New with My Subject? In ancient Greece, if you wanted to ensure success in some undertaking you invoked the god who oversaw your particular endeavor with prayers and offerings.
As stated before, Asklepios was the Greek god of healing and dream. He was the son of Apollo and the mortal Coronis who was slain by Apollo for infidelity before the child was born. Taken prematurely from his mother, Asklepios was raised by the centaur Chiron, who was a master of the healing arts. Asklepios was an able student who soon surpassed his teacher and incurred both the wrath and blessings of the various gods and goddesses. To protect him from these whims, Zeus immortalized him as the Divine Healer. An entire healing tradition developed in ancient Greece based on this myth. The medical physicians became known as Asklepiads; however, the Asklepian dream healing temple was the place to go if their medicines and treatments failed.
At the Asklepian temple, the god himself visited mortals in their dreams to bring Divine healing. At the temple, Asklepian priests oversaw the rites and procedures which brought the sick mortal into direct contact with the god. These temples were located at great distances from the cities and populated areas in Greece so that to reach one a pilgrimage was necessary. Having arrived at the temple, one was received by the temple priests who began the sometimes lengthy process of determining whether or not the god had summoned one for healing. The priests did have a therapeutic function in the temple, but they were not in any way therapists, nor did they interpret any of the supplicant's dreams.
The priests determined whether or not one had been summoned by Asklepios by making discreet inquiries about the god's appearance in their dreamlife. An appearance by the god signified that one had indeed been invited and was ready to enter the temple. The form which Asklepios assumed in dreams was either a snake, or less commonly a dog (or wolf). The next steps of bodily and mind purification were begun. Another interview with a priest was held because it was recognized that unless a person was conscious and accepting of his present life condition he could not expect a healing from the god. After the interview, the patient's body went through cleansing in the springs or streams around which the temples were always constructed. And at last, the supplicant was prepared to approach the god.
Since Asklepios visited the sick in their dreams, a special chamber, called the abaton (a Greek word meaning "a place not to be entered into uninvited"), was provided where the person would remain alone and asleep. The couch inside where the patient lay was known as the kline. This period of waiting for the god was called the incubation. After dreaming the patient was interviewed by the priests who, without interpreting the dream, would instruct the patient as to whether or not the god had brought the healing. Sometimes many sessions in the abaton on the kline were necessary to come into contact with the god and the sick did not leave the temple until they were healed. As far as interpreting the dream, the belief was that the experience of the dream and not an interpretation was how the healing came to the sick.
The healing was accomplished through the direct intervention of the god himself with the patient's soul through the dream. As a final part of the healing process, a fee was paid to the temple priests as an offering for the ongoing maintenance and work of the Temple. It was said that a failure to do so would result in a relapse of the dis-eased condition. Testimonies were inscribed on the temple walls attesting to the miraculous and powerful healing which went on in the temples, including cures for afflictions like blindness.
In this way the Asklepian dreamhealing went on for hundreds of years. This tradition is continued in dreamhealing. The eight phases of dreamhealing reflect an archetypal healing process. This healing myth is reiterated in the techniques ("ceremonies") of many disciplines. These steps form the real sequence of inner healing no matter what the outer form, including traditional medical practice. These phases include: 1) the pilgrimage; 2) the confession; 3) purification; 4) the offering; 5) dream quest; 6) dreamhealing; 7) work on dreams; 8) re-entry or integration. The entire process is contingent on a healing sanctuary, whether that refuge can be found without or within.
Processing is the principle of assisting an individual to look at his own existence, and improve his ability to confront what he is and where he is for greater adaptability, wholeness, and health.
THE PILGRIMAGE
The pilgrimage satisfies the necessary first step in healing. It is important because one commits one's energies and resources to healing. It is a notice of intent. The outcome of the process is directly proportional to the personal energy put into it, as well as the intent. As in ancient times, the refuge, retreat, or sanctuary is a place where the seeker can devote all of their energy to their dreams and healing without worry about the outer world. That sense of safety is a key factor in healing, because healing is an act of trust. Sanctuary is being in a state of total safety which supports trust. Healing involves pushing past old boundaries and negating old confining belief systems and that too is best done in trust and safety.
Disease is a state of deep inner fear and pain, and it is easier to face fears and pain from a base of safety. Most therapists know this, but generally conceive of it as a pleasant office, confidentiality and being game and script free. But it takes more--a deep respect and honoring of the natural healing process from within, rather than egotistically claiming to be "the healer." This is why we jokingly call Doctors -- M.D.s -- "Minor Deities."
Dreams and visions seem so fragile, so whimsical, and insubstantial in our pragmatic, materially oriented society. When the substantial and concrete is valued more than the mystical and insubstantial it is more difficult to validate one's own inner life. This is perhaps one reason the retreats were located a distance from any city. To live and survive in the civilized world requires a well-structured, strong ego and intellect just to deal with its technological complexity and its threat to our sense of self.
But the ego, in defending itself often feels and acts directly opposite to our deeper wisdom. In a word, we go against ourselves, a case of ego vs. higher self. This creates a state of tension or dis-ease which eventually manifests throughout our whole organism as mental and physical diseases that assume the shape of this inner conflict. For example, most of us have a deep and basic fear and unease over how we are impacting our planet's ecosystems. We may or may not be aware of it, depending on our vested interests and whether or not we identify as environmentalists, but it is there. Yet, in our daily battle to survive we burn fossil fuel driving to work in automobiles that deplete resources and generate pollution. We support hundreds of other activities daily that similarly degenerate the ecosystem. This deeply distresses, puts part of us out of ease with ourselves. We are torn in opposite directions by the pulls of our survival instincts. It may be out of our awareness but we are distressed by it.
Similarly, a person may continue to smoke cigarettes fully aware of the building health risks incurred. The fear of cancer may remain subconscious, but it exists, nevertheless. Most degenerative diseases reflect this state of distress. Degenerative is also a word that characterizes what is happening to the ecosystem. For example, cancer is both a symbol and a physical manifestation of our existential conflict. We could describe cancer as living cells in a state of uncontrollable growth destroying their host organism. This is a perfect metaphor for our relationship as a species to the ecosystem. Aerial photographs of cities bear a remarkable likeness to photographs of microscope slides of cancer cells.
The outer disease assumes the shape of the inner state of dis-ease. Nature and wilderness, however, invite flow and merging of the spirit and soul with the ego. Nature's threats are not to the ego or self alone, but to the entire organism. They require instinctual or intuitive responses involving the whole organism. This allows the ego self and the deeper instinctual self to cooperate in a dynamic balance and that fosters ease. That, plus the beauty and serenity of wilderness, takes us back to our grounding-founding state. Nothing has the ability to return harmony to soul and ego so readily as nature. The nature-mystic experience is one of the most easily accessed non-ordinary states. Untainted wilderness is possibly one of the least realized yet most valuable healing resources that we have. Water, in particular, was important to the dream temples, and there was always a healing spring within the precinct.
THE CONFESSION
The confession helps you target where in your life you have missed the mark. The word "sin" is simply an old Greek archery term (hamartia) for "missing the mark." So if you miss, you simply try again. This self-analysis goes beyond an intellectual review of wrongs, shoulds and ought-tos. It is a special form of in-sight. It signifies attention is turning inward, and becoming reflective.
Dreamhealing begins with the premise that each feature of the dream is a part of the dreamer. One can enter a symbol and speak as if one were that symbol and learn a lot about perspectives other than the ego. It is a way to experience the multiplicity of consciousness within each of us. Many ego parts exist in states of conflict or dis-ease with each other, and by experiencing or becoming the symbols in a dream, and exploring the relationships among them, one eventually can resolve, or move beyond the rifts to a 'gestalt' or inner merging. This signifies the unification of conflicting parts into a state of wholeness or integrity. This is a very healing experience for the ego.
Occasionally in Gestalt dreamwork, the therapist-client team slips past the experience of the symbol to some deeper state of consciousness. These are confusing initially, because they don't compute with traditional training or experience, but they are intriguing. If you merely forage deeper into the dreams, following the dream symbols through and beyond the surface features, they function as doorways into profound states of consciousness, very healing states of consciousness.
There are apparently extremely powerful energies or forces within dreams. Just getting to them and experiencing them leads to profound healings. What is really amazing is that they seem to have effects on physical levels, resulting in physical as well as mental restructuring of self image. Perhaps someday we can devise experiments to track these processes with biofeedback. It may eventually become possible to monitor physiology and feedback the unique pattern of mental and physical states that promote healing on an individualized level.
The confession is an extremely important part of the healing and letting-go process. The Asklepians believed that you couldn't be healed or visited by the god Asklepios until you were at ease with your own soul. Paralleling that practice, the confessional during a retreat is more a case of exploring the state of disease at many levels and from many perspectives. It usually ends up looking more like psychotherapy. The physical and emotional diseases reflect or manifest inner states of dis-ease between ego-personal self and the deeper soul-self, or among the separate parts of the ego. Identifying these out-of-ease states is the purpose of the psychotherapy-like confessional. It is a process of becoming more aware of and intimately acquainted with the disease and one's relationship to it on a very personal level.
Harking back to the meaning of sin as simply missing the mark, you have missed where you have sinned. So if you sin, try again with another arrow to reach your target. This is a closed-loop feedback system. It is important for the individual to actually hear their own voice identifying the problem area. Another aspect of a psychotherapeutic confessional is that you also have the opportunity to declare and validate out loud, to yourself and others, what you have done right. Often in life this simple validation is unavailable or overlooked. We all need a pat on the back once in a while for our growth and well being. Willingly taking time to self-reflect on one's positive and negative aspects promotes being honest with yourself. It implies taking personal responsibility in the sense of recognizing your personal ability to respond.
The dream guide functions in a manner similar to that of the ancient dream priest who oversaw the dream temples. A guide helps you make a trip through unfamiliar territory. They help you prepare for the trip and guide you to the best routes, but they don't take the trip for you -- they just provide the guidance. The therapist's role, like the shaman of old, is to lead people on journeys deep into the unfamiliar terrain of the self and to the balancing states of consciousness that ease or heal. This is likely what the dream priests did. The word "priest" had different connotations to the Greeks than us. The role of the Asklepian priest was to prepare, and guide the seekers to meet the healing god in the dream. They don't claim to be, or to speak for (channel), or interpret (analyst) the god. They simply guide each individual to their own personal encounter.
PURIFICATION
Purification prior to entry into sacred ground or sacred space has always been a priority in all forms of magic. And, make no mistake, the ancient technique was a form of magic with its own protocols. Today we can use a sweatlodge or sauna to purify through sweat and heat, a spa for water purification, and a healthy diet of natural foods. Most of these are easily available. If dreamhealing is used in a traditional setting, the client may take a ritual bath, perhaps with herbs, before arriving for the session. It is a symbolic gesture of intent, and sets the tone that one is on a sacred mission with a higher aim in mind.
Both purification and confession imply relieving oneself of sin. These practices also help reduce the stress of modern life. Purification of mind and spirit can be an important symbolic part of the process, preparing one for transformative challenge and change. When it comes to purifying the body, the cleansing needs to be literal. Most people's bodies are filled with poisons, pesticides, preservatives and other anti-life chemicals in food. Nearly all meat is full of steroids and antibiotics, and even amphetamine residues used in chicken-raising. A more natural diet cleans up the body chemistry. As you truly come to love yourself, you desire only the best for yourself both inside as well as outside.
Some people use exercise, music, or drumming, and dancing partly as catharsis to clear out old emotional baggage. What is most important is not the form of the purification but letting the creative process flow to take whatever form is appropriate for the individual.
THE OFFERING
The dreamhealing offering may also take many forms. The most surface level, of course, involves dealing with paying fees for your therapeutic sanctuary. It has ever been so, since the days of the temples. In fact, the Greeks believed that stinting on this offering could jeopardize the healing. Ceremonial offerings invoke a deeper and more personal commitment. Sometimes we create a more formal personal offering ceremony for individuals on retreat. But the offering happens at many levels, ceremonial or not.
During a ceremony, the seeker at some point is asked to offer something of themselves to help induce a healing dream. It is another personal energy commitment to healing, like the pilgrimage. For example, one might offer to devote time to working with the homeless, or commit to picking up three pieces of litter everyday, or some other form of community service. This offering is committing to give some form of service beyond one's self for the collective good. The offering places even more value on the healing. It helps satisfy or ease the soul-ego conflicts. Further, following through on the offering puts ongoing energy into the healing process to prevent the dis-ease creeping back. Healing is a mind or mindful journey and so you have to help the mind to prepare and execute it. The offering helps invoke that state of mind.
DREAM QUEST
A "dream journey" uses the mind, in the broader concept of mind, to enter one's healing states. States of mind or consciousness can manifest, for example, as the "placebo effect" in medical terminology -- or in the evangelist's terms, faith healing. It is a journey to our ultimate creative state of mind which is the source of our dreams and imagination. If you are so minded you might even consider this state to be "the Creator," "Higher Power," or "God force" within. In Jungian terms it would mean an experience of the healing power of the Self. Healing is an act of creation, and that part of us, our creative spirit or the god within, speaks most vividly through dreams and imagination.
Even Einstein considered imagination more important than knowledge. It is not an anti-scientific approach to dream. A dream is a mystical expression of imagination and creative mind which is what ritual and ceremony help invoke. There is safety in ritual and ceremony--secureness in it. It is another symbolic act of commitment to an inner faith. Ceremony by-passes the mind or intellect; it boggles it. It is a way of opening to a state of grace or faith, and these are integral aspects of mystical healing. Ceremony reminds you of something you already have within you, but don't usually notice. It brings it to surface awareness.
Because ceremonies are not rational, they confuse the rational mind. They appeal to the senses and take us outside of our usual ego experiences and beyond the experience of the rational or intellectual ego mind. This is where you find these healing states of consciousness, beyond the rational ego mind, in the mystic. Any time you turn your attention within and become receptive to yourself you enter a whole new world of experience, which is just as real in effects as the outer world. You can facilitate change within yourself and cooperate with your personal growth or evolution. The only problem is getting around the habitual ego identity with its resistances to change. Many techniques of hypnotherapy have been used for years to accomplish this.
One of the more famous, the "confusion" technique was popularized by therapist Milton Erickson, a pioneer in modern hypnotic therapy. Any momentary disequilibrium of either the mind or body can induce a trance state which by-passes the conscious censoring ego and creates receptivity in the subconscious. The ego mind is formed from the sum accumulation of our life's experiences and our reactions to them. It sets the limits or boundaries of our usual thing-feeling-behaving patterns.
Based on our experiences, at deep levels of mind we form multi-sensory images of self and world -- images that capture their essence and shape our belief systems which in turn shape our ego and personality. Not only do these primal sensory energy images and beliefs limits us, they also contain the "psychic" distortions which form the nuclei of our dis-eases. This structure is the ego-mind. It is limited, but what lies beyond is infinite mind or consciousness. It is our source of energy for re-imagining ourselves and healing.
New or unfamiliar experiences, irrational ones like ancient dream rituals that don't compute or match with your normal experiences cause confusion and disorientation in the ego-mind, and can even turn it off. In fact, most of the techniques used in dream guiding are based on fooling this part of the mind. In ceremony, the ego either automatically or voluntarily steps aside and becomes willing to relinquish its fantasy of "control." It becomes more vulnerable and open, particularly if the environment is safe and supportive.
This is when the deep wisdom, the collective infinite consciousness tapped into through dreams and visions helps transform the old beliefs and images into more ease-ful, less limiting ones. Then one opens to free and easy states of mind. A healing retreat creates a different world image, one in which the inner mystical experiences, dreams and visions, are held to be equally, if not more important than outer processes.
With sanctuary one is free to explore them -- the permission is there in the environment. Virtually all religious traditions throughout recorded history held that the deities communicated with mortals through dreams and visions. Yet, direct communication with deity is a new, unsettling thought for many people. These experiences are neither encouraged nor allowed in our culture by its healing and religious institutions.
DREAMHEALING
Healing doesn't happen with a one or two time workshop, nor will one dream accomplish it entirely. Great progress comes in the initial stages occasionally, but it is not probable and most likely will only be symptomatic healing. Deep healing or restructuring takes a full commitment of self, time, and energy. Most disease has taken years, perhaps a lifetime to develop and permeate all levels of our organism. By the time it takes on physical or emotional symptoms, it has been around for awhile and involves the whole person and most of their life patterns. There is a momentum to each life and that is not usually changed overnight. It might not take three months, or it may take longer.
Still, a retreat gives a person time and sanctuary and a better chance to explore themselves thoroughly to make deep physical and mental changes, to change the momentum. In ancient Greece, the dream priest would look for a sign of the god in dreams. If they saw a sign of the god, then that was a sign that the healing had already occurred. Then you simply paid your fee for the upkeep of the temple, and left. As therapists, we can't say, "Oh, there is a snake in your dream--you've been healed--see you later." The ancient healings may have been conducted in this manner, but it is not necessarily enough for the modern ego, because it is a surrender of personal power to an external force which only visits in certain dreams.
Dreamhealing participants learn to realize that they are really the power behind their healing, not the therapist. That is much more empowering, and real healing is an empowering process, an opportunity for personal evolution. Knowledge of self-healing capacities goes back over the millennia. That is a fundamental way dreamhealing differs from the ancient technique, or for that matter, most modern medical or new age healing practice. Common to shamanism, psychology, and the medical approaches are their implications that the healing power is outside of the person seeking healing. Somehow it is the doctor or his medicines and techniques, the shaman or the God -- someone, something, or somepower outside of the self who provides the healing. That disempowers.
WORK ON DREAMS
Bringing the awareness or senses of the inner healing process from the dream into the conscious or rational mind, which is what a dream journey does, helps us to realize the healing in the outer world also. It draws the ego-mind into a partnership of cooperation to make outer changes in lifestyle and behavior that compliment or support the inner ones. The individual is empowered and takes a more active -- pro-active -- role. The pattern is learn, commit, do. Dream therapy often triggers surprising changes in life patterns without intellectual awareness of how the change of attitude occurs.
For example, some dreamhealing participants find they are simply unable to eat certain foods, or lose the desire to smoke after a dream session, even though the work didn't touch on that at all. It often takes the mind weeks or months to finally understand the depths and changes in personal dynamics that the dream therapy initiates. But it is still an inner process. We could describe it as intellect catching up to wisdom.
So, dreamhealing incorporates and expands on Asklepian dreamhealing. It was not derived from or contrived to fit this archetypal model. It emerges spontaneously, reiterating the same themes, loud and clear. It is a new paradigm for healing, a model that incorporates the old but only as part. It integrates science and mysticism yielding a view beyond the capabilities of either system alone. Dreams themselves, as the long-forgotten healers, do this.
From the scientific side, there has been much research and acknowledgment that dreams are necessary to health. They are believed to exert a balancing effect, and without them we soon show signs of mental and physical deterioration. For example, studies have shown that sleep deprivation within days results in extreme nervousness and anxiety, hallucinations, or delusions.
Freud, Jung, and Fritz Perls were among the earliest contemporary scientists who recognized the healing potential in dreams and used them as therapeutic tools, but they did so more from the superficial ego and interpretive levels. Jung hinted at much deeper aspects of dreams, but still remained interpretive in his dream therapy. Perls recognized that it was the experiences in the dream that were healing, but limited it to the ego. Most "in depth" psychotherapies include dream therapy. And, of course, from the mystical perspective dreams come from the deities, and give us the gifts of prophecy, wisdom, and their unique perspective. By and large, dreams are the forgotten healer. When healing is needed, very few people think of turning to their dreams.
RE-ENTRY
Dreams provide a missing feminine element as contrasted with the characteristically masculine approach in the medical healing model. It is an intuitive one where the person needing healing is acted on from the outside by therapists, chemicals, surgery, or technology. Dreams, on the other hand, are a personal inner healing, a non-intrusive one that arises from within, a creative healing of faith. Modern medicine is practiced in bright lights and technically outfitted hospitals.
Dreams are the night's creations from the soul and sleep. The contrast is that of a masculine quality, with a feminine quality. This doesn't mean dreams should necessarily replace allopathic healing; they provide a balance and wholeness it is missing -- the yin and yang complementing the whole. It is a marriage between dreamhealing and medical science that seems most appropriate. Dream therapy in hospitals might speed recovery rates from surgery and other medical techniques and treatments. It would certainly empower patients with a sense of personal and deep participation in the healing process.
For the skeptic, who wonders how ancient practices like Aesculapian mythology could play a role in our lives today, we suggest an open-mindedness about dreams. We can learn from them without having to become "true believers." A new paradigm for healing has to incorporate all the models, but not be bound or limited to them. This includes the old and new medical technology, psychology, Aesculapian dreamhealing, shamanism, and anything else with something to offer. But it needs to be much more than just the sum of all of them. The old models are incomplete and inadequate, too limited and narrowly focused. They are entrenched in dogma and habitual ways of viewing reality, and the patient.
Contemporary medical or psychological therapies, perhaps even more so than the ancient practices, are biased belief systems. Immediate change is imperative because, for starters, we need to heal our species' relationship with its environment. It is one of dis-ease. None of the old models motivates us or shows us how to heal it--creativity will be required. Healers cannot just focus on only healing parts of the individual any more, the issues are much broader. The survival of our species is at stake.
The paranormal dream that seems to transcend time and space remains no less controversial today than it was in the days of Cicero, the great Roman orator... --Stanley Krippner
According to Joseph Campbell, "Dream is the personalized myth. Myth is the depersonalized dream."
With the popularization of his work, and more recently that of David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner, many people are becoming more aware of the importance of myth and dream in our daily lives. Awareness of personal mythology is enriching and adds to our self-knowledge. It gives us a deeper meaning to our lives, now that the major myths of our culture and religions no longer form the glue to bind our psychic life and profane experience together. The growing awareness of the value of myth, dreams, and ritual has produced a resurgence of interest in ancient practices and ceremonies to express our modern selves and invoke the aid of higher forces for our pursuits.
Myth, dream, and ritual meet in sacred psychology. This infintely expanded and extraordinary consciousness introduces us to a culture of the depths, a larger framework of reality. It is transformative. This experience is substantively real, and has consequences in daily life. It is the source of poetry, music, science, and art which we can tap for inspiration, sanctuary, or healing.
Jean Houston cites some physical changes which result from engaging in sacred psychology in THE SEARCH FOR THE BELOVED, pg. 33, (1987): "Part of the work of sacred psychology is to reeducate the brain and nervous system for reception of this nested reality. As you do this work regularly, you may notice some curious physiological phenomena such as energy rushes or perhaps signficant mood changes. Such occurences often indicate a change in your brain and nervous system, the creation of new electrochemical connections, and more dentdritic growth than usual. These changes provide the necessary increase in complexity in your biological equipment, permitting you clearer access to larger realities without going into overload and feeling blown out. Thus this work deconditions you from old habit structures of mind and body and reeducates and refines your biological structures."
For many reasons--spiritual hunger, curiosity, and our natural tendency toward structure and ritual in our lives--people are tuning into the wisdom of ancient cultures and healing traditions. It is within this fabric of mythic awareness that dreamhealing is practiced. Sacred psychology helps us promote growth and transformation. We learn to orchestrate and integrate different states of consciousness, build greater sensory awareness, tap the vast riches of the imaginal realm, incorporate multiple realities, and recognize our spiritual genesis.
DREAMHEALING
The history of dreams is longer than that of humanity itself. Science now tells us that dream may reflect a fundamental aspect of mammalian memory processing. Crucial information acquired during the waking state may be reprocessed during sleep. Humans have always sought to understand the meaning of dreams, and indeed science verifies that they are meaningful. Throughout the centuries there have been many approaches to the dream. Some of these approaches focused on the individual, others on society at large.
The shamanic practice of travelling in dreamtime through non-ordinary states of consciousness is perhaps our oldest lore about dreamlife. Through their dream journeys, shamans garnered the personal power and knowledge to help and heal the members of their societies. The ancient Egyptians believed that dreams possessed oracular power. In the Bible, for example, Joseph elucidates Pharoah's dreams and averts seven years of famine. Possibly the first recorded "dreamwork" was known as Egyptian "temple sleep," in which the participants entered a trance state. Hypnotic in nature, it probably was the prototype of practices re-iterated in Greece in the Asklepian dream healing temples.
Modern dreamwork employs various techniques, but trance is common to all the experiential methods. Mostly "natural trance" is employed rather than formal induction. Natural trance is induced simply by focusing inward, taking a few deep breaths, and relaxing the body. Modern dreamwork draws together these two threads of our heritage (dream and trance) in the relationship between therapist and client. This type of work creates a co-consciousness of the dreamworld shared by both participants. In the early 1900s, Freud proposed that dreams were the "royal road" to the unconscious. He rediscovered an ancient truth known to many cultures who valued dreams as inspirational, curative, or alternative realities. Together, therapist and client create a shared reality, an altered state of consciousness, using the dream as a doorway to enter on a journey into the unknown depths of the imagination.
Allan Hobson of Harvard Medical School had maintained for years that dreams were just responses to random nerve firings in the primitive brain, without purpose or meaning. He has recently revised his theories, acknowledging the deep psychological significance of dreams. The sense or plot of dream results from order that is imposed on the chaos of neural signals, according to Hobson's current view. "That order is a function of our own personal view of the world, our remote memories." In other words, he is saying, the individual's emotional vocabulary could be relevant to dreams, and that brain stem activation may simply function to switch from one dream episode to another. Jonathan Winson (SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Nov. 1990) has suggested that theta rhythm "reflected a neural process whereby information essential to the survival of a species--gathered during the day--was reprocessed into memory during REM sleep."
Theta rhythm has been linked to spatial memory and survival behavior that is not genetically encoded, a response to changing environmental information. Theta is also sometimes associated with meditation states and the regeneration of body tissue. Today our culture is learning more and more respect for the nightly dramas that are so much a part of the fabric of our lives. This has not always been the case. Over the centuries the dream has been feared and maligned, ignored or distorted. Some have dreaded its portentous message, while others refused the notions it contained any meaning at all.
Dreams present us with a seemingly chaotic jumble of imagery which all agree is difficult to grasp with the rational mind. In primitive times, people took it for granted that dreams were related to the world of the supernatural beings in which they believed. Dreams served a special service: they predicted the future. As humans evolved out of their more intuitive-instinctual relationship with nature and became more rationally-oriented, dreams came to be interpreted in many ways.
The phenomena always remains the same, but theories come and theories go. The extraordinary variations in the concept of dreams and in the impressions they produced on the dreamer made it difficult to formulate a coherent conception of them. The value and reliability of information processed as dreams has gone through as many changes as our culture. To Aristotle, arguably the grandfather of logical thought, the dream constituted a problem of psychology. He alleged that the dream is of daemonic origin, not god-sent.
The ancient Greeks believed that nature is daemonic, not divine; that is to say, the dream is not a supernatural revelation, but is subject to the laws of the human spirit, which of course has a kinship with the divine. The dream is defined as the psychic activity of the sleeper, inasmuch as he is asleep. Aristotle knew that a dream converts the slightest sensation perceived in sleep into intense sensations.
The dream exaggerates and distorts. Nevertheless, he concluded that dreams might easily betray to the physician the first indications of an incipient physical change which had escaped observation by daytime consciousness. We shut our focus on the inner world of visions, hunches, etc. because we have to tune ourselves into the physical world. In that action we filter out much valuable input.
Earlier Greeks realized the inherent healing power within dreams and deified this force as the Olympian god, Apollo, and his son the healer Asklepios (known later in Rome as Aesculapius). When the potions and practices of medicine failed, one sought healing in the sacred dream. There were many dream temples throughout the countryside devoted to this very mission. Here one could end one's pilgrimage with purifications in the sacred spring in hopes that the god Asklepios would visit on his nightly sojourn. Priests attended these temples and the worshippers, but never interfered with the pure healing energy of the god by offering their own rational interpretations.
This ancient approach to the dream grounds modern non-interpretive, experiential dreamwork in a rich cultural heritage. Because they have an archetypal quality, these images emerge again and again through the centuries and their dynamic is as relevant for us today as it ever was. There is an archetypal timeless quality, something which transcends both space and time, to both dreams and dreamhealing. None of this means that there is no value in dream analysis or interpretation, but the dream's power is not limited to that. It is the ego, not the larger self, which forms and desires interpretation to give "meaning" to a dream. On the other hand, the meaning of dreams is inherent in the experience, much like the purpose of being IS being.
There are many ways the dream symbols help us gain conscious self-knowledge. However, in the last century perhaps too much emphasis was put on the rational side. So today, a lot of people who are interested in growth and healing, emphasize feeling and the heart over the head. They seem to wish to reject anything mental or especially intellectual. Again, this seems one-sided. The mind has its rightful place as an ally. It takes heart and mind to be whole. The proper role of the rational mind in dreamhealing is to surrender to the autonomous flow of the stream of consciousness, and to suspend any analysis of dream material until after the dreamjourney has revealed its unique qualities. After that, the mind may integrate the gut reactions with "what it knows."
It matters little if we take the Freudian approach and reduce most of the dream material to repressed sexuality and instinct, or grasp a broader concept of our movement toward the higher self, as the Jungians allege. We can even form Gestalt relationships with various dream aspects and become involved with our myriad of inner parts. There are several systems for accessing a feeling-identification with dream images, but they rarely lead to whole healing of the psyche and body. Some people feel they really "get" a dream when they experience the moment of "a-ha" or integration. The problem here is that stops the process of relating to the dream image by substituting some sort of intellectual inner "click" which may or may not be "right."
Dreams have many levels of reality, so no single interpretation can encompass that. A myriad of interpretations contain useful self-knowledge. Even a single dream can continue to unfold over the years since it contains an unfathomable depth of information. Beyond the symbols, beyond the "click," beyond "a-ha" is a healing state. It is a gift from your dream in the form of a healing state--a place which is without dialogue, which is about vision, which is about healing inside, and which is beyond mere psychological understanding. This is Mystery. So much of our time and energy is invested in building up models allowing us to formulate our ego view of the world of relationships and preferences.
Where the most profound healing comes in is in the holistic (body/mind) experience of the dream. When you re-enter a dream in therapy, both the conscious mind and subconscious cooperate in a new and wonderful way that you may never have experienced before. Unpleasant seeming dream imagery often transforms into a peaceful, healing place, if you allow the imagery to take your consciousness down into deeper, less structured awareness. The healing comes from simply "being there." This is a far cry from the scientific understanding of dreams.
However, Freud was not wrong when he postulated that the dream was the result of the conflict or cooperation of psychic forces. The process that underlies dreams, when studied, can elucidate the nature of these psychic forces. One of the main focuses in modern dreamhealing is on actualizing the healing power within dreams and other visionary consciousness states. There are many things you can do with a dream. One popular pastime now is the development of lucid dreaming, where you become conscious within the dream and direct your activities as in waking life. This may produce an increased sense of personal power and control.
However, there is a chance that this is an invasive intrusion on natural corrective forces by an over-active ego. The point of dreamwork is not to take the ego into the dreamworld. We need to bring the dream images into our conscious awareness and waking life. Since the dream state arises from beyond the ego, anything can happen, and natural laws of physical reality do not apply. Unbounded by any physical limits and laws, dream realities broaden awareness so that we can begin to experience our full range of humanness. Virtually anything is possible in the dream reality -- death, rebirth, time travel, out-of-body journeys, enhanced physical or mental powers, even extraordinary effects like healing and balancing. Yet, there is a voice in most of us that wants to discount the dream experience as a less important, inconsequential reality than our waking experience.
For example, a parent tells a child, "Go back to sleep; it was only a dream!", after the child has just awakened from a terrifying dream and still experiences the physiological consequences, which are very real. Disregarding the nightmare is one way to ignore the power of the dream as if it did not have impact or validity in the conscious awareness and experience of the child. The truth is that the experience of a nightmare is just as threatening and dreadful as any waking situation that evokes extreme fear and bodily contraction. In fact, the nightmare may usher in an even stiffer fright because it may be drawing on the fantastic and other-worldly aspects of the psyche. What is important to observe is that, in both cases, the fear experience causes bodily feelings and reactions.
Our natural reaction to a fearful situation like a nightmare is to turn away and avoid the experience entirely. This avoidance (a version of "out of sight, out of mind") sets our system off-balance and triggers the fight/flight syndrome. To re-establish the balance and harmony, it is usually necessary to stop avoiding the fear and turn around and move toward it, accepting it and owning it as a valid part of our reality. The monsters of our dreams are only alienated parts of ourselves, vying for attention. If we can embrace the fear, we no longer need to run away, and we can experience the peace that comes from having "let go" of the fear. Pain, either physical or emotional, is a marker that indicates where healing is needed within us; but we usually surround our pain with fear to protect us from experiencing it.
The fear is usually a base for our anger, or any of the other numerous denial and avoidance strategies we use. The nightmare makes us a gift of the fear and its underlying pain. It leads us to the inner places that need healing, and provides the healing as we experience expansion within of our "stuck", blocked, lifeless parts. At the heart of our approach is the notion that because dreams affect us on our primary experience level -- the body -- and can stir intense multi-sensual feelings and reactions in us, dreams can be used to enter a bodily place of dis-ease and restore the natural flow and balance to that place. In honoring the dream we draw from the ancient healing tradition of the past, and the best of modern psychotherapeutic technique.
The ancient word for therapy, therapeuin, originally meant "service to the gods." In this case therapy facilitates the healing process of the Greek god Asklepios. He was god of both dreams and healing. The content of the dreams -- the characters, the inanimate objects, the activities, the feelings, the colors -- can all be doorways into the infinite inner territory of our myriad inner selves. They are states of consciousness that facilitate healing on mental, physical and spiritual levels. If we can go deeply into the experience of a dream such as the nightmare, for example, we can bring a healing to the dis-ease that caused the nightmare.
Dreams and nightmares are a unique way to move our awareness into our inner feelings and bodily places of flow and blockage. With a remembered dream, we already have in our grasp a good start at an inner resolution of the process. Borrowing from C.G. Jung, we propose the idea that dream symbols arise from the psychic energies that create us and bind us together with all other life forces, the collective unconscious.
However, moving beyond analytical and interpretive methods of treating dreams, it is possible for us to experience directly the timeless and dimensionless primal force that creates dreams. To do so we have to use dreamhealing to travel beyond the symbols to their very source. We call these experiences dream journeys, in the old shamanic sense. The therapist functions as a guide to take the client deeper than the surface symbolism. Symbols are merely a means of capturing our attention -- of attracting, appeasing, or scarring our ego's conscious waking awareness.
Any illness or disease, as the name itself suggests, has at its source a state of dis-ease or out-of-balance energies. Like the shamans of old, Jung noted that the onset of any serious disease was reflected in dreamlife. In addition to leading to the source of our dis-ease, dreams and nightmares also have within them the potential for expansive experiences which can heal and bring us back to a state of balance and health. They are both diagnostic and prescriptive, in that sense. They reveal both problem and solution, if we only learn how to attend to their clarion call. On the surface and analytical level, dream symbols usually relate to the ego's particular concerns.
Some "big dreams" carry a more mysterious, archetypal or collective value. However, each symbol is actually of equal value. They are doorways opening into the formless, chaotic energy underneath it which gave rise to it. Interpreting the symbol gives us a more detailed description and picture of the doorway, but does not give us the experience of going beyond that doorway and exploring experientially what is on the other side over the threshold in those primal energies.
Dreamhealing centers around the idea that by going into and then past the experience of the symbols, we can experience the consciousness that created them. This creative state is a source of healing and re-creation. Some symbols offer access to memories of the past, some reveal future events, others can lead us to our inner healer -- the part of us that can provide the energy we need to restore balance and harmony within ourselves.
Much work has been done lately with imagery and healing, usually importing symbols or images into the client's visualization. The healing tale or teaching tale is used in both spiritual and secular counseling. The "imported metaphor" is part of the stock-in-trade repertoire of Ericksonian hypnosis. The results are inherently stronger when the individual produces their own imagery while the therapist unobtrusively helps the client avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgent fantasy.
The client is guided to stick with the metaphors that arise from within to describe what his state of being and experience is like. You can experiment with this yourself, simply by asking yourself a few simple questions: What would you like to have happen? When it isn't happening, how do you know its not? And where do you feel that in your body? And what's it like? By this means you create your own metaphor for your personal experience, whether it comes from dreamlife or some problem, or a childhood trauma.
The therapist functions solely as a guide to the inner realms, since it is familiar territory to the practitioner. We can use the well-known map analogy, noting that the map can only be a partial representation or symbol of the actual terrain. For example, looking at any map of the countryside we can see lines that mark rivers, hills, and other topological features; however, to walk through an actual old growth forest with a compass, climb the hills and pitch camp under the protective canopy of the trees, and listen to one of those rivers imprints a much deeper impression of the forest than the map ever could. It is a full experience of what is behind the map.
Trying to experience the terrain through the map is like interpreting the symbol, while the experience of going into and beyond the symbols is as ever-changing and alive as an excursion deep into the forest and the mysteries of nature. Another example of the distinction is the difference between reading a recipe and tasting the dish. The savor certainly isn't the same.
A dream guide, like a river guide, takes the person through the turbulent (chaotic) waters of the psyche, past the rocks and boulders of their fear, to find the safe passage where the river flows easily into the calm beyond the rapids. The therapist's approach evolves in the moment to keep pace with the flow of the client's process deep in the heart of the dream. Consequently, the client has an active part in the healing process and learns psychological self-care. Flowing with the experience through the progression of multi-sensory images provides the pathway to healing. The experience of finding an inner healing state is invaluable, as it teaches firsthand that the healer is within.
The outer healers are only representations or mirrors of what is already inside. The healing process and myth are deeply engrained in our lives, as individuals and societies. Each culture evolves its own variations on health and disease, and those able to aid in recovery from physical and mental distress. The problem with the old western healing paradigm is that the perception is that healing comes from without. In our culture now we are developing many alternatives to mechanistic medical and psychological practices. One of those alternatives is awareness of personal mythology. Jung suggested that each individual life is based on a particular myth. By discovering that myth, we can live it consciously and adapt ourselves to our destiny, thus harmonizing inner and outer experience, and allowing our true individuality to emerge.
But mythic living doesn't necessarily mean living one myth, since the patterns of all god/dess forms are within us. The myth does not provide us with a blueprint for daily living concerning what we should or ought to do. Instead, it helps us in the process of discovering who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. They spark our sense of discovery and urge us to question and go deeper. There is a chaotic assortment of mythical images within each of us, but sometimes certain themes emerge and assert their priority on a life.
So, an individual life seems to strongly parallel a specific myth theme. One way this can manifest is through an uncanny series of synchronistic events, wherein a particular myth becomes the paradigmatic model of a life. The quest for actualization of this myth motivates a variation on the age-old journey of the hero. What's New with My Subject? In ancient Greece, if you wanted to ensure success in some undertaking you invoked the god who oversaw your particular endeavor with prayers and offerings.
As stated before, Asklepios was the Greek god of healing and dream. He was the son of Apollo and the mortal Coronis who was slain by Apollo for infidelity before the child was born. Taken prematurely from his mother, Asklepios was raised by the centaur Chiron, who was a master of the healing arts. Asklepios was an able student who soon surpassed his teacher and incurred both the wrath and blessings of the various gods and goddesses. To protect him from these whims, Zeus immortalized him as the Divine Healer. An entire healing tradition developed in ancient Greece based on this myth. The medical physicians became known as Asklepiads; however, the Asklepian dream healing temple was the place to go if their medicines and treatments failed.
At the Asklepian temple, the god himself visited mortals in their dreams to bring Divine healing. At the temple, Asklepian priests oversaw the rites and procedures which brought the sick mortal into direct contact with the god. These temples were located at great distances from the cities and populated areas in Greece so that to reach one a pilgrimage was necessary. Having arrived at the temple, one was received by the temple priests who began the sometimes lengthy process of determining whether or not the god had summoned one for healing. The priests did have a therapeutic function in the temple, but they were not in any way therapists, nor did they interpret any of the supplicant's dreams.
The priests determined whether or not one had been summoned by Asklepios by making discreet inquiries about the god's appearance in their dreamlife. An appearance by the god signified that one had indeed been invited and was ready to enter the temple. The form which Asklepios assumed in dreams was either a snake, or less commonly a dog (or wolf). The next steps of bodily and mind purification were begun. Another interview with a priest was held because it was recognized that unless a person was conscious and accepting of his present life condition he could not expect a healing from the god. After the interview, the patient's body went through cleansing in the springs or streams around which the temples were always constructed. And at last, the supplicant was prepared to approach the god.
Since Asklepios visited the sick in their dreams, a special chamber, called the abaton (a Greek word meaning "a place not to be entered into uninvited"), was provided where the person would remain alone and asleep. The couch inside where the patient lay was known as the kline. This period of waiting for the god was called the incubation. After dreaming the patient was interviewed by the priests who, without interpreting the dream, would instruct the patient as to whether or not the god had brought the healing. Sometimes many sessions in the abaton on the kline were necessary to come into contact with the god and the sick did not leave the temple until they were healed. As far as interpreting the dream, the belief was that the experience of the dream and not an interpretation was how the healing came to the sick.
The healing was accomplished through the direct intervention of the god himself with the patient's soul through the dream. As a final part of the healing process, a fee was paid to the temple priests as an offering for the ongoing maintenance and work of the Temple. It was said that a failure to do so would result in a relapse of the dis-eased condition. Testimonies were inscribed on the temple walls attesting to the miraculous and powerful healing which went on in the temples, including cures for afflictions like blindness.
In this way the Asklepian dreamhealing went on for hundreds of years. This tradition is continued in dreamhealing. The eight phases of dreamhealing reflect an archetypal healing process. This healing myth is reiterated in the techniques ("ceremonies") of many disciplines. These steps form the real sequence of inner healing no matter what the outer form, including traditional medical practice. These phases include: 1) the pilgrimage; 2) the confession; 3) purification; 4) the offering; 5) dream quest; 6) dreamhealing; 7) work on dreams; 8) re-entry or integration. The entire process is contingent on a healing sanctuary, whether that refuge can be found without or within.
Processing is the principle of assisting an individual to look at his own existence, and improve his ability to confront what he is and where he is for greater adaptability, wholeness, and health.
THE PILGRIMAGE
The pilgrimage satisfies the necessary first step in healing. It is important because one commits one's energies and resources to healing. It is a notice of intent. The outcome of the process is directly proportional to the personal energy put into it, as well as the intent. As in ancient times, the refuge, retreat, or sanctuary is a place where the seeker can devote all of their energy to their dreams and healing without worry about the outer world. That sense of safety is a key factor in healing, because healing is an act of trust. Sanctuary is being in a state of total safety which supports trust. Healing involves pushing past old boundaries and negating old confining belief systems and that too is best done in trust and safety.
Disease is a state of deep inner fear and pain, and it is easier to face fears and pain from a base of safety. Most therapists know this, but generally conceive of it as a pleasant office, confidentiality and being game and script free. But it takes more--a deep respect and honoring of the natural healing process from within, rather than egotistically claiming to be "the healer." This is why we jokingly call Doctors -- M.D.s -- "Minor Deities."
Dreams and visions seem so fragile, so whimsical, and insubstantial in our pragmatic, materially oriented society. When the substantial and concrete is valued more than the mystical and insubstantial it is more difficult to validate one's own inner life. This is perhaps one reason the retreats were located a distance from any city. To live and survive in the civilized world requires a well-structured, strong ego and intellect just to deal with its technological complexity and its threat to our sense of self.
But the ego, in defending itself often feels and acts directly opposite to our deeper wisdom. In a word, we go against ourselves, a case of ego vs. higher self. This creates a state of tension or dis-ease which eventually manifests throughout our whole organism as mental and physical diseases that assume the shape of this inner conflict. For example, most of us have a deep and basic fear and unease over how we are impacting our planet's ecosystems. We may or may not be aware of it, depending on our vested interests and whether or not we identify as environmentalists, but it is there. Yet, in our daily battle to survive we burn fossil fuel driving to work in automobiles that deplete resources and generate pollution. We support hundreds of other activities daily that similarly degenerate the ecosystem. This deeply distresses, puts part of us out of ease with ourselves. We are torn in opposite directions by the pulls of our survival instincts. It may be out of our awareness but we are distressed by it.
Similarly, a person may continue to smoke cigarettes fully aware of the building health risks incurred. The fear of cancer may remain subconscious, but it exists, nevertheless. Most degenerative diseases reflect this state of distress. Degenerative is also a word that characterizes what is happening to the ecosystem. For example, cancer is both a symbol and a physical manifestation of our existential conflict. We could describe cancer as living cells in a state of uncontrollable growth destroying their host organism. This is a perfect metaphor for our relationship as a species to the ecosystem. Aerial photographs of cities bear a remarkable likeness to photographs of microscope slides of cancer cells.
The outer disease assumes the shape of the inner state of dis-ease. Nature and wilderness, however, invite flow and merging of the spirit and soul with the ego. Nature's threats are not to the ego or self alone, but to the entire organism. They require instinctual or intuitive responses involving the whole organism. This allows the ego self and the deeper instinctual self to cooperate in a dynamic balance and that fosters ease. That, plus the beauty and serenity of wilderness, takes us back to our grounding-founding state. Nothing has the ability to return harmony to soul and ego so readily as nature. The nature-mystic experience is one of the most easily accessed non-ordinary states. Untainted wilderness is possibly one of the least realized yet most valuable healing resources that we have. Water, in particular, was important to the dream temples, and there was always a healing spring within the precinct.
THE CONFESSION
The confession helps you target where in your life you have missed the mark. The word "sin" is simply an old Greek archery term (hamartia) for "missing the mark." So if you miss, you simply try again. This self-analysis goes beyond an intellectual review of wrongs, shoulds and ought-tos. It is a special form of in-sight. It signifies attention is turning inward, and becoming reflective.
Dreamhealing begins with the premise that each feature of the dream is a part of the dreamer. One can enter a symbol and speak as if one were that symbol and learn a lot about perspectives other than the ego. It is a way to experience the multiplicity of consciousness within each of us. Many ego parts exist in states of conflict or dis-ease with each other, and by experiencing or becoming the symbols in a dream, and exploring the relationships among them, one eventually can resolve, or move beyond the rifts to a 'gestalt' or inner merging. This signifies the unification of conflicting parts into a state of wholeness or integrity. This is a very healing experience for the ego.
Occasionally in Gestalt dreamwork, the therapist-client team slips past the experience of the symbol to some deeper state of consciousness. These are confusing initially, because they don't compute with traditional training or experience, but they are intriguing. If you merely forage deeper into the dreams, following the dream symbols through and beyond the surface features, they function as doorways into profound states of consciousness, very healing states of consciousness.
There are apparently extremely powerful energies or forces within dreams. Just getting to them and experiencing them leads to profound healings. What is really amazing is that they seem to have effects on physical levels, resulting in physical as well as mental restructuring of self image. Perhaps someday we can devise experiments to track these processes with biofeedback. It may eventually become possible to monitor physiology and feedback the unique pattern of mental and physical states that promote healing on an individualized level.
The confession is an extremely important part of the healing and letting-go process. The Asklepians believed that you couldn't be healed or visited by the god Asklepios until you were at ease with your own soul. Paralleling that practice, the confessional during a retreat is more a case of exploring the state of disease at many levels and from many perspectives. It usually ends up looking more like psychotherapy. The physical and emotional diseases reflect or manifest inner states of dis-ease between ego-personal self and the deeper soul-self, or among the separate parts of the ego. Identifying these out-of-ease states is the purpose of the psychotherapy-like confessional. It is a process of becoming more aware of and intimately acquainted with the disease and one's relationship to it on a very personal level.
Harking back to the meaning of sin as simply missing the mark, you have missed where you have sinned. So if you sin, try again with another arrow to reach your target. This is a closed-loop feedback system. It is important for the individual to actually hear their own voice identifying the problem area. Another aspect of a psychotherapeutic confessional is that you also have the opportunity to declare and validate out loud, to yourself and others, what you have done right. Often in life this simple validation is unavailable or overlooked. We all need a pat on the back once in a while for our growth and well being. Willingly taking time to self-reflect on one's positive and negative aspects promotes being honest with yourself. It implies taking personal responsibility in the sense of recognizing your personal ability to respond.
The dream guide functions in a manner similar to that of the ancient dream priest who oversaw the dream temples. A guide helps you make a trip through unfamiliar territory. They help you prepare for the trip and guide you to the best routes, but they don't take the trip for you -- they just provide the guidance. The therapist's role, like the shaman of old, is to lead people on journeys deep into the unfamiliar terrain of the self and to the balancing states of consciousness that ease or heal. This is likely what the dream priests did. The word "priest" had different connotations to the Greeks than us. The role of the Asklepian priest was to prepare, and guide the seekers to meet the healing god in the dream. They don't claim to be, or to speak for (channel), or interpret (analyst) the god. They simply guide each individual to their own personal encounter.
PURIFICATION
Purification prior to entry into sacred ground or sacred space has always been a priority in all forms of magic. And, make no mistake, the ancient technique was a form of magic with its own protocols. Today we can use a sweatlodge or sauna to purify through sweat and heat, a spa for water purification, and a healthy diet of natural foods. Most of these are easily available. If dreamhealing is used in a traditional setting, the client may take a ritual bath, perhaps with herbs, before arriving for the session. It is a symbolic gesture of intent, and sets the tone that one is on a sacred mission with a higher aim in mind.
Both purification and confession imply relieving oneself of sin. These practices also help reduce the stress of modern life. Purification of mind and spirit can be an important symbolic part of the process, preparing one for transformative challenge and change. When it comes to purifying the body, the cleansing needs to be literal. Most people's bodies are filled with poisons, pesticides, preservatives and other anti-life chemicals in food. Nearly all meat is full of steroids and antibiotics, and even amphetamine residues used in chicken-raising. A more natural diet cleans up the body chemistry. As you truly come to love yourself, you desire only the best for yourself both inside as well as outside.
Some people use exercise, music, or drumming, and dancing partly as catharsis to clear out old emotional baggage. What is most important is not the form of the purification but letting the creative process flow to take whatever form is appropriate for the individual.
THE OFFERING
The dreamhealing offering may also take many forms. The most surface level, of course, involves dealing with paying fees for your therapeutic sanctuary. It has ever been so, since the days of the temples. In fact, the Greeks believed that stinting on this offering could jeopardize the healing. Ceremonial offerings invoke a deeper and more personal commitment. Sometimes we create a more formal personal offering ceremony for individuals on retreat. But the offering happens at many levels, ceremonial or not.
During a ceremony, the seeker at some point is asked to offer something of themselves to help induce a healing dream. It is another personal energy commitment to healing, like the pilgrimage. For example, one might offer to devote time to working with the homeless, or commit to picking up three pieces of litter everyday, or some other form of community service. This offering is committing to give some form of service beyond one's self for the collective good. The offering places even more value on the healing. It helps satisfy or ease the soul-ego conflicts. Further, following through on the offering puts ongoing energy into the healing process to prevent the dis-ease creeping back. Healing is a mind or mindful journey and so you have to help the mind to prepare and execute it. The offering helps invoke that state of mind.
DREAM QUEST
A "dream journey" uses the mind, in the broader concept of mind, to enter one's healing states. States of mind or consciousness can manifest, for example, as the "placebo effect" in medical terminology -- or in the evangelist's terms, faith healing. It is a journey to our ultimate creative state of mind which is the source of our dreams and imagination. If you are so minded you might even consider this state to be "the Creator," "Higher Power," or "God force" within. In Jungian terms it would mean an experience of the healing power of the Self. Healing is an act of creation, and that part of us, our creative spirit or the god within, speaks most vividly through dreams and imagination.
Even Einstein considered imagination more important than knowledge. It is not an anti-scientific approach to dream. A dream is a mystical expression of imagination and creative mind which is what ritual and ceremony help invoke. There is safety in ritual and ceremony--secureness in it. It is another symbolic act of commitment to an inner faith. Ceremony by-passes the mind or intellect; it boggles it. It is a way of opening to a state of grace or faith, and these are integral aspects of mystical healing. Ceremony reminds you of something you already have within you, but don't usually notice. It brings it to surface awareness.
Because ceremonies are not rational, they confuse the rational mind. They appeal to the senses and take us outside of our usual ego experiences and beyond the experience of the rational or intellectual ego mind. This is where you find these healing states of consciousness, beyond the rational ego mind, in the mystic. Any time you turn your attention within and become receptive to yourself you enter a whole new world of experience, which is just as real in effects as the outer world. You can facilitate change within yourself and cooperate with your personal growth or evolution. The only problem is getting around the habitual ego identity with its resistances to change. Many techniques of hypnotherapy have been used for years to accomplish this.
One of the more famous, the "confusion" technique was popularized by therapist Milton Erickson, a pioneer in modern hypnotic therapy. Any momentary disequilibrium of either the mind or body can induce a trance state which by-passes the conscious censoring ego and creates receptivity in the subconscious. The ego mind is formed from the sum accumulation of our life's experiences and our reactions to them. It sets the limits or boundaries of our usual thing-feeling-behaving patterns.
Based on our experiences, at deep levels of mind we form multi-sensory images of self and world -- images that capture their essence and shape our belief systems which in turn shape our ego and personality. Not only do these primal sensory energy images and beliefs limits us, they also contain the "psychic" distortions which form the nuclei of our dis-eases. This structure is the ego-mind. It is limited, but what lies beyond is infinite mind or consciousness. It is our source of energy for re-imagining ourselves and healing.
New or unfamiliar experiences, irrational ones like ancient dream rituals that don't compute or match with your normal experiences cause confusion and disorientation in the ego-mind, and can even turn it off. In fact, most of the techniques used in dream guiding are based on fooling this part of the mind. In ceremony, the ego either automatically or voluntarily steps aside and becomes willing to relinquish its fantasy of "control." It becomes more vulnerable and open, particularly if the environment is safe and supportive.
This is when the deep wisdom, the collective infinite consciousness tapped into through dreams and visions helps transform the old beliefs and images into more ease-ful, less limiting ones. Then one opens to free and easy states of mind. A healing retreat creates a different world image, one in which the inner mystical experiences, dreams and visions, are held to be equally, if not more important than outer processes.
With sanctuary one is free to explore them -- the permission is there in the environment. Virtually all religious traditions throughout recorded history held that the deities communicated with mortals through dreams and visions. Yet, direct communication with deity is a new, unsettling thought for many people. These experiences are neither encouraged nor allowed in our culture by its healing and religious institutions.
DREAMHEALING
Healing doesn't happen with a one or two time workshop, nor will one dream accomplish it entirely. Great progress comes in the initial stages occasionally, but it is not probable and most likely will only be symptomatic healing. Deep healing or restructuring takes a full commitment of self, time, and energy. Most disease has taken years, perhaps a lifetime to develop and permeate all levels of our organism. By the time it takes on physical or emotional symptoms, it has been around for awhile and involves the whole person and most of their life patterns. There is a momentum to each life and that is not usually changed overnight. It might not take three months, or it may take longer.
Still, a retreat gives a person time and sanctuary and a better chance to explore themselves thoroughly to make deep physical and mental changes, to change the momentum. In ancient Greece, the dream priest would look for a sign of the god in dreams. If they saw a sign of the god, then that was a sign that the healing had already occurred. Then you simply paid your fee for the upkeep of the temple, and left. As therapists, we can't say, "Oh, there is a snake in your dream--you've been healed--see you later." The ancient healings may have been conducted in this manner, but it is not necessarily enough for the modern ego, because it is a surrender of personal power to an external force which only visits in certain dreams.
Dreamhealing participants learn to realize that they are really the power behind their healing, not the therapist. That is much more empowering, and real healing is an empowering process, an opportunity for personal evolution. Knowledge of self-healing capacities goes back over the millennia. That is a fundamental way dreamhealing differs from the ancient technique, or for that matter, most modern medical or new age healing practice. Common to shamanism, psychology, and the medical approaches are their implications that the healing power is outside of the person seeking healing. Somehow it is the doctor or his medicines and techniques, the shaman or the God -- someone, something, or somepower outside of the self who provides the healing. That disempowers.
WORK ON DREAMS
Bringing the awareness or senses of the inner healing process from the dream into the conscious or rational mind, which is what a dream journey does, helps us to realize the healing in the outer world also. It draws the ego-mind into a partnership of cooperation to make outer changes in lifestyle and behavior that compliment or support the inner ones. The individual is empowered and takes a more active -- pro-active -- role. The pattern is learn, commit, do. Dream therapy often triggers surprising changes in life patterns without intellectual awareness of how the change of attitude occurs.
For example, some dreamhealing participants find they are simply unable to eat certain foods, or lose the desire to smoke after a dream session, even though the work didn't touch on that at all. It often takes the mind weeks or months to finally understand the depths and changes in personal dynamics that the dream therapy initiates. But it is still an inner process. We could describe it as intellect catching up to wisdom.
So, dreamhealing incorporates and expands on Asklepian dreamhealing. It was not derived from or contrived to fit this archetypal model. It emerges spontaneously, reiterating the same themes, loud and clear. It is a new paradigm for healing, a model that incorporates the old but only as part. It integrates science and mysticism yielding a view beyond the capabilities of either system alone. Dreams themselves, as the long-forgotten healers, do this.
From the scientific side, there has been much research and acknowledgment that dreams are necessary to health. They are believed to exert a balancing effect, and without them we soon show signs of mental and physical deterioration. For example, studies have shown that sleep deprivation within days results in extreme nervousness and anxiety, hallucinations, or delusions.
Freud, Jung, and Fritz Perls were among the earliest contemporary scientists who recognized the healing potential in dreams and used them as therapeutic tools, but they did so more from the superficial ego and interpretive levels. Jung hinted at much deeper aspects of dreams, but still remained interpretive in his dream therapy. Perls recognized that it was the experiences in the dream that were healing, but limited it to the ego. Most "in depth" psychotherapies include dream therapy. And, of course, from the mystical perspective dreams come from the deities, and give us the gifts of prophecy, wisdom, and their unique perspective. By and large, dreams are the forgotten healer. When healing is needed, very few people think of turning to their dreams.
RE-ENTRY
Dreams provide a missing feminine element as contrasted with the characteristically masculine approach in the medical healing model. It is an intuitive one where the person needing healing is acted on from the outside by therapists, chemicals, surgery, or technology. Dreams, on the other hand, are a personal inner healing, a non-intrusive one that arises from within, a creative healing of faith. Modern medicine is practiced in bright lights and technically outfitted hospitals.
Dreams are the night's creations from the soul and sleep. The contrast is that of a masculine quality, with a feminine quality. This doesn't mean dreams should necessarily replace allopathic healing; they provide a balance and wholeness it is missing -- the yin and yang complementing the whole. It is a marriage between dreamhealing and medical science that seems most appropriate. Dream therapy in hospitals might speed recovery rates from surgery and other medical techniques and treatments. It would certainly empower patients with a sense of personal and deep participation in the healing process.
For the skeptic, who wonders how ancient practices like Aesculapian mythology could play a role in our lives today, we suggest an open-mindedness about dreams. We can learn from them without having to become "true believers." A new paradigm for healing has to incorporate all the models, but not be bound or limited to them. This includes the old and new medical technology, psychology, Aesculapian dreamhealing, shamanism, and anything else with something to offer. But it needs to be much more than just the sum of all of them. The old models are incomplete and inadequate, too limited and narrowly focused. They are entrenched in dogma and habitual ways of viewing reality, and the patient.
Contemporary medical or psychological therapies, perhaps even more so than the ancient practices, are biased belief systems. Immediate change is imperative because, for starters, we need to heal our species' relationship with its environment. It is one of dis-ease. None of the old models motivates us or shows us how to heal it--creativity will be required. Healers cannot just focus on only healing parts of the individual any more, the issues are much broader. The survival of our species is at stake.
HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF CHAOS THEORY:
Consciousness, Physiology, Perception, and Psychology
ABSTRACT: A brief introduction to the discovery of chaos theory and its applications to understanding human awareness and behavior. The mathematics of deterministic chaos underlies the growth patterns of nature and our nature. There is an implicate order in chaos. But we don't need to understand the math to see that expression in our physiology and psychology. Chaos is our fundamental essence. It is inherent in the self-organizing matter within us.
Creation came out of chaos, is surrounded by chaos and will end in chaos. --Anonymous
Despite their training, psychoanalysts have a dread of unconscious meaning, which really translates into a dread of chaos. --Robert Langs
CREATION, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND CREATIVITY
According to classical Greek myth, only Chaos existed in the beginning. The random element eventually produced Gaea, the deep-breasted earth or matter, from within infinite potential. For matter to exist, the force of attraction also had to appear (super-celestial Eros). Uranus, the starry heavens, is Gaea's first-born child. In other words, the first descent of matter into the threshold of concrete existence came from a chaotic matrix.
This cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction lies at the heart of chaos theory. It bears directly on another Greek archetype that we all share--the psyche. Just as the ancient pantheon provided a foundational orientation for the Greeks, chaos theory can provide us with a model for constructing cognitive maps. By embracing the chaos in our lives--learning to re-honor the principle--we can begin balancing out millennia of identification which held that only order equates with "good."
Part of our cultural heritage is the programming that we should stave off chaos at every point. Some speculate this was a patriarchal reaction against the ancient matriarchal, chaos cultures. Sometimes it is psychologically more fruitful to "let go" of control, pass through that de-structured state, and discover what happens on the other side.
Chaos is definitely part of the process of creativity. It generates the new order spontaneously from deep within itself. What makes it imperative for us to embrace the new scientific paradigm implied by chaos theory? By rejecting chaos, you reject Gaea. And she is not only the Earth, the love of the planet, the integrity of life forms, but also love of your own physical embodiment. Whatever the essence of chaos is, we are that. By rejecting it, we run the danger of rejecting our selves.
Chaos is the essence of life. Chaos is essential to health. Research has shown that chaos in bodily functions signals health, while periodic behavior can foreshadow disease. Whether Eros (the principle of attraction) is evident in the mathematics of a strange attractor or in human behavior, there is a resonance with Chaos and Gaea. Chaos has laws of its own, which harmonize with order. Chaos describes the structural growth patterns in nature, and the patterns of breakdown, entropy, or decay. It describes systems far-from-equilibrium, not just the rarely found stable state. It applies to all complex dynamic systems, which certainly includes human beings. It provides a new perspective on reality. Adaption of this perspective into our worldview helps us understand whole systems.
Chaos theory leads to a new vision of matter, one no longer passive, as described in the mechanistic worldview, but one associated with spontaneous, creative, orderly activity. This scientific frontier is fertile ground for new metaphors and models. It will help us solve some of our practical problems, both personal and global. Throughout history many innovative discoveries have come through the process of reverie, daydreaming, or inspiration.
Research has also shown that the greater the mental challenge, the more chaotic the activity of the subject's brain (Rapp). After incubating a solution in the chaotic state, we seem to "get a brainstorm." Certain brainstates, high in virtually random, chaotic activity are conducive to creativity. Let's hope that by "letting go" of our old rigid structures and beliefs, and letting chaos back into our lives consciously, that we can find more of those creative solutions. Both scientific and intuitive apprehensions of chaos will lead the way.
A NEW DIALOGUE WITH NATURE
Chaos theory came on the scientific scene in the late 1970s. It was introduced by a self-motivated group of Santa Cruz scientists. As students they had to fight their faculty to pursue their fascination with this unorthodox subject. After its initial presentation, chaos became a buzzword in many disciplines, as scientists thought of ways it applied in their fields. Even more interesting, scientists began crossing over fields, developing multidisciplinary approaches.
Chaos is not entirely random, but is an occult, "hidden," or implicate order within nature. Cosmology, weather prediction, animal migration patterns, quantum mechanics, and more were affected. We now have terms like "quantum chaos," and chaotic planetary motion. Chaos is a major influence from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Some astronomers even postulate a cosmic Great Attractor toward which all the local galaxies are moving.
Is the earth, our solar system, and galaxy really on a pilgrimage to the Great Attractor? Technically, the attractor isn't only "out there." Our galaxy is part of the attractor, whatever it is. With a sphere influence of 300 million light-years, it is one of the most gigantic known entities in the cosmos. And, it may have relatives! At the other end of the scale, it appears that chaos is found in the distribution levels of certain atomic systems and wave patterns (Gutzwiller, 1992).
Chaotic systems lie beyond the description of normal perturbation theory. Quantum chaos may be a way of linking quantum systems and chaotic systems. One interesting property of chaotic systems of quantum energy is that they cannot be decomposed. Chaos also shows up in the way electrons scatter. Probably the first popular book to discuss chaos theory was ORDER OUT OF CHAOS: MAN'S NEW DIALOGUE WITH NATURE, by Ilya Prigogine, published by Bantam in 1984. By far, the most widely read has become James Gleick's now-classic, CHAOS: MAKING A NEW SCIENCE (1987).
Others, like THE TURBULENT MIRROR, Briggs and Peat, (1989), have sought to express the theory more simply, and poetically. Some books have focused on the computer graphics, known as fractals, which have emerged from this new science. Their natural beauty holds an aesthetic fascination. Even the art world discovered chaos through fractals. Images of dynamic fractals are used in discos, like light shows. Chaos software has brought them to the home PC. Chaos moved through science into the arts and humanities. Chaos bears on our consciousness, physiology, perception, and psychology. We can learn a lot from what chaos theory tells us about the nature of reality. Most of reality, instead of being orderly, stable, and equilibrated, is fluctuating and boiling with change, disorder, and process. 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. 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. It provides pause for reconsidering the nature of time and the role of chance during transformation from one state to another. Chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation. But, of course, we can never determine when the next bifurcation will arise.
Chance rises phoenix-like to take its place among physical processes. Thus, nonequilibrium, the flux of matter and energy, is a source of order. In the new concept of matter, matter is active. Paradoxically, matter leads then to irreversible processes, yet irreversible processes (entropy) organize matter (negentropy).
Chaos theory is therefore a new evolutionary paradigm, based in dynamics and thermodynamics. Irreversibility seems to be a source of order, coherence, or organization. Time, reality, and reversibility/irreversibility are closely related. The implication is that "time" is a real dimension, not merely introduced through human observation. Irreversibility is not a universal phenomenon, but it is not necessarily subjective, either.
Our human reality is embedded in the flow of time. It appears that our consciousness creates that sense of time flow by information processing, but it may be a given. The question then becomes, "what is the specific structure of dynamic systems that permits them to distinguish past and future?" If we can answer that, and determine the minimum complexity involved, perhaps we can be more precise about the roots of time in nature. The irreversibility of time is itself closely connected to entropy. To make time flow backward we would have to overcome an infinite entropy barrier. Natural systems contain essential elements of randomness and irreversibility. After a bifurcation there can be no return to the old condition. Time has both linear and nonlinear qualities.
Time might be described, rather than as a flow, as a dimensional manifold of infinite processes, the ultimate feedback loop. All biological systems are dissipative structures which are self-organizing (DNA) and self-iterating (reproduction). The type of system which evolves is critically dependent on the conditions in which the structure is formed. We can speculate that the gravitational field of earth, as well as EM fields play an essential role in the selection mechanism of self-organization [see EMBRYONIC HOLOGRAPHY, Miller and Webb, 1973].
Chaos theory has caused us to reexamine the concept of matter as inert and without consciousness. It expresses its own quality of consciousness and determinism, a type of awareness also seen in some quantum phenomena. According to Prigogine, in equilibrium matter is "blind," but in far-from-equilibrium conditions it begins to be able to perceive, to "take into account," in its way of functioning, differences in the external world (such as weak gravitational or electrical fields). [see THE DIAMOND BODY on scalar physics, Miller and Miller, 1982].
Prigogine and Stengers comment further on the so-called consciousness of dynamic systems: Near bifurcation, systems present large fluctuations. Such systems seem to "hesitate" among various possible directions of evolution, and the famous law of large numbers in its usual sense breaks down. A small fluctuation may start an entirely new evolution that will drastically change the whole behavior of the macroscopic system. The analogy with social phenomena, even with history is inescapable. Far from opposing "chance" and "necessity," we now see both aspects as essential in the description of nonlinear systems far from equilibrium. This is very different than the static view of classical dynamics or the evolutionary view associated with entropy. Perhaps this is one intuitive perception the Greeks had when they deified these principles. "Necessity" is the goddess Ananke, while "chance" and opportunism corresponds with Hermes. The whole pantheon evolves through these principles from the pure chaos of the source.
In FACING THE GODS, James Hillman points out the common identity of Necessity and Chaos with anxiety: The psychological viewpoint sees Necessity and Chaos not only as explanatory principles only in the realm of metaphysics; they are also mythic events taking place also and always in the soul, and they are the fundamental archai of the human condition. To these two principles the pathe (or motions) of the soul can be linked. Psychology has already recognized the faceless, nameless Chaos, this "sacred and crazy movement" in the soul, as anxiety, and by naming it such, psychology has directly evoked the Goddess Ananke, from whom the word anxiety derives. If anxiety truly belongs to Ananke, of course, it cannot be "mastered by the rational will."
This creation process continues to this day, through every moment, a dance of creation and destruction. It takes place in the quantum flux, as virtual entities pop in and out of physical manifestation. It takes place in the crucible of new and dying stars, galaxies, and perhaps our entire universe. Chaos may even be the ground state of multiple universes.
MEASURES OF COMPLEXITY AND CHAOS
Turbulence was one of the key phenomena that motivated the resurgence of interest in nonlinear dynamical systems. It was, after all, investigation into the mechanisms for turbulence that led to the invention of the term "strange attractor" in 1971. The turbulence that is described by strange attractors is "turbulence in time"--deterministic chaos, or temporal chaos in current terminology. In the past decade, a vocabulary for the quantitative characterization of temporal chaos was developed. It has been used to describe and analyze an incredible variety of phenomena in practically all fields of science and engineering. The dimensions of strange attractors, the entropies, and Lyapunov exponents describing motion on the attractors, have been used to analyze heartbeats, brainwaves, chemical reactions, lasers, the economy, flames, radiation, and fluid flow.
Yet this vocabulary is not sufficient to describe turbulence, for its complex nature exists in time and space. Time evolution is seamlessly united with the quantitative characterization of spatial complexity. Turbulence is dynamical, nonlinear spatio-temporal complexity. Dimensions, entropies, and Lyapunov exponents [don't worry about this one; there is no test later] have become the standard measures of temporal chaotic behavior.
Dimensions lend themselves to computer modeling of fractal attractors. Fractals visibly demonstrate harmonies that may not be apparent within the mathematical formulas. Graphic generators make this beauty visible, where it speaks to us geometrically, intuitively. The large variety of fields in which dimensions, entropies, and exponents have been used to characterize temporal evolution is an indication of the extent to which these quantities have become elements of a scientific vocabulary that is now nearly universal. These quantities are used to characterize astrophysical data, dendritic growth, electroencephalographic and electrocardiographic data, nerve fibers, epidemics, etc. As one of the most basic applications of these methods, dimensions have been used to discriminate between chaos and noise.
Nonlinear dynamical systems produce complex temporal or spatial patterns by stretching and folding regions of phase-space in an iterative way. Space and time get folded like so much multi-layered pastry dough [more on this aspect shortly]. As a result of the unfolding procedure, the dynamics is described as a sequence of deterministic paths (blocks of symbols) which appear as random in time, with given transition probabilities. This would seem to imply that chaos underlies the implicate order [see Bohm, WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER].
It has already been shown as an influence in quantum probability, the mechanism of quantum flux. Chance and necessity may not be widely separated phenomena--they may be two sides of the same chaotic coin. A large variety of physical systems exhibit seemingly disordered (turbulent, chaotic) spatio-temporal behavior which, behind its apparent irregularity, hides a high degree of organization.
The observation that low-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems are able to generate aperiodic bounded solutions gave rise to an increasing interest in the study of chaotic behavior, which led to the definition of strange attractors. These objects have been geometrically described in terms of fractal dimensions and, dynamically, by means of Lyapunov exponents and metric entropies. Their future time evolution can be predicted only for finite (relatively short) times, although they are fully deterministic, because of the exponential amplification of the uncertainty on the initial conditions.
Highly structured patterns can be produced, which are not necessarily related to chaotic motion. Examples of "complex" behavior are provided by biological systems, hydrodynamic flows, spin glasses, neural networks, fractals, cellular automata, and nonlinear dynamic systems. It is easy to show that entropy and Lyapunov exponents are not useful indicators for the characterization of complexity.
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.
There are mechanisms for the creation of defects. In deterministic systems, several mechanisms can lead to their formation, including initial conditions and phase instabilities. VORTICES can be induced by initial conditions, such as dislocations. Phase instability plays a crucial role in the creation of defects. Transitions which involve vortices, as for example the Hopf bifurcation, lead to patterns which are described in terms of a phase.
These transitions are in some sense "phase breaking" transitions. More complicated patterns, as for example standing waves, require more than a single phase. In more than one dimension, large enough systems can sustain vortices. Phase fluctuations eventually become large enough to break, locally in space and time, this "phase only" description. In regions where large gradients appear, the creation of defects destroys the quasi-long range order induced by the pattern.
In one dimension, defects are spatio-temporal, i.e. they occur at a given spatial position, for a given time. Lastly, defects can be created in the transient process accompanying a subcritical transition. Defects play an important role in the spatio-temporal destruction of the order induced by symmetry breaking transition. The most efficient way to create defects in these non-equilibrium systems is related to phase instabilities.
Experimental evidence of such a defect-mediated picture of turbulence exists. All this sounds very far afield from human life, but is it really? Aside from the literal expression of chaos, there is its metaphorical aspect. If we re-read the above with an intuitive eye, it might provide archetypal insight on depression, nervous breakdown, personality defects, life transitions, phases of development, and other human realities. [See CHAOS THEORY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXES, Miller, 1991].
Chaos relates directly to information theory. Quantitative measures of chaos have been developed and used to connect theory and experiment. All these systems are closed. Imposing closed boundary conditions means the system "interacts with itself at all times," so the effects of a perturbation to one location cannot escape, but influences the dynamics of the entire system. This also holds true for individual human beings. The primary instability in such systems is absolute and information on the dynamics of spatially distributed, but closed systems may be obtained by studying the temporal behavior at a single location. Indeed, the vast majority of experimental investigations have assumed the observed chaotic systems have finite spatial extent, without information flows across their boundaries.
Again, also applicable to the individual person. In open systems, information may enter and leave the system. It is not always possible to describe the dynamics by the time series at a single, fixed location. In contrast to closed systems, open systems frequently possess downstream propagating primary instabilities. In human life, a trauma at a given point will create exponential problems (turbulence) further on in time, until and unless one passes through the chaotic breakdown into a place of healing--into flow.
Technically, spatial development of flow may depend crucially on external forcing, often by low amplitude noise. For human beings, the healing space is often one with so-called "white noise," like the flowing of a waterfall or ocean surf, or the rustling or whoosh of the wind. We create the same state internally when we enter the alpha brainwave state. These are generated by the dynamics of chaos, and their healing, soothing effect on our personality is well known to nearly everyone.
THE PARADOX IN CHAOS
There is order in chaos; randomness has an underlying geometrical form. Chaos imposes fundamental limits on prediction, but it also suggests causal relationships where none were previously suspected. In chaotic systems, since there is no clear relation between cause and effect, such phenomena are said to have random elements. Simple deterministic systems with only a few elements can generate random behavior. The randomness is fundamental. Gathering more information does not make it go away. Randomness generated in this way has come to be called chaos. A seeming paradox is that chaos is deterministic, not probabilistic. It is generated by fixed rules that do not involve any elements of chance.
A paradox is a union of opposites in a transcendent third. In principle the future is completely determined by the past, but in practice small uncertainties are amplified. Even though the behavior is predictable in the short term, it is unpredictable in the long term. This is because any effect, no matter how small, quickly reaches macroscopic proportions. Graphic depictions of attractors allow us to map a dynamical system's behavior in discreet-time or phase-space. It helps us visualize a complex situation.
Roughly speaking, an attractor is what the behavior of a system settles down to, or is attracted to. Some systems do not come to rest in the long term but instead cycle periodically through a sequence of states. An analogy might be the cycling between competing attractors in bi-polar disorder, or manic-depression. What slight perturbation causes the switch? A system may have several attractors [complexes, archetypes, subpersonalities?] The set of points that evolve to an attractor is called its basin of attraction. What's New with My Subject?
STRETCHING TIME AND FOLDING SPACE
The key to understanding chaotic behavior lies in understanding a simple stretching and folding operation, which takes place in the state space. The orbits on a chaotic attractor are shuffled by this process, much as a deck of cards is shuffled by a dealer. The randomness of the chaotic orbits is the result of the shuffling process. The process of stretching and folding happens repeatedly, creating folds within folds ad infinitum. A chaotic attractor is, in other words, a fractal--an object that reveals more detail as it is increasingly magnified.
Crutchfield, et al describe, in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, how chaos mixes the orbits in state space in precisely the same way a baker mixes bread dough by kneading it. Just imagine rolling out the dough and placing a big drop of food coloring in the center. As you spread and fold the dough, you create many layers of alternating blue and white. Then finally the dye becomes thoroughly mixed with the dough. Chaos works the same way, except that instead of mixing dough it mixes the state space.
The state of the system is located not in a single point but rather within a small region of state space. The stretching and folding operation of a chaotic attractor systematically removes the initial information and replaces it with new information. The stretch makes small-scale uncertainties larger, and the fold brings widely separated trajectories together and erases large-scale information. Thus chaotic attractors act as a kind of pump bringing microscopic fluctuations up to a macroscopic expression. In humans only small fluctuations in mental processes are required initially to amplify over time into major changes or re-visioning of reality.
To slightly alter experience of a psychological complex is to work directly on the ego. Any microscopic fluctuations we make in therapy are amplified into real-time. This reflects on our concepts of transformation, and permission for change to occur in a nonlinear manner in personality. After a brief time interval the uncertainty of the initial conditions covers the entire attractor and all predictive power is lost: THERE IS SIMPLY NO CAUSAL CONNECTION BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE. There is also no psychological mandate to adhere to an outworn self-simulation. The change can be instantaneous, unfolding over time. Healing is an ever-present potential. Chaotic systems generate randomness on their own without the need for any external random inputs.
Based on this, we can make quite a case for allowing clients to develop their own therapeutic metaphors in therapy. Some therapists "import" teaching tales or metaphors into the process which they feel could help the client. The imaginal free association of dream healing seems to open them to the flow of their own process and imagery. Facilitating that process, the therapist functions best as a guide. Random behavior comes from more than just the amplification of errors and the loss of the ability to predict it; it is due to the complex orbits generated by stretching and folding.
If a system is chaotic, how chaotic is it? A measure of chaos is the entropy of the motion, which roughly speaking is the average rate of stretching and folding, or the average rate at which information is produced.
CHAOS AND HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY
Nonlinear chaos refers to a constrained kind of randomness, which, remarkably, may be associated with fractal geometry. Fractal geometry is the basis of human anatomy, but it pervades nature. Fractal structures are often the remnants of chaotic dynamics. Wherever a chaotic process has shaped the environment (the seashore, the atmosphere, a geological fault), fractals are likely to be left behind.
Fractals consist of varying size and orientation but similar shape. Certain neurons (nerve fibers), for instance, have a fractal-like structure. If one examines such neurons through a low-power microscope lens, one can discern asymmetric branches, called dendrites, connected to the cell bodies. At slightly higher magnifications, smaller branches on the larger ones are observable. At even higher magnification, one sees another level of detail--branches on branches on branches. Although at some level the branching of a neuron stops, idealized fractals have infinite detail.
The details of a fractal at a certain scale are similar (though not necessarily identical) to those of the structure seen at larger or smaller scales. All fractals have this internal, look-alike property called self-similarity. Because length is not a meaningful concept for fractals, mathematicians calculate the "dimension" of a fractal to quantify how it fills space. Self-similarity of a system implies that features of a structure or a process look alike at different scales or lengths of time. The greater the dimension of a fractal, the greater the chance that a given region of space contains a piece of that fractal.
In the human body fractal-like structures abound in networks of blood vessels, nerves, and ducts. The most carefully studied fractal in the body is the system of tubes that transport gas to and from the lung. The heart also exhibits fractal anatomy or fractal architecture. Fractal branches or folds greatly amplify the surface area available for absorption (as in the intestine), distribution or collection (by the blood vessels, bile ducts, and bronchial tubes) and information processing (by the nerves).
Fractal structures, partly by virtue of their redundancy and irregularity, are robust and resistant to injury. Fractal structures in the human body arise from the slow dynamics of embryonic development and evolution. These processes, like others that produce fractal structures, exhibit deterministic chaos. In the early 1980s, when investigators began to apply chaos theory to physiological systems, they expected that chaos would be most apparent in diseased or aging systems, but contrary to what training and intuition might suggest, the opposite is true.
For example, careful analysis reveals that healthy individuals have heart rates that fluctuate considerably even at rest. To identify the type of system dynamics (chaotic or periodic), one determines the trajectories for many different initial conditions. Then one searches for an attractor: a region of phase space that attracts trajectories. The strange attractor describes systems that are neither static nor periodic. In the phase space near a strange attractor, two trajectories that started under almost identical conditions will diverge over the short term and become very different over the long term.
The system described by a strange attractor is chaotic. Recent evidence suggests that chaos is a normal feature of other components of the nervous system, including those components responsible for hormone secretion. This might account for a degree of randomness in mood and emotions, related to secretion of neurotransmitters in the brain. It might also be the mechanism for a dream "putting a mood on you" after you awaken. It is a real-time effect of chaos reaching out from the subconscious mind to the conscious.
Chaos can be generated in a model of the olfactory system. This research appeared in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, February 1991. This model incorporates a feedback loop among the "neurons" and a delay in response times. There is a recognized importance of time delays in producing chaos. Why should the heart rate and other systems controlled by the nervous system exhibit chaotic dynamics? Such dynamics offer many functional advantages.
Chaotic systems operate under a wide range of conditions and are therefore adaptable and flexible. This plasticity allows systems to cope with the urgent requirements of an unpredictable and changing environment. However, the periodic patterns in disease and the apparently chaotic behavior in health do not imply that all pathologies are associated with increased regularity. Controlled chaos may play a roll in the human ability to quickly produce strings of different speech sounds. It seems biological systems may use chaos, and the richness in chaotic behavior, to change their behavior on the fly. Edward Ott, et al speculate (SCIENCE NEWS, "Ribbon of Chaos," January 26, 1991), that just small disturbances can radically alter a chaotic system's behavior--tiny adjustments can also stabilize their behavior.
The success of this strategy for controlling chaos hinges on the fact that the apparent randomness of a chaotic system is really only skin deep. Beneath this chaotic unpredictability hides an intricate but highly ordered structure--a complicated web of interwoven patterns of regular, or periodic, motion. Physicists from the Naval Surface Warfare System in Silver Springs, Maryland, have succeeded in experimentally controlling chaotic behavior in a magnetic ribbon. Normally, a chaotic system continually shifts from one pattern to another, creating an appearance of randomness. In controlling chaos, the idea is to lock the system into one particular type of repeating motion. William Ditto reports, "We don't avoid the chaos; we stay in the chaotic region. We take advantage of the system's sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
The trick is to exploit the fact that a chaotic system already encompasses an infinite number of unstable, periodic motions, or orbits. That makes it possible to zero in one particular type of motion, or periodic orbit, or to switch rapidly from one type of motion to another. In the past, most scientists and engineers considered a chaotic system's extreme sensitivity to initial conditions as something to be avoided. To ensure that, say, a chemical reaction or a bridge would function reliably and predictably, they tried to design systems that shunned chaos. However, chaos may offer a great advantage, allowing system designers greater flexibility and making possible systems that adapt more quickly to changing needs.
The Maryland researchers write, "In particular, the future state of a chaotic system can be substantially altered by a tiny perturbation. If we can accurately sense the state of the system and intelligently perturb it, this presents us with the possibility of rapidly directing the system to a desired state."
If physical and mental states are analogous, imagine what this might mean in terms of therapeutic intervention. In fact, it is the theory of all therapeutic intervention, but in practice the effect is unpredictable, both in occurrence and change over time. Psychologist used to conjecture that one third of clients get better, one third get worse, and one third stay about the same. This formula is debatable, but the healing powers of placebo and normal recovery with time of many ailments are commonly recognized. Understanding the therapeutic nature of chaos might increase positive results.
CHAOS AND PERCEPTION
Walter J. Freeman (U.C., Berkeley) is the pioneer in applying chaos theory to perception and the interface between sensory-motor information and brain patterns. He says, "the brain transforms sensory messages into conscious perceptions almost instantly. Chaotic, collective activity involving millions of neurons seems essential for such rapid recognition." (SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, February, 1991). In other words, "brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world." He has created a new physiological metaphor, where chaotic behavior serves as the essential ground state for the neural perceptual apparatus. He proposes a mechanism for acquiring new forms of patterned activity corresponding to new learning. (BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1987) 10:2).
Researchers speculate that chaos underlies the ability of the brain to respond flexibly to the outside world and to generate novel activity patterns, including those that are experienced as fresh ideas (also fresh behavior, emotions, belief systems, mythologies, etc.). Chaos results in meaning-laden perception, a gestalt, that is unique to each individual. Chaos is implicated in human perception as a multi-sensory phenomenon. The controlled chaos of the brain is more than an accidental by-product, like "putting your brain in neutral." Indeed, it may be the chief property that makes the brain different from an artificial-intelligence machine.
One profound advantage chaos may confer on the brain is that chaotic systems continually produce novel activity patterns. The ability to create activity patterns may underlie the brain's ability to generate insight and the "trials" of trial-and-error problem-solving. These chaotic patterns have been documented in the olfactory system. This is the system most efficient for recalling a memory gestalt. Just recall how an old familiar scent can bring memories flooding back. Gamma bursts across large cortical regions involved in recognizing visual images have also been found. Brain patterns are identical whether experiences are imaginal or real-time. The stimulation to the visual cortex is identical. In neuroscience, a new paradigm for the general dynamics of perception is emerging.
The brain seeks information, mainly by directing an individual to look, listen, feel, and sniff. The search results from self-organizing activity in the limbic system (that part of the brain that includes the entorihinal cortex and is thought to be involved in emotion and memory). It funnels a search command to the motor systems. As the motor command is transmitted, the limbic system issues what is called a reafference message, alerting all of the sensory systems to prepare to respond to the new information.
And respond they do, with every neuron in a given region participating in a collective activity--a burst. Synchronous activity in each system is then transmitted back to the limbic system. There it combines with a similarly generated output from the other sensory systems to form a GESTALT. Then, within a fraction of a second, another search for information is demanded, and the sensory systems are prepared again by reafference.
Excitatory inputs at synapses generate electric currents that follow in closed loops within the recipient neuron toward its axon, across the cell membrane into the extra-cellular space and, in the space, back to the synapse. The existence of chaos affects the scientific method itself. The classic approach to verifying a theory is to make predictions and test them against experimental data. If the phenomena are chaotic, however, long-term predictions are intrinsically impossible.
Chaos demonstrates that a system can have complicated behavior that emerges as a consequence of simple nonlinear interaction of only a few components. The ability to obtain detailed knowledge of a system's structure has undergone a tremendous advance in recent years. Yet, the ability to integrate this knowledge has been stymied by the lack of a proper perceptual framework within which to describe qualitative behavior.
The interaction of components on one scale can lead to complex global behavior on a larger scale that, in general, cannot be deduced from knowledge of individual components. Chaos may provide the possibility of putting variability under evolutionary control. Even the process of intellectual progress relies on the injection of new ideas and on new ways of connecting old ideas.
Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and molds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be exercise of WILL. In this light, chaos provides a mechanism that allows for FREE WILL within a world governed by deterministic laws. In other words, Newton's laws are only local ordinances.
Chaos suggests causal relationships where none were previously suspected. Studies have discovered chaotic activity in the brain. Chaos is evident in the tendency of vast collections of neurons to shift abruptly and simultaneously from one complex activity pattern to another in response to the smallest of inputs. In healing terms, this implies that ONE TRAUMATIC EVENT CAN SHAPE A LIFE; ONE INTENSE THERAPEUTIC EVENT CAN RESHAPE IT.
Trauma can create a large disturbance both immediately and exponentially over time. Healing spreads out through the individual life like ripples on a pool of water. This changeability is the prime characteristic of many chaotic systems. It is not harmful to the brain. In fact, it may be the very property that makes perception possible. Consciousness may well be the subjective experience of this recursive process of motor command, reafference and perception. If so, it enables the brain to plan and prepare for each subsequent action on the basis of past action, sensory input, and perceptual synthesis. In short, an act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stimulus. It is a step in a trajectory by which brains grow, reorganize themselves and reach into their environment to change to their own advantage.
Consciousness is not confined to the ordinary state of awareness. Dreams (and other non-ordinary states) can be used for healing by employing the imagination to create new realities within the psyche which facilitates multi-state education. This learning can supersede physical history, according to the "changing history" principle of NLP, (Neurolinguistic Programming), wherein a reiteration of past trauma is reprocessed and supersedes the historical version.
The latest dream research has shown that DREAMS HELP US LEARN. Tasks performed or information gleaned during the day are assimilated into long-term memory during dreams. Researchers found that those whose dreams were interrupted experienced more difficulty in absorbing what they learned that given day. The same holds true if what is learned comes through dreamhealing.
The poet William Blake wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." Such cleansing would not perhaps be desirable. Without the protection of the doors of perception -- that is, without the self-controlled chaotic activity of the cortex, from which perceptions spring -- people and animals would be overwhelmed by infinity. The lack of external driving means the activity is self-generated. Such self-organization is characteristic of chaotic systems.
Chaos theory is based on the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics. But it is also a set of attitudes toward complexity--a new way of seeing, that moves from fragmentation toward integration. It evolved through the discovery of strange attractors (remember, the cosmic principle of attraction, Eros). Strange attractors can even be plotted in free will, as we have discussed. The concept of free will as a strange attractor brings up philosophical and theological implications. Again, it presents a different relationship than a mechanistic model between human beings and the Higher Power.
Chaos theory does suggest that God, in the forefront of science as usual has outstripped us once again. This is less surprising than you might suppose: science of late, arcane sub-atomic physics in particular, has begun to implicate a higher presence. The second coming may arrive as fractal geometry on some lab computer screen. That our universe is irrational and unjust has long been a forceful argument against the Higher Power's existence. Yet all the randomness we perceive from Big Bang through Big Whimper may, in fact, contain secret, huge rhythms of creation and destiny. There can be no more tremendous paradox -- suitable to an omnipotent creator -- than order-from-chaos.
No: ORDER-IN-CHAOS. So even chance--still obstinate, still anarchic--is not incompatible with divine arrangement. We have begun to apprehend a new description of certainty. It may have all the traits that characterize disorder and yet be under law, and those who ask, "How can God exist when there is chaos in our universe?" may have answered their own questions. Research on the chaotic brain is yielding new models of behavior. Nonlinear dynamics is being used to focus on overall patterns of behavior, describing how stable or unstable they are and pinpointing the circumstances that make them change.
Results are showing that changes in patterns of electrical activity in the brain are linked to changes in behavioral states. What we used to consider as meaningless background noise, output of large groups of nerve cells in the brain, are evidently quite meaningful. They just contain so much information, it blurs together and looks like no coherent message. Our perceptions can't decode it because they respond through an all-or-nothing relay system.
For a complementary approach to chaos in the brain, see Karl Pribram's BRAIN AND PERCEPTION, 1991. He speaks there of a theory of nonlocal cortical processing in the brain, and the geometry of neurodynamics. But Pribram is now exploring chaos, as his attendance at the first conference on psychology and chaos theory in 1991 shows. We can eagerly await his conclusions. NEUROANATOMY AND CHAOS
World famous researcher, E. Roy John [Brain Research Lab, New York University Medical Center] has edited the definitive book on the MACHINERY OF THE MIND (1990). It includes integrative processes, strange attractors and synchronization, cognitive functions, visual information processing, human development, and brain imaging. All are related to chaos theory and the hardwiring of the brain. Neuroscientists have dissected the brain minutely defining all structure. They have charted the wetware circuits of nerve pathways and identified some 60 neurotransmitters.
But they could never explain the synergistics of an emotion, idea, act of will, or consciousness itself. Mathematical metaphors help us visualize the bigger picture. Chaos theory has led to the discovery of amazing variations among vast collections of neurons. This is one application of chaos theory, since nonlinear equations can describe many phenomena from the subatomic to cosmic level. Nonlinear phenomena are sustained by complex loops of feedback in which the outcomes of initial inputs are diverted back into the system at unpredictable points in its cycle. This certainly bears on many aspects of perception, consciousness, and personality.
In the cult film, EAT THE SUN, the Videru Telemahandi teaches that, "The ecology of the soul is to recycle one's consciousness." The body uses complex feedback loops to maintain biochemical balance. These "biological oscillators" lead to reactions which reveal nonlinear dynamics. The structure emerges around a strange attractor, and the system may vacillate erratically, but it always stays within a bounded range or norm. The boundaries are strictly defined mathematically, but within the chaos is apparent method in the madness.
PERSONALITY TRAITS AS STRANGE ATTRACTORS
Chaos is not total randomness, but implies an implicate, "hidden", or occult order within the nature of reality. The strange attractor construct of chaos theory offers a new way to think about personality. It is exceptionally difficult to predict the specific behavior of an individual, yet if we know a person, his or her behavior seldom suprises us. The observation that personality varies within limits may be understood within the context of chaos theory. Specifically, the strange attractor construct is proposed to account for nonperiodic, nonrandom order. Understanding and predicting human behavior remains a fundamental goal of psychology.
Personality theory developed for this reason. Yet, accurate prediction of behavior continues to elude personality researchers. Chaos theory provides a framework within which the puzzling inconsistency of traditional measures of personality can be understood. The consistency may be there, but in nonlinear form under the guise of the strange attractor's "hidden order." Personality is inferred from behavior and personality consistency refers to similar behavior in similar situations (cross-situational consistency) and/or similar behavior over time (temporal consistency). Consistency, here, simply refers to the repeated presentation of the same or similar behavior.
Some theories of personality stress static or stable traits, while other emphasize states or psychodynamics. Others find that traits and states are virtually indistinguishable and consider the distinction arbitrary. Regardless of whether personality is governed by characteristic dispositions (traits) or an intrapsychic balance of forces, the effect upon observed behavior is the same; that is, stable internal factors generate behavioral continuity.
The person's interpretation or "mental representation" is his "true situation," not the actual external environment. Our intuitive belief in the consistency of personality may be derived from a real, but nonlinear, order underlying human behavior. It forms the basis of self-simulation moving through time. There is a nonlinear influence in negative feedback the organism perceives. It molds behavior.
Chaos theory provides tools for identifying complex, nonlinear relationships. Behavior is variable, but always within the limits and ranges set by the person's structure itself. Unpredictable variation within limits sounds very much like the operation of a strange attractor. Chaotic systems have a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
For humans this means, any perturbation from conception onward can be a determining factor in structure and personality. If personality or personality traits function as a strange attractor of behavior, then correlations of behavior over time would not be expected to be very high. Exact behavior would be unpredictable from moment to moment, but would remain within loose boundaries--those of the strange attractor. All potential behavior would not have an equal probability of occurrence. In contrast, if behavior were random, then every possible behavior would have an equal probability of occurrence at any given time. It would not be surprising to discover that personality traits can be construed as strange attractors of behavior.
Natural chaos allows adaptation and self-organization so it is an evolutionary advantage. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions ensures that long term prediction of human behavior remains unattainable. Prediction within limits, as probabilities of certain behaviors, may be possible based on the strange attractor characterizing the personality or personality trait of an individual. One may have a particular personality trait that seems to operate like a strange attractor at one time, but later the trait enters a phase of periodicity. Also, types of attractors may differ from trait to trait within a particular individual.
Research may reveal that assessments of personality or a personality trait over time generate data that leads to a fractal correlation dimension. Such evidence would confirm that personality or that a particular personality trait may be described as a strange attractor of associated behavior. Essentially, the same statements can be made for dynamic states of consciousness, if states and traits are interchangeable.
Creation came out of chaos, is surrounded by chaos and will end in chaos. --Anonymous
Despite their training, psychoanalysts have a dread of unconscious meaning, which really translates into a dread of chaos. --Robert Langs
CREATION, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND CREATIVITY
According to classical Greek myth, only Chaos existed in the beginning. The random element eventually produced Gaea, the deep-breasted earth or matter, from within infinite potential. For matter to exist, the force of attraction also had to appear (super-celestial Eros). Uranus, the starry heavens, is Gaea's first-born child. In other words, the first descent of matter into the threshold of concrete existence came from a chaotic matrix.
This cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction lies at the heart of chaos theory. It bears directly on another Greek archetype that we all share--the psyche. Just as the ancient pantheon provided a foundational orientation for the Greeks, chaos theory can provide us with a model for constructing cognitive maps. By embracing the chaos in our lives--learning to re-honor the principle--we can begin balancing out millennia of identification which held that only order equates with "good."
Part of our cultural heritage is the programming that we should stave off chaos at every point. Some speculate this was a patriarchal reaction against the ancient matriarchal, chaos cultures. Sometimes it is psychologically more fruitful to "let go" of control, pass through that de-structured state, and discover what happens on the other side.
Chaos is definitely part of the process of creativity. It generates the new order spontaneously from deep within itself. What makes it imperative for us to embrace the new scientific paradigm implied by chaos theory? By rejecting chaos, you reject Gaea. And she is not only the Earth, the love of the planet, the integrity of life forms, but also love of your own physical embodiment. Whatever the essence of chaos is, we are that. By rejecting it, we run the danger of rejecting our selves.
Chaos is the essence of life. Chaos is essential to health. Research has shown that chaos in bodily functions signals health, while periodic behavior can foreshadow disease. Whether Eros (the principle of attraction) is evident in the mathematics of a strange attractor or in human behavior, there is a resonance with Chaos and Gaea. Chaos has laws of its own, which harmonize with order. Chaos describes the structural growth patterns in nature, and the patterns of breakdown, entropy, or decay. It describes systems far-from-equilibrium, not just the rarely found stable state. It applies to all complex dynamic systems, which certainly includes human beings. It provides a new perspective on reality. Adaption of this perspective into our worldview helps us understand whole systems.
Chaos theory leads to a new vision of matter, one no longer passive, as described in the mechanistic worldview, but one associated with spontaneous, creative, orderly activity. This scientific frontier is fertile ground for new metaphors and models. It will help us solve some of our practical problems, both personal and global. Throughout history many innovative discoveries have come through the process of reverie, daydreaming, or inspiration.
Research has also shown that the greater the mental challenge, the more chaotic the activity of the subject's brain (Rapp). After incubating a solution in the chaotic state, we seem to "get a brainstorm." Certain brainstates, high in virtually random, chaotic activity are conducive to creativity. Let's hope that by "letting go" of our old rigid structures and beliefs, and letting chaos back into our lives consciously, that we can find more of those creative solutions. Both scientific and intuitive apprehensions of chaos will lead the way.
A NEW DIALOGUE WITH NATURE
Chaos theory came on the scientific scene in the late 1970s. It was introduced by a self-motivated group of Santa Cruz scientists. As students they had to fight their faculty to pursue their fascination with this unorthodox subject. After its initial presentation, chaos became a buzzword in many disciplines, as scientists thought of ways it applied in their fields. Even more interesting, scientists began crossing over fields, developing multidisciplinary approaches.
Chaos is not entirely random, but is an occult, "hidden," or implicate order within nature. Cosmology, weather prediction, animal migration patterns, quantum mechanics, and more were affected. We now have terms like "quantum chaos," and chaotic planetary motion. Chaos is a major influence from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Some astronomers even postulate a cosmic Great Attractor toward which all the local galaxies are moving.
Is the earth, our solar system, and galaxy really on a pilgrimage to the Great Attractor? Technically, the attractor isn't only "out there." Our galaxy is part of the attractor, whatever it is. With a sphere influence of 300 million light-years, it is one of the most gigantic known entities in the cosmos. And, it may have relatives! At the other end of the scale, it appears that chaos is found in the distribution levels of certain atomic systems and wave patterns (Gutzwiller, 1992).
Chaotic systems lie beyond the description of normal perturbation theory. Quantum chaos may be a way of linking quantum systems and chaotic systems. One interesting property of chaotic systems of quantum energy is that they cannot be decomposed. Chaos also shows up in the way electrons scatter. Probably the first popular book to discuss chaos theory was ORDER OUT OF CHAOS: MAN'S NEW DIALOGUE WITH NATURE, by Ilya Prigogine, published by Bantam in 1984. By far, the most widely read has become James Gleick's now-classic, CHAOS: MAKING A NEW SCIENCE (1987).
Others, like THE TURBULENT MIRROR, Briggs and Peat, (1989), have sought to express the theory more simply, and poetically. Some books have focused on the computer graphics, known as fractals, which have emerged from this new science. Their natural beauty holds an aesthetic fascination. Even the art world discovered chaos through fractals. Images of dynamic fractals are used in discos, like light shows. Chaos software has brought them to the home PC. Chaos moved through science into the arts and humanities. Chaos bears on our consciousness, physiology, perception, and psychology. We can learn a lot from what chaos theory tells us about the nature of reality. Most of reality, instead of being orderly, stable, and equilibrated, is fluctuating and boiling with change, disorder, and process. 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. 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. It provides pause for reconsidering the nature of time and the role of chance during transformation from one state to another. Chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation. But, of course, we can never determine when the next bifurcation will arise.
Chance rises phoenix-like to take its place among physical processes. Thus, nonequilibrium, the flux of matter and energy, is a source of order. In the new concept of matter, matter is active. Paradoxically, matter leads then to irreversible processes, yet irreversible processes (entropy) organize matter (negentropy).
Chaos theory is therefore a new evolutionary paradigm, based in dynamics and thermodynamics. Irreversibility seems to be a source of order, coherence, or organization. Time, reality, and reversibility/irreversibility are closely related. The implication is that "time" is a real dimension, not merely introduced through human observation. Irreversibility is not a universal phenomenon, but it is not necessarily subjective, either.
Our human reality is embedded in the flow of time. It appears that our consciousness creates that sense of time flow by information processing, but it may be a given. The question then becomes, "what is the specific structure of dynamic systems that permits them to distinguish past and future?" If we can answer that, and determine the minimum complexity involved, perhaps we can be more precise about the roots of time in nature. The irreversibility of time is itself closely connected to entropy. To make time flow backward we would have to overcome an infinite entropy barrier. Natural systems contain essential elements of randomness and irreversibility. After a bifurcation there can be no return to the old condition. Time has both linear and nonlinear qualities.
Time might be described, rather than as a flow, as a dimensional manifold of infinite processes, the ultimate feedback loop. All biological systems are dissipative structures which are self-organizing (DNA) and self-iterating (reproduction). The type of system which evolves is critically dependent on the conditions in which the structure is formed. We can speculate that the gravitational field of earth, as well as EM fields play an essential role in the selection mechanism of self-organization [see EMBRYONIC HOLOGRAPHY, Miller and Webb, 1973].
Chaos theory has caused us to reexamine the concept of matter as inert and without consciousness. It expresses its own quality of consciousness and determinism, a type of awareness also seen in some quantum phenomena. According to Prigogine, in equilibrium matter is "blind," but in far-from-equilibrium conditions it begins to be able to perceive, to "take into account," in its way of functioning, differences in the external world (such as weak gravitational or electrical fields). [see THE DIAMOND BODY on scalar physics, Miller and Miller, 1982].
Prigogine and Stengers comment further on the so-called consciousness of dynamic systems: Near bifurcation, systems present large fluctuations. Such systems seem to "hesitate" among various possible directions of evolution, and the famous law of large numbers in its usual sense breaks down. A small fluctuation may start an entirely new evolution that will drastically change the whole behavior of the macroscopic system. The analogy with social phenomena, even with history is inescapable. Far from opposing "chance" and "necessity," we now see both aspects as essential in the description of nonlinear systems far from equilibrium. This is very different than the static view of classical dynamics or the evolutionary view associated with entropy. Perhaps this is one intuitive perception the Greeks had when they deified these principles. "Necessity" is the goddess Ananke, while "chance" and opportunism corresponds with Hermes. The whole pantheon evolves through these principles from the pure chaos of the source.
In FACING THE GODS, James Hillman points out the common identity of Necessity and Chaos with anxiety: The psychological viewpoint sees Necessity and Chaos not only as explanatory principles only in the realm of metaphysics; they are also mythic events taking place also and always in the soul, and they are the fundamental archai of the human condition. To these two principles the pathe (or motions) of the soul can be linked. Psychology has already recognized the faceless, nameless Chaos, this "sacred and crazy movement" in the soul, as anxiety, and by naming it such, psychology has directly evoked the Goddess Ananke, from whom the word anxiety derives. If anxiety truly belongs to Ananke, of course, it cannot be "mastered by the rational will."
This creation process continues to this day, through every moment, a dance of creation and destruction. It takes place in the quantum flux, as virtual entities pop in and out of physical manifestation. It takes place in the crucible of new and dying stars, galaxies, and perhaps our entire universe. Chaos may even be the ground state of multiple universes.
MEASURES OF COMPLEXITY AND CHAOS
Turbulence was one of the key phenomena that motivated the resurgence of interest in nonlinear dynamical systems. It was, after all, investigation into the mechanisms for turbulence that led to the invention of the term "strange attractor" in 1971. The turbulence that is described by strange attractors is "turbulence in time"--deterministic chaos, or temporal chaos in current terminology. In the past decade, a vocabulary for the quantitative characterization of temporal chaos was developed. It has been used to describe and analyze an incredible variety of phenomena in practically all fields of science and engineering. The dimensions of strange attractors, the entropies, and Lyapunov exponents describing motion on the attractors, have been used to analyze heartbeats, brainwaves, chemical reactions, lasers, the economy, flames, radiation, and fluid flow.
Yet this vocabulary is not sufficient to describe turbulence, for its complex nature exists in time and space. Time evolution is seamlessly united with the quantitative characterization of spatial complexity. Turbulence is dynamical, nonlinear spatio-temporal complexity. Dimensions, entropies, and Lyapunov exponents [don't worry about this one; there is no test later] have become the standard measures of temporal chaotic behavior.
Dimensions lend themselves to computer modeling of fractal attractors. Fractals visibly demonstrate harmonies that may not be apparent within the mathematical formulas. Graphic generators make this beauty visible, where it speaks to us geometrically, intuitively. The large variety of fields in which dimensions, entropies, and exponents have been used to characterize temporal evolution is an indication of the extent to which these quantities have become elements of a scientific vocabulary that is now nearly universal. These quantities are used to characterize astrophysical data, dendritic growth, electroencephalographic and electrocardiographic data, nerve fibers, epidemics, etc. As one of the most basic applications of these methods, dimensions have been used to discriminate between chaos and noise.
Nonlinear dynamical systems produce complex temporal or spatial patterns by stretching and folding regions of phase-space in an iterative way. Space and time get folded like so much multi-layered pastry dough [more on this aspect shortly]. As a result of the unfolding procedure, the dynamics is described as a sequence of deterministic paths (blocks of symbols) which appear as random in time, with given transition probabilities. This would seem to imply that chaos underlies the implicate order [see Bohm, WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER].
It has already been shown as an influence in quantum probability, the mechanism of quantum flux. Chance and necessity may not be widely separated phenomena--they may be two sides of the same chaotic coin. A large variety of physical systems exhibit seemingly disordered (turbulent, chaotic) spatio-temporal behavior which, behind its apparent irregularity, hides a high degree of organization.
The observation that low-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems are able to generate aperiodic bounded solutions gave rise to an increasing interest in the study of chaotic behavior, which led to the definition of strange attractors. These objects have been geometrically described in terms of fractal dimensions and, dynamically, by means of Lyapunov exponents and metric entropies. Their future time evolution can be predicted only for finite (relatively short) times, although they are fully deterministic, because of the exponential amplification of the uncertainty on the initial conditions.
Highly structured patterns can be produced, which are not necessarily related to chaotic motion. Examples of "complex" behavior are provided by biological systems, hydrodynamic flows, spin glasses, neural networks, fractals, cellular automata, and nonlinear dynamic systems. It is easy to show that entropy and Lyapunov exponents are not useful indicators for the characterization of complexity.
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.
There are mechanisms for the creation of defects. In deterministic systems, several mechanisms can lead to their formation, including initial conditions and phase instabilities. VORTICES can be induced by initial conditions, such as dislocations. Phase instability plays a crucial role in the creation of defects. Transitions which involve vortices, as for example the Hopf bifurcation, lead to patterns which are described in terms of a phase.
These transitions are in some sense "phase breaking" transitions. More complicated patterns, as for example standing waves, require more than a single phase. In more than one dimension, large enough systems can sustain vortices. Phase fluctuations eventually become large enough to break, locally in space and time, this "phase only" description. In regions where large gradients appear, the creation of defects destroys the quasi-long range order induced by the pattern.
In one dimension, defects are spatio-temporal, i.e. they occur at a given spatial position, for a given time. Lastly, defects can be created in the transient process accompanying a subcritical transition. Defects play an important role in the spatio-temporal destruction of the order induced by symmetry breaking transition. The most efficient way to create defects in these non-equilibrium systems is related to phase instabilities.
Experimental evidence of such a defect-mediated picture of turbulence exists. All this sounds very far afield from human life, but is it really? Aside from the literal expression of chaos, there is its metaphorical aspect. If we re-read the above with an intuitive eye, it might provide archetypal insight on depression, nervous breakdown, personality defects, life transitions, phases of development, and other human realities. [See CHAOS THEORY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXES, Miller, 1991].
Chaos relates directly to information theory. Quantitative measures of chaos have been developed and used to connect theory and experiment. All these systems are closed. Imposing closed boundary conditions means the system "interacts with itself at all times," so the effects of a perturbation to one location cannot escape, but influences the dynamics of the entire system. This also holds true for individual human beings. The primary instability in such systems is absolute and information on the dynamics of spatially distributed, but closed systems may be obtained by studying the temporal behavior at a single location. Indeed, the vast majority of experimental investigations have assumed the observed chaotic systems have finite spatial extent, without information flows across their boundaries.
Again, also applicable to the individual person. In open systems, information may enter and leave the system. It is not always possible to describe the dynamics by the time series at a single, fixed location. In contrast to closed systems, open systems frequently possess downstream propagating primary instabilities. In human life, a trauma at a given point will create exponential problems (turbulence) further on in time, until and unless one passes through the chaotic breakdown into a place of healing--into flow.
Technically, spatial development of flow may depend crucially on external forcing, often by low amplitude noise. For human beings, the healing space is often one with so-called "white noise," like the flowing of a waterfall or ocean surf, or the rustling or whoosh of the wind. We create the same state internally when we enter the alpha brainwave state. These are generated by the dynamics of chaos, and their healing, soothing effect on our personality is well known to nearly everyone.
THE PARADOX IN CHAOS
There is order in chaos; randomness has an underlying geometrical form. Chaos imposes fundamental limits on prediction, but it also suggests causal relationships where none were previously suspected. In chaotic systems, since there is no clear relation between cause and effect, such phenomena are said to have random elements. Simple deterministic systems with only a few elements can generate random behavior. The randomness is fundamental. Gathering more information does not make it go away. Randomness generated in this way has come to be called chaos. A seeming paradox is that chaos is deterministic, not probabilistic. It is generated by fixed rules that do not involve any elements of chance.
A paradox is a union of opposites in a transcendent third. In principle the future is completely determined by the past, but in practice small uncertainties are amplified. Even though the behavior is predictable in the short term, it is unpredictable in the long term. This is because any effect, no matter how small, quickly reaches macroscopic proportions. Graphic depictions of attractors allow us to map a dynamical system's behavior in discreet-time or phase-space. It helps us visualize a complex situation.
Roughly speaking, an attractor is what the behavior of a system settles down to, or is attracted to. Some systems do not come to rest in the long term but instead cycle periodically through a sequence of states. An analogy might be the cycling between competing attractors in bi-polar disorder, or manic-depression. What slight perturbation causes the switch? A system may have several attractors [complexes, archetypes, subpersonalities?] The set of points that evolve to an attractor is called its basin of attraction. What's New with My Subject?
STRETCHING TIME AND FOLDING SPACE
The key to understanding chaotic behavior lies in understanding a simple stretching and folding operation, which takes place in the state space. The orbits on a chaotic attractor are shuffled by this process, much as a deck of cards is shuffled by a dealer. The randomness of the chaotic orbits is the result of the shuffling process. The process of stretching and folding happens repeatedly, creating folds within folds ad infinitum. A chaotic attractor is, in other words, a fractal--an object that reveals more detail as it is increasingly magnified.
Crutchfield, et al describe, in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, how chaos mixes the orbits in state space in precisely the same way a baker mixes bread dough by kneading it. Just imagine rolling out the dough and placing a big drop of food coloring in the center. As you spread and fold the dough, you create many layers of alternating blue and white. Then finally the dye becomes thoroughly mixed with the dough. Chaos works the same way, except that instead of mixing dough it mixes the state space.
The state of the system is located not in a single point but rather within a small region of state space. The stretching and folding operation of a chaotic attractor systematically removes the initial information and replaces it with new information. The stretch makes small-scale uncertainties larger, and the fold brings widely separated trajectories together and erases large-scale information. Thus chaotic attractors act as a kind of pump bringing microscopic fluctuations up to a macroscopic expression. In humans only small fluctuations in mental processes are required initially to amplify over time into major changes or re-visioning of reality.
To slightly alter experience of a psychological complex is to work directly on the ego. Any microscopic fluctuations we make in therapy are amplified into real-time. This reflects on our concepts of transformation, and permission for change to occur in a nonlinear manner in personality. After a brief time interval the uncertainty of the initial conditions covers the entire attractor and all predictive power is lost: THERE IS SIMPLY NO CAUSAL CONNECTION BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE. There is also no psychological mandate to adhere to an outworn self-simulation. The change can be instantaneous, unfolding over time. Healing is an ever-present potential. Chaotic systems generate randomness on their own without the need for any external random inputs.
Based on this, we can make quite a case for allowing clients to develop their own therapeutic metaphors in therapy. Some therapists "import" teaching tales or metaphors into the process which they feel could help the client. The imaginal free association of dream healing seems to open them to the flow of their own process and imagery. Facilitating that process, the therapist functions best as a guide. Random behavior comes from more than just the amplification of errors and the loss of the ability to predict it; it is due to the complex orbits generated by stretching and folding.
If a system is chaotic, how chaotic is it? A measure of chaos is the entropy of the motion, which roughly speaking is the average rate of stretching and folding, or the average rate at which information is produced.
CHAOS AND HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY
Nonlinear chaos refers to a constrained kind of randomness, which, remarkably, may be associated with fractal geometry. Fractal geometry is the basis of human anatomy, but it pervades nature. Fractal structures are often the remnants of chaotic dynamics. Wherever a chaotic process has shaped the environment (the seashore, the atmosphere, a geological fault), fractals are likely to be left behind.
Fractals consist of varying size and orientation but similar shape. Certain neurons (nerve fibers), for instance, have a fractal-like structure. If one examines such neurons through a low-power microscope lens, one can discern asymmetric branches, called dendrites, connected to the cell bodies. At slightly higher magnifications, smaller branches on the larger ones are observable. At even higher magnification, one sees another level of detail--branches on branches on branches. Although at some level the branching of a neuron stops, idealized fractals have infinite detail.
The details of a fractal at a certain scale are similar (though not necessarily identical) to those of the structure seen at larger or smaller scales. All fractals have this internal, look-alike property called self-similarity. Because length is not a meaningful concept for fractals, mathematicians calculate the "dimension" of a fractal to quantify how it fills space. Self-similarity of a system implies that features of a structure or a process look alike at different scales or lengths of time. The greater the dimension of a fractal, the greater the chance that a given region of space contains a piece of that fractal.
In the human body fractal-like structures abound in networks of blood vessels, nerves, and ducts. The most carefully studied fractal in the body is the system of tubes that transport gas to and from the lung. The heart also exhibits fractal anatomy or fractal architecture. Fractal branches or folds greatly amplify the surface area available for absorption (as in the intestine), distribution or collection (by the blood vessels, bile ducts, and bronchial tubes) and information processing (by the nerves).
Fractal structures, partly by virtue of their redundancy and irregularity, are robust and resistant to injury. Fractal structures in the human body arise from the slow dynamics of embryonic development and evolution. These processes, like others that produce fractal structures, exhibit deterministic chaos. In the early 1980s, when investigators began to apply chaos theory to physiological systems, they expected that chaos would be most apparent in diseased or aging systems, but contrary to what training and intuition might suggest, the opposite is true.
For example, careful analysis reveals that healthy individuals have heart rates that fluctuate considerably even at rest. To identify the type of system dynamics (chaotic or periodic), one determines the trajectories for many different initial conditions. Then one searches for an attractor: a region of phase space that attracts trajectories. The strange attractor describes systems that are neither static nor periodic. In the phase space near a strange attractor, two trajectories that started under almost identical conditions will diverge over the short term and become very different over the long term.
The system described by a strange attractor is chaotic. Recent evidence suggests that chaos is a normal feature of other components of the nervous system, including those components responsible for hormone secretion. This might account for a degree of randomness in mood and emotions, related to secretion of neurotransmitters in the brain. It might also be the mechanism for a dream "putting a mood on you" after you awaken. It is a real-time effect of chaos reaching out from the subconscious mind to the conscious.
Chaos can be generated in a model of the olfactory system. This research appeared in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, February 1991. This model incorporates a feedback loop among the "neurons" and a delay in response times. There is a recognized importance of time delays in producing chaos. Why should the heart rate and other systems controlled by the nervous system exhibit chaotic dynamics? Such dynamics offer many functional advantages.
Chaotic systems operate under a wide range of conditions and are therefore adaptable and flexible. This plasticity allows systems to cope with the urgent requirements of an unpredictable and changing environment. However, the periodic patterns in disease and the apparently chaotic behavior in health do not imply that all pathologies are associated with increased regularity. Controlled chaos may play a roll in the human ability to quickly produce strings of different speech sounds. It seems biological systems may use chaos, and the richness in chaotic behavior, to change their behavior on the fly. Edward Ott, et al speculate (SCIENCE NEWS, "Ribbon of Chaos," January 26, 1991), that just small disturbances can radically alter a chaotic system's behavior--tiny adjustments can also stabilize their behavior.
The success of this strategy for controlling chaos hinges on the fact that the apparent randomness of a chaotic system is really only skin deep. Beneath this chaotic unpredictability hides an intricate but highly ordered structure--a complicated web of interwoven patterns of regular, or periodic, motion. Physicists from the Naval Surface Warfare System in Silver Springs, Maryland, have succeeded in experimentally controlling chaotic behavior in a magnetic ribbon. Normally, a chaotic system continually shifts from one pattern to another, creating an appearance of randomness. In controlling chaos, the idea is to lock the system into one particular type of repeating motion. William Ditto reports, "We don't avoid the chaos; we stay in the chaotic region. We take advantage of the system's sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
The trick is to exploit the fact that a chaotic system already encompasses an infinite number of unstable, periodic motions, or orbits. That makes it possible to zero in one particular type of motion, or periodic orbit, or to switch rapidly from one type of motion to another. In the past, most scientists and engineers considered a chaotic system's extreme sensitivity to initial conditions as something to be avoided. To ensure that, say, a chemical reaction or a bridge would function reliably and predictably, they tried to design systems that shunned chaos. However, chaos may offer a great advantage, allowing system designers greater flexibility and making possible systems that adapt more quickly to changing needs.
The Maryland researchers write, "In particular, the future state of a chaotic system can be substantially altered by a tiny perturbation. If we can accurately sense the state of the system and intelligently perturb it, this presents us with the possibility of rapidly directing the system to a desired state."
If physical and mental states are analogous, imagine what this might mean in terms of therapeutic intervention. In fact, it is the theory of all therapeutic intervention, but in practice the effect is unpredictable, both in occurrence and change over time. Psychologist used to conjecture that one third of clients get better, one third get worse, and one third stay about the same. This formula is debatable, but the healing powers of placebo and normal recovery with time of many ailments are commonly recognized. Understanding the therapeutic nature of chaos might increase positive results.
CHAOS AND PERCEPTION
Walter J. Freeman (U.C., Berkeley) is the pioneer in applying chaos theory to perception and the interface between sensory-motor information and brain patterns. He says, "the brain transforms sensory messages into conscious perceptions almost instantly. Chaotic, collective activity involving millions of neurons seems essential for such rapid recognition." (SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, February, 1991). In other words, "brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world." He has created a new physiological metaphor, where chaotic behavior serves as the essential ground state for the neural perceptual apparatus. He proposes a mechanism for acquiring new forms of patterned activity corresponding to new learning. (BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1987) 10:2).
Researchers speculate that chaos underlies the ability of the brain to respond flexibly to the outside world and to generate novel activity patterns, including those that are experienced as fresh ideas (also fresh behavior, emotions, belief systems, mythologies, etc.). Chaos results in meaning-laden perception, a gestalt, that is unique to each individual. Chaos is implicated in human perception as a multi-sensory phenomenon. The controlled chaos of the brain is more than an accidental by-product, like "putting your brain in neutral." Indeed, it may be the chief property that makes the brain different from an artificial-intelligence machine.
One profound advantage chaos may confer on the brain is that chaotic systems continually produce novel activity patterns. The ability to create activity patterns may underlie the brain's ability to generate insight and the "trials" of trial-and-error problem-solving. These chaotic patterns have been documented in the olfactory system. This is the system most efficient for recalling a memory gestalt. Just recall how an old familiar scent can bring memories flooding back. Gamma bursts across large cortical regions involved in recognizing visual images have also been found. Brain patterns are identical whether experiences are imaginal or real-time. The stimulation to the visual cortex is identical. In neuroscience, a new paradigm for the general dynamics of perception is emerging.
The brain seeks information, mainly by directing an individual to look, listen, feel, and sniff. The search results from self-organizing activity in the limbic system (that part of the brain that includes the entorihinal cortex and is thought to be involved in emotion and memory). It funnels a search command to the motor systems. As the motor command is transmitted, the limbic system issues what is called a reafference message, alerting all of the sensory systems to prepare to respond to the new information.
And respond they do, with every neuron in a given region participating in a collective activity--a burst. Synchronous activity in each system is then transmitted back to the limbic system. There it combines with a similarly generated output from the other sensory systems to form a GESTALT. Then, within a fraction of a second, another search for information is demanded, and the sensory systems are prepared again by reafference.
Excitatory inputs at synapses generate electric currents that follow in closed loops within the recipient neuron toward its axon, across the cell membrane into the extra-cellular space and, in the space, back to the synapse. The existence of chaos affects the scientific method itself. The classic approach to verifying a theory is to make predictions and test them against experimental data. If the phenomena are chaotic, however, long-term predictions are intrinsically impossible.
Chaos demonstrates that a system can have complicated behavior that emerges as a consequence of simple nonlinear interaction of only a few components. The ability to obtain detailed knowledge of a system's structure has undergone a tremendous advance in recent years. Yet, the ability to integrate this knowledge has been stymied by the lack of a proper perceptual framework within which to describe qualitative behavior.
The interaction of components on one scale can lead to complex global behavior on a larger scale that, in general, cannot be deduced from knowledge of individual components. Chaos may provide the possibility of putting variability under evolutionary control. Even the process of intellectual progress relies on the injection of new ideas and on new ways of connecting old ideas.
Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and molds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be exercise of WILL. In this light, chaos provides a mechanism that allows for FREE WILL within a world governed by deterministic laws. In other words, Newton's laws are only local ordinances.
Chaos suggests causal relationships where none were previously suspected. Studies have discovered chaotic activity in the brain. Chaos is evident in the tendency of vast collections of neurons to shift abruptly and simultaneously from one complex activity pattern to another in response to the smallest of inputs. In healing terms, this implies that ONE TRAUMATIC EVENT CAN SHAPE A LIFE; ONE INTENSE THERAPEUTIC EVENT CAN RESHAPE IT.
Trauma can create a large disturbance both immediately and exponentially over time. Healing spreads out through the individual life like ripples on a pool of water. This changeability is the prime characteristic of many chaotic systems. It is not harmful to the brain. In fact, it may be the very property that makes perception possible. Consciousness may well be the subjective experience of this recursive process of motor command, reafference and perception. If so, it enables the brain to plan and prepare for each subsequent action on the basis of past action, sensory input, and perceptual synthesis. In short, an act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stimulus. It is a step in a trajectory by which brains grow, reorganize themselves and reach into their environment to change to their own advantage.
Consciousness is not confined to the ordinary state of awareness. Dreams (and other non-ordinary states) can be used for healing by employing the imagination to create new realities within the psyche which facilitates multi-state education. This learning can supersede physical history, according to the "changing history" principle of NLP, (Neurolinguistic Programming), wherein a reiteration of past trauma is reprocessed and supersedes the historical version.
The latest dream research has shown that DREAMS HELP US LEARN. Tasks performed or information gleaned during the day are assimilated into long-term memory during dreams. Researchers found that those whose dreams were interrupted experienced more difficulty in absorbing what they learned that given day. The same holds true if what is learned comes through dreamhealing.
The poet William Blake wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." Such cleansing would not perhaps be desirable. Without the protection of the doors of perception -- that is, without the self-controlled chaotic activity of the cortex, from which perceptions spring -- people and animals would be overwhelmed by infinity. The lack of external driving means the activity is self-generated. Such self-organization is characteristic of chaotic systems.
Chaos theory is based on the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics. But it is also a set of attitudes toward complexity--a new way of seeing, that moves from fragmentation toward integration. It evolved through the discovery of strange attractors (remember, the cosmic principle of attraction, Eros). Strange attractors can even be plotted in free will, as we have discussed. The concept of free will as a strange attractor brings up philosophical and theological implications. Again, it presents a different relationship than a mechanistic model between human beings and the Higher Power.
Chaos theory does suggest that God, in the forefront of science as usual has outstripped us once again. This is less surprising than you might suppose: science of late, arcane sub-atomic physics in particular, has begun to implicate a higher presence. The second coming may arrive as fractal geometry on some lab computer screen. That our universe is irrational and unjust has long been a forceful argument against the Higher Power's existence. Yet all the randomness we perceive from Big Bang through Big Whimper may, in fact, contain secret, huge rhythms of creation and destiny. There can be no more tremendous paradox -- suitable to an omnipotent creator -- than order-from-chaos.
No: ORDER-IN-CHAOS. So even chance--still obstinate, still anarchic--is not incompatible with divine arrangement. We have begun to apprehend a new description of certainty. It may have all the traits that characterize disorder and yet be under law, and those who ask, "How can God exist when there is chaos in our universe?" may have answered their own questions. Research on the chaotic brain is yielding new models of behavior. Nonlinear dynamics is being used to focus on overall patterns of behavior, describing how stable or unstable they are and pinpointing the circumstances that make them change.
Results are showing that changes in patterns of electrical activity in the brain are linked to changes in behavioral states. What we used to consider as meaningless background noise, output of large groups of nerve cells in the brain, are evidently quite meaningful. They just contain so much information, it blurs together and looks like no coherent message. Our perceptions can't decode it because they respond through an all-or-nothing relay system.
For a complementary approach to chaos in the brain, see Karl Pribram's BRAIN AND PERCEPTION, 1991. He speaks there of a theory of nonlocal cortical processing in the brain, and the geometry of neurodynamics. But Pribram is now exploring chaos, as his attendance at the first conference on psychology and chaos theory in 1991 shows. We can eagerly await his conclusions. NEUROANATOMY AND CHAOS
World famous researcher, E. Roy John [Brain Research Lab, New York University Medical Center] has edited the definitive book on the MACHINERY OF THE MIND (1990). It includes integrative processes, strange attractors and synchronization, cognitive functions, visual information processing, human development, and brain imaging. All are related to chaos theory and the hardwiring of the brain. Neuroscientists have dissected the brain minutely defining all structure. They have charted the wetware circuits of nerve pathways and identified some 60 neurotransmitters.
But they could never explain the synergistics of an emotion, idea, act of will, or consciousness itself. Mathematical metaphors help us visualize the bigger picture. Chaos theory has led to the discovery of amazing variations among vast collections of neurons. This is one application of chaos theory, since nonlinear equations can describe many phenomena from the subatomic to cosmic level. Nonlinear phenomena are sustained by complex loops of feedback in which the outcomes of initial inputs are diverted back into the system at unpredictable points in its cycle. This certainly bears on many aspects of perception, consciousness, and personality.
In the cult film, EAT THE SUN, the Videru Telemahandi teaches that, "The ecology of the soul is to recycle one's consciousness." The body uses complex feedback loops to maintain biochemical balance. These "biological oscillators" lead to reactions which reveal nonlinear dynamics. The structure emerges around a strange attractor, and the system may vacillate erratically, but it always stays within a bounded range or norm. The boundaries are strictly defined mathematically, but within the chaos is apparent method in the madness.
PERSONALITY TRAITS AS STRANGE ATTRACTORS
Chaos is not total randomness, but implies an implicate, "hidden", or occult order within the nature of reality. The strange attractor construct of chaos theory offers a new way to think about personality. It is exceptionally difficult to predict the specific behavior of an individual, yet if we know a person, his or her behavior seldom suprises us. The observation that personality varies within limits may be understood within the context of chaos theory. Specifically, the strange attractor construct is proposed to account for nonperiodic, nonrandom order. Understanding and predicting human behavior remains a fundamental goal of psychology.
Personality theory developed for this reason. Yet, accurate prediction of behavior continues to elude personality researchers. Chaos theory provides a framework within which the puzzling inconsistency of traditional measures of personality can be understood. The consistency may be there, but in nonlinear form under the guise of the strange attractor's "hidden order." Personality is inferred from behavior and personality consistency refers to similar behavior in similar situations (cross-situational consistency) and/or similar behavior over time (temporal consistency). Consistency, here, simply refers to the repeated presentation of the same or similar behavior.
Some theories of personality stress static or stable traits, while other emphasize states or psychodynamics. Others find that traits and states are virtually indistinguishable and consider the distinction arbitrary. Regardless of whether personality is governed by characteristic dispositions (traits) or an intrapsychic balance of forces, the effect upon observed behavior is the same; that is, stable internal factors generate behavioral continuity.
The person's interpretation or "mental representation" is his "true situation," not the actual external environment. Our intuitive belief in the consistency of personality may be derived from a real, but nonlinear, order underlying human behavior. It forms the basis of self-simulation moving through time. There is a nonlinear influence in negative feedback the organism perceives. It molds behavior.
Chaos theory provides tools for identifying complex, nonlinear relationships. Behavior is variable, but always within the limits and ranges set by the person's structure itself. Unpredictable variation within limits sounds very much like the operation of a strange attractor. Chaotic systems have a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
For humans this means, any perturbation from conception onward can be a determining factor in structure and personality. If personality or personality traits function as a strange attractor of behavior, then correlations of behavior over time would not be expected to be very high. Exact behavior would be unpredictable from moment to moment, but would remain within loose boundaries--those of the strange attractor. All potential behavior would not have an equal probability of occurrence. In contrast, if behavior were random, then every possible behavior would have an equal probability of occurrence at any given time. It would not be surprising to discover that personality traits can be construed as strange attractors of behavior.
Natural chaos allows adaptation and self-organization so it is an evolutionary advantage. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions ensures that long term prediction of human behavior remains unattainable. Prediction within limits, as probabilities of certain behaviors, may be possible based on the strange attractor characterizing the personality or personality trait of an individual. One may have a particular personality trait that seems to operate like a strange attractor at one time, but later the trait enters a phase of periodicity. Also, types of attractors may differ from trait to trait within a particular individual.
Research may reveal that assessments of personality or a personality trait over time generate data that leads to a fractal correlation dimension. Such evidence would confirm that personality or that a particular personality trait may be described as a strange attractor of associated behavior. Essentially, the same statements can be made for dynamic states of consciousness, if states and traits are interchangeable.
Continued at http://dreamhealing.iwarp.com/
Theta Training & Co-Consciousness
Theta Training & Co-Consciousness in Shared Journeys
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
IACS, (c)2001
Abstract: The theta range of brainwave activity is four to seven cycles per second. This is reportedly the psychic range of the mind and the area from which psychic experiences emerge is the temporal lobe, source of most theta generation. Children under seven have a predominance of theta, although they experience other ranges as well. Therefore, children in this age group are highly receptive to suggestions or “programming” from all sources. In theta, learning is extremely rapid, and may be subliminal.
Co-consciousness, the shared virtuality of the journey process, is a telepathic rapport wherein both participant’s brainwaves become synchronized or entrained, in essence, into a single holographic biofield. Co-consciousness might be measured via the observation of spontaneously shared, matching or resonating brainwave frequencies. Experimental verification (through EEG monitoring of both participants) of these hypotheses is scheduled as the second experiment in our pilot study of CRP phenomena.
Conversely, in the CRP training program, theta training in deep reverie via biofeedback offers trainees a definite experience of the target state. Most subjects can increase their alpha production easily; theta is more difficult but also can be increased. A second part of this experiment would be to induce shared states of consciousness via shared biofeedback where both parties synch to the same deepening rhythm toward a very deeply internalized focus.
Previous neurological studies conducted for Asklepia by Thomas A. Blakely, Ph.D. [Neuropsychology and Clinical Electroencephalography] of Lake Oswego, Oregon have indicated that co-consciousness reveals itself through unique brainwave patterns. The subject appears to be sleeping, but responds and remains internally focused, interactive within and without the shared Journey. This has implications for restructuring trauma patterns (state-bound learning), and the process of facilitating spontaneous psychophysical healing.
Theta brainwave generation is associated with dreams, creative thinking, and twilight states. Theta is probably the best model we have for the shared nature of co-consciousness. Spontaneous psi phenomena have been associated with theta waves by Krippner (1977), the Greens (1977), and more recently Persinger (1997). These phenomena include but are not limited to telepathy or ESP and synchronicities. The left hemisphere of the brain is linear and logical, while the right hemisphere is non-linear and perceives gestalts. Theta generation entrains both hemispheres in a single activity that creates a harmonization and sense of deep-felt meaning and well-being.
Preparing for the co-consciousness process can be described as "emptying". Any preconceived notions about self, the mentored or the process are completely suspended, and the Journey is approached with a "beginner's mind." But one's experiential skills and wisdom are brought to the process. Though theta generally indicates a deep sleep, it is possible to maintain awareness and be interactive in the journey process. Brainwaves will fluctuate back and forth across the alpha-theta boundary as both participants move deeper into the journey.
The ability to generate theta and remain consciously aware has been demonstrated by yogis and experienced meditators. It's almost like falling asleep, but then something else happens, a lucidity. In order to produce theta consciously it is necessary to quiet body, emotions and thoughts all at the same time. This leads to integrative reverie, a deep focus of attention. Training in theta reverie leads to integrative experiences of physical and psychological well-being.
What we sense and control is not the brainwave itself, but the state of consciousness, a gestalt of subtle existential cues. The production of the brainwaves themselves do not constitute a "state", as such. Brainwaves, in and of themselves, have no sensory representation. What can be detected and restructured are factors such as focus of attention, thought processes, and feelings. Theta training is awareness training, or level of awareness training, and facilitates creativity.
Theta rhythms are usually associated with near-unconscious or subliminally conscious states. The presence of theta is often accompanied by hypnagogic or dreamlike images. It is not a daydream-type experience, but a projection of impulses from unconscious sources. Although most untrained people are unable to maintain full consciousness during theta production, almost everyone maintains awareness during alpha.
In CRP there is a spontaneous rapport which kindles the participants’ oscillatory harmonization and entrainment with one another. Theta probably does not occur in the subject until the later portion of the journey when the rapid eye movement indicative of REM, alpha waves, and the arousal phase has yielded to the profound paradoxical relaxation of chaotic consciousness.
Dr. Stanley Krippner has demonstrated the reality of dream telepathy in his research on the subject, and we suggest this is the mechanism of co-consciousness in the mentoring of journeys. Ervin Laszlo (1996) has also attributed these properties to an existentially fundamental "psi field," which he likens to Jung's alchemical notion of unus mundus, where the realms of mind and matter merge. Such co-consciousness is a classical phenomenon in the practice of shamanism.
"In the 'experience of dual unity' a patient in an ASC [altered state of consciousness] experiences a loosening and melting of the boundaries of the body ego and a sense of merging with another person in a state of unity and oneness. In this experience, despite the feeling of being fused with another, the patient retains an awareness of his or her own identity. Then, in the experience of 'identification with other persons,' the patient, while merging experientially with another person, has a sense of complete identification to the point of losing the awareness of his or her own identity. Identification is total and complex, involving body image, physical sensations, emotional reactions and attitudes, thought processes, memories, facial expression, typical gestures and mannerisms, postures, movement, and even the inflection of the voice. The "other" or others can be someone in the presence of the patient or someone absent; he or she can be part of an experience from the subject's childhood, his or her ancestry, or even of a previous lifetime."
Lazlo goes on to recount Stan Grof's (1988) extensive work penetrating beyond normal limits of personal sensory experience into "biographic-recollection," perinatal, and transpersonal domains. He reports identifications with groups and group consciousness, animals, plants and botanical processes, oneness with all life, and all kinds of natural processes, including waters of rivers and oceans, fire, earth and mountains; catastrophes such as storms, earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanic phenomena, as well as specific materials like diamonds, crystals, and other metals.
In fact, such experiences extend into the microworld, involving the dynamic structure of DNA, molecules, atoms, interatomic bonds, electromagnetic forces, subatomic processes, and the zero-point field. Cosmic dimensions include "planetary consciousness," and "extraterrestrial experiences" of stars, quasars, galaxies, even black holes, and "identification with the entire physical universe." All these processes are experienced in CRP as part of the organism and psyche of the all-encompassing dynamic universal process, or holomovement. These experiences are expanding, even spiritual, which begs the question of their source or origin.
Dr. Michael A. Persinger (1987) has demonstrated the temporal lobe as the biological basis of the spiritual experience, and intense meaning. The hippocampus and amygdala are within the temporal lobe, and have to do with remembering and evaluation, reward and punishment. The hippocampus becomes a gateway to the experience of images and its stimulation unleashes a vivid stream of past memories. It can initiate inundations of imaginal imagery.
Hypnagogic imagery is produced during theta rhythm dominance in the temporal lobe. Reverie or the “fringe of consciousness”, hypnagogic imagery, dreaming, and creativity are closely related. When consciousness is alert but unfocused, alpha is found. When a person becomes drowsy, or moves into a state of reverie, theta waves tend to appear.
As early as 1943, Kubie reports:
“The hypnagogic reverie might be called a dream without distortion. Its immediate instigator is the day’s “unfinished business,” but like the dream it derives from more remote ‘unfinished business’ of an entire lifetime as well...Whatever the explanation...with [hypnagogic reverie] significant information about the past can be made readily and directly accessible without depending upon the interpretation...of dreams...It is probable that in this partial sleep, in this no-man’s land between sleeping and waking, a form of dissociation occurs which makes it possible to by-pass the more obstinate resistances which block our memories in states of full conscious awareness, and which contribute to the distortion of memory traces in dreams...”
Theta is associated with a deeply internalized state and with quieting of the body, emotions, and thoughts. This allows usually unheard or unseen things to come to consciousness in the form of hypnagogic imagery. Typical imagery associated with theta is vague and diffuse, but includes a number of classical or archetypal features: images of tunnels, the experience of going through a dark tunnel, or a tunnel lighted at the far end; images of stairs or ladders and climbing up or down; images of a cave or pyramid; of eyes or a single eye, spirals or vortices, etc.
Hypnagogic imagery comes suddenly into the mind from some unconscious source; it may be visual, auditory or somatic, a fragrance or a taste. It has an autonomous character, seeming to follow its own course independently. Attempts to observe it too closely or control it voluntarily usually make it disappear. Pilot studies show that theta training increases the ability to be aware of the images and hold them long enough to report the hypnapompic perceptions.
Many theta trainees report spontaneously “going down there” into the figure, "becoming," or merging with the image. The borderline of alpha-theta means staying on that thin line between low-frequency alpha consciousness and high-frequency theta semi-consciousness. The stream of dissociated thoughts and images is constant, perceived as an autonomous flow. Images simply float by, coming to mind from an unknown source.
There may be dissociation from the body, and thoughts are quite detached--flowing along with the vague images with a feeling of perceptual change. Some subjects report their focal point changing from being in front of the eyes to behind the eyes, and a slight falling feeling.
The amygdala is the control center of emotions and moods, the heights of euphoria and depths of depression. Connections between the frontal lobes and temporal lobe means emotions become mixed with the experiences of the self. Hippocampal cells display the highest electrical instability of all portions of the brain. These cells are prone to repeated firing long after the stimulation has been removed.
The amygdala and the hippocampus can learn specific electrical patterns. One of the most frequent electrical patterns generated from this lobe is called theta activity. Theta is associated with alterations in temporal lobe function. These waves occur during dreaming, creative thinking, and twilight states, according to Persinger.
Transient electrical perturbations of the human temporal lobe (TLT) result in emergence of innate feelings of the God Experience. They range from mild cosmic highs, to knowledge infusions, to religious conversions, to peak experiences, and personal communions with God.
Psychic seizures appear without convulsions and the brain experiences vivid landscapes or the forms of living things, glowing forms, or bright, shining sources. The modality of the experience, that is, whether it is experienced as a sound, a smell, a scene or vision, or an intense feeling, reflects the area of the electrical instability. These endogenous sensory images are accompanied by a sense of conviction or meaningfulness, personal and profound significance.
The God Experience is a normal organized pattern of temporal lobe activity. It can be precipitated by personal stress, or loss and the fear of anticipated death, or the awesomeness of nature or sexual experience. It brings a sense of personal destiny; it feels ineffable as details remain fuzzy. All one remembers is that something important, profound, or deeply spiritual took place.
These divine seizures bring seeming insight into another realm; feelings of intoxication, lightness, flying, moving, spinning, or even leaving the body (OBEs). There is both a compulsive and euphoric factor--compulsive behaviors and thoughts, and euphoric or intermediately manic mood. Personal and natural events become fraught with meaning or symbolism. Fear and terror are also effects and frequent parts of the temporal lobe seizure experience.
Dreaming is intimately tied to the function of the temporal lobe because of the hippocampus-amygdala complex. Stimulation of the temporal lobe region can unleash dreamlike experiences over which the person has little control. Dream production can be induced directly by electrical peculiarities or by interfering with the chemical transmitters that effectively connect the neurons of the brain. Certain drugs appear to induce dreams during the waking state, where they are experienced as real.
All human cultures have developed some form of meditational technique to enhance the experience. Psychological addiction to this type of God Experience occurs because of the brain’s chemical reaction to the intense motor agitation or to the seizure. The release of the brain’s own opiates can cause a narcotic high during the agitation in receptor sites for endogenous opiates within the amygdala. Elevation of brainstem levels of norepinepherine elevate mood for several days to weeks. The person can become addicted not only to the mystical experience but to the God high.
High altitudes, and low blood sugar can facilitate TLTs. Since the temporal lobe is very sensitive to changes in hypoxia (lack of oxygen), blood sugar (hypoglycemia), and blood flow, situations that produce these are most correlated with the spiritual experience. Another source of hypoxia is low-level breathing during meditation. A person trained appropriately can drive the temporal lobe into bouts of theta activity. Sometimes outright electrical seizures will occur, simultaneously with the meaningful experience.
Psychological stress, and radical existential change is the most common condition that facilitates the God Experience. Elevation of stress hormones in the hippocampus and amygdala influence fantasies to be stored as actual memories; vivid and realistic dream images can burst into awareness. In general, the more severe the disturbance, the more intense the God Experience. The most profound occur after the sudden loss (death) of a close loved one.
Depending on the degree of hormonal arousal and the instability of the temporal lobe, the experience can occur due to simple cumulative effects. They can be less spectacular, but just as impressive and meaningful. Music can trigger TLTs in a sensitive brain. Very loud sound patterns or flashing lights can drive the epileptic brain into seizures, as can repetitive sounds, such as white noise or mantras.
Conversely just the sound of ocean waves or even a gentle stream creates a soothing feeling; when the negative ions from actual water are present, the effect is magnified into well-being. Certain smells, perfume, or incense can be the trigger, as the temporal lobe is the “home” of olfaction. Thus, sensory cues can act as active drivers of theta.
In the context of the present hypothesis, there must be some feature of the temporal lobe that is involved with the experience or origin of the self-concept. The adult’s sense of “body image” is associated with the parietal lobe. But, for the first few months of life, the body image is not totally associated with the parietal, but is “stored” in the temporal lobe. During the time the infant is dependent on the behaviors of the mother and father and the pattern of those behaviors, the temporal lobe integrates and grows with that information.
Body image and sense of self spontaneously emerge during the Consciousness Restructuring Process. Usually locked away, they are there ready to be released by the appropriate key. The key is the temporal lobe transient. When it occurs the images and protosensations long locked within the old contexts of the temporal lobe are released. The adult experiences the old sense of the infant self. Basic images, long forgotten are retrieved in the God Experience. The infantile sense of self is permanently shaped and bound to the pattern of parental behavior.
In CRP journeys after an initial stage of arousal (fear and pain), there is a paradoxical switch to a deep state of tranquility and serenity, described as a healing place. This switch is from the ergotrophic system to the tropotrophic system of arousal.
REFERENCES
Green, Elmer and Alyce (1977); Beyond Biofeedback; San Francisco:Delacorte Press.
Grof, Stanislav (1988); The Adventure of Self-Discovery; Albany, New York: SUNY Press.
Krippner, Stanley, Ullman, Montague (1973); Dream Telepathy; New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.
Laszlo, Ervin (1996); "Subtle connections: psi, Grof, Jung, and the quantum vacuum; Dynapsych
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsych/1996/subtle.html
Persinger, Michael A. (1987);Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs; New York: Praeger.
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
IACS, (c)2001
Abstract: The theta range of brainwave activity is four to seven cycles per second. This is reportedly the psychic range of the mind and the area from which psychic experiences emerge is the temporal lobe, source of most theta generation. Children under seven have a predominance of theta, although they experience other ranges as well. Therefore, children in this age group are highly receptive to suggestions or “programming” from all sources. In theta, learning is extremely rapid, and may be subliminal.
Co-consciousness, the shared virtuality of the journey process, is a telepathic rapport wherein both participant’s brainwaves become synchronized or entrained, in essence, into a single holographic biofield. Co-consciousness might be measured via the observation of spontaneously shared, matching or resonating brainwave frequencies. Experimental verification (through EEG monitoring of both participants) of these hypotheses is scheduled as the second experiment in our pilot study of CRP phenomena.
Conversely, in the CRP training program, theta training in deep reverie via biofeedback offers trainees a definite experience of the target state. Most subjects can increase their alpha production easily; theta is more difficult but also can be increased. A second part of this experiment would be to induce shared states of consciousness via shared biofeedback where both parties synch to the same deepening rhythm toward a very deeply internalized focus.
Previous neurological studies conducted for Asklepia by Thomas A. Blakely, Ph.D. [Neuropsychology and Clinical Electroencephalography] of Lake Oswego, Oregon have indicated that co-consciousness reveals itself through unique brainwave patterns. The subject appears to be sleeping, but responds and remains internally focused, interactive within and without the shared Journey. This has implications for restructuring trauma patterns (state-bound learning), and the process of facilitating spontaneous psychophysical healing.
Theta brainwave generation is associated with dreams, creative thinking, and twilight states. Theta is probably the best model we have for the shared nature of co-consciousness. Spontaneous psi phenomena have been associated with theta waves by Krippner (1977), the Greens (1977), and more recently Persinger (1997). These phenomena include but are not limited to telepathy or ESP and synchronicities. The left hemisphere of the brain is linear and logical, while the right hemisphere is non-linear and perceives gestalts. Theta generation entrains both hemispheres in a single activity that creates a harmonization and sense of deep-felt meaning and well-being.
Preparing for the co-consciousness process can be described as "emptying". Any preconceived notions about self, the mentored or the process are completely suspended, and the Journey is approached with a "beginner's mind." But one's experiential skills and wisdom are brought to the process. Though theta generally indicates a deep sleep, it is possible to maintain awareness and be interactive in the journey process. Brainwaves will fluctuate back and forth across the alpha-theta boundary as both participants move deeper into the journey.
The ability to generate theta and remain consciously aware has been demonstrated by yogis and experienced meditators. It's almost like falling asleep, but then something else happens, a lucidity. In order to produce theta consciously it is necessary to quiet body, emotions and thoughts all at the same time. This leads to integrative reverie, a deep focus of attention. Training in theta reverie leads to integrative experiences of physical and psychological well-being.
What we sense and control is not the brainwave itself, but the state of consciousness, a gestalt of subtle existential cues. The production of the brainwaves themselves do not constitute a "state", as such. Brainwaves, in and of themselves, have no sensory representation. What can be detected and restructured are factors such as focus of attention, thought processes, and feelings. Theta training is awareness training, or level of awareness training, and facilitates creativity.
Theta rhythms are usually associated with near-unconscious or subliminally conscious states. The presence of theta is often accompanied by hypnagogic or dreamlike images. It is not a daydream-type experience, but a projection of impulses from unconscious sources. Although most untrained people are unable to maintain full consciousness during theta production, almost everyone maintains awareness during alpha.
In CRP there is a spontaneous rapport which kindles the participants’ oscillatory harmonization and entrainment with one another. Theta probably does not occur in the subject until the later portion of the journey when the rapid eye movement indicative of REM, alpha waves, and the arousal phase has yielded to the profound paradoxical relaxation of chaotic consciousness.
Dr. Stanley Krippner has demonstrated the reality of dream telepathy in his research on the subject, and we suggest this is the mechanism of co-consciousness in the mentoring of journeys. Ervin Laszlo (1996) has also attributed these properties to an existentially fundamental "psi field," which he likens to Jung's alchemical notion of unus mundus, where the realms of mind and matter merge. Such co-consciousness is a classical phenomenon in the practice of shamanism.
"In the 'experience of dual unity' a patient in an ASC [altered state of consciousness] experiences a loosening and melting of the boundaries of the body ego and a sense of merging with another person in a state of unity and oneness. In this experience, despite the feeling of being fused with another, the patient retains an awareness of his or her own identity. Then, in the experience of 'identification with other persons,' the patient, while merging experientially with another person, has a sense of complete identification to the point of losing the awareness of his or her own identity. Identification is total and complex, involving body image, physical sensations, emotional reactions and attitudes, thought processes, memories, facial expression, typical gestures and mannerisms, postures, movement, and even the inflection of the voice. The "other" or others can be someone in the presence of the patient or someone absent; he or she can be part of an experience from the subject's childhood, his or her ancestry, or even of a previous lifetime."
Lazlo goes on to recount Stan Grof's (1988) extensive work penetrating beyond normal limits of personal sensory experience into "biographic-recollection," perinatal, and transpersonal domains. He reports identifications with groups and group consciousness, animals, plants and botanical processes, oneness with all life, and all kinds of natural processes, including waters of rivers and oceans, fire, earth and mountains; catastrophes such as storms, earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanic phenomena, as well as specific materials like diamonds, crystals, and other metals.
In fact, such experiences extend into the microworld, involving the dynamic structure of DNA, molecules, atoms, interatomic bonds, electromagnetic forces, subatomic processes, and the zero-point field. Cosmic dimensions include "planetary consciousness," and "extraterrestrial experiences" of stars, quasars, galaxies, even black holes, and "identification with the entire physical universe." All these processes are experienced in CRP as part of the organism and psyche of the all-encompassing dynamic universal process, or holomovement. These experiences are expanding, even spiritual, which begs the question of their source or origin.
Dr. Michael A. Persinger (1987) has demonstrated the temporal lobe as the biological basis of the spiritual experience, and intense meaning. The hippocampus and amygdala are within the temporal lobe, and have to do with remembering and evaluation, reward and punishment. The hippocampus becomes a gateway to the experience of images and its stimulation unleashes a vivid stream of past memories. It can initiate inundations of imaginal imagery.
Hypnagogic imagery is produced during theta rhythm dominance in the temporal lobe. Reverie or the “fringe of consciousness”, hypnagogic imagery, dreaming, and creativity are closely related. When consciousness is alert but unfocused, alpha is found. When a person becomes drowsy, or moves into a state of reverie, theta waves tend to appear.
As early as 1943, Kubie reports:
“The hypnagogic reverie might be called a dream without distortion. Its immediate instigator is the day’s “unfinished business,” but like the dream it derives from more remote ‘unfinished business’ of an entire lifetime as well...Whatever the explanation...with [hypnagogic reverie] significant information about the past can be made readily and directly accessible without depending upon the interpretation...of dreams...It is probable that in this partial sleep, in this no-man’s land between sleeping and waking, a form of dissociation occurs which makes it possible to by-pass the more obstinate resistances which block our memories in states of full conscious awareness, and which contribute to the distortion of memory traces in dreams...”
Theta is associated with a deeply internalized state and with quieting of the body, emotions, and thoughts. This allows usually unheard or unseen things to come to consciousness in the form of hypnagogic imagery. Typical imagery associated with theta is vague and diffuse, but includes a number of classical or archetypal features: images of tunnels, the experience of going through a dark tunnel, or a tunnel lighted at the far end; images of stairs or ladders and climbing up or down; images of a cave or pyramid; of eyes or a single eye, spirals or vortices, etc.
Hypnagogic imagery comes suddenly into the mind from some unconscious source; it may be visual, auditory or somatic, a fragrance or a taste. It has an autonomous character, seeming to follow its own course independently. Attempts to observe it too closely or control it voluntarily usually make it disappear. Pilot studies show that theta training increases the ability to be aware of the images and hold them long enough to report the hypnapompic perceptions.
Many theta trainees report spontaneously “going down there” into the figure, "becoming," or merging with the image. The borderline of alpha-theta means staying on that thin line between low-frequency alpha consciousness and high-frequency theta semi-consciousness. The stream of dissociated thoughts and images is constant, perceived as an autonomous flow. Images simply float by, coming to mind from an unknown source.
There may be dissociation from the body, and thoughts are quite detached--flowing along with the vague images with a feeling of perceptual change. Some subjects report their focal point changing from being in front of the eyes to behind the eyes, and a slight falling feeling.
The amygdala is the control center of emotions and moods, the heights of euphoria and depths of depression. Connections between the frontal lobes and temporal lobe means emotions become mixed with the experiences of the self. Hippocampal cells display the highest electrical instability of all portions of the brain. These cells are prone to repeated firing long after the stimulation has been removed.
The amygdala and the hippocampus can learn specific electrical patterns. One of the most frequent electrical patterns generated from this lobe is called theta activity. Theta is associated with alterations in temporal lobe function. These waves occur during dreaming, creative thinking, and twilight states, according to Persinger.
Transient electrical perturbations of the human temporal lobe (TLT) result in emergence of innate feelings of the God Experience. They range from mild cosmic highs, to knowledge infusions, to religious conversions, to peak experiences, and personal communions with God.
Psychic seizures appear without convulsions and the brain experiences vivid landscapes or the forms of living things, glowing forms, or bright, shining sources. The modality of the experience, that is, whether it is experienced as a sound, a smell, a scene or vision, or an intense feeling, reflects the area of the electrical instability. These endogenous sensory images are accompanied by a sense of conviction or meaningfulness, personal and profound significance.
The God Experience is a normal organized pattern of temporal lobe activity. It can be precipitated by personal stress, or loss and the fear of anticipated death, or the awesomeness of nature or sexual experience. It brings a sense of personal destiny; it feels ineffable as details remain fuzzy. All one remembers is that something important, profound, or deeply spiritual took place.
These divine seizures bring seeming insight into another realm; feelings of intoxication, lightness, flying, moving, spinning, or even leaving the body (OBEs). There is both a compulsive and euphoric factor--compulsive behaviors and thoughts, and euphoric or intermediately manic mood. Personal and natural events become fraught with meaning or symbolism. Fear and terror are also effects and frequent parts of the temporal lobe seizure experience.
Dreaming is intimately tied to the function of the temporal lobe because of the hippocampus-amygdala complex. Stimulation of the temporal lobe region can unleash dreamlike experiences over which the person has little control. Dream production can be induced directly by electrical peculiarities or by interfering with the chemical transmitters that effectively connect the neurons of the brain. Certain drugs appear to induce dreams during the waking state, where they are experienced as real.
All human cultures have developed some form of meditational technique to enhance the experience. Psychological addiction to this type of God Experience occurs because of the brain’s chemical reaction to the intense motor agitation or to the seizure. The release of the brain’s own opiates can cause a narcotic high during the agitation in receptor sites for endogenous opiates within the amygdala. Elevation of brainstem levels of norepinepherine elevate mood for several days to weeks. The person can become addicted not only to the mystical experience but to the God high.
High altitudes, and low blood sugar can facilitate TLTs. Since the temporal lobe is very sensitive to changes in hypoxia (lack of oxygen), blood sugar (hypoglycemia), and blood flow, situations that produce these are most correlated with the spiritual experience. Another source of hypoxia is low-level breathing during meditation. A person trained appropriately can drive the temporal lobe into bouts of theta activity. Sometimes outright electrical seizures will occur, simultaneously with the meaningful experience.
Psychological stress, and radical existential change is the most common condition that facilitates the God Experience. Elevation of stress hormones in the hippocampus and amygdala influence fantasies to be stored as actual memories; vivid and realistic dream images can burst into awareness. In general, the more severe the disturbance, the more intense the God Experience. The most profound occur after the sudden loss (death) of a close loved one.
Depending on the degree of hormonal arousal and the instability of the temporal lobe, the experience can occur due to simple cumulative effects. They can be less spectacular, but just as impressive and meaningful. Music can trigger TLTs in a sensitive brain. Very loud sound patterns or flashing lights can drive the epileptic brain into seizures, as can repetitive sounds, such as white noise or mantras.
Conversely just the sound of ocean waves or even a gentle stream creates a soothing feeling; when the negative ions from actual water are present, the effect is magnified into well-being. Certain smells, perfume, or incense can be the trigger, as the temporal lobe is the “home” of olfaction. Thus, sensory cues can act as active drivers of theta.
In the context of the present hypothesis, there must be some feature of the temporal lobe that is involved with the experience or origin of the self-concept. The adult’s sense of “body image” is associated with the parietal lobe. But, for the first few months of life, the body image is not totally associated with the parietal, but is “stored” in the temporal lobe. During the time the infant is dependent on the behaviors of the mother and father and the pattern of those behaviors, the temporal lobe integrates and grows with that information.
Body image and sense of self spontaneously emerge during the Consciousness Restructuring Process. Usually locked away, they are there ready to be released by the appropriate key. The key is the temporal lobe transient. When it occurs the images and protosensations long locked within the old contexts of the temporal lobe are released. The adult experiences the old sense of the infant self. Basic images, long forgotten are retrieved in the God Experience. The infantile sense of self is permanently shaped and bound to the pattern of parental behavior.
In CRP journeys after an initial stage of arousal (fear and pain), there is a paradoxical switch to a deep state of tranquility and serenity, described as a healing place. This switch is from the ergotrophic system to the tropotrophic system of arousal.
REFERENCES
Green, Elmer and Alyce (1977); Beyond Biofeedback; San Francisco:Delacorte Press.
Grof, Stanislav (1988); The Adventure of Self-Discovery; Albany, New York: SUNY Press.
Krippner, Stanley, Ullman, Montague (1973); Dream Telepathy; New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.
Laszlo, Ervin (1996); "Subtle connections: psi, Grof, Jung, and the quantum vacuum; Dynapsych
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsych/1996/subtle.html
Persinger, Michael A. (1987);Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs; New York: Praeger.
One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play round it, and talk about it with other people.
Primitives tell each other impressive dreams, in a public palaver if possible, and this custom is also attested in late antiquity, for all the ancient peoples attributed great significance to dreams.Treated in this way, the dream suggests all manner of ideas and associations which lead us closer to its meaning.
The ascertainment of the meaning is, I need hardly point out, an entirely arbitrary affair, and this is where the hazards begin. Narrower or wider limits will be set to the meaning, according to one’s experience, temperament, and taste. Some people will be satisfied with little, for others much is still not enough. Also the meaning of the dream, or our interpretation of it, is largely dependent on the intentions of the interpreter, on what he expects the meaning to be or requires it to do.
In eliciting the meaning he will involuntarily be guided by certain presuppositions, and it depends very much on the scrupulousness and honesty of the investigator whether you gain something by his interpretation or perhaps only become still more deeply entangled in his mistakes. --Jung, CW 10, Civilization in Transition, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man, Page 317