The Paranormal Power

In 1973, the international expose PSYCHIC DISCOVERIES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN by Shiela Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder became a best-seller. Former Naval Intelligence Officer, Dr. Carl Schleicher actively wondered why the U.S. had no comparable program in psychotronics, where esoterics meets science. He resolved to create one, recruited authors Ostrander & Schroeder to turn over their untranslated data, and began collecting researchers and creating experimental protocols. Thus, in 1973, Mankind Research Unlimited (MRU) in Washington D.C. was born as a private company, seeking government and corporate contracts.

The irony of this Cold War era, is that the Soviets thought we were using psychic spies, so they began their program, which in turn sparked actual US interest, based on their claims of success. Soviet interest in psi was piqued in February 1960 by a story in the French magazine Science et Vie (Science and Life) entitled “The Secrets of the Nautilus.” It claimed that the US government secretly used telepaths to communicate with the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, while it was under the Arctic ice pack. This telepathy project allegedly involved President Eisenhower, the Navy, the Air Force, Westinghouse, General Electric, Bell Laboratories and the Rand Corporation.

Communicating with submarines is difficult as radio waves do not penetrate to the depths of the ocean. Extremely low frequency (ELF) waves are used to signal the submarine to come to the surface to receive a message. These super-long waves penetrate almost anything including water but carry little information. If telepathy could work it would be a perfect method of communicating with submerged submarines. The story was probably a propaganda hoax but the Soviets were spurred into action.

The Cold War among psychic spies is recounted in James Mills’ book THE POWER (1990), which is loosely based on MRU’s principle spyentist, “KT,” a longterm advisor to Dr. Schleicher and Joint Chiefs of Staff. The fictional Jack Hammond is a scientific intelligence officer for the Monday Afternoon Group, America’s top secret paranormal research unit, employing occult forces for intelligence and military objectives. As Mills notes, “The most terrifying weapon lies in the darkest regions beyond the human mind.”

Blue Sky research became of interest to both the government and private sector. It spread from R&D thinktanks into the open-minded counterculture then to the mainstream. Along the way, these revolutionary ideas became the obsession of spooks, spyentists, spycologists, psychedelic physicists and a whole host of fringe characters and psychics. Psychotronic researchers broke through the Iron Curtain and brought their discoveries to the West. Many world-class scientists and engineers passed through the threshold of MRU.

Technovelties

Blue sky projects that begin as implausible can produce incremental advances that eventualy result in applied technologies, even if it takes decades. It is bottom-up versus top-down research. Bottom-up means exploring from the known to the unknown, seeing if there are any serendipitous opportunities that emerge. By its nature, bottom-up work is unpredictable, based in some kind of intuition.

Top-down means problem directed, oriented to solving a problem. The reality dimension, how realistic the project is, shows up independently for either. Some bottom-up projects are highly realistic, other top-down projects are somewhat unrealistic. No one knows in advance which research directions will deliver.

We now take for granted many once-magical technologies even better than those in sci-fi space operas that emerged from the inspiration of the “Star Trek philosophy.” It became Dr. Schleicher’s policy not to dismiss any outlandish idea for fear of missing some breakthrough. That led to a wide scope of blue sky investigation.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), founded in 1958 when the Soviets launched Sputnik, is the Pentagon’s autonomous Blue Sky agency. Such projects are still conducted behind closed doors by DARPA, who’s “holy grail” is cracking the the brain’s code to build a brain-computer interface.

Many dark chapters in brainwashing and mind control have been written since Tavistock Institute of Human Relations began its massive social engineering program after WWII and teamed with CIA to deploy nefarious experimental programs, such as MK Ultra. There is a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Psychic Center and the NSA (National Security Agency) studies parapsychology, that branch of psychology that deals with the investigation of such psychic phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, and psychokinesis. They also did experiments where the mind of one person controlled the bodies of others.

The Dark Side

One project led by Dr. Peter G. Bourne, aimed at creating a psychocybernetic “cyborg” or remotely controlled assassin as depicted in the classic “Manchurian Candidate,” “Telephon,” and the Jason Bourne series. Controllers pull the post-hypnotic trigger and the subject commits a murder with no memory of the incident. Some of these CIA mind control projects used the public as unwitting guinea pigs exposed to drugs, infectious agents and toxic psychiatry. Many projects became public during 1975 Congressional investigation by the Church Committee. Surrepetitious research continued, farmed out to subcontractors who were not accountable under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In the 1970’s, clandestine programs were conducted at Standford Research Institute (SRI) in Remote Viewing. In the 1980s, the Army applied it militarily in the New Earth Battalion, (“Be all that you can be”), subject of the 2009 movie, “Men Who Stare At Goats.” Likewise Special Forces, such as Navy Seals, began using paranormal ESP training for rapid intuitive decision-making in the field, and more. One of Dr. Schleicher’s earliest experiments involved dowsing — not for ‘witching’ a water well, but to find and trace Vietcong tunnels and tunnel rats.

Promising Potential

Astronaut Edgard Mitchell, who did his own telepathy experiment from the dark side of the Moon, founded the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS) in 1973. It explores different ways of “knowing,” including spiritual practices and exploration of transformative relationships. IONS prominent role in Dan Brown’s 2009 best-seller, THE LOST SYMBOL, is fixing the meaning of ‘noetic science’ in the public imagination. The Esalan Physics Consciousness Group was founded at the same time by fellow scientists Jack Sarfatti, Nick Herbert, Saul-Paul Sirag, and Fred Alan Wolf, to investigate The Fringe by studying frontier science subjects such as time travel, consciousness after death, and ESP.

MRU alumni, Uri Geller with his ESP and spoonbending parlour tricks captured the public imagination and led to crazes in firewalking and other demonstrations of extraordinary human potential. Few in the public understood the spectrum of psychotronics or noetics, but the old mechanical model of the mindbody relationship died and a new model based in psi, mind-body healing and subtle energies emerged aimed at developing innate human potentials and creative capacity. Boundaries between inner and outer experience collapsed.

The new consciousness paradigm opened our culture to the holistic world of complementary medicine, the human potential movement and the idea that we, too, could participate directly in the mysteries of nature and Cosmos. The premise was that the strangest phenomena have the most to teach us about science and ourselves. New interdisciplinary specialties in parapsychology, biophysics, accelerated learning and alternative medicine emerged. MRU was at the forefront of this cultural revolution, which promised transformational breakthroughs in personal and collective consciousness, integral healing and a new worldview. The fascinating history of early psi research is summarized by Jeffrey Mishlove in his classic The Roots of Consciousness, and in this site at http://mankindresearchunlimited.iwarp.com/whats_new_16.html

Many MRU associates went on to produce early classics in paranormal literature, such as Dr. Stanley Krippner, who included work by other MRU scientists in his ground-breaking books:

Galaxies of Life: The Human Aura in Acupuncture and Kirlian Photography (with Daniel Rubin). Gordon & Breach, 1973.

Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal Extrasensory Perception (with Montague Ullman, M.D. and Allan Vaughan). 1973.

The Kirlian Aura: Photographing the Galaxies of Life (with Daniel Rubin). Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974.

The Energies of Consciousness: Explorations in Acupuncture, Auras, and Kirlian Photography (with Daniel Rubin). New York: Gordon & Breach, 1975.

Future Science: Life Energies and the Physics of Paranormal Phenomena (with John White). Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1977.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/23/george-clooney-in-the-men_n_328682.html

“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.” -George Orwell

BRITISH MIND CONTROL: Principles of modern psychology originated in esoterics which is also the root of modern espionage and intelligence psyops, as well as parapsychology. Magic and religion has been employed to control populations since the dawn of written history. In military terms psychic operations are called psychotronics.

Adversaries are rogue psi operatives, psiwarriors who battle like sorcerers. Psychic self defense employs thought disruption, shielding techniques, mind drain and energy manipulation. Psionics is scientific magic ~ magecraft, the product of extraordinary human potential. Precogs, like analysts, are attuned to the future. Deep Cover They understand viscerally that things are often not what they seem. Both are masters of disguise, the hidden environment, intelligence, espionage, and covert action. Both aim to ‘tweak the timeline’ with small perturbations that pump up to macroscopic results, setting up currents of intentional influence. They also tweak minds by controlling the environment. No one can resist what they cannot detect.

Both are Inside Outsiders, working at the fringes of the System. The “outsider” aesthetic is charged by a desire to break free from the contrivances of tradition. They look boldly outside the system and deep within themselves for inspiration that arises directly from Creative Source. Both work sub rosa. This phrase comes from the Latin meaning ‘under the rose’ for confidentiality, black ops. It comes from the Masonic fraternal tradition. The rose is the emblem of Horus, God of Silence and Secrecy; the Tudor Rose shares the same root.

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300 – 400 B.C. One of Plato’s tricks was “forbidding the question.” His Republic is a blueprint for tyrannical systemic philosophical control. ‘The Big Lie,’ a hypnotic propaganda technique, is rooted in Plato’s ‘Noble Lie,’ the myth knowingly told by the elite to maintain social control. The lie is different at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.

1559 John Dee (1527-1608): Wizard, Magus and Spymaster is the historical root of British intelligence operations, political assassinations and cryptography.

Freemasonry, a secret society and fraternal organization arose from obscure origins in the late 16th to early 17th century. Freemasonry now exists in various forms all over the world, with a membership estimated at around 5 million, including just under two million in the United States and around 480,000 in England, Scotland and Ireland.The various forms all share moral and metaphysical ideals, which include, in most cases, a constitutional declaration of belief in a Supreme Being. Extensive research and use of occult symbolism and initiatory rites.

1601 British East India Company – colonial monopoly, military expansionism, opium trade (1773-1842 First Opium War

ENLIGHTENMENT: There is no consensus on when to date the start of the age of Enlightenment, and some scholars simply use the beginning of the eighteenth century or the middle of the seventeenth century as a default date. If taken back to the mid-1600s, the Enlightenment would trace its origins to Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, published in 1637. Others define the Enlightenment as beginning in Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 or with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Scholars date its end in the French Revolution of 1789 or Napoleonic Wars (1804-15)

1623 Sir Frances Bacon, head of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, expressed his aspirations and ideals in New Atlantis. Released in 1627, this utopian novel was his creation of an ideal land where “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit” were the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of Bensalem. In this work, he portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge. The plan and organization of his ideal college, “Salomon’s House” (or Solomon’s House), envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure science. He sent secret society members to the new world shortly after the Pilgrims to launch the esoteric empire through a colonization scheme.

1776 American Revolution The original visionary imprint of what became the United States of America came from Francis Bacon, who was one of the great mystics of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He wrote a book right before he died that was unpublished because he died very soon thereafter, called New Atlantis. He believed and asserted that the North American Indians were the survivors and descendants of the original Atlantean civilization, and he called to mind that Atlantis had risen to global power and then been destroyed because of its hubris. So whatever was going to be built in North America would be Atlantean in its basic archetypal pattern and destiny path, and at some point it was going to rise to the level global dominion. Then it would, like ancient Atlantis, have to make a choice between power for the sake of service and power for the sake of more power, and as it decided, the fate of the world would be determined.

Many of the founding fathers of the United States, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, etc., were Masons and Rosicrucians. They were all students of Bacon. They believed they were creating the new Atlantis, the new Israel, the new Rome, the new Athens, and they consciously set forth to build a nation around light and power. On the back of a dollar bill is the pyramid and the all-seeing Eye of Horus. We were born out of a mystical vision of human perfection that was basically Atlantean in its impulse. So the challenge today is to reconnect with the Wisdom Tradition that gave rise to Atlantis, that gave rise to the United States of America, and that is ultimately an esoteric pursuit. The issue is not whether there was a real Atlantis or not, the issue is the mythic force and worldview behind that claim. America was to be Atlantean — imperial, global, beyond imagination in scope and power. The Fathers pioneered a new depth wand expansiveness worldcentric in nature. They unraveled all hierarchies with “elite egalitarianism”, enlightened self-interest, gentry class, Atlantean vision. The egalitarian elements: human rights, political freedoms, and the republic have been undermined by Tavistock which has led us astray with an appearance of freedom.

1813 “The Great Game” described strategic rivalry between British and Russian empires for supremacy in Central Asia, from 1813 – Russo-Perisan Treaty of 1813 and 1907, to Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Popularized by Kipling in the novel Kim (1901).

1875 Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky

1879 At Leipzig University in 1879, Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychological laboratory, and among his students were Ivan Pavlov, William James (the “Father of American Psychology”), and G. Stanley Hall (who would become the mentor of John Dewey, the “Father of Progressive Education”). Pavlov is well-known for his stimulus-response experiments with dogs. In Clarence Karier’s SCIENTISTS OF THE MIND (1986), one reads concerning James that “we pass from a culture with God at its center to a culture with man at its center.”

1882 Society for Psychical Research in London

1884 Fabian Society. Utopian socialism. George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst.

1885 The American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) was founded in 1885 by a distinguished group of scholars and scientists who shared the courage and vision to explore the uncharted realms of human consciousness, among them renowned Harvard psychologist and Professor of Philosophy, William James. Many of the early participants were pioneers in psychology, psychiatry, physics and astronomy. Freud and Jung were honorary members. Luminaries from a wide range of disciplines have been drawn to the Society throughout its history, including Chester Carlson, the inventor of Xerox; quantum physicist, David Bohm; psychologist Gardner Murphy; and dream researcher Montague Ullman, M.D.

1886 Freud begins psychoanalytic practice with “talking cure,” based in unconscious, subconscious, dreams, hypnosis, repression, phobias, psychosexual development, personality and behavior, dissociation, amnesia, sublimation, conversion reaction, defense mechanism, denial, repression, displacement. In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his “pressure technique” and his newly-developed analytic technique of interpretation and reconstruction. Freud practiced clinical hypnosis from roughly 1886-1900 and linked it to transference. Ego, Super-ego, Id. Eros & Thanatos.

The “talking cure” became the signature of the “Tavistock Method,” and a blanket solution (with psychotropic drugs) to mental distress.
Defense mechanisms include acting out, autistic fantasy, denial, devaluation, displacement, dissociation, idealization, intellectualization, isolation, passive aggression, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, somatization, splitting, suppression, and undoing. The therapist handles them with bypassing, reassurance, distraction, confrontation, interpretation, or changing vantage point or scope.

1888 Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky

1904 – 1913 Freud – Jung training relationship. Amongst the thinkers who are held to have set the stage for transpersonal studies are William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow [peak experience], and Roberto Assagioli (Miller, 1998: 541-542.) Research by Vich (1988) suggests that the earliest usage of the term “transpersonal” can be found in lecture notes which William James had prepared for a semester at Harvard University in 1905-6.

1909 Secret Intelligence Service, (SIS) MI6 British Intelligence. Freud and Jung visit William James in America.

1913 Jung breaks with Freud with libido theory, including collective unconscious, mysticism, occult and mythic psychic archetypes, free association. Plato said that “true philosophers make dying their profession,” referring to the wisdom inherent in this process. What is natural and instinctual is allowed to die and transform. Where Freud saw a life/death struggle, Jung saw a death/rebirth mystery of cyclic passages and renewal, later called ‘creative regression.’

1914 – 1918 WWI. 1914 – Wellington House Propaganda Bureau, Tavistock precursor. After discovering that Germany had a Propaganda Agency, a British War Propaganda Bureau was set up at Wellington House, the London headquarters of the National Insurance Commission, with Masterman as chairman. Masterman invited 25 leading British authors to Wellington House to discuss ways of best promoting Britain’s interests during the war. Those who attended included William Archer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, John Masefield, Ford Madox Ford, , G. K. Chesterton, Henry Newbolt, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Gilbert Parker, G. M. Trevely and H. G. Wells. The project stay secret until 1935. Several of the writers agreed to write pamphlets and books promoting the government’s point of view. The War Propaganda Bureau published over 1,160 pamphlets during the war. Report On Alleged German Outrages published by 1915.

1919 Freud’s double nephew mass manipulator Edward Bernays, Tavistock Director, combines work of Freud and others on mass psychology to establish promotion, advertising, Public Relations PR industry. Propaganda techniques were first codified and applied in a scientific manner by journalist Walter Lippman and psychologist Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) early in the 20th century. During World War I, Lippman and Bernays were hired by then United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to participate in the Creel Commission, the mission of which was to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of Britain. Edward Bernays said in his 1928 book Propaganda that, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

1920 – Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, under Brigadier-General John Rawlings Rees researches human breaking point and psychological warfare — mass manipulation by psychological shock.

In the period following the War To End All Wars, Viennese witch doctors came to realize that neurotic disabilities were endemic and pervasive in a modern society. The Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology (Tavistock Clinic) was founded in 1920 in order to take advantage of these neuroses and develop manipulative procedures.

The founding group included physicians, neurologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists and socioliogists, Interest focussed on “dynamic psychologies”. On the one hand were the adherents of Freud, Jung and Adler. On the other were a neurologically-oriented general psychiatry, a somatically-oriented general medicine and a surrounding subject population.

Key figures included Jack Rawlings-Rees, Henry Dicks, Ronald Hargreaves, Tommy Wilson and Wilfred Bion. The Clinic began to take on a conceptual direction consonant with the emergent ‘object relations approach’ in psychoanalysis. The object relations approach emphasized relationships rather than instinctual drives and psychic energy.

1921 – The 11th Duke Tavistock donates a building for Tavistock Clinic to study the effects of shellshock. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was formed in New York City as an American nonprofit and nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. With an additional office in Washington D.C., CFR is considered to be ‘the most influential foreign-policy think tank.” It convenes tasks forces and meetings at which government officials, global leaders and prominent members of the foreign policy community discuss major international issues. Its think tank, the David Rockefeller Studies Program, is composed of about fifty adjunct and full-time scholars, as well as ten in-resident recipients of year-long fellowships, who cover the major regions and significant issues shaping today’s international agenda. These scholars contribute up-to-date information and analysis for the foreign policy debates by making recommendations to the presidential administration, testifying before Congress, serving as a resource to the diplomatic community, interacting with the media, authoring books, reports, articles, and op-eds on foreign policy issues. CFR publishes Foreign Affairs, “the preeminent journal of international affairs and U.S. foreign policy.”

1923 – 1930s Liepzig School – Frankfurt School, Institute for Social Research (Freudian Theory, Marxist Theory, Critical Theory)

1926 Anna Freud lectures at Tavistock.

1928 H.G. Wells publishes “The Open Conspiracy”; “Manipulating Public Opinion” and “The Business of Propaganda” by Edward Bernays

1930 Humanist, pacifist Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932) takes mescal in Berlin with magician Aleister Crowley heralding psychedelics, counterculture, and occulture. Grandson of Darwinian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who influenced H.G. Wells. Crowley claimed to have met Blavatsky and required students to read her.

1932-1933 Director Kurt Lewin exchanged theories with Eric Trist of Tavistock Clinic before moving to America. Lewin emigrated to the United States in August 1933 and became a naturalized citizen in 1940. He went on to become director of the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. At Tavistock, German refugee, Kurt Lewin originated the anti-Germany propaganda campaign to “turn the American public against Germany and involve us in World War II.

John Rawlings Rees (who would be a co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health in 1948) was Deputy Director of Tavistock at this time (he would become Director in 1932). Rees developed the “Tavistock Method,” which induces and controls stress via what Rees called “psychologically controlled environments” in order to make people give up firmly held beliefs under “peer pressure.”

Rees’ Tavistock Method was based on work done by British psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion regarding the roles of individuals within groups. This design was later shifted in a series of conferences (1957-1965) led by A. Kenneth Rice, chairman of Tavistock’s Centre for the Applied Social Research. The shift was to the dynamics of leadership and authority relations in groups.

Wilhelm Reich wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich wrote, “Fascism is only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man’s character. It is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life.” Reich thought we are all potentially fascist. But his theory was rooted in repression, not raw power motives. He predicted commodification of the body image and the development of consumer identity through the corruption of human sexuality.

1933 Humanist Manifesto. On April 11, 1933, Rockefeller Foundation president Max Mason assured trustees that in their program, “the Social Sciences will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control,… the control of human behavior”

1935 – Psychoanalysis is “all the rage” in London. Jung’s Tavistock Lectures on the structure of the psyche. typology, archetypes, mythemes, shadow. By 1935, Jung is at Tavistock Clinic with Wilfred Bion, delivering five theory and practice lectures in analytical psychology on the deep nature of the psyche, including the collective unconscious and autonomous ‘complexes’ of painful, traumatic yet compelling character. We also call them subpersonalities. He lectured on the dreams and visions of physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In 1935, Harvard psychologist (1930-1967) Gordon Allport co-authored THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RADIO with Hadley Cantril. Allport would be a leading agent in the U.S. for the Tavistock Institute, and Cantril in 1937 would be a member of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Office of Radio Research at Princeton University established to study the influence of radio on different groups of listeners.

1936 “The Office of Population Research was founded in 1936 when Frederick H. Osborn ‘10, a charter trustee of Princeton, formerly a trustee at the Milbank Memorial Fund, used his good offices with both of these institutions to persuade the University to found a program in teaching and research in population, and the Milbank Fund to provide much of the initial financing. Osborn, later a major general during World War II, appointed to study and foster improvement in the morale of the armed services, had a deep interest in population matters, as well as in his alma mater.” “The Office of Population Research at Princeton University is the oldest population research center in the country. Founded in 1936, it has trained more than a hundred students who received doctoral degrees and more than a hundred others who received one-year professional training. Many of these alumni occupy important professional positions in developing countries; others are on university faculties in this country and abroad.” -A Princeton Companion

1938 OSS General Donovan was indoctrinated and ‘processed’ at Tavistock. After obtaining his medical qualification Wilfred Bion spent seven years in psychotherapeutic training at the Tavistock Clinic, an experience he regarded, in retrospect, as having had some limitations. It did, however, bring him into fruitful contact with Samuel Beckett. He wanted to train in Psychoanalysis and in 1938 he began a training analysis with John Rickman, but this was brought to an end by the Second World War. In the Army Medical Corps he got ideas about psychoanalysis of groups. The entire group at Tavistock had in fact been taken into the army, and were working on new methods of treatment for psychiatric casualties (those suffering post-traumatic stress, or ’shell shock’.)

1939 WWII begins. The New World Order published by H.G. Wells. Freud is Tavistock Director, follwed by daughter Anna Freud. Tavistock mocked as “Freud Hilton.”

1940 Rees went even further than this on June 18, 1940 at the annual meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene of the United Kingdom. In his speech on “Strategic Planning for Mental Health,” he proclaimed: “We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine…. Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence…. If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people, I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity…. Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth columnists.’” (See MENTAL HEALTH, Vol. 1, No. 4, October 1940)

In 1940, Cantril would author THE INVASION FROM MARS: A STUDY IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PANIC regarding the radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. Tavistock senior staffer, Fred Emery, would later (HUMAN RELATIONS, Vol. 12, No. 3, August 1959) begin his article on “Working Hypotheses on the Psychology of Television” with the words: “The psychological after-effects of television are of considerable interest to the would-be social engineer.”

1942: The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wartime precursor to CIA, begins searching for a drug that will force subjects of interrogation, such as captured Nazi U-boat crews, to reveal secrets. As project director Dr. Stanley Lovell will recall, the idea of a “truth drug” is “considered fantastic by the realists, unethical by the moralists, and downright ludicrous by the physicians.” But according to OSS records, Lovell goes ahead and tests “mescaline, various barbiturates, scopolamine, benzedrine, cannabis indica (marijuana), etc.” The best results are obtained with the marijuana: “A few minutes after administration, the subject gradually becomes relaxed, and experiences a sensation of well-being… thoughts flow with considerable freedom… conversation becomes animated and accelerated. Inhibitions fall away…. [the drug] makes manifest any strong characteristics of the individual…. Whatever the individual is trying to withhold will be forced to the top of his subconscious mind.” To “administer” the pot without a subject’s knowing it, OSS scientists dissolve marijuana leaves in acetone, then heat the result into a clear, odorless, viscous liquid — tetrahydrocannabional acetate — which can be “injected into any type of food, such as mashed potatoes, butter, salad dressing, or in such things as candy.”

1943 LSD developed by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at Sandoz A.B. – a Swiss pharmaceutical owned by banker, S.G. Warburg. [He’s a Federal Reserve shareholder]. British and U.S. intelligence were directly involved.

The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi (Master of the Game) is the last work magnum opus of the German author Hermann Hesse. Begun in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943, the book was mentioned in Hesse’s citation for the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature. “Magister Ludi” can also be seen as a pun lud- is a Latin stem meaning both “game” and “school.”

1944 The International Monetary Fund was created in July 1944, originally with 45 members, with a goal to stabilize exchange rates and assist the reconstruction of the world’s international payment system. Countries contributed to a pool which could be borrowed from, on a temporary basis, by countries with payment imbalances. (Condon, 2007)

During the Second World War, Tavistock was part of Great Britain’s Psychological Warfare Department. On May 7, 1944, Dr. Rees of Tavistock and the British War Ministry injected Nazi prisoner Rudolf Hess with the narcotic Evipan. According to Lt. Col. Eugene Bird in PRISONER NO. 7: RUDOLF HESS (in the chapter titled “A Secret Drug”), Rees examined Hess 35 times. Rees and his associates via chemicals caused Hess’s memory to fail and then “explained that they could bring back the memory with an injection of Evipan.” Hess was told that “while under its influence he would remember the past he had forgotten.”

1945 (-1991) Cold War. World Federation for Mental Health

1946 – 1947 Rockefeller grant funds the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (London), as a not-for-profit organization for social psychiatry, group and organizational behavior research. Psychiatrist, Wilfred Bion, founding member, specialty group psychotherapy, group dynamics. OSS becomes CIA using Tavistock guidelines. Their redefined social mission was called Operation Phoenix. There were four divisions of staff members: consultants, principal project officers, project officers and assistant project officers. The grand strategy is the overall approach to winning the perpetual war – prosecuting the direct and indirect (covert) agenda.

National Training Laboratories, Bethel, Maine. Human Relations journal. “[The] National Training Laboratories… operation revolves around the particular form of Tavistock degenerate psychology known as ‘group dynamics,’ developed by German Tavistock operative Kurt Lewin…In a Lewinite brainwashing group, a number of individuals from varying backgrounds and personalities, are manipulated by a ‘group leader’ to form a ‘consensus’ of opinion, achieving a new ‘group identity.’ The key to the process is the creation of a controlled environment, in which stress is introduced (sometimes called dissonance) to crack an individual’s belief structure. Using the peer pressure of other group members, the individual is cracked, and a new personality emerges with new values. The degrading experience causes the person to deny that any change has taken place…

Mass production of TV sets. Benjamin Spock Commonsense Book of Child Care.

1947 While working with at MIT in 1946, Lewin received a phone call from the Director of the Connecticut State Inter Racial Commission requesting help to find an effective way to combat religious and racial prejudices. He set up a workshop to conduct a ‘change’ experiment, which laid the foundations for what is now known as sensitivity training. In 1947, this led to the establishment of the National Training Laboratories, at Bethel, Maine. Carl Rogers believed that sensitivity training is “perhaps the most significant social invention of this century.” Following WWII Lewin was involved in the psychological rehabilitation of former occupants of displaced persons camps with Dr. Jacob Fine at Harvard Medical School. When Eric Trist and A T M Wilson wrote to Lewin proposing a journal in partnership with their newly founded Tavistock Institute and his group at MIT, Lewin agreed. The Tavistock journal, Human Relations, was founded with two early papers by Lewin entitled “Frontiers in Group Dynamics”. Lewin taught for a time at Duke University.

1948 Tavistock joined with Kurt Lewin’s Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at the University of Michigan the next year and begin disseminating human relations literature, relating theory to practice, including promotion of change, engineering consensus, mass persuasion, breakdown of cognitive structure, and overcoming resistance.

Concept of ‘world citizenship’ proposed at 3rd International Congress of Mental Hygiene. B.F. Skinner publishes Walden Two; Alfred Kinsey publishes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. World Federation for Mental Health founded 1948 by John Rawlings Rees (Margaret Mead, President 1956-57).

James Paul Warburg, son of Paul Warburg who wrote the Federal Reserve Act, and nephew of Max Warburg who had financed Hitler, set up the Institute for Policy Studies to promote [LSD]… and the New Left counter-culture.”

RAND thinktank develops from Air Force Project RAND. The Prisoner’s Dilemma of game theory (originally framed at RAND in 1950 as a Cold War strategy) frames paradoxes in self-interest. There is a higher payoff in betrayal than cooperation. The iterated prisoner’s dilemma has also been referred to as the “Peace-War Game.” Without a doubt, RAND is THE think tank most beholden to Tavistock Institute and certainly the RIIA’s most prestigious vehicle for control of United States policies at every level. Specific RAND policies that became operative include our ICBM program, prime analyses for U.S. foreign policy making, instigator of space programs, U.S. nuclear policies, corporate analyses, hundreds of projects for the military, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in relation to the use of mind altering drugs like peyote, LSD (the covert MK-ULTRA operation which lasted for 20 years). BRAINWASHING remains the primary function of RAND.

In 1948, the British government formed an Industrial Productivity Committee which had a Human Factors Panel. This made grants for research aiming to secure improved productivity through better use of human resources. The grants were administered by the Medical Research Council.

Tavistock used these grants to develop techniques to integrate management and labor and integrate different levels of management; to restructure society in order to raise productivity; and to pioneer a new form of post-graduate education for field workers in applied social research.

Further experiments in manipulation were carried out in Ahmedabad, Pakistan; with Unilever; in the manufactured food industry to promote “pleasure foods” with little or no nutritional value, consumed excessively to satisfy oral cravings and reduce anxiety. Areas of study included ice cream, candy, smoking and alcohol. Private industry consultations supplemented Rockefeller support and extended the reach of the Institute. The Institute developed ever larger research and training programs, with increasing support from US foundations.

1949 ‘1984′ by George Orwell. The year after Tavistock and the RCGD began publishing HUMAN RELATIONS, the journal (Vol. II, No. 3, 1949), published “Some Principles of Mass Persuasion” by Dorwin Cartwright who helped establish the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. In this article, Cartwright reveals: “It is conceivable that one persuasive person could, through the use of mass media, bend the world’s population to his will.” The article goes on to describe “the modification of cognitive structure in individuals by means of mass media” and how “a person can be induced to do voluntarily something that he would otherwise not do.” The article also provides “a list of essential requirements for the success of any campaign of mass persuasion.”

1950 Korean War brainwashing exposed. Maoist techniques techniques included, dehumanizing of individuals by keeping them in filth, sleep deprivation,, partial, sensory deprivation, psychological harassment, inculcation of guilt, group social pressure. CIA Project MK Ultra mind control, drug and brainwashing experiments. LSD, hypnosis, “psychic driving,” amnesia. Dr. Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association and president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations.

Postmodern Culture Theory and Philosophy in academia, literature, design, history, law, marketing/business: Postmodernist philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory in the late 20th century. Re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, child-rearing, shift from industrial to service economy) took place since 1950’s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968. Described as postmodernity, as opposed to postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement.

1950 – 53 Korean War

1953 Bertrand Russell publishes The Impact of Science on Society, promoting mass psychology strategies throughout the educational process. Frank Olsen’s LSD-related death. 1953: CIA launches Operation MK/ULTRA, a major drug and mind-control program. Although THC acetate is studied as an interrogation aid, CIA is more concerned about reports of communist brainwashing experiments on American POWs in Korea, and focuses on stronger, hallucinogenic drugs. “Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field… gives a thorough knowledge of the enemy’s theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are.” Some CIA employees, including perhaps Meyer, volunteer for experiments. Through a front organization called The Society For Human Ecology, CIA begins sponsoring $25 million in research into the effects of mind-altering drugs — LSD, psilocybin and mescaline — at Harvard University and at several cites in the San Francisco-Oakland area, including Stanford and Berkeley.

1954 Founding of Bilderberger Group annual conferences and steering committees. “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley

1955 MK ULTRA launched by CIA and RAND for mind control, drug, brainwashing research. Mental Health Study Act mandates mental health practices. Further projects included: the British Society for Projective Psychology, the Phillipson’s Object Relations Technique, Interpersonal Perception, Rorschach testing of state-school pupils, socio-technical studies, agricultural restructuring, social networking, prison relationships, electro convulsive therapy (shock treatment), lobotomization, 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, the study of the Russian national character, sensitivity training, psychobehavioral chemical incapacitation, experiential mass-learning, inter-group experience, responses to meta-problems emerging in society, social analysis, Project Bluebird-Artichoke-MKULTRA (the investigation of this project was stage-managed by Nelson Rockefeller, brainwashing, the Unabomber, LSD-promotion, false personality overlaying, the New Age movement, acceptance of occult practices, promotion of abortion, the development of inclusive language, social engagement, multi-culturalism, open borders, and the questioning of “normal” social structures, the acceptance of deviancy, and so on.

1956 R.D. Laing was appointed senior registrar at the Tavistock Clinic in 1956, three years after he left the British Army Psychiatric Unit. He began experimenting with LSD in 1960, and then in 1962 when he became a family therapist at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, he also met Gregory Bateson while visiting the U.S. Bateson had been with the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), and then led the MK-Ultra hallucinogen (LSD) project. Bateson’s and Margaret Mead’s daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, along with New Ager Jean Houston, would later help Hilary Clinton write IT TAKES A VILLAGE. IN 1964 Laing met LSD proponent Timothy Leary in New York and also authored “Transcendental Experience in Relation and Psychosis” (THE PSYCHEDELIC REVIEW, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1964). Three years later Laing participated in the July 15-30 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress.

1959 VIET NAM WAR (1959-1975) Television is a hypnotic for social engineering (Emery). The Manchrian Candidate novel by Richard Condon, (films 1962, 2004).

1960 The psychedelic “counter-culture” originated when Sandoz A.G., an asset of S.G. Warburg & Co., developed LSD. James Paul Warburg (son of Paul Warburg who had written the Federal Reserve Act in 1910 and sponsored Nazi eugenics programs), financed a subsidiary of the Tavistock Institute in the United States called the Institute for Policy Studies, whose director, Marcus Raskin, was appointed to the National Security Council. James Paul Warburg set up a CIA program to surreptitiously experiment with LSD on human “guinea pigs”, some of whom committed suicide. This program, MK-Ultra, was supervised by Dr. Gottlieb.

1961 Leary starts Harvard LSD experiments. “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” (Aldous Huxley), Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961. Wilfred Bion, Tavistock founding member, wrote the influential Experiences in Groups, London: Tavistock, 1961. Experiences in Groups was an important guide for the group psychotherapy and encounter group movements beginning in the 1960s, and quickly became a touchstone work for applications of group theory in a wide variety of fields.

Chaos Theory and Mandelbrot’s fractal dimensions and attractors formalized by Edward Lorenz with computer. Dynamics applied to mathematics, biology, computer science, ecology, population dynamics. psychology, robotics, economics,engineering, finance, philosophy, physics, politics,

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Esalan founded. The Human Potential Movement (HPM) arose out of the psychosocial culture of the 1960s and formed around the concept of cultivating extraordinary potential that its advocates believed to lie largely untapped in most people. The movement took as its premise the belief that through the development of “human potential”, humans can experience an exceptional quality of life filled with happiness, creativity and fulfillment. Those who begin to unleash this assumed potential often find themselves directing their actions within society towards assisting others to release their potential. Adherents believe that the net effect of individuals cultivating their potential will bring about positive social change at large.

Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded the Esalen Institute in 1962, primarily as a center for the study and development of human potential, and some people continue to regard Esalen as the geographical center of the movement today[update]. Aldous Huxley gave lectures on the “Human Potential” at Esalen in the early 1960s and some people consider his ideas too as fundamental to the movement.

George Leonard, a magazine writer and editor who conducted research for an article on human potential, became an important early influence on Esalen. Leonard claims that he came up with the phrase “Human Potential Movement” during a brainstorming session with Murphy. He and Murphy then popularized the idea in bestselling books. Leonard has worked closely with the Esalen Institute ever since and in 2005 served as its president.

Over the next two decades, the NTL would spread its operations to various countries around the world. And in its ISSUES IN (HUMAN RELATIONS) TRAINING (1962), its sensitivity training is referred to as “brainwashing.” Recently, NTL has conducted programs relevant to Tavistock such as “NTL and Tavistock: Two Traditions of Group Work,” “Tavistock Program: Re-Thinking and Planning for Organizational Change,” and “The Tavistock–Task Working Conference which is a program structured around various group configurations…. Periodically each group will review its actions and results to learn from processes, roles, values, and methods as they evolve.” Other recent NTL programs have featured people such as New Ager Jean Houston and the witch Starhawk.

Manchurian Candidate film, The Mindbenders film, Clockwork Orange novel. Tavistock has twisted roots. In the 1960s, the para-medical group morphed into social science and social engagement — Operational Research (OR), a matrix form of organization — with nodes of an emerging international inter-corporate organization. Types include socio-psychological, the socio-technical and the socio-ecological perspectives.

Tavistock-like centers spread with joint undertakings in generic field-determined problems, not just small issues. Some are no longer directly linked with London. The work is future oriented and concerned with the transition to post industrial social order and transmodern paradigm shift. Problem-oriented research includes interdependent research/teaching, research/service, research/action forms. Autonomous institutes which must network arise from the later.

1963 Kennedy Assassination. Dr. Stranglove film.

1964 MK Search, truth-drug. Beatles in America. 1964, annual eugenics workshop-conference inaugrurated, called the Princeton Conferences. At the third of these Princeton Conferences, not only were demographers, “behavioral geneticists,” anthropologists, and psychiatrists in attendance, but a computer specialist attended. By November 1969, the Fifth Princeton Conference took the bold step of going under the title “Genetic Reconstruction of Human Populations.” Remember that by then, the periodical Eugenics Quarterly had sanitized its name to Social Biology. By 1970 Rockefeller Center was more or less serving as a hub for discourse in behavioral eugenics.”

1965 According to the A.K. Rice Institute, “In 1965 Rice led a conference in the United States, as the Tavistock Method began to be developed in the U.S. by Margaret Rioch and others. The A.K. Rice Institute is now the U.S. equivalent of the Tavistock Institute.”

1966 Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Laguna Beach ‘hippie mafia’ LSD wholesalers with Tim Leary and CIA connections. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was an informal organization of psychedelic drug enthusiasts and dealers that operated in the late 1960s. Founded in Anaheim at The Church, the group was headquartered in the Mystic Arts bookstore on Pacific Coast Highway, a common stopping point for those traveling south from Haight Ashbury to Mexico. Timothy Leary, the excommunicated Harvard psychology professor and devotee of free love and author of “turn on, tune in and drop out,” became the resident godfather of the group. Leary said, “The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they’d go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill.”

1967 Summer of Love. Haight-Ashbury. Ramparts, a radical magazine, exposes CIA sponsorship of the National Student Association, a Cord Meyer project. Meyer’s best friend, James Angleton, assigns CIA officer Richard Ober to begin a leak investigation into the Ramparts story. Ober’s probe is soon expanded into a spy program on the countercultural and student-protests movements, code named CHAOS. Just as CHAOS is launched Leary moves from upstate New York contemplating The Tibetan Book of the Dead, to the Southern California countercultural scene. He became a media-hound, urging all to “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out.” He lives in Laguna Beach with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the ‘hippie mafia’ who have CIA connections also.

1968 Woodstock Nation. Erlich’s Population Bomb published. Assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

1969 Earth Day mass environmental movement established. 1969: Leary critics will eventually point with suspicion to his close connections during this time to an international LSD-smuggling cartel, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which is rumored to be a CIA front. The Brotherhood is controlled by Ronald Stark, whom an Italian High Court will later conclude has been a CIA agent since 1960, and the Brotherhood’s funds are channeled through Castle Bank in the Bahamas, a known CIA “proprietary.” For two years Leary lives at Brotherhood headquarters, located on a ranch in Laguna Beach. During this period, the Brotherhood corners the U.S. market on LSD and begins distributing only one variety of the drug, “Orange Sunshine.” Stark says he plans to distribute the product to CIA-backed guerillas fighting Chinese occupation; he reportedly knows a high-placed Tibetan close to the Dalai Lama, and wants to provide enough LSD to dose all Chinese troops in Tibet. In the U.S., meanwhile, Stark provides enough Orange Sunshine to dose the hippie culture and radical left many times over. This is the “bad acid” on which Charles Manson’s followers murder Sharon Tate, and on which Hell’s Angels stab to death a black man during a concert by the Rolling Stones. The Summer of Love has been supplanted by a Season of Hate. Because of this, many countercultural insiders — including William S. Burroughs, White Panther leader John Sinclair, and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey — will eventually entertain the theory that Stark, Leary, and Orange Sunshine are all part of CIA plot to discredit and neutralize the radical left. According to former radicals Martin Lee and Bruce Shalin, widespread use of Orange Sunshine “contributed significantly to the demise of the New Left, for it heightened the metabolism of the body politic and accelerated all the changes going on… In its hyped-up condition, the New Left burned itself out.”According to declassified government documents, CIA now has a CHAOS agent with “particularly good entree into the highest levels of the domestic radical community,” who is providing “extremely personal data.” It is decided to send this agent to infiltrate the overseas headquarters of the Black Panthers, but this will not be accomplished for many months. In the meantime, CIA will debrief him for purely domestic information about his associates, in part because he does not “wish to deal with the FBI.” This description perfectly fits Leary. No one has better “entree” than Leary, who has recently been helicoptered in as the guest of honor at Woodstock. Few have more “personal” data on radical figures than the man who is personally turning them on. The overall pattern of Leary’s career, his continual links to people who are linked to CIA, is certainly suggestive. So is the fact that, like CIA’s “star agent,” his willingness to mix with CIA-types does not extend to the FBI, which Leary has disliked since Liddy’s raid on Milbrook.

1970 “The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by and elite, unrestrained by traditional values.” –Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, 1970

Henry Kissinger, whose meteoric rise to power is otherwise inexplicable, was a German refugee and student of Sir John Rawlings-Reese at SHAEF. Programmer, Dr. Peter Bourne, a Tavistock Institute psychologist, picked Jimmy Carter for President of the U.S., solely because Carter had undergone an intensive brainwashing program administered by Admiral Hyman Rickover at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

In 1970, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) of the NEA published TO NURTURE HUMANENESS: COMMITMENT FOR THE ’70s, in which Sidney Jourard (Fellow at the Tavistock Clinic and former president of the Association for Humanist Psychology), wrote: “We are in a time of revolt…. The new society will be a fascist state or it will be pluralistic and humanistic.” The primary characteristic of the fascist state is increasing control over people’s lives by government in league with corporations. Sound like today?

1971 “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” –Henry Kissenger, NY Times.

Clockwork Orange film. “Future Shock” published.

1972 “Limits to Growth” published by Club of Rome

SRI – Jesse Hobson, the first president of Stanford Research Institute, in a 1952 speech made it clear what lines the institute was to follow. Stanford can be described as one of the “jewels” in Tavistock’s Crown in its rule over the United States. Founded in 1946 immediately after the close of WWII, it was presided over by Charles A. Anderson, with emphasis on mind control research and “future sciences.” Included under the Stanford umbrella was Charles F. Kettering Foundation which developed the “Changing Images of Man” upon which the Aquarian Conspiracy rests. Experiments conducted in remote viewing at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). CIA conducts evaluations, paying $50k experimental contract. Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, Ingo Swann, Joe McMoneagle, Project SCANGATE, Project STARGATE ten-year ESP program including the DIA, the CIA, NASA, and Army Intelligence. 2009 film, Men Who Stare At Goats. Stanford Research is plugged into at least 200 smaller “think tanks” doing research into every facet of life in America.

Rockefeller proposed the creation of an International Commission of Peace and Prosperity in early 1972 (which would later become the Trilateral Commission). At the 1972 Bilderberg meeting, the idea was widely accepted, but elsewhere, it got a cool reception. According to Rockefeller, the organization could “be of help to government by providing measured judgment.”

In 1969, Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof and Anthony Sutich were among the initiators behind the publication of the first issue of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, the leading academic journal in the field (Chinen, 1996:10). This was soon to be followed by the founding of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (ATP) in 1972. Past presidents of the association include Alyce Green, James Fadiman, Frances Vaughan, Arthur Hastings, Daniel Goleman, Robert Frager, Ronald Jue, Jeanne Achterberg and Dwight Judy. In the 1980s and 90s the field developed through the works of such authors as Jean Houston, Stanislav Grof, Ken Wilber, Michael Washburn, Frances Vaughan, Roger Walsh, Stanley Krippner, Michael Murphy, Charles Tart, David Lukoff, Vasily Nalimov and Stuart Sovatsky. While Wilber has been considered an influential writer and theoretician in the field, he has since personally dissociated himself from the movement in favor of what he calls an integral approach.

1973 The first Psychotronic Conference was held in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in June of 1973. Mankind Research Unlimited (MRU), Dr. Carl Schleicher, Director is D.C. equivalent of the Stanford Research Institute thinktank. Holographic Concept of Reality, Miller & Webb

1975 Cable TV begins.

1976 Apple Computer founded.

1977 Fred Emery of Tavistock publishes ‘Futures We Are In.’ Theory of adaptive retreat. Apple II computer released.

1980 CNN founded by Ted Turner. Globalization of world economy.

1981 MTV. Osborne 1 computer, first true portable computer.

1982 Compaq Computer Corporation announced the Compaq Portable, the first portable IBM PC compatible.

Gordon Lawrence “discovers” a Social Dreaming Matrix at Tavistock in 1982. Dreams could be used to extract cultural knowledge and scientific ideas, illumine social situations, provided the Sphinx knowledge perspective was used, and not the classic Oedipal one.

“Knowledge of the dream is the focus. Knowledge can be of three kinds. (a) Knowledge of the inanimate world which is expressed through mathematics, and physics making use of mathematical and mechanical metaphors, and formal logic. (b) Knowledge of the organic world as expressed in biology which is linked with the use of evolutionary and organic metaphors, and dialectical logic. (c) Knowledge of the world of the personal, which is the highest and most comprehensive form of knowledge being the mutual knowledge of two persons. This personal knowledge includes the material and organic.”

A Matrix is a place (Dreamland) from which something grows, acknowledging the unconscious, both personal and social, including the critical feelings and emotions of participants. A group is bounded by a universe of meaning but a Matrix is open and facilitates a multi-verse of meaning. Divergent thinking is possible in the Matrix, a generative working hypothesis with intellectual and spiritual qualities. Often the ‘unthought known’ of the system is voiced, the ’secret’ that is recognized but not spoken as a factor in the being of the system.

All these techniques induce a trance state because they function hypnotically, swinging wide the ‘Doors of Perception,’ described by Tavistock pioneer, Aldous Huxley. Tavistock wrote the blueprint for global domination, a triumph of image over substance. They wrote the book on propaganda, prognostication and profiling — the staples of the full-spectrum surveillance society. They have contrived history.

1985 Stewart Brand founds The Well, first Interne-based community. Amiga by Commodore computer released.

1990 Information Operations (Info Ops) is an evolving discipline within the military. It has emerged from earlier concepts such as “Command & Control Warfare” and “Information Warfare” – mainly US-dominated, originating in the 1990s and considering lessons learned from the Gulf War(s), phenomena like the so-called “CNN Effect” and enormous advances in Information Technology.

1992 – 1995 Bosnian War

1995 In the 1990s, the Tavistock Institute not only began a new journal titled EVALUATION in 1995, but the Institute and the European Commission also worked on a feasibility study to research the effect of using “Smart Cards” in competence accreditation. The study was carried out in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The project involved assessing and validating students’ skills, with information placed on personal skills Smart Cards which “become real passports to employment.” The implication, of course, is that without this “real passport,” one will not be employed.

1996 Since the 1996 Telco act, television and radio stations all across the nation were bought out by major international media outlets. Clear Channel and Infinity are the two largest corporations in radio today. This has centralized the distribution of information and has threatened our free society ever since. The media drums to the heartbeat of its owners, whose interests are not of the general public. Instead they are interested in their other financial endeavors like defense contracting, oil business, political parties, prison industry. The conflicts of interest are monumental with the deregulation of the corporations. The lines are now blurred between one network’s coverage of the war and the other.

1997 The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neo-conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that lasted from early 1997 to 2006

October 1997 the Tavistock Institute (and Manchester University) completed a final report (under Contract ERB-SOE2-CT-96-2011) for the European Commission, and described in a report summary was that there will be “partnerships between government, industry, and representatives of worker organizations.” The report summary also described “the relevancy of Goals 2000, SCANS (U.S. Department of Labor SECRETARY’S COMMISSION ON ACHIEVING NECESSARY SKILLS) typology with its profound implications for the curriculum and training changes that this will require,” valid skills standards and portable credentials “benchmarked to international standards such as those promulgated by the International Standards Organization (ISO).” The report summary went on to say that “there is increasing attention being focused on developing global skill standards and accreditation agreements.”

2000 The mission of the U.S. military today and tomorrow is to fight and win the nation’s wars. How DoD goes about doing this is 2020’s focus. “Full-spectrum dominance” means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations. The four capabilities at the heart of full-spectrum dominance are dominant maneuver, precision engagement, focused logistics and full-dimensional protection. These four capabilities need the full capabilities of the total force. “To build the most effective force for 2020, we must be fully joint: intellectually, operationally, organizationally, doctrinally and technically,” the report states.

2001 9/11 Twin Towers attack. War on Terrorism. The War in Afghanistan, which began on October 7, 2001, as the U.S. military’s Operation Enduring Freedom and the British military’s Operation Herrick, was launched in response to the September 11 attacks. The stated aim of the invasion was to find Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda members and put them on trial, to destroy the whole organization of Al-Qaeda, and to remove the Taliban regime which supported and gave safe harbor to Al-Qaeda. The United States’ Bush Doctrine stated that, as policy, it would not distinguish between terrorist organizations and nations or governments that harbor them.

2003 Iraq War

2005 The Singularity is Near (non-fiction), a 2005 non-fiction book by Ray Kurzweil

2008 The CFR started a 5 year program called “International Institutions and Global Governance: World Order in the 21st Century” which aims in setting up global institutions in different levels to foster a global governance, in order to tackle different trans-national problems

* Countering Transnational Threats, including terrorism, proliferation of WMD, and infectious disease
* Protecting the Environment and Promoting Energy Security
* Managing the Global Economy
* Preventing and Responding to Violent Conflict

2009 The Obama administration urged cooperation with UN to tackle the same points covered by CFR plan’s. “The Obama administration will work with the United Nations to fight terrorism and other major world challenges…like nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea, the global financial crisis, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, pandemics and global warming.”

2010 The Tavistock Institute is a $6 Billion a year network of Foundations in the U.S., consisting of ten major institutions, 400 subsidiaries, and 3000 other study groups and think tanks. Tavistock’s pioneer work in behavioral science along Freudian lines of “controlling” humans established it as the world center of foundation ideology. Its network now extends from the University of Sussex to the U.S. through the Stanford Research Institute, Esalen, MIT, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, where State Dept. personal are trained, US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand and Mitre corporations. The personnel of the corporations are required to undergo indoctrination at one or more of these Tavistock controlled institutions. A network of secret groups, the Mont Pelerin Society, Trilateral Commission, Ditchley Foundation, and the Club of Rome is conduit for instructions to the Tavistock network.

2012 The end of the world as we know it is being sold. If the news isn’t feeding it to you, then the History Channel or Discover Channel are either talking about the crusades, asteroids, UFOs, earthquakes, tsunamis, supervolcanoes, comets, pole flips, magnetic storms, solar flares, terrorism, global warming, impending iceage, or exposes about serial killers…and dirty bombs. They dismiss conspiracy theories with disinfotainment. They craft the message that our world is unstable, and the threat is always an invisible and dangerous one that only our military can fix. When you compile all the messages and their effects, you end up with a script — a screenplay produced in the movie studios of Hollywood hell.

Also see: http://www.scribd.com/doc/12752559/Steps-Toward-Global-Mind-Control-Timeline

An ASKLEPIA FOUNDATION Journal
HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE PARADOX?
Chaos Theory and Fuzzy Philosophy
by Iona Miller, 1993

ABSTRACT: The notion of paradox comes from a consciousness conditioned to think in terms of opposites, dualistic paradox. Self-referential paradox feeds back and annihilates itself. Such bivalence (binary logic: this or that; true or false; black or white) can be superceded by multivalent consciousness which perceives in terms of degrees. Multivalence more accurately reflects the complex dynamics of consciousness. As in the case of fractal generation, solutions are not found in terms of this or that, but in terms of degrees of fractional transformation, relationships. Fuzzy philosophy is based on acceptance of degrees of truth, the “grayness” of most propositions (truth values), the fractional solutions of fuzzy logic. Human consciousness is a self-referential system which embodies this principle of a connection between logic and chaos, in holistic (“whole brain”) awareness.

What we’ve been discussing is the beginnings of a whole new theory of dynamic logic, invented by Gary Mar and Patrick Grim in the department of philosophy of the State University of New York at Stony Book. It provides a link between semantic paradoxes and chaos theory.
–Ian Stewart, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
The universe is deterministic but gray. Chaos theory had already gotten the determination part right. Fuzzy theory now confirmed that and should that all things were matters of degree too.
–Bart Kosco, FUZZY THINKING
Know Thyself is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act.”
–James Hillman, HEALING FICTION
A FUZZY REVOLUTION?
We can read the progressive theories of leading-edge science as modern myths. They both create and reflect changes in collective consciousness and the global worldview. These new myths permeate culture, fomenting change and opening new conceptual territory for exploration.
The “new myth” seems to be one of “guiding fictions,” even “healing fictions.” Mythic consciousness and its practice, ritual life, requires a telos to create momentum–the dynamics of consciousness. The fictional carrot dangles, ever-present before us. As a culture, we are in the position of having to take ritual fictions (including scientific theories) seriously, while recognizing their status as fiction at the same time. This means being in two ontological “places” at once, facilitating the development of new ways of thinking about the nature of knowledge, being, and reality.
The myths are bigger than any one of us. Yet through Creative Mysticism we can enter the imagination, not as an exercise in “doing our own thing,” but as a disintegration of the reference points that make it possible for the archetypal energies to live through us. Thus radical deconstruction of ego leads beyond the paradoxes of yoked opposites. Dogmas dissolve and merge on their own. The surety of fact melds into psychic reality. The new myth is not one of polarity, but plurality–panoply.
Given these choices, each of us is faced with a struggle to acquire an authentic sense of identity. We have been saddled with a cultural mandate to “pick one” and sustain a strong ego identification at the expense of empathy, compassion, and perspective. What for one is a liberating experience is terrifying for others, or leads to the despair of cultural disenfranchisement. Our sense of identity impacts us individually, socially, and existentially. Broadening those boundaries opens us to an expanded sense of self.
In my own search for identity, I first became aware of the notion of paradox as a teenager. I was given a button with the cryptic message, “Have you been to the Paradox?” Puzzling over its meaning, I finally found out it was a music club, which I subsequently patronized. On the broader scale, I became aware of another club–a “Reality Club.” I continue to visit “the Paradox” as I define and refine myself, through opening not only to the opposites but to all degrees of interpenetration between. At this “inn between,” I’ve many times found the thread of my chaotic trajectory through life.
Traditionally logic and chaos have held sway in two separate camps. But what of that boundary domain where the two meet and progressively meld into one another? In this “twilight zone,” two threads of the new science revolution have come together in a “sacred marriage” between logic and chaos. Ian Stewart (1993) gives an example of dynamic logic:

“You take the train of thought involved in assessing the truth value of a set of self-referential statements and convert it into a dynamic process. Then you can apply all the techniques of chaos theory to that process. The escape-time plot is inspired by exactly the same method that creates all those wonderful multi-colored images associated with the Mandelbrot set: swirling spirals, sea horses, cacti, stars, and so on.”

This statement could also be read as commentary on the self-referential consciousness process expressed as “Know Thyself.” This Apollonian dictum is the utterance of the ancient god of logic Himself. The Jungian method of “Know Thyself” means a radical activation of imagination. It calls to us, echoing through the aeons–urging us to turn our consciousness back on itself, assessing and experiencing the relative “truth” of what we find within.
Jung’s solution to this injunction is summarized by Hillman:

We have already been given the clue in the instructor’s manual as to how this third realm traditionally called ’soul’ can be re-established–and by anyone. Jung says he treated the figures whom he met “as though they were real people.” The key is that as though; the metaphorical, as-if reality, neither literally real (hallucinations or people in the street) nor irreal/unreal (‘mere’ fictions, projections which ‘I’ make up as parts of ‘me’, auto-suggestive illusions). In an ‘as-if’ consciousness they are powers with voice, body, motion, and mind, fully felt but wholly imaginary. This is psychic reality…

Hillman points out that we can remember, associating backward and downward into the forgotten and repressed. And in psychic reality we find a multiplicity of answers to all major, archetypal, sorts of questions–relative answers. Each archetypal perspective has its way of self-knowing.
In alchemy the multi-state paradigm is known as multiplicatio, which touches all points of the soul, all channels of images. According to Hillman, it is “spirit’s self-knowledge in the mirror of the soul, soul’s recognition of its spirits.”
There is no single way of knowing thyself, even though psychology has favored the method of introspection and insight. According to Hillman, “Know Thyself terminates whenever it leaves linear time and becomes an act of imagination. A partial insight, this song now, this one image; to see partly is the whole of it. Self-understanding healed by active imagination.”
Our unique method of knowing ourselves is through our own epistemological metaphors which reflect “how we know what we know” about ourselves. They are the result of our personal experience of archetypal experiences–our direct experience of the nature of reality, expressed as image. The non-linear co-relationship of simultaneous cause/effect means that archetypes become embodied as specific, yet dynamic, imagery.
The imperative to know ourselves challenges us to reflect on our identity, beliefs, assumed truths, interpretations, and even our archetypal experience and self-understanding. This dynamic recycling of consciousness creates/reveals the dynamic flux of holistic feedback patterns. It establishes a patterning matrix–a strange attractor–reflective of the organism’s relationship to the whole, through a unique relationship of chaos and order. The whole brain approach to existence is both/and chaotic and logical–logically chaotic, chaotically logical. It is a holding of the tension of the opposites between the logical and natural mind.
Complex systems, such as human beings, manifest emergent properties which tend to be non-linear. They are sufficiently context dependent that they become unpredictable under normal circumstances. The reason has to do with the fact that sufficient context dependence leads to self-reference. That is, insofar as one part effects another part, which in turn effects the first, the first can be seen to be effecting itself through the mediation of the second. Multiply the parts and the system gets really out of control, at least as an object of modelling.
Godel proved why such self-referential systems are inherently unpredictable. Any finitely axiomatized formal system rich enough in entailment to manifest self-reference displays true theorems not deducible from the axioms. Since all mathematical modelling systems can be formalized as axiomatic systems, and since the project of such modelling is the essence of deterministic reductionism, it follows that systems capable of self-reference cannot be reduced to deterministic causality. They can be modelled, but they become descriptive of organization, rather than predictive of future states (Naser, 1993, Bridge-L).
Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the initial conditions of existence. The physical body is conditioned by physical laws. At the mesocosmic level, we either exist or we don’t, we’re alive or dead. But the flow of our essence within the whole is not so black and white. We remain ourselves, despite the loss of discrete body parts or faculties of perception.
At the quantum level, our atomic “matter” merges with the environment and the vacuum of non-existence. The I-Not I dichotomy breaks down in pure consciousness. Our physical constituents remain, even after death, with their own molecular and quantum perceptions, but the genetic information becomes obsolete. We all decay according to the same biological process.
Free of the gravitational valley of corpo-reality, consciousness can soar unfettered. When consciousness flows into an “escape-time plot,” we experience the boundary-dissolving transcendence of cosmic consciousness. An increased sense of freedom comes with liberation from the gravity of literalism. Yet we are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings. The nature of our existence is both/and–psychobiological.
BETWEEN DARKNESS AND LIGHT
To “fuzzy consciousness” nothing is absolute–everything is a matter of degree. Diffuse awareness permits conceptual transcendence of all or nothing thinking, rigid definition of right or wrong. Fuzzy thinking helps us consider the universe from several relative perspectives at once. It frees us from having to “choose” identification with some polarities over others. It is inclusive, rather than reductive. It helps us juggle conflicting concepts, differing truths.
We live in a symbiotic universe, part of the seamless webwork of existence, which is the root of deep ecology, the science of relationships. We interact in a pluralistic social milieu, with seemingly irreducible diversity. Within such multiplicity, common interpretation can only exist by coercion, and then conformity is only superficial.
Fuzzy philosophy is one way of affirming our oneness as humans while honoring and affirming our diversity. Perhaps it is one way of embracing multiplicity which can help heal the global spiritual crisis. This openness to many forms of validity is reflected in nature. Within the laws of organic evolution, diversity is essential to the process of adaptive change.
Fuzzy consciousness cleaves neither to the Light nor the Darkness, neither this nor that, not even the Void (existence/non-existence). The void is not empty once you’re there; it is intense richness. That which the outer personality calls nothing, the inner traveller calls All.
The “Fuzzy Principle” is described and experienced as vagueness, “shades of gray.” There are an infinite number of gray values on the continuum between 0 and 1, an infinite continuum of gray scores like fractal solutions which spin out an infinite number of virtually random decimals places.
In dynamic logic, statements can be more than true, false, or “indeterminate.” Indeterminacy defines a continuum of multiple values, partial truths, probabilities. Our uncertain reasoning is “fuzzy.” According to Kosco, fuzzy logic “labels an idea or family of ideas–shades of gray, blurred boundary, gray area, balanced opposites, both true and false, contradiction, reasonable not logical–and those ideas are very old and have many ancestors.”
Jung and the Jungians speak of balanced opposites as the coincidentia oppositorum. They have raised the process of “holding the tension of the opposites” to a fine art. This psychotherapeutic method has to do with keeping soul and spirit “distinct but conjoined,” in a combination of solar and lunar consciousness. It is the alchemical marriage of masculine and feminine principles, which are representative of all polarities.
Solar consciousness is bright, analytical, logical; lunar consciousness is dark, diffuse, relational. Their alchemical combination is a sort of “illumined lunacy,” according to Hillman. Thus, the “fuzzy” domain is revealed as the realm of imagination between the spiritual heights and psychobiological depths–that limbo, or twilight zone, between heaven and hell. This imaginal perspective is neither real nor unreal, in the conventional sense.
In the psychotherapeutic journey, both the unconscious and conscious are transformed through the imaginal morphological process. The whole is a process of fuzzy transformations of imaginal forms, culminating in a state of consciousness which transcends them all. An old alchemical text says, “Whence will come the Chamaeleon of our Chaos, in which all secrets are hid in their potential state.” One result of embracing the alchemical notion of coincidentia oppositorum is the logical consequence of the relativity of the God-concept. It evokes the fundamental ambiguity of the divine nature of the self.
The coincidence of opposites is expressed in the image of a divine or royal marriage, which has universal cultural validity and redeeming effects. It supercedes the constructive/destructive powers of the unconscious, allowing us to experience awareness of a fraction of the unconscious which gets us outside of ourselves, our times, and our cultural bias. In alchemy this state is symbolized as an androgyne, that which is whole unto itself.
Mystical models of thing and no-thing, such as the Taoist symbol of yin-yang embody such polarity in ever-shifting proportions of dynamic interplay. It reflects the interpenetration of existence with non-existence, of essence and Source. The principles of coherence and correspondence unite them. Zen Buddhism sees three truths with the same mind: things are real, unreal, and neither real nor unreal. According to Buddha, “The no-mind not-thinks no-thoughts about no-things.”
An epistemology is based on an inclusive “both/and” principle, which characterizes both the “structure of cognition” and “dimensions of variation of the human potential for spiritual realization” (Schuman, 1993, Bridge-L). John Wiegley defines the paradox of oneness and duality:

The position [of zazen] expresses the oneness of duality: not two, and not one. This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two ‘and’ one. We usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one; if it is not singular, it is plural. But in actual experience, our life is not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent.

Mystics live at “the Edge,” with a foot in two worlds. Such an image of “life at the dividing line” may point to the source of creativity and intelligence. We might consider the bottomless fractal decomposition of what it means to live “between the cracks” (in the cracks between the cracks between the cracks). Fractal descriptions capture the organic properties of living systems, but also function within hierarchy. They define a linear trajectory–a linear index of levels, as they descend into their bottomless complexity.
We can make a distinction between “levels” of conceptual modelling, defining our linkage to the Divine sources. This topology is the generic basis of “maps of consciousness,” how we project toward that which we do not know. Hierarchical/fractal modelling is not a contradiction, but may be a “fuzzy” term for a reiterating process of self-similar cascades which emerge in the reiteration and interpenetration of self and Self. Forms are identical to the descending cascade of “levels of abstraction.”
The division between parts and whole marks the dividing line between dependent and independent variables. If logic flow is going down the hierarchy, every element below a higher element becomes a dependent variable, whose values change as they receive input from above. And as logic flow ascends the hierarchy every element becomes independent, as it determines the composition of the forms above it.
Such relativistic models more accurately reflect reality. They reflect the nature of consciousness more accurately. Our individual boundaries are actually gradients. In logic things can be 100% true or false; in nature they seldom are. The facts usually are partially true or false. To the extent science has measured facts and interpreted them in all or nothing terms, it has failed to describe experiential reality. “Truth” doesn’t always match the facts.
THE PROBABILITY PARADOX
Have you been to the Paradox? If you have embraced the worldview of quantum mechanics, “chances are” you have. It is based on the a priori assumption of bivalent thinking, and is ultimately a linear mathematics attempting to describe a non-linear reality, of observers desperately trying to remain impossibly “objective.” Therefore its symbols don’t necessarily equate with “the facts” of reality. Multivalent experience requires participation.
Semantic paradoxes reflect classic conundrums, such as the paradox of the heap. With each grain removed it is still a heap, until you remove one and have nothing. The paradox revolves around when it ceases being a heap. Fuzzy sets easily resolve the paradox of the heap, gliding smoothly across the truth continuum. With each grain, it looses membership value. This vagueness is best described as a “haze at the edges,” though ambiguous.
With vagueness, more information does not lead to precision, just as more measurement in QM cannot resolve uncertainty. Vagueness and precision are features of language (even mathematical language), not reality. Ordinary, traditional logic is the structure of mathematics, it confirms or denies. Yet, the nature of reality is that all that exists is continuous, even consciousness itself is a continuum.
Paradox has been considered fundamental to the nature of reality since the birth of quantum physics. Assuming that all systems are ultimately quantum in nature, the primary paradox surrounds the act of measurement. In the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, the mathematics describes the superposition of probability waves prior to observation as the pristine nature of reality.
This theory asserts that the act of observation collapses the probability wave into the reality we experience. It is vital to remember that the superposition does not represent a set of alternatives–an either/or choice–but a genuinely overlapping combination of possible realities. These realities not only co-exist, they overlap and interfere with each other by the wave interference phenomenon.
The Everett/DeWitt “many-worlds” interpretation of QM eliminates the measurement paradox described above. It takes the mathematical description at face value. Therefore, no special collapse into reality is needed at the moment of observation–the reality is already there. Yet the superposition of other states is an inescapable component of QM. This interpretation further assumes the reality, not mere potentiality, of all others worlds in superspace.
This theory implies that the world is continually splitting into countless copies of itself–stupendous numbers of branches, multiplying infinitely. This sounds suspiciously like fractal generation, cascades of chaos. Like the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory, every subatomic process has the power to multiply the world, maybe an enormous number of times. This ceaseless replication theoretically splits and multiplies our bodies, brains, and consciousness infintely. What starts out at birth as one consciousness multiplies countless billionfolds by death.
The splitting process is totally unobservable because the separate worlds of superspace are completely discrete. Rather than parallel universes, the mathematics of extra dimensions describes them as perpendicular to ours. Local space is just one three-dimensional subspace from a superspace that contains an infinity of perpendicular directions.
The many-worlds theory lends a new perspective to the fundamental indeterminacy of QM. The “missing information” which could lead to complete predictability is “hidden” from us in the other worlds to which we have no access. Thus, superspace as a whole is completely deterministic; the random element comes from our sampling just a minute portion of the whole. The widest view of superspace implies that every situation can be reached along some convoluted path of development, in at least one of these other worlds.
Fuzzy philosopher, Kosko rejects the notion of probability in favor of fuzzy logic. Kosco notes, “If fuzziness exists, the physical consequencesare universal, and the sociological consequence is startling: Scientists, especially physicists, have overlooked an entire mode of reality.” We have overlooked this way of conceptualizing reality in favor of “crisp” logic.
Fuzzy logic is reasoning with fuzzy sets, degrees of embedding or enfoldment. Logical truth differs from factual truth, being based on symbols and their formal relationships. Probability is the fortress of a science based on bivalent thinking–it is an assumption, a worldview, a belief system. It ranks or weighs future alternatives. Kosco postulates a “probability instinct,” in the Jungian sense, resulting from millennia of organizing our perceptions, memories, and expectations.
He postulates pure fuzz as a parent of probability, citing the fuzzy idea of containment–how much one thing contains another–how much one set contains another set. The whole in the part is probability. The subset theorem shows that the universe is deterministic but gray (this and not-this to some degree). Fuzzy logic transcends paradox, eliminating probability, asserting that paradoxes of self-reference are half-truths, fuzzy contradictions. The yin-yang equation holds where this equals not-this. It is the midpoint of a reference “truth line” from zero to one.
Even in physics the truth of statements is a matter of degree. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shifted probability into an all-or-nothing bivalent truth, which requires rounding off descriptions, trading simplicity for accuracy. In self-referencing paradoxes, rounding off leads to annihilation, infinite contradiction, like a Zen koan.
The ultimately linear nature of QM “causes” uncertainty in systems. The nonlinear theories of quantum chaos offer a step toward the nonreality reality. The measure of the whole in the part swallows up the old notion of “randomness” or the probability of a part. The essence of fuzzy logic describes the whole in the part.
In Kosco’s theory of fuzzy entropy, when A equals not-A fuzzy entropy is maximal. He says, “At the midpoint you cannot tell black from white or white from black. The midpoint is the black hole of set theory. It is the gray hole of set theory…subsethood or degree of containment is the deepest and strangest idea in fuzzy logic and explains probability or “randomness” as the whole stuck in the part.”
Lotfi Zadeh discovered fuzzy sets, nearly calling them “cloudy” instead of fuzzy. Multivalence has also been termed “vagueness” in the past for obvious reasons. Zadeh pointed out that, “for coping with the analysis of biological systems, and to deal effectively with such systems, which are generally orders of magnitude more complex than man-made systems, we need a radically different kind of mathematics, the mathematics of fuzzy or cloudy quantities which are not describable in terms of probability distributions.”
According to McNeill and Freiberger, “Zadeh realized that complex disciplines team concepts. They include such notions as obscenity and insanity in law; arthritis, arteriosclerosis, and schizophrenia in medicine; recession, value, and utility in economics; grammaticality and meaning in linguistics; stability and adaptivity in systems theory; truth, morality, and causality in philosophy; and intelligence and creativity in psychology. Fuzzy sets can describe them all.”
Fuzzy thinking will allow us to revision our perspective on the relationship of man and God, man and the universe(s), life and death (not-life), morals and ethics. It is part of our adaptive evolution, a new twist in worldviews, a new way to be conscious–logically. Multivalued logic, though vague, reminds us of Hillman’s diffuse awareness which he calls “anima consciousness.” Other synonyms are gray logic, cloudy logic, and continuous logic. Diffuse logic takes the edge of extremism off left-hemisphere thinking.
Fuzzy philosophy reflects the fusion of cultural inputs in society and thought. It is an androgynous consciousness, rooted in the interpenetration of masculine and feminine principles, melding the qualities of both hemispheres of brain functioning into a holistic continuum of perspectives.
REFERENCES
Davies, Paul; OTHER WORLDS: A Portrait of Nature in Rebellion; Simon and Schuster, New York, 1980.
Hillman, James; HEALING FICTION, Station Hill, 1983.
Jung, C.G.; MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1963.
Kosco, Bart; FUZZY THINKING, Hyperion, New York, 1993.
McNeill, Daniel and Freiberger, Paul; FUZZY LOGIC; Simon and Schuster, New York, 1993.
Stewart, Ian; “A Partly True Story”; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Feb. 1993, p. 110-111.

CHAOSOPHY 1993-09
An ASKLEPIA FOUNDATION Journal
THE UNBORN DREAM
Thriving On Chaos
by Iona Miller, 1993

ABSTRACT: If the implicate order is analogous to the frequency domain, as Bohm-Pribram have shown, the image/object domain unfolds from this invisible reality. That which is enfolded within the undivided whole is the “Bornless One,” the unborn dream of our infinite possibilities. Unity-in-diversity is the direct experiential/existential goal of the Creative Consciousness Process in its experimental form.
Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of the “waves of unborn nothingness” which constitute the unborn dream, the relentless flow of consciousness in search of embodiment and formlessness. Consciousness journeys are the “reading” or explication of the formless domain of Spirit. Following Nature to whatever abysses she leads, they reveal a way of thriving on chaos.
KEYWORDS: polyphasic consciousness, entrainment, shamanism, the pregnant Void, iterative paradox, recursive feedback, bifurcation, penetration, quantum mechanics.

The ecology of the soul is to recycle one’s consciousness.
–Videru Telemahandi, EAT THE SUN
Thee I invoke, the Bornless One.
Thee, that didst create the Earth and the Heavens.
Thee, that didst create the Night and the Day.
Thee, that didst create the darkness and the Light.
Thou art Myself-made-Perfect:
Whom no man hath seen at any time.
Thou art the Truth in Matter.
Thou art the Truth in Motion…
I invoke Thee, the Terrible and Invisible God:
Who dwellest in the Void Place of the Spirit.
The Bornless One.
–A. Crowley, LIBER SAMEKH
POSTMODERN MAGIC
We can invoke the Bornless One with the postmodern “magic” of chaos theory, following the trail deep into bottomless Nature. It is a journey through the magic mirror of the imagination into the looking-glass universe of multiple realities.
The nameless, shapeless, unborn face of chaos is the matrix of all creation. At the root of the universe, and ourselves lies chaos, or paradoxical order of an infinite degree. The “self made perfect” is not a picture of ultimate hypostasis, but only of “self made whole”, the union of unbroken wholeness rooted beyond the paradoxical realm of opposites. The paradox of the Bornless One is that it is always manifest as infinite multiplicity.
At the turbulent brink of chaos–the bifurcation point–we see nonlinearity and feedback throbbing in the form of an utterly wild and eerily beautiful creature called the strange attractor. With its siren call, it beckons us to dissolve and merge with the formless, shapeless, unborn chaotic potential–to transform through repatterning by the whole–to reiterate the process of unfolding creation from nothingness.
The unfolding process of creation is riddled with intermittency taking the form of islands of order in a sea of randomness, or randomness interrupting order, like static breaks up a clear signal. Paradoxically, in regions of intermittency, the old order (or chaos) momentarily reasserts itself. It is a never-ending dance at the edge of chaos–the universal flux of creation and destruction.
Paradox constantly reenters itself through the process of iteration–feedback loops involving the continual reabsorption or enfolding of what has come before. Chaos theory describes this operation as one of stretching and folding spacetime.
Similarly our experience is encoded in nonlinear form through the process of association. Things that are alike are grouped together, and the more energy stored in the system, the greater the emotional charge. In consciousness journeys we find that experiences from later life lead to sequences from birth trauma, even embryonic development, and their transpersonal counterparts.
Grof (1988) refers to these constellations of memories and associated imaginal material as COEX systems, systems of condensed experience. They consist of material from different periods of life with a strong emotional charge of the same quality, intense physical sensations, or additional shared elements, such as a discrete state of consciousness.
Trauma creates typical reactions which become habituated as self-induced trance states, which recycle the accumulated existential responses of multiple incidents. Initially they may develop as coping mechanisms, defenses, and dissociations. In terms of chaos theory we can view this stretching and folding of the experiential continuum as “temporal recursiveness.”
Nonlinear phenomena express in CCP through experiential transcendence of spatial boundaries and linear time frames. Thus we find shifting identifications with inorganic processes, plant life, animals, even planetary or universal consciousness. Temporal distortion manifests as pre-existence, embryonic and fetal experience, ancestral and genetic consciousness, tapping the racial and collective unconscious, and various evolutionary themes. Grof has compiled a useful taxonomy of these states in THE ADVENTURE OF SELF DISCOVERY.
The chaotic attractor systematically removes the initial information and replaces it with new information: the stretch makes small-scale uncertainties larger, the fold brings widely separated trajectories together and erases large-scale information. Thus chaotic attractors act like a kind of pump bringing microscopic fluctuations up to a macroscopic expression (Crutchfield, et al). Chaos is generated by the stretching and folding of complex orbits.
Elementary particles generate themselves through a constant process of creation and destruction through iteration from the vacuum state. This “quantum potential” has the quality of infinite sensitivity to its surroundings. Quantum potential is infinitely sensitive feedback with the whole–the webwork of ever-changing possibilities. This fluctuation of the whole of the information field gives rise to the probabilistic results of quantum processes–quantum chaos.
In much the same way, our dream images come and go, permeating our life with their iterated message. They are constantly repeating and reflecting our central concerns, and our sensitivity to the slightest perturbations in our external and internal environment. Listening to the voice of our unborn dreams provides infinitely sensitive feedback with the whole.
The brain is a nonlinear feedback device. Iteration generates chaos, through the dynamic cycling process. Iteration suggests that change is stability. Determinist systems, including ourselves, which are maintained through oscillation, iteration, feedback, and limit cycles are vulnerable to chaos and face an indeterminate (unpredictable) fate when pushed beyond critical boundaries. We maintain identity only by remaining continually open to the flux and flow of the environment.
The whole shape of things depends on the minutest part. The part is the whole, since through the action of any part, the whole in the form of chaos or transformative change may manifest. That transformative “part,” the incipient whole, is the “missing information,” which through iteration traces out the system’s unpredictability. The shape it traces is the strange attractor. There will always be missing information, a hole (or whole) at the center of our logic.
The missing, transformative information lies within the very heart of chaos, a shapeless, unborn form–an unborn dream, waiting to unfold its potential. Chaos is an infinite information source, a “hidden variable.” Nuances are full of a sense of the “missing information.” Dreams are full of creative nuances. So are wondering, uncertainty, and questioning; they are the very flux of creative disequilibrium.
In experiencing nuance we enter the borderline between order and chaos, and in nuance lies our sense of wholeness and inseparability of experience. Dreams express as sensory metaphor. For metaphor to elicit nuance it must be fresh, not dead; it must shock the mind into wonder by opening up a gap, an abyss, a void.
Herein lies that missing information–again, the unborn dream. Thus dreams continually amaze us with their freshness, engage us with their ability to clothe our recycling issues in story and metaphor.
Dreams also encode our evolution, our coevolution with the entire webwork of life. Pioneer dream researcher Montague Ullman (1988) states, “I no longer look upon dreaming primarily as an individual matter. Rather, I see it as an adaptation concerned with the survival of the species and only secondarily with the individual.”
For Ullman, dreams represent our failures and frustrations in maintaining positive bonds, links to others, our connections with the larger supportive environment, our capacity for involvement. The images metaphorically reflect the core of our being, the place we have made for ourselves in the world. They offer deeper insight into the truth about ourselves, a way of exploring both internal and external hindrances to flow and unbroken wholeness.
His view of dreams suggests, “that we are capable of looking deeply into the face of reality and of seeing mirrored in that face the most subtle and poignant features of our struggle to transcend our personal, limited, self-contained, autonomous selves so as to be able to connect with, and be part of, a larger unity.”
In the waking brain, the chaotic activity of neuron firings is at a low level. But as the brain sinks deeper and deeper into sleep, the chaos becomes more pronounced. However, during REM activity, when dreaming takes place, the amount of background chaos decreases. Chaos seems to become embodied within the dream image, rather than the physical patterning of the firing neurons.
The iterative paradox, the (w)hole in the center of our orderly logic, represents the potential chaos of the missing information, which applies to most of our experience. Recycling ourselves, recycling our consciousness, with CCP means dissolving into the unborn dream, connecting with the missing information, opening to the whole and its self-organizing impression.
Familiar order and chaotic order are laminated like bands of intermittency. Wandering into certain bands, a system is extruded and bent back on itself as it iterates or recycles–dragged toward disintegration, transformation, and chaos. Thus, for example, birth trauma, near death experience, and ego death become experientially contiguous. The unfolding wave of the unborn dream presents imagery iterating any/all of them simultaneously.
Meanwhile, inside other bands, systems cycle dynamically, maintaining their shapes for long periods of time. Beneath each thought or simple emotion lie layers of sensation and feeling which keep cycling in the brain’s feedback loops. Memories arise as relationships within the whole neural network–a sort of phase space of memories. But eventually all orderly systems feel the wild, seductive pull of the strange chaotic attractor.
In chaos theory, state changes occur at the point of bifurcation–a forking or splitting of possible paths of development. Some bifurcations are catastrophic, others somewhat gentler. The amplification of bifurcations leads to order or chaos. The system takes off in a new direction. Over time, cascades of bifurcations either cause a system to fragment itself toward chaos, or to stabilize a new behavior through a series of feedback loops, coupling the new change to the environment.
There is flux at some bifurcation points–the consideration of choices within a virtual infinity of degrees of freedom. The order of choice is so high that it is chaos. Other choices are limited in degrees of freedom through constraints imposed by coupling feedback processes from the environment.
Similarly, in chaotic consciousness the choices are from infinite self-organizing potential. It allows the highest degree of freedom for the whole to pattern the new self/world image. From the All–total potential–probabilities unfold–in this case the probabilities of evolutionary transformation. An emergent order manifests.
Bifurcations are the milestones in any system’s evolution, including our own. They crystallize our history. An untold number of evolutionary bifurcations are enfolded in all our forms and processes. During flux, many futures exist. But through iteration and amplification, one future is chosen. The system embodies the exact conditions of the environment at the moment the bifurcation occurs.
Thus, in CCP the bifurcation which occurs during chaotic consciousness embodies the therapeutic environment or context. It is an expression of the feedback arising out of the flux of chaos. In that instant one becomes the “Bornless One,” the Unborn Self. “No man hath seen” the Bornless One, because it transcends “seer” and “seen.” Its essence is evolutionary because–following nature’s lead–it is based on the pure intensification of life, intensification of consciousness.
Research shows that even chromosomes can reprogram themselves when exposed to enough environmental stress–learning from the organism’s experience. DNA inhabits the edge between order and chaos. Acting like a feedback relay center, it balances the negative feedback ability to maintain stability with the positive feedback ability to amplify change.
The greater an organism’s autonomy, the more feedback loops are required between the system and environment. We are immersed in and reflective of a vast webwork of being to which we are seamlessly connected. This bonding through feedback loops is the “yoga of chaos,” the yoking or binding back to the whole which is the essence of “religion.” This implies that individuality is an illusion, an abstraction, a category, or conception.
WAVES OF UNBORN NOTHINGNESS
What happens in that instant where nothing becomes something? Waves of energy “crystallize” into matter in the womb of empty space, a dynamic void. The transpersonal Void is primordial Emptiness, the silent cradle of existence. It is the ineffable Source, which is experienced as both beyond phenomenal existence, while paradoxically underlying it.
In its dynamic form matter cannot be separated from energy. Energy is a property of matter, which can be considered potential energy. The mystic believes in matter, but believes it is more than science has yet discovered. Long before Western science began, mystics perceived that mind, consciousness, or spirit is a property of matter. It hardly matters, philosophically, if you consider it as manifesting force or manifesting spirit.
THE HEART SUTRA tells us that subtle forces underlie matter-energy and space-time. All form and power are latent within the void: “Form is not other than Void, Void is not other than Form.” This implies that our human form also is not other than void, and biophysics shows this to be essentially true. Our physical makeup is largely emptiness.
If we conceive of humans as being fundamentally electromagnetic entities, instead of chemical beings, we can imagine our finer existence as wave-fronts in space. Our personal “space” is not utterly empty, but cannot be conceived apart from our matter exhibiting itself in particular ways, i.e. as “waves.”
Yet, the void state or primal matrix is “cosmic zero,” and proportionately our most fundamental reality. The characteristic feature of the universe is not matter, but empty space. It is part of the surrealistic quantum realm. It lies within us all, for the relative space between our atoms is astronomical. The void is both a dynamic and receptive field. This is the ground state of existence which mystics seek in their meditation, moving beyond mind and maya.
Echoing all the qualities of the Bornless One, Grof (1988) describes the void as follows:

The Void is beyond space and time, beyond form of any kind, and beyond polarities, such as light and darkness, good and evil, stability and motion, and ecstasy or agony. While nothing concrete exists in this state, nothing that is part of existence seems to be missing there either. This emptiness is thus, in a sense, pregnant with all of existence, since it contains everything in a potential form. This experience has a certain similarity with the experience of the interstellar space and with the concept of the dynamic void known from quantum-relativistic physics, although it is obviously on a much higher metaphysical level than either of the above.
The experience of the Void also transcends our ordinary concepts of causality. Subjects who are having this experience accept as self-evident that various forms of phenomenal worlds can emerge into existence out of this void without any obvious cause. The possibility of something originating out of nothing or of something vanishing without any traces does not appear absurd, as it would in everyday consciousness.

Washburn (1988) takes care to distinguish this high mystical illumination, speaking of its measureless immensity, power, and grandeur as an “eclipse of the ego.” Mystical illumination needs to be distinguished from the other types of objectless states: (1) the dead void; (2) the empty trances; (3) undifferentiated effusions and ecstasies; and (4) objectless contemplation. All fall considerably short of mystical illumination, though they are akin to it.

Dead void states differ from mystical illumination in being bereft of the power of the Ground; these experiences are merely episodes of mental vacancy, without any degree of dynamic infusion or absorption. Empty trances differ from mystical illumination in being implosive rather than infusive absorptions; moreover, trances are dense and dark rather than ethereal and bright.
Undifferentiated effusions and ecstasies differ from mystical illumination in being wild and impure; they are explosive absorptions or transports that are admixed with derepressing feelings and instincts. And objectless contemplations, although suffering from none of these deficiencies, differ from mystical illumination in being experiences of significantly lesser stature; they fall far short of mystical illumination in the degree to which the ego is infused, illumined, and beatified by spirit.”
The difference in degree that distinguishes mystical illumination from objectless contemplations is sufficiently great to constitute a difference in kind. Mystical illumin-ation is not just an experience of serene enlightenment, as are objectless contemplations; it is rather an experience of celestial exaltation and effulgence.
Mystical illumination is an experience of inconceivable enormity. In the case of mystical illumination, the Ground releases a prodigious outpouring of spirit. The aperture of the soul is opened to its widest bore and spirit, in the fullness of its power and glory, graces the ego with the ultimate vision. Mystical illumination, then, unlike objectless contemplation, is inherently of the nature of a gift…it is the Ground itself, or the inner principle that regulates it, that determines when an ultimate disclosure will occur.

The Bornless One is pure unborn Spirit, the unborn dream or vision. Because of its pre-existent condition, it is eternal, beyond the realm of time and space, always without exception. It is inherent in its paradoxical nature, however, that it can be unfolded into “ordinary” experience from initiation in nonordinary consciousness–i.e. dream-healing, vision quest, etc. As a patterning principle, it transcends and contains all forms.
The image is one of symbolic penetration into the primordial field. Perception of the “pregnant void” implies penetration to that sacred dimension of experience. Imagery orders the process until the last possible instant, even the “imagery” of “nonperception.” Like the void, emergent imagery is “pregnant” with meaning, which only partially emerges as the panoply unfolds. Imagery is a natural expression of the Void fleshing itself out to the fullest extent.
Meanings elaborate and multiply through the integration of information. That information is infused through direct experience. Once again, we find the “missing information.” Imagery invites entrainment–the evocation of beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and behavior. It invites experience by attracting our attention and evoking multiple associations. Imagery invites us to experience by penetrating to the very core of natural process, through recognition of pattern, mediating available information.
Images penetrate or directly affect unconscious intentionalities, often initiating habituation. The purpose is generally coordination of the organism. The activities of one system affect other systems. Changes of state are only partially isomorphic with one another.
RIDING THE DREAMWAVE
Healers in all societies diagnose mental and physical disease from symbolic expressions. In many societies dream symbolism is interpreted as symptomatic of psychological disorder. Experience is considered as symptomatic of changes or problems existing outside the range of consciousness. Stress responses can be elicited from various physical systems merely by evoking an image of dangerous or painful experience.
Emphasis on the residual effects of physical trauma, in addition to emotional pain, is one of the distinguishing features of experiential therapy compared with “talk therapies.” Sensorial symptoms “invite” penetration through symbolic means of healing (i.e. CCP). Imagery work sets up a continuous feedback interaction between sensorial neural and nonsensorial neural and somatic systems.
It is virtually impossible to distinguish whether the imagery is an expression of unconscious processing in the person, or whether the imagery is the penetrator to unconscious processes. This bidirectional communication among discrete systems is crucial to the maintenance of whatever degree of fragmentation or integration of systems is characteristic of any particular consciousness.
Metaphor is used to constitute meaning in all cultures. It is one of the basic structural “building blocks” of culture. Through metaphor, imagery attained in one domain of experience is used to order, or provide meaning for, events in another domain of experience. The superposition of images from memory and the present entrain associations.
Utterance of such imagery may evoke thoughts, scenes, feelings, states of arousal, autonomic and metabolic responses. They may or may not carry the intense emotional discharge indicative of some intentionalities, (i.e. complexes).
Laughlin, et al (1990) speak of various techniques of symbolic penetration, engendering metaphorical understanding and transformation of ego identity. They include ritualized practices of evocation, and the dramatic performance of metaphor. They are “especially interested in the use of penetration techniques in order to evoke significant warps of consciousness–an evocation that is a universal theme of transpersonal religious practices cross-culturally.”
The experiential therapeutic process, CCP in particular, provides a “container,” ritual, or means of initiating the unfolding transformation via the process of “penetration” of the transpersonal domain.
Feedback from that domain comes in the non-linear form of a “call” and an “answering receptivity.” When we respond to the initiatory call of the dynamic ground, there is movement of both poles of consciousness toward common ground. They are synchronized through the process of resonance, entrainment.
The “penetration” of the transpersonal process is recursively linked to the instant of penetration of sperm by egg, the mutual interpenetration of their genetic material, and all subsequent experiences of sexual or other forms of penetration, as well as transpersonal imagery.
Thus one consciousness journeyer reports her multi-dimensional insight: “Now that I just am this ovum being penetrated by the sperm, I’m no longer violated…how about that! I’m created, I’m not violated! I feel like Jesus when they pierced him in the side. I was still resisting until now that sperm penetrating, and until it did, I couldn’t be whole. Now I’m feeling like I’m in the Fallopian tube, and going into the uterus, and I can implant, and grow to where I am now. Its a wonderful feeling, because I can be inside my mother and here at the same time. I can be in all of those places. It’s wonderful!”
The images work in arenas far beyond the conscious awareness of the journeyer. Images penetrate networks latent in their functioning, or operating outside the bounds of awareness. They can activate a broad field of intentionality, as systems synch with one another.
Beyond our wildest imagination, the opening of this doorway to chaos, invites an influx of the formerly repressed unconscious. It manifests the return of natural wildness. It is embodied as kaleidoscopic, pluralistic chaos consciousness. It may virtually erupt into awareness, resulting in profound alterations in personality, autonomic balance, understanding, and behavior.
RUNNING WITH THE WOLVES
The archetype of “wildness” has enjoyed a certain fashionability in the last few years. Both the men’s movement and the popularization of Feminine wildness in WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES have extrolled the virtues of reconnecting with the part of ourselves which is so often lost in modern life. It is a shamanic form of penetration to the heart of a natural symbol.
Laughlin, et al describe a wolf ritual used to generate an alternate phase of consciousness, and penetrate to primal experiential domains. As reported by Ernst in 1952, there is a secret society among the Makah offering an initiation every winter. Initiates fast and act out wolflike traits; they wear wolf masks, sing about wolves, and channel their attention toward “wolfness.”
Imitating the behavior of the wolf they work themselves into a Wolf frenzy, punctuated by wolf calls. Circling round the fire they “show what they are”–the essence of wolfness–until the fire goes out. The Wolf frenzy initiates radical biophysical changes in respiration, heart rate, corticosteroid secretion, adrenalin secretion, endorphin and enkephalin secretion, muscle tone and facial expression.
The researchers interpret this experience as “mediated by the older core limbic and brain stem networks which, when triggered to total eruption, relevate the fundamental, “bestial” functions of these systems into full awareness.”
They go on to note that, “the initiate experiences a gestalt of specific neurophysiological responses that become associated with the “wolf-frenzy” and the core symbol, the wolf, particularly as depicted in masks. This experience and the resulting alterations in cognition constitute the conation of the ritual.”
“There exists the potential for a more complete integration of these archaic structures within the confines of conscious network. That is, the individual may now have more conscious access to these structures as they are more likely to be entrainable to conscious network.” One can draw on this primal awareness across a continuum ranging from gut instinct to intuition.

For those members of the Wolf cult who actually do experience the frenzy, cognitive, experiential, and physiological models become transformed by association with paleoneurognostic models and are reintegrated as intentionality around (penetrable by) a core symbol. Presumably, by manipulating this core symbol, the secret society is able to penetrate and access this new intentionality for its collective purposes.

POLYPHASIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Probably the most sophisticated postmodern theory of consciousness has been described in BRAIN, SYMBOL, AND EXPERIENCE. The authors (Laughlin, et al) abandon all notions of dualism between consciousness and the nervous system, between mind and matter.
They theorize that “consciousness is produced by a field of neural entrainments that is constantly in flux but exhibits recurrent patterns of reentrainment.” Phases of consciousness are in fact patterns of entrainment in the community of living, goal-seeking cells.
There is moment-by-moment entrainment of the oscillating infrastructure of neurons. They suggest that recruitment and eventual entrainment of most, if not all, somatic systems comes through sustained concentration of attention upon an object or process. Similarly Bentov (1977) has hypothesized that certain meditative procedures lead ultimately to the synchronization of all standing waves in the body to the rhythm of the dominant, aortic standing wave.
Laughlin, et al suggest a state-of-the-art way of viewing reality, combining the mystical art of mature contemplation and scientific method to correct perceptual errors intrinsic within each system. They interpret the experience of multiple realities as alternate fields of neural activity entrainable to conscious network.
Their evidence shows that “experience appears to be phasically organized; the shifting reentrainment of neural components making up the ever-changing conscious network” which is organized into temporally recursive configurations. Awareness is related to vigilance, attention to and detection of danger, and recognition of recurrent patterns in awareness.
It is this awareness that is self-organized into different “states” or phases of consciousness. Sequences of phases are marked by transitions or warps intervening between phases. They are the points of transformation between systemic states modeled in catastrophe theory. Warps have both structural and functional aspects just as do phases.
Different neural entrainments are initiated during trauma. Repeated episodes lead to fragmentation of consciousness over time, resulting from entrainment and reentrainment of alternative networks to conscious network. Complexes and subpersonalities develop, as well as the less emotionally charged systems of condensed experience, described by Grof as COEX systems. These competing networks are patterns of entrainment which persist even though excluded from or inhibited by entrainment to conscious network.
In regression or retrogression, “the structures strain, twist, and often come apart (disentrain). Yet, sectors of functional entrainment remain; some structures continue intact. With good fortune, should a “cure” be affected, the ego system will find a relative equilibrium…”
Ordinarily the nature of our ego controls the nature of our experience. The intentional guided induction of nonordinary states of consciousness leads to adaptive experience of multiple realities. It is the function of the shaman to guide initiates to direct transpersonal experiences that enliven the multiple realities depicted in cultural myths and archetypes. Experience is symbolic because the system that generates experience processes only symbolic material.
Experimental and naturalistic observation are applied to the task of observing the very processes that “produce the ego, the object, and the entire cognized environment.” The observer watches the process of reduction during transformations of state. They suggest that one cross-cultural expression of this way of being is the shamanic principle. “The shaman learns to transcend empirical ego constraints by altering his ego state, allowing him to immerse himself and participate in a broader, more destructured phenomenal field.”
The ego itself is chaotically based, displaying its own self-organization and adaptation. As a system, it is its own expanding universe. It expands by separating, differentiating, and reintegrating, echoing the alchemical maxim, “Solve et Coagula.” Laughlin, et al hypothesize that the ego emerges based on the developmental sequence that is the very process of cellular reproduction–separation, differentiation, and integration.
The isolated, alienated ego is trapped in the dead void of its own creation. It perceives the ground state as a vast black hole, a bottomless pit whose magnetic pull it fears. If it finds itself within that hole it hears only the dull echo of its own cries. Resisting the pull, the ego/hero may be dragged into the adventure irregardless. According to Laughlin, “From the ego’s point of view, looking at its own supportive field and developmental context is like looking down into a massively spiraling vortex of dancing shapes, receding further into haze and eventual murky darkness.”
One participant in a consciousness journey found herself near a dark hole, which, after initiating sensations of dizzyness and swinging, became a cold cave with echoes. Listening to the echoes she became an owl and eventually moved into a crack in the rocks to become a powerful hibernating polar bear, who begins to dream. Thus she realized the embodiment of her unborn dream of empowerment, safety, rest, and recuperation.
In another instance, a different journeyer entered through sensations of sharp pressure on her chest area. This session revolved around the issue of her domineering, pushy mother. She described a gray mist in the area of her heart, which had a calming effect. During the journey she had also approached a black hole. Attempting to put her leg in it, she felt tremendous sensations of physical energy shooting up her legs, and she did not like it. Following her process, allowing the journey to go elsewhere, permitted direct experience of flowing with the non-pushy Feminine.
This upwelling of energy from the unconscious abyss represents the derepressing influx of all that suppressed energy and existential information. Having already been differentiated, Graywolf suggested she bring this energy into the heart area to interact with the mist.
This conjunction provided a sense of sanctuary within that she had formerly been seeking externally through control and compulsive orderliness. That which was separated and differentiated became integrated–assimilated. Sensations of flow derive from the breakdown of body image entrainment in favor of direct entrainment with proprioceptive fields, (sense receptors or sensory homunculus). She manifested her unborn dream of serenity, embodying the new myth that contentment flows from within.
Each of these journeys shows polyphasic consciousness in process. Identifications range from self image, to inorganic objects, to natural processes, to biological forms, to geometric and destructured primitive forms. Other journeys have symbolically shown the destructuring process as “dismemberment.”
Dismemberment (ego death) is experienced as the internal structure is literally coming apart under powerful and impelling intrusion from unassimilated neural structures. If they do not shatter the ego, those structures eventually may reciprocally assimilate with ego into a greater structure producing a wider vision. During creative emergence, the usual body image is replaced by the experience of flow, which may entrain visual and other sensory systems.
With guidance and experience a shaman gains mastery over the new realm of experience. According to Laughlin, “He becomes expert at cross-phasing warps and transcending levels of his own internal structures. What was earlier experienced as dismemberment and madness now becomes an exploration,” of a world of symbolic transformations of internal neurological processes.
The internally generated images in the sensorium are perceived to be as “real” as the external world. These images are embedded in fields of affect. Entry to the other world is usually accomplished through a process we can describe as “portaling,” using some kind of portal, door, tunnel, or vortex to navigate the crack between the worlds.
Laughlin, et al attribute the universality of this process to “the consistent organization and entrainments of neurognostic (self-organizing) structures existent within the human nervous system. As one experientially converges toward the vortex of the internal structuring process, individual and cultural variations vanish to reveal a profound, common structure. This structure embedded neurognostically in the human brain is experienced by shamans everywhere in their realization of the interrelatedness of all things, of energy flow, and of the existence of nonprofane world outside the bounds of conditioned normal perceptions.”
Thus, the shaman accesses and reshapes a world of almost pure experience. Changes take place at subconscious levels of neural entrainment, rearranging substructures, and progressively entraining other systems through elicitation and sequencial exposure. Internal entrainment becomes more fluid, less constrained.
The world of the shaman is one of the application of myth through the mystical journey. Myth, symbol, and ritual, as well as the generative ground of dreams and visions, provide the context which frames the experience and its interpretation. In the mythic world, imagery and feeling are unfolded into a narrative. The shaman helps others access the mythic experience; the human need for this engenders the shaman. “Myth acts as the field of external constraints molding the ego from the outside as the shamanic experience remolds him from the inside.”
In the initial stages, typically the journeyer enters a trance state induced by overstimulation, because the ego is immersed and overwhelmed. The seasoned journeyer can maintain the bifurcation of consciousness, where the ego is detached and stable, while polyphasic consciousness flows. This allows the shaman to function simultaneously as guide and co-conscious journeyer.
Shamans are those who have learned, not only to survive and adapt, but to actually thrive on chaos. In shamanic consciousness, the flesh meets the spirit world. Through the consciousness journey, we can also have the experience of thriving on chaos, facilitating destructuring of outworn adaptive patterns via shamanic consciousness, and subsequent repatterning through polyphasic process.
Laughlin et al consider polyphasic consciousness as potentially fully informed about all phases of consciousness in each phase of consciousness. They assert that,

Fully polyphasic awareness is subtly different from egocentric awareness of transpersonal material. Polyphasic awareness describes a consciousness that is operating within the same intentional range of attention, concentration, and awareness in every phase of consciousness, whether waking, or dreaming, or trance.
The intentionalities of all networks that become entrained to it are “meaningful” to conscious network within the frame of reference provided by whatever pattern of entrainment prevails at the moment. In other words, to the fully polyphasic consciousness, experi-ence is meaningful as it is occurring, regardless of the phase of conscious-ness during which it arises.
Polyphasic consciousness does not require interpretation of events occurring within one phase of consciousness to be rendered in another phase of consciousness in order to be meaningful. Yet, because cross-phasing is fluid, each phase of consciousness may interpret events in other phases according to its own context, intentionalities, and logic of events.

Their model includes rare, totally polyphasic individuals who are characterized as having realized Void Consciousness–healers, guides, leaders, sages, and wise teachers. Social interpretations of these individuals within cultures ranged from “crazy” or deviant to legitimate travelers to alternative realities, depending on the reductive or holistic nature of the society.
They posit that a truly “Polyphasic Void Society” would have institutions that encourage exploration of dream and other alternative phases, not as ends in themselves, but as means to the realization of a phase of consciousness beyond any phenomenal reality. Mature contemplation involves the cessation of both conceptualizing and imagery.
In the experience of totality, global entrainment, “subject,” “object,” and “observer” are moot. The completely integrated process is inseparable from the field of potentialities that is the Void.
REFERENCES
Briggs, John & Peat, David; TURBULENT MIRROR, New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Crutchfield, James; Farmer, J.; Packard, N. & Shaw, R.; “Chaos”, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,
Grof, Stanislav, THE ADVENTURE OF SELF DISCOVERY, New York; SUNY Press, 1988.
Laughlin, Charles, McManus, John, d’Aquili, Eugene; BRAIN, SYMBOL, AND EXPERIENCE: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness, Boston: Shambhala, 1990.
Ullman, Montague; “Wholeness and Dreaming” in QUANTUM IMPLICATIONS, London & New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1987.

CHAOSOPHY 1993-08
An ASKLEPIA FOUNDATION Journal
DREAM WAVE:
Primal Imagery in the Creative Consciousness Process
by Iona Miller, ©1993

ABSTRACT: Consciousness appears as the urge toward manifestation or embodiment and an equal but opposite urge toward formlessness. This interplay creates the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception. These clashing currents in the stream of consciousness create “standing waves” of informational content which may be unfolded from their implicate to explicate state through direct participation in that stream.
The premise of the consciousness journey is that this “dream wave” may be followed backward/forward toward more primal representations into the nonrepresentational mode of perception. Certain typical, recurrent patterns occur at the further limits of these journeys. Particular phenomena are reiterated at the threshold of chaos–the threshold of dissolution–including amorphous clouds, black holes in psychic space, spirals and vortices, as well as dead and fertile voids.

In summary, black holes are accessways between consciousness and the prepersonal unconscious. They are the first points at which the power of the Dynamic Ground burns through into the mental-egoic sphere. They are festering concentrations of psychic energy that magnetically draw the mental ego away from its worldly involvements and lead it toward its repressed underlife, which is a perilous unknown. Black holes therefore should be explored only by the ego that is ready for “the journey,” regression in the service of transcendence.
–Michael Washburn, THE EGO AND THE DYNAMIC GROUND
This existentially full holoplenum that enfolds the totality of existence is the primary reality for Bohm. Objects are secondary, derived by unfolding from the enfolded totality. More precisely, there is a continuous movement of enfolding and unfolding. Bohm uses here the image of ‘a turbulent mass of vortices in a stream.’ The flowing stream qua plenum ‘creates, maintains, and ultimately dissolves’ the totality of vortex structures.
–Gordon Globus, QUANTUM IMPLICATIONS
THE DREAM WAVE
Consciousness always strives to take on form. But something within us is also constantly seeking formlessness. These paradoxical currents in the stream of consciousness meet in imagination, overlap and set up interference patterns much like those of a hologram.
Energy flow patterns are defined by existential experience, which can not only channel, but distort the formless flow of free energy. Thus imagination can appear in representational and non-representational forms. It can appear as fleeting images or apparent absence of form or pattern that is nevertheless perceptible.
When we turn our attention to a specific “wave” of the stream of consciousness, the act of perception arrests the flux of the world, manifesting an image or impression of what may be in a state of continuous, perhaps infinite movement.
This “dream wave” may be followed from its representational form to more primal nonrepresentational perceptions. Perception occurs somewhere between sensory stimulation (physical or imaginal) and conscious awareness, and is subject to internal “tweaking” of its informational content.
We have spoken elsewhere (“The Un-Named Dream”) about the possible etiology of one of the recurrent primal images in the dreamhealing–the amorphous grayness, cloud or fog. But there are other typical images found at the threshold of chaos, including spirals or vortices, “black holes in psychic space,” dead and fertile voids. Whatever these perceptions represent, they are reiterated in various forms in the majority of consciousness journeys. They each have analogies in the reports of mystics.
Representational activity seems to indicate transitional phenomena, while nonrepresenta-tional activity implies global experience, or diffuse existential states of being.
AMORPHOUS PERCEPTION
Amorphous perception is not always an experience of the primal ground state as described by mystics. It may be pre-conscious nonrepresentational activity of the psyche. It comes up in the consciousness journeys with memories of early life which are experienced before the mind has learned to think in terms of abstraction and concepts. Thus it carries a diffuse, impressionistic quality of aperception.
Arieti refers to this pre-conceptual “knowing” as the endocept, which he describes as follows:

The endocept is a primitive organization of past experiences, perceptions, memory traces, and images of things and movements. The previous experiences, which are repressed and not brought back into consciousness, continue to have an indirect influence. The endocept goes beyond the cognitive stage of the image, but inasmuch as it does not reproduce anything similar to perceptions, it is not easily recognizable. Also, it does not lead to prompt action. Nor can it be transformed into a verbal expression; it remains at a preverbal level. Although it has an emotional component, it does not expand into a clearly felt emotion.

As a disposition, it is vague, uncertain, or partial at best. It involves a sense of expansion, accompanied by a decrease in the intensity of subjective awareness. It is felt as an “atmosphere,” an intention, a diffuse, “global” or “oceanic” feeling.
This form of cognition is non-verbal, non-dialogical, non-verifiable. In this primal condition ’self’ cannot talk to itself to verbally define reality. Intuition, inspiration, and empathy (rapport) are three modes of amorphous cognition. Assuming the form of an image, they are expressed as creativity.
Amorphous perception arises from pre-verbal, pre-conceptual existential experience. Expression in images, words, thoughts, feelings, or actions is absent. It also arises spontaneously in dreams in which language does not enter. However, more frequently dreams function to bring mute, unconscious, invisible ideas into representational forms.
THE SPIRAL WAVE
Spiral waves permeate all levels of organization in nature. The propagation of spiral waves is archetypal. It is an emergent property of self-organization. We see it in the spinning of electrons to the spinning of galaxies. As they move through space, their trajectories form spirals. Spirals manifests in many of the fractal patterns which model the complex dynamics of nature.
There are spiral waves in physics, chemistry, and biology. Nonlinear interactions transport energy along the helical coils of protein molecules. The complex spiral of the double helix of DNA is the basis of all life as we know it. The twin serpents spiraling up the Caduceus mirror in symbolism the human nervous system, crowned by the mind, winged with imagination. This serpentine spiral is the symbol of healing.
Human consciousness and imagery are no exception to this dynamic patterning principle. As consciousness “moves” through imaginal space, it creates a spiral trajectory as past/future unite. Forms of spirals we find in the consciousness journeys include funnels, whorls, eddies, apocalyptic whirlwinds, tornados, whirlpools–and all types of natural vortices. In dreamhealing, the spiral generally marks the initiation of disintegrative forces.
Spirals as “vehicles of transition” in the dream journeys may have an analog in chemical processes. They are an archetype of spatiotemporal pattern formation. Spiral waves may be discerned within the unfolding of the natural number sequence. Chemical reactions may be able to help us understand temporal and spatial organization in living systems.
Propagating spirals emerge in chemical reactions from sheared target patterns. Rather than annihilating one another, interacting waves pattern and condition each other. They have been observed in phenomena as diverse as the aggregation of cellular slime mold, calcium release, chemical oscillators, and traveling wave patterns. Epstein (1991) describes aspects of this process relevant to our discussion.

Chemists and mathematicians have developed an understanding of this process in terms of the behavior of an excitable medium. (Other examples of an excitable media include cardiac and neural tissues.) In such a medium, small perturbations of the homogeneous stationary state are rapidly damped out, but disturbances larger than a critical size cause the medium to undergo a large excursion in the concentrations of reactive species before returning to its initial state.
If such a medium contains a pacemaker nucleus, a small region capable of generating periodic supercritical perturbations, then, as a result of diffusion, targetlike patterns of chemical reactivity will develop. If these circles are broken, the loose ends wrap into rotating spirals.

“Pacemaker nuclei generating supercritical perturbations” is another way of describing the phenomena of chaotic dynamics and strange attractors.
Epstein’s work implies it should now be possible to apply the insights gained from traveling waves in excitable chemical systems to biological phenomena. We suggest it can also be applied, to some extent, in consciousness transformation.
The image of the “sacred spiral” is older than our notion of time itself. In primal cultures it is carved in ideoglyphs, danced in sacred rites, and enshrined in intricate labyrinths. As a primitive geometry, it is more primal or fundamental than the archetypal stratum of myth.
Cirlot (1962) views the spiral as “a schematic image of the evolution of the universe…a symbol for growth.” In PREHISTORIC ART, Parkin notes that “no ornamental motif seems to have been more attractive than the spiral.” Spiral movements dominated dances for healing and incantation from the Mesolithic Age onwards. They helped primal man escape from the material world and enter the “beyond” through the mystic Center.
There is a spiral in the Egyptian hieroglyphics which “denotes cosmic forms in motion, or the relationship between unity and multiplicity.” Cirlot also links bonds (feedback loops) and serpents with the spiral. For the Egyptians the spiral form symbolized the breath and spirit, and a large spiral crowned the head of the god Thoth.
Spiral’s mythic form is best expressed in poetic language: “From out of the unfathomable deeps there arose a circle shaped in spirals….Coiled up within the spirals, lies a snake, a symbol of wisdom and eternity.”
Because the spiral is a dynamic notion, it was overlooked by Plato in his elevation of divine geometrical forms, which he conceived of as more or less static representations–immutable therefore eternal.
Yet most cultures revere this patterning principle through appreciation of its aesthetic appeal. It has come to be known as The Golden Mean, or geometric mean, defined by ratios of integers. It is the basis of human creative phenomena from musical generation to mythic cosmic cycles.
As far back as we can trace tradition, we find a distinction being made between the creative spiral (rising in a clockwise direction, and attributed to Pallas Athene) and the destructive spiral like a whirlwind (which twirls around to the left, and is attributed to Poseidon). The spiral (like the snake, serpent, or Kundalini force) can also represent the potential center.
The evolution of spiral systems relates to angular momentum, gravitation, spin, and turbulence. Rotatory forms condense from clouds of undefined random atoms, which develop form and structural symmetry.
Turbulence is inevitable in this process of “condensation from the void.” It is an eternal reality of nature. It is the shearing effect of disparate velocities, the divergence of streams into eddies and subeddies. Its elemental dynamic forms–the stress wave–has been described as the “music” of fluid motion.
At the cosmic level, turbulence is directly responsible for the “condensation” of diffuse gases which have been and are continuously turning into stars and planets. The process paradoxically creates and is guided by gravity. It warps or distorts the spacetime continuum, creating gravity wells. (Ref. “gravity waves.”)
In much the same way the “condensation” or “constellation” of imagery is accompanied by a dynamic momentum which keeps the process moving.
Analogously in consciousness journeys, the amorphous endocept–or primal cloudiness–congeals in specific imagery. Rather than worlds in the physical universe, habitable inner worlds emerge. This dream-wave can continue unfolding into material manifesta-tions in the body, psyche, and environment of the dreamer.
The trajectory of spirals in imaginal space typically leads toward a “strange attractor,” or “gravity well.” The ultimate universal image of a gravity well is that of a “black hole” in psychic space. Quantum mechanics has the complementary notion of “mini black holes” or “wormholes in space,” which are connections to other possible universes, or dimensions.
BLACK HOLES IN PSYCHIC SPACE
A frequent report during consciousness journeys is of a perception of “a black, blacker-than-black,” exerting a magnetic pull on the subject which is either welcomed or resisted.
They are a means-to-an-end in the process of de-stratification of consciousness, movement from one universe to another, which allows the dissolution or passing of the old state of consciousness, the old “world,” into a radically de-constructed flow of energy.
In CCP we enter this process willingly. The journeys help us experience and experiment with form and formlessness. The direction of movement is of ego toward Dynamic Ground. But unguided, the direction of flow can be reversed, in which case there is an invasion of personality by uncontrollable, eruptive, transformational energy.
Washburn (1988) describes “black holes” as an intrusion of the Dynamic Ground into the egoic system, part of the risk of submitting the ego to the deep unconscious with its definite dangers:

The mental ego maintains its internal dialogue so long as the mental-egoic system remains intact, i.e., closed to the Dynamic Ground. This internal dialogue continues no matter how disillusioned, dispossessed, and despairing the mental ego might be. However, once original repression gives way and, consequently, the Dynamic Ground is opened, interruptions in the internal dialogue begin to occur.
And these interruptions are not periods of restful, better yet serene, silence; they are rather moments of trancelike blankness, moments during which the internal dialogue is extinguished by the infiltration into consciousness of heavy currents of energy. To use a simile, these interruptions are like encounters with black holes in psychic space. The mental ego feels as if in the presence of an oppressive gravity that draws the mental ego, inwardly and downwardly, toward a dreadful unknown.

In the mystical practice of Hermetic Qabalism, there is an analogous description of a mysterious state of consciousness known as Daath. It is not a true vortex or sphere of consciousness like the others, but lies in the shadowy realm of the gulf between the realms of soul and spirit known as “The Abyss.” Pure Spirit is completely beyond form.
This shadowy sphere forms an 11th sphere on the Tree of Life circuit. In many ways it is analogous to the Throat Chakra, although its connotations are often negative. Daath is said to be a gateway to the reverse of the Tree of Life, the demonic underbelly of the subconscious mind of the divine–emergent chaos within the divine order.
In contrast to the other stable, steady-states of consciousness depicted by the other spheres, Daath is the “strange attractor” of the Tree of Life. It has no real “existence” of its own, being wholly created from the mind of the operator. It is that “rock in the stream” that allows you to ford across safely. A supportive, but temporary construct for consciousness to spring from in the void. It is the otherworldly ghost of parallel universes.
A positive journey here means an encounter with archetypal Knowledge, an infusion, or “cosmic download.” It is an encounter with the mysterious, shadowy side of existence, a trip through the looking-glass universe.
The ancient Hebrew qabalists expressed extreme caution for this shadowy sphere. They reiterate time and again that there are “10 Spheres on the Tree of Life, 10 and not 9, 10 and not 11.” The corresponding title of this invisible sphere is “Knowledge,” in the sense of experiential immediacy.
On the Path of Return, working up the Tree of Life, it is an “island” in the mystical void–an oasis in the arid wilderness for the weary wanderer. Its traditional color has always been described as “black, blacker than black.” When seen in imagination it is well demarcated from the surrounding velvetiness.
Daath is a paradoxical image involving the merging of opposites. It signifies a complete change in the vehicle of consciousness from one invested in form (soul) to one informing formlessness (spirit). It is recommended that novice qabalists avoid this state without guidance.
Whether imagined as dimensional gates in the depths of abyssal space, or consciousness gates in the abyss of the Transcendent Imagination, they are to be approached with caution. They are “accessways to the dynamic depths;” doorways between consciousness and the prepersonal unconscious, according to Washburn. Only a breath away lies the Unknown.

They are the first points at which the power of the Dynamic Ground burns into the mental-egoic sphere. They are festering concentrations of psychic energy that magnetically draw the mental ego away from its worldly involvements and lead it toward its repressed underlife, which is a perilous unknown. Black holes therefore should be explored only by the ego that is ready for “the journey,” regression in the service of transcendence.

In physics a black hole means both the death and the birth of matter, simultaneously. In the consciousness journeys it heralds the death of the ego, the old self-image, and the creative emergence of the new, like the phoenix rising from the black ashes. A black hole is also a white hole–spewing out matter in a parallel universe, having its time sense reversed from our own.
Black holes exist on the edges of eternity balanced between two parallel universes. They are not stagnant, but move in time. In fact they drag time and space around with them much like a drain hole drags sewage down into itself. As an image it is an extreme variation of the spiral.
For a readable description of “An Imaginary Journey to Parallel Universes through a Black Hole,” see Wolf’s PARALLEL UNIVERSES. But prepare to have your mind boggled with paradoxes about time and space!
In much the same way spiraling into a black hole in the dream journeys seems to boggle the mind, loosen the identification with the old self image, overwhelm the sensory system with an influx of subconscious force, and create a paradoxical shift from hyperstimulation to hypostimulation. Thus black holes lead to the void of the completely de-stratified state of consciousness.
They lead to the void; or from one void to another; or open into an emergent universe, but not before complete dissolution in chaotic consciousness. Imaginal time travel through a black hole involves the collapse of the event horizon into a singularity whose velocity exceeds the speed of light. Time and space reverse.
Passing through the black hole is like passing into our parallel past, possibly reaching the time of our birth, seeing ourselves being born again. This is the mechanism of regression in the service of transcendence, or rebirth with a new self image. Black holes are connected to an infinity of parallel universes.
Each journey moves through a time warp. The past ceases to be the exclusive conditioning agent of the present and multiple futures open up as resources–potential and hope are restored, as emergent creative processes unfold a new sense of self and world.
DEAD, VIOLENT, AND FERTILE VOIDS
Holes and blank spaces represent the unknown, the unnamed threat, the source of anxiety, and the fear of disintegration.
Black holes are potentially restorative and creative wellsprings. The feared empty space is actually a fertile void. Exploring it is a turning point toward therapeutic change. But first comes the chaotic, catastrophic exposure to the violent void.
Some of its manifestations include falling into blank trances, seriously deranged states of mind, mental absorptions and agitations, morbid vacancies, frenzied effusion, mental darkness, riotously overflowing ideation and affect, mania and confusion.
These are many of the negative manifestations which can occur in the sensory deprivation tank when there is suspension of all external input. The compelling power of the unconscious is greatly amplified when there is no competition from external stimuli. Then the only process left for the brain to interpret is its own functioning–processing its own processes.
Washburn asserts that morbid vacancies “indicate that the mind has been taken in tow and is held in traction by the gravitational pull of the power of the Ground.” This sounds like an “unconscious as Great Attractor” model.
There are voids and voids. The ego inhabits its own dead void, which it conjures up by separating itself from the whole with existential alienation. The ego’s subjective internal dialogue dominates this realm. It appears dead because ego is isolated, alone. The dead void disappears when consciousness begins to experience the void of the Dynamic Ground.
Here one is subjected to the de-repression of the overwhelming contents of the deep psyche (Transcendent Imagination). The “violent void” means the infusion of all the pre-personal or pre-existance consciousness. One is connected now, but overwhelmed by this underlying realm of experience that is alive with energy.
Weathering the storm, the hero/ine makes a successful “journey to the other side” to the so-called fertile void, plenum, or pleroma. The fertile void is the formless state of pure potential, which contains All–a multiplicity of unity.
Brain research has created some models relevant to our discussion. Globus (1987) refers to much the same psychic territory in discussing three holonomic approaches to thebrain:

In the holographic version of image-producing system the system is initially empty, like a tabula rasa, and information is loaded in by input (through ‘experience’). This is a ‘weak’ holonomy in that the enfolded whole — the ‘implicate order’ (Bohm) — is entirely derivative of input, not the primary reality.
In a second ’strong’ version, the holonomic system initially is full with existence; there is an a priori plenum of enfolded existentia that is the fundamental reality. Bohm views the primary reality as an existentially full holoplenum that enfolds the totality of existence. The matter of the brain holographically enfolds all the matter of the universe.

According to Bohm,

Various energies such as light, sound, etc., are continually enfolding information in principle concerning the entire universe of matter into each region of space. Through this process, such information may of course enter our sense organs, go on through the nervous system to the brain. More deeply, all the matter in our bodies, from the very first, enfolds the universe in some way.

The enfolded structure of both information and matter enters consciousness, but the brain is always filled even prior to input with universal existence.
In the third ‘very strong’ version, the holonomic system is initially full with all possible worlds; there is an a priori plenum of enfolded possibilia that is the fundamental reality. So for the three versions of brain functioning, the a priori plenum is empty, full with existence, and full with possibility, respectively.”
The only version of brain functioning which doesn’t contradict itself upon examination is that of the holoplenum of possibilia, in which the enfolded whole is neither primary nor secondary to explicate input, but is of complementary status. Enfolding/unfolding are cooperative processes.
According to Globus,

The enfolding process that creates the holoplenum is non-specific; there are randomly-generated “waves” of all frequencies, phases and amplitudes which are superposed. There results an interference pattern of infinite richness, all possibilities of explicate order being enfolded to it by random mechanisms. So the non-specific process generates “holoplenum of possibilia.” The unfolding process, on the other hand, specifically selects a possibility for actual explicate existence. Brain action thus includes a continuous selection process. The selection unfolds particular order to explicate existence and the generative process provides all possibilities of enfoldment.

This has tremendous implications for those “selecting” to engage in therapy, in consciousness journeys, and in the spiritual quest. By choosing to be “observer/participant” in the unfolding process we literally create new possibilities.
The enfolding process has no linear order, only random activity patterned by chaotic dynamics. The unfolding process is “active”, requiring processing and interpretation. When the active process of world simulation ceases, as in meditation or consciousness journeys, all that remains is the non-active, non-dual void, a holoplenum of possibilia.
According to Globus, it appears that the brain in its unsurpassed complexity generates it own holoplenum of possibilia–a virtual holoworld of possible worlds. So this plenum of possibilities emerges as a property of this dynamic system. The brain might also enfold a plenum, like all matter, in some holographic sense as Bohm suggests, but it also generates its own plenum.
Whatever the brain’s matter enfolds (existentia or possibilia) at its highest level the brain generates it own plenum governed by the law of the whole, a virtual holoworld of enfolded possible worlds.
Mind and matter may be unfolded from a common higher dimensional ground (Bohm). But mind is the very action of unfolding. In the case of perception, mind is a process of selecting worlds from the holoworld constituted by autonomous processes. (Or we might say in phenomenological terms that “intentional action” is selective unfolding.)
The discriminative process continuously selects the perceived world by unfolding from the holoworld. The two processes complement each other in generating the world. The world’s status is accordingly derivative and illusory, as in the doctrine of maya.
In extraordinary conditions, such as consciousness journeys, the discriminate process ceases, and all that remains is the indiscriminate process that generates the holoplenum of possibilia, a dynamic distinction less void that enfolds all possibilia.
The third version of holonomic brain theory (possibilia) is supported by consideration of altered states of consciousness in CCP and the perennial philosophy. It is also supported by the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
When we turn our attention within, and observe the stream of consciousness with a disengaged mind, we have certain archetypal impressions. Whether a shaman of old, mystic, magician, consciousness explorer, or scientist–all report strikingly similar observations. It is only in the process of de-coding the experience, putting it into words, that the differing doctrinaire philosophies yield different translations.
It is an existential perception that we are “real,” physical beings in a physical world. It is true that consciousness embodies form in our being. But just as surely the vast amounts of space between the ghostly “solids” of our sub-atomic structure constitute a virtually infinite vastness of space.
In this sense, we are truly more formlessness than form. We are structured consciousness/energy, ever so loosely held together by a matrix of chaotic disorder. When we let go of structure, seeking formlessness, we find renewal.
REFERENCES
Arieti, Silvano, CREATIVITY: THE MAGIC SYNTHESIS, New York: Basic Books, 1976.
Cirlot, J.E., A DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
Epstein, Irving R., “Spiral Waves in Chemistry and Biology,” SCIENCE, April 5, 1991, p. 67.
Globus, Gordon G., “Three Holonomic Approaches to the Brain,” in QUANTUM IMPLICATIONS, Hiley & Peat, Eds.; London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
McClain, Ernest G., THE MYTH OF INVARIANCE, Boulder: Shambhala, 1978.
Washburn, Michael, THE EGO AND THE DYNAMIC GROUND, Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.
Wolf, Fred Alan, PARALLEL UNIVERSES, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

THE VARIETIES OF VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE
VIRTUAL REALITIES BEYOND THE DIALOGICAL SELF
by Iona Miller, ©1993

ABSTRACT: The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves–a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to the outer awareness. The extreme form of splintering seen in Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) simply reflects an extreme form of multiplicity with conflicting perspectives. The “multistate paradigm” of human nature extends toward a psychology and spirituality that is polytheistic, even pantheistic.
Dialogue is a form of imagery which creates and sustains a worldview through the means of imaginal conversations. Within the fabric of multiple centers or vortices within the psyche, an on-going dialogue emerges which ranges from selftalk (ego to ego), through “group” discussion (ego with subpersonalities), to spiritual dialogue (ego with transpersonal entities). Beyond the dialogical realm lies the unspeakable experience (untranslatable) of the Void or Clear Light, the realm of archetypal light and sound as pure consciousness.
The “Word” helps us create and define reality. Conversation as well as observation defines our reality. Dialogue of the self with its various conscious and unconscious forms creates a series of “virtual realities” which form the basis of self-simulation and world-simulation. These forms are limitless in number, far beyond the classic archetypes such as persona, anima/animus, etc, suggesting the notion of “radical pluralism.”

“One of the most harmful illusions that can beguile us is probably the belief that we are an indivisible, immutable, totally consistent being….Each of us is a crowd. There can be the rebel and the intellectual, the seducer and the housewife, the saboteur and the aesthete, the organizer and the bon vivant–each with its own mythology, and all more or less comfortably crowded into one single person.”
–Piero Ferrucci, WHAT WE MAY BE
“We conceptualize self in terms of dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I positions in an imaginal landscape. The I has the possibility to move, as in a space, from one position to another in accordance with changes in situation and time. The I fluctuates among different and even opposed positions. The I has the capacity to imaginatively endow each position with a voice so that dialogical relations between positions can be established. The voices function like interacting characters in a story.”
–Hermans, Kempen & van Loon, “The Dialogical Self”

THE VIRTUAL REALITY OF POSSIBLE SELVES
Fictional virtual realities are constructed by aspects of the self as imaginal conversations. Imaginal dialogues play a central role in our daily lives, existing alongside actual dialogues and interactions. The dialogical self can be seen as a multiplicity of I positions or possible selves, with a decentralized, polyphonic character. This view dissolves the sharp “self-not self” boundary.
Ecological fundamentalism has sought absolute truth in nature, but nature rejects this naivete. The notion of “relativity” implies that there is no absolute truth, therefore, no absolute self. Thus arises the notion of “radical pluralism”, which is reflected in our chaotic modern society as exposure to virtually every religious belief, every political view, and a myriad of social values. There is no central belief system in a pluralistic society.
The social construction of reality is up for grabs. The whole concept of reality has been called into question by a variety of ideologies and lifestyles. There are widening splits within traditional belief systems. There is transition in human cultural evolution, with the new paradigm in dialogue with the old, seeking a new synthesis. The move is toward a substitution of “story” for Truth, reflecting that sense of movement, change, flow.
Perhaps the hallmark of Post-Modern philosophy has been disbelief or skepticism of all “metanarratives.” The breakdowns of the story lines of religions, ideologies, even science has led to chaotic social change.
We are beginning to realize, individually and as a world-wide culture that “realities” are all human constructions. The task becomes one of “catching ourselves in the act” of creating our own “reality” from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience.
The sociological message of Chaos Theory and CCP is that we don’t have to fear the collapse of what we think we are. We don’t need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system, nor our belief in absolute truth.
VARIETIES OF SELF-SIMULATION
According to Tart (1990), “Contemporary neurology and psychology show that we already live in one or more internal virtual realities, generated by neurological and psychological processes. Stable patterns, stabilized systems of these internal virtual realities, constitute states of consciousness, our ordinary personality, and multiple personalities.” All these aspects of self have their own dialogical component. Reality is constructed as much by “conversation” as “observation.”
The dialogical tendency of the psyche has been noticed and utilized by both mystics and psychologists. Examples include meditative encounters with wise figures, such as Christ, the Beloved, an Inner Healer, guide or shaman figure. The dialogue might even take place with an animal or object. Other pluralistic spiritual constructs include the chakra system and the multiple states of consciousness circuit of the Tree of Life in Qabala.
Examples from psychology include “self talk,” cognitive restructuring, ego states, psychodrama, “invisible guests.”
Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and Psychosynthesis have the technique of the “Parts’ Party,” round-table discussion, or board meeting, giving voice to the various semi-autonomous subpersonalities. It provides a forum for the airing of conflicting views, empathic alignment, circumspect judgment, and personification of conscience.
Transactional Analysis (T.A.) posits three dialogical ego-states–Parent, Adult, and Child. The dialogical content consists of “scripts, games and rackets.”
Gestalt psychology uses dialogue such as the “two chair technique” to create imaginal spaces for therapeutic process. In these “virtual realities,” point-of-view is shifted between the various entities imaginally engaged in the dialogue. The participant becomes the imaginal other, and speaks “as if” that other. The self takes the actual perspective of the other, outside the self. That other may be one or several dream figures, as well as familiar or unfamiliar people, in an imaginary social world. The other is “felt” to be there.
Oneself is conceived of as I (self as subject) or Me (self as object, viewed as the main figure in the story of one’s life). I is observer; Me is observed. I is an author; Me is an actor in the psychodrama. I construes another person or being as a position I can occupy and this position creates an alternative perspective on the world and self.
If that “other” is transpersonal in nature, the engagement becomes one of the ego with the unconscious (I-Thou), emphasizing the bodily nature of thought and imagination. The “I” constructs an analog space and metaphorically moves in this space. I is not a center of “control” but actively engaged with the autonomous flow of primal consciousness.
Transpersonal theory is wholly based on the “Dynamic-Dialectical Paradigm,” conversations between the ego and the dynamic ground of psyche (Washburn, 1988). Its static representation is the “Structural-Hierarchal Paradigm.”
In the therapeutic context, Jungians refer to this dialectical process as “active imagination,” engagement of the ego and the unconscious. Active imagination is patterned after the alchemical meditatio, which consisted of an imaginal dialogue between the alchemist and his alchemical process, personified in various forms.
Active imagintion is a process in which the imagination and the images it throws up are experienced as something separate from the ego–a “thou” or an “other”–to which the ego can relate, and with which the ego can have a dialogue (Edinger, 1972). It is a dialectic of development, like the Hegelian “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.”
Narration (storytelling) puts the general human condition into the particulars of experience. It locates experience in space and time, even imaginal space and time. Imaginal others, despite their invisible quality, are typically perceived as having a spatially separated position. Metaphor–what the experience is like–is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience.
Creative engagement with chaos means direct experience of self as a changing, pluralistic, multi-dimensional entity. This existential philosophy of “dynamic co-consciousness” is process-oriented, rather than “state-oriented” even though we employ the term state to imply a stable-yet-transitory condition. This is not an experience of a static “self” moving through process, but rather existential experience of self as process.
Based on a plurality of perspectives, a plurality of consciousness, a plurality of worlds, this notion means giving breath to many voices. Dialogue reveals the essential pristine nature of the character’s psyche, and psyche’s character.
Our consensus consciousness is not our natural condition, but a construction within cultural constraints. This construction is semi-arbitrary. The constructivist approach in psychology conceives of the self as dialogical, a view that transcends both individualism and rationalism (Hermans, Kempen & van Loon, 1992). It is a concept of self that takes the role of the body, or embodied nature of the self into consideration.
It is based in the notion that story telling is cross-cultural. Narration is a root metaphor. These stories help order world and self. We can investigate this dialogical realm which is familiar from mysticism. It creates a mind-space with multiple positions possible for multiple selves. The result is a multiplicity of dialogically interacting selves, in a variety of “as if” (virtual) realities.
The free flow of fantasy as internal dialogues with various aspects of the self allows for creative development of higher thought. These fictions, like myth, may not correspond to reality, but they contain “constructs” which are freely fashioned of empirical elements. Constructs are ways in which some things are construed as being alike and yet different from others.
Chaos theory and CCP are radically “de-constructionalist” metaphors. W. Brian Arthur, an economist from Stanford University suggests that, “Science is about the creation of metaphor.” Today tidy metaphors are insufficient and we need to, “go beyond order and construct systems from simple premises that turn out to be very, very messy.”
In terms of the structure and limitations of language, virtually anything we say or write can be contradicted. Oddly we create our essence from this paradox. Tart (1990) reminds us that Korzybski, the founder of semantics, admonishes us that “the map is not the territory.” Tart adds that most of the time we prefer the map, since the map is organized and orderly. Yet, the territory tends to be messy and inconsistent.
Co-consciousness on the individual level means plurality of selves; in CCP it means the virtual reality of mutually shared therapeutic space, with plurality of consciousness available to both participants simultaneously, from the infinite field of possibilities.
CO-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM
The holographic paradigm is a constructed model of consciousness derived from neuropsychology and quantum physics. It views the processing of mental forms as occurring within the context of part/whole relationship, where the identified part exists within the code of the whole.
Against the backdrop of the holographic paradigm, the therapeutic relationship is a shared partnership, also a co-consciousness. The “cure,” as insight, is already within the client, within the interactional relationship, though it has not become manifest, “unfolded” and “explicate.” The patterning or configuration of experience, intent, and behavior form a “tendency to isomorphism”.
The therapist sees in the clinical material through perceptual process recurrent, identifiable forms. Any small piece of clinical material may contain the total configuration, both past and future. It is the resonance or expansion and reexpansion of this awareness over time that leads to change rather than particularized insight itself.
Insight does not result from learning but results from a subsequent phenomenological shift in the holographic template called insight. Insight results from expansion and overload rather than from a specific, focused understanding.
Within the process model, the total patterns of experiencing within the organismic whole which have remained unattended became the holographic blur. In other words, this part of the unconscious is not regarded as a preexisting form.
Drive manifestations in thought, repressed memories, archetypal themes, and so on are particularized meanings, cognitively derived from the holographic “frequency domain”–the stage of transforming sensory data across the entire brain. Because the frequency domain deals with the density of events, time and space are collapsed in it.
Not until these mathematical transforms are reversed does the object or image reappear as concrete, three-dimensional reality “out there.” In the frequency domain itself there is no out there (Pribram, 1982). Pribram’s “frequency domain” is Bohm’s “implicate order” while the image domain is “explicate order.”
The transformative process may be holographic. The manner by which old and new identities are assimilated, by which affects are released, are potentially deepened by therapeutic trance, especially process-oriented trance–absorption in the dynamic flow of psychic imagery. Sometimes the client’s mental representations are dominated by form, especially that initiated by past experiences.
Other times, consciousness is dominated more by formlessness, uncommitted attention, receptivity to new ideas. Between frames, or states of consciousness are transitive or “empty” moments in which vague, unformulated experience occurs.
These states make it possible to assimilate those “contents” of conscious and unconscious into the self–providing a sense of space for play and experimentation. CCP broadens the capacity to “toy” with form and formlessness.
Shifts can be made back and forth, holographically reflecting back the wholeness of the self. It includes the creative capacity to be formless in consciousness, and to shift to the “form-dominated,” content-focused, representational realities of ego states (Watkins, 1978).
In the shifts made from these particulari-zations of consciousness to ones of formlessness, the relational ground of the client and therapist may be said to holographically exist. In this state of formlessness of consciousness, in the safety of the therapeutic process, the client may temporarily suspend the sense of objectifying the self into a particular image reflected by others and experience “pure being.”
In this transitional space, the client is neither required to commit his consciousness to a particularized experience or reality, nor to a state of fantasy, though these factors are present in the whole person. The person is able to be “between channels,” and to remain whole as well–an experience of somato-psychic unity. We can refer to this “state” as amorphous cognition, the nonrepresenta-tional activity of the psyche (Arieti, 1976).
There are on-going transforms in the frequency domain. If reality as we know it is only a contraction of consciousness, process-oriented therapy may be a way of making the whole patterning of healthy, balanced self-organization more available through progressively acquired transitional states.
It is possible that during co-consciousness, the therapist’s and client’s organizations of consciousness in some way literally and not metaphorically cross into a wave length or plane in which there is neither reality nor fantasy but the enfolded-implicate-primary reality that is mutually shared.
The metaphor is superceded by the holographic blur of a possibilities of form–form overcome by formlessness–finally free from groping around using inadequate analogies. Simulations can run through the past and future, trying different scenarios and responding in advance to probable future environments.
Randomness has gotten a bad reputation because of ignorance of its power. “Purposeful randomness” is a survival mechanism in nature–a disorderly dance that is rather disorienting yet somehow rewarding. But combined with selection it yields purposeful behavior and leads to adaptation.
It begins to sound a lot like dreaming. Elaborate sequences shift gradually into something quite different, hinging on some minor detail that brings forward a scene from some other story line…as if another story had been running unseen.
William Calvin (1987) postulates that, “the sequencer currently connected to the language system might be the talking-to-ourselves aspect of consciousness and foresight, but the other sequencers would still be hard at work subconsciously, busy piecing together other scenarios at random, most of them nonsense, when checked against our memories, but a few being realistic.” He posits a number of independent sequencing circuits in the brain, potentially explaining much of foresight, free will, and imagination.
VORTICES OF THOUGHT
Why are structures formed? Why do repetitive patterns occur?
Using David Bohm’s concept of implicate and explicate ordering, Shainberg (1987) suggests that the explicate order is what we see as form. He asserts that human consciousness and language are relatively autonomous subtotalities, but they also create fixed points in this universal forming which block further transformations with inner conflict or interpersonal problems.
He uses the same analogy Graywolf developed independently in CCP: these points become like rocks around which the stream of life moves. By definition these fixations are part of the explicate as well as the implicate order.
Form is not an isolated definitive outlined thing which relates to other objects. Its structure is the active process, a structuating event, that is making a relationship to all other active processes. When we experience our own relative consistency within the formative process, we assume that we are a continuous being with a capacity to respond, which we think of as our ’self,’ in connection with other continuous forms.
According to Shainberg, this self-simulation becomes fixed on ideas or images of good (or bad) situations that have occurred in its experiences. It then attempts to replay them in the present because they worked (gave pleasure) in the past. When consciousness meets new situations and checks with memory for help in defining the nature of the new situation, it often depends more on memory for determining what is in front of it than it does on the perception of reality, or raw experience.
This tendency to live in terms of memory is most serious in those whose life since childhood has been tense and conflicted, and who have been able to integrate the uncertainties of their reality. While thoughts, images and feelings are processes which connect “things” in the movement of relationship, they can also fix the relationships into specific old forms.
The fixation into repetitive behavior that is characteristic of human beings is part of what we might think of as the “form of repetition” in nature. We observe that the repetition forms in consciousness when it consistently meets the present with the past.
Whether it is in the form of repeating an old relationship or attempting to obtain the goal of a particular desire, consciousness uses the same mechanism to engage the present. And that mechanism is itself a repetition of a past event. So, at many levels, and among them human consciousness, nature is expressing the form of repetition.
The explicate form–the memory image–becomes a nodal point which demands that a new situation becomes like an old one.
When a particular thought or focus in consciousness dominates a person’s behavior, this flow in human relationship is inhibited. Such foci force relating processes into a vortex by insisting that the movement of relationship stay in its orbit. Such vortices lead to separation, conflict, emptiness.
The matrix of thoughts creates a focus around which there are relationships that form a vortex and make up a fragmented subsystem, a ‘relatively autonomous subtotality’ which, in contrast to other subtotalities, brings about conflict with the larger whole.
The vortex fragments off from the movement that is occurring in the other aspects of the universe. It is not receptive to information from those aspects. The fixed ideas organize the relationships in the present and bring about a system of relationships that keep the vortex operating in a way which, to some extent, separates the system from the larger whole.
This response repeatedly unfolds a form which restricts the movement in the implicate, but we don’t seem to respond to any feedback we notice about that restriction. Despite psychological conflicts or psychosomatic illnesses the security in the repetition is read as preferable to any change.
We might guess that if this form were connected with the flow of the implicate its characteristics would be transformed by the integration with that flow and the block would be released and more open relationships would unfold. But, unfacilitated, this doesn’t happen with much regularity.
Without process work, such as CCP, the form maintains itself and there is no action by the brain to create a more harmonious relationship with reality. Apparently the agreement brought about by this subsystem has provided pleasure and security which is communicated to the brain as more satisfactory than the alternatives memory promises beyond the repetition of these safety measures.
As children, we naturally form a center, a ’self’ to focus our relationships. But that focus naturally dissolves when each ordered condition opens new relationships to other foci around us. That changing moving process of relating is after all the essential insecurity of human existence.
THE SELF THEN IS A RELATIVELY AUTONOMOUS SUBTOTALITY THAT UNFOLDS IN THE IMPLICATE AND IS DISPLAYED IN THE EXPLICATE, ONLY TO BE DISSOLVED AGAIN INTO THE IMPLICATE.
Our brains are another subtotality and the responses that flow through them are part of the explicate order as well. The thoughts and images construct the self but that flow of responses in the brain includes the seductive offering which comes with the promises of security in the repetitions of memory and mother’s support for identifying with some fixed ways of living. The propaganda of consciousness seems to be that if we choose one identity, one self, one set of plans for how to be in the world, we might find security and pleasure.
But dedication to the realization of that image fixes a person’s relationship in the explicate order and in some sense curtails flow in the implicate order. When fixation occurs in the natural world, for example in the unfolding of genetic programming, its purpose is to maintain a balance with the whole movement of the implicate order and its connection.
The curtailment of flow insinuates pathology. The life process of people caught in such an image is a circular form that operates inside its own criteria and does not connect with the elements of the reality outside of its defined fragment. What is most astounding in this image process is the way the individual commits himself completely to the virtues of the state through thought and internal dialogue.
THE REPETITIVE USE OF THOUGHT ACTS LIKE A ROCK IN A STREAM. The vortex is formed as a result of forces exercised by the form of repetition in consciousness. The pull to repeat the desirable memories draws all other relating processes of the implicate order into the orbit of the explicate focus. The person who is absorbed by the fixation of this self-image responds to those aspects of reality which enable execution of that image.
But individuals who are caught in the repetitive process that makes a vortex do occasionally become aware of their fragmented condition and their inadequate relationship to the greater whole of the implicate order. Moving into realms not controlled by thought, their fixation dissolves when their behavior opens into relationships of a more formless nature.
A vortex is formed based on the premise that the image provides certainty and security. The contradiction to realize the fixed image of what life should be and the movement of the implicate order creates a deep strain at the core of being. Repeating the same behavior again and again narrows the frame of mind.
The fixation is dissolved through transformation by something larger than the self-simulation. There are many different ways in which we sense the limitations of our thought and manage to find connections to the implicate order beyond.
The therapeutic dialogue brings release from the trap of self-orientation. Being with another whose worldview is more expansive is part of it. So is immersion in the flow of creative process. The narration of the therapeutic process goes back and forth among the participants creating a dialog which is the matrix of a mutual virtual reality.
When the dialogue partners see that thought gets into a frozen state, or that the same images are appearing chronically in different form, the process dissolves the state, and the oscillation around the vortex stops. Discussion after the session and follow up lead to a new story about what constitutes self.
Shainberg concludes that, “points of order or centers of organization are inherent to the implicate order as it unfolds into the explicate. These points always create something of a vortex around them as they provide for interactions and further relationships in that flow.” Thus the new primal self-image is better adapted, stabilizing.
Fixed images in consciousness are only relatively fixed points as there are numerous relationships intertwining and unfolding from them, even if they do form a vortex. We are left with the image of psyche as vortices within vortices within vortices.
This image is precisely that of a “strange attractor” in chaos theory. Edward Lorenz defined it as consisting not “of a simple point, curve, or higher-dimensional manifold, but [it] contains an infinite complex of manifolds…”
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER
Studies of dissociative states in Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) disclose that simple confabulation is not an adequate model for the syndrome. Conscious role-playing could not duplicate certain abilities.
We can consider a possible role for state-dependent learning in the phenomenology of MPD (Silberman, et al, 1985). Patients may experience themselves as several discrete alter personalities who do not share consciousness or memories with one another.
Disparate personality states compartmen-talize information and learning. Both drugs and mood states have been shown to induce state-specific encoding operations and retrieval strategies, and provide specific cues for accessing previous experience. Information acquired in a given state remains available in memory, but inaccessible when remembering takes place under different retrieval (state) conditions.
MPD patients may provide more powerful markers and contexts for encoding and retrieving previous experience than does the conscious role playing of personality states by controls. MPD cannot be “faked,” because dissociation creates super-normal phenomena in memory, cognition, learning, and psychosomatic manifestations.
In contrast to classical state-dependent learning phenomena, however, which are generally more robust under free recall conditions, the partial dissociation of MPDs tended to be more pronounced under recognition. Highly dissociative MPDs may have allergies or other specific illnesses in some alters and not others.
Tart (1990) offers a model for MPD based on the World Simulation Process approach. He roots its purpose in survival and adaptability by construction of rapidly functioning internal models of the real world. “Simulation” of the self, providing a sense of continuity of identity, is part of its purpose, also. It includes psychophysical coherence between self image and external reality, but usually includes a sense of an internal psychological self beyond bodily compo-nents.
A core psychological pattern tends to control other aspects of the World Simulation Process, automatically organizing the rest of experience around itself in a way that further supports the basic pattern. These patterns/systems try to stabilize themselves, preserve themselves, maintain identity.
For example, anger or any other core pattern can become the dominant core of the World Simulation Process, which automatically (mis)interprets sensory patterns of the world and self in a way consonant with core pattern. Since the virtual reality created by the WSP is “reality” for the time being, it is very difficult not to completely identify with the virtual reality as experienced and accept it as “real” reality.
He notes that “while we ordinarily completely and automatically identify with the self that is produced by the World Simulation Process, we do not have to…There is a great freedom available, a kind of enlightenment, when you realize that the world and self you take for granted because they are an immediate perception are actually, in a vitally important way, an interpretation, a simulation, not final reality.”
When the WSP gives us virtual realities that differ from the real world in significant ways, we begin to behave maladaptively, creating both real world consequences and/or psychological suffering in ourselves and others. Deciding what is “real” in the world is heavily influenced by the virtual realities already created by our WSP.
Tart defines a person with MPD as “someone who has two or more well developed core patterns, constellation patterns that can take over his or her World Simulation Process such that the person temporarily lives in a virtual reality that constitutes an identity, a personality, a state of consciousness…that is experientially perfectly real.”
He considers a “normal” person to have only one well developed pattern, yet with considerable degrees of multiplicity. The “neurotic’s” WSP differs in areas of suffering and maladaptive functioning. The “psychotic” lives in a virtual reality so obviously different from the virtual reality range of “normals” that it is obviously different, perhaps constituting a threat to themselves and others.
POLYTHEISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
The “multiple” model of human nature suggested by MPD research invites comparison with the work of such theorists as psychologist James Hillman, and other archetypal and imaginal psychologists, such as Bolen, Miller, and Woolger. In the conventional model of psyche proposed by modern psychology and medicine, human nature is described largely in terms of an all-important central ego. All other facets of psychic experience are considered subordinate and relative to it.
Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be “monotheistic” in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman has suggested the need for a more “polytheistic” view of psyche, one that might draw fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche’s diversity and needs.
RADICAL PLURALISM
The Creative Consciousness Process recognizes all these varieties of pluralism, but suggests an even more iconoclastic view–radical pluralism. CCP is not based in dialogue with any inner figures, but in “becoming” whatever image the psyche suggests within the process of flow. Thus, it moves beyond identification, beyond alters, beyond personification, beyond archetypes as godforms, even beyond humanism, into the psychoid realm of nature.
The radical deconstructionalist stance promotes the direct experience of pluralistic consciousness in whatever form it appears, and fosters movement toward formlessness–destructuralization. Thus one may begin a consciousness journey as the “dream self”, dream figure, or even background, but move quickly through these symbolic “doorways” to less structured forms or patterns.
Rather than engaging any aspect or presentation of self in dialogue, the movement is toward one of immersion in the free flow of consciousness wherever that leads. One may become an object, a force of nature, a tiny mote, a color, a spiral, even empty space.
The dialogue, or narrative, comes not from engaging imaginal figures but within the co-conscious exchange of subject and guide, a dynamic, emergent story which deepens and “carries” the process forward. The direct experience of “de-personification” of psychic elements points to the “psychoid” nature of the psyche, and fosters the realization of connection to the greater whole.
One comes to perceive directly and experientially that one is potentially all of it. Consciousness seeks to take on imaginal and physical form, and we partake of that experience at any level of existence within the “virtual space” of the therapeutic context.
Much like the Buddhist concept of anatman–no self or no soul–we can experience directly what it means to be pure consciousness incarnating through a multitude of forms, culminating in the impressionistic experience of formlessness. As all things, we are neither this nor that–no thing. As pure potential, all possibilities exist for re-structuring prior to the return to ordinary consciousness.
We can experience directly that we are not a “self” or even “selves” moving through a concrete reality. We are consciousness in search of itself, experiencing the panoply of multitudinous, dynamic, energetic forms. The entity we are has no “stable” center in the classical sense, only an apparently contiguous memory of self and world simulation.
This sense of a confined self can be radically destructured through consciousness journeys, which facilitate the perception of the flow of events. No two journeys are ever the same, though certain patterns and forms tend to persist and recur. You can never step into the same river twice.
CCP helps us move deeper into the psyche, past “thinking-feeling-believing” levels of the psyche, below mythic patterning, even below primal existential patterning. Below any hierarchical systems is a state of pure being. This process of “diving deep” through the layers of acquired constructs “destratifies” perceptual consciousness leaving its pure state undiluted by interpretive overlays.
The dialectical paradigm, even though it is a dynamic model, is always stuck in the narrative of “what it is like” to be actively involved in a certain condition, event, or entity. This metaphorical perception of reality is always a step removed from direct, unconditioned experience, which can only be non-reflective.
That is why, in terms of Buddhist mystical states of consciousness (jhanas), in this absorption there is no-perceiver and no-perceived. It is even beyond awareness of no-thing-ness, beyond infinite consciousness. The four formless states include contemplation of infinite space, infinite consciousness, the realm of no-thing-ness, and the realm of neither perception-nor-nonperception.
Daniel Goleman describes the “formless jhanas” as follows:

The next level is attained by achieving the consciousness of infinite space, and then turning attention to the element of infinite awareness. Thus the thought of infinite space is abandoned, while objectless infinite consciousness remains. This marks the sixth jhana.
Having mastered the sixth, the meditator attains the seventh jhana by first entering the sixth and then turning contemplation to the nonexistence of infinite conscious-ness. The seventh jhana is thus absorption with no-thing-ness, or the void, as its object. That is, consciousness has as its object the awareness of absence of any object. Mastering this jhana, the meditator then reviews it and finds any perception at all a disadvantage, its absence being more sublime.
So motivated, the meditator can attain the eigth jhana by first entering the seventh, and then turning attention to the aspect of peacefulness, and away from perception of the void. The delicacy of this operation is suggested by the stipulation that there must be no hint of desire to attain this peacefulness, nor to avoid perception of no-thing-ness.
Attending to the peacefulness, he reaches the ultrasubtle state where there are only residual mental formations. There is no gross perception here at all: thus “no perception”; there is ultrasubtle perception: thus “not-nonpercep-tion.” This eigth jhana is called the sphere of “neither-perception-nor-nonperception.” The same degree of subtlety of existence is here true of all concomitants of consciousness. NO MENTAL STATES ARE DECISIVELY PRESENT, yet residuals remain in a degree of near-absence.

This beingness beyond all states is so subtle we can’t say whether it is or is not. It is the ultimate limit of perception–the virtual reality beyond the dialogical self.
CCP never strives to recreate any of these states during the journey, but time after time the flow of consciousness leads to reports which match these descriptions. Consciousness journeys function like a guided tour of potential states, potentiating them, and initiating their unfolding into the explicate as emergent and stabilizing resources.
The dissolution into formlessness happens at the “edge of chaos.” In this condition we speculate that free-flowing matter and energy are capable of self-organization. The implied “self” in this case is pure consciousness in dynamic evolution through multiple forms in multiple universes.
REFERENCES
Arieti, Silvano, CREATIVITY, THE MAGIC SYNTHESIS, Basic Books, New York, 1976.
Bohm, David, WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Bohm, David, FRAGMENTATION AND WHOLENESS, Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation (1976).
Calvin, William H. “Bootstrapping Thought: Is Consciousness a Darwinian Sidestep?” WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, Summer 1987.
Cassirer, E. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS; Vol. 2, Mythical Thought, New Haven CT; Yale University Press, 1955.
Dyer, Frank J., “Virtual Reality: Philosophical Implications of a New Technology,” THE QUEST, Summer 1992.
Edinger, Edward F., EGO AND ARCHETYPE, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1972.
Goleman, Daniel, “The Buddha on Meditation and States of Consciousness,” TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGIES, Tart, Ed. Harper & Row, 1975.
Hermans, Kempen, & van Loon, “The Dialogical Self: Beyond Individualism and Rationalism”, AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, Jan. 1992, Vol. 47, No. 1, p. 23-33.
Hillman, James, RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY, Harper & Row, New York, c1975.
Miller, David, THE NEW POLYTHEISM, Spring Pub., Dallas, 1981.
Ornstein, Robert, MULTIMIND: A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT HUMAN BEHAVIOR,
Pribram, Karl, THE HOLOGRAPHIC BRAIN,
Shainberg, David, “Vortices of Thought in the Implicate Order and Their Release in Meditation and Dialogue,” QUANTUM IMPLICATIONS, Hiley & Peat, Eds.; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1987.
Silberman, Putnam, Weingartner, Braun, and Post, “Dissociative States in Multiple Personality Disorder: A Quantitative Study,” Psychiatry Research 15, p. 253-260, 1985.
Sliker, Gretchen, MULTIPLE MIND: HEALING THE SPLIT IN PSYCHE & WORLD,
Smith, Alexander, “The Hypnotic Relationship and the Holographic Paradigm,” AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CLINICAL HYPNOSIS, Vol. 32, No. 3, Jan. 1990.
Tart, Charles T., “Multiple Personality, Altered States and Virtual Reality: The World Simulation Process Approach,” DISSOCIATION, Vol. III, No. 4, December 1990.
Washburn, Michael, THE EGO AND THE DYNAMIC GROUND, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1988.
Watkins, Mary M., INVISIBLE GUESTS: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, Hillsdale, NJ; Erlbaum, 1986.

II. POLYPHASIC CONSCIOUSNESS
THE MULTISTATE PARADIGM:
The Un-named Dream and Parallel Universes
by Iona Miller, ©1993

ABSTRACT: In the Creative Consciousness Process (CCP), participants frequently encounter typical archetypal imagery at the threshold of chaotic consciousness. One of these reiterating images is that of grayness, black/whiteness, amorphousness. There are analogous reports from mystics and physicists about a fundamental cloudiness to the perception of ultimate realities. Relevant associations include parallel universes, the scientific notion of “observer effect”, and the mystical notion of “the witness” or observer self.

When I speak of darkness, I am referring to a lack of knowing. It is a lack of knowing that includes everything you do not know or else that you have forgotten, whatever is altogether dark for you because you do not see it with your spiritual eye. And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but rather a cloud of unknowing that is between you and your God.
–Ira Progoff, THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

THE MULTISTATE PARADIGM
Notions about the nature of self and world are undergoing a radical revisioning within philosophy, physics, and psychology. Current research suggests that a viable approach to understanding reality is that of parallel universes; human consciousness necessarily also consists of relative, multiple perspectives, or states of consciousness. We can refer to this fundamental notion of reality as the Multistate Paradigm.
Science has traditionally been based on observation, predictability, and repeatability. In seeking nature’s secrets, it has dived into the very heart of God. Philosophy is the dynamics of the search for God. Science is a natural philosophy, which is best served by following nature’s lead.
However, the basic foundations of science have been called into question by relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory. Science has been “interpreting” rather than witnessing nature. Quantum mechanics and relativity theory inform us that there is no objective observer, because the process of observation changes the state of that which is observed, as well as the observer. The observer is, in fact, always a participant in the process.
Quantum processes are inherently indeterminate, probabilistic, fuzzy, cloudy. Quantum entities appear to inhabit a myriad of states until a direct observation or measurement is performed by an “observer.” Under observation, quantum processes appear to “leap” into one of the possible states–the so-called quantum leap.
We can appear to make a quantum leap in consciousness by altering our point-of-view through empathic identification with other aspects of ourselves than the ego’s point-of-view. We have the capacity to experience reality from multiple states of consciousness.
Mystics speak of a relative point-of-view which is rooted beyond the personality. In eastern mysticism, it is the Witness or Observer Self, which dispassionately surveys the experience of the person from a higher spiritual perspective.
It is essentially objective with respect to the ordinary personality, pure attention or awareness with no judgmental characteristics. It simply notes what’s happening. It is interesting in the transition period between two states of consciousness, radical destructuring, which technically eliminates the ability to observe. Then there is blankness–no direct experiential observation of the transitional period–blackout. If destructuring is not total, then limited or incomplete descriptions emerge.
However, an observer self may maintain awareness through the help of a guide or identification with other structures, i.e. the therapeutic process.
In western mysticism, it is the “I” of the “I-Self” or “I-Thou” dialogical realm. An “observer” implies a split from the system observed–it is objectifed. In Unitive states, this “I” merges with the “object” of contemplation and duality is superceded. The unitive state is characterized as the Clear Light of the Void.
In science, the observer is usually taken for granted, yet we have the phenomenon of “observer bias,” the unconscious bias of the investigator. Observations are mixed with evaluations. We know that this tends to skew the results of inquiry in the direction of tacit expectations. For example, a parapsychologist who is a “true believer” tends to “find” whatever psychic phenomena he is looking for.
The root of the word theory means “to see.” We can create a reality for ourselves, a predisposition to “see” what we “believe” we will find. The more passionate the belief, the more likely the outcome. Furthermore we tend to “see” it in the metaphors with which we are enculturated. It is a matter of “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” Thus those in a religious milieu generally experience God in their “approved” local form.
Even the Witness as point-of-view carries its positional bias of spiritual orientation. It is rooted in the belief system, one of the primary “filters” of direct experience. Its advantage as a perspective lies in the fact, that since it is not identified with the ego/personality, it provides an observational point from which to view ego’s dissolution. Thus, it is a “vehicle” for transcendence of ordinary awareness.
Whether we are speaking physics or mysticism, apparently we are ultimately describing the observation of internal states (Tart, 1975), i.e. some form of introspection. Virtually all that can be observed is some form of image, whether it is an image of self, or world, or God.
The congealed potential of such imagery can appear as a fog, cloudiness, amorphous generalized grayness without distinct features. We can speculate that this cloudiness represents the diffuse, undifferentiated imagery of all potential imagery: all self-images, all nature-images, all God-images.
Tart has used people’s reports of their internal experiences in developing a systems approach to discrete states of consciousness (d-SoCs), “even though these reports are undoubtedly affected by a variety of biases, limitations, and inadequacies.” They are nevertheless the most relevant data for studying states of consciousness.
According to Tart it cannot be known to what extent, “the Observer’s apparent objectivity is a reality and to what extent a fiction.” If Tart alleged we could know, we would have to suspect his investigator’s bias! When experiential data are used to understand states of consciousness, the observation process cannot be taken for granted. But neither does it need to be interpreted.
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
There is a 14th century text, known as THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING, which is a classic of mystical literature. Its purpose was to provide practical advice for all individuals interested in achieving a direct knowledge of God that they might verify their own experience (Progoff, 1957). This contact with God was not understood as something transcendent or removed from daily life, but was sought as a content of immediate experience.
Reminiscent of THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING, the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics (Everett) informs us that we live in a cloud of positional universes. This interpretation of parallel universes emerges from the mathematical reconciliation of relativity theory with quantum mechanics.
Both predict that the deeper nature of reality is this “Multiverse.” This (amorphous) cloud of infinity veils the true face of God. Mystics are more interested in the “heart of God” where they approach without interpretation, quantification, objectification, etc.
The whole universe is connected through the existence of all parallel universes. Each and every atom in our brains and bodies are connected to each and every atom everywhere, particularly the local parallel universes that immediately surround it. Those universes make up its electron wave cloud. As long as no attempt is made to discern where the electron actually is, it is present in all of these universes simultaneously. These universes overlap, producing the single universe containing a stable atom (Wolf, 1988).
Any one universe is composed of virtually an infinite number of potential or unobserved overlapping parallel universes so long as no resolution or observation is attempted. In this manner the whole range of unobserved phenomena represents a completely undivided universe.
The many-worlds interpretation is consistent with cosmology, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and perhaps psychology. In this interpretation, matter exists in all the parallel universes as “parallel ghosts.” It is not the conventional, nor conservative interpretation of QM (the Copenhagen Interpretation), but it is the only one which accounts for certain phenomena.
These parallel universes are all necessary to create the stable universe we inhabit. On the atomic scale, single electrons exist as clouds within atoms so they have stable energy. The Uncertainty Principle assures us we can never know its position and dynamics simultaneously.
Infinite possibilities appear as a “smear”–that cloudiness. It implies that according to quantum rules, we can never know and experience simultaneously all that is in principle knowable, hence the “cloud of unknowing.”
Nature generates infinities of possibilities which veil the face of God. It is a self-referential process. These self-generated, self-reflective infinities only create uncertainty (indeterminacy; unpredictability based on cause/effect) when viewed from a certain perspective–that of a single observer in a single universe.
Parallel worlds emerge when we consider multiple observers making multiple observations (relative perspectives). We too are composed of the stuff of infinity, and our consciousness creates and alters what we observe. The very act of observation changes ourselves. We become part of the process by becoming involved with it–the observer becomes part of the wave.
Consciousness is a pattern of order in superspace, created by the overlapping of fleeting flashes of energy, which creates mind and matter. Therefore, the existence of matter and the perception of it are the same thing (Wolf, 1988).
In the parallel worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics there are no quantum jumps–just continuous transformation. Mother Nature branches into infinity, through branches of possibilities from a central trunk of initial conditions into a universe of all possible universes (Wolf, 1988). This is the “Tree of Life,” which fills all-space, all-time, all dimensions, like a fractal generator. This Tree functions as an algorithm of existence.
There is evidence now that the seemingly indeterminate world of quantum physics is undergird with an inherently unpredictable, yet deterministic matrix of chaotic flux. The emergent creative order within randomness is so ethereal it has been virtually invisible (therefore, ignored) prior.
DETERMINISTIC PHILOSOPHY
If we view “determinism” as underlying the uncertainty principle, we have changed philosophical “camps.” As defined by Fred Alan Wolf, “Determinism is a philosophy that says what is depends on what was. What will be depends on what is. All are connected across time by laws of physics that allow one to determine what happens based on what happened, and what will be based on what is happening now.”
Chaos theory, which describes complex dynamical systems far from equilibrium, heralds the return from indeterminacy. The chaotic signature permeates nature. Processes can be extremely unpredictable, yet still deterministic. Our view of their future is always clouded. Chaotic systems have a high degree of unpredictability. The virtually mind-boggling notion we are left with is one of indeterminate-determinacy, or determinate-indeterminacy.
Scientists are now contemplating the notion that chaotic dynamics may underlie the statistical probabilities of quantum flux (Gutzwiller, 1992). So, it is not a return to the cause-and-effect determinism of classical physics. Rather, it is a non-linear, always unpredictable, yet boundaried determinism. There may be a nonlinear mechanism to quantum physics.
“Quantum Chaos” has been discovered in the distribution of energy levels of certain atomic systems, in their wave patterns, and when electrons scatter from small molecules. Chaos shows up in quantum scattering as variations in the amount of time the electron is temporarily caught inside the molecule during the scattering process (Gutzwiller, 1992).
A new approach is being sought to reconcile the distribution of quantum mechanical energy levels with the chaotic orbits of classical mechanics. Chaos is at work in the wavelike nature of the quantum world, just as it is at work in classical chaos, and at the cosmological level in such phenomena as The Great Attractor, one of the largest known structures in the universe (see DISCOVER, Nov. 1989, p. 20).
In chaos theory, all is determined by the initial conditions of the process. The whole process is extremely sensitive to those initial conditions and any subsequent perturbations, no matter how minor. Small errors in our initial descriptions quickly “pump up” into complex, compound errors in predictability.
In the wildly fluctuating realm of subatomic activity, “probability is a measure of possibilities that must somehow exist simultaneously because these possibilities can effect, or overlap with, each other, thus changing the physical properties of matter” (Wolf, 1988). The apparently random phasing in and out of “points” in the universe displays a hidden order when we observe its dynamics.
DOORWAYS INTO CHAOS
Humans live at the perceptible level of so-called classical or Newtonian mechanics. Quantum fluctuation, as expressed by the probability distribution, is normally very small and ignorable for an entity of our size. But when the dynamics is chaotic, these quantum fluctuations grow very large. One electron might, for example, fluctuate and initiate a change in brain waves, resulting in a phase shift or change in “state” of consciousness.
Observation seems to change nothing more in the universe than the observer which becomes involved with it. By determining a specific “state” for the entity, a perturbation is created which has repercussions throughout the system, but also effects the “state” of the observer more than anything else. Parallel universes manifest whenever any observation takes place. They emerge because their presence is not forbidden by the mathematics; it is mandated.
Just imagine the self-referential paradoxes which emerge when we observe ourselves! It is like an infinite hall of mirrors. And to compound the Mystery, both science and mysticism tell us that in the most essential ways we never observe anything but ourselves. Further, that self is apparently divine. For whatever the universe is, we are woven of that self-same fabric.
How can we know the nature of ourselves and the universe(s)? How can we not? We are quantum creatures, as well as electrochemical biologies. Apparently all we need to do is look. Then the act of looking deterministically, yet non-linearly alters us infinitely, forever, and our universe as well.
How can we “see through”; where is the “Doorway into Chaos” beyond the classical view? It comes with the suspension of “interpretations” of our experience. It comes with the suspension of the sense of separateness; suspension of disbelief in the reality of images.
Science has been interpreting nature, like psychologists have interpreted dreams. This distances us from the immediacy of experience; it is a reaction to or against experience. It holds existential reality at bay.
Our experience of the cosmos is essentially one of the experience of multi-dimensional (holographic) images. Even in the scientific view, matter is simply frozen light or energy. This fundamental energy also patterns our consciousness. We can observe this ongoing dynamic process as the stream of consciousness, with its concurrent imagery.
THE UN-NAMED DREAM
This imagery manifests in our dreams and the “dream-wave” continues to manifest in our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, which may also be viewed as imaginal phenomena. Dreams are an uninterpreted experience of that Great River of imaginal existence we call the Universe.
To interpret dreams is to make the same mistake as to try to interpret nature. We come to “know” simply by being, looking, expressing, experiencing, experimenting. This very act leads to infinite transformation.
But we do not remove ourselves from life to subjectively choose to look at one of our internal images, objectively. Instead, following nature’s way, we immerse ourselves consciously, deliberately, in the on-going emergent process which is always there usually below the threshold of conscious awareness.
This choice–to observe oneself–is a great experiment, perhaps the greatest science can devise. It yields direct, experiential evidence of the true nature of being, of reality. We do not experience an image, the image, or even images in general. We cannot experience an image, because we are constantly and unavoidably experiencing through them all the time.
We do not perceive images, but through them. We are not distinctionally different from them. Ultimately, there is no concrete reality, only an infinite variety of virtual realities, vague fleeting dynamic images. Again, we are that; when we look at them, we look at ourselves. And like the cosmos, we find chaotic, dynamic multiplicity.
Within that multiplicity we seek the unifying, creative, ordering principle, paradoxically finding its name is Chaos, its name is our Self, its name is Many, its name is Divine. The Heart of God is the heart of Chaos.
With this philosophy, we suggest an experimental-experiential therapy, based on multiple experiences of multiple states of consciousness–immersion in the fluid flow of psychic imagery. Direct existential (multi-sensory) observation–with the suspension of interpretation–creates emergent transforma-tions of an organic nature, based on the unfolding of natural chaotic dynamics.
Experience is inseparable from perception. Again, we do not experience perception through imagery, but perceive/experience directly our imaginal nature, which is not limited to the “rational” observation point of the ego, but consists of infinite multiple states of consciousness in chaotic, dynamic flux, within a field of multiple universes.
In Gestalt and CCP we speak of “becoming” a symbol or image. But we can’t become them, because we already are them. We realize our own essence through realizing the essence of dynamic imagery. It is the experience of multiple states of consciousness–a continuous transformation.
This flux is undetermined (cloud-like, amorphous) until an observation is made, in which case it assumes a specific–perhaps bizarre–imaginal form or pattern, which is manifested as a gestalt experience. It happens spontaneously in dreams, visions, and parapsychological phenomena. It can be facilitated through experimental/experiential therapy.
We can conceive of a sort of “fractal therapy” wherein we penetrate deeper and deeper into the self-iterating forms and patterns of our being, revealing and reflecting the essence of ourselves, our nature, and the nature of reality. There is “no point” in trying to predict just how we will change–what states we will experience–nor in interpreting that experience through corrupting models.
What seems most therapeutic is simply “being there,” with that multiple consciousness in its various forms, in that multiple universe of experiential possibilities. Because of the “observer effect”, we cannot help but “become” the image as we observe it. If you don’t believe it, try it and see for yourself.
Note of Caution: you will be unpredictably changed by partaking in the process.
MANY POINTS OF VIEW
There are an infinite number of mutually exclusive views about the universe. We call some sciences, others religions, or philosophies. We value them on a scale ranging from consensus agreement to idiosyncratic representations.
More than one of these viewpoints can exist simultaneously in one brain. Physics tells us that the observer splits into two alter egos as a measurement with two alternatives is being carried out. Instead of measurement suddenly producing a single answer, the parallel worlds views says that each possible answer is produced in a parallel world.
In psychology, a polarized ego experiences the Jekyll and Hyde split of the Shadow; an abused child evades further abuse by splitting into multiple egos, so the burden of dealing with the offender is shared among “the troops.” There is some evidence that human personality, the ego state, undergoes multiple splits (fragmentation) if confined. Some “multiples” report detecting other “viewpoints”; others report only “blankness” between personalities. Even their pathologies, such as allergies, may vary between personalities.
According to Jung, the personal unconscious is constellated around magnetic nodes called “complexes” which function like “strange attractors” at the core of stored traumatic experiences. They are natural structures within the psyche, and without them personality would have no individual expression.
The collective unconscious also appears as multiple archetypes with characteristic styles of consciousness. These are the transpersonal forms, including shadow, anima/animus, and images of the Self, such as animal totems, magicians, healers, angels, and wise ones. Their many forms constitute the “Thou” of the “I-Thou” dialogue. The imagery of the unfolding self is generally considered prognosticative of our future states–it reveals what we may expect to potentially unfold over time.
The “quantum unconscious” appears as clouds, time fogs, waves, spirals, black holes, tunnels into other dimensions, full and empty voids. The cloud or fog of time is parallel universes–the hologram of parallel universes. Beyond the realm of personified archetypes and mythic beings, it is non-dialogical, purely existential experience of raw energy transforms.
In physics, black holes mean both the death and the birth of matter, simultaneously. They mean the same thing for consciousness in the journeys. Wolf intimates that given the right circumstances it is possible to witness other worlds by somehow tuning in to our own electrons. If we could enter an electron, we might see just the kinds of things that might be seen when entering a spinning black hole as predicted to exist by general relativity. Then our bodies would themselves be “time machines.”
Only stagnant or nonrotating black holes rip everything apart. Entering them leads to images of dismemberment, dissolution, annihilation–ego death. In the consciousness journeys, participants report unusual blackness–black blacker than black–which they describe as doorways to other dimensions. Sometimes they actually refer to them spontaneously as being like black holes. Mystics refer to the Abyss of the Transcendent Imagination, and suggest one have a guide for travel in that realm.
One of the most interesting implications of the parallel universes model (multistate paradigm) is that it becomes, in principle, possible to violate the Uncertainty Principle simply by talking to yourself in the future! Mystics have reported this conversational (dialogical) experience over the aeons under various names–the genius, the daemon, Mercurius, the Holy Guardian Angel, the Higher Self, the radiant form of the Guru.
In the parallel universes theory, there is no absolute past, because there is always the possibility at any time that some present event will alter it (Wolf, 1988). Paradoxically the future communicates with the present–all possible futures act on the present. If time is a “river” it contains two counterstreaming currents. Past and future influence the present.
Wolf notes that, “the tiny quantum, through the reality of the quantum wave of probability and its behavior in spacetime, already implies that information can flow from past to present and from future to present. Thus it implies the existence of both the past and the future ’simultaneously’ with our own time.”
In terms of physics, a complex conjugate wave travels back through time, meeting the original wave, modulating it in the process–transforming the present through a transaction. Every observation–including those of consciously observing self–sends out a wave toward both future and past. Both the beginning of the wave and end appear to begin in our mind–our mind in the future and our mind in the present. This bears on the emergence of creativity and intuition.
Wolf says that, “the past, present, and future exist side-by-side. If we were totally able to ‘marry’ corresponding time each and every moment of our time-bound existences, there would indeed be no sense of time and we would all realize the timeless state, which is taken to be our true or base state of reality by many spiritual practices.”
It appears that time and mind are connected, and that the arising of order and evolution in the universe may come from the future, since information flows from past to present and from future to present. Quantum chaos and consciousness are the hidden variables which condition reality.
We can conceive of a new kind of “path-ology,” a path that twists through spacetime and somehow arrives back on itself–after traveling through time–at the same time it left. Thus, consciousness continually reports from the “front”–and conditions the present–through the flow of inherent dynamic imagery. By choosing to observe/participate in this process we embrace the chaos and open ourselves to its natural transformative influence. It is “recycling” of consciousness.
We can conclude that the quantum wave function is a real wave which exists in all of the parallel worlds simultaneously. It never stops propagating from the past and future. Where waves coincide, events occur; something physical appears. And there is also something else–intelligence, order, and consciousness.
Wolf imagines consciousness as the resonant gathering of simultaneously present quantum waves–clashing waves of time–one coming from the future and one from the past, defining the present. Mind emerges as the focal point of these waves. He asserts that, “There is associated with every appearance of a physical object a site of knowledge. When these sites of knowledge are grouped together in a tight region of space alone, we have consciousness.”
He goes on to state that, “Knowledge or mind is then the relationship of future to past–that relationship appearing as, and creative of, the present moment. Knowledge is thus equivalent to meaning, and meaning is only present when there are two events–a future and a past,” recognized by emergent mind.
Classical determinism is determined by the past alone; chaotic determinism is non-linear and determined by past/future.
All parallel universes are real, but not all exist. We can tune in to multiple, virtual realities, passing across time barriers, sensing the future, and reappraising the past. In consciousness journeys we partake of the infinite possibilities of transformative imagery and existentially realize ourselves.
We view the cosmic hologram, and in so doing determine one of its myriad forms. What we see depends on the viewpoint we take. That viewpoint alters the hologram because it alters the probabilities by moving in time.
Thus the human mind is the alchemical laboratory of consciousness and new physics. It is already tuned in to the past and the future, making existential certainties our of probable realities. According to Wolf and the multistate paradigm, it does this “by simply observing. Observing oneself in a dream. Observing oneself in this world when awake. Observing the action of observing.”
REFERENCES
Bearden, Thomas, EXCALIBUR BRIEFING, Strawberry Hill Press, San Francisco, 1988.
DeWitt, Bryce S. and Grahm, Neill. THE MANY WORLDS INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Gutzwiller, Martin C., “Quantum Chaos,” SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Jan. 1992, pp. 78-84.
Penrose, Roger, “Quantum Physics and Conscious Thought,” QUANTUM IMPLICATIONS, Hiley & Peat, Eds. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1987.
Progoff, Ira, THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING, Dell, New York, 1957, 1983.
Tart, Charles T., STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1975.
Vogel, Shawna, “Star Attraction,” DISCOVER, Nov. 1989, pp. 20-22.
Wolf, Fred Alan, PARALLEL UNIVERSES, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1988.

THE CREATIVE FLOW OF MEANING
An Introduction to the Nonunitarian Philosophy
of the
Creative Consciousness Process
by Iona Miller, ©1993

ABSTRACT: In nonunitarian, discontinuous transformations, a system opens itself to novelty and potentiality by dissolving into a state of nonlocal communion with the whole and reforms unconditioned by the past. Nonunitary transformation is based in the dissolution of all forms and structures, and creative emergence of unconditioned creativity–metamorphosis. In this organic model of multiple universes and states of consciousness, everything is involved in a pattern of continuous rebirth, and everything is the manifestation of the underlying creative potential, transcending physical and spiritual boundaries.

Evidence provided by anthropology, psychotherapy, experimental psychology, and common human experience strongly suggests that the capacity for imagery is species wide and that human adults have a continual, night-and-day stream of it, to which they may or may not attend.
–Michael Murphy, THE FUTURE OF THE BODY
The perfection of that which rests in itself in no ways contradicts the perfection of that which circles in itself. Although absolute rest is something static and eternal, unchanging and therefore without history, it is at the same time the place of origin and the germ cell of creativity. Living the cycle of its own life, it is the circular snake, the primal dragon of the beginning that bites its own tail, the self-begetting Ouroborous.
–Erich Neumann, ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
The postmodern era has seen the fall of the modern notion of a mechanistic personality living within a clockwork universe. The reification of a single, stable unified self was deified in monotheistic cultures. But in our current pluralistic society, we find expression through a number of “selves” within each context or event.
The romantic tradition of a profound and stable center of identity has given way to a functionalist dynamic image of self as multiple shape-shifting identifications. A deeper truth of our culture is that we have come to “worship” many gods, giving attention to diverse and contradictory aspects of ourselves. But we have retained the romantic notions that powerful forces lie buried deep within the psyche, such as passion, inspiration, creativity, even madness.
The pragmatism of modern life leads to excessive demands for attention to deal with the here and now of ordinary consciousness. To survive in the complex world, we may have narrowed our self image, perceptual continuum, and sense of potential. As a cultural movement, modernism is crumbling. It is being replaced by a perhaps even more skeptical distrust of all metanarratives for describing the nature of reality.
Gergen (1991) lists such reasons as “populating of the self, demands of multiple audiences, and repetition of images” as factors which reinforce the postmodern notion of multiple selves or systems operating within each individual.
In contemporary society we play many roles, wear many hats during any given day. Simple roles are no longer adequate “containers” for self. We reveal ourselves through different social masks and by expressing different facets of ourselves in different relationships.
The notion of “authenticity” gives over to that of relativity. Being “romantic” or “functionalist” become ways of participating. Our uniqueness is not self-determined but reflects the patterns of our relationships, and the deep context in which they occur.
Creative Consciousness Process is a postmodern psychotherapy, which operates on the premise of following nature’s processes, rather than a mechanistic model of cosmos and human beings. The organic process of natural unfolding is one of order emerging from chaos and recycling back into chaos through the de-structuring or deconstruction via the flow of creative regression.
The centroversion of a strong ego may have been the psychological goal of the past, but the cultural mandate is now one of radical pluralism, identification with a multiplicity of views. Creative regression is neither a fragmentation nor shattering of the ego into disparate parts. Rather, in CCP, it is a “guided tour” of the myriad of potentials for being from the most embryonic forms of consciousness to the most complex. Ego consciousness is superceded in favor of an animated realm of infinite possibility.
When the unifying perspective of the ego reaches its apex and decline, it needs to be renewed through immersion in radical multiplicity, dissolving its boundaries to experience that greater than itself. Ego returns to the unconscious, voluntarily dissolving into its underlying essence. This immersion is like a baptism, a renewing bath in unfathomable holy waters–unimaged wholeness.
CCP is empirical in the sense that it is based on observation of psyche’s phenomenal display. But it is a participatory, rather than an “objective”, experiment. The process is guided by experience and theory, but CCP was not constructed from any original theory of consciousness. It emerged from spontaneous deepening of experiential psychotherapy. CCP uses a stratified map of consciousness which helps the guide orient within the phenomenology of the process.
It is “reductionistic”, not in the sense of reducing the whole to its parts, but of reducing manifest imaginal phenomena down to creative essence–reducing all psychic material to its primal elements. It draws its legitimacy from “functionalism”; it works, consistantly facilitating emergent forms of creativity and healing. Thus, CCP fulfills its intentionality.
In terms of physics, we can view CCP as analoguous to the eternal flux of implicate (nonmanifest, enfolded) and explicate (manifest, unfolded) realities. In CCP, the transformative process leads from a stratified phenomenology of imagery into less structured representations, and finally into nonrepresentational perception. Thus consciousness crosses the abyss between the phenomenological and nonphenomenological domains. Both domains accomodate transformative events.
CCP recognizes consciousness in the primal, universal flow of active information. This phenomenological model views consciousness as a self-directed intentionality with the ability to override its physical substratum, and even genetic instructions to manifest a creative course of unfolding, by introducing “missing information.” CCP is phenomenological because it deals with events–phenomena–as we directly experience them and interpret them.
In the human psyche, this process manifests as the upwelling spring of emergent imagery which conditions our entire perception of reality. The so-called stream of consciousness flows through all manifestations of phenomenal existence, conditioning it with its dynamic global imprint, a universal pool of active, intentional, evolutionary information.
The flow of psychic energy carries the deep context of the whole. This emergent flow of deep context embodies meaning. Therefore direct perception of meaning is inherent in participation within this flow.
Most of the time we ignore this “window” on our psychic processes. But we can enter this imaginal world within the context of experiential psychotherapy. Philosophers such as Hegel and Bergson have spoken of this intrinsic ability which CCP evokes and facilitates.
Experience has subjective connotations which imply participation in the cycle of immersion and reflective release; a nonreflecting experience of giving up of self and volition to the flow. In the therapeutic context, the consciousness journey provides a ritualistic structure for the process of letting go of ordinary identifications of self and world.
Therefore, this surrender/subjugation of the self to ritual and flow is a prelude to increased freedom through ritual. Immersion paves the way for empowered emergence. The process becomes a communion, the ritual form of which is constituted by consciousness, being led along by itself, engrossed and carried along in suspense–suspension of self–within the scintillating context of the whole.
THE CREATIVE FLOW
The creative flow of meaning is facilitated by intentionally turning attention toward imagery. The stream of consciousness can become accessible through the faculty of introverted intuition. In his early work, Bergson emphasized the immediate, nonconceptual character of intuition. He emphasized it as a direct participation in, or identification with, what is intuited.
In self-referential processes intuition is an immersion in the indivisible flow of consciousness, a grasp of pure becoming. Ultimately, unlike the relative knowledge of intellect which remains detached from its objects, intuition enters into what it knows, dispensing with symbols (Murphy, 1992).
The stream of consciousness unfolds a dynamic panoply of unfolding imagery in which we can immerse ourselves. Participation in the stream of consciousness reveals multiple selves, multiple ways of being, multiple states of consciousness.
Intentionality sets the tone of the process. In CCP, creativity and healing are the intentions which condition positive expectations. By recycling our consciousness, we feed these emergent images back into the system, amplifying certain patterns. The amplification is reflected in subsequent emergent imagery.
Intentions act like magnetic fields, moving attention toward some objects and away from others, keeping our mind focused on some stimuli in preference to others (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
Each image contains the gestalt of an individual’s existential condition, encoding all potentialities and limitations simultaneously. Like fractals, each image contains a certain self-similarity with others, reflecting all levels of organization.
The whole is contained in the part; the entire therapeutic “problem” is implied within any discrete image. Each image emerges from the creative context which links all events, real and imaginal–the underlying destructured phenomenal field–a meaningful void.
Consciousness is patterned by self-referential circular (non-linear) causality: consciousness shapes the self and is in turn unpredictably shaped by it. It conjures the image of the serpent Ouroborous, eating its own tail. In the self-referential imagery process, images are fedback, or recycled, into consciousness.
Disorder, or conflicting information and intentions in the psyche, include pain, fear, rage, anxiety, etc. In consciousness journeys, the guide is always open to sensing the nature or essence of the dis-ease, what shape or form the obstruction to flow takes.
Instead of attempting to harmonize, “work through,” or order these disorderly systems, CCP intentionally amplifies them through feedback, then de-constructs them by adventuring further into their depths–into chaos–the organic transformation process which then creatively re-patterns the liberated energy locked up in their expression.
As we follow the stream of consciousness back to its source of emergence, many typical phenomena appear. Raw, archetypal energy is conditioned in its appearance on discrete levels of organization. As consciousness seeks form, it is channeled and patterned first by archetypal and mythic dynamics, which constitute the deeper strata of the psyche. These are archetypal states of consciousness.
It is also conditioned to the extent that it encounters resistance to its free flow. The obstructions it encounters in the personality strata of psyche are psychophysical blocks composed of “frozen consciousness,” held osified by the forces of repression. They are the result of interaction of self and environment–existential obstructions within the flow of manifest and nonmanifest energy, resulting from trauma. These states of consciousness appear in a virtually unlimited number of idiosyncratic forms.
Particularly in youth, trauma leads to the mobilization of defense and survival mechanisms. Later, these become power struggles, problems in our relationships to self, others, and the environment–blocks in the flow of relationship.
One of these primary defenses is the reconstruction of one’s sense of boundaries–one’s primal sense of self within this world. Under the chaotic threat of traumatic events, we constantly redraw our boundaries in an attempt to preserve the sanctity of self. Various defenses invoke the actualization of different potentialities for survival. These defenses tend to persist into adult life, long after the immediate threat is gone.
Maladaptive coping mechanisms obstruct the free flow of psychic energy, or libido. The obstructive patterns are the source of our psychophysical dis-ease, and may be de-constructed through CCP. Following the stream of consciousness into deeper strata of the psyche, into more primal and fundamental states of consciousness, allows the old forms to dissolve. Dissolving all boundaries in the journey, we become open to re-patterning by the creative source.
In CCP, we follow the natural unfolding of imagery quite closely, generally choosing to guide the journey toward a more deeply enfolded domain of experience. Each transform of image is virtually a different state of consciousness, as identification migrates through forms and patterns. The metamorphosis may be smooth–”morphing”–or discontinuous. Morpheus, the maker of forms was also the god of dreams, according to Ovid.
Unitary consciousness is just one example–a special case–of nonunitary consciousness. Discontinuous, or nonunitive transforms are separated by transitive states which are often blank or void of perceptual content. These microstates may allow repatterning of each transform by global intentionality. Integral practice in CCP reveals that each transform also manifests in the physical body. Each tranformative practice has physical effects.
REFERENCES
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper & Row, New York, 1990.
Gergen, Kenneth, “The Decline and Fall of Personality,” PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, Nov/Dec 1992, p59-63.
Harding, M. Esther, PSYCHIC ENERGY; ITS SOURCE AND ITS TRANSFORMATION, Princeton University Press, 1947.
Murphy, Michael, THE FUTURE OF THE BODY, Tarcher, New York, 1992.
Neumann, Erich, THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, Princeton Univ. Press, 1954.

CHAOS THEORY
AND PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXES
by Iona Miller, ©1991

ABSTRACT: There is a similarity between the “strange attractors” of chaos theory and Jung’s notion of psychological complexes which may be more than metaphorical. The complex is a meaningful feeling-toned group of representations in the unconscious. It is a sort of manifold of symbolism all relating to the same archetype — variations on a theme, enfolded in the infrastructure of our subconscious mind. Attractors exhibit their self-iterating capacity in the psyche by demonstrating their attractive or seductive power as phenomena, ideas, theories, moods, and behaviors. The scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality as presently understood in CDS (complex dynamical systems).

That people should succumb to these eternal images is entirely normal, in fact it is what these images are for. They are meant to ATTRACT, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation.
–C.G. Jung, COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 9
If the charge of one (or more) of the “nodal points” becomes so powerful that it “magnetically” (acting as a nuclear cell”) ATTRACTS everything to itself and so confronts the ego with an alien entity…that has become autonomous–then we have a complex.
–Jolande Jacobi, COMPLEX, ARCHETYPE, AND SYMBOL
According to classical Greek myth, only Chaos existed in the beginning. The random element eventually produced Gaea, the deep-breasted earth, or matter. For matter to exist, the force of attraction also had to appear (super-celestial Eros). Uranus, the starry heavens, the evolutionary impulse, 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. Chaos, the gaping maw of open space, is a pure cosmic principle. This cosmic trinity of chaos, matter and attraction lies at the heart of chaos theory, the field of complex dynamical systems (CDS).
Just as the ancient pantheon helped to orient the Greeks as a foundational perspective, CDS provides tools for constructing cognitive maps that really work in a practical way to give us an edge, or advantage, in our own evolution. It gives us phenomena, models, and metaphors such as deterministic chaos, “strange attractors,” turbulence, stretching time and folding space, and nonlinear phenomena.
Several Jungian psychologists, most notably Ernest Rossi, have observed that the new science of chaos theory, with its strange attractors, is suggestive of some of Jung’s most basic assertions about the psyche. In fact, they have noticed that the concept of “strange attractors” is archetypal in its appeal. In the sciences in general this concept of chaotic attractors has taken on the quality of an activated archetype in collective awareness.
The attractor once again exhibits its self-iterating capacity by demonstrating its attractive or seductive power as a phenomenon, idea, and theory. Chaotic systems display certain characteristics including complex feedback loops, self organization, holistic behavior, inherent unpredictability.
Many of these qualitative descriptors apply directly to Jung’s concept of the psyche. It is easy to begin drawing analogies with his concept of the self, complexes, archetypes and their seemingly chaos-infusing effects on the ego and its concepts of control and orderliness.
Jung came upon his theories of the psyche through first-hand empirical observation of his clients. He shared an interest in their hopes, dreams, problems, belief systems, and myths which gave their lives meaning. Jung trusted his perception of psychological phenomena when outlining the characteristics of the complex dynamical system we call psyche.
The complexity of the psyche reflects not only on the issue of mental health and well being. Even more fundamentally it relates directly to issues of survival and evolution. A complex system is more creative and flexible at solving all the problems life has to offer. Heinz Pagel in THE DREAMS OF REASON, (Simon & Schuster, 1988) has suggested that science has neglected the basic relationship between chaos, order, and evolution:

Complex systems exhibit far more spontaneous order than we have supposed, or order evolutionary theory has ignored. But that realization only begins to state our problem…Now the task becomes much more trying, for we must not only envision the self-ordering properties of complex systems, but also try to understand how such self-ordering interacts with, enables, guides, and constrains natural selection. Its worth noting that this problem has never been addressed.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow described the human developmental process as a series of periodic risers beginning with basic survival issues and culminating in self-actualization. The ability to execute one’s free will increases exponentially. This is because energy or libido formerly wrapped up in “stuck” patterns becomes available to the ego to use as it chooses.
Despite the fact that Jung had a profound yearning to see a kind of “unified field theory” between physics and psychology, he continued to support his own observations, rather than restrictively tie them to the limited scientific metaphors of his day. Physical science had not yet caught up with Jung’s concepts.
His concept of depth psychology based on archetypes (read “attractors”) escaped the Procrustean bed of a limited physical worldview. The new sciences at last provide some vindication for his stance that psyche is not different from matter.
In their article, “Jungian Thought and Dynamical Systems” (PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES, Spring 1989, Vol. 20, #1), May and Groder summarize the main feature of Jung’s ideas which relate to chaos theory:

Jung’s descriptions of psychological phenomena are very similar to system descriptions coming from the new science of chaos…Jung described regular recurrent qualitative forms (archetypes) contained in the specifics of human interaction; he emphasized the polar interactional nature of human phenomena (anima/animus, shadow/light); and he noted the potential for patterns of events related in a way beyond the immediate cause/effect relationship (synchronicity).
“Chaos” is a mathematical/ physical science of dynamical interactions that reveals regular qualitative forms and describes relatedness beyond immediate cause/effect. One of Jung’s great contributions was his insistence on the validity of such phenomena in the face of the restricted scientific metaphor of his time. Chaos and dynamical systems now provide “hard” science terms that fit and support Jung’s observations.

The scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality as presently understood. It provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities. This is strongly reminiscent of the Hermetic axiom, “As Above, So Below.” 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 realistic self-concept. It helps us evolve out of the body/mind or nature/spirit split instilled during the era of mechanistic science. Great minds, like Jung, have been moving in this direction waiting for science to catch up.
Consciousness may be an all-pervasive field, but awareness can be imagined more like a flashlight that can be selectively focused on different areas. One can broaden the beam and expand awareness of self to include more and more consciousness through such experiences as psychotherapy, meditation, and a mental grasp of the physical nature of reality.
Newtonian mechanics is great for describing the movement of planets and star systems. Quantum mechanics, with its inherent uncertainty, non-locality, and fuzziness, describes the mysteries of the sub-atomic realm. Humans participate in both, to be sure, but rather than only macro- and micro-systems, we also need one that fits the human scale.
This model needs to be compatible with human capabilities and experience. Humans, though partaking of the macroscopic and microscopic worlds normally focus awareness in a median range. In this median (mesocosmic) range, it seems chaos reigns supreme.
We see chaos in the various forms of turbulent movement and natural growth in nature. We see it in the flight of birds, the seeds of a sunflower, the rapids of a river, the patterns of weather, and much more. And, we see it in our destinies. We even try to find some meaningful ordering principle within that chaos to call divine.
This model of purposeful, though intuitive chaos is perhaps one underlying aspect of the concept of karma. It may not be apparent to an individual why certain types of experiences come, but there seems to be an underlying order and purpose, even though it may remain unconscious.
The choices implied by the free will inherent in chaotic systems seems to switch some responsibility onto the evolving ego and away from chance fate. An act of free will represents rational insight trained upon past experience, self interest, and potential reward.
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 realms have been studied by mathematicians and psychiatrists.
Their studies [see PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, May 1989, pg. 21] produced models of a person’s chaotic and unstable behavior in comparison to their stable behavior. Stable behavior can be imagined as being like the sky, unstable like mountains, with little pockets or “caves” of serenity within them. According to Jerome Sashin of Harvard Medical School, “if we can get people’s mental state to fall into one of those caves, their behavior would stabilize.” Perhaps dreamhealing, through the chaos, is the quickest route there. It often goes directly into a symbolic “cave.”
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. We can experience identity crisis during major life passages.
Perhaps it is not by chance that Jung’s theory of the complexes shares a semantic and essential relationship with complex system dynamics. Both complex and archetypes function like strange attractors, drawing numerous associations around themselves. These psychic nexus points are instrumental in the foundation of belief systems, emotional response, and behavior.
Each archetype has its parameters, but within the myth there are a jumbled myriad of possibilities that play through the personality seemingly at random, at least to the casual observer. Yet each has its agenda and characteristic mode of appearance. The activation of a mytheme in a life is decoded by noticing its corresponding effects, in dreams and waking life.
An individual’s personal myth or mytheme might be conceived of as an activated chaotic attractor. In another phase of life, the focus could change to others. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, sometimes competitive, 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 may lead to a psychotic break, while for others it opens the door to new freedom and an expanded sense of self, and creativity.
There are many questions which arise within the model of human development based on chaos theory. We can conjecture about 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 may not be easy to resolve.
Free choice may be a factor, but our choices are limited by our attitudes concerning what we believe is possible for us. The only solution is to dive to the deepest levels, seeking revolutionary transformation…a quantum leap in consciousness. The first step in understanding how these attractors affect us has to do with our personal complexes, our distorted experiences of raw archetypal power.
CHAOS AND COMPLEX
There are certain obvious parallels between strange attractors and the psychological phenomena of complexes. The complex is a feeling-toned group of representations in the unconscious. It is sort-of a manifold of symbolism all relating to the same archetype — variations on a theme, enfolded in the infrastructure of our subconscious mind. Complexes may be “hardwired” into our psychic system. We never exist without them and their varying degrees of influence.
Complexes consist not only of meaning but also of value, and this depends on the intensity of the accompanying feeling tones, according to Jung. All of them may show somatic as well as psychic symptoms, and combinations of the two. An unconscious complex acts like a second ego in conflict with the conscious ego, an alter ego.
This conflict places the individual between two truths, two conflicting streams of will, threatening to tear them in two. A complex can engulf or overpower the ego through partial or total identification between the ego and the complex.
A complex may be projected in the form of spirits, sounds, animals, figures, etc. A deeply unconscious conflict might appear as a UFO sighting or even abduction, or some other psychic phenomenon. It is an initiatory call to Mystery.
The ego can take four different attitudes toward the complex:
1. total unconsciousness of its existence
2. identification
3. projection
4. confrontation
But only confrontation, or conscious empathic identification, can help the ego come to grips with the complex and lead to its resolution. Switching back and forth between ego and complex diffuses polarization.
For Jung, the complexes were “focal or nodal points of psychic life, which must not be absent, because if they were, psychic activity would come to a standstill.” They constitute those “neuralgic points” in the psychic structure, to which undigested, inacceptable elements, elements of conflict, will cling.
Carrying our complexes is usually painful, embarrassing, and a burden. But just because they are painful does not prove that they are pathological disturbances. We always pathologize, but to what extent, and how do we act on that? All human beings have complexes. They constitute the structure of the unconscious part of the psyche and are its normal manifestations. From the behavioral perspective, personality traits are strange attractors.
Jung asserts that, “Complexes obviously represent a kind of inferiority in the broadest sense–a statement I must at once qualify by saying that to have complexes does not necessarily indicate inferiority. It only means that something incompatible, unassimilated, and conflicting exists–perhaps as an obstacle, but also as a stimulus to greater effort, and so perhaps, as an opening to new possibilities of achievement.” Jung also held that certain complexes stem entirely from an actual situation, above all those which appear in the spiritual crises of middle life.
Some complexes have never been in consciousness before. They grow out of the unconscious and invade the conscious mind with their weird and unassailable convictions and impulses. They interfere with the ego complex and functionality.
Jung also believed that certain complexes arise on account of painful or distressing experiences in a person’s life. When we experience trauma, we may “get a complex” about something. These unconscious complexes are of a personal nature. They are one source of [post traumatic] subliminal stress.
But there are also others, autonomous subpersonalities, that come from a source having nothing to do with our daily life. They have to do with the deepest irrational contents of the psyche–that which has never been conscious before. Jung termed them shadow, anima/animus, and self.
Unlike the contents of the personal unconscious which seem to “belong” to us, the contents of the collective unconscious seem alien (Not-I), as if they had invaded from outside. The reintegration of a personal complex has the effect of release and often of healing (mental and physical). But the invasion of a complex from the deep collective psyche is a disturbing, even threatening, phenomenon.
The parallel with the primitive belief in souls and spirits is obvious. This is where those energies and images come from. Souls correspond to the autonomous complexes of the personal unconscious. Spirits are those of the collective unconscious.
In psychotherapy, only a certain number of complexes, varying with the individual, can be made conscious. No one can ever fathom the entire contents of the psyche or self. To attempt to do so would be superheroic, an ego error. It is grandiose to consider. The remaining complexes continue to exist as “nodal points” as “nuclear elements,” which belong to the eternal matrix of every human psyche. They remain potential and do not unfold into the objective world.
Although psychic energy operates continuously, it is “quantum-like” in nature. The quanta in our comparison are the complexes, innumerable little nodal points in an invisible network. According to Jung and Jacobi,

In them, as distinguished from the “empty” spaces, the energy charge of the unconscious collective psyche is concentrated, acting in a manner of speaking, AS THE CENTER OF A MAGNETIC FIELD. If the charge of one (or more) of these “nodal points” becomes so powerful that it “magnetically” (acting as a “nuclear cell”) ATTRACTS EVERYTHING TO ITSELF and so confronts the ego with an alien entity, a “splinter psyche” that has become autonomous–then we have a complex. [Emphasis added by editor].

If that entity expresses through mythical or universal transpersonal imagery, it has originated in the collective unconscious. If it is contaminated with individual, personalistic material, if it appears as a personalized conflict, then it has emerged from the personal unconscious.
In summary complexes have:
1). two kinds of roots – infantile trauma or actual events and conflicts.
2). two kinds of nature – pathological or healthy.
3). two kinds of expression – bipolar, positive and negative.
Complexes, as strange attractors of undefined psychic energy, actually are the generic forms and dynamic structure of the psyche. The complexes themselves are essential, healthy components of the psyche, unless they have been twisted by fate.
What comes from the collective unconscious may be intense, but it is never “pathological.” All our sickness comes from disturbances in the personal unconscious. This is where pure complexes are colored by our individual conflicts.
When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed with therapy, by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through.
When the conflict seems unresolvable for consciousness, when its desires are continually thwarted, we often find that it is the contents of the collective psyche that are intractable. If a complex remains only a greater or lesser strange attractor in the deep psyche, if it doesn’t swell up with too much personal baggage, then it usually stays positive. It functions as the energy-giving cell from which all psychic life flows. But if it is overcharged it can turn negative, in the form of neurosis or psychosis.
Erich Neumann commented in THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS:

We can see in pathological cases, in fixed or compulsive ideas, manias, and states of possession, and again in every creative process where “the work” absorbs and drains dry all extraneous contents, how an unconscious content attracts all others to itself, consumes them, subordinates and co-ordinates them, and forms with them a system of relationships dominated by itself.

When the conscious mind cannot cope with these contents, the result is fragmentation, disorganization, disintegration — chaos. The role of the complex is determined by its interaction with the conscious mind, what states it creates. Without understanding, it de-stablizes the personality.
But in so doing, it opens the possibility of re-stabilizing at another level. It takes understanding, assimilation, and integration of the complex to appease its destructive energy. Otherwise the conscious mind falls victim to a regression and is engulfed by the deep psyche. Back to square one of the hero quest — dragon-slaying.
The danger, anxiety, and stress produced during a confrontation with complexes of the transpersonal psyche can create a personal catastrophe. Catastrophic chaos usually leads to what is called a bifurcation or splitting of the energy in two different directions. The experience may be shattering. But sometimes regression serves the process of evolution and leads to creative transformation and renewal of the self. Therefore, the potential benefit makes the risks worthwhile. It may lead to artistic creativity and expression.
References:
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES, Vol. 20, Number 1, Spring-Summer 1989.
COMPLEX, ARCHETYPE, AND SYMBOL, Jolande Jacobi, Princeton University Press, 1959.
THE ORIGINS & HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, Erich Neuman, Princeton University Press, 1954.