Chaos As the Universal Solvent

CHAOSOPHY 1993 PART 3

[An ASKLEPIA FOUNDATION Journal]
CHAOS AS THE UNIVERSAL SOLVENT
Re-Creational Ego Death in Psychedelic Consciousness
by Iona Miller, ©1992

Universal Solvent
This article appears in PSYCHEDELICS REIMAGINED,
Thomas Lyttle, Ed., Introduction by Timothy Leary, Autonomedia, NY, 1999.

ABSTRACT: There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic–purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation.
The alchemical operation SOLUTIO, called “the root of alchemy,” corresponds with the element water. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, “liquification” of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns–a psychedelic, expanded state. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.

“All substances are part of my own consciousness.
This consciousness is vacuous, unborn, and unceasing.”
Thus meditating, allow the mind to rest in the uncreated state. Like the pouring of water into water, the mind should be allowed its own easy mental posture in its natural, unmodified condition, clear and vibrant.
–Leary, Metzner, Alpert; THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE
To summarize, I have spoken of seven major aspects of SOLUTIO symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego’s confrontation with the unconscious that brings about SOLUTIO.

–Edward Edinger, ANATOMY OF THE PSYCHE

THE MEDICINE OF PHILOSOPHERS
Alchemy had one great prescription for the accomplishment of the Great Work: “Solve et Coagula”–reduce or dissolve all to its primary, most fundamental essence and embody that creative, holistic spirit. The ancient alchemists sought to transform “lead” into “gold.” We repeat this process as modern alchemists when we seek the transformative medium which allows us to recognize our rigidities (“lead”) and facilitates our healing and expression of our full creative potential (“gold”). That medium is the ever-flowing river of our consciousness.
The organic, regenerative process of “re-creational ego death” is common to mysticism, experiential psychology, and psychedelic journeys. Spiritual exploration, or soul travel, is shared by all three modes of immersion in the universal stream of consciousness. They are all variations on the theme of the consciousness journey, and echo our shamanic roots, and the mythemes of eternal return and hero/heroine. Participants reach a deep, integral level, and direct experience of Higher Power, often merging with the Creation or the Creator.
All these modes facilitate psychedelic consciousness, though any given experience may vary in duration and depth. Their prescribed frequency varies: meditators are advised to “die daily;” in psychotherapy once a month may be enough for regenerative therapy; psychedelic use varies from single experiences, to monthly, to annually. Despite different modes of induction, all these experiences reflect the illusory nature of time, space, and ego as reality constructs. The primary nature of consciousness is revealed.
The word psychedelic has its roots in the Greek psyche, soul, and delos, visible, evident. It is direct evidence of the soul, the pure manifestation of soul. Stace (1960) identifies nine qualities of the psychedelic experience as follows: 1) unity of all things; 2) transformation of space and time; 3) deeply felt positive mood; 4) sacredness; 5) objectivity and reality; 6) paradoxicality; 7) alleged ineffability; transiency, and 9) persisting positive changes in subsequent behavior.
In the practice of mysticism there is identification with progressively more subtle “bodies” or vehicles of consciousness, culminating in a transform from a mental or causal body to a vehicle of pure Light. In experiential psychotherapy, transformation results from deepening within the flow of psychic imagery, progressively identifying with more primal forms, and ultimately with formlessness. In psychedelic experience, expansion of consciousness dissolves ego boundaries leading to morphological transformations and ecstatic communion.
In alchemy, one sought not only to find or create the Stone, but also to apply it, or use it creatively in the everyday world. Now, we might speak of integrating or actualizing the results of our transformations in daily life. Thus, self-actualization or self-realization implies the grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration.
The liquid form of the Philosopher’s Stone was known as the UNIVERSAL SOLVENT. According to the alchemists, the operation of solutio (liquification) has a twofold effect: it causes old forms to disappear and new regenerate forms to emerge. To a rigid consciousness, the primal ocean of the unconscious is experienced as chaotic, violent, irrational processes of generation and destruction.
Through “creative regression,” the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles, recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perception, and quantum consciousness.
As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves. Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the Nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation.
When the constructed forms which hold personality together are voluntarily relinquished, consciousness “liquifies” and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state. Though easy to say, it is sometimes difficult to achieve such liberation from the mental-conceptual activity of the nervous system. When we do, the quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations.
The Universal Solvent dissolves problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns. These new patterns embody the evolutionary dynamic. According to chaos theory, free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. In consciousness this means that the obstructions to free flowing energy must first be dissolved. Through re-creational ego death, consciousness dissolves into healing communion with the whole of existence, renewing itself, emerging with a new creative potential.
The need for the periodic destruction of outmoded systems implies the value of recycling consciousness through death/rebirth experience. The universal solvent is not ordinary water, but “philosophical” water, the water of life, aqua permanens, aqua mercurialis. It is also the panacea, “elixer vitae,” “tincture,” or universal medicine. To periodically dip into these healing waters has a tonic, rejuvenating effect which pervades all aspects of being, like a soothing balm.
This divine water signifies the return of The Feminine, a reflective consciousness with inner awareness and archetypal spiritual perceptions. This Feminine Divinity is the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. This dynamic has been known as Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary.
In psychedelic mysticism, the animating principle is being referred to as Gaian Consciousness (Abraham, 1992), which we might view as a rebirth of ancient ecstatic, communal consciousness. It is the psychobiological basis of deep ecology, the flow of relationships. The return of chaos heralds the “greening of consciousness,” the greening of the cultural wasteland.
Hillman (1985) describes the anima not as a projection of, but rather the projector of psyche. We are contained within Her fantasy, not She within ours. Grinnell (1973) describes the transformative process of solutio which facilitates the fluid, mobile basis of consciousness:
For aqua permanens is a mode of the arcane substance; its symbol is water or sea-water, an all-pervading essence of anima mundi, the innermost and secret numinosum in man and the universe, that part of God which formed the quintessence and real substance of Physis, at once the highest supercelestial waters of wisdom and the spirit of life pervading inorganic matter.
The arcane descriptors of this paradoxical liquid Stone are cryptic, couched in metaphor. But what does it mean experientially and pragmatically? How does this chaotic transformative process engineer our consciousness? The divine water, as a liquid symbol of the Self, can be experienced in many ways. It has been described as innocuously as the “stream of consciousness,” and as poetically as the “Heart of The River of Created Forms.”
Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow. They include roles, game patterns, defense strategies, rigid attitudes and beliefs, interpretations, complexes, “old” myths, and “frozen” energy surrounding traumas which manifests as fear and pain.
Fossilized or ossified energies create obstructions to free flow, like boulders in a stream produce turbulence. Destructuring transformative processes can dissolve them, increasing the sense of flow. This “liquified” consciousness is psychedelic, a nonordinary expanded awareness which dissolves fixations and habits, and loosens cramped attitudes.
Mystic ecstasy, or the psychedelic state is mind-manifesting, consciousness expanding. It dissolves the identification of our consciousness with our histories, bodies, emotions, thoughts, and even beliefs. We are free to explore myriad forms, structures, and patterns, and/or become formless, resting in that unborn, unconditioned, unmodified healing state.
We experience the essence of other forms of existence. The Oneness of all life and existence is directly experienced through a variety of transformations ranging from plant and animal identifications to planetary and universal consciousness.
Entering the turbulent flow of the stream of consciousness, we can ride its currents back to the Source, pure unconditioned cosmic consciousness. We can imbibe the life-giving qualities of this “water” through mind-expanding experiential contact with this deep consciousness.
The transformative process is also reflected in our modern physical worldview as chaos theory, which we can view as a modern “myth,” a new metaphor for the dynamics of consciousness. Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, pervading all dynamic processes, perturbing them unpredictably. Chaos theory shows us that nature is continually unfolding new forms from the chaotic matrix of creation.
Our dynamic consciousness is an essentially chaotic process. Chaos tracks a time evolution with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When we “return” experientially to the “initial conditions” of our existence, our whole being is holistically repatterned. Our historical limitations are superceded by the creative power of the eternal Now.
We can allow chaos, as the universal solvent, to liquify consciousness and re-create ourselves. This presumes a therapeutic atmosphere, a “safe” set and setting, because each phase of the journey is an encounter with uncertainty.
The journey into deep consciousness appears inherently chaotic because the state of uncertainty pervades each moment of transition. Underlying moments of transience there are momentary blanks in awareness–little voids–flickering microstates which repattern each phase. Whether the experience is one of loss of personal boundaries or direct perception of stark, raw reality, or visionary dreams, there is no predicting where the chaotic orbit of consciousness will roam next.
To embrace chaos in our consciousness journeys, therefore means to cooperate and flow with the transformative process, opening ourselves to our deepest emergent potential. It’s O.K. to let go periodically and temporarily become unstructured nothingness and open to holistic re-patterning.
Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution (Kauffmann, 1991). This “recycling” of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex.
Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being “point-like,” they are more like vortices within vortices. The Philosopher’s Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion.
The Philosopher’s Stone may thus be seen as a “strange attractor” in the life of anyone engaged in the quest for transformation. It is an instinctual attraction toward processes which dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness, leading to transpersonal experience after symbolic death/rebirth. Freedom in the exploration of imagery comes from the creative capacity to experience loss.
Experientially, it appears as being channeled into the swirling mass of interacting symbols, an overwhelming vortex of pure information. We are sucked inexorably into interaction with the self-symbol, sucked into ourselves, like flotsam is pulled into a whirlpool. This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries.
In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception. Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized. The concrete image of the body “morphs” into the flow of pure energy, in a variation of Transubstantiation. It is the “rapture” of being siezed up into the heavenly realm.
The flow of dynamic energy from the deep Self reawakens and activates the body, and also that portion of the unconscious that the body carries. The body not only carries, but is the memory of the entire evolutionary cycle. Consciousness can access any portion of this material memory through creative regression. The body manifests kinesthetic, preverbal, and preconceptual memory of its direct experience. Immersion in the healing creative energy flow is like a spiritual baptism, which facilitates creative reformation of ordinary consciousness, and even the physical body.
Solutio, as a state of consciousness, unites the powers of above and below, transpersonal and personal. It is the integration of the higher spiritual powers with personal experience that embodies the healing dynamic. This produces the paradoxical poison-panacea. The dual nature of the universal medicine points to a consciousness state beyond both opposites.
In Greek myth, Athena gave Asklepios, the divine healer, the blood of Medusa as the universal medicine. In its negative aspect it was toxic and produced death. The positive aspect brought healing; this mysterious potion is the “cure-all,” the “solution.” Divine water (sometimes symbolized as blood) is dangerous, poisonous, seductive, addictive, even deadly in its primeval, untransformed state–madness.
In the science fiction novel, DUNE, the new messiah and the Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood imbibe the psychoactive “water of life” with impunity. Moving past the fear and pain, they transcend time/space and commune with the continuum of all existence. What sets them apart from others, on whom the potion has a fatal effect, is their ability to withstand and convert its initial toxic effects into a religious ecstasy. They know how to navigate in that turbulent flow, during their consciousness journeys–”moving without travelling.”
The alchemical solution to this problem of primordial, raw experience is to “cook” it into a reflective consciousness. Recycling itself, the ego cooperates in its own “re-creational death,” connecting with the transpersonal forces of rebirth and renewal. The reborn personality is resurrected, restored to life through new meaning.
The ego acknowledges the Self as its new center of gravity, and personality heals. Experiential connection to the living reality of the Self, the “waters of life” is the panacea, the magical elixer of life. Solutio (and its prime agent, chaos) arises spontaneously from the depths as irrational images, dreams and fantasies.
In dreamhealing, the dream symbols are followed deeper and deeper down to the primal level where all structure dissolves into its original source. This journey into the depths, and subsequent emergence, is the basis of shamanic healing. As we journey in the autonomous consciousness stream, guided movement deeper into and beyond the fear and pain brings up the classical imagery of the solutio, as resistance subsides. There is no part of it that is not us. The transformative process dissolves blockages, obstructions or “frozen” consciousness which disturb and distort the free flow of energy.
1) RETURN TO THE WOMB OR PRIMAL STATE
The alchemist Paracelsus said, “He who enters the kingdom of God must first enter his mother and die.” That death-like silence is also our mother, the virgin womb of the imagination.
The dynamics of “creative regression” are common to mystical experience, psychedelic exploration, and therapeutic consciousness journeys. All lead to immersion in the flow of the stream of consciousness. Creative regression is a generic form of the myth of the eternal return, chronic recurrence, reiteration. In the dynamics of chaos theory we find this recursive motion in the concept of iteration–self-similarity–which produces the similarity in infinitely descending scales of fractal generation.
Iteration is like a stretching and folding of the spacetime continuum. Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive “bending back” of instinct toward that which is primordial and divine. Thus, whether induced through psychoactive substances, mystical transport, or experiential psychotherapy typical imagery recycles, recapitulates, or reiterates cascades of impressionistic transformations spanning the entire spectrum of archetypal experiences–morphological transformations.
These include but are not limited to childhood, birth, embryonic development, ancestral, mythic, genetic, evolutionary, universal, and quantum consciousness. Access to the entire continuum of organic and inorganic evolution as well as the collective unconscious becomes available. That information most pertinent to the whole self emerges in the stream of consciousness as virtual experience. What is pertinent is what gets spontaneously “downloaded,” and it repeats and reiterates the basic issues in yet another, eternally creative way. Stan Grof has catalogued an extensive taxonomy of these states, most notably in THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY (1988).
Such experiences of cosmic consciousness constitute a “return to the Mother,” the blissful fusion of primal union, at both personal and universal levels. The direction of this dynamic process is recursive, bending back through deep time, ontology, and phylogeny. It echoes the semantic roots of the words religion and yoga, which imply a “linking backward” in the bond between gods and man, a craving for ecstasy, and transcendence of the limitations of physical form (Milkman, 1987).
Jung called this dynamic an opus contra naturam, a work against nature. But chaos theory shows us it is actually quite organic, natural, and instinctual. In alchemy it was the Great Work. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or “unborn” state. This primal state is amniotic bliss experienced as the Void, the cosmic womb.
Images of the Great Mother system become reactivated, though not exactly in their original form. Imagery like fractals is self-similar, but not entirely identical. This creative regression is to the prepersonal domain, the preverbal, preconceptual domain, not the transpersonal spiritual domain (transverbal, transconceptual).
Typically in the first few dreamhealing sessions, a person will enter a dream symbol doorway which leads back to a conception memory. They may or may not recognize it as such during the journey. But in content, the symbolism is very clear. The imagery is fundamental or primal, appearing as a dance of energy, matter, and consciousness–the body-ego’s conscious experience.
These images are close to the stuff of our creation — the prima materia — of our existence. We may experience it as free-floating: a paradox of chaos and a deep-felt sense of flowing and peace. The imagery here is psychedelic — consciousness expanding — an autonomous manifestation of imagination. The panoply of the ceaseless transformation of energy may overwhelm the senses, leading to a sense of total chaos. There is nothing to do but let go, surrender to it, merge with it, flow with it.
The dancing energy waves and patterns are perceived as deep whorls, spinning spirals, black holes, infinite voids, gray clouds of nothingness. There is melding of the senses — synesthesia — such as “tasting” music, “seeing” sound, etc. Simple throbbing and other extremely primitive sensations may be experienced. Experience of this state produces a new acceptance of the original conditions of conception, and re-structuring of the primal self-image.
We go into the primal chaos to begin the process of reformation from our pre-structural beginning. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source.
2) DISSOLUTION, DISPERSAL, DISMEMBERMENT
The classic text of re-creational surrender or sacrifice of self is THE BARDO THODOL, or THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. It is explicitly for the living who undertake the death-like regression into the unconscious, as well as the dying. Because of their orientation toward consciousness journeys, THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE and THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD are useful translations or contemporizations of the transformational classic.
The realm of death is the twilight zone between consciousness and matter. Here psychoid phenomena manifest through the mingling of these modes. Here mind/matter duality ceases, creating enchantment, uncanny synchronicities, time warps, psychic experience, revelation of the mind of matter, the Nature Mind.
The moment of ego death is heralded by certain symptoms of transition. Resistance by the mind to this creative dissolution brings about physical symptoms which range from shaking and a sense of increasing pressure and anxiety, to paradoxical flashes of hot and cold, to extreme dizzyness and disorientation. As the classic psychedelic manual says, “The hard, dry, brittle husks of your ego are washing out; Washing out to the endless sea of creation.” (Leary et al, 1964).
Distressing or disturbing symptoms symbolize the violence of the passage of consciousness from form to formlessness. Images of the body disintegrating or being blown to atoms (fear of exploding = fear of expanding) are characteristic psychedelic experiences. Perhaps the very elements of our bodies “remember” their formation in the crucible of some supernova. There may be identification with merciless destruction, the Dance of Shiva, the raging elements of nature, a variety of forms of explosive discharge. Here are visions of fires, floods, raging storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, turbulent lakes of magma.
Consciousness “breaks up” into its elemental forms, manifesting as overwhelming imagery. This first phase of dissolution may be characterized by the futility of resistance, magnetic downward spirals, gravity wells, loss of morphological identity.
E.J. Gold describes the second stage of the voyage as one of being overwhelmed by illusions produced by conditioning. Yet the primal element of pure forms breaks through and the voyager recognizes “the basic component of consciousness which when combined produces what is called the element Water.”
In consciousness journeys, chaos functions as the universal solvent, that which dissolves all patterns and forms including the rigid, outmoded aspects of the self. In the dream journey, one might enter a spinning vortex and become dismembered by centrifugal force, torn limb from limb. We remain in this state of dis-integration until we re-member our essential self, embodying the wounded healer.
That sense of disintegration comes as the ego gives up its “unified” linear perspective (bivalent) to the multiple consciousness or awareness (multi-valence) of the deep self. Fear makes it feel like fragmentation, but in truth there is nothing in that imagery that is not us. The death throes of the ego prepare it for rebirth, through communion with cosmic consciousness, a new incarnation of the spirit, death and resurrection.
The nature of universal consciousness is oceanic. When the ego is in danger of “getting in over its head,” it panics as if faced with drowning in the depths of this vast ocean of consciousness. It overwhelms the ego which cannot fathom this abyss.
This aspect of solutio brings mythic images of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice, and of the isolation of the hero. It means nothing less than the sacrifice of the old self. The dissolution phase may mean myths of the triumph of darkness; myths of floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero.
In Gold’s words, “Death comes to all forms; everything eventually is broken up by dissolution, so there’s no point clinging to yet another biological form out of desire, longing for stability, or from fear and weakness.”
3) CONTAINMENT OF A LESSER THING BY A GREATER
The ego “takes the plunge,” it lets go and dissolves its old matrix, its old boundaries. When its boundaries melt, ego-consciousness dissolves into deep consciousness. The “wave merges with the ocean,” and experiences its own deep transpersonal nature. It moves swiftly through the fear and pain, awakening to an infinitely wider reality of universal energy waves. In the ocean of creativity, “your own consciousness, shining, void and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth, nor death.” (Leary, 1964).
Experience of the pure, unmodified state of consciousness transcends all opposites, and therefore consciousness journeys provide an experiential “container” for the reconciliation of paradox within a larger field of experience–a broader, transcendent perspective. The transformational process acts as a “container” (alchemical retort) of the contents of psyche. But these contents, reduced to their essence are “nothingness,” simply dreams and imagination. Emptiness is the real Philosopher’s Stone.
By dissolving into non-relative consciousness, mood swings or identification with conflicting polar positions may be transcended by an enlarged state of consciousness which embraces and contains the entire continuum. Flow replaces polarity.
Jung spoke of the transcendent function as a symbol-forming force continuously creating emergent imagery which facilitates whole-self realization. It is thus an evolutionary and adaptive force. Mindell (1985) speaks of the flow in alchemical terms:
The alchemists called this flow the ‘aqua permanens’, or permanent water. Aqua permanens is the fluid process, the energy or life which was locked up in the tension of conflict which has now been freed through the flow between the opposites. Fluidity comes from conflict. Whereas before there was a boundary between conflicting opposites, between intent and reality, streaming energy now transforms therapy into natural science.
Dreams, visions, or the stream of consciousness can be used therapeutically as an evolutionary force to guide people from a small sense of self and expand them toward a larger image. This expansion of the sense of self may require some adjustment. The illumination (awakening to larger Reality) may also come through a nature-mystic experience, intense sexual experience, E.S.P., a consciousness journey, or meditation. Enlightenment (even the “seed” of enlightenment) is an experience of awe, bliss, and infinite possibilities.
The ego realizes it is not the center of the whole person, but only “manages” the personality. There are autonomous archetypal forces which inhabit the psyche with their own agendas, patterns, and goals. Our psyche is transpersonal; it has no boundaries. Our conscious awareness is only a manifestation of this larger consciousness. Within this larger consciousness, we are at home with a plurality of visions. The parts contain the whole (to a degree), enfolded or embedded like a fractal or hologram.
Containment may take place symbolically in the therapeutic relationship. The consciousness guide, therapist, or shaman functions as a guide to the netherworld. The “wounded healer” has a numinous quality which provokes the projections of others. Shamans work within the belief systems of their subjects to expand their sense of what is possible. Those subjects’ experiences generally reflect the style and beliefs of the shaman–the shaman’s positive expectation of particularized results.
Exposure to the infinitely broader worldview of a shamanic personality will automatically move a “smaller” personality into solutio, dissolution. This rapport or participation mystique is an unconscious, automatic process–a positive sort of psychic contagion. This unconscious dynamic may be responsible for the phenomenon of “contact high.”
4) REBIRTH, REJUVENATION, IMMERSION IN THE CREATIVE ENERGY FLOW
Psychedelic, as well as mystical literature contains many examples of surrendering, letting go, accepting, merging, and joining the flow of the “Nature Mind,” where all is consciousness–the audible life stream. This “Diamond Consciousness” is awareness of creative flux of the Void, the fluid unity of life. We flow within it, and it flows through us.
The death-rebirth sequence typically opens a person to the transpersonal domain with its virtually infinite creativity. It reveals and unfolds our future potentials. In dreamhealing, chaotic consciousness is also creative consciousness. Terence McKenna reminds us that, “Riverine metaphors are endlessly applicable. They represent the flowing of forces over landscapes, the pressure of chaos on the imagination to create creatively. . .The key is surrender and dissolution of boundaries, dissolution of the ego.”
When we immerse ourselves in that creative energy, we find healing on many levels of our being. It may feel tingly or effervescent, or like streaming energy. Direct experience of this level brings a true sense of oneness with all that exists, the seamless fabric of existence. It opens us to re-patterning by the whole–a re-construction or re-patterning of personality through holistic change at the most fundamental level.
Immersion in the oceanic experience of universal consciousness is a life-changing experience. It is experience of the web of life, the biological life flow, an ineffable current of bliss. Once we experience that larger world and self–the rhythmic pulse of all life–we are never the same again, so long as we remember.
Communing with this energy, experiencing these states of consciousness, has been the practice of shamans since the dawn of man. Shamanic consciousness means the ability to enter and exit altered states at will. This power is connected to the liquid expression of life–the sap of life–the vegetable forms of the liquid Stone, and its identity with psychotropic plants. This notion reiterates that of the “greening of consciousness.”
Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1973) spoke of the distillate of his mystical experience as follows:
“The Current is clearly a subtle, fluid-like substance which brings the sense of well-being already described. Along with It, a more than earthly Joy suffuses the whole nature. To myself, I called It a Nectar. Now, I recognize It under several names. It is also the ‘Soma,’ the ‘Ambrosia of the Gods,’ the ‘Elixir of Life,’ the ‘Water of Life’ of Jesus, and the ‘Baptism of the Spirit’ of St. Paul. It is more than related to Immortality; in fact, It is Identical with Immortality.”
When the ego is completely dissolved in this renewing bath, we experience timeless consciousness, and are reborn based on a new, healthier primal self-image. This rejuvenation comes from connecting with pristine consciousness, the eternal aspects or forces of nature. Even though we cannot conceive of it, we can experience the infinite, the eternal, the transcendent. Visions of Creation, Emanation, the upwelling Source, emerge.
Spiritual reincarnation means bringing to life that which was formerly dead or unawakened, through connection with the original creative power. It is the theme of the Quest — the greening of the Wasteland. The process of rebirth is the mythic enactment of “the one story” whose pattern is found in every narrative. Beneath the differences, the meaning — having to do with the loss and recovery of identity — does not change.
This story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of most literature, from which comes the hero with a thousand faces. Some variation of the hero’s adventures, death, disappearance, and marriage or resurrection are the focal points of most stories.
The original sense of identity (romance and comedy), its loss (tragedy and irony), and its recovery in the regenerate world of romance and comedy is mirrored in the mythic quest. Myths of the birth of the hero, revival and resurrection, creation and defeat of the powers of darkness and death are perennial themes.
The descent and subsequent ascent, going deep into the consciousness journey and emerging transformed, is a form of death/rebirth, a powerful archetypal theme which is initiatory in character.
5) PURIFICATION ORDEAL
Aesculapian dreamhealing, uses many ritual forms of purification, such as diet, sweats, and baths. But the psychic purification is a process of shedding fears and pain which prevent us from flowing. Fear and pain are what keep us “stuck.”
Each initiation contains an ordeal within its enfolded nature. At least it feels like an ordeal to the old ego structure which must dissolve or die. The quantum leap of initiation, being seized from one state and moved to another, involves a sudden and profound change. It requires an adjustment. Also, life may present synchronistic challenges, outside the dreamhealing sessions.
One dreamhealing participant was having a sweat. She was sent to look for an offering in the form of some wood to burn in the ritual. She finally returned with a huge gnarled log, which was quite representative of her twisted back (scoliosis). That wood really stank when it first was consigned to the fire–but as time went on, it burned pure and smelled extraordinarily sweet. She emerged with more mobility than she could remember every having and the healing persists.
In yoga, we hear about clearing blocks at the various chakras through purification practices. Progressive stages of purification allow the energy of the serpent power to flow or rise ever-higher through the chakra system. Thus, the yogi realizes the true nature of self. Mindell (1982) has commented on this process in regards to flow and healing:
In healing ceremonies, light, water, love, release of emotions, energy flow, circulation, harmony and crystal clear water are all descriptions of curative experiences. The water is a description of free flowing energy which cleans the body by unlocking egotism and its resulting cramps. . .The sap of plants flows in the body of the enlightened yogi. In India lack of flow in the imaginary veins and arteries which carry energy and blood is blamed for illness. Cleaning these conduits and reestablishing flow is all-important. . .there is a resistance at some point to the flow of energies. In fact, all disease is merely a restriction of the flow of life force in a particular area.
Speaking more of the mental aspect of the process he uses water as an image of purification ordeal:
Whenever a complex exists, consciousness rigidifies and tries to steer around the strong emotions connected with the core of the complex. Water therapy allows the complexes to speak, encourages the body to dance its own rhythm and lets the unpredictable come alive. A water experience is holistic and unifies the entire personality so that ego, Self, dreams, body, inner and outer come together in one human being.
The more rigid the ego and the more powerful a governing complex, the more threatening the flow of the body or the psyche appears. A rigid and frightened personality becomes terrified, split off from nature, and cannot believe that a Self or a body consciousness exists that can organize behavior once ego rulership is given up. . .Water is medicine against the rigidification of intuition, physical mobility, and feelings.
Another expression of purification ordeal occurs with psychedelics. It is a mental purge of gross karma which manifests as wrathful visions or second bardo nightmares. These visions, as well as the peaceful ones must simply be endured, despite awe and terror. They may be horrific visions of apocalypse and catastrophe–bloodthirsty hallucinations.
They come as the ego struggles to maintain its boundaries, as the mind seeks to reconstruct the personality. But the experience of this hellish state of consciousness is not mandatory with every journey. Recognition of the greater Reality brings instantaneous liberation from this ordeal.
Edinger (1973) uses Job from THE BIBLE as a classic example of an ego’s confrontation with the awesome powers of the unconscious through its trials and travails. Job’s encounter with the Self brings about a death/rebirth experience. Job feels like he is being punished, and insists on discovering the meaning of his experience.
Job encounters Jahweh in dreams first, anticipating later conscious encounter. Job is shown the abysmal aspect of God and the depths of his own psyche with its monstrous aspects, much like the wrathful visions of THE BARDO THODOL. Finally, Job’s questions are answered, not rationally, but through living experience, conscious realization of the autonomous archetypal psyche. The realization comes to birth only through the ordeal.
All these struggles in the cycling of death/rebirth may be linked back through symbolic similarity to the individual birth ordeal. It is characteristic of chaotic systems that events originally separated by time and space can become enfolded closely together.
Events linked by the same state of consciousness are related; learning is state-related (Tart; Rossi). Our lessons and our ordeals are related to our states of consciousness. Thus personal and transpersonal experience of this eternal cycle of the generation of forms become fused and conditioned by the individual aspect of archetypal experience.
6) SOLUTION OF PROBLEMS
There is more than a linguistic link between the metaphor of a liquid solution, and the solution of a problem. The moment of “a-ha” comes frequently in process-oriented therapy, as direct realization brings fresh understanding through the “empty mind,” or “beginner’s mind.”
Solutions come through creativity. They may appear effortlessly. The relationship between healing and creativity is implicit–healing is the physical analog of creativity, like attitude changes and intuition are its emotional and mental analogs. Healing is a special case of creativity, or creative problem-solving.
During reverie states, the mind goes into chaotic patterns for problem-solving. The more difficult the problem, the more chaos. Dreamhealing facilitates entry into these healing states of consciousness.
McAuliffe (198 ) reported in OMNI on the work of Paul Rapp detecting chaos in brain wave fluctuations:
After analyzing the EEGs of humans, Rapp has also come around to this friendlier view. “When we are healthy and alert, the interval between electrical waves is never rigidly fixed,” he reports, “but always vacillates around a certain frequency range.” Moreover, when we are mentally challenged, the interval between the electrical wave becomes even more variable–or chaotic. This suggests, in Rapp’s opinion, that chaos “may actually be highly beneficial during problem solving.
Clearly the greater the mental challenge, the more chaotic the activity of the subject’s brain. . .What does all this mean? In Rapp’s opinion, chaotic activity may be an asset in problem solving. “You want to be able to scan as wide a range of solutions as possible and avoid locking on to a suboptimal solution early on,” he explains. “One way to do that is to have a certain amount of disorderliness, or turbulence, in your search.”
We can draw a direct analogy between the dreamhealing process and creative process. Dreamhealing begins with the pilgrimage, which expresses one’s intent or commitment. The creative process begins with receptivity, which includes interest, preparation, and immersion in the subject matter.
Next in dreamhealing comes the confession, or the identification of the problem, where you have missed the mark. Creativity also requires the ability to identify the problem, see the right questions, to use errors, to have detached devotion.
The purification or cleansing of dreamhealing parallels the generalized sensitivity to problems that come during creativity, an attunement to the realization of what needs to be done.
The offering is a sign of letting go, sacrifice of the old ego form, the commitment to healing. Creativity requires the surrender of time and self to the process of flow; fluency of thinking; flexibility; abandoning old ways of thought.
The heart of the quest is dream incubation, a reverie which seeks connection with higher power. Creativity also requires incubation, reverie, serendipity, spontaneity, adaptation, tolerance for ambiguity, and originality. This permits uncommon responses and unconventional associations.
Healing occurs in a moment of oneness, chaotic consciousness. In creativity it is paralleled by the moment of illumination, redefinition, invention, vision.
Dreamhealing requires amplification, or work on dreams and validation. Elaboration is its counterpart, the use of two or more abilities for the construction of a more complex object or theory, plus verification.
Re-entry implies actualization, renewal, grounding, maturing. Creatively it means real-time application, follow-through, product, utilization of the result. It implies choosing the post-session personality, as re-calibrated through the imprint of the whole. It means stabilizing that state of creative consciousness which emerged in the session.
In all cases, guided or not, the creative or healing process follows approximately this model. The resources are contacted deep within and they well-up in sometimes unexpected ways from the deep Source.
7) MELTING OR SOFTENING PROCESS
Melting turns what was solid into a liquid. Variations on the theme include moistening and softening. Whether we look at modern consciousness journeys, ancient reports, or psychedelic experiences the metaphors are the same. Melting or softening is the result of incubation in dreamhealing, yoga, and alchemy.
THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE offers such suggestions as “Let the feelings melt all over you,” “Let your body merge with the warm flux,” “Allow your own mind also to melt away very gradually.” Feelings of the body melting or flowing as if wax are typical of the psychedelic experience, as boundaries dissolve.
Leary et al note a state of consciousness where, “All the harsh, dry, brittle angularities of game life [are] melted. You drift off — soft, rounded, moist, warm. Merged with all life. You may feel yourself floating out and down into a warm sea. Your individuality and autonomy of movement are moistly disappearing.”
An older report is this passage from THE BOOK OF LAMBSPRING, a seventeenth century alchemy text:
The Father sweats, surrounding his Son,
And pours out his prayer to God,
To Whom all things are possible,
Who creates, and has created all things.
He prays that his Son may be led from his body,
And he be reborn as he was at first.
God grants his prayer, it is not ignored,
Telling the Father to lie down and go to sleep.
God sent down rain from heaven
Through the clear stars; in truth,
It was fruitful silver indeed.
The Father’s Body is moistened and softened.
By the help and Grace of God, at the end,
We may obtain Thy gracious Gift!
The Father strongly sweats and glows,
While oil and True Tincture from him flows.
The feverish father sweats the tincture of the wise from his body. The hidden fire causing the sweat is the antithesis of the moisture that it produces. This heat is the warmth of incubation, which is equivalent to a “brooding” state of meditation. The aim of this meditation is self-incubation for transformation and resurrection.
This liquefaction is a characteristic state of consciousness during psychedelic sessions. When the normal structures of awareness break down, consciousness transforms to a flowing or fluid state.
Speaking of his fusion of non-linear dynamics, post-structuralism, and psychedelic experience, psychonaut Manuel DeLanda was interviewed by MONDO 2000 (Issue 8; Winter, 1992). He reports on his experience in the language of chaos theory.
The metaphor they use is solid, liquid, gas. If the system is solid, too crystallized, its dynamics are completely uninteresting. If it’s gaseous, it’s also uninteresting–all you have to do is take averages of behavior and you know what’s going on. Liquids have a lot more potential, with all kinds of attractors and bifurcations. Now what they’re coming to believe is that the liquid state in nature–not just actual liquids, but liquidity in the abstract sense of being not too rigid or too loose–these liquid systems “poised on the edge of chaos” are natural computers.
…When you trip, you liquify structures in your brain, linguistic structures, intentional structures. They acquire a less viscous consistency, and your brain becomes a super-computer. You are able to think concepts you were not able to think before. Information rushes in your brain, which makes you feel like you’re having a revelation. But of course no one is revealing anything to you. It’s just self-organizing. It’s happening by itself. …free-flowing matter and energy are capable of self-organization.
I don’t think there are higher states of consciousness. You liquify yourself, and you go through phase transitions, and then it seems to you that you are in a higher state of consciousness. When I’m tripping, I’m thinking concepts I’m sure no one’s ever thought before, and in a way it’s like a higher state of consciousness, but it’s not a plane that was waiting there for me to access it. It’s something I’m building that moment by destratifying my brain.
There might be an ethics here: how to live your life poised at the edge of chaos, how to allow self-organizing processes to take place in all the strata that bind you. In your life, you could create maps of attractors that bind your local destiny–those behaviors that are habitual and so on. And try to find those bifurcations that would allow you to jump, if not to complete freedom–that doesn’t exist–but to another set of attractors less confining, less binding, less stratifying. Or learn to lead your life near a bifurcation without ever crossing it–the lesson of being poised on the edge of chaos.
In reducing all to pure water, the prima materia and the ultima materia become synonymous. That primal consciousness state, that creative and chaotic consciousness is the beginning of the operation of “water”, and its ultimate realization.
It becomes easy to see why the operation of water is the “root of alchemy.” Through consciousness journeys which liquify our rigid notions of self and world, we re-create the adventures of the hero or heroine. The theme is the loss and recovery of identity.
The hero is deserted, betrayed or even killed, but then comes back to life again. They may be swallowed by a huge sea monster, or wander in a strange dark underworld and then fight their way out again. The shift is from abandonment and isolation, to struggle, to the triumph or marriage phase, (unitive consciousness).
The myth of the defeated hero (rigid ego) brings images of the triumph of dark forces, myths of floods and the return of chaos. Then the stage is set for miraculous rebirth–The Son is born from the Father, as in THE BOOK OF LAMBSPRING passage. This process of rebirth is the universal medicine.
REFERENCES
Aaronson, Bernard S., “The Hypnotic Induction of the Void,” Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine, Vol. 26: No. 1, p. 22-30; No. 2, p. 63-72; No. 3, p. 114-117; No. 4, p.129-133.
Abraham, Ralph; McKenna, Terence; Sheldrake, Rupert; TRIALOGUES AT THE EDGE OF THE WEST; Bear and Co., Santa Fe, 1992.
Davis, Erik, “DeLanda Destratified”; MONDO 2000, #8, Winter 1992, p. 45-48.
Edinger, Edward F.; ANATOMY OF THE PSYCHE, Open Court; LaSalle, Illinois, 1985.
Edinger, Edward F.; EGO AND ARCHETYPE, Penguin Books Inc., Baltimore, 1973.
Evans-Wentz, W.Y.; THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD; Causeway Books, New York, 1973.
Gold, E. J.; AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD; Gateways
Grinnell, Robert; ALCHEMY IN A MODERN WOMAN, Spring Publications, New York, 1973.
Grof, Stanislav; THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY; SUNY Press, Albany, 1988.
Hillman, James; ANIMA; Spring Publications, Dallas, 1985.
Kauffman, Stuart A., “Antichaos and Adaptation”; SciAmer, August 1991, p.78-84.
Leary, T., Metzner, R., Alpert, R.; THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE, University Books, New York, 1964.
McAuliffe, Kathleen; “Get Smart: Controlling Chaos”; OMNI
Merrell-Wolff, Franklin; PATHWAYS THROUGH TO SPACE; Warner Books, New York, 1973.
Milkman, Harvey & Sunderwirth, Stanley; CRAVING FOR ECSTASY; D.C. Heath & Co., Lexington, Massachusetts, 1987.
Miller, I. & Miller, R.A.; THE MODERN ALCHEMIST (formerly The Book of Lambspring); Phanes Press, Chicago; in press (available Spring 1994).
Mindell, Arnold; DREAMBODY; Sigo Press, Boston, 1982.
Mindell, Arnold; RIVER’S WAY; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.
Rossi, Ernest: THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF MIND-BODY HEALING, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York, 1986.
Stace, W.D.; MYSTICISM AND PHILOSOPHY; Lippincott, New York, 1960.
Swinney, Graywolf and Iona Miller; DREAMHEALING: CHAOS AND THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESS, Asklepia Press, 1992.
Tart, Charles; STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS; E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1975.
Washburn, Michael; THE EGO AND THE DYNAMIC GROUND; SUNY Press, New York, 1988.

Chaos Consciousness

CHAOS CONSCIOUSNESS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY
An Experiential Approach and Application to
Dreamwork, Creativity, and Healing
by Graywolf Fred Swinney, M.A. and Iona Miller
Aesculapia Wilderness Retreat, Grants Pass, Oregon
Emergence: Unsuspended Animation, I. Miller
Prepared for the Proceedings of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology. Presented at Saybrook Institute, Summer, 1991.

ABSTRACT: Experiential therapy sessions and mysticism demonstrate that as we journey deeper and deeper into the psyche we eventually encounter a state characterized either as “chaotic” or void of images. In a therapeutic context, chaos is experienced as a consciousness state–the ground state. This state is related to healing, dreams, and creativity. Shamanic approaches to healing involve co-consciousness states which lead to restructuring both physical and emotional-mental senses of self.
Dreams, creativity, and healing arise from this undifferentiated “chaotic consciousness.” Dreamhealing uses images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect. Chaos-oriented consciousness journeys suggest these states reflect complex phase space, fractal patterns, strange attractors, “the butterfly effect,” sensitivity, complex feedback loops, intermittency, and other general dynamical aspects suggested by chaos theory. More than an experiential process, this is a philosophy of treatment–”Chaosophy.”

“I’m just asking you to hear yourself. Listen to what you’re really saying and to what you think you’re saying. Control, control, control. When are you going to realize that nothing can be controlled?”
“We live in chaos; it’s the central issue in everyone’s life. Mack, look around you. Everyone in this parking lot is struggling for control. And you know what it is they’re trying to control, each and everyone of them? Fear–they’re trying to control their fear.”
–Steve Martin character in the film, GRAND CANYON

Creative Chaos
We all instantly recognize the fundamental nature of chaos in our lives. The archetypal creation myth posits that all originates in Chaos. We all “get it,” intuitively. But generally we are enculturated to fear chaos, to hold it at bay through so-called “control.” Chaos is a very personal experience. We relate to it viscerally as well as emotionally and intellectually. When chaos intrudes on our lives, we feel pain, and defend against that pain with fear, rather than embracing the chaotic dynamic.
In psychology, we have had the idea that we need a “strong ego,” that we need a stable structure in order to function and cope. But nothing exists in complete order or complete randomness. We live in a chaotic universe. When we are “far from equilibrium” change becomes inevitable. Like a bifurcation point in chaos theory, the old system either falls apart or emerges with a higher degree of order. Our bifurcations state changes are personal crossroads, decision points, initiated by perturbations of our systems.
Chaos theory applied to experiential psychotherapy shows us we actually need to cooperate with chaotic dynamics, to enter a less-rigid process of flow, submitting outworn aspects of the ego to dissolution, which increases our adaptability, helping us evolve.
The phase space of non-linear dynamics is analogous to psychic space–our psychophysical construct of our experience of reality. This complex inner landscape can be mapped and has all the features of phase space: stability, chaos, bifurcation points, and catastrophic changes.
This virtual reality is the world of virtual experience. The landscape of information is richly structured with attractor basins, valleys, and mountains with peaks, saddles, and passes. And it is also hyperdimensional containing a vast amount of implicate or enfolded information.
This landscape (self-scape) can be explored with experiential psychotherapy by faithfully sticking to the imagery emerging from the autonomous imaginal flow. It is a dynamic “ocean of active information” in wave form, with which we can commune, transcending conventional boundaries. The inner journey is one of movement without motion–stretching and folding spacetime.
Imagination is the voice of creativity. It is the primary way we experience soul. Creativity expressed in imagination means experiencing multiple states of consciousness. There is an infinity of realities and states of consciousness. Imagination embodies it’s own reality. It is self-revelatory. Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.
We are learning from chaos theory that physically and mentally we need chaotic disorder to function smoothly. Dipping into that disorder shakes everything loose and allows creative restructuring to occur. Self-organizing systems, both organic and inorganic, naturally evolve toward the “edge of chaos.” Many natural systems develop their own dynamic stabilities. Dynamic stability applies to development in chaos theory, and research shows that living systems are naturally self-correcting.
Strength is a measure of what force it takes to destroy or break a rigid structure. True power, on the other hand, is a measure of readily-available energy for immediate use. Strength is rigid, while power is flowing. Empowerment flows forth naturally when we come into intimate therapeutic contact with our stream of consciousness. This stream is most easily observed as our dreams, and manifests in our symptoms.
Water is a natural metaphor of consciousness. The turbulent stream of consciousness flows through the labyrinth of the psyche. It is the source of dis-ease and our healing as indicated by its importance in the cult of Asklepios, the god of dreams and healing. In Greece, the springs of his shrine were channeled into circular labyrinths, forming a concrete metaphor of the healing process. Healing “springs” from deep within. However, first the old rigid images must be dissolved, and the “universal solvent” is chaos.
Dreams bridge the gap between the spiritual and scientific worldviews. Most would agree that dreams are a truly chaotic phenomenon. Object of scientific inquiry and healing tool of the psychotherapist, they are firmly entrenched in the scientific worldview, although on the fringe. On the mystical side, most religions teach that God, or the nature of the transpersonal Source is revealed through dreams and visionary experience.
Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities. Supreme insights are always metaphorical in expression. But the relationship of chaos and psychotherapeutic effects may be more than metaphorical and subjective. The empirical connection may lie in the mystery of the true nature of consciousness and creativity.
Dreamhealing
One of the authors, Graywolf, discovered a way to journey and guide others into the deepest layers of the psyche while practicing Gestalt dreamwork and shamanism. Therapy at its very best is a matter of changing consciousness and so is shamanism. In dream guiding, all the action lies in going just beyond the boundary from the known and comfortable toward the fear and challenge.
Following the images below the ego deeper into more fundamental consciousness states, he found that clients could easily be guided to the level of chaotic consciousness with therapeutic results. Mapping these levels below behavior, emotional-mental process, belief systems, and mythic zones of imagery, he refined the technique and directions for guidance.
This process (Dreamhealing or Creative Consciousness Process) was not originally based on chaos theory, but observed directly in working with dreams, symptoms, feelings, and healing. The theory came later as an analogy for describing the observations. But chaotic dynamics may be the actual mechanism of its action, rather than merely a metaphor of the transformative process, as were the hydraulic and cybernetic models.
Dreamhealing is not an interpretive or analytical way of understanding a dream, but is a non-linear consciousnesness journey into its healing heart. Dreamhealing is not guided imagery. The guide follows the autonomous flow of psychic imagery, while guiding the focus to deeper, more primal imagery. Then letting go of that form, and entering a yet deeper one, much like entering deeper into a fractal image to find yet deeper images.
In dreamhealing one “becomes” the image which leads to sensing, identifying, empathizing with the essence of a color, shape, form, or pattern–then letting go of form. It is a process of initiation–becoming, sharing, feeling, releasing, yielding, accepting, deepening, intensifying, surrendering, healing, and integrating.
Everything in the dreamtime occurs in the present tense–it is happening. But it is linked in a non-linear fashion–through association–with the past and the future. Becoming the image creates the experience of a new state of consciousness, new sensations, awarenesses, feelings, visceral and kinesthetic reactions, responses, acceptances.
Dreams are chaotic by nature and so is much of shamanic practice. Both evoke the irrational, and of all the healing modalities, these two reflect chaos theory. The forte of shamans is the dream journey or consciousness journey, based on the assumed ability to experience multiple consciousness states other than ordinary consensus reality.
The shaman/therapist acts as guide by entering a co-consciousness state or shared experience with the journeyer. This virtual experience has the ability to create natural consequences or results in real-time. The experience of multiple states of consciousness leads away from egocentricity toward a biocentric perspective. A larger sense of participation counteracts existential alienation.
Small changes in initial conditions (sensitivity) are pumped-up into larger changes, via the “butterfly effect.” There is a complementary notion in psychotherapy that one traumatic event can shape a life, and a therapeutic event or experience can re-shape it. Small changes can make phenomenal differences in outcome.
A dream is a stream of chaos, a river of turbulent, undifferentiated consciousness and creativity, flowing through the self-scape of the psyche. It is shaped by the frozen states and complex feedback loops of consciousness, the existential images and patterns that define and mold the self and the reality of our perceptions. When it finally emerges into awareness, the images and plots that are presented to our almost-waking self are reflections of these states. They are another way of seeing the self and the reality we create that is less prejudiced by the ego.
The dream is also much like a hologram. The passage of the consciousness stream through the psyche, and its encounter with the frozen consciousness states, causes ripples and patterns that create images of the deeper self that formed them. Like a hologram or fractal, the whole is contained and re-iterated within any part of the dream, though details may be fuzzy.
Our primal existential image of who and what we are begins with conception (universal, undifferentiated consciousness) and is conditioned by our internal and external experiences. But, of course, not all disease originates here. Trauma at any point can trigger a disruption in the primal self image, setting the “butterfly effect” in motion as the consequences of that trauma permeate the life. There may be multiple, or re-iterated trauma. This deep existential image contains the essence of our dis-ease.
Chaos permeates our existence from the sub-atomic to universal level, and we react to it with fear and pain. The primal image is revealed in the ongoing process of imagery: dreams, visions, visceral reactions, symptoms, feelings, beliefs, and behavior. Dreams are shaped by these existential images much as they also shape our lives and destinies.
Chaos Consciousness
During consciousness journeys, participants report encountering a place, after moving through the fears and pains, that is totally disorienting, chaotic. They, for example, enter into a gray cloud, and becoming that cloud the mind goes totally blank. Or they enter into a spiral, and giving over to the motion of that spiral, they become so totally disoriented that there is nothing to hang onto.
This experience is what we call “chaotic consciousness,” observed within the therapeutic context–undifferentiated, or universal consciousness. It is virtually a place of “all and no structure,” a no-boundaries condition, pure potential, the source of creativity. It appears paradoxically as a plenum or a void. The plenum represents hyperarousal; the void hypoarousal. Direct experience of the transpersonal means going back below the ego, into this infinite place, back into this basic formless consciousness–the void or chaos of pre-existence.
Chaotic consciousness is the crucible of our creative spirit. Creativity emerges from chaos. This negentropic, or syntropic principle is the matrix of evolution. Infinite process is constantly creating itself and destroying itself at all levels. Nature repeats herself at all levels of organization, and whatever it is we are that.
Dreams reflect this self-generating, self-iterating and self-organization of patterns, and so does the natural philosophy emerging from the New Sciences. This deterministic philosophy incorporates the human condition, rather than vilifying or pushing it away. Chaos helps us feel our way through a complex, unstable world.
Like the supercritical state of chaotic dynamics, “chaotic consciousness” may be characterized as dynamic, non-linear, paradoxical, self-generating, self-iterating, and self-organizing. It could be likened to an infinite complex of manifolds potentially enfolding infinite information–vortices within vortices within vortices–exploding limitless detail.
There is an essential relationship between healing and irrational consciousness. Irrational consciousness “works” the cure. Somehow that chaotic consciousness, the giving up of the old order, the letting go of the old structure to chaos changes things fundamentally. The next set of imagery emerging out of that chaotic consciousness is always a healing one. So chaos, as the matrix of transformation, seems vitally important at the existential level.
The process of creativity is one of new forms emerging from the void, new forms that have not existed previously. Not merely a juggling of existing forms or ideas into a new configuration, it is more of a quantum leap, a disruption of the old perception into new levels of consciousness and awareness. Chaos theory provides an apt metaphor for this process. In a nutshell, chaos theory states that in all apparent structure is hidden chaos and in chaos there are hidden forms.
We exist in a twilight zone between chaos and order. We flow back and forth between them and that keeps us healthy. Consciousness always strives to take on form. We build a structure and it begins to develop flaws and rigidities. Our illness comes when we hang onto that worn-out structure. But when we let go, we let ourselves flow back into that primal chaos and into total freedom. It is like a heart that periodically develops a chaotic beating pattern to renew itself. We seem to need that within our consciousness, too.
The Transformative Process
Consciousness, creativity, healing, dreaming, and chaos are fundamental to the human condition. They are crucial to our health and ability to move through life. Creativity is also evolution. Dis-ease may be seen as a crisis that forces the organism to expand beyond its limits and evolve. It is part of the evolutionary action of natural selection.
Current research shows that dreams reflect an individual’s strategy for survival. Those who adapt, survive. Those who adapt better, thrive. Much of this has to do with our states of consciousness, which lead to creative choice-making. All of a sudden we are free, we are flowing again, and that is the natural condition of health.
Disease, as a crisis, presents the organism with the opportunity to dissolve the old structure and evolve into a new one better adapted to survival. Evolving into a new form, the process of recreating oneself, makes a difference in our view of the disease process. There is no heroic search for a cure, or compulsion to “get rid of” symptoms. The focus of transformation goes to the deepest level.
The implication is that form and rigidity need to periodically give way to non-structure and chaos for renewal and recreation. Much as the “dance of Shiva” destroys the existing forms so that new reality can be created, we can foster the disintegration of outworn images of ourselves, even those seemingly “hard-wired” into our perceptual system.
The process creates a new primal self image, a new attractor as the core of the organism. 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. Order emerges spontaneously from chaos, and tends to degenerate into chaos when forms are obsolete. Creative Consciousness Process follows nature’s lead by amplifying and intensifying the movement toward chaos, rather than heroically defending against it.
But letting go of the old forms is frightening. We identify with them, and to a large degree define our sense of the self by them. To forsake them is to dissolve that part of self, to let it die. Most of us are only comfortable in the known territory within the limits of our belief systems, which define our reality and existence. The creative solution often exposes the limits of our beliefs by moving beyond them, thrusting us into unknown territory, which is frightening.
Typically, we try to hang on to the old limits even if it means we are destroyed or have to hang on to our problem rather than letting go to move into a broader awareness and reality. We mark the boundaries of our belief systems with fear and discomfort to keep ourselves safe and enclosed.
To journey into undifferentiated chaos we need to go through the fear which surrounds the pain, then through and beyond the pain to the healing core. This profound and creative state of consciousness provides our form and the core of our being. Here, we create our healing from within. We experience first-hand that personal power (empowerment) arises from within.
To transform we must break free and let go of the cocoon of fear and pain which has kept us prisoner of our own device. We must pass through the discomfort and confusion and let go of what we know and are comfortable with. We must make a quantum leap in consciousness beyond the known into chaos–into the void, like The Fool in the Tarot.
Chaos is inherent in our being and structure just as science has shown. We’ve always known it intuitively, but the ego seeks to deny it by heroically, one-sidedly adhering to the principles of order and light. Only by entering the dark, by entering chaos, yielding to it, do we allow newly evolved form to come into being–to arise spontaneously, yet deterministically, out of chaos. It is a journey through fear to a Way in which each moment is an act of personal creation and freedom.
The primal self-image functions like an attractor. It forms based on the organism’s interaction with the “Not-I” or environment. Under conditions which could be characterized as “far from equilibrium” this image may suddenly dissolve (bifurcation), leading to confusion, disorientation and fragmentation of the personality.
The same process, facilitated (rather than defended against) in therapy can lead through the confusion and ego death to healing, renewal, and rebirth. The new self image is better adapted to current reality. In chaos, the search for information is open and novel solutions emerge.
We are attractor-centered, whether we conceive of that primal attractor as divinity, the higher self, the core self, the Jungian self, the Gestalt self, or that deepest sense of self–our primal self image (including its unconscious aspects). Its pattern appears in all the sensory and extrasensory modalities. The attractor embodies the long-term qualitative behavior of a system.
As an attractor, it contains an infinite complex of potential forms and images which are unfolded over time in unpredictable yet characteristic ways. The personality “revolves” around its strange attractor until a bifurcation occurs and another stable center is found. It might be conceived as a new existential myth, or a different dominant archetype. It is a dynamic multi-sensory image that is not different from our very essence–from ourselves.
By entering into chaotic consciousness new forms arise organically out of chaos. Consciousness is reborn after its sojourn in the underworld of the deep psyche. The “lost soul” is found and retrieved through the shamanic journey in the dreamtime. In embracing chaos, we tune in to its self-directing flow.
In dreamhealing we move deeper into the images, becoming them, rather than interacting or interpreting them. So too with other states of consciousness we encounter. As long as the image is followed back faithfully, the connection can be made from any feeling, symptom, or dream image, old or new. In dealing with illness there is always a specific image that underlies the ailment. That is what to look for when guiding a dream journey.
Healing
In each dream journey we encounter a state of consciousness that is personal experience of primal chaos. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the tornado or whirlpool is a surrender to chaos, an experience of no-form and total confusion and disorientation. It is like the whirling, twisting molecule of water in the chaotic world of non-laminar flow.
The experience of committing oneself to the fire and becoming it, and as the random flickering of the flames, and the torrid heat, disintegrating into pure energy. Becoming the boiling, flowing every-changing body of molten magma at the core of the earth is felt as a visceral sensation. These are some of the personal, subjective responses to the experience of total chaos.
The closer one is to the chaos consciousness field, the more undifferentiated the imagery is. Archetypal states define its borders. Visual images dissolve into impressionistic colors, visceral sensations, intuitive perceptions, vague awareness, and often culminate in total blankness or lack of any form, or an overwhelmingness of sensation. There may be grayness or cloudiness, and paradoxical sensations of falling or falling-floating within vast emptiness.
Another perception is characterized as a spiral or vortex. It exerts a magnetic draw on the journeyer who is drawn into it. Sensations of spinning and being drawn deeper often cause intense dizziness and disorientation. There may be feelings of flying apart–dismemberment in the centrifugal forces of the vortex. Dissolution might, for example, be experienced as a deep red which leads into a magma-like flowing sensation in which intense heat melts the journeyer.
The imagery tends on one side to zero, and on the other, infinity, like the paradoxical concept of the plenum which is also a void. It appears void because it contains a vast amount of undifferentiated information which is chaotic and overwhelms the senses. It is invisible because it is not-yet-visible. Reaching this state, one has the sense of transformative forces at work–a feeling of almost palpable relief.
The sense of peacefulness and security is the essence of the journey itself and what the guide brings to it. Many other aspects of this “whole brain” state have been described, such as feelings of dimensionlessness, timelessness, and boundarylessness. It has also been called cosmic consciousness.
Many sensations are involved, such as the experience of bubbles or effervescence and tingling in the body, often at the site of a symptom. It may be specific or generalized. It may be expressed as a new primal image that is seen, heard, or perceived in a deeply felt way. Healing manifests as a new emergent order–the implicate becomes explicate as a new perception of self and one’s relationship to the whole, of essence to source.
Evolution in consciousness comes with a quantum shift in awareness. That quantum shift occurs during the period in which the evolving structure is in chaos. So if one is in a dreamhealing process, experiencing for example, the multiple consciousness of the Earth Mother as decay, one may follow that to the point of total disintegration.
Since one is identified with that state of consciousness at the time, personal awareness dives down into the chaos, journeying to the most fundamental, primitive or primal condition–the ground state of being. Here a shift is possible as consciousness is totally de-structured, non-linear, yet dynamic, and Here we are simultaneously everything and nothing. We are not separate from the universe: both science (holism, holography, new physics, philosophy) and mystics (shamans, saints, and gurus) tell us so. The whole is reflected in the part and the part is seamlessly unified with the whole. Chaos theory is the result of unitary, iterative processes. Chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior.
“Solve et Coagula”
As we watch the cycles of nature, we observe that things go into life and death, and rebirth, as energy changes form. If this is happening all around us, what is to make us think we are any different than that?
We are part of nature, unlike the “civilized” or “objective scientific” views which set us apart. So we may, quite naturally, expect to go through the same cycle ourselves, in consciousness as well as in biology. Further, we can trust that and embrace that evolutionary flow of life, death, and rebirth, because in this transformative change lies true stability.
Always, passing through this state, the new order of imagery, thought, emotion, sensory perception reflects a new and less dis-eased sense of being. The deeper self image undercuts the old belief system, and begins to create a new order of being, a new way of perceiving the self and the world.
Chaos provides a new image around which to order the personality and often the physiology. This is an application of the old alchemical maxim, “solve et coagula,” dissolve and reintegrate. One half of the process is being able to let go of the focus of attention and enter the chaos. The other half is being able to seize the new order that arises from it. Order is present in the most chaotic state of mind, just as chaos underlies even the most rigid and orderly intellect.
The primal images, the deep multi-sensual experiences and perceptions act like psychic magnets, attracting and ordering energies around them, which echo their shapes and forms. Like fractal patterns displayed on a computer screen, the quantum shift comes when the attractor values are changed. The old image that lies on one side of the chaos experience gives way to a surprising new image that arises from the chaos. Emotions, thinking, and behavior are all affected.
Condensed from the book Dreamhealing: Chaos & the Creative Consciousness Process, by Graywolf Swinney and Iona Miller, c1992. For further information, contact Aesculapia, P.O. Box 301, Wilderville, OR 97543.

RELATIONSHIP TIDAL WAVE
In this session a young woman, who has been separated from her alchoholic husband for some time, recounts a dream which comes up when her divorce proceeding go to court. During the session she re-owns her projected ANIMUS (inner male) and finds new power in her center. Graywolf’s comments are ALL CAPS, while her responses are lower case.
WHEN YOU ARE READY TO LET THE DREAM COME IN, JUST ALLOW IT TO ENTER INTO YOUR MIND…THE IMAGES…FEELINGS…AND SENSATIONS. THEN, WHEN YOU ARE IN THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE READY TO SHARE THE DREAM, DO IT…BUT TAKE YOUR TIME.
I can see John lying on the couch…all I can see is the couch and him. And he’s pretty drunk…he can’t sit up. I wish he’d just pass out…
BE THIS DRUNKEN MALE…BE THAT BODY…BECOME…AND AS YOU BECOME, SHARE…[she describes her state of consicousness ending with the word "toxic"]…THAT IS A VISCERAL SENSATION…THAT TOXICITY. FOCUS ON THAT NOW. WHAT COLOR IS IT? WHAT SHAPE IS IT? WHAT CONSISTENCY DOES IT HAVE?
It’s a yellowish-green, sort of like a blob…sort of frozen. WHAT KIND OF BLOB? IN YOUR IMAGINATION, NOW, BECOME THIS BLOB…THIS YELLOWISH-GREEN BLOB. EXPERIENCE YOURSELF…AND WHEN YOU ARE READY…SHARE WITH ME WHAT THAT EXPERIENCE IS LIKE. [She gives an obviously mentalized description so the therapist urges letting go and she becomes "blue-green"]. SO YOU’RE FEELING THE POTENTIAL OF THE ENERGY? LET GO OF MIND AND INTERPRETATIONS…AND JUST FEEL THE ENERGY AS ENERGY. JUST NOTICE HOW YOU FEEL NOW.
There’s a huge, huge tidal wave…STAY WITH IT…STAY WITH THE ENERGY…There’s things floating in it, obstructions…there’s a lot of power in it…WHERE DOES THAT CARRY YOU? STAY WITH THAT AND TELL ME WHAT YOU NOTICE…Down at the bottom are little things that swim through it, small particles at the mercy of the tide…little things…(AT THIS POINT WE DON’T KNOW IF SHE WILL REGRESS INTO THE HELPLESSNESS OF CHILDHOOD OR DISCOVER SOMETHING NEW).
BRING ONE INTO YOUR MIND NOW…BECOME ONE OF THOSE REALLY TINY THINGS…They’re like little pieces of grass, and… BECOME ONE…It’s really pleasant–the force–swimming…I AM…I am…FEEL THAT…I am absorbed by the tidal force, it’s like a spiral. I DON’T KNOW QUITE HOW TO SAY THIS, BUT BECOME BOTH THE STUFF FLOATING IN THE BOTTOM OF THE TIDAL WAVE AND THE WAVE…THAT RELATIONSHIP…BECOME THAT VISCERALLY. It’s very physical…GIVE IN TO THAT PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE IT…JUST NOTICE, AND REPORT WHEN YOU WANT…[long pause].
I see a shiny black thing…its like an opeing I can go into…it opens into another place..and it seems to open into forever…JUST FEEL…THE SENSATIONS…THE VISCERAL THINGS…WHAT IT’S LIKE IN THERE…[pause]. STAY WITH IT AS LONG AS YOU WANT…WHEN YOU’RE READY TO BRING IT BACK JUST TAKE TWO OR THREE DEEP BREATHS…DON’T HURRY…TAKE YOUR TIME…
It feels like everything is in there [she indicates her abdomen, her power chakra]. THIS IS ABOUT EXPRESSING FEAR…Its like some huge ocean..in there…like in Journey to Center of the Earth, when there is that giant ocean…with power….
AND THERE IS A SENSE OF MALENESS IN THERE WITH THAT, TOO?…Yes…BE AWARE THAT YOU FOUND THAT POWER IN THE PART OF YOURSELF WHICH YOU GAVE THE SYMBOL OF BEING A DRUNK EX-HUSBAND…Rejecting maleness?…UH-HUH! OUT-OF-CONTROL MALENESS…SCARY, LIKE THE TIDE. FROM THE OUTSIDE, IT LOOKED TERRIBLE, BUT WHEN YOU WENT INSIDE, YOU FOUND SOMETHING. I WOULD SAY THAT SOMETHING ON THE SURFACE, YOUR PERSONALITY AND YOUR EGO, KEEPS YOU FROM THIS PLACE. IT IS AS CLOSE TO BEING ABLE TO FOCUS ON IT. IT IS ALREADY IN THERE, IT IS YOU…IT IS A STATE OF YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS.
I CAN’T TAKE YOU ANY PLACE THAT ISN’T IN YOU ALREADY. YOU’D BEEN SCARED OFF BY THIS POWER WHICH WAS HIDING BEHIND THIS IMAGE OF A DRUNKEN MAN. That’s right. Now my whole body breathes with it. Being in the blob was not a pleasant thing…later it felt good, but I didn’t see colors at that time. It became pleasant when I became the tidal wave. The pain turned into pleasure. THAT IS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE DREAM JOURNEY. YOU HAVE TO GO INTO THE PAIN, FEAR, OR DISTRUST TO FIND THE POWER.
We are a really a powerful form of energy which takes on the form of a mind and body. That form is based on the kinds of experience this life energy encounters, and it stores that experience in the form of images. Essentially that is the essence of this work, to go to those images, and change or transform those images, to make the energy available for us. In this case, the toxicity was where the energy was being held.
As we hit traumatic experiences in childhood, they rob us of some of our power, manifesting as defenses which just keep us from getting there. In the image itself is where all the stuff is stored. The purpose of the work is to get to that image. For this client, this was tied up in the image of the drunken man. Within that was this image of toxicity or poison. The poison had the shape, the essence of an unpleasant green color. What that yellow-green told me was that it has to do with love expression and power expression.
That fits in with the fact it was expressed as a male power-figure she was once intimate with. That is an image she had carried around in her. She chose to express it that day as a sort of blue-green, which when she became it, gave her access to the tidal power.
Those images that we store need to be transformed, because when we restructure the images, our personality and body take on the actual new shape of these images. Change the image and you change the attitudes associated with it. If you only understand it intellectually, it just changes the defense systems. We go deeper into the image, into CHAOS, and shake it loose. That brings catharsis.

CONCEPTION DREAM JOURNEY
This healing took place over a two-day period during our annual gathering on CHAOS AND CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a mature, cosmopolitan woman, with a beautiful poetic spirit. She recounted her dream the morning after her arrival.
I go into a bedroom where Jeannie Eagle is sitting on a large bed in a flowing white dress. Her dark locks of hair fall around her shoulders, and the contrast is like a photo negative of Mt. Shasta. I go forward and lightly kiss Jeannie on her forehead. There is a shadowy presence in the room that I take to be Graywolf.
Graywolf initiated the process. JUST LIE DOWN AND GET COMFORTABLE…START BY JUST BREATHING…RELAX AND ENTER YOUR DREAM…RE-EXPERIENCE YOUR DREAM…AND THEN WHEN YOU’RE READY, WALK ME THROUGH THE DREAM WITH YOU.
I’m approaching the bed…slowly, not cautiosly…just very confidently…I’m seeing a person sitting on the bed [a woman]…I’m experiencing contrasts…the pristine whiteness of the clothing, and the very somber, dark and black hair…I’m feeling…ahhhh, the edges of the white and the edges of the black meeting, kind of jagged…
JUST GIVE OVER TO THAT SENSATION OF JAGGED MEETING PLACES NOW…JUST EXPERIENCING…AND TELL ME WHAT YOU NOTICE…I’m coming to where they…ah…possibility of interchange…the black becomes white and the white becomes black. JUST EXPERIENCE THAT…BE THAT…FEEL THAT AS YOU BECOME THAT AND GO THROUGH THAT…FEEL IT VISCERALLY…WHERE DO YOU NOTICE THAT IN YOUR BODY? In my stomach, here. BRING YOUR ATTENTION TO THAT SENSATION OR FEELING…DOES IT HAVE A SHAPE?…ANY DISTINGUISHING THINGS YOU NOTICE ABOUT IT?
It’s like it comes and it goes…The black is blacked and the white is frozen…JUST GIVE OVER TO THAT NOTION…THAT THOUGHT…LET GO NOW OF ANY OTHER SENSE OF SELF YOU HAVE…AND JUST BECOME THAT FLOW…FEEL YOUR SIDES…YOUR LEFT SIDE, YOUR RIGHT SIDE…JUST FEEL THE FLOW NOW…BECOME NOTHING BUT THAT KIND OF MOTION…
The black side’s getting very violent like dark waves lashing…its like shark’s fins, the jagged part. GIVE IN TO THAT BLACKNESS, THE SHARKNESS, THE ANGRYNESS…BECOME IT…LET GO OF THE REST NOW AND JUST BECOME THE BLACK…THE SHARKNESS…Feels like a sword…darksword…FEEL YOUR ESSENCE…BECOME IT NOW…TRUST YOUR IMAGINATION. I press into soft flesh…BREATHE DEEP…IS THAT IN YOUR STOMACH, TOO? It’s in my legs, in my thighs…GIVE OVER TO THAT…FEEL IT NOW…STAY WITH IT…I’LL GO WITH YOU INTO THE PAIN…COME WITH ME INTO THE PAIN.
It feels like penetration…OK…JUST EXPERIENCE THAT NOW…It’s very painful…STAY WITH IT…I feel I’ll cry…IT’S OK…It’s myyyy…JUST FEEL…DEEPER, DEEPER…FEEL…WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW? I’m feeling like there’s a knight with armor on…it’s black…all of its black…BECOME THAT…BECOME HIM…COME INTO YOUR SHADOW WITH ME…STAY WITH IT…WITH ME…IT’S OK, I’M WITH YOU…STAY WITH IT. Hmm…I’m seeing a lot of yellow flames; its like I want to jump in…DO IT!…I walk in and its just like red coals (YEAH) and I feel like a devil dancing on them…FEEL THAT ENERGY…FEEL YOUR HEAT…Horns!…I’m all red, and…STAY WITH IT.
WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW? It’s all turning into ashes and turning into snow!…it’s a lot cooler…FEEL THAT…it’s very soft to touch…Hhhmmmm…I’m going into the ground like a seed…FEEL IT NOW….JUST FEEL IT VISCERALLY…hmmmm, roots…going down…deeper…DEEPER….deeper…ALL THE WAY NOW, WITH THEM…AND BECOME THE ROOTS…
I’m finding gold down under the earth…it’s some kind of light…BECOME THAT LIGHT NOW…MOVE OVER TO IT…LET GO OF BODY, LET GO OF FORM…BECOME THE LIGHT…DEEP, DEEP LIGHT…It’s all like a ball, very white, and all around is the darkness…like a void…and the lower I get, the lower it goes, and I can’t quite reach it…but I’m trying…JUST STAY WITH WHERE YOU’RE AT…EXPERIENCE THE VOID…BECOME THE VOID…LOOK IN NOW…BECOME THE VOID…FEEL YOURSELF AS THE VOID…WHAT YOU’RE EXPERIENCING…[she breathes very deeply]…SHARE WITH ME…
Ah…I was there…I think I thought that if I breathed it would go away, but it’s still there, and I could breath and it’s still there…WHERE ARE YOU?…I’m like in a…ah, a quarry hole all filled with water and the sun shifts down it, and I’m inside it and I don’t need to breath, and I’m just like part of that water, and at the same time, its like air…it has a lot of little motes…motes…STAY WITH THAT…JUST ACCEPT THAT…FEEL…THIS IS ONE OF THE GIFTS OF THE DREAM TO YOU…IT’S A HEALING PLACE FOR YOU…
MY THOUGHT IS THAT THERE IS A SENSATION OF TINGLING WITH THIS…yes!…JUST ALLOW THAT TO BE…LET THAT WORK ON YOU…THAT’S THE HEALING…IT COMES FROM WITHIN. Wow!!!…hmm,hmmmm that was the primal energy! Oh, I can feel it in my whole body as I said that, all the way up my legs! I can feel my whole body tingling!!!
THAT’S THE HEALING…JUST STAY WITH IT NOW…Hmmmm….STAY WITH IT, AND FEEL IT AS LONG AS YOU NEED…WHEN YOU ARE READY TO COME BACK, BRING THE HEALING WITH YOU…AND ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS JUST TAKE THREE DEEP BREATHS AND LET YOUR EYES OPEN…BUT DON’T COME BACK UNTIL YOU’RE READY…WHEN YOU DO COME BACK JUST COME BACK TO THE SURFACE OF THE DREAM, AND I WILL MEET YOU THERE BECAUSE THERE IS ANOTHER PLACE I’D LIKE TO TAKE YOU.
I feel like a very fuzzy caterpillar…MMM-UHUH….that’s eaten a lot…it’s so fat and it’s soft….hmmmmm. ARE YOU READY TO GO BACK UP TO THE SURFACE OF THE DREAM NOW?…hmmm…Uhuh. THERE’S A PRESENCE IN THAT DREAM…A GUIDE…DO YOU FEEL IT? I’m seeing all of her now…a woman like a fairy with butterfly wings. DO YOU FEEL THEM ON YOUR OWN SHOULDERS?…Yeah, Ok, Ok, uhuh…they’re sprouting…irridescent wings! OK…STAY THERE…those wings, its like the same irridescence as those motesMOTES [spoken simultaneously]. [NOTE: in Greek, PSYCHE means butterfly]
GO JUST A LITTLE BIT DEEPER NOW…AND FEEL THE ENERGY THAT YOU RADIATE…THESE COLORS…Uhuh…what’s in my mind is that passing over the clouds over the mountains coming into Medford there is a double circular rainbow around the shadow of the plane…below. The shadow of the plane is in the exact middle always, and I’m sitting right beyond the wing, and I’m looking down and seeing this rainbow…and it’s now like I’m in the center of that rainbow…mmmm-huh…two rainbows…I see all these colors over here. JUST LET THEM ENTER YOU…FEEL THEM…FEEL THE CENTER…I’m the center spot…MAY I TOUCH YOU?…Yeah…[touches heart center]………….[long pause]……..[eyes open]…WELCOME BACK!
INTEGRATION
Now I’m feeling…oh, I’m feeling like integrating the feeling of the movement of the plane and all those vibrations…and at the same time the rainbows and the shadow of the plane are constant. That’s what I’m feeling. I’m feeling like there is a constancy in the movement, you see? UHUH…It can’t be but it is…THAT’S A GOOD LESSON, ISN’T IT? Yeah, yeah…yeah….THERE IS WISDOM THERE, YOU’VE TOUCHED SOME WISDOM THERE…Yeah, I’m a very wise person…YOU BET…Oh wow!
THE STRUCTURE IS THE ILLUSION; IT’S THE MOVEMENT THAT IS THE REALITY. THE STRUCTURE OF THE PLANE, THE THINGS WE THINK ARE PERMANENT, THEY ARE THE ILLUSIONS. Yes. FEEDBACK….COMMENTS?
Thank you…I’ve got my mama’s tit again. When I was saying I’m a wise person, I usually can’t say that, like its not good to be presumptuous, right. And it’s like its OK to be yourself…UHUH, THAT’S A NICE GIFT FROM THE DREAM, TOO.
She recalls her song where she wrote, “Woman trust your body’s wisdom…” Graywolf asks her if she has had trouble in her legs. She says “No,” but refers to month-old distress on the bottom of her forearms, slight arthritis, etc.
THE TINGLING IN THE BODY, THOUGH, THERE WAS SOMETHING WITH THAT. Oh, [emphatically], the tingling was…SEEMED INTENSE…yes, it was very intense, yea. At the beginning of this session I was asking myself what this is about. And its about coming here. It’s about my mother going 50 years ago to Farther South Camp, a forerunner of Outward Bound.
I stayed home on the farm to cook, sweep, and wash for my father and brothers. And my mother went galavantin’ off, just like I am now. Only no one has to cook and sweep for me. My kids are grown. Still, though, I was having the image of the woman going off to the wilderness to find herself. THAT’S SOMETHING OF THE ESSENCE OF WHY YOU’RE HERE THEN. Hmmmhuh. And I was hearing this morning a poem that my mother loved, I think by William Blake or John Dunn, someone of the mystical faith. It goes:
Every morning lean thine arms upon the windowsill of heaven; And contemplate thy God. And then with a vision freshen thy heart and go forth into the day.
I am not knowing if I have permission to lean my hands on the windowsill of Heaven. [she rubs her arms where she has complained of the distress]. YOU JUST DID…SO YOU MUST…Like I just did right now…So I do…So I don’t need that! [She makes shaking motions as if to let go of that energy].
SO AGAIN, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE OF FEAR IS THE POWER. JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FEAR AND THE PAIN. JUST EXPRESSING THE FEAR AND THE PAIN DOES NOTHING MORE THAN HONOR IT…IT DOESN’T TAKE YOU TO THE OTHER SIDE OF IT. ALSO, THERE WAS AN INNOCENCE OF SHADOW IN THIS DREAM. YOU WENT INTO THE SHADOW SIDE IN THE SHARK…aimed at the light…I had a momentary flashback to a time when my husband with Alzheimer’s tried to make love to me. It was scary, but I saved myself from that situation. Before that fear of my father that summer my mother went to camp.
I’D LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT YOU EXPERIENCED EVEN ONE LEVEL DEEPER…THIS IS CONJECTURE AT THIS POINT…I THINK YOU EXPERIENCED THE MOMENT OF YOUR CONCEPTION. Hhmmm…the sperm, yes…going into the egg…the motes. I HAD VERY MUCH THE FEELING OF THAT WHILE YOU WERE THERE. Uhuh, uhuh. That thought was the penetration there–that’s very interesting–AHA! THAT’S WHERE SOME OF THE INITIAL IMAGES WERE FORMED. SOME OF THE VERY MOST PRIMAL IMAGES THAT SHAPED YOU. Hmmmm.
Graywolf…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! THAT’S A BIG CHANGE IN IMAGE, ISN’T IT. Uhuh, tremendous! Tremendous, tremendous. ITS A VERY FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN YOURSELF IN TERMS OF WHO YOU ARE NOW. I feel like Jesus when they pierced him in the side…aha, aha, aha. That tingling…now its in my back and it’s in my arms.
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!
REFERENCES
Aaronson, Bernard S., “The Hypnotic Induction of the Void,” Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine, Vol. 26: No. 1, p. 22-30; No. 2, p. 63-72; No. 3, p. 114-117; No. 4, p.129-133.
Abraham, Ralph; McKenna, Terence; Sheldrake, Rupert; TRIALOGUES AT THE EDGE OF THE WEST; Bear and Co., Santa Fe, 1992.
Davis, Erik, “DeLanda Destratified”; MONDO 2000, #8, Winter 1992, p. 45-48.
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Edinger, Edward F.; EGO AND ARCHETYPE, Penguin Books Inc., Baltimore, 1973.
Evans-Wentz, W.Y.; THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD; Causeway Books, New York, 1973.
Gold, E. J.; AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD; Gateways
Grinnell, Robert; ALCHEMY IN A MODERN WOMAN, Spring Publications, New York, 1973.
Grof, Stanislav; THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY; SUNY Press, Albany, 1988.
Hillman, James; ANIMA; Spring Publications, Dallas, 1985.
Kauffman, Stuart A., “Antichaos and Adaptation”; SciAmer, August 1991, p.78-84.
Leary, T., Metzner, R., Alpert, R.; THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE, University Books, New York, 1964.
McAuliffe, Kathleen; “Get Smart: Controlling Chaos”; OMNI
Merrell-Wolff, Franklin; PATHWAYS THROUGH TO SPACE; Warner Books, New York, 1973.
Milkman, Harvey & Sunderwirth, Stanley; CRAVING FOR ECSTASY; D.C. Heath & Co., Lexington, Massachusetts, 1987.
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Mindell, Arnold; RIVER’S WAY; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.
Rossi, Ernest: THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF MIND-BODY HEALING, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York, 1986.
Stace, W.D.; MYSTICISM AND PHILOSOPHY; Lippincott, New York, 1960.
Swinney, Graywolf and Iona Miller; DREAMHEALING: CHAOS AND THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESS, Asklepia Press, 1992.
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Chaosophy

I. CHAOS AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
CHAOSOPHY
An Imaginal Perspective on the Nature of Reality,
Consciousness, Experience, and Perception
by Iona Miller, ©1993

ABSTRACT: Our notions about ourselves and the nature of the world (worldview) around us are filtered through our prejudices about “the way things work”. We never apprehend reality directly–only our world-simulation which is congealed from the convergence of our sensory input channels and the information-creating processes of chaotic neural activity. The brain filters and creates reality.
Brains are chaotic systems which create internal perceptual patterns that substitute directly for sensory stimuli. These stimuli are evoked potentials or evoked fields–standing waves in the brain. Imagination has the ability to induce real-time changes in the psychophysical being.
Imagination embodies the power of transformation. It may be accessed through obvious imagery, such as dreams, vision, and other sensory analogs, or viewed directly in symptoms, behavior patterns, emotional patterns, mental concepts, and spiritual beliefs.
The imaginal process is our primary experience and it permeates and conditions all facets of human life. During experiential psychotherapy, the sensory-motor cortex system is influenced through imagination. Psyche affects substance at the most fundamental level, through chaotic neural activity.

Imagination is not a talent of some men, but is the health of every man.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
In answer to the introductory question of what is consciousness, it is this flickering process that combines corollary discharge with the messages on all the sensory lines. These sensory lines at once carry fresh input and are shaped by previous experience. Like them, consciousness bears the imprint of both the recent past and the expectation of future action, real or imagined, that will shortly involve the most intimate reaches of the brain and body
–Walter J. Freeman, MACHINERY OF THE MIND
“Chaosophy” is a natural philosophy emerging from the implications of research in complex dynamic systems. It is a radical re-visioning of our notions about the way things work in the universe. Our notions about the nature of our existence are conditioned by our understanding or comprehension of state-of-the-art scientific awareness as well as cultural and spiritual experience.
Chaos is being investigated in many different phenomena, and is a major influence in developing a new paradigm. Some of the most promising results are coming from consciousness studies and experiential psychotherapy. There are many psychological and philosophical implications to chaos theory which reflect on our apprehension of the nature of our existence. It is helping us create an integrated view of psyche, soul, and nature.
Chaos theory reflects on the age old questions of determinism, stability and change, creativity, free will, and the underlying nature of spacetime. It is well established now that most movements in nature, ranging from the orbits of planets to behavioral adjustments in life, are essentially chaotic.
Since the Enlightenment, the western mind has had trouble comprehending the nature of reality. We adopted a cause and effect, mechanistic notion of reality (the clockwork universe) which fit well with our level of observation. Therefore, it felt intuitively correct. But now we can observe the infinitely small and cosmic levels of dynamics, and find a counter-intuitive challenge to our causal philosophy, in quantum mechanics and chaos theory.
Einstein taught us that “all is relative” to the point of view or orientation of the observer. Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time. Quantum mechanics introduced the uncertainty principle, mandating participation rather than observation. And chaos theory means dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. This pretty much undermines the old scientific perspective of cause-and-effect predictability, repeatability, and objectivity.
Yet, our biology still seems to condition our philosophy. Neurologist Walter Freeman has suggested that, “the physiological basis for our human conception of cause and effect lies in the mechanism of reafference; namely, that each intended action is accompanied by a motor command (“cause”) and expected consequence (“effect”) so that the notion of causality lies at the most fundamental level of our capacity for acting and knowing. This trait results in the replacement of sensory stimuli by self-organized activity patterns that are contingent on past experience, present motivational state, and expectancy of future action.”
But he goes on to say that, “the intuition of causality is essential for human understanding and action but it cannot validly be applied to the process by which intuition emerges.” Intuition is an informational source which is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Reality seems to depend on how you look at it.
Embracing the true nature of reality, embracing the darkness and chaos leads to new intuitive perceptions which accord with an expanded perspective–new images. The healing capacity of images is well known. When we become that chaos, our old notions and forms are de-structured.
Intuition makes a quantum leap, and what seemed counter-intuitive now seems to “make sense,” viscerally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Through imagination, we can “see through” to a deeper level of reality. It all depends on how one looks at it.
VIRTUAL REALITY CHECK
Mystics have always spoken of the illusory nature of consensus reality–ordinary consciousness–and so does quantum physics. Mind and matter are not separate, not two separate worlds. Matter embodies imagination; it mandates participation, not objective observation.
We are learning to “see through” the three great illusions of time, space, and the separate ego. There is no objective point of observation in the universe. Solid physical existence is a complex illusion. All is mind-stuff, an intangible, mythically or archetypally structured, virtual reality.
Charles Tart, the “altered states” expert, notes that “we already live in a variety of internally generated virtual realities…We live ‘inside’ a world simulation machine. We almost always forget that our ‘perception’ is a simulation, not reality itself…” We clearly experience the outer world indirectly through electrochemical changes in various receptor organs, which process raw neurological information. But consciousness is more than those electrochemical processes in the nervous system.
Identified with our ego (self simulation) it is no more than that. But there is a deeper current of microstates which conditions our perception of reality. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed. We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. It’s not only a case of “we are the world”; we are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness.
Our decisions about what is “real” in the world and ourselves is influenced by the virtual reality created by our world simulation process, according to Tart (1990). We can experience a sense of an internal psychological self beyond our bodily components–primal self image–and alterations in this image affect us in the real world. When the image changes creatively, so do behaviors, feelings, conceptualizations, and beliefs. Our self-simulation is a dynamic image which unfolds through a myriad of forms and patterns, microstates woven into a unified perception of consciousness.
Like fractal patterns emerging on the computer screen, no process-oriented therapist can fail to notice the aesthetic beauty of the unfolding process of the creative imagination. Experiential psychotherapy facilitates the participating, rather than observing self. Therapy is an art, and as such, it yields esthetic and physical pleasure as by-products. When the therapist joins with the participant, rather than remaining “objective observer”, a co-creative shared reality emerges.
This shared reality is more than mutual hypnosis, or shared subjectivity. It is a virtual world that is essentially an artistic, expressive form–a “living form.” Art embodies imagination. A work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and it expresses human feeling. A work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality–the logic of consciousness itself.
Process work is experience set-off from the general flow of life experience. It is AN EXPERIENCE which stands out and presents itself as having some kind of unity. These states can occur spontaneously, but are facilitated through therapy. Other examples are sudden illumination, esthetic appreciation, opening to nature, simple recognition to dramatic realization, awe. An experience always has aesthetic appeal. They are self-consciously recognized as being our own personal experiences where we are reflectively aware of our awareness.
Not all awareness is heightened awareness. To know is one thing and to be is another. This is the gulf which experiential therapy bridges. Inviting someone deeper into their process–inviting them to become the image–means a temporary disidentification from personality and ego.
“Me-experiencing-this” is superceded by the sense that “I AM” an incredibly wide variety of consciousness states in dynamic flux. Alienation and duality of self are suspended in favor of complex connectedness. The creative state is conducive to the evolution of novel relations and new meaning. This is expressed as a response of delight, distress, or surprise.
Immersion in this fluid flux of consciousness is virtual experience–imaginal, yes, but nonetheless real. It is poetic, metaphorical, epistemological. These images are the basis of “how we know what we know.” They define us, and whatever they are, we are essentially that. Becoming them, we consciously realize experientially, “I AM THAT.” The image “matters” as it is embodied.
When we have a therapeutic experience, it involves a degree of realization of “what it is like” to apprehend this given, to undergo this happening. It may not be actual experience, but it is influential experience. Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both information content and the rate of information processing. Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the therapeutic process. It is knowing by living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy–it always is happening in the “now.”
Knowledge about natural phenomena, the way nature and ourselves work, can help us attune to deeper resources. Natural science deals with man as one phenomena among others in a natural world. We now see the influence and beauty of chaotic dynamics as it unfolds in the natural world and our own physiology and psychology. Embracing that, following nature’s lead, we learn to cooperate with our own transformative process–through chaotic dynamics–through the mystification of science.
The therapeutic art is designed to elicit a full response: sensuous, intellectual, and emotional, not separated but interfused. It has an air of intimacy, of immediacy. The fullness of presentation matches the fullness of response–yielding a sense of lived experience–personal experience. Like art, experiential therapy is inherently humanistic–concerned with human feelings and values. It helps us embody those values, and the nature of beauty.
Beauty is an emotional value which affects our volitional and appreciative nature. It is not inherent in any thing, but is our own pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing or event. It is neither intrinsic nor objectified. It is the first-hand experience of a state of consciousness. It may not be in the eye only, but beauty is in the beholder. Yet the beholder doesn’t stand on the outside looking in, but becomes the object of contemplation. When the focus of contemplation is the self, a complex feedback loop manifests of self contemplating self manifesting self, contemplating self.
Beauty as a state of consciousness is described in the Qabala and Hermetic Philosophy as the sphere Tiphareth, on the Tree of Life. In psychological terms it implies transcendence of the realm of personality and intimate knowledge of the transpersonal self. It corresponds with healing, creativity, genius, and bliss states or unitive experiences.
The direct path to this sphere on the Tree of Life is called “ART”, and concerns itself with the paradoxical melding of the opposites. Art had its origin in magic. It is the path of transcendence from personality to Self, through the Middle Way. Art is the explication of the transformative process. Through art, common experience is transformed to archetypal, timeless experience. Art is nature transformed. Art shapes our perception of things outside ourselves, and embodies the workings of inner life.
Archetype, ritual, myth, and dream are other manifestations of this same parataxic mode, as is expressive therapy. It is characterized by the production of images who meaning is not clear or categorical (Gowan, 1975). In parataxic mode, symbols or images are used in a private or idiosyncratic manner. Through art, they can be shared with others, expressing feeling and transmitting understanding. In contrast, in the creative mode (Tiphareth) meaning is more or less fully cognized symbolically, with ego present.
In complex dynamics, the opposites to be wed are order and chaos. Order is “in-formation,” the form within. Interesting transforms happen at the threshold of chaos. In therapeutic terms, this chaotic consciousness is where ego death is consummated and new order subsequently emerges.
The dynamic union of chaos and order is symbolic of our human process of transformation: old outworn forms break down (ego death), and that chaos is fertile ground for creative rebirth, rejuvenation. This Royal Wedding means nothing less than finding the lost soul–the alienated part of oneself which we normally call “Not-I.”
THE HOMUNCULUS
In the ancient art of alchemy (another analog of the transformation process), the soul is depicted as a homunculus, or “small man.” It was symbolically equivalent to the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Elixer or Universal Medicine. This homunculus personified the unconscious as an Inner Man, a hermaphroditic being, a spirit in the bottle, a “brain child.”
Zosimos and Paracelsus spoke of the homunculus as devouring himself, rending himself with his own teeth, like the Urobouros serpent which bites its tail and gives birth to itself. Both homunculus and uroborous are symbols of paradox. What an image of the dynamics of chaos and order, as it appears in experiential psychotherapy. The image typically appears before dissolution of the center into its unconscious element–the undifferentiated consciousness of the ground state.
The liquid form of the philosopher’s stone is the called the “universal solvent,” and chaos is certainly that. As such, it reflects the self–the prima materia, the massa confusa of the original chaotic state. Consciousness occurs in a continuum accompanying the flow of matter and energy in and through brains. Our apprehension of all of our experience is conditioned by our input channels, the sensory and extrasensory (or metaphorical) systems. Intuition is one such meta-sensory channel.
Walter Freeman believes that perception begins with an internally generated neural process that prepares the organism to seek future stimuli in the outside world. Between the experience and the input that triggers the experience, something is “added” to conscious experience by the transformational processes that lead from sense organ to brain. Invariant stimulus from the environment (physical space) arrives as information in sensory space and finally proceeds to cerebral space as meaningful input. Experience is synchronized cerebral, sensory, and physical (survival) space-times.
Meaning is a function of the level of arousal at which it is experienced. The symbolic interpretation of one’s own central nervous system activity, the integration of information to systemic meaning depends on the level of arousal.
Higher levels of arousal, and thus more complete withdrawl from physical space-time into cerebral space-time, narrow the field of attention and deepen the experience of meaning (Fischer, 1969). Meaning results from integration of information within the systemic context of a self-referential, self-organizing system.
The brain interprets this input, along with its own creative addition of (virtual) information, and creates a simulation of perceived reality. It is a convergence of the body sense of muscles and joints, the viscera, and the outward-looking senses.
Nerve signals from all over the body are sent to the thalamus, which has sections made up of neurons assigned to each body area. These signals are passed on to the neurons in the somatosensory cortex which contains the brain’s own map of the body. Our experience and expectations are geared to our perceptions, which have a wide range of subjective interpretation.
Consciousness is intimately linked with the sensory-motor cortex (parietal lobe). The sensory cortex is typically “mapped” onto the brain as a small, distorted human figure called the “homunculus.” Though they are analogous, the homunculus of alchemy (the soul) is not equivalent to the homunculus in the brain.
Rather than the elusive “seat of the soul,” the sensory homunculus is part of the “hardwired brain,” a skin-map in the cortex. Yet it is implicated in the somatic part of spiritual experience. Each part of the sensory system is assigned a particular region in proportion to other parts. Both sensory and motor cortices have about the same layout of corresponding points. The body is reflected in the cortex.
[insert homunculus/brain diagram here]
A specific sensory to motor ratio is the reflection of the subjective and objective facets of our nature. With eyes closed we can experience the universe inside ourselves in sensory imagination, that is, subjectively. With eyes open we can change “what there is” outside ourselves through voluntary motor performance, that is, objectively.
These experiential and experimental facets are implicit in the nature of self-referential, self-organizing systems. Self-reference implies that the universe exists subjectively, that is, in reference to the self; self-organization, or goal seeking, refers to the ability to rearrange the outside universe (Fischer, 1967).
There is the complementary notion in the medieval consciousness science of alchemy. In alchemy, the homunculus is sort of the primal test-tube baby to be created through a dynamic process in the Hermetically-sealed retort vessel. Paracelsus alleged that the entity could be created from semen that is gently heated in the vessel for 40 days, then “magnetized.” It feeds daily on the hidden mysteries of nature. Some of the ancient philosophers were said to have been begotten by this process.
Jungian psychology reads this process as the creation of a renewal of spirit which takes place in the psyche when psychic contents are prevented from “leaking out” and being lost. “Heating” is symbolic of amplifying or intensifying the transformative process. In terms of chaos theory, “magnetizing” the entity might insinuate the formation of a strange attractor as the complex core of the system. An attractor describes a temporary stability far from equilibrium. We can conceive of it as a polarization of gray matter.
The homunculus is the archetype of the magical child. It is thus an embryonic symbol of rebirth, or re-creation of self by Self. In alchemy, the homunculus is generated by a succession of transformations through the four elements to reach its essential nature. The elements may be corresponded with the four arenas of human life: physical-earth; emotional-water; mental-air; spiritual-fire. The homunculus mapped on the sensory cortex gives us access to this transformational system through the imagination.
This phenomenon has been dealt with in yoga as kundalini, the serpent power. When it is activated there is a stimulus spreading along the sensory cortex of both hemispheres of the brain. Stimulus may be induced electrically, mechanically, or imaginally. When induced through imagination, the experience is virtual in nature, yet just as “real,” in terms of psychophysical results.
A (real or imagined) stimulus moves along the cortex, setting up acoustical standing waves in the cerebral ventricles (Bentov, 1977). Vibrations that arise in the ventricles are conducted to the gray matter of the cortex which lines the fissure between the two hemispheres. These vibrations stimulate and eventually “polarize” the cortex in such a way that it tends to conduct a signal along the homunculus, usually beginning from the toes upward. This creates a stimulus-loop, unlike the normal input-output of normal signal processing. When nerve cells interact, there is the seed of a bodily action within each pattern that arises through chaotic dynamics.
Self-stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain may be created by circulating a current along the sensory cortex. When body motion is involved, there is cross-talk onto the similarly-mapped motor cortex. Standing waves can be induced mechanically through resonance by pulsating a magnetic field around the head at frequencies of 4-7 Hz (Theta), or through the auditory channel by eliciting frequency following response.
Areas of stress in the body may produce symptomatic responses when stimulated through the homunculus. It usually appears as localized pain. Severity is proportional to the degree of stress encountered. Participants in process work report paradoxical sensations of hot-cold, and pleasure-pain.
Pain and temperature are intimately related, and initiate experiences of suffering and comfort, chills and thrills. “Heat and cold” are the archetypal guardians residing in the brain stem. These signals are processed in the amygdala of the limbic forebrain (frontolimbic system).
Pleasure and pain are mediated by the ergotrophic (sympathetic nervous system) and trophotrophic (parasympathetic) systems of arousal, and their neurotransmitters, noradrenelin and serotonin. At their extremes, they paradoxically convert into their opposite. Arousal and involvement with the outer world (action) is mediated by the ergotrophic system; tranquility and the inner world (contemplation, relaxation)) by the trophotropic system.
Sympathetic nervous system activity involves goal-orientation, increased tone of striated muscles, cortical desynchronization, excitement of smooth muscles of the eye, heart, and vascular system, goose-flesh, inhibition of gastrointestinal activity, increase in adrenomedullary secretions, and rise in blood sugar.
Parasympathetic activity is characterized as satiety, decreased respiration, cortical synchonization (alpha, theta), inhibitory effects on smooth muscles of eye, heart, and vascular system, muscular relaxation, increased visceral activity, and fall in blood sugar.
Hyperarousal can be symbolized as a Plenum; hypoarousal as a Void. When the sensory cortex is overwhelmed, it paradoxically switches to void-consciousness. Paradoxes provide the dynamic for transcendental experiences and the attainment of creative consciousness. The shift takes place as we move from a sense of “I” or ego toward the transpersonal self, or no-boundaries condition.
Pain and anxiety arise from an inability to verify the state of arousal through cortical interpretive models or voluntary motor activity. But in the bliss state, there is no separate “I” left to become anxious, feel pain, or “freak out.” It is characterized by oneness with everything.
The paradox of the ergotrophic and trophotropic systems is that they not only represent the guardians or obstacles of spiritual paths, but they are also the paths themselves. Increased trophotrophic arousal represents a perception-meditation continuum which culminates in samadhi, while increasing ergotropic arousal represents a perception-hallucination continuum which culminates in ecstasy (Fischer, 1971).
Jung described a “full void” he called the pleroma as a source of Everything–a sense of vastness, of emptiness that is nevertheless ordering. In complex dynamics, ordering does not come from a single “somewhere” but from everywhere and nowhere–from the void that is full.
The sensory/motor ratio may be increased either by enhancing the sensory component (overloading the nervous system with drumming, dancing, sweating, music, mental or physical stress), or by inhibiting the motor component. The paradoxical shift happens because of sensory input overload coupled with motor activity impairment.
In this meditative-like state, the brain produces endorphins and enkephalins which block pain perception and create feelings of well-being. The electronic signal is converted into a chemical messenger, forming the material basis of emotions (Pert, 1988).
NEUROPEPTIDES
Neuropeptides and their receptors are the key to understanding how mind and body are interconnected and how emotions can be manifested throughout the body. It makes more sense to speak of an integrated entity, since this information network is based in chaotic dynamics, and chaotic systems are holistic.
An interesting feature of peptides is that they grow directly off the DNA which stores the information to make our brains and bodies. The brain’s cells create neuropeptides. About 60 neuropeptides have been identified so far. There are receptor sites for them in the body as well as the brain. They are intimately linked with the function of the immune system and the biochemistry of emotions. They float within the body, attaching to receptors which sort out the information exchange in the body.
Receptors are concentrated within the limbic system of the brain which mediates emotion, and other nodal points like the back horn of the spinal cord, (brain stem). This is the first synapse in the brain where touch-sensory information is processed. All senses enter the brain through a nodal point for neuropeptide receptors. Most signals enter through the old brain, or “reptilian” brain, the serpent which lies sleeping within. Chemically speaking, neuropeptides mediate our drives, bringing us to a state of consciousness and to alterations in those states (mood state). They integrate brain and body.
The agents of the immune system (monocytes) are mobile cells which have receptors for every neuropeptide. Receptor sites also create neuropeptides. Immune cells make the same chemicals which control mood in the brain. Emotion-affecting biochemicals control the routing and migration of monocytes. The immune system distinguishes between self and non-self, preserving the integrity of the organism.
Neuropeptides are signaling molecules. They signal receptors. Biochemist Candace Pert, who discovered endorphins, postulates that “receptors have both a wave-like and a particulate character, and it is important to note that INFORMATION CAN BE STORED IN THE FORM OF TIME SPENT IN DIFFERENT STATES.”
The molecular substance of all receptors of all species is the same, down to the simplest of animals, demonstrating the simplicity and unity of life. So, there are 60 or so signal molecules for enlivening emotions or flowing energy. Pert notes: “The identical molecular components for information flow are conserved throughout evolution.”
Mind is information flow with a physical substrate. The brain, glands, and immune system are joined in a bi-directional network of communication where the information carriers are neuropeptides. Mind holds the network of bodily parts together.
Pert maintains that, “it is possible now to conceive of mind and consciousness as an emanation of emotional information processing, and as such, mind and consciousness would appear to be independent of brain and body.” Walter Freeman says, “a conscious “willed” action begins as a self-organized pattern of neural activity in the limbic system.”
FREE WILL AND GOAL-SEEKING BEHAVIOR
Just prior to his death in 1961, Jung was asked about his idea of God during an interview. Jung’s reply accents the chaotic elements of life. His answer was that, “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”
We find this sentiment echoed in alchemy, where the transformation of God is also the secret and essential meaning of alchemy. The prima materia to be transformed into the Philosopher’s Stone via the alchemical process is sometimes identified explicitly with God. Both seem to be saying that God manifests in our lives through chaotic intervention that is much like a fluctuation, state change, or bifurcation.
As we participate in the recycling of consciousness, we become identified with God and the I-Thou (subject-object) dichotomy is transcended. This transcendental notion is reflected in physics: the observer is the observed. We identify “God” or evolutionary dynamics as the prime agent of chaos–chaotic dynamics in action. This is a naturalistic or pantheistic philosophy wherein God is identical with the holomovement (Bohm) of the universe. Consciousness is a more subtle form of matter.
In physics, the Uncertainty Principle speaks of the fundamental nature of indeterminacy. Chaos theory reveals the determinacy within the most apparently random influences. Therefore, the naturalist point-of-view or natural philosophy must imply “indeterminate-determinacy” or “determinate-indeterminacy.” This paradox appears convoluted enough to reflect the nature of reality–a chaotic world of probabilities. It is deterministic in principle, yet virtually random in practice.
This paradox once again raises the question of the plenum/void. In quantum mechanics the vacuum state contains no real matter or light, yet has in it (through the uncertainty principle) all possible matter and light in the form of so-called ‘virtual particles’ or ‘zero-point’ fluctuations. The state of pure consciousness is also said to contain all possibilities, to be a state of pure potentiality in the sense that it is empty but lively (Gowan, 1980).
We encounter phenomena analogous to “indeterminate-determinacy” in consciousness journeys. We cannot predict just how the imagery will unfold, but it does conform to certain archetypal patterns and forms. These patterns appear to be self-organizing, self-generating, and self-iterating. They are chronic, having a tendency to recur over time, as one form of iteration.
Experientially, we can move through the dialogical experiences (I-Thou) of the symbolic or archetypal layers of the psyche into the clear light of the void which is All and No-Thing (Unitive). This is the ground state of consciousness. Only from this unstructured state can we “formulate” and express our True Will, in alignment with the whole, rather than personality’s desires.
For centuries philosophers have conjectured over the amount of “play” in the web-work of fate, and to what degree we control our own destinies. Jung commented on the limitations of normal human will–the will of the ego–and its limitations in “On the Nature of the Psyche”:

The will cannot transgress the bounds of the psychic sphere: it cannot coerce the instinct, nor has it power over the spirit, in so far as we understand by this something more than the intellect. Spirit and instinct are by nature autonomous and both limit in equal measure the applied field of the will.

This autonomy of the deeper self is why we are limited in our self-mastery, and creates the impotence we feel when faced with “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” There are many things in life we can’t control despite our best efforts. There are many things we wouldn’t want to control if we could.
The independent will of the deep self appears as “God’s Will.” From the transcendent perspective personal free will is a moot point, since it is subject to being “overwritten,” through chaotic intervention. It is not exclusively an inner or outer reality, though it has aspects of both. Immersion in the imaginal drama of the psyche changes us in fundamental ways. Chaotic intrusions from the outer world can also be meaningful in our spiritual life.
To Jung, will was simply freely available psychic energy, which could be directed by an intervention of consciousness–a decision to apply that energy in a specific way for a purpose–intent. Its availability is determined by one’s freedom from distorted or deformed patterns.
Neurotic or pathological patterns keep the energy tied up, stuck, unavailable. When the energy is freed up it becomes available. If will means freedom of choice, then the question becomes “to what life purpose do we direct our will?” Does the ego learn to subordinate itself to the totality of self? Is ego free of identification with the power instinct?
Freedom of will remains a mystery. ‘Will’ implies intention and power to implement that intention. This determines our values and choices. Ego’s perspective is too circumscribed and linear to make informed decisions. Becoming permeable, opening to the complex, non-linear input of intuition and spirituality may help. We are often forced from our course through lack of self understanding as well as external opposition.
Will is a dynamism which implies degrees of freedom within the constraints of “indeterminate – determinacy.” It operates along a continuum which includes instinct, impulse, ambition, drive and compulsion. It is a form of energy that can overcome other forms of energy, such as feeling or sensation.
A will turned toward self-understanding develops psychological faith in the reality of imaginal experience through self-reflection. Psychological faith is reflected as the love of images, and confirms the reality of the soul as image-making power.
The inner world is just as “real” as the outer, although different. This acknowledgement translates into an alignment with one’s wholeness, beyond simplistic wishes and personalistic desires. They are real in different ways that can be recognized and experienced. One world is visible, the other invisible or virtual or implicate (enfolded). But the two apparent worlds are one. Matter is not different than consciousness–but consciousness is not limited to matter.
The rational mind cooperates with the soul, once it is convinced there is something beyond itself. At this stage, will or change comes through an imaginal or meditative process. The alchemists had an operation for the incubation of images known as the meditatio–a sort of brooding on imagery–a way of being in imagination.
In terms of human biology, Walter Freeman suggests that neural activity patterns emerging by chaotic dynamics express a drive toward a goal in the form of commands to the motor and sensory systems. Sensory consequences are fed back into the limbic system through the entorhinal cortex.
Sensory input converging onto the entorhinal area is channelled into the hippocampus, then returned to the entorhinal and motor cortices and finally passed on to the motor system–action. Emergent properties within the entorhinal area condition behavior. There is spontaneous, self-organized, dynamic production of goal-oriented behavior.
Freeman boldly asserts (1990) that, “Philosophical and psychological considerations suggest that the cyclical process of emergent goal-seeking, reafference, and sensory feedback constitute the basis for what we perceive as subjective consciousness.” This process leads to perception, concept formation, a “cognitive map.”
Consciousness is an intrinsic emergent property. Through the chaotic process of emergence, order appears “spontaneously” (or instantaneously) within a system. A willed action begins as a self-organized pattern of neural activity in the limbic system, initiating a motor command to the sympathetic system and a corollarly discharge within the somatosensory system (parasympathetic).
Complex feedback (confirmation of change) from these systems constitutes integration. This process contains the essence of our relationship to our world. Yet, this process cannot be said to “create” nor contain consciousness. Consciousness emerges from chaos. Their essence is one.
Creation is instantaneous. The flow of energy washes life and consciousness into the world. Chaos reflects the wildness and irregularity in nature, and in ourselves.
Virtually random element endow chaotic ystems with the freedom to explore vast ranges of consciousness and behavior patterns within the creative flow.
In process work, adherence to the principles of chaosophy means that we don’t try to create with the will. There is no need to do so. We simply notice and follow what is naturally happening, following nature’s lead. Chaos is nature’s guide, the matrix of formation of imagery, consciousness, and matter.
REFERENCES
Bentov, Itzhak, STALKING THE WILD PENDULUM, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1977.
Bohm, David, WHOLENESS AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER, Routledge & Kegen Paul (1980).
Fischer, Roland, “Biological Models of Creativity,” JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, 1967.
Fischer, Roland, “A Cartography of Exalted and Meditative States,” SCIENCE, 1971.
Freeman, Walter, “On the Fallacy of Assigning an Origin to Consciousness,” MACHINERY OF THE MIND,
E. Roy John, Ed., Birkhausser, Boston, 1990.
Gowan, John Curtis, TRANCE, ART, AND CRETIVITY, California State University, Northridge, 1975.
Gowan, John Curtis, OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER, California State University, Northridge, 197 .
Jung, C.G., ON THE NATURE OF THE PSYCHE, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1960.
Miller, Webb, & Dickson, “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” PSYCHOENERGETIC SYSTEMS, S. Krippner, Ed., Gordon and Breach, New York, London, Paris 1979, pp 231-237.
Pert, Candace, “The Material Basis of Emotions,” WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, Summer 1988.
Tart, Charles, “Multiple Personality, Altered States, and Virtual Reality; The World Simulation Process Approach,” DISSOCIATION, Vol. III, No. 4, Dec. 1990.

Chaosophy 93 by Iona Miller

ABSTRACTS
I. CHAOS AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
CHAOSOPHY:
An Imaginal Perspective on the Nature of Reality,
Consciousness, Experience, and Perception;
Iona Miller, 1993
ABSTRACT: Our notions about ourselves and the nature of the world (worldview) around us are filtered through our prejudices about “the way things work”. We never apprehend reality directly–only our world-simulation which is congealed from the convergence of our sensory input channels and the information-creating processes of chaotic neural activity. The brain filters and creates reality.
Brains are chaotic systems which create internal perceptual patterns that substitute directly for sensory stimuli. These stimuli are evoked potentials or evoked fields–standing waves in the brain. Imagination has the ability to induce real-time changes in the psychophysical being.
Imagination embodies the power of transformation. It may be accessed through obvious imagery, such as dreams, vision, and other sensory analogs, or viewed directly in symptoms, behavior patterns, emotional patterns, mental concepts, and spiritual beliefs.
The imaginal process is our primary experience and it permeates and conditions all facets of human life. During experiential psychotherapy, the sensory-motor cortex system is influenced through imagination. Psyche affects substance at the most fundamental level, through chaotic neural activity.
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CHAOS CONSCIOUSNESS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY:
An Experiential Approach and Application to Dreamwork,
Creativity, and Healing;
Graywolf Fred Swinney and Iona Miller, 1991
ABSTRACT: Experiential therapy sessions and mysticism demonstrate that as we journey deeper and deeper into the psyche we eventually encounter a state characterized either as “chaotic” or void of images. In a therapeutic context, chaos is experienced as a consciousness state–the ground state. This state is related to healing, dreams, and creativity. Shamanic approaches to healing involve co-consciousness states which lead to restructuring both physical and emotional-mental senses of self.
Dreams, creativity, and healing arise from this undifferentiated “chaotic consciousness.” Dreamhealing uses images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect. Chaos-oriented consciousness journeys suggest these states reflect complex phase space, fractal patterns, strange attractors, “the butterfly effect,” sensitivity, complex feedback loops, intermittency, and other general dynamical aspects suggested by chaos theory. More than an experiential process, this is a philosophy of treatment–”Chaosophy.”
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CHAOS AS THE UNIVERSAL SOLVENT:
Re-Creational Ego Death in Psychedelic Consciousness;
Iona Miller, 1992
ABSTRACT: There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic–purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation.
The alchemical operation SOLUTIO, called “the root of alchemy,” corresponds with the element water. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, “liquification” of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns–a psychedelic, expanded state. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
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CHAOS THEORY
AND PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXES:
Jung’s Notion of the Complex as “Strange Attractor”
Iona Miller, 1991
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
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THE CREATIVE FLOW OF MEANING:
An Introduction to Nonunitarian Philosophy;
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.
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II. POLYPHASIC CONSCIOUSNESS
THE UN-NAMED DREAM
AND PARALLEL UNIVERSES:
A Multistate Paradigm;
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.
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THE VARIETIES OF VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE:
Virtual Realities Beyond the Dialogical Self;
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.”
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DREAM WAVE:
Primal Imagery in the Creative Consciousness Process;
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.
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THE UNBORN DREAM: Thriving on Chaos
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.
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HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE PARADOX?
Chaos Theory and Fuzzy Philosophy;
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.
To go directly to the article click here.
III. THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM
THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM AND CCP:
Explication, Ego Death, and Emptiness;
Iona Miller, 1993
ABSTRACT: David Bohm suggests psychological “atom-smashing” as a way of radically destructuring the ego, opening it to wider experience of the undivided whole. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information (explication). The stream of images in CCP functions analogously to the unfolding of the stream of consciousness and the enfolding and de-structuring of the ego (ego death). Consciousness and matter share the same essence; their difference is one of degree of subtlety or density. “Emptiness” is an integral aspect of mind/matter. Chaos theory links all these elements as aspects of the archetypal healing process, which is facilitated by CCP.
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FRACTAL THERAPY:
Information Theory and the Vortex of Internal Structuring Process
Iona Miller, 1993
ABSTRACT: Because of its very nature a chaotic system cannot be decomposed. If consciousness is pure information it is not limited to physical form; its patterning may emerge from chaotic dynamics operating at the quantum level, where the “no-thing” of pure information becomes a structured “some-thing,” through intentionality coupled with chaotic determinism (self-organized emergent order). The so-called “software of consciousness” is unlike the matter and energy of classical understanding, but exerts a measureable effect on the physical world, apparently through quantum chaos.
Fractal therapy allows us to penetrate deeply into the psyche–into the vortex of the internal structuring process–through progressively de-structuring patterns of organization. The undecomposable level of chaotic consciousness is experienced as the pure, unconditioned imprint of the whole, resulting in a new primal self image and sense of relationship to the greater whole which emerges through nonunitary transformation.
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A HOLOGRAPHIC CONCEPT OF REALITY
Richard Alan Miller, Burt Webb, Darden Dickson, 1973-1993
ABSTRACT: The organization of any biological system is established by a complex electrodynamic field which is, in part, determined by its atomic physiochemical components and which, in part, determines the behavior and orientation of these components. The holographic model of reality emerging from this principle may provide a scientific explanation of psychoenergetic phenomena.
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EMBRYONIC HOLOGRAPHY:
An Application of the Holographic Concept of Reality;
Richard Alan Miller and Burt Webb, 1973-1993
[Presented at the Omniversal Symposium, California State College at Sonoma, Saturday, September 29, 1973. Reprinted in the journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 6, 1993. 137-156. Boynton Beach, FL.]
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SELF-ORGANIZATION
IN BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS:

The Holistic Patterning Process of Chaos and Antichaos
Iona Miller, 1993

ABSTRACT: Self-organization is an emergent property of systems and organisms, including human beings. Chaotic dynamics governs the emergence of this new order from apparent randomness. The deep coherence of the overall process implies hidden or missing information for holistic patterning within the apparent “noise” or randomness of chaotic processes.
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IV. CHAOS CULTURE
DISRUPTION: LIFE BEYOND THE CIRCLE;
Graywolf, 1990
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THE EMPTY MEDICINE BAG;
Graywolf, 1989
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RELATIVITY OF BODY AND SOUL;
Iona Miller, 1992
…we are not concerned here with a philosophical, much less a religious, concept of the soul, but with the psychological recognition of the existence of a semiconscious psychic complex, having partial autonomy of function, [anima].
C.G. Jung, TWO ESSAYS
The soul loses its psychological vision in the abstract literalisms of the spirit as well as in the concrete literalisms of the body.
James Hillman, RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY
Psychic and somatic symptoms express the soul’s painful wounds and obstructions. The rational mind is incapable of deciding what is bet for the soul. The mind can discover what is needed only by listening to and reflecting upon the subtle movement of the soul as it expresses itself in bodily sensations, feelings, emotions, images, ideas, and dreams.
Robert M. Stein, “BODY AND PSYCHE”
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VIRTUAL THERAPY:
Speculations on a New Modality
Iona Miller and Burt Webb, 1992
ABSTRACT: The advent of virtual reality technology opens up a whole new dimension for therapy. Psychotherapist and client may enter an electronic simulation which allows them both to occupy a shared imaginal space. The parameters of the system and environment can be programmed to display specific archetypal imagery which is known to influence the deep psyche. The ability to interact with the system provides a means of intervention and transformation.
The therapist, as electronic shaman, either guides or follows the client’s process. He chooses from a repertoire of archetypal encounters those images which fit most closely, thus amplifying the “cybernaut’s” imagery experience. Distinctions of inner vs. outer become experientially moot. Therapeutic interventions, impossible in consensus reality, become readily available without standard ethical considerations.
The shaman’s flight into the netherworld to retrieve a “lost” soul becomes a literal reality experienced as a co-conscious journey. The discernment and non directive attitude of the therapist insures that the client will not be traumatized. The perception of universal and personal metaphors is enhanced and amplified, rather than imposed. As in hypnosis, the client maintains the possibility of “escape” back into consensus reality, simply by closing their eyes.
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THE GUIDE WAVE:
Synchronized Chaos and Co-Consciousness
by Iona Miller, 1993
ABSTRACT: In a Bohm/de Broglie theory, the guide wave (or pilot wave) governs or patterns the whole quantum experiment–the observer as well as the observed. This nonlocal guiding principle also acts as a morphogenetic field for the structuring of atoms and cells. An analogous structuring of free flowing energy appears in the stream of consciousness.
The on-going stream of imagery manifests the process of co-evolution which is not distinct from our psychophysical being. Imagery and the entity it shapes are not separate. They are different dimensions of the same energy. The guide wave is something of a cosmic memory which holistically conditions the present moment through complex feedback and feedforward phenomena. The guide wave maintains specific forms as new moments unfold.
Research shows that synchronized chaos may be engineered through perturbation and operational amplification, creating flexibility among many different behaviors. Isolated chaotic systems cannot synchronize, but parts can synchronize through supporting subsystems, like a phase-locked loop. Thus, chaotic signals are generated which drive stable periodic behavior. The presence of chaos appears to be an advantage in controlling dynamic behavior, leading to flexibility and stability. Just as small disturbances in chaotic systems radically alter their behavior (“butterfly effect”), tiny adjustments can stabilize behavior.
To go directly to the article click here.
V. INFORMATION THEORY
AN INFORMATION THEORY OF
THE UNIVERSE AND NEURODYNAMICS:
The Interface of Consciousness and Information Quanta
by Iona Miller, 1993.
ABSTRACT: Information Theory has been employed to model dynamic processes ranging from the entire universe (Ed Fredkin, 1988) to human neurological functioning (Karl Pribram,1991). Pribram’s research on human perception has culminated in a theory of neurodynamics based on nonlocal cortical processing–holonomy. According to Pribram, “space-time and spectrum provide the dimensions within which information occurs.” The information theory of the universe models bits of information as fundamental, while neurodynamics conceives of quanta of information. Holonomy supercedes general systems theory and thermodynamics as models of brain/mind/consciousness.
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ODE TO WHITE NOISE AND STRANGE LOOPS
The Concepts of Form and Intentionality
in Information Theory,
by Iona Miller, 1993
ABSTRACT: Physics deals with the energetic aspect of the world. Information theory deals with the communicational aspect, the message from the external world (universe) to the individual and his reactions. Information is a quantity whose value depends on its usability, what it adds to a representation–its originality, unforeseeability. The general study of information theory can be applied to perception in the human receptor.
The emergence of imagery from white noise–the figure/ground distinction of Gestalt–is one implication relevant to process-oriented therapy and certain philosophical considerations about the nature of chaos and order in reality. Wave fronts exhibit a fractal nature, including sound waves. Meaningful sound, such as music and speech lies in between total white noise and the monotone of indefinitely held pure notes
We tend to take the constant imaginal flux of the stream of consciousness for granted, rarely focusing our conscious awareness in that direction. But we can experientially “decode” the universal “message” it contains for us in terms of potential holistic repatterning. No universal message is really “transmitted” because it is a nonlocal quantum phenomenon of consciousness. There is no channel or receiver, but the classical ego interprets it that way–as information.
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IMAGE PROCESSING:
The Fractal Nature of Emergent Consciousness
by Iona Miller, 1993
ABSTRACT: Transformations can be effected within the autonomous stream of imagery, through imagery processing via experiential therapy. The essence of this transformative process is revealed in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols–i.e. their ability to encode, enfold, or compress the informational content of the whole. Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Emergent consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. Rather it is the transformational process of non-manifest, undifferentiated consciousness emerging into manifestation.
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THE SELF-AWARE UNIVERSE :
A Synopsis of Amit Goswami’s
Theory of Physics and Psychic Phenomena,
by Iona Miller, 1993
SUMMARY: Amit Goswami, Ph.D. has proposed a theory of consciousness, rather than atoms, as the fundamental reality of the material world. Based in the philosophy of monistic idealism, he claims to obtain a consistent paradox-free interpretation of the new physics. He suggests a quantum mechanical, as well as classical nature for mind, which accounts for nonlocal psychic phenomena.
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CHAOSOPY ‘93 INTRODUCTION
The modern myths of our times are those scientific theories which foster our sense of mystery and awe when we gaze into the deep heart of Nature. The Anima Mundi–Soul of the World–the soul of matter, is alive and well. All we need do to connect with her is turn an imaginal eye on our relations with self, others, and world.
There is a therapeutic value in deliteralizing our theories about the way things work. We can view theory poetically, metaphorically to illuminate the natural process of creation and dissolution of pattern and form. Nature repeats herself at all levels of organization. Therefore insight on the fundamental nature of matter and the relationship of interacting systems reveals analogies with human existence and behavior. Whatever nature is, we are that.
As the ancient alchemists noticed, the transformation of matter is analogous to transformation in the psyche. This is not to say that consciousness cannot transcend its physical substratum. If we concur with David Bohm, positing consciousness as pure information, it not only transcends the human sphere but the entire domain of physical manifestation.
Chaos theory provides an interesting philosophical basis for exploring this relationship of psyche and matter–the interface of mind and matter. Perhaps one of its primary virtues is that it allows us to formulate a theory of consciousness and healing based on an organic model of transformation, rather than a mechanistic or cybernetic process, which form the basis of some other current theories.
Unfolding the analogies of the Creative Consciousness Process with Chaos Theory is not intended to bind the two together as a final picture of the way things are. CCP was not developed from nor structured around Chaos Theory. It is just the best state-of-the-art scientific metaphor we have to describe the transformative process in nature’s terms.
Most of the nuts and bolts “how to” of CCP is covered in DREAMHEALING: CHAOS AND THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESS. The science behind what Graywolf later called CRP (Consciousness Restructuring Process) is in HOLOGRAPHIC HEALING, by Graywolf Swinney. Since this journal is being developed essentially as a “house organ” for practitioners of CCP or CRP, or dreamhealing, it refers to this foundational work as the source of the basic theory and method of practice.
CHAOSOPHY ‘93 explores the philosophical implications and assumptions underlying that practice. It is rooted in the notion that imaginal representation is the fundamental experiential reality of human existence, and that these representational systems can be radically deconstructed and creatively repatterned holistically.
Psyche is not separate from matter. Consciousness is not separate from matter. But this philosophy is neither dualist nor materialist–it is functionalist; it works. Yet it also adheres to the romantic traditions of shamanism, philosophy, the arts, and depth psychology.
Chaos is ubiquitous throughout nature, yet has largely been ingnored by science in the past due to the overwhelming complexity of detecting its underlying pattern and purpose. Much the same could be said for its appearance in human psychology and philosophy.
Yet chaos has always been recognized as a primal or fundamental condition from which all systems emerge and into which they dissolve. This statement holds as true for the ego as it does for the creation of any form of order.
Chaosophy, as a philosophy of treatment, is based in the notion of following the creative flow of meaning which emerges continually as the stream of consciousness–an upwelling river of imagery. When there are blocks to this free flow of energy–frozen states of consciousness obstructing the flow–they can be deconstructed, “liquified.”
As the ego encounters the powerful flow of autonomous imagery, consciousness can ride its waves back to their emergent source. Creative regression into more fundamental (less-structured) states of consciousness ranges from representational forms to nonrepresentational patterns, from the phenomenological to the nonphenomenological.
In this process the ego is deconstructed–temporarily dissolved–relieved of its fossilizations and rigidities, and prepared for holistic repatterning by “chaotic consciousness,” the holistic ground state.
This “RE-CREATIONAL EGO DEATH” paves the way for the new emergent order which repatterns the whole person, radically altering self image and relationship to the world at large. It is a direct experience of an enlarged sense of self and participation in the greater whole. It restructures the belief system and personal mythology. Creativity and healing are emergent properties of self-organizing systems.
Several other scientific theories are relevant to an amplification of the nature of this natural transformative process. CCP just facilitates and follows nature’s way. Other relevant concepts include relativity and quantum mechanics, theories of the holographic nature of mind and universe, parallel universes, virtual realities, nonunitarian transformations, general systems theory, and information theory.
Part I, CHAOS AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY, introduces a worldview which serves as a philosophical basis for experiential therapy with an organic deconstructionist orientation.
Part II, POLYPHASIC CONSCIOUSNESS, presents the case for a model of consciousness rooted in radical pluralism of infinite states or phases of consciousness.
Part III, THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM, provides further links from physics and cognitive sciences which embed CCP in holistic models of reality.
Part IV, CHAOS CULTURE, is meant to suggest applications of this philosophy in daily life.
Part V, INFORMATION THEORY carries us into even more arcane areas of applications in psychology and philosophy.
Though these articles build on one another, they are not necessarily to be studied in a linear manner. They build on one another in a reflective, recursive fashion. Therefore, they may require more than one reading, as the later material illuminates notions presented earlier in more cursory fashion. Like iterating fractals, these articles present multiple views of the same self-similar process over and over again from slightly different perspectives.
As poetic or metaphorical speculation they are meant to provoke and evoke deep thought and awareness in the reader, helping perhaps to clarify the reader’s own worldview. We hope they will shed some light on the nature of the archetypal healing process and creativity as they emerge in therapeutic interaction.
Hopefully, those of you who are practitioners or “armchair” philosophers may be moved to make your own contributions.
Chaos theory has been one of the most fertile venues of interdisciplinary study of the nature of consciousness and reality, and we welcome all comments for revue.
–Iona Miller, 1993
“…the idea of psychotherapy grounded in philosophy is different from the idea of psychotherapy grounded in healing, medicine, shamanism.”
James Hillman,
We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy

Nonconforming Expertise

HUMAN SURVIVAL TECHNOLOGIES
WILD CARD PLAYERS: Studies on Lying, Dogmatic, and Creative Persons, by Paul Robert Henrickson, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, 1970) suggest that 4% of the untrained, uneducated and unsophisticated judging population are as perceptive as experts in a field. If consensus could establish truth and point out the beautiful there would be no reason for the loftier concerns of rarer persons. The perceptive individual is capable of responding, intuitively perhaps, but still effectively, and with insight, on a level of excellence comparable to the specialist. Therefore, it is not surprising the perceptive person loses interest in inept and misguided exercises that reduce intelligent behavior while encouraging mindless intellection and conformist thought processes. Such people resist group pressure to conform with consensus reality. This segment of the population is more creative than the majority and includes a small group who have not been professionally trained who demonstrate the ability to make professional level judgments that are more perceptive. Yet, this is a society, that is ruled by the non-creative lying conformist. (Henrickson, http://tcp.com.mt)

http://tavistockagenda.iwarp.com
New Sept. 2009 – “The Mother of All Think Tanks,” Tavistock transnational tentacles form holographic feedback loops, clandestine backdoors and wormhole shortcuts among cultural institutions with compartmentalized projects. Each can be unpacked for their associations and effects on society – Intelligence, Military, Government, NGOs, Economics, InfoTech, Mass Media, Philosophy, Occult, Religion, Science, Academia, Psychology, Psychiatry, Medicine and Zeitgeist.

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EDGEWORKS: The transformative worldview that we are all in it together is the only foundation for mutually assured survival rather than the deadly alternative. EDGEHUNT means expressing something relevant we haven’t seen in the mashup before so it can be addressed through sacred activism, personal and collective. Be an advocate for the future. Steele claims, “Modern IO is not about the old messages of psychological operations (PSYOPS), but rather about empowering billions of people with both information tools and access to truthful information. It is about education, not manipulation. It is about sharing, not secrecy. It is about human understanding to create wealth and stabilize societies, not about the threat of violence and the delivery of precision munitions. IO substitutes information for violence.”

Take a slide down the labyrinthine rabbithole of CIA wizard, Michael J. Riconosciuto

mjrplanet.iwarp.com/index.html

2009 – PROMISes, PROMISes: Please BeLIEve Me

Take a slide down the labyrinthine rabbithole of CIA wizard, Michael J. Riconosciuto

DIRTY TRICKS: Why are some people drawn to the Shadow, to archetypal evil? Some are seduced, some are sociopathic, and some are just born into it. Others, finding themselves opposed to it, overcome their natural denial, groupthink and fear to work as watchdogs against it to help others wake up to the unpleasant realities of Transmodern life. Some live their whole lives in the Shadowlands where white is black and black is white, and no one can tell one from the other. Michael James Riconsciuto is one such man. To enter his world is to enter a wrestling match with the devil of evil that men do, but that for which they must still be held accountable. Likewise, we are all accountable for the collective evil that is done in the name of our nation. Do the ends justify the means? Are good and evil relative? Our destiny lies in our answer. Black Ops is a realm where it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference. Some consider their mission spiritual warfare, a transcendent battle. Are they deluded or working from a broader paradigm of restricted knowledge? Is evil a vehicle, a means to an end, or an end in itself? What we do know is it bites the hand that feeds it.

09/29/2009

COVER UP MURDERS MASKED ILLEGAL ACTIVITY ON RESERVATION. Software piracy, weapons testing, biowarfare experiments, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action: The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department has identified a suspect in the 1981 unsolved murders of three Coachella Valley residents. 52-year-old James “Jimmy “ Hughes was arrested at the Miami International Airport Saturday on a fugitive warrant related to three California murders. A self-described ex-mafia hit man, evangelist and president of Jimmy Hughes Ministries, Hughes has traveled throughout Honduras and the U.S. “taking the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” according to his Web site. He is fighting extradition from Miami. Hughes is suspected of being involved in “the Octopus murders” – the 1981 killings of 32-year-old former Cabazon tribal leader Fred Alvarez, 44-year-old Patty Castro, and 42-year-old Ralph Boger. The California attorney general is prosecuting the case because Hughes is a distant relative of Riverside County D.A. Rod Pacheco. The bodies were found on the patio of a house Alvarez rented in Rancho Mirage. Members of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians have long disputed any possibility of a link between the murders and the tribe.

Many Have Died But the Story Has Not…

The Undercover Cover-Up that Still Haunts Many Survivors and Our Nation

Convicted felon, Michael James Riconosciuto is a nexus of Spyence, Conspiracy & Cover Up but not implicated in any murders: “All scandals overlap” — Secret Government, “October Surprise,” Iran-Contra, CIA, Drug & Arms Smuggling, Biowarfare, PROMIS, Inslaw, Wackenhut, Conmen, Danny Casolaro Murder, Experimental Weapons Testing, Cabazon Indian Reservation, Cabazon Arms, Lockerbie, BCCI Money Laundering, Transnational Crime, Robert Hanssen/OBL, 9/11, Disinformation, Octopus Murders

www.youtube.com/watch

BeLIEve Me: Accused as a disinfo agent, MJR may lie, but he has part of the truth…whether he was bagman for Iran/Contra, or the SARS biochemist, or the CIA computer Einstein, some person of interest surely was…and his framing and analysis indicate insider knowledge.

Call it the mother of all overlapping conspiracy theories…

…a marriage of the Mob, Intel & Government:

Let’s see, there’s Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Casey, plotting dirty tricks together. There’s the Ayatollah Khomeini, Ed Meese, Moammar Gadhafi, Ollie North and Saddam Hussein, helping out. There’s Manuel Noriega, Clark Clifford and the notorious Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) making it easy to do bad, backed by a vast network of drug barons, arms merchants, spies, hit men, Indian tribes and international con artists whose evil web reaches every corner of the Earth. This is the story — THE OCTOPUS — that got journalist Danny Casolaro and 3 Indio/Rancho Mirage residents murdered.

ARMS MERCHANT & EVIL GENIUS: And there’s one Michael James Riconosciuto — acknowledged as a technical and electronics genius — a native of Tacoma and a convicted illegal drug maker, who claimed that his life was in danger because he knows too much. His father Marshall, was a business partner of Richard Nixon. MJR is in the same prison-system now monopolized by Wackenhut and affiliates. Wackenhut changed its name to avoid its negative history. He claims to have invented a ‘pineapple bomb,’ a barometric bomb with Ted Gunderson, a suspected COINTEL PRO agent.

Following the Oklahoma City bombing, Gunderson promoted Michael Riconosciuto’s claims that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was destroyed not by a truck bomb, but by a pineapple-sized “barometric bomb”. Gunderson refers to local (not national) news reports of bombs planted inside the building which were found because they did not detonate.

GUNDERSON DEFENDED RICONOSCIUTO WHEN HE WAS ARRESTED AND INDICATED HE AND RICONOSCIUTO HAD WORKED TO PREVENT TERRORISM AT THE LA OLYMPICS. 7/26/98 www.esotericworldnews.com/octopus.htm

“….Former FBI. Special Agent, Ted Gunderson, speaks for Riconosciuto’s credibility. Gunderson, who lives in Manhattan Beach, has worked with Riconosciuto for many years in his capacity as private investigator. “Together, according to Gunderson, they were responsible for thwarting a terrorist operation during the Los Angeles Olympics. According to Gunderson, Riconosciuto was well known in certain circles as a genius in almost all sciences. “The so-called drug operation broken up in Washington State was an electro hydrodynamic mining operation claimed Gunderson, using Townsend Brown technology. A videotape viewed by this journalist revealed metallic powders and apparent processes unrelated to drug manufacture. Indeed, a government analysis of soil samples revealed the absence of drug contamination, but a high concentration of barium. Barium is often found in high voltage related work…”"

www.newsmakingnews.com/vm,phi…,08.htm

“Incredibly, Riconosciuto developed the “electrostatic bomb” at Dyno-nobel, which is the real bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. McVeigh’s bomb anfo truck bomb was actually only used to destroy the signature of the much more powerful electrostic bomb that Riconosciuto named “blue lightning”. Interestingly enough, Dyno-Nobel, which is based in Salt Lake City (and was ” taken over” by the Mormons) sold all of the ammoniun nitrate that Ramzi Yousef used in the 1993 WTC bombing…Dyno-Nobel was formerly known as Hercules Powder, which was an exposives manufacturer founded by Michael’s father, Marshal Riconosciuto.”

BLUETOOTH ANTECEDENT in the 80s?: “The most startling revelation in Riconosciuto’s discussion is that the PROMIS software wasn’t “bugged” by any ordinary means (say, by providing a secret telephone line access). Instead, it utilized a radical new technology Riconosciuto developed that actually enabled the “bugged” computer to broadcast without wires or phone connections – signals which could be picked up at a remote site, say from an Elint satellite. The software modification forces the computer to produce non-sinusoidal waveforms called Walsh functions, waveforms different from radio waves or other kinds of transmission media. “All the files were read out, all the files were broadcast constantly,” Riconosciuto said. He added that the technique has vast commercial applications, and will “allow wireless computer networking, with very small amounts of power, over very large distances.”

CIA ASSET: Shortly after his surprise 1991 visit to So. Oregon after Danny Casolaro’s suspicious death, I became aware that Michael Riconosciuto, known to me as a long-time CIA asset, was arrested in Washington State by DEA for the manufacturing of illegal chemical drugs. I had also become aware of the fact that Riconosciuto made a sworn statement, prior to his arrest, about his participation in a covert U.S. intelligence initiative to sell INSLAW’s PROMIS to foreign governments. Historically, the high-tech genius had been well-protected by an alphabet soup of intel agencies: NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA and ATF. But in 1991, the enterprise turned on him.

DISINFO EXPERT & WHISTLEBLOWER: Not your average LSD and Meth cook, his claims include carrying the money to delay hostage release in Iran-Contra, selling stolen Stinger missiles to OBL during Afghan war with the USSR, engineering race-specific biowarfare agents, money-laundering, programming PROMIS espionage back channel software, experimental weapons, explosives, and much, much more… In Feb. 2001, he warned Colin Powell of a terrorist threat of great magnitude. www.michaelriconosciuto.com/nine11/

educate-yourself.org/tg/TCUr…01.shtml

INTERNET DESIGNER: In 1965, MJR had a company, Tymeshare, and a ‘Tymesharing’ program that was the early form of communicating between computers over voice capable lines. His company, along with Dartmouth College, got two computers communicating from coast to coast. So, in this sense we have the Internet because of his pioneering efforts and inspiration.

CHILD PRODIGY: When he was just 10 years old, Michael wired his parents’ neighborhood with a working private telephone system that undercut Ma Bell; in the eighth grade, he won a science fair with a model for a three-dimensional sonar system. By the time he was a teenager, he had won so many science fairs with exhibits of laser technology that he was invited to be a summer research assistant at Stanford’s prestigious Cooper Vapor Laser Laboratory. Dr. Arthur Schalow [sic], a Nobel laureate, remembers him even now. “You don’t forget a 16-year-old youngster who shows up with his own argon laser. (Village Voice)

INFORMANT: ‘Magic Mike’ is a self-acknowledged informant who has been instrumental in revealing details of methamphetamine operations in the California counties of Mariposa, Madera, Fresno, Riverside, Alameda and Sonoma. Riconosciuto names as participants in these operations such people as Richard Knozzi, Jim DeSilva, Ben Kalka and others. Several of the people he informed on served long jail sentences.

Riconosciuto keeps one foot firmly in the drug culture and the other foot securely planted in the world of covert operations. Those who wrapped themselves in the secrecy of black ops were also named by Riconosciuto. He exposed the activities of Robert Booth Nichols, Al C. Holbert, “Dr.” Earl Brian and others.

INMATE: Federal Prison inmate (#21309-086) Inmate locator list Michael James Riconosciuto, age 61, white male, release date 6-03-2017 from Terminal Island FCI (San Pedro, California).

WILD BLUE YONDER: Michael Riconosciuto was a Wackenhut-CIA employee who told researcher Michael Lindemann that he had attempted to get a whole helicopter full of documents and evidence detailing illegal biogenetic activities and non-Congressionally sanctioned projects involving ‘illegal aliens’ out of the Nevada Test Site. MJR claims, the chopper was blown out of the sky, killing all five personnel on board. Michael’s father happened to be Marshall Riconosciuto, a fascist and a supporter of Adolph Hitler who was a very close friend of Fred L. Crisman. Crisman was involved in the Maurey Island ‘UFO’ sighting incident in 1947 near Tacoma, Washington, which researcher Anthony Kimory believes involved the test-flight of hybrid craft.

GENOCIDE: The PROMIS software eventually evolved into very bio-chemistry-specific versions named “Daylight” and “Oracle8i”.

This PROMIS software evolution is best understood by reading THE LAST CIRCLE by Cheri Seymour, aka Carol Marshall – particularly the 15th chapter. This chapter reveals the contents of files provided to Seymour by PROMIS program-modifier Michael Riconosciuto documenting the history of Ft. Detrick’s biological warfare development and the stated desire of our nation’s top “National Institutes of Health” and CDC scientists to use new computer technologies to create sophisticated “Designer Viruses” for covert CIA use. He also documents the INFILTRATION of ISRAELI AGENTS into the labs of Ft. Detrick.

Riconosciuto’s “modifications” are so “sensitive to national security” that Riconosciuto was placed into forced detention in a high-security federal prison – not because any “crime” had been committed – but to keep him from being kidnapped by other competing “multi-national group’s” interests.

According to Riconosciuto’s files, the NEW GENERATON of PROMIS software, today trademarked as DAYLIGHT™ and ORACLE8i™ are unbelievably complex, and have exhibited incredible ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE capabilities as portrayed so well in the movie, “Eagle Eye”.

ORACLE8i™ not only has the ability to rapidly analyze gene clade sequencing in viruses and bacteria in mere minutes, it can build a model of a complex new viral structure just as quickly, and can calculate to the minutest detail its possible “drift” of mutations after its release. This software can not only predict the DEATH TOLL the virus would produce, but also the accurate final numbers of its genetic mutations over a given period of time. In short, this software can indeed control a complex GENOCIDE AGENDA in the form of an engineered, worldwide VIRAL PANDEMIC from beginning to end – Alpha to Omega. Evidence suggests that this agenda was indeed systematically set in motion in March of 2009.

The big question is “who in the cryptocracy would NOT want this man dead?”

Danny Casolaro was writing a book related to MJR called THE OCTOPUS. Inslaw, a manufacturer whose owner had accused the Justice Department of stealing its extremely powerful PROMIS case management software; the so-called “October Surprise” theory that Iran had held back the American hostages to help Ronald Reagan win the 1980 presidential election; the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International; and Iran-Contra. The scheme was so vast and complex that Casolaro referred to it as “the Octopus”. Casolaro was found dead in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia in August of 1991, his wrists slashed 10 to 12 times. His death was, of course, ruled a suicide.

Casolaro’s story might have continued its slow fade into the dusty corners of conspiracy theory folklore, except that charges were filed 10-4-2009 against a Miami-based missionary to Honduras named Jimmy Hughes for the 1981 slayings of Fred Alvarez and two associates in Rancho Mirage, California. It is believed that Alvarez was killed to silence him before he could carry out a threat to exposure financial improprieties and other illegal activity on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Riverside County, California. Incredibly, what happened on Cabazon land in the late ’70s and early ’80s reaches around the world and into the highest levels of the US government — part of Casolaro’s “Octopus”.

Central to the story, especially when he tells it, is the mysterious Michael Riconosciuto, now serving a 20-year sentence for production and distribution of meth. Understanding “the Octopus” is like the old story of the blind men trying to comprehend their first encounter with an elephant: the parts you touch can appear to be completely different and totally unrelated. Running over the outlines of the case in about half an hour, we didn’t even mention mainstream media reports — published prior to 9/11 — that FBI spy Robert Hanssen sold an upgraded version of PROMIS to Russia, which in turn sold it to Osama bin Laden. It’s believed Al Qaeda used the software to penetrate databases and move funds between banks without being detected by US counterterror groups. A PROMIS derivative was also allegedly used by Chinese military intelligence to steal nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. So, like the Octopus, the tentacles extending from the modifications made by Michael Riconosciuto at the Cabazon reservation are many and far-reaching.

Danny Casolaro was found with his wrists slashed in a motel bathtub in Martinsburg, West Virginia on August 10, 1991. He was a struggling writer and something of a romantic. Recently he had also styled himself as an investigator, contacting a variety of spooks-turned-victims and weaving their stories into an “Octopus” theory. This would be the book of his career: Danny as dragon-slayer. A year later, documents were missing from Casolaro’s motel room. Was it suicide or murder?

THE OCTOPUS involves Inslaw, Inc. and its Promis software, as well as Michael Riconosciuto, a child prodigy who became a secret agent and drug pusher, and still keeps a bevy of fringe journalists busy by dispatching leads from his jail cell. Mix in several years of affidavits flying like shrapnel, mostly due to Inslaw’s reasonable claim that Promis was stolen by the Justice Department. Add Riconosciuto’s unreasonable claim that he hacked Promis, making it so magical that U.S. intelligence tried to install it everywhere as a Trojan horse. Include more prominent names than you can shake a stick at, each with loose but spooky connections to everyone else, and throw in a few more investigative trails that end in corpses.

Michael Roconosciuto claimed to be an intelligence officer monitoring the hostage situation in Iran, staying at the apartment of Robert Booth Nichols and Ellen Hopko Nichols located near the Nicosia, Cyprus airport. This group of people, according to Michael, were also involved in the “controlled drug operation” run by the DIA. Riconosciuto stated that they were paid with unsigned BCCI travelers checks. Shortly before the Lockerbie crash Riconosciuto returned to his home in Oregon. He knew that the McKee team would be returning to the United States to “blow the whistle” on the drug operation run by George W. Bush. Riconosciuto told me that when the warning came to the unit in Nicosia that there might be a bombing of Pan Am #103, Robert Booth Nichols told Rinconosciuto that he would change the reservation for the McKee team to another flight, just as FBI agent Revell’s son had done. The night of the Lockerbie crash, Bobbi Riconosciuto was watching the television with their children when she learned of the crash and heard that the McKee team went down with others on board. She woke Michael up and told him. Michael broke from Robert Booth Nichols from that point forward because he held Nichols responsible for betraying the McKee team. Robert Booth Nichols became the key source for Danny Casolaro who had contacted Lester K. Coleman seven days before his murder in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

Michael Riconosciuto enters the intrigue. Michael Riconosciuto, a self proclaimed CIA operative, was a project manager for the Wackenhut Company, a security company that is virtually a CIA front. After Earl Brian of Hadron, Inc. illegally obtained the legal rights to PROMIS from Inslaw, the software company the Hamiltons had owned, he hired Michael to create a “back door” into the software. This would enable the trackers of other intel agencies using PROMIS to be tracked by the CIA. Riconosciuto was working out of the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, CA a hotbed of CIA intrigue and black-ops projects.

Previously, Michael Riconosciuto had participated in developing software enabling the CIA to launder drug money raised by trafficking drugs through an airport in Mena, Arkansas while Clinton was governor of the state and Bush Sr. was in the White House. In a signed affidavit to a federal court, Riconosciuto stated “that the Wackenthut-Cabazon joint venture was intended to support the needs of a number of foreign governments and forces, including governments and forces in Central America and the Middle East. The Contras in Nicaragua represented one of the most important priorities of the joint venture”.

Casolaro

Coincidentally, Danny Casolaro, an independently wealthy individual turned free lance, investigative journalist, was working on a book to be titled “The Octopus”. His investigations lead him to the Wackenhut-Cabazon operation during Riconosciuto’s involvement there. Gary Webb was another freelance investigative journalist, albeit not independently wealthy, who touched on the Wackenhut-Cabazon operations as revealed in his 1998 book “Dark Alliance.”

Webb stated: “Wackenhut was very active in El Salvador during the Contra war, providing employees to protect the U.S. Embassy and other installations, and doing ‘ “things you wouldn’t want your mother to know about’ “. Gary Webb goes on to explain how the isolation of the small Cabazon reservation, a tribe of thirty people, and its tax exempt status and lack of federal oversight were the advantages gained by using that location. (“Dark Allance” p.113)

Webb continued ” . . . Danny Casolaro was looking into the Cabazon/Wackenhut projects as part of a lager conspiracy investigation at the time he was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, allegedly a suicide victim. He had told friends he was convinced that ” ’spies, arms merchants and others were using the reservation as a low-profile site on which to develop weapons for Third World armies, including the Nicaraguan Contras.’ ” (Dark Alliance p.113)

Karen Bixman in her “Octopus” article wrote, “Riconosciuto asserted that all scandals overlap, and Casolaro, who gave Roconosciuto the title ‘ ” Danger Man’ “, was introduced to the underground world of ‘ “spooks’ “. Amid investigating the related scandals, a pattern of mysterious deaths also began to emerge”. In her “Octopus” article, Karen Bixman goes into detail on these mysterious deaths. Personally, I believe Gary Webb’s death was the most recent of related mysterious deaths.

Broken PROMIS: Tentacles of Cryptocracy

This germy story is linked to the Octopus conspiracy and the PROMIS software scandal of the 1980s as described by mad genius Michael James Roconosciuto. In an interview with this author shortly before he went to prison, MJR personally recounted the tangled story of the many tentacles of the metacontrol system, Octopus.

Roconosciuto subsequently told his story in print but the details and analysis remain the same. This is the dangerous story that got investigative journalist Danny Casolaro killed in 1991, best summarized in The Final Circle, by Carol Marshall (1996), who used MJR’s secret files to connect the dots. www.lycaeum.org/books/book…ircle/1.htm

The strongest link is personnel from Hadron, a front company, founded in the 80s, for questionable activity including germ warfare. Nearly every hospital in the world buys their products. Hadron, with Dr. Earl Brian as director, provided engineering and computer consulting services. Brian was convicted in the 1980s on fraud charges.

Both Hadron and Dr. Brian were linked with the theft of enhanced PROMIS software from its owner, the Inslaw Corporation. PROMIS was a highly sophisticated computer program capable of integrating a wide variety of databases, now reportedly mated with artificial intelligence. PROMIS was modified by intelligence agencies with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data from adversaries.

Bio Rad made the most hazardous medical, biological and nuclear chemicals in the world. BioRad’s Earl Brian started InfoTech, then Hadron to protect the parent company from lawsuits. MJR claims they had the capacity to bioengineer DNA based, genetically targeted pathogens – ethnic bioweapons.

Hadron tried to buy Inslaw and its PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) software in 1983. It could be used not only for cracking business, national or international computer systems through a built in backdoor, but also be modified to track money laundering.

By 1985, Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy in a DoJ investigation. When Inslaw refused to sell to Hadron, DOJ tried to bankrupt and liquidate Inslaw forcing the rock bottom sale of its assets, including PROMIS, perhaps to Hadron. Dr. Brian turned his interests to genetic research, biological technology.

This scandal was closely tied to shady dealings by Wackenhut to develop biological warfare viruses on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, California. In order to develop vaccines, which sounds innocuous enough, the virus must first be created. Biological warfare viruses have to be highly sophisticated to be used in military applications.

Any type of biological research on an Indian reservation is not subject to scrutiny by the federal government because Indian reservations are sovereign nations. Wackenhut Corporation attempted to sell “biological warfare viruses” and vaccine kits to the U.S. government to be used against small countries bordering Albania or large countries bordering the Soviet Union.

William C. Patrick, III developed the process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at the level of one trillion spores per gram. Patrick has worked with Kanatjan Alibekov, known as “Ken Alibek” since he defected to the US in 1992. In Russia, Alibek was the No. 2 expert in the FSU’s biowarfare program, under Vladimir Pasechnik.

Ken Alibek became President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems, a subsidiary of Alexandria, Va.-based Hadron, Inc. Hadron specializes in “the development of technical solutions for the intelligence community.” It received millions in funding for medical biodefense research in the field of non-specific immunity from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and the NIH.
AKA “Dangerman”

Broken PROMIS: Tentacles of Cryptocracy

In Intelligence they eat their own. The sinister webwork is littered with stolen and broken promises. This germy story is linked to “The Octopus” (intelligence and black ops for profit) conspiracy and the PROMIS software scandal of the 1980s as described by eccentric scientific genius Michael James Roconosciuto, (pronounced Riconoshooto), weapons systems designer and computer software expert.

He’s been accused of being a publicity-seeking pathological liar and a disinformation agent, but the intervening years have proved him right more often than not. He has one foot in the drug underground and the other in hi tech intelligence. Still, even after he went to prison, he continued making uncanny predictions.

MJR was involved in a variety of sensitive intelligence projects besides PROMIS, from selling shoulder-fired missiles to Osama bin Laden during “Charlie Wilson’s War,” to hi-tech top-down computer programming operations, microwave transmissions, digital cash dispersal, cryptoanalytic attack, to germ warfare, and alleged drug dealing. It wouldn’t be far off to say he operated like a gangster. That is to say, this wise-guy knows the score when it comes to both state-sponsored and organized transnational crime

He even predicted 9/11 by hijacking but was ignored. According to Riconosciuto, if properly investigated, the events of 911 may not have occurred. On February 5, 2001, Riconosciuto wrote a certified letter to his attorney, Don Bailey, that he had contact with someone in an Islamic group called the “Base” (AI Qaeda), and that said group was currently in preparation for an attack in the United States, but would not divulge specific details unless the U.S. Government granted immunity from prosecution to his sources. In this letter, Riconosciuto also stated that he had an inside source who could furnish information concerning the handling of false IDs and passports for the group. (Ted Gundersson, tedgunderson.com/)

PROMIS was a people-tracking software system sold to intelligence organizations and government drug agencies worldwide. The global dispersion of PROMIS to 88 countries was part of a U.S. plot to spy on other spy agencies. Riconosciuto is one of the architects of the PROMIS backdoor. The original backdoor was a signal using a specialized chip that broadcast the contents of the existing database to monitoring vans or collection satellites using digital spread spectrum data compression whenever the software was run.

The SIGINT was embedded as ordinary computer “noise,” actually encrypted stream cipher. A stream cipher applies a time- varying transformation to individual digits or bits of data. “Time-varying” means the same sequence of plaintext data bits seen at two different points in time will be encrypted to a different sequence of ciphertext data bits. The most famous stream cipher is the Verdam cipher, or “one-time pad.” It requires independent, uniform distribution of the keys, which are used only once and then discarded.

PROMIS was eventually even sold for $2 million to the Russians by infamous traitor Robert Hanssen, who worked for FBI. The Russians passed it on to bin Laden, allowing him to monitor U.S. efforts to track him down, federal law enforcement officials said, according to the Washington Post.

October 26, 2001. Brit Hume. The software program is called Promis. Sources tell Fox that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have used and constantly modified Promis software to manage caseloads, track and store classified information, and keep it secure for decades.

But the concern is that bin Laden or Al Qaeda could get on-line and use it to monitor the worldwide criminal investigation and hide themselves, to monitor the worldwide financial investigation and hide their money, or monitor government operations of the governments that use the software.

As a senior agent in the FBI’s counterterrorism bureau, sources say Hanssen was tasked with helping allies like Germany and England with the installation and use of their versions of the PROMIS program. Numerous countries now, however, are tightening their cyber security, including Germany, Great Britain and Canada has actually investigated potential tampering with its Promis programs. Israel has used it on and off for years, too. www.boingboing.net/2001/10/…it-w.html

In an interview with this author (Miller) shortly before he went to prison, MJR personally recounted the tangled story of the many tentacles of the metacontrol system, “The Octopus.” His story got weirder than The Matrix but he was perfectly lucid, easily recounting names, dates and particulars, seemingly eager to spread his story in a futile gesture to protect himself from what he perceived correctly as immanent danger. His well-placed “partners” had turned on him. This explained why he had arrived in Southern Oregon “on the lamb” in a Winnebago with a gun turret and a phalanx of body guards.

Michael Riconoscuito was a computer expert for the Central Intelligence Agency, he was their Einstein. There was nothing he couldn’t do with a computer, for good or for bad. But he had many secrets and he began to see the ruthlessness of his colleagues. Michael Riconoscuito decided to testify about massive corruption in the U.S. Justice Department and the intelligence agency. He agreed to provide his insider knowledge to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee investigating the Inslaw affair. www.toddjumper.com/eaglenet…wo57.html

The Secret War Against Medford, Oregon

>Subject: The Secret War Against Medford, Oregon (fwd)
>Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 15:18:35 -0700
Perceptions, July/August 1995

>From "The Secret War Against Medford, Oregon", by Mark Metcalf.

Recently, while reading a back issue of Nexus magazine, I came across a
news clip titled "The Mysterious Taos Hum."  The story said that
Representative Bill Richardson (D-NM) has asked the House Select Committee
to investigate a noise that causes dizziness, shortness of breath,
headaches, anxiety and sleeplessness, and is thought by some to emanate
from a secret defense-related project plaguing various cities in New
Mexico.

I realized that I might know something about that sound, something that I
had been playing it safe with for fourteen years.

During the years 1980-83, I was living with the daughter of the new-
deceased Dr. David Fraser, former head of the Department of Toxicology at
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  One Day she told me of a
frightening encounter involving her father and the American military.  When
Dr. Fraser came to stay with us while on vacation in 1981, I asked him to
tell me the story.

Suicide capital overnight

He said that in the early 1970s, the small city of Medford, Oregon, became
the suicide capital of the United States overnight.  (The exact dates can
be found by checking national health statistics.)  After Dr. Fraser was
notified of this dramatic anomaly, he organized and sent a team of
researchers to look for the cause.  The team checked the water, the air,
the soil and a variety of additional possibilities, but could find no reason
for the massive increase in suicides.  Then the researchers discovered that
*ultra low frequencies* (ULF) were being beamed into Medford, Oregon, from
a nearby military base.  When they went to the base and met with its
commanding officer, he said that although he knew about ULF, his base was
not responsible, the Russians were!  However, the ULF waves stopped the
very next day.

The researchers determined that the military base was not the only source;
the ULF was also coming into the homes of the populace through their
television antennas, which created some sort of standing-wave resonance
within the structure of the home itself.  People who were often at home in
the houses with TV antennas became severely depressed even if they did not
watch TV.

Since the ULF wave had stopped, the researchers returned to the University
to write their report and to confer with Dr. Fraser.  Several men
displaying CIA credentials arrived on campus and said that the ULF waves
beamed into Medford were a "national security" matter.  They explicitly
threatened to kill each of the researchers, including Dr. David Fraser
himself, should anyone speak further about it.  As far as I know, no one
did.

It seems clear that the military-industrial complex secretly declared war
on the American people quite some time ago and is waging a long-term
psychological warfare operation, complete with fully operational, mass
mind-control technology.

In fact, our whole society seems to be what Walter Bowart* refers to as a
"psycho-civilization" ruled by a "cryptocracy."

How we respond makes a difference

What makes this evil that pervades our nation so effective is the
inappropriateness of our response.  We behave much like Dr. B.F. Skinner's
chicken when placed between two salivating wolves.  We just go on pecking.
But who do we call when the bad guys have badges and judges and ray guns--
when blueprints of new federal prisons have cells labeled "labs"?

How can we learn to develop responses that are appropriate to the dire
position we have acquiesced to?  We must look for new models of behavior to
consider and act upon.  We must deeply consider the achievements of the
founding fathers, which in many ways were without precedent.  If we do not
find the courage to change our behavior we may soon come to the end of
human history on this planet.

     As Abraham Lincoln said:

     "The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and
     conspires against it in times of adversity.  It is more despotic
     than monarchy.  More insolent than autocracy.  More selfish
     than bureaucracy.  I see in the near future, a crisis approaching
     that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my
     country.  Corporations have been enthroned.  An era of
     corruption will follow and the money power of the country will
     endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of
     the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and
     the republic is destroyed."

-----
* Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control, Dell Publishing, 1978, out of
print, Tucson.  Jim Martin at (707)964-8326.  Now available from Flatland,
P.O.Box 2420, Fort Bragg, CA 95437

Why Is It Called Brain “Trust”?

Brainstorming: “Yes, We Can”

“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

“The Mother of All Think Tanks,” Tavistock tentacles form holographic feedback loops, backdoors and wormhole shortcuts among cultural institutions.  E ach can be unpacked for their associations and effects on society – Intelligence, Military, Government, NGOs, Economics, InfoTech, Mass Media, Philosophy, Occult, Religion, Science, Academia, Psychology, Psychiatry, Medicine and Zeitgeist. Behavior “Mod Squad”

Tavistock coordinates the architectsof control. The fractal ‘fallout’ — other institutions, programs and cultural trends — can be mapped from combinations of the above working together as societal control mechanisms.

The shortlist of Tavistock’s fellow globalist institutions includes Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rice Institute, CIA, MI6, SRI, Brookings, RAND, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations, IMF, PNAC, Pilgrim’s Society, NASA, MIT, Wharton School, World Bank, National Training Laboratories, Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Tavistock tailors programs to specific situations for these and more as well as setting standards in psychiatry, psychology and organizational management.

Programs with proven historical contexts originating or rooted in Tavistock “brain trust” include: “War on Terror,”  “Total Information Awareness,” “Full Spectrum Dominance,” Joint Vision 2020, “Shock & Awe,” propaganda, narco-capitalism, psyops, psiops, social engineering, psystrat, “Open Government,” Infowar, behavioral modification, mass brainwashing, “buzzwords,” “Delphi Panels,” “Round Table” agenda, Air Force 2025, suppressed science, manufactured wars, “responsible globalization.”

These “Illuminoids” also orchestrate the psychosocial war for your mind, your body and your soul: nonconsensual experimentation, counterculture, LSD, New Age, rebellion, dissociation, alienation, cults, -isms, cryptocracy, disinformation, false-flag ops, militant activism, crisis creation, postmodern Apocalypse culture, presence-in-absence, fake rapture, ‘prophet hologram,’ rogue nations, manufactured psychological shocks and stress, encounter groups, Aquarian Conspiracy, Agenda 21, Project Blue Beam, Long Crisis, corporate feudalism and some say extraterrestrial threat.  [Details at http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_committee300_10.htm ]

“Bourne Again”

In the 2002-2007 film series, a take-off on CIA’s MK Ultra program, hypno-patsy Jason Bourne learns how intelligence eats its own. As the series unfolds, we see how mind control and programmed assassins are used to steer sociopolitical “reality,” while concealing and erasing memory of the mindbending puppetmasters. Only the biggest lies are ‘too big to fail.’

The irony is, in this sense, “we the people” are all “Bourne Again.” Not surprisingly, the fourth film of the franchise is on the way, and a first-person shooter video game is already here. The seduction/murder perps who pull the ‘magic trigger’ on the smoking gun have perfected the art of ‘hiding in plain sight’ in their Magic Kingdom. Tavistock is the rudder on the pirate ship of state.

They don’t even care if we know how it works because ‘plausible deniability’ has become irrelevant in the Theatre of Cruelty that molds minds with metaphysics while shattering our perceptions. “The Secret” of reality creation is that it’s beyond your control. The new Holy Trinity of our warring instincts is money/sex/power. The GOD we learned to worship is GoldOilDrugs.

Tavistock’s “Time Machine”

Just outside London, Tavistock Institute is the sloganeering nerve center of a global psywar apparatus that attacks our collective conscious and unconscious relentlessly. Established after World War I by the Duke George of Kent to study shellshock, the original Tavistock Clinic developed psychological warfare for British intelligence.

More than an international institution, Tavistock became a nonlocal community of practice — a dark “invisible college,” the Castaglia of the cryptocracy. Tavistock’s grandmother is the drug empire of the British East India Company and Theosophical esoterics. Its grandfather is “The Open Conspiracy” of Utopian H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Cecil Rhodes and Fabian socialists. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) helped create the Fabian Society.

Tavistock is the paranoid child of the Liepzig and Frankfurt Schools of critical thinking and behaviorism. The psychodynamics of Freud and Jung are its godparents. But Tavistock’s birth mother was a whore — a propaganda front called Wellingon House, known as “The Lie Factory.”

We live in duality. Using ‘time’ as their fulcrum, Tavistock explorations in crafting reality became exploitations, selling Utopian idealism to the New Left and patriotic Homeland Security to the born-again Right. Pitting them eternally against one another is a neo-con racket that molds all party themes. The game is collapsing the traditional world. They employ both religious and secular currents in the same way, playing both sides against the middle.

Turning ‘Great Game’ strategies on the public, Tavistock’s agenda transcends institutional boundaries, hoodwinking us about the nature of reality with stealth psystrat, media and cultural tactics while imposing and maintaining control through the collective psyche. The seat of power has switched from a pyramidal to a holographic power structure.

Intelligence tricks are deployed from the heart of the machinery of state to engineer the consistent illusions of our psychosocial culture — an interactive fiction. The social glue of trust has dried and cracked, leaving less than enlightened self-interest in an “I’ll get mine first,” mentality.

Tavistock is now selling downshifting income and aging lean. Modulating someone’s internal state is a powerful form of control using the power of imagery. Conditioning replaces external constraint with internal compulsions on both essence and substance. Collectively, Tavistock is a ’strange attractor’ in the global psychodynamic field. It has brought us all to the self-organizing state of criticality – the boundary of chaos and order.

Our only defense is awareness and DIY mind control. But the torrent of information is manipulated to guide our motivations while engineering consensus by repackaging myths, memes and metaphors. In the 1960s, the Milgram Experiment demonstrated the draconian perils inherent in authority overriding personal conscience to compliantly “follow orders.” The sun shines alike on torture and compassion.

Multimedia quietly changes our thoughts and opinions, creating a mashup of fiction and reality — a ‘friction’ that rubs everyone the wrong way. The magic circle of the hypnotic primetime television schedule holds all in its restrictive spell of dominion with celebrity ringmasters.

While it captures the appearance of things, mimesis holds up an illusory mirror. Catharsis creates communal emotional discharge that orchestrates identification with group feelings. To Freud, catharsis was the traumatic transfer of a memory ["meme-ory", collectively] from the unconscious to the conscious. Though it effectively empties us of our own potentially meaningful creative content, the culture is addicted to it.

Rather than purging our pathologies, emotional ventilation voyeuristically facilitates them. It evokes them with daily rituals. Simulation becomes second nature like breathing — we are The Sims. First-person shooter games are Transmodern scapegoating. What we ‘Discover’ on one channel becomes ‘History’ on another. As one commentator put it, “Armageddon is the new black.”

Crisis Creation

Not reserving their techniques for the enemy, Tavistock spread their contagious theory and practice of mass mind control into all strategic institutions. Tavistock wrote the blueprint for global domination, a triumph of image over substance. The ‘hydraulic model’ of tensions has given way to The Field theory of full-spectrum domination. The holographic structure is  everywhere contained in its fractal satellites, each of which contains the entire program and can take over when others fail.

They wrote the book on propaganda, prognostication and profiling — the staples of the full-spectrum surveillance society. They have contrived history. Facts mixed with fiction produces friction. The simulation substitutes for reality. A ritual is just a play with audience participation. But it changes you in the alchemical process.

Funded by British royalty, Rothchilds, Rockefellers, the Federal Government and Wall Street they learned the secret of transmuting infinite symbols of transformation into infinite power. Without wielding overt control, the Tavistock juggernaut has influenced the direction and effects of virtually every human endeavor with political and psychological warfare through its web of interlinking institutions.  Following the lead of the British East India Company, transnational drug money is the mother’s milk of black ops politics.

Through a twist of fate, the shaping of Tavistock became synonymous with the shaping of global culture by forcing unwelcome changes and seizing psychological control of the human race. The brainwashing institute has twisted our beliefs into their very opposites by collapsing our psychic boundaries. Now, we are permanently “shellshocked.”

Holographic Power Structure

The Tavistock agenda identifies and creates macro-trends, such as the “New Left” and militant activism as counter point to Neocon manipulation through radical religious policies. In other words, it is a primary polarizing entity at work throughout all levels of society, playing both sides against the middle. It does even better creating outside Adversaries through propaganda and projection, such as the distracting wars on terror, drugs, poverty and cancer — all of which seem unresolvable. Viable solutions simply aren’t allowed and are actively suppressed.

A Rockefeller grant gave birth to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London in 1947. 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. [Historical details at www.newswithviews.com/Cuddy/d...s122.htm and educate-yourself.org/nwo/nwo...t.shtml]

Tavistock sets national agendas as part of the global shadow government. It used covert techniques to sell the war with Germany, the state of Israel, the Domino Theory and the Cold War for financial gain. Deliberate creation of crisis is a primary tool of social engineering and global psychodrama. Other networked thinktanks are its dissemination organ. They create peer pressure throughout all strata of society designed to break people down into consensus conformity.

Class War

The character of mighty oaks and dense forests are holographically contained in their tiny seeds. There are many intertwined twisted roots, many divergent branches each with their own agendas, and many strange fruits on the Tavistock family tree. All of them lead to interesting tangents, wild connections, and fantastic conclusions. They range from occult influences to outright greed but always involve power and control over the world we experience.

Forms of cultural hegemony include psychological, spiritual, emotional, political, social, military, economic, and intellectual. Like any ideology, Tavistock asks us to believe its deceptive promises. Posthegemony is not a class struggle but a “struggle to produce class,” and maintain an elite class. This is how and why we’ve been Neoconned. No traditional myth is as untruthful as the modern myth of progress — the fiction that life can be altered at will. Paradoxically, the human imagination can be blamed for the worst crimes of our era.

Political Philosopher John Gray attacks humanism as a worldview in which volition and morality are an illusion. He portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. His view is that universal human rights are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different. In the course of pursuing the utopian ideal of a world without evil, entire societies have been destroyed.

“The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run.” (John Gray, Heresies)

Cryptocracy refers to a type of government where the real leaders are hidden. A fake government may appear to be in charge and not know themselves that they are not in charge. It can also be used when referring to similar arrangements in institutions, organizations, orders, sects and cults. Tavistock and its subsidiaries and de facto offshoots are such institutions. Tavistock is the rudder on the pirate ship of state, not only steering but manipulating delusionary and inappropriate foreign and domestic policy.

The occult is one of the keys to world events. Reality is also defined by geopolitics. Like nature, history is cyclic. Drug companies are now as powerful as banks and oil. Corporate feudalism has replaced democracy as the new elitist rule. Corporations compete with nation-states and international mafia-style crime rings, employing the gambits of straw-dogs, smokescreens, hypnotized patsies, manufactured demons and false flags. In this world, nothing is ever as it seems. The best laid plans for utopia have diverted us from confronting geopolitical realities while masking consequences. False pretenses are used to execute plans serving manufactured ambition with quasi-religious zeal.

Taking a cue from the history of the British East India Company, Tavistock created the drug-culture of the 60s by flooding the country with drugs to undermine the peace movement and traditional family. Narco-capitalism is one of the less advertised features of globalization, likely to grow larger in the economic downturn. In the past, drugs have financed what nations could not or would not do. Iran/Contra and Air America are two examples that likely continue in other forms.

The anti-drug crusade is ritual combat masking a deeper level of profound conlusion and profiteering by intelligence groups, money-laundering banksters, urban guerillas, and terrorists. The futile global crusade continues, despite evidence that it is driven by the forces same forces that promoted and exploited it. Consensus is growing that the falsely so-called War on Drugs has failed, yet it is still imminently fundable as an industry. The double-bind is that we cannot afford to continue an absurd war on drugs, nor can we afford to stop. A collapse in drug prices would reduce yet another false bubble in the global economy.

The Tavistock strategy moved far beyond any institutional walls as it mutated and adapted full-spectrum dominance to every facet of life, controlling all elements of the psyops battlefield across the range of conflicts with the witting and unwitting help of NGOs, academia, government, medicine and military. But the negative effects of hegemony lead to global instability. Sinister schemes take on a life of their own.

Society works by mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon responsibilities, threats and punishments. Social Contract Theory is a political and philosophical concept describing how people form states or maintain social order. This is the theoretical groundwork of democracy and republicanism. It implies we give up some autonomy to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order through the rule of law with consent of the governed. Criminals abdicate their rights and society protects itself from such outlaws, theoretically. The biggest criminals remain at large though politicians like to pretend they embody a moral consensus.

The utilitarian social contract and the civil rights it protects are neither “natural rights” nor permanently fixed. The contract itself is only a means to an end — the benefit of all. It is only legitimate to the extent that it meets the general interest. When it fails, we renegotiate the terms with elections and legislation – a reflective equilibrium or a two-stage bargaining game with flesh and bones — the Prisoner’s Dilemma of game theory (originally framed at RAND in 1950 as a Cold War strategy). There is a higher payoff in betrayal than cooperation. The iterated prisoner’s dilemma has also been referred to as the “Peace-War Game.”

If the contract leads to unwitting tyranny, it is void and the right to rebellion is legitimized. Inferred justification is no excuse. In terms of game theory, it isn’t ‘playing fair.’ Strategy-set restricitons skew the game. The old game is made irrelevant by the noncooperative predatory game. There are unseen forces in play.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a classic example of a non-zero-sum game. The equilibrium in Prisoner’s Dilemma is not the optimum solution. The enlightened self-interest of ethical philosophy doesn’t have a chance. Risk is minimized by cooperation at the expense of individuation, of ’soul.’ Illegal, immoral experiments are conducted daily in the name of national securityand you are not exempt. Your compliance is manipulated with forced choices.

Although cooperation is ultimately exploited and extinguished, dynamic paths can “pseudo converge” in ways that allow partial cooperation to flourish for extended periods of time. Propaganda twists emotional involvement wrapped up in personal identity and sense of morality. Restricting information supports false beliefs and ‘belief retention’ blurs critical thinking. If the controllers are criminal, engaging in mass deception, the social contract is utterly broken. The deception is pretending that is not so.

Uninvited States of America

Many articles have described the psychosocial history of the Tavistock Institute and its draconian social-engineering agenda. But this one approaches it using Tavistock’s own analytical frame. It uses the terminology and working model of the psyche of its pioneers, Freud and Jung. Both described the dynamic interplay of instincts, ego and the transpersonal.

Psyche or ’soul’ is our innermost being. Jung believed that, “… within the soul from its primordial beginnings there has been a desire for light and an irrepressible urge to rise out of the primal darkness. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.” Current research suggests that light within us is literal. German biophysicist Popp discovered the virtual photon master control system of cells, but that is another story, (see ‘Photonic Human’).

Depth psychology has retrieved the patterns of psychic dynamics, yet it remains for each individual to make them consciously his or her own as it unfolds from within. In psychology, this is individuation; in philosophy it is the mystic quest. To ’see the light,’ we first have to separate from it by observing ourselves.

The first thing we notice in the ‘examined life’ is the conflicted duality of nature and man: light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Jung (1961) said, “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse.”

Many psychic dynamics, (each with their clusters of behaviors, feelings, thoughts and beliefs), operate like specific trance states, creating a form of tunnel-vision or blinkered vision. They include sexual reductionism, subversion of sexuality, repression, narcissism, projection, fragmentation and integration, compensation, opposition and polarity, fixation, repetition compulsion, catharsis and more.

Jung stressed complexes, typology, mythology, dreams, individuation, transference, universal patterns, esoterics and the dynamic unconscious. Psychodrama retrieves myth and ritual. Politics and history is collective psychodrama. Ritual psychodrama is a mass metaprogramming technique.

So is misdirection, and cultural fads, such as ‘The Secret.’ The real secret is you had better look somewhere else for the truth. (see ‘Intentionality’) This doesn’t imply there is no truth in the notion that “when many people share the same thought, that thought can have physical effects.” History demonstrates that when historic change is in progress, the staus quo engages agents of distraction and disinformation to slow the process.

You are in a conditioned trance right now. Consensus reality is a trance state, your lifestyle is a trance state, your self-image, your social roles, your politics, your lovelife, your beliefs, even your dreams — all conditioned by cultural forces manifesting through your subconscious.

If you aren’t “in” the trance, you are “out” of society, stuck in a desire-lack gulag. Attention, trust, reputation and intimacy are in short supply. Subtle (covert) order undergirds the chaos of the ‘reign of terror,’ a phantom empire, whose latest buzzwords are, “Risk, Control, Trust.” Self-organizing and self-directed behavior is much more likely in the government of the near-future. It gives new latutude to ‘plausible deniability.’

‘Open government’ is emerging as Gov 2.0: “There is a growing tension between hierarchy and collaborative networks. Rewarding based on value produced, rather than how its produced has interesting desultory effects on new tools and approaches. The accuracy and attribution of Web 2.0 tools must be improved for many government applications. Security requirements, fear of scrutiny, and need-to-know create a culture that inhibit the sharing of knowledge and best practices. Communication lines are blurring between department, agency, and national entities. Trust is a notion that’s already deeply held by most government workers.” Yet this government that ‘trusts’ itself doesn’t trust its citizens at all.
Cultural theorist, Arthur Kroker, outlines a dehumanizing vector: “what we traditionally have meant by human perception, (vision, insight, ethical judgment, discriminating between reality and illusion) has been effectively shut down, almost surgically replaced by the virtual vision machine of the militarized imagination. We are suddenly rendered vulnerable to the new virtual myths about the supposedly hygienic character of posthuman warfare.” Information warfare (PSYOPS; Agitprop; psychotronics) is bloodless but just as pernicious.

We live in a complex physical and social structure, historically located in space and time. Kroker suggests we develop filters against such psychic infiltration. He suggests that in radical crisis the individual must courageously refuse to assent to totalitarian power. The destiny of individual freedom depends on maintaining critical ethical judgment and a clarity that can filter out propaganda and rebel against it. Too bad, even our rebellions are controlled. The ’story’ must be continually upgraded to keep the audience engaged.

The institutions and patterns of thought of the (military/industrial/academic) World-Machine have created an interconnecting set of world-wide problems of an ecological, economic and political nature. Machine-minded think tanks, even if they are thinking globally, can only see entropic decay through their own worldview. They cannot think out of the box, unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift that is reflected in the sciences, and likely foreseen in the arts.

The energy shortage, rise of food prices, scandals in government, and unwinable wars against ideas like ideologies and ‘terrorism’ are the first harbingers of the approaching mega-crisis. There are two routes from here: The route of stagnation and eventual total collapse, and the route of flexibility and growth, which could lead to a golden age. Chaos Theory reveals both catastrophe (bifurcation) and renewal are likely inevitable.

Rather than the obsolete paradigm of a ‘world machine’, we need to think in more organic terms of holistic self-organization ~ reorganization at a higher level — as revealed in Chaos Theory, which demonstrates nature’s own creative way of evolutionary assembly. All things are simply connected.

The Talking Cure

The ‘cure’ for society’s ills depends upon who is framing the question and prescribing the remedy. Theories often reflect the personalities of their creators. Freud emphasized family metaphors and psychosexual healing against the backdrop of a war between the instincts for life and death. Jung favored connection to and emancipation from the mythic collective. Patterns and imitation of patterns are common to both theories, as are primacy of frustrations and fears.

The chaos of realities contains hidden consensual structure. Our perceptions are attracted to certain types of order. Yet myths underlie our perceptions of permanence, objective individualism, collectivism, and symbolic reality. Narcissism is destructive, alienating and self-defeating. Trance is a psychic black hole, a reality wormhole.

Breuer’s “talking cure” preceded both Freud and Jung. Talking alone, personal and collective narrative, can change neural pathways in the brain. There is power in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They define our reality. (see ‘Healing Tales’)

The “talking cure” became the signature of the “Tavistock Method,” and a blanket solution (with psychotropic drugs) to mental distress. The character-building method is self-questioning and psychiatric investigation. While therapy gives empathy a mirroring face, it also substitutes a surrogate parent with sanctimonious certitude for self-care and self-regulation.

When Tavistock pioneers began exploring the psyche, it was terra incognita. Now that once unknown ground is riddled with the twisted roots of Tavistock’s insidious penetration and experimentation which has permeated the collective psyche. Modulating someone’s internal state is a powerful form of control using the power of imagery. Conditioning replaces external constraint with internal compulsions on both essence and substance.

Today’s experiential therapies and other panaceas arose from explorations at “the Tavi.” They seem to have a salutory effect on individuals and groups, but therapeutics became the new authority for authority — the arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate thinking. There is no questioning it.

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.

Perhaps the real expose lies not in the Tavistock history but in the methodology of institutionalized alienation. Much of it is Psychology 101, taken to unimaginable extremes, combined with inverted spirituality. There are too many details to cover here, particularly regarding directed-energy weapons and psychotronics (see ‘Synthetic Telepathy’). But generally-speaking, the poison is the cure.

Name Your Poison

The paradoxical Greek word “pharmakon” can be translated as “drug,” which means both “remedy” and “poison”. In “Plato’s Pharmacy”, Derrida traces its meanings in Plato’s dialogues: remedy, poison (either the cure or the illness or its cause), philter, drug, recipe, charm, medicine, substance, spell, artificial color, and paint.

The alchemists also call their elixir or panacea both a cure and a poison, describing the dangers of the interactive field experience, including failure to recognize trance states. Derrida notes, “This pharmakon, this “medicine”, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence.” Tavistock ‘paints’ a picture of the world (simulacrum; textual trance) and we must embrace it.

Restricting the multiple meanings of a given word is a problem of translation, so we can call “pharmakon” either a remedy or a poison. Both a curative medicine and poison, it represents a fundamentally ambiguous binary opposition with no fixed identity or meaning. It is the medium in which opposites are opposed and the contradictory meanings in which they appear to play out. Opposites are identical in nature but different by degrees.
Jung was distinctly Hermetic. Freud exalted the fused instincts Eros and Thanatos as the root of drives, eroticism and suffering, affirmation and negation. Culture takes place in between as they war with one another. Symptomatic sexuality is based in the Eros-Thanatos tension. Guilt arises from the irreversible tension between the two.

As a transitional phase Thanatos is the gap between the former and future social position or magico-religious state, a liminal period of uncertainty, of virtual ‘invisibility.’ If the social condition is permanent, it means marginalization, disenfranchisment, ‘Outsiderhood.’ Liminal personae occupy an edge realm of potential for new ideas and concepts and so pose a threat to the establishment. For the deeply oppressed to gain access to their objective interests they must sometimes undergo liberating personal transformation.
In alchemy, the images of figurative death appear during the operation called mortificatio. This symbolic experience of death has to do with darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, rotting, penance, and abstinence — denial of the body. Emotionally it means the primitive, violent outbursts, resentments, and pleasure and power demands must die for the process of transmutation to occur. Paradoxically, we must make ourselves miserable to transform. Then the dark images change to positive ones of growth, resurrection and rebirth.
Fear is the primary agent of mortificatio. Moving toward the fear and pain–deepening it–brings one closer to the tranformation. It feels like defeat and failure. Yet, to resist seems like madness–in fact, it induces madness. Those with near-death experiences tell us that to embrace death brings about deeper meaning and purpose in life.
Rotting corpses, decapitation, amputation, creeping, crawling worms and snakes, and particularly noxious odors like the stench of graves are images which are reported in therapeutic journeys, again and again. It is truly a journey through “the Valley of the Shadow of Death.”

Thus the psyche depicts the decay of outworn forms in preparation for new. It can be a voluntary death, giving up the old order for the sake of wholeness, the incorruptible body that grows from death. The infantile, personalistic ego is eclipsed. The journey to the land of the dead (collective unconscious) opens one to transpersonal life.
Life, Death, Love are the experiential nucleus of our existence. Ego-death emerges from activated Thanatos, raw, undifferentiated consciousness. This unformed consciousness — which we often mistake for death — is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams (Hypnos) and the flow of our imagination.

Never-satisfied Eros or libido is the force “which ensures the unity and cohesion of everything existing in the world.” As Eros moves the warmth of life toward greater complexity, Thanatos personifies our unconscious cynicism. If Thanatos is entropy, Eros is complex adaptive systems. Thanatos is our mortality.
Both Jung and Freud recognized the latent archetypal “murderer and suicide” in us. Freud pointed out that “pathologizing” is a metaphorical language of the psyche, allowing it to deliteralize the events of our daily life. Psychopathologies had been considered trivial, but Freud showed that they contained a previously invisible depth of meaning. The nature of that meaning revealed the profound relationship of death to life. Dreams, symptoms, and afflictions became the inroads into the dark realm of the subconscious.
Freud resurrected the intimate symbolic connection between soul and death for Westerners. Eastern religions had never lost this connection. He showed how the perspectives of Hades and Thanatos dissolve the organic, social, and emotional aspects of human life. Fantasies of putrefaction, decay, sickness, compulsion, and suicidal impulses disclose this psychological perspective which seeks deepening. Freud ended his own life enraptured or fascinated with this train of thought.

Life is sustained by desire and self-preservation. Eros also personifies love of Psyche, love for the imaginal. The death drive destroys connections and eliminates tension. Aggression is a projection of the death drive. Freud’s student Adler added the ‘will to power’ to primary drivers. Hermes collapses opposites by breaking boundaries.

Mythic polarities include creation-apocalypse; nurturance-deprivation; achievement-failure; completion-fragmentation; affirmation-cynicism; acceptance-debilitation; hope-despair; reconcilation-polarization; wisdom-ignorance; celebration-betrayal; rebirth-death; questing-passivity, and intimacy-separation (Krippner). They are the black and white keys on the psychic organ.

Meaning is created through the play of opposites, including ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. It hints at negative ’side effects’ inherent in any intervention. In terms of ‘healing,’ remedy and poison are inseparable: because the pharmakon is artificial, because it comes from outside rather than from within, it is never be simply beneficial. When it is not treating a disease, a psychotropic becomes dope.

“Pharmakos,” “human scapegoat” or “sacrificial slave” derives from the same root, but changing the scapegoat doesn’t change anything real. Catharsis is the emotional release associated with talking about the underlying causes of a problem or seeing a dream.

Psychotherapy replaces the scapegoat with catharsis, a form of self-sacrifice, for purification and emotional purgation, particularly in relation to the projective contents of the Shadow. Archetypal and programmed biases residing in the self-image are “owned” consciously, transformed and relinquished. Transmodern scapegoating takes placein the virtuality – first-person shooter games.

“Pharmakeus” means druggist, poisoner and by extension, wizard, magician, trickster or sorcerer, initiator — the shaman/healer. Shamanism is medicine for the imagination using tricks or techniques to alter perception. Whether transformation is induced through drugs, behavior modification, or emotive talk therapies, the purpose is to change perception of reality. The shaman/therapist is mediator of dreams, soul guide and consummate image-maker and interpreter.
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.

The psychotherapeutic approach to healing essentially represents order (through chaos). The shamanic approach represents chaos, often including trance, drugs, adventure and spiritual power plays. These worldviews seem divided but the true nature of reality is dynamic interplay of chaos and ordet. Like yin and yang, they encompass one other, so there is flow between the two.

The shaman/therapist embodies and personifies both polarities with one foot in the natural and supernatural world. Traditionally, the shaman is involved in soul retrieval, returning a lost soul from the realm of the dead.

Healers help others find the doorways to the opportunities that crises can offer as traditional guiding models break down. The guiding myth of the shaman is that “personal power arises within.” The blending of the traditional and the innovative, the mystical and scientific, the masculine and feminine elements in healing, could guide our culture towards a balanced approach to healing. By recognizing our boundaries, we could move beyond them. The action takes place in the unknown, beyond the boundary of the known.

But the trickster can also trap with control. The clever, opportunistic trickster is often a deceitful transformer who creates ambiguity, illusion and altered states. Also, by extension, we have the ‘deliberate insincerity’ of Big Pharma and the pharmacratic War on Terror and Drugs. The latest bitter pill in this category is “bailouts.” At the fringe, UFO phenomena are trickster phenomena.
Guiding vision is another premise common to both camps. Jung wrote extensively how visionary experience affected his life and gave him a mandate for his work. The shamanic vision quest is the native model. These visions “work” because we are not separate from the universe, nature, each other, our bodies, or hidden aspects of ourselves. But again, vision can be impressed and exploited by interpretation and other means up to the scale of zeitgeist. Worldview is collective vision.

Brief Therapy Never Ends

When the “talking cure,” lifelong analysis, became impractical, brief focal and serial psychotherapy was initiated at the Tavistock Clinic by Balint and Malan. The ‘point of maximum pain’ or the ‘therapeutic metaphor’ is the chosen dynamic focus. Thus Tavistock’s abusive arc compulsively motivates us, playing on our fear and pain. Fragmentation (multiple states of being), dissolution and alienation are the result. We need a cultural de-frag.

In alchemy, I Ching and even chaos theory, psychological dissolution is the further breaking down of the artificial structures of the psyche by the immersion in the unconscious or irrational and rejected parts of our minds. It is an unconscious process in which our conscious mind allows the surfacing of previously buried emotions that conceal or distort our true nature. It results in a flowing presence that is free of inhibitions, prejudgments, and restrictive mental structures.

Tavistock is so woven into our fabric, it is a ’sideffect’ of life. It’s about power not health. A population stalled in a narcissistic, puerile condition is super-susceptible to authoritarian regimes. Humanity has been stuck in a selfish, self-centered adolescence by control of 1) environment, 2) food and water, 3) disease, 4) wars and disaster, 5) crime 6) human rights, 7) science and technology. Controlled conflict brings controlled ‘progress.’ Humanity needs to grow up.

Soft-core brainwashing is so subliminal most people don’t recognize it. Nor do they recognize covert pressures hiding in plain sight. You can’t really fight this hydra-headed monster and you can’t flee the mindbenders ‘No Exit’ game with a geographic or mental escape. They want you to escape into the virtuality and leave the ‘real’ world to them. If you withdraw into the virtuality you are no longer a protagonist in the social setting. “Gamer” (2009) describes one such scenario:

“Set in the near future, a time when mind-control technology has taken society by storm. Humans control other humans in a mass-scale, multiplayer online game. Reclusive billionaire Ken Castle has created the controversial form of entertainment, “Slayers,” a hugely popular game that allows millions to act out their innermost desires and fantasies — online — in front of a global audience. Gaming has evolved into a terrifying new dimension-mind control-manipulation-people playing people. At the center is Kable, the superstar and cult hero of “Slayers,” the savage, ultra-violent first person shooter game. Kable is controlled by Simon, a young gamer with rock star status who continues to defy all odds by guiding Kable to victory each week. Taken from his family, imprisoned and forced to fight against his will, the modern day gladiator must survive long enough to escape the game to free his family, regain his identity and to save mankind from Castle’s ruthless technology.”

Like a bad relationship, we habitually need more ‘therapy’ with each disabling crisis. Tavistock is a ’strange attractor’ in the global psychodynamic field. It has brought us all to the self-organizing state of criticality – the boundary of chaos and order.

But order and health are not synonymous. Not everyone can be forced down the linear road to conformity. Describing how entrainment occurs over time, strange attractors can also move us into the space of what could be. Health does not come from a highly ordered world.

Jung believed that in psychic dynamics, chaos is inevitable, so he tried to find patterns in the chaos, The most constructive approach is to impose very little order and let organization emerge on its own. Jung also thought secrets were poison and confession was the cure.

A state of criticality (SOC) is the governing dynamical mechanism in a large class of complex natural systems. All events are intrinsic to the system. Various kinds of systems can be engineered into a critical state, by fine-tuning the parameters. Kindling changes can lead to cascades of morphing dynamics, avalanches of consequences. Though the ‘edge’ can be a horizon of creativity, chain reactions and catastrophic collapse are also possible.

Instead of inhabiting the United States, we are plunged into the bizarro world of imposed trance-states — the Uninvited States of America. Whether you are on the Left or the Right, you are played against one another in the social construction of reality (totalitarian environment) with indirect suggestion, political and religious cliches and milieu control.

You can cause fear of extinction and annihilation by forcing choice on a future existential path. Loss of biometric identifiers, self-reliance, house, job, credit cards, bank account, driver’s license, spouse, family is for the most part equated with death — or worse — irrelevance. You must obey the doctrine or lose your personal identity which was created for you and will be stripped away. So don’t question too much; just follow along.

You will continually have to fight for your liberation, for your civil and human rights. The oppressor does not tolerate resistance or dissent, peaceful or otherwise. And your right to self-defense and self-determination will repeatedly be undermined. The rhetoric about democracy is just that—it has never been actualized.

In the culture at large, therapeutic authority has transformed personal and group relations in family, work, school, hospital, office, media, government and military. While it has taught us “better” communication, it has undermined traditional roles. Stories we consistently tell ourselves determine our reality.

Your reality is made of symbols weighted by metaphors. All communication is hypnotic. NLP demonstrates how even casual conversation can be loaded with sleight of mouth, cues, “embedded commands,” suggestive language patterns. Parallel realities, triggers and anchors, time binds, illusory choice, submodalities, persuasion and psychological drivers can be manipulated.

The collective will of the people has been undercut with “shock and awe,” frustration and demoralization. Tavistock first fed us illusions as stepping-stones before weaning us on disillusion, exemplified in lowered expecations and the current healthcare debates. Positive and negative reinforcement include “the takeaway,” turning dreams into pipe dreams and mystical manipulation.

Even though its agenda has jumped the boundaries of its parent organization, Tavistock has seeded chaos leading to the death of an outworn post-industrial mindset, clearing the stage for a transmodern information society with a distinctly fascist tone.

Controlled chaos leads to submission. How we got into this double bind is a labyrinthine story involving psychiatry, fascism, Nazis, Communism, CIA, MI6, media, corporations, government and universities. It is the story of how we lost even the fantasy of democracy to corporate feudalism.

The Mindbenders

Just outside London, Tavistock Institute is the nerve center of a global psywar apparatus that attacks our collective psyche relentlessly. Established after World War I by the Duke George of Kent, the original Tavistock Clinic developed psychological warfare for British intelligence after studying shellshock (PTSD) victims. They determined neurosis, self-division, was pervasive in modern society and they learned how to manipulate that for brainwashing.

Riding the coattails of “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), a B horror movie, “The Mindbenders” came out in 1963, starring Dirk Bogarde as the victim of British brainwashers who isolated and water tanked him. The slow-paced script itself was a bit torturous, but apparently someone in Britain knew what was going on.

In the opening scene a clearly confused Professor on a moving train in a carriage full of passengers stands up and jumps off the train. The investigating Major is convinced Professor Sharpe acted like a Communist spy with remorse, but his young acolyte Dr. Tate refuses to accept this verdict and seeks the help of Sharpe’s former colleague and friend, Dr. Longman.

The latter volunteers to undergo a devastating experiment and the scientists quickly learn that eight hours of isolation in a water tank has the same nightmarish effect on people as eight months of intense brainwashing methods. Trying to break both him and his relationship, they ramp the test up to an even more dangerous level to make Dr. Longman believe he doesn’t love his wife of twelve years and mother of their four children.

It isn’t difficult to induce a repressed psychosomatic state. We dissociate or turn on the auto-pilot to protect ourselves. Freud proved that breaking relationships and imposed sexual repression could be used as a weapon, spreading emotional contagion, bringing very primitive emotions to the forefront of targeted populations. It could simultaneously be used to build entire mythic systems.

Sexual repression and sex taboos could therefore be used to control and repress entire political communities, transforming their entire belief systems or separate the elite from the non-elite. Over the years more subtle, insidious techniques were developed for mass brainwashing, including modulation of the dynamical field of meaning.

Polluting water sources with estrogen and estrogen-like chemicals is having a devastating effect, leading to declines in male desire, potency and fertility. We excrete what we don’t use. Unfilterable pharmaceutical pollution, not to mention detergents and pesticides, enter the food-chain through fish, affecting reproductive fitness.

There are accumulating signs of nicotine, steroids, antibiotics, blood pressure reducers, hormones, psychiatric drugs, and pain killers in treated water leaving sewage plants and adjacent aquafers, rivers, streams, and lakes. But if your agenda is culling the population that is a bonus.

Freud was brought into the Tavistock Institute of British Intelligence in order to keep this secret of the elite quiet. Countless MKULTRA Mind Control studies confirm sexual abuse and general repression as the perfect psychological warfare weapon: it can produce powerful conversion effects leaving little or no physical evidence of harm.

How did Tavistock become an interdisciplinary den of mad spyentists working on emergent meta-problems? In this case, indeed, the power of the many is greater than the power of the one. Tavistock has spread a dark net across the globe.

Since 9/11, even the memory of democracy is being erased. “Free Association” is putting an end to freedom, making ’self-observation’ virtually obsolete through surveillance and manipulation. More than an international institution, Tavistock has become a nonlocal community of practice — a dark ‘invisible college,’ the Castaglia of the cryptocracy.

Change Management

Officially, Tavistock presents itself as an apparently benign, mild-mannered thinktank and consultancy firm. But in the name of public service it conceals many toxic “family” secrets of its origins, personnel, “pioneering” approach, R&D and covert “psychotechnology” agenda.

Tavistock controls a metaverse from spirituality to pragmatic to covert levels. In a sense, they’ve turned us all into “Bilder-bots,” wage-slave robots for their own controllers. Tavistock gave the shadow government its strongest weapons. Fear of breakdown alone can bring it about.

Founded in 1920, Tavistock Institute was first directed by John Rawlings Rees; his wife, Dr. Mary Rees Hemingway, was a co-founder. By 1947, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations turned its research findings on the British and American public, declaring a silent war on consciousness by reversing the equation that social structure is a defense against anxiety.

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.

After phoney wars on poverty, drugs and terror, the current offensive is on debt and surplus population. But the bottom line is class war, as demonstrated by the recent gutting of the American middle class. When you ‘lose’ money, where do suppose it goes? It’s not just your money, it’s your freedom.

This war is conducted through the big guns of Information Warfare. Information warfare is a large set of activities aimed at the mind and will of the enemy. Partof the domestic information war is a barrage of useless information as well as disinformation.

The decisions to pursue the development of information weapons or to prosecute information warfare are governmental decisions. These decisions need to be made consciously and deliberately and with an understanding of the moral and ethical risks of information warfare. After assessing all the risks and deciding to create information weapons or engage in information warfare, the decision makers should first have an understanding of these weapons and a weapon employment theory before such warfare starts rather than after the weapons are deployed or have already been employed. Deception and disinformation, radioelectronic combat, propaganda, and the whole gamut of “psychological warfare” or command and control warfare attacks against enemy combatants at the operational level cannot be said to be wrongful. These aim to subdue without fighting or to reduce the amount of violence required. Becoming unhinged from reality in combat, like death or some other form of suffering, is a risk of which combatants are aware and is a possibility that combatants must accept. (Szafranski, USAF)

Cultural psychology was used to assess the enemy mentality. The original “Tavi-stalkers” didn’t stop with the enemy and rewriting history. They spread their “Tavistock Method” theory and practice of mass mind control into all strategic institutions. Their psystrat — turning reality inside out — had multiple vectors, reconciling and unifying levels of strategy.

Synergy influenced manoeuvers produce generalized effects, such as mob control, social mobility, changing mindsets or ideology and counterinfluencing through disinformation. Once you learn how to organize behavior — “joint optimization” — you know how to dis-organize it with value-dilemmas in groups, matrix and international networks.

Tavistock has upgraded from 1940s general systems theory to Chaos Theory and complexity modeling. Increasing in complexity, the contemporary environment is a ‘turbulent field’ in which the amount of disorder is increasing to the limit of a ‘vortical’ state in which healthy adaptation is impossible.

Turbulence cannot be managed by top-down bureaucracies but can be perturbed from collaborative bottom-up grassroots levels. This is a socio-ecological approach but regressive primitive behaviors re-emerge under stress and uncertainty.

One of the domain level approaches is futures studies and “headin’ em off at the pass.” The carrot now is the New Age dream of superhuman powers connected to the quickening pace of the 2012 mythos, a Precessional convergence into singularity, a “new” unity. “Pay no attention to the mysterious signs in the sky.” If you don’t know you are in a Schrodinger’s Box, alive or dead, you make no attempt to get out. Many are convinced 2012 is the ‘tipping point.’

Other demoralizing psystrat techniques include psychotropic drugs, depersonalization, diversion, stepping-stones, traumatization, eroding confidence, creating confusion, broken relationships, distrust and state-related learning. Memory-encoding maintains the trance and for recall one must return to the context-dependent state in which learning took place.

Recent discoveries link behavioral state-related gene-expression to the same loop, so physiological changes are possible. Behavioral states modulate certain patterns of gene-expression. Neurotransmitters modulate mental states, including natural healing, biorhythms and dreams.

The psychophysical link leads to the maxim that “psyche matters.” Interaction between the genetic and behavioral levels is a two-way street. Genes and behavior are related in cybernetic loops of mind-body communication.
There is evidence that “immediate-early genes (IEGs) function as mediators of information transduction between psychological experience, behavioral states, and gene expression. A wide range of behavioral state-related gene expression (from relaxation, hynosis and sleep to high arousal, performance, stress and trauma) culminate in the production of new proteins or homeostasis, physical and psychosocial adaptation.” (Rossi)
Immediate-Early Genes (IEGs) are also fundamental in the regulation of REM-on, REM-off neurons, neuronal networks that are associated with REM sleep and dreaming. Deprivation of REM and dreaming creates its own phenomenology and pathologizes, which are naturally exploitable.

Gordon Lawrence “discovered” 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.

Twisting facts with fiction produces friction. The simulation substitutes for reality. Netlife has taught us to invest the simulation with the weight of reality. When the real world gets too tight, we head to the virtual world for the space we need. As in physics, manifestations emerge from a phase space of possibilities of being and these events affect us in realtime.

Its as if cyberspace is a virtual training simulator for global architectronics. Are we mimicing what the Tavistock system has imposed on us – an ability to manipulate signs, icons, imagery and symbols to alter perception? But there is a subtext to what we do there. Web-Bots read the collective unconscious from the Internet.

We now write our own open source dossiers for the watchers. We are profiled by demographic harvesters. And they know who and where (density maps) our friends are, even what astrological sign and psychetype the majority are. They have commodified our content to sell to others.

Psychology Today has labeled conspiracy thinking a psychotic illness, implying dissent or divergent thinking is insane as if conformity is sanity. Even with designer bodies, the virtuality is no escape from the “No Exit” Tavistock game. Soon we will live inside our televisions as they now live within us. We will have merged with the technology.