Document prepared for workshop participants
Trusting Chaos in Personal Growth and World Life
Chaos theory, quantum physics, and analytical psychology provide portals for new awareness both of the processes of personal growth and of changes in world life. In this Friday lecture and Saturday workshop, participants will gain access to the theories of chaos psychology and theirpractical application in everyday experience. The modeling will incorporate also the five structures of consciousness—archaic, magical, mythic, mental, and integral—as described by Carl Jung’s friend and associate Jean Gebser.
In our mental consciousness of everyday life, the experience of <CHAOS> is generally viewed as irrational and negative—paired with <ORDER> as a rational and positive opposite. Chaos is bad, the threat, the enemy, and [C1]the demonic. Order is good, the ideal, the ally, and the sanctified.
However, in mythic consciousness—as we know in our dreams—Chaos is ever-present as the primordial animating principle. In mythic consciousness, there is no creation without destruction. States of order are largely regarded as transient or even as interludes in the on-going drama of nature and human nature.
With magical consciousness, chaosorder states mutually interphase and [C2]interpenetrate in fields of volatile energies without consistent distinctions. In alchemical work, the Prima Materia can be described as the sacred chaos that includes the shadow.
In the realm of the archaic, it is as valid to say All is chaos as it is to say All is order. In quantum understanding, the potentialities of existence are smooth and continuous, while any actuality emerges only as a discontinuity.
With integral consciousness, that is, individuation, the experience of opposites such as <chaos/ order> is the very archetypal patterning of soul’s emergence in the world. Soul’s journey advances through holding the opposites until the transcendent function allows symbols of transformation to emerge. With integral consciousness, all opposites, including <chaos/order> are apprehended transparently. Individual wholeness is radically interconnected with the experience of the living Universe—the One World, Unus mundus.
A tenet of chaos theory is that “chaos connects.” Among many valuable observations, the theory opens more widely the notion that Jung and quantum physicist Wolfgang Paoli described as synchronicity or acausality—connections without causes.
With access to the highly useful tools of chaos theory and the integral consciousness model, participants in this event will be guided through personal (and private) exercises. By using active imagination, each participant should gather new awareness of archetypal processes—and life processes—as analinear dynamical systems that can be trusted.
Friday, June 7, 7:00 P.M.
Deconstructing mental-rational conceptions of [ CHAOS ]
Collapsing ego-systems and missing information
Chaos connects.
Origin and five structures of consciousness (Jean Gebser):
Ever-present origin: archaic, magical, mythic, mental, integral
The spiral map
Chaos and
Archetypal attractors
Shadow
The transcendent function
The feminine
The stages of life
Alchemical practice
Wisdom traditions
LEST
Liminalities and limits
Entropy and exhaustion
Synchronicities of shadow
Trust the chaotic process
Saturday, June 8, 10 A.M.—3 P.M.
Review/overview
Sketching personal concepts of chaos
Mapping chaotic experiences and archetypal attractors
Integrating shadow: working through the missing information
Affirming the negative: bridges and portals
On chaos…
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
C. G. Jung
From a traditional point of view, equilibrium and stability mean mental health: disequilibrium and disorder define pathology. However, the new way of meaning suggests the disconcerting possibility that mental health and pathology may be just the reverse of our assumptions all along. That is, psychological pain results when the self system becomes encapsulated (a futile attempt at equilibrium), in order to maintain an old way of knowing and to resist the inevitable emergent novelty woven into the process of living. To the extent that psychologists accept stability and order as the hallmarks of psychological well being we are accomplices in the individual’s own assumption that disequilibrium, complexity, and chaos are signs of sickness and are thus to be avoided. We would do well to consider that the symptoms cast as pathology in mechanistic, linear models may well reflect an individual precariously ready to move to a more complex reorganization of his or her own making. Chaos is not so much pathological as it is a state of maximum readiness for an emerging reorganized self-system. Individuals with schemas or working models bordering on chaos are likely to be those most capable of accommodating the inevitable change associated with living. Complexity theory may offer a revised scientific basis for describing and promoting optimal human development and mental health; that is, individuals most capable of adaptation and growth are those poised at the edge of chaos.
Frank Masterpasqua
Flexibility depends on choices. Chaos offers more choices than order.
J. R. Van Eenwyk
Healthy systems don't want homeostasis. They want chaos.
R. Pool
A brief description of chaos theory
Chaotic patterns are recognizable and describable but never fully predictable.
Systems theory analyzes structures by tracing nodes and nuances of feedback loops in order to recognize and describe variables sensitivities. Habituated thinking patterns—least-resistance pathways—form limit cycles of what is “known” and thus organizationally closed. Systems with limited or fixed points-of-view lose flexibility. The ‘de-constructing’ of systems allows what needs to die to die so that new life can emerge. Uncertainty is necessary for growth.
To study an analinear dynamical system such as the weather, the calculation of a given observation is fed back into an operation to form the basis of the next calculation, thus creating an infinite positive-feedback loop open to both external influences and internal variations. Such a system never precisely repeats its initial state as it bifurcates in self-replicating, self-similar patterns. These patterns are recognizable and describable but never fully predictable. The interconnectedness of dynamical systems is open because of the missing information of unknowable, future iterations. The system is holistic because the missing information of one system cannot be separated from the missing information of any other system, including subtle influences of any observer observing any system.
A point describes a system at rest. A cycle represents a system in oscillation. An attractor, strange attractor, or, if of greater dimensions, great attractor, is a region of phase space into which a system is drawn, eventually settling down into a recognizable configuration or clumping pattern attracting all nearby states. A fractal curve forms out of the iteration of each new factor along the thresholds of the missing information of future iterations. In this way, an attractor explicates the implicit wholeness of the system.
Bifurcation (dividing into “forks”) is the process of actualizing possibilities of growth in a significant branching of an attractor. Cascading bifurcations may lead to fragmentation or to stabilization. Mutual inhibition occurs when two or more dynamics modify one another. After bifurcating, a system may enter a limit cycle and resist further change for indeterminate periods of time. A gradual change is a subtle bifurcation; an abrupt change of size is an explosive bifurcation; a sudden appearance or disappearance of an attractor is a catastrophic bifurcation. The pattern of actualized bifurcations comprises an archive of the exact environmental conditions of bifurcations as consequent futures advanced and other possibilities perished. Entropic chaos never resolves into a new order.
Feedback describes the dynamic relationship of chaos and order. Negative feedback controls (cybernetic systems); positive feedback amplifies. Feedback operates at all levels of living systems.
Fractals are patterns of bifurcation that cannot be predicted or characterized exactly but can be recognized and described. The fractal dimension of an object measures its degree of complexity and quality of 'pattern' and 'relationship' rather than 'quantity,' 'cause,' and 'effect.' Reiterating at progressively diminishing scales, a fractal curve has infinite length.
Stability, oscillation, and chaos can be present in a single system, with each state actualizing alternately. An intermittency is a period of predictability. A system in intermittency may be pulled into a chaotic attractor by missing information drawing it toward wholeness at a greater scale. Conjecture has it that our familiar reality may be an intermittency in a Universe that is a great attractor among other dimensions and larger structures.
With a linear equation, one solution indicates future solutions. A nonlinear equation works on itself through iteration, determining its own future in a positive feedback loop that takes the result of one computation as the basis for the next.
f (z) = z 2 + c
Present solutions may appear to have little relationship to future solutions, which will include the information that is now missing.
A phase space imaginally maps those dimensions or variables necessary to describe a movement or change. An orderly system may have a phase space of multiple dimensions with activity settling down to a relatively small subspace. The phase space of a pendulum may be described as a closed orbit with one degree of freedom. A space shuttle operates in a phase space with three degrees of freedom. At a critical juncture termed a homoclinic point, an extremely minor fluctuation may flip a system from stability to chaos, from simplicity to complexity, and the system will bifurcate in greater magnitudes of phase space. Some bifurcations are so complex as to bring about virtually infinite degrees of freedom. A phase space that resists change actualizes a limit cycle, or limit cycle attractor. Such an attractor defines the control function of a negative feedback system.
Fractals recognizably replicate with across scales of magnitude from microcosm to macrocosm with scale invariance. The similarity of a whirlpool in an emptying sink and the spiral of a galaxy is a scale invariant pattern.
The origin of a complex phenomenon may actually be relatively simple, but in a chaotic system, any variation in the initial state, no matter how small, can bring about an arbitrarily different state of randomness within a finite time-period. This characteristic is described as Sensitivity Dependence on Initial Conditions (SDIC) or the Butterfly Effect.
Complexity Theory describes the Universe as a complex of whole systems spontaneously generating out of a void and self-organizing at thresholds between chaos and stability. Complexity Theory describes growth processes in terms of progressive magnitudes of diversity, interconnectedness, and vitality. Each emerging level of complexity produces novelty—something not present in the organizational elements of a preceding level. Autopoeisis refers to a system with a unique history, a self-renewing structure, and open boundaries connecting with the environment in extreme complexity.
Resources
John Briggs, Fractals: the patterns of chaos, Simon & Schuster, 1992. ISBN 0671742175
John Briggs and F. David Peat, Seven life lessons of chaos; spiritual wisdom for the science of change, HarperPerennial, 2000.
ISBN 006093073X
John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent mirror; an illustrated guide to chaos theory and the science of wholeness, HarperCollins, 1990.
ISBN 0060916966
Edward N. Lorenz, Essence of chaos (The Jessie and John Danz Lecture Series), University of Washington Press, 1996.
ISBN 0295975148
Frank Masterpasqua and Phyllis A. Perna, editors, Psychological meaning of chaos; translating theory into practice, American Psychological Association, 1997.
ISBN 1557984298
John R. Van Eenwyk, Archetypes & strange attractors; the chaotic world of symbols, Inner City, Toronto, 1997.
ISBN 0919123767
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[C1]1Although sentence structure is correct with the word and, your style provides suspense.
[C2]1I changed this only because I could not find the word interphased. However, the change alters the verb tense throughout. I’m sure I’m wrong; let me know.