CHAOSOPHY JOURNAL
Iona Miller, Editor, Asklepia Foundation
Institute for Consciousness Technologies
http://ionamillersubjects.weebly.com/chaosophy.html
Therapeutics, Integration & Awareness:
Creating Emergent Patterns & Traits for Transformation
Institute for Consciousness Technologies
http://ionamillersubjects.weebly.com/chaosophy.html
Therapeutics, Integration & Awareness:
Creating Emergent Patterns & Traits for Transformation
Graywolf Drumming, photo Tim Bullard
Excerpt - by Paul Nelson, What Is Consciousness?
http://paulenelson.com/organic-poetry/what-is-consciousness/
"A model created by Graywolf Swinney[2], a psychologist and self-described Consciousness Engineer, suggests that the first four levels at which consciousness manifests are thus:
Behavior/Physiology
Thoughts/Emotions
Belief System
Personal Mythology
This model suggests that the most superficial way in which consciousness manifests is through Behavior and Physiology and gets more complex from there. After Personal Mythology, his model gets murky, but includes two other levels for which the model developed by Dr. David Hawkins[3] may be more articulate. Dr. Hawkins uses the methodology of kinesiology (muscle testing), the validity of which is under great debate. Somewhere between the levels between 350 and 540 on the Hawkins Map of Consciousness[4] is where I would put the next level of consciousness. Level 350 is cited as the level of acceptance, where a harmonious life-view dominates in a process of transcendence. Certainly when we have reached a level of acceptance and transcendence, we can see ourselves as the latest manifestation of a certain mode or type of existence, though with the new twist that our cultural moment helps to create. The archetypal level may be seen as a template for one’s life. The American Heritage dictionary defines archetypes as an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.
In the larger groupings created by Swinney, the final and 6th level was referred to as Chaotic Consciousness. We might call it Cosmic Consciousness as we can imagine was experienced by Christ or the Buddha-Field, which is John Hogue’s[5] term. On Dr. Hawkins map, this would be levels 700 to 1,000, which he says is the highest level which the human nervous system is designed to handle.
So, to finish our model introduced by Swinney, we would have the six levels as:
Behavior/Physiology
Thoughts/Emotions
Belief System
Personal Mythology
Archetypal
Chaotic/Cosmic Consciousness/Buddha-field"
http://paulenelson.com/organic-poetry/what-is-consciousness/
"A model created by Graywolf Swinney[2], a psychologist and self-described Consciousness Engineer, suggests that the first four levels at which consciousness manifests are thus:
Behavior/Physiology
Thoughts/Emotions
Belief System
Personal Mythology
This model suggests that the most superficial way in which consciousness manifests is through Behavior and Physiology and gets more complex from there. After Personal Mythology, his model gets murky, but includes two other levels for which the model developed by Dr. David Hawkins[3] may be more articulate. Dr. Hawkins uses the methodology of kinesiology (muscle testing), the validity of which is under great debate. Somewhere between the levels between 350 and 540 on the Hawkins Map of Consciousness[4] is where I would put the next level of consciousness. Level 350 is cited as the level of acceptance, where a harmonious life-view dominates in a process of transcendence. Certainly when we have reached a level of acceptance and transcendence, we can see ourselves as the latest manifestation of a certain mode or type of existence, though with the new twist that our cultural moment helps to create. The archetypal level may be seen as a template for one’s life. The American Heritage dictionary defines archetypes as an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.
In the larger groupings created by Swinney, the final and 6th level was referred to as Chaotic Consciousness. We might call it Cosmic Consciousness as we can imagine was experienced by Christ or the Buddha-Field, which is John Hogue’s[5] term. On Dr. Hawkins map, this would be levels 700 to 1,000, which he says is the highest level which the human nervous system is designed to handle.
So, to finish our model introduced by Swinney, we would have the six levels as:
Behavior/Physiology
Thoughts/Emotions
Belief System
Personal Mythology
Archetypal
Chaotic/Cosmic Consciousness/Buddha-field"
Chaos theory provides a useful 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 spontaneously emergent healing based on an organic model of transformation, rather than a mechanistic or cybernetic process. 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."
"Yea verily, I say unto you - A man must have chaos yet within him to birth a dancing star." --Nietzsche
"To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse." --Carl Jung, 1961
"...the 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
CHAOSOPHY A Journal of Chaos, Consciousness, and Philosophy
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.
"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.
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 re-patterned 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 ignored 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.
HOLOGRAPHIC HEALING
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."
"To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse." --Carl Jung, 1961
"...the 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
CHAOSOPHY A Journal of Chaos, Consciousness, and Philosophy
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.
"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.
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 re-patterned 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 ignored 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.
HOLOGRAPHIC HEALING
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."
CHAOSOPHY 93: CHAOS, CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE
CHAOSOPHY 1993
CHAOS AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/intro.html
http://asklepia.tripod.com/Chaosophy/intro.html
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/intro.html
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACTS
Introduction
I. CHAOS AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
Chaosophy
Chaos Consciousness in Psychotherapy
Chaos As the Universal Solvent
Chaos Theory and Psychological Complexes
The Creative Flow of Meaning
II. POLYPHASIC CONSCIOUSNESS The Un-Named Dream and Parallel Universes
The Varieties of Virtual Experience
Dream Wave
The Unborn Dream
Have You Been to the Paradox?
III. THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM The Holographic Paradigm and CCP
Fractal Therapy
The Holographic Concept of Reality
Embryonic Holography
Self-Organization in Biological Systems
IV. CHAOS CULTURE Disruption: Life Beyond the Circle
The Empty Medicine Bag
Relativity of Body and Soul
Virtual Therapy
The Guide Wave
V. INFORMATION THEORY An Information Theory of the Universe and Neurodynamics
Ode to White Noise and Strange Loops
Image Processing
The Self-Aware Universe
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/intro.html
____________________________________________
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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."To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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 SYMBOLTo go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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."To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.] To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
IV. CHAOS CULTURE
DISRUPTION: LIFE BEYOND THE CIRCLE; Graywolf, 1990 To go directly to the article click here.
THE EMPTY MEDICINE BAG; Graywolf, 1989 To go directly to the article click here.
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" To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/intro.html
CHAOS AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/intro.html
http://asklepia.tripod.com/Chaosophy/intro.html
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/intro.html
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACTS
Introduction
I. CHAOS AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY
Chaosophy
Chaos Consciousness in Psychotherapy
Chaos As the Universal Solvent
Chaos Theory and Psychological Complexes
The Creative Flow of Meaning
II. POLYPHASIC CONSCIOUSNESS The Un-Named Dream and Parallel Universes
The Varieties of Virtual Experience
Dream Wave
The Unborn Dream
Have You Been to the Paradox?
III. THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM The Holographic Paradigm and CCP
Fractal Therapy
The Holographic Concept of Reality
Embryonic Holography
Self-Organization in Biological Systems
IV. CHAOS CULTURE Disruption: Life Beyond the Circle
The Empty Medicine Bag
Relativity of Body and Soul
Virtual Therapy
The Guide Wave
V. INFORMATION THEORY An Information Theory of the Universe and Neurodynamics
Ode to White Noise and Strange Loops
Image Processing
The Self-Aware Universe
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/intro.html
____________________________________________
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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."To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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 SYMBOLTo go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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."To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.To go directly to the article click here.
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.] To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
IV. CHAOS CULTURE
DISRUPTION: LIFE BEYOND THE CIRCLE; Graywolf, 1990 To go directly to the article click here.
THE EMPTY MEDICINE BAG; Graywolf, 1989 To go directly to the article click here.
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" To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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. To go directly to the article click here.
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
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy/intro.html
ASKLEPIA MONOGRAPH SERIES - CRP Protocols.
CHAOSOPHY 2000
ASKLEPIA MONOGRAPH SERIES
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy2/intro.html
FULL TEXT:
http://chaosophy2000.iwarp.com
ASKLEPIA MONOGRAPH SERIES:
Contents
An Integrative View of Normal Adult Development
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Counseling Philosophy
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
About Fibromyalgia (FM) and Consciousness Restructuring
by Rob Kuehn and Graywolf Swinney
Chronic Fatigue Syndromes (CFS)
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Depressive Disorders/Grief
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Bipolar Disorder
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Attention-Deficit Disorder (A.D.D./A.D.H.D./O.D.D.)
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Cancer
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Borderline Personality Disorder
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Eating Disorders
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Psychoactive Substance Abuse Disorders
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
ComingSoon! Co-Dependence/Dependent Personality Disorder
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Autoimmune Disorders (R.A., M.S., Lupus) and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Stress-Reduction and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Hypertension and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Anxiety Disorders and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Chronic Pain Management and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
__________________________________________________
http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy2/intro.htmlABSTRACTS
Dreaming and the Self-Organizing Brain
by David Kahn, Stanley Krippner, and Allan Combs
[Used with author's permission from Journal for Consciousness Studies (JCS)]
ABSTRACT: We argue the REM dream experiences owe their structure and meaning to inherent self-organizing properties of the brain itself. Thus, we offer a common meeting ground for brain based studies of dreaming and traditional psychological dream theory. Our view is that the dreaming brain is a self-organizing system highly sensitive to internally generated influences.
Several lines of evidence support a process view of the brain as a system near the edge of chaos, one that is highly sensitive to internal influences. Such sensitivity is due to several factors. First, the dreaming brain normally gates out external input and thus operates without the stabilizing influences of external feedback. Second, the pre-frontal cortex is only minimally activated during REM sleep, and hence the brain operates with weakened volition, reduced logic, and diminished self-reflection. Third, because the neuromodulatory inhibitition mechanism is turned off during REM, the brain responds spontaneously to the least provocation. In addition, the dreaming brain is also subject to powerful intermittent cholinergic stimulation which may stimulate creative patterns of dream activity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Integrative View of Normal Adult Development
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, c2000
Abstract: Developmental theory helps us gain a concept of what unblocked or free flowing developmental process looks like in terms of the fulfillment of human potential. The integrative developmental framework emphasizes the continuing evolution of the whole person; ultimately it is a spiritual process.
The results of the stimulus of forward development and progression that is provided by the normative crisis of midlife, with its adjustments to aging and mortality, is examined in respect to the Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP). The goal of treatment is elimination of blocks to the still-evolving personality and to the course of current and future development.
CRP often leads to spontaneous initiatory spiritual experiences. The adult experiences a constant process of dynamic change and flux, and is always in a state of “becoming” or “finding the way.” We present seven hypotheses about development in adulthood, and identify phase-specific issues and challenges, including typical adult rites of passage and the developmental phenomena of middle and later life as well. Erickson’s eight stages of life are used to outline the developmental continuum through the illuminative phase of potential transpersonal experience.
The evolution of the authentic self in adulthood is a dynamic process which is part of the lifelong shaping of identity and self-image. The attainment of authenticity is a central, dynamic task of adulthood achieved through restructuring of the self. Confronting the quintessential adult-human experience can lead to integration of the highest order and produce profound awareness of what it means to be human. A number of factors, some unique to adult experience, build on the self constructed from earlier phases of life and develop it further. Some of the most important include: (1) the body, (2) object ties, (3) time and death, and (4) work, creativity, and mentorship.
Keywords: Adult development, developmental theory, Erickson, Maslow, Piaget, Gowan, Freud, Jung, midlife crisis, adult passages, rites of passage, death and dying, aging, mentoring, maturity, parenting, marriage, pair-bonding, self-actualization, self-realization, self-image, integrative models, character, vision, soul, spirituality, Transpersonal Psychology, peak experiences, ego-death, spiritual growth, creativity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Counseling Philosophy
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, c2000
Abstract: The Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP) is rarely practiced in isolation from simple counseling, formal or informal. CRP has roots in a multidisciplinary approach which includes the psychodynamics of Freud and Jung, as well as the humanistic/existential school, in particular the techniques of Transactional Analysis and Gestalt. The work on childhood development by Piaget, Erickson, and Alice Miller is also pertinent. Adult developmental theories of transpersonalists Maslow, Houston, and Gowan also describe some important aspects of this treatment philosophy. As an eclectic approach, CRP is not limited to these, and each practitioner will no doubt pick a variety of therapies of choice from the entire gamut, including so-called shamanic techniques.
Consciousness journeys are not necessarily employed each session. This paper attempts to provide a skeletal background of the basic philosophical roots of CRP as they relate to the counseling practice of this process of natural healing.
Keywords: Freud, Jung, Berne, Perls, Miller, Erikson, Piaget, libido, psychodynamics, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Depth Psychology, childhood, fetal development, REM, dreams, psychosomatic families, psychosomatic disorders, chaos theory, Chaosophy.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT FIBROMYALGIA (FM)
and CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING
by Rob Kuehn and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: Fibromyalgia is a syndrome, difficult to diagnose, which is psychophysical in nature. Symptoms are numerous, but feature characteristic tender points and muscular pain, chronic fatigue and sleep disturbances, and psychological factors. The inflammatory process also produces chemicals that are known to cause fatigue. Emotional and physical stress exacerbate symptoms, constricting bloodvessels and amplifying distress, often to the point of incapacitation. Allopathic treatments help curb symptoms, but only mask rather than transform psychological or emotional blocks.
Conventional treatment offers no known cure for FM. Therefore, the goal of treatment is successful symptom management. The integrative approach of the Consciousness Restructuring Process uses dreams, feelings, and symptoms to initiate a therapeutic healing journey. This journey leads past fear-based patterns of consciousness and psychophysical pain to a deep experience of the restructuring of the existential primal self-image.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROMES
and the
Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, 2000
ABSTRACT: Leading CFS researcher, Jay A. Goldstein, MD posits an etiology for CFS in limbic encephalopathy in a dysregulated neuroimmune network. Thus his allopathic treatment protocols include interventions in the “bidirectional communication” between the immune and neuroendocrine systems. This means that CFS can be considered among those syndromes which respond to Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), through intervention in the “cross-talk” between the central nervous system and the immune system. Viral disease can also cause neuropsychological deficits which are amplified under physical or emotional stress.
The limbic system plays a crucial role in regulatory physiology. The Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP) can influence this psychophysical network, through cognitive, behavioral and attitudinal changes that alter the state of limbic elements. Nonrestorative, alpha-EEG sleep abnormalities are common in CFS patients. Nevertheless, most report frequent, vivid dreams and nightmares which can be used to initiate the therapeutic process.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER
and the
Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, 2000
ABSTRACT: The alter personalities experienced under dissociation in Multiple Personality Disorder may form around “strange attractors” in the psychobiological field of an individual attempting to escape or heal traumatic stress in a self-organizing way. Generally, “personality change” is a creative attempt at growth. However, in MPD it leads to “divided consciousness,” where different aspects of self are isolated by state-dependent amnesias or trances, mediated by characteristic changes in neuroimmunologic response.
It is possible that through dissociation, the person is attempting to heal in a self-organizing way, but the transformative process gets “stuck” at the classical stage of fragmentation, which then recreates itself through the dynamics of “infinite nesting” and “self-iteration.” Core psychological patterns reinforce themselves by filtering sensory information about the world and self, and automatically organizing the rest of experience around itself in a way that further supports the basic pattern.
In shifting identities MPDs experience uncommon dreams, in an intuitive, if misbegotten, attempt at growth and change. Experience of alters carries the aura of a ‘waking dream,’ where things appear real, but not quite ‘right.’ The Consciousness Restructuring Process fosters this healing attempt, rather than thwarting it. CRP facilitates inter-modal shifts between not only identities, but sensations, perceptions, emotions, imagery and behavior. Thus, it offers a ‘positive outlet’ for a process trying to self-correct the organism, but allowing that process to flow beyond the state of fragmentation to the fully undifferentiated experience for healing, dissolving old ‘basins of attraction’ in the mindscape. The psychophysical channels of both the limbic-hypothalamus system (seat of reward/punishment circuits) and the placebo effect are invoked to account for positive results.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEPRESSIVE DISORDERS
and the
Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, 2000
ABSTRACT: There are three main types of depressive disorders: major depressive disorder, dysthymia, and the depressive lows of bipolar disorder. While conventional treatment has been to freely dispense antidepressants (SSRIs), an integrative approach would include psychosocial therapy to focus on the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal issues behind depression. For many individuals, SSRIs are contra-indicated due to a wide range of side effects, some quite severe.
CRP offers a comprehensive psychoimmunotherapy, which can alter mood in a positive direction, restore interest or pleaure in daily activities, promote healthy sleep patterns, restore energy reserves, transform feelings of worthlessness or guilt, foster pro-active decisions, calm restlessness, and ameliorate recurrent thoughts of death or morbidity. In CRP, the value of the depressive state is acknowledged and honored.
Rather than medicating it away, CRP facilitates the the depressive process and allows it to cycle through. Biological disturbances lead to a complex, dynamic interlocking group of psychophysical changes which depress the well-being and functionality of the individual until the call to restructure consciousness is heeded. By going deeper into the process and allowing imagery of death, for example, to play out to its natural conclusion in rebirth, CRP fosters restructuring at the genetic, cellular, biochemical, and psychoneuroimmunological levels.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD)
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: Posttraumatic stress is a disorder, and disorder implies automatically a chaotic state of being. The sorts of trauma that tend to induce PTSD include combat trauma, crimes, rape, grief, kidnapping, natural disasters, accidents, torture, and imprisonment. Predisposition to dissociation can arise in violent family environments. Those with PTSD become hypervigilant and hyperreactive to environmental threat. The traumatic syndrome is ever present and unchanged. Emotionally, it is as if it keeps on happening. State-related learning and memory encoding help maintain the trance-like steady state. Depression, shame, anxiety, subtance abuse, and survivor guilt are complications.
The nucleus of the disorder is a physioneurosis, somatization, depersonalization, and dissociation. Psychosomatic symptoms are expressions of the dissociation. Therapy proceeds by facilitating information transduction between them. There is poor impulse control and explosive aggressive reactions. There are persistent and profound alterations in stress hormone secretions and immune function. Integration of traumatic memories proceeds by verbal and nonverbal means in therapy.
Time does not heal all wounds. Different treatments are needed at different stages of posttraumatic adaptation. CRP offers a way of restructuring the frozen structure of this disorder at the most fundamental level, in the sensory terms in which it is encoded.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BIPOLAR DISORDER
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: CRP addresses this psychobiological disorder in terms of non-linear dynamics instead of as a battle of opposing states. Using Ernest Rossi’s Dream-Protein Hypothesis, a theory of this disease process is developed which accounts for much of its phenomenology. It examines the complex dynamics of learning and memory, which lead to greater creativity, stability, and healing in therapy.
Bipolar disorder consists of dramatic mood changes, characterized by irrational shifts in behavior and temperament. It used to be called manic depression, because of the alternating between normal, manic and depressive states. Rather than far poles of a linear oscillation, this effect is revisioned as related states of one primary attractor which accounts for them all. Bipolars experience both behavior and mood disorders, rooted in a runaway feedback loop modulating highs and lows. This disease is akin to a Hydra, the multiheaded monster from Greek mythology. It is a virulent disorder with multiple faces, making diagnosis difficult.
Bipolars experience dramatic changes in sleeping patterns, eating habits, may drink excessively or suddenly begin to abuse drugs. Excessive activity, spending sprees, reckless driving, foolish business investments, infidelity, etc. can create problems. Moods and behavior are as changeable as weather’s unfolding divergence.
This mood disorder disrupts normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness. On the down side it includes depression, passivity, lethargy, fatigue, and at the extreme, delusions, hallucinations, and thoughts of suicide. The elated pole includes wildly racing thoughts, expansiveness, agitation, restlessness, excitement, irritability, grandiosity, hyperactivity, and again, when severe, delusions, and hallucinations which repeatedly sweep over the person, altering normal personality. CRP helps ameliorate swings, reducing need for medication.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER (ADD/ADHD)
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: The Consciousness Restructuring Process can be used in an integrative treatment of ADD in both children and adults. ADD is a developmental disorder characterized by distractability, impulsive behavior, and the inability to remain focused on tasks or activities, without or with (ADHD) hyperactivity. Although the exact cause of ADHD is not known, an imbalance of certain neurotransmiters, the chemicals in the brain that transmit messages between nerve cells, is believed to be the mechanism behind symptoms. CRP goes deeper than behavioral, or cognitive behavioral therapy, and includes family therapy, neurofeedback, and proper nutrition in its integrative approach.
Adults who had ADD as children still carry some of the patterns of the disease, as well as residuals from years of treatment with stimulants, tricyclics, or other antidepressants, and psychological fallout. They benefit from CRP therapy as much as children in whom symptoms are amplified. Many children with ADHD receive neither behavioral training nor careful dose calibrations for the stimulants physicians prescribe, especially though community sources. About two-thirds of children do well enough to stay off medication with behavioral treatment alone. Psychosocial interventions like CRP, especially combined with neurofeedback, can profoundly affect ADHD even if a genetic predisposition is involved.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC TREATMENT OF CANCER
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: There are basic human drives toward sexuality, death, and a general evolutionary healing growth force. They are respectively eros, thanatos, and physis. The inwardly directed force of physis is a healing power that can be invoked through CRP even in the face of life-threatening disease. In fact, physis is the counterpoint to disease, a generalized creative drive toward health. Crisis may precipitate enhanced opportunities for the recognition and manifestation of physis; opportunities for massive reorganization along lines that are developmentally healthier and creatively more productive and healing. This creates more flexibility and resilience. In T.A. correlated script-free aspirations are under the influence of physis.
As people get closer and closer to their true self or “First Nature” (which always involves a sense of somatic and organismic integrity), they connect more profoundly with an inner healing and actualizing drive. CRP journeys enhance awareness of the spiritual, transpersonal, or transcendent dimension of our endeavors. Dreamhealing journeys provide the proper ambiance for clients’ self-discovery of healing physis within themselves. In this process the life-force is kindled, facilitating healing and self-realization.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: Those with Borderline Personality Disorder live at the “Edge of Chaos.” Sensitive to the initial conditions of their lives, they are labile, jostled by the slightest perturbations into unstable states of being. They inhabit the borderline between psychotic and non-psychotic states. Psychotic episodes are generally transitory and relatively brief, but the personality disorder, an attractive impulse without logic, is notoriously intractable. It can be conceptualized as a level of personality organization rather than a disorder.
Borderlines are raised within dysfunctional family systems where emphasis is on maintenance of family myths in the face of neglect and/or abuse (physical or sexual) through double-binding messages or communication given to the child victim. There is a discrepancy between the social facade presented to the outside world and the actual transactions within the family. The child creates defenses including denial of fantasies of good enough parents in order to deal with painful realities. Family members often collude with the abuser either to justify the abuse or to keep it a secret. The victim is damned by the fact that the abuse is either denied as real or the child is accused of causing it. Therefore, the child is either mad (“crazy”) or bad.
KEYWORDS: Borderline Personality Disorder, psychotherapy, dreams, REM, placebo effect, family therapy, healing, spirituality, dreamwork,
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EATING DISORDERS
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: Typical treatment for eating disorders involves ego building and cognitive redecision therapy; existential systems-oriented therapy. But eating disorders are holistic dis-eases. The root of the disorder is a mistake in self-image. They reveal the relationship of a self to the world who either can’t get enough, or for whom any input is too much. Since we must all eat to live, being out of balance with food means being out of balance with nature. The CRP process dissolves old patterns of self-image, of relationship with food, and rebuilds ego by first restructuring consciousness at the sensory root or primordial level. REM journeys facilitate creative self-organization.
CRP for disordered eating is not just for those with clinical disorders, or even food cravings for carbohydrates, fats, or sweets. Poor dietary and sleeping habits lead to hypoglycemia, subclinical depression, fatigue, insomnia, and poor concentration, disrupt daily life, strain relationships, and even jeopardize careers. Self-esteem, self-control, mood, and eating are intertwined, so what a person eats or feels is wrongly metabolized. What we eat affects whether we are happy, sad, irritable, moody, alert, or sleepy. If you want to feel your best, you have to eat your best. Children can also benefit from CRP: 1 out of 3 children are overweight and in danger of obesity; children are 30% heavier than they were 10 years ago.
Keywords: Eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia, obesity, dreams, dreamwork, REM, consciousness, binging and purging, eating behavior, psychotherapy, mood and food, hypoglycemia, alcoholism, psychosomatics, sugar blues, cravings, nutrition, depression.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Psychoactive Substance Abuse
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
Abstract: Substance Abuse can be revisioned as a substitute spiritual experience. This notion has even entered into colloquial language, where intoxicants are refered to as ‘spirits.’ The addictive process is a bastardization of the shamanic form of drug and ritual-induced initiatory healing and transformation. It leads to false ego states, ranging from inflations to atavistic regressions into unconsciousness and dissolution. A progressive disorder, addiction is literally a matter of life and death, and a seach for regeneration often ending in a literalized or symbolic “trip to hell.” The archetypal background of addiction and madness is the ancient Greek godform, Hades-Dionysus.
Acting-out this pattern can be seen as a pattern of avoidance: the habit is used to dodge psychological reflection. Sometimes we act in order not to see. Addiction means actively doing and taking part in order to avoid knowing what one’s soul is doing. Instead of looking for himself, for satisfaction within himself, the addict keeps “looking for action,” for predictable gratification which never quite lives up to his euphoric recall. Addiction is a black hole for creativity; it sucks all life energy down into itself, as if nothing else matters. Addictions are pursued with a zeal that can ironically be called “religious.” The religious theme is implied by “transgressions” and the “contrition” that tends to follow binges, by the oaths and deals with the devil or God, for surcease, or perhaps pleas for more intoxicants to “get well.” Addiction is a cult-of-substance.
CRP addresses the underlying spiritual disconnectedness through the inner journey which leads through dissolution and death, thus following the recurrent theme of addiction, substituting altered states for intoxication and personal experience of the death/rebirth cycle instead of compulsively acting it out. The creative leap occurs when observed facts are correlated; that is, when by perceiving a heretofore unsuspected identity, a conjunctive path or new order is discovered. The discovery of this class reveals a new piece of the order of the universe, of Spirit, and each individual recognizes himself to have similar properties. Access to a higher state of being is possible only through symbolic and ritual death and regeneration. It is an initiation of the soul’s transformation. A symbolic death is a new beginning; an experiential regenerative journey and opportunity for rebirth. The creative energy that was wrapped up in the repetitive addictive cycle is free to flow in positive channels. CRP is for those seeking a deeper meaning within their suffering and patterns.
Keywords: Addiction, substance abuse, creativity, spirituality, altered states, initiation, recovery, transpersonal psychotherapy, REM, dreams, healing, sobriety, “dry drunk,” Spirit, Higher Power.
FULL TEXT:
http://chaosophy2000.iwarp.com
ASKLEPIA MONOGRAPH SERIES
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy2/intro.html
FULL TEXT:
http://chaosophy2000.iwarp.com
ASKLEPIA MONOGRAPH SERIES:
Contents
An Integrative View of Normal Adult Development
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Counseling Philosophy
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
About Fibromyalgia (FM) and Consciousness Restructuring
by Rob Kuehn and Graywolf Swinney
Chronic Fatigue Syndromes (CFS)
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Depressive Disorders/Grief
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Bipolar Disorder
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Attention-Deficit Disorder (A.D.D./A.D.H.D./O.D.D.)
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Cancer
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Borderline Personality Disorder
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Eating Disorders
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Psychoactive Substance Abuse Disorders
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
ComingSoon! Co-Dependence/Dependent Personality Disorder
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Autoimmune Disorders (R.A., M.S., Lupus) and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Stress-Reduction and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Hypertension and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Anxiety Disorders and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Chronic Pain Management and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
__________________________________________________
http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy2/intro.htmlABSTRACTS
Dreaming and the Self-Organizing Brain
by David Kahn, Stanley Krippner, and Allan Combs
[Used with author's permission from Journal for Consciousness Studies (JCS)]
ABSTRACT: We argue the REM dream experiences owe their structure and meaning to inherent self-organizing properties of the brain itself. Thus, we offer a common meeting ground for brain based studies of dreaming and traditional psychological dream theory. Our view is that the dreaming brain is a self-organizing system highly sensitive to internally generated influences.
Several lines of evidence support a process view of the brain as a system near the edge of chaos, one that is highly sensitive to internal influences. Such sensitivity is due to several factors. First, the dreaming brain normally gates out external input and thus operates without the stabilizing influences of external feedback. Second, the pre-frontal cortex is only minimally activated during REM sleep, and hence the brain operates with weakened volition, reduced logic, and diminished self-reflection. Third, because the neuromodulatory inhibitition mechanism is turned off during REM, the brain responds spontaneously to the least provocation. In addition, the dreaming brain is also subject to powerful intermittent cholinergic stimulation which may stimulate creative patterns of dream activity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Integrative View of Normal Adult Development
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, c2000
Abstract: Developmental theory helps us gain a concept of what unblocked or free flowing developmental process looks like in terms of the fulfillment of human potential. The integrative developmental framework emphasizes the continuing evolution of the whole person; ultimately it is a spiritual process.
The results of the stimulus of forward development and progression that is provided by the normative crisis of midlife, with its adjustments to aging and mortality, is examined in respect to the Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP). The goal of treatment is elimination of blocks to the still-evolving personality and to the course of current and future development.
CRP often leads to spontaneous initiatory spiritual experiences. The adult experiences a constant process of dynamic change and flux, and is always in a state of “becoming” or “finding the way.” We present seven hypotheses about development in adulthood, and identify phase-specific issues and challenges, including typical adult rites of passage and the developmental phenomena of middle and later life as well. Erickson’s eight stages of life are used to outline the developmental continuum through the illuminative phase of potential transpersonal experience.
The evolution of the authentic self in adulthood is a dynamic process which is part of the lifelong shaping of identity and self-image. The attainment of authenticity is a central, dynamic task of adulthood achieved through restructuring of the self. Confronting the quintessential adult-human experience can lead to integration of the highest order and produce profound awareness of what it means to be human. A number of factors, some unique to adult experience, build on the self constructed from earlier phases of life and develop it further. Some of the most important include: (1) the body, (2) object ties, (3) time and death, and (4) work, creativity, and mentorship.
Keywords: Adult development, developmental theory, Erickson, Maslow, Piaget, Gowan, Freud, Jung, midlife crisis, adult passages, rites of passage, death and dying, aging, mentoring, maturity, parenting, marriage, pair-bonding, self-actualization, self-realization, self-image, integrative models, character, vision, soul, spirituality, Transpersonal Psychology, peak experiences, ego-death, spiritual growth, creativity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Counseling Philosophy
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, c2000
Abstract: The Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP) is rarely practiced in isolation from simple counseling, formal or informal. CRP has roots in a multidisciplinary approach which includes the psychodynamics of Freud and Jung, as well as the humanistic/existential school, in particular the techniques of Transactional Analysis and Gestalt. The work on childhood development by Piaget, Erickson, and Alice Miller is also pertinent. Adult developmental theories of transpersonalists Maslow, Houston, and Gowan also describe some important aspects of this treatment philosophy. As an eclectic approach, CRP is not limited to these, and each practitioner will no doubt pick a variety of therapies of choice from the entire gamut, including so-called shamanic techniques.
Consciousness journeys are not necessarily employed each session. This paper attempts to provide a skeletal background of the basic philosophical roots of CRP as they relate to the counseling practice of this process of natural healing.
Keywords: Freud, Jung, Berne, Perls, Miller, Erikson, Piaget, libido, psychodynamics, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Depth Psychology, childhood, fetal development, REM, dreams, psychosomatic families, psychosomatic disorders, chaos theory, Chaosophy.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT FIBROMYALGIA (FM)
and CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING
by Rob Kuehn and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: Fibromyalgia is a syndrome, difficult to diagnose, which is psychophysical in nature. Symptoms are numerous, but feature characteristic tender points and muscular pain, chronic fatigue and sleep disturbances, and psychological factors. The inflammatory process also produces chemicals that are known to cause fatigue. Emotional and physical stress exacerbate symptoms, constricting bloodvessels and amplifying distress, often to the point of incapacitation. Allopathic treatments help curb symptoms, but only mask rather than transform psychological or emotional blocks.
Conventional treatment offers no known cure for FM. Therefore, the goal of treatment is successful symptom management. The integrative approach of the Consciousness Restructuring Process uses dreams, feelings, and symptoms to initiate a therapeutic healing journey. This journey leads past fear-based patterns of consciousness and psychophysical pain to a deep experience of the restructuring of the existential primal self-image.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROMES
and the
Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, 2000
ABSTRACT: Leading CFS researcher, Jay A. Goldstein, MD posits an etiology for CFS in limbic encephalopathy in a dysregulated neuroimmune network. Thus his allopathic treatment protocols include interventions in the “bidirectional communication” between the immune and neuroendocrine systems. This means that CFS can be considered among those syndromes which respond to Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), through intervention in the “cross-talk” between the central nervous system and the immune system. Viral disease can also cause neuropsychological deficits which are amplified under physical or emotional stress.
The limbic system plays a crucial role in regulatory physiology. The Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP) can influence this psychophysical network, through cognitive, behavioral and attitudinal changes that alter the state of limbic elements. Nonrestorative, alpha-EEG sleep abnormalities are common in CFS patients. Nevertheless, most report frequent, vivid dreams and nightmares which can be used to initiate the therapeutic process.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER
and the
Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, 2000
ABSTRACT: The alter personalities experienced under dissociation in Multiple Personality Disorder may form around “strange attractors” in the psychobiological field of an individual attempting to escape or heal traumatic stress in a self-organizing way. Generally, “personality change” is a creative attempt at growth. However, in MPD it leads to “divided consciousness,” where different aspects of self are isolated by state-dependent amnesias or trances, mediated by characteristic changes in neuroimmunologic response.
It is possible that through dissociation, the person is attempting to heal in a self-organizing way, but the transformative process gets “stuck” at the classical stage of fragmentation, which then recreates itself through the dynamics of “infinite nesting” and “self-iteration.” Core psychological patterns reinforce themselves by filtering sensory information about the world and self, and automatically organizing the rest of experience around itself in a way that further supports the basic pattern.
In shifting identities MPDs experience uncommon dreams, in an intuitive, if misbegotten, attempt at growth and change. Experience of alters carries the aura of a ‘waking dream,’ where things appear real, but not quite ‘right.’ The Consciousness Restructuring Process fosters this healing attempt, rather than thwarting it. CRP facilitates inter-modal shifts between not only identities, but sensations, perceptions, emotions, imagery and behavior. Thus, it offers a ‘positive outlet’ for a process trying to self-correct the organism, but allowing that process to flow beyond the state of fragmentation to the fully undifferentiated experience for healing, dissolving old ‘basins of attraction’ in the mindscape. The psychophysical channels of both the limbic-hypothalamus system (seat of reward/punishment circuits) and the placebo effect are invoked to account for positive results.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEPRESSIVE DISORDERS
and the
Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, 2000
ABSTRACT: There are three main types of depressive disorders: major depressive disorder, dysthymia, and the depressive lows of bipolar disorder. While conventional treatment has been to freely dispense antidepressants (SSRIs), an integrative approach would include psychosocial therapy to focus on the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal issues behind depression. For many individuals, SSRIs are contra-indicated due to a wide range of side effects, some quite severe.
CRP offers a comprehensive psychoimmunotherapy, which can alter mood in a positive direction, restore interest or pleaure in daily activities, promote healthy sleep patterns, restore energy reserves, transform feelings of worthlessness or guilt, foster pro-active decisions, calm restlessness, and ameliorate recurrent thoughts of death or morbidity. In CRP, the value of the depressive state is acknowledged and honored.
Rather than medicating it away, CRP facilitates the the depressive process and allows it to cycle through. Biological disturbances lead to a complex, dynamic interlocking group of psychophysical changes which depress the well-being and functionality of the individual until the call to restructure consciousness is heeded. By going deeper into the process and allowing imagery of death, for example, to play out to its natural conclusion in rebirth, CRP fosters restructuring at the genetic, cellular, biochemical, and psychoneuroimmunological levels.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD)
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: Posttraumatic stress is a disorder, and disorder implies automatically a chaotic state of being. The sorts of trauma that tend to induce PTSD include combat trauma, crimes, rape, grief, kidnapping, natural disasters, accidents, torture, and imprisonment. Predisposition to dissociation can arise in violent family environments. Those with PTSD become hypervigilant and hyperreactive to environmental threat. The traumatic syndrome is ever present and unchanged. Emotionally, it is as if it keeps on happening. State-related learning and memory encoding help maintain the trance-like steady state. Depression, shame, anxiety, subtance abuse, and survivor guilt are complications.
The nucleus of the disorder is a physioneurosis, somatization, depersonalization, and dissociation. Psychosomatic symptoms are expressions of the dissociation. Therapy proceeds by facilitating information transduction between them. There is poor impulse control and explosive aggressive reactions. There are persistent and profound alterations in stress hormone secretions and immune function. Integration of traumatic memories proceeds by verbal and nonverbal means in therapy.
Time does not heal all wounds. Different treatments are needed at different stages of posttraumatic adaptation. CRP offers a way of restructuring the frozen structure of this disorder at the most fundamental level, in the sensory terms in which it is encoded.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BIPOLAR DISORDER
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: CRP addresses this psychobiological disorder in terms of non-linear dynamics instead of as a battle of opposing states. Using Ernest Rossi’s Dream-Protein Hypothesis, a theory of this disease process is developed which accounts for much of its phenomenology. It examines the complex dynamics of learning and memory, which lead to greater creativity, stability, and healing in therapy.
Bipolar disorder consists of dramatic mood changes, characterized by irrational shifts in behavior and temperament. It used to be called manic depression, because of the alternating between normal, manic and depressive states. Rather than far poles of a linear oscillation, this effect is revisioned as related states of one primary attractor which accounts for them all. Bipolars experience both behavior and mood disorders, rooted in a runaway feedback loop modulating highs and lows. This disease is akin to a Hydra, the multiheaded monster from Greek mythology. It is a virulent disorder with multiple faces, making diagnosis difficult.
Bipolars experience dramatic changes in sleeping patterns, eating habits, may drink excessively or suddenly begin to abuse drugs. Excessive activity, spending sprees, reckless driving, foolish business investments, infidelity, etc. can create problems. Moods and behavior are as changeable as weather’s unfolding divergence.
This mood disorder disrupts normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness. On the down side it includes depression, passivity, lethargy, fatigue, and at the extreme, delusions, hallucinations, and thoughts of suicide. The elated pole includes wildly racing thoughts, expansiveness, agitation, restlessness, excitement, irritability, grandiosity, hyperactivity, and again, when severe, delusions, and hallucinations which repeatedly sweep over the person, altering normal personality. CRP helps ameliorate swings, reducing need for medication.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER (ADD/ADHD)
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: The Consciousness Restructuring Process can be used in an integrative treatment of ADD in both children and adults. ADD is a developmental disorder characterized by distractability, impulsive behavior, and the inability to remain focused on tasks or activities, without or with (ADHD) hyperactivity. Although the exact cause of ADHD is not known, an imbalance of certain neurotransmiters, the chemicals in the brain that transmit messages between nerve cells, is believed to be the mechanism behind symptoms. CRP goes deeper than behavioral, or cognitive behavioral therapy, and includes family therapy, neurofeedback, and proper nutrition in its integrative approach.
Adults who had ADD as children still carry some of the patterns of the disease, as well as residuals from years of treatment with stimulants, tricyclics, or other antidepressants, and psychological fallout. They benefit from CRP therapy as much as children in whom symptoms are amplified. Many children with ADHD receive neither behavioral training nor careful dose calibrations for the stimulants physicians prescribe, especially though community sources. About two-thirds of children do well enough to stay off medication with behavioral treatment alone. Psychosocial interventions like CRP, especially combined with neurofeedback, can profoundly affect ADHD even if a genetic predisposition is involved.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC TREATMENT OF CANCER
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: There are basic human drives toward sexuality, death, and a general evolutionary healing growth force. They are respectively eros, thanatos, and physis. The inwardly directed force of physis is a healing power that can be invoked through CRP even in the face of life-threatening disease. In fact, physis is the counterpoint to disease, a generalized creative drive toward health. Crisis may precipitate enhanced opportunities for the recognition and manifestation of physis; opportunities for massive reorganization along lines that are developmentally healthier and creatively more productive and healing. This creates more flexibility and resilience. In T.A. correlated script-free aspirations are under the influence of physis.
As people get closer and closer to their true self or “First Nature” (which always involves a sense of somatic and organismic integrity), they connect more profoundly with an inner healing and actualizing drive. CRP journeys enhance awareness of the spiritual, transpersonal, or transcendent dimension of our endeavors. Dreamhealing journeys provide the proper ambiance for clients’ self-discovery of healing physis within themselves. In this process the life-force is kindled, facilitating healing and self-realization.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: Those with Borderline Personality Disorder live at the “Edge of Chaos.” Sensitive to the initial conditions of their lives, they are labile, jostled by the slightest perturbations into unstable states of being. They inhabit the borderline between psychotic and non-psychotic states. Psychotic episodes are generally transitory and relatively brief, but the personality disorder, an attractive impulse without logic, is notoriously intractable. It can be conceptualized as a level of personality organization rather than a disorder.
Borderlines are raised within dysfunctional family systems where emphasis is on maintenance of family myths in the face of neglect and/or abuse (physical or sexual) through double-binding messages or communication given to the child victim. There is a discrepancy between the social facade presented to the outside world and the actual transactions within the family. The child creates defenses including denial of fantasies of good enough parents in order to deal with painful realities. Family members often collude with the abuser either to justify the abuse or to keep it a secret. The victim is damned by the fact that the abuse is either denied as real or the child is accused of causing it. Therefore, the child is either mad (“crazy”) or bad.
KEYWORDS: Borderline Personality Disorder, psychotherapy, dreams, REM, placebo effect, family therapy, healing, spirituality, dreamwork,
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EATING DISORDERS
and the
CONSCIOUSNESS RESTRUCTURING PROCESS
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
ABSTRACT: Typical treatment for eating disorders involves ego building and cognitive redecision therapy; existential systems-oriented therapy. But eating disorders are holistic dis-eases. The root of the disorder is a mistake in self-image. They reveal the relationship of a self to the world who either can’t get enough, or for whom any input is too much. Since we must all eat to live, being out of balance with food means being out of balance with nature. The CRP process dissolves old patterns of self-image, of relationship with food, and rebuilds ego by first restructuring consciousness at the sensory root or primordial level. REM journeys facilitate creative self-organization.
CRP for disordered eating is not just for those with clinical disorders, or even food cravings for carbohydrates, fats, or sweets. Poor dietary and sleeping habits lead to hypoglycemia, subclinical depression, fatigue, insomnia, and poor concentration, disrupt daily life, strain relationships, and even jeopardize careers. Self-esteem, self-control, mood, and eating are intertwined, so what a person eats or feels is wrongly metabolized. What we eat affects whether we are happy, sad, irritable, moody, alert, or sleepy. If you want to feel your best, you have to eat your best. Children can also benefit from CRP: 1 out of 3 children are overweight and in danger of obesity; children are 30% heavier than they were 10 years ago.
Keywords: Eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia, obesity, dreams, dreamwork, REM, consciousness, binging and purging, eating behavior, psychotherapy, mood and food, hypoglycemia, alcoholism, psychosomatics, sugar blues, cravings, nutrition, depression.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Psychoactive Substance Abuse
and the Consciousness Restructuring Process
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
Asklepia Foundation, 2000
Abstract: Substance Abuse can be revisioned as a substitute spiritual experience. This notion has even entered into colloquial language, where intoxicants are refered to as ‘spirits.’ The addictive process is a bastardization of the shamanic form of drug and ritual-induced initiatory healing and transformation. It leads to false ego states, ranging from inflations to atavistic regressions into unconsciousness and dissolution. A progressive disorder, addiction is literally a matter of life and death, and a seach for regeneration often ending in a literalized or symbolic “trip to hell.” The archetypal background of addiction and madness is the ancient Greek godform, Hades-Dionysus.
Acting-out this pattern can be seen as a pattern of avoidance: the habit is used to dodge psychological reflection. Sometimes we act in order not to see. Addiction means actively doing and taking part in order to avoid knowing what one’s soul is doing. Instead of looking for himself, for satisfaction within himself, the addict keeps “looking for action,” for predictable gratification which never quite lives up to his euphoric recall. Addiction is a black hole for creativity; it sucks all life energy down into itself, as if nothing else matters. Addictions are pursued with a zeal that can ironically be called “religious.” The religious theme is implied by “transgressions” and the “contrition” that tends to follow binges, by the oaths and deals with the devil or God, for surcease, or perhaps pleas for more intoxicants to “get well.” Addiction is a cult-of-substance.
CRP addresses the underlying spiritual disconnectedness through the inner journey which leads through dissolution and death, thus following the recurrent theme of addiction, substituting altered states for intoxication and personal experience of the death/rebirth cycle instead of compulsively acting it out. The creative leap occurs when observed facts are correlated; that is, when by perceiving a heretofore unsuspected identity, a conjunctive path or new order is discovered. The discovery of this class reveals a new piece of the order of the universe, of Spirit, and each individual recognizes himself to have similar properties. Access to a higher state of being is possible only through symbolic and ritual death and regeneration. It is an initiation of the soul’s transformation. A symbolic death is a new beginning; an experiential regenerative journey and opportunity for rebirth. The creative energy that was wrapped up in the repetitive addictive cycle is free to flow in positive channels. CRP is for those seeking a deeper meaning within their suffering and patterns.
Keywords: Addiction, substance abuse, creativity, spirituality, altered states, initiation, recovery, transpersonal psychotherapy, REM, dreams, healing, sobriety, “dry drunk,” Spirit, Higher Power.
FULL TEXT:
http://chaosophy2000.iwarp.com
CHAOSOPHY 2001: Neuropsychology and Quantum Metaphysics
CHAOSOPHY 2001
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND QUANTUM METAPHYSICS
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy3/intro.html
Volume III: CHAOSOPHY JOURNAL
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy3/intro.html
CHAOSOPHY 2001: Neuropsychology and Quantum Metaphysics
Volume III: CHAOSOPHY JOURNAL CHAOSOPHY 2001:
Neuropsychology and Quantum Metaphysics
INTRODUCTION
Neuroscience, Biophysics and the Whole Person
A PILOT STUDY IN ESP, DREAMS, AND PURPORTED OBEs
Stanley Krippner, PhD, Saybrook
PSI RESEARCH
& the Human Brain's "Reserve Capacities"
Stanley Krippner, PhD, Saybrook
HOLOGRAPHIC HEALING
Placebos and Consciousness Restructuring through REM
by Graywolf Swinney
FRACTAL NATURE OF ACTIVE SLEEP & WAKING DREAMS
Restructuring Consciousness through Metaphor, Fetal REM, and Neural Plasticity
Iona Miller & Graywolf Swinney
GOD IS IN THE DETAILS
Fractal Iteration of Self-Image & Disease Patterns:
A Transmodern View of Spontaneous Healing
Iona Miller & Graywolf Swinney
EMOTIONAL ALCHEMY
The Neurochemistry of Stress, Healing & Transcendence
Iona Miller & Graywolf Swinney *
GRANT STUDIES & EXPERIMENTS
THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF CRP, DREAMS, AND REM
P300 Waves and PGO Spikes
and Their Role in Consciousness Restructuring
Iona Miller & Graywolf Swinney
CRP THETA TRAINING
Theta Reverie and Co-Consciousness in CRP
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
NEUROMAGNETIC THERAPY
The Role of Magnetic Fields in Consciousness
by Iona Miller and Richard Miller
QUANTUM METAPHYSICS: HOLONOMIC PHYSICS
EXOTIC MATTER AND ENERGY:
Vacuum Fluctuation in the Macro- and Microcosm
or Surfing the Primordial Gravity Waves
by Iona Miller
THE PHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS ENGINEERING:
The Role of Enfolded Order in Mindbody and Personality, Part I and II
by Iona Miller
AS ABOVE; SO BELOW
The Mysteries of Quantum Metaphysics & Consciousness
by Iona Miller
BOOK REVIEWS
Holographic Healing
Placebos and Consciousness Restructuring through REM
1999 by Graywolf Swinney
This paper first appeared in DREAM NETWORK; reprinted with permission.
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are two of the most powerful yet discounted healing phenomena known in the healing arts and sciences. Such healing occurs with any or all illnesses, yet nothing, no treatment or substances, has been administered that can account for it. In studies of new treatments, as a control, the placebo consistently brings about symptomatic remissions 30-50% of the time. If a test drug performs in the 60% range (as many, if not most, do) the placebo was also at work in the test group and accounts for at least half or more of the effectiveness of the test treatment. The proponent of the treatment generally prefers to claim it to be the entire 60% effective. The half or more that is accountable by the placebo effect is ignored and illusions created about the drug's effectiveness.
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are consciousness events, and more specifically events in which consciousness and matter interact to naturally change or transform diseased structures into healing process or flow. At the level of reality at which this event takes place, it is not even an interaction, it is a reality in which consciousness-matter, or as it is more popularly known, mind-body, are not different but are virtualities not committed to either condition, yet the potential of both. It is, in other words, a level of quantum reality.
Quantum theory describes the state of reality in which something, for example, light simultaneously displays the properties of being both matter and pure energy waveform. Here, sudden shifts of state, quantum shifts, instantaneously occur, all is interconnected and uncertainty reigns. We too exist on this level, part of this natural process, influencing it and being influenced by it at subtle levels where outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
Dreams are our personal experience of REM consciousness and very much embody the quantum reality described above. There are a number of interesting facts that have come to light from scientific studies of REM that suggest it is probably the mechanism or consciousness-state which underlie the healing power of the placebo. There are clues from these studies that suggest that REM-Consciousness may also help in forming the roots of our diseases.
The Chaos-REM Process of Natural Healing
The CRP (Chaos-REM or Consciousness Restructuring Process of natural healing) is a healing process that resembles the placebo effect. Studying of its mechanisms has led to understanding how placebos may operate. This process (CRP) uses imaginative sensory imagery in wakened REM state to follow dream symbol or action to its root consciousness structure. This structure, stored deep in the subconscious, is a primal, existential, sensory self-image and it defines personal reality both inner and outer. It is a personal existential hologram that underlies perceptions of self and world.
This deepest sense of self is imprinted on the brain as neural firing patterns which, as suggested by Karl Pribram, create the interference wave pattern of this self-hologram. Our disease structures are incorporated within it. Reaching this root image and activating it while in REM draws it into implicate or chaotic consciousness field, and at this pre-quantum level of reality, it dissolves. A quantum shift occurs and from free or unstructured chaotic consciousness a new, more easeful image forms and becomes a transformed existential hologram except minus the disease structure. The shift is deeply felt on sensory and pre-sensory levels. One model of how the brain operates is that any action or behavior is first imaged in the brain, e.g. to turn this page one first creates an image of doing so and the hand then conforms to the image. The healed image is externalized in this way.
Access to the consciousness dynamics (hologram) that underlie our self and diseases is best accomplished in the Consciousness State associated with their formation. In the CRP, we have found that this requires working in wakened REM consciousness. We have also found that the basis of many disease structures is in consciousness structures formed while still a fetus.
REM Consciousness in Disease and Healing
How REM helps form disease at fetal levels is implied in the work and findings of several scientists studying REM. Dr. Allan Hobson, a noted sleep and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, states that, "REM may stimulate immature brains while they're in utero." Dr. Mark Manhowald of the Minnesota REgional Sleep Disorder Center states that: "The fetus is in REM consciousness during most of its term in utero. Because the new baby's brain begins development with only the basics, like a new computer, the life process, [REM], programs the brain with capabilities in each developmental state and continues doing so after birth."
Dr. Stanley Krippner and Dr. Montague Ullman, in their work at Maimonides Dream Laboratory, demonstrated that REM consciousness is a psi-conductive state. They demonstrated that two people in REM could share common dream experiences, even when separated by walls and space. All this suggests that a fetus in REM shares its parent's dream states and is preprogrammed by them.
Dreams are known to be necessary for dealing with waking traumas and events. Through REM sharing a fetus is therefore exposed to the past and present traumas and experiences affecting its parents' lives. In this way programming the fetal development is determined by both parents, and the events in their lives that require dream (REM) processing. This is in addition to physiological conditioning through the chemical environment created in the womb by the mother's personal life choices.
Through REM, the fetus taps not only into co-consciousness with the parents, but also into the collective consciousness of the species. These experiences ae imprinted into the neural network and developing cells of the fetus and form the basis of its existential self-hologram. (Physicist Amit Goswami believes all structure in the Universe is based in consciousness). This mechanism continues after birth, except also incorporates the post natal life experiences of the individual.
All the above affects both biology and mind. REM is associated with womb experience such as the generation and development of the nervous system and tissue-cells. Nervous system and personality developments are very susceptible to mood and experience. These are matters with which depth psychiatry and psychology deal. Tissue and cell formation and functioning are also associated with mood and experiences.
Dr. Carl Simonton demonstrated this in relation to the development of cancer and its remission. For example, many cancers develop within two years of a major loss such as death of a relative or loss of one's career through retirement. He also identified a psychological profile based on childhood experiences that are associated with cancer. He found that remission of cancer was very much facilitated by visual imagery combined with other informational and therapeutic psychological techniques. Norman Cousins demonstrated that healing was induced through laughter, peace of mind and positive attitude.
The Role of Chaos in Natural Healing Process
We know from chaos theory that any complex system is very much influenced by minor perturbations or differences in its initial conditions. This is known as the "butterfly effect." The human organism is certainly a very complex system and so very much influenced in its formation by influences in its earliest developmental conditions. Early conditions of REM consciousness in the womb greatly influence our future physiology and personality.
We suggest that the potential for our future illnesses is programmed into our consciousness structure and also our neurological and tissue structure during these sensitive initial conditions. It is incorporated into the person existential hologram into outer reality creating the somatic and psychic presentations inherent in it.
Returning to these consciousness structures in the REM state in which they were formed allows restructuring of this hologram. We suggest this restructuring occurs in REM sleep, for example, when a placebo has been administered and expectations for its effectiveness are held. This is also the consciousness-state required for the profound self-healing observed in the CRP Journeys.
Further validation of the healing powers of REM comes from dream deprivation studies which show that the mind, the nervous system and eventually the body and physiology deteriorate when the organism is deprived of REM sleep. Also, it has long been an observation in medical therapy that sleep is regenerative, and that people recovering from illness or surgery need more sleep and thus REM than usual.
Studies in neurofeedback addressing the interface of chaos with the brain and its role in the brain's functioning also provide validation. Although measurements of brain waves result in their division and categorization into certain frequencies or states such as the alpha state, the theta state, and delta, etc, such is not really the case. The frequencies of the brain waves vary randomly within a given state. The distance between peaks is highly variable and disordered around the average. When these varied frequencies are used to program a fractal (the mathematics describing chaos theory) it becomes possible to measure the degree of chaos or complexity in the brain's functioning. These degrees of complexity are known as dimensions and the higher the dimensionality, the more complex or chaotic the neural firing patterns.
Lower dimensionality is associated with such dysfunction of the brain as epilepsy, comas and strokes. Similarly, dysfunction such as obsessive compulsive behavior may be associated with linearity or lower dimensionally. On the other hand, high dimensionally is associated with healthy brain functioning. Chaos theory itself implies that the more complex a system is, the more self-correcting it is. This is because disruption to a linear system will throw the whole system off, but only affects a portion of a complex system, which soon adjusts to "fill in the gap." In a way this is the reverse of the butterfly effect and operates in the complex system once past its initial conditions. It emphasizes the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e. at the organism's initial conditions. However, the important data to note here is that the highest level of dimensionality, complexity, or chaos measured in the brain, a dimensionality of nine, occurs only in REM consciousness.
The Chemistry of Natural Healing
Changing the neural firing patterns (hologram) of the brain through the aforementioned REM-chaos process affects the body's chemistry and the existential perceptions of the entire organism. Since the brain is known to operate holographically, change to any part affects the whole. Chemistry is modified through the pineal and pituitary glands, parts of the brain itself. These glands affect the release of neurotransmitters, which control mood, and the hormonal chemicals which control how our various organs function throughout the body. Messages sent to and received by the brain throughout the entire nervous system are also affected. Fundamental perceptions of self and reality change. Outer soon follows inner. Somatic and personality presentation changes.
In CRP journeys, we infer that this chaotic, implicate or complex (REM-Chaos) consciousness is the state in which the healing chemical transformations are initiated by changes in the primal existential hologram. This model suggests a similar process for placebos.
Implications of REM-Chaos Natural Healing Process
Spontaneous healing is closely associated with REM. These clues all imply the mechanism through which dreams, placebos, and the CRP do their healing and regenerative work. Chaos is always associated with change and is usually seen as its aftereffect. Chaos is actually the mechanism of the change itself. REM-Chaos consciousness is the most chaotic or complex state of dynamics in the brain. It is the state that most supports its self-correction (the homeostasis effect) and the natural transformation of any organism to healthy flow. It is the state that supports profound self-healing.
This information also implies a major change in the way we can view illness and healing. Seen from a consciousness viewpoint and consistent with the new physics of quantum holographic, and chaos theories, illness and wellness are more a matter of basic consciousness structure than mere chemistry. Chemical change are an effect rather than a cause, an associated phenomenon.
We can no longer view illness as merely the invasion of the body by carcinogens or germs and viruses and healing as the mechanistic or chemical correction of these conditions. Natural healing happens at quantum-implicate levels of reality. Accessing it through the REM-Chaos state brings about subsequent changes in brain chemistry and may be the mechanisms by which placebos heal. The CRP is an awakened means of doing this in REM-Chaos consciousness.
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy3/intro.html
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND QUANTUM METAPHYSICS
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy3/intro.html
Volume III: CHAOSOPHY JOURNAL
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy3/intro.html
CHAOSOPHY 2001: Neuropsychology and Quantum Metaphysics
Volume III: CHAOSOPHY JOURNAL CHAOSOPHY 2001:
Neuropsychology and Quantum Metaphysics
INTRODUCTION
Neuroscience, Biophysics and the Whole Person
A PILOT STUDY IN ESP, DREAMS, AND PURPORTED OBEs
Stanley Krippner, PhD, Saybrook
PSI RESEARCH
& the Human Brain's "Reserve Capacities"
Stanley Krippner, PhD, Saybrook
HOLOGRAPHIC HEALING
Placebos and Consciousness Restructuring through REM
by Graywolf Swinney
FRACTAL NATURE OF ACTIVE SLEEP & WAKING DREAMS
Restructuring Consciousness through Metaphor, Fetal REM, and Neural Plasticity
Iona Miller & Graywolf Swinney
GOD IS IN THE DETAILS
Fractal Iteration of Self-Image & Disease Patterns:
A Transmodern View of Spontaneous Healing
Iona Miller & Graywolf Swinney
EMOTIONAL ALCHEMY
The Neurochemistry of Stress, Healing & Transcendence
Iona Miller & Graywolf Swinney *
GRANT STUDIES & EXPERIMENTS
THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF CRP, DREAMS, AND REM
P300 Waves and PGO Spikes
and Their Role in Consciousness Restructuring
Iona Miller & Graywolf Swinney
CRP THETA TRAINING
Theta Reverie and Co-Consciousness in CRP
by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney
NEUROMAGNETIC THERAPY
The Role of Magnetic Fields in Consciousness
by Iona Miller and Richard Miller
QUANTUM METAPHYSICS: HOLONOMIC PHYSICS
EXOTIC MATTER AND ENERGY:
Vacuum Fluctuation in the Macro- and Microcosm
or Surfing the Primordial Gravity Waves
by Iona Miller
THE PHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS ENGINEERING:
The Role of Enfolded Order in Mindbody and Personality, Part I and II
by Iona Miller
AS ABOVE; SO BELOW
The Mysteries of Quantum Metaphysics & Consciousness
by Iona Miller
BOOK REVIEWS
Holographic Healing
Placebos and Consciousness Restructuring through REM
1999 by Graywolf Swinney
This paper first appeared in DREAM NETWORK; reprinted with permission.
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are two of the most powerful yet discounted healing phenomena known in the healing arts and sciences. Such healing occurs with any or all illnesses, yet nothing, no treatment or substances, has been administered that can account for it. In studies of new treatments, as a control, the placebo consistently brings about symptomatic remissions 30-50% of the time. If a test drug performs in the 60% range (as many, if not most, do) the placebo was also at work in the test group and accounts for at least half or more of the effectiveness of the test treatment. The proponent of the treatment generally prefers to claim it to be the entire 60% effective. The half or more that is accountable by the placebo effect is ignored and illusions created about the drug's effectiveness.
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are consciousness events, and more specifically events in which consciousness and matter interact to naturally change or transform diseased structures into healing process or flow. At the level of reality at which this event takes place, it is not even an interaction, it is a reality in which consciousness-matter, or as it is more popularly known, mind-body, are not different but are virtualities not committed to either condition, yet the potential of both. It is, in other words, a level of quantum reality.
Quantum theory describes the state of reality in which something, for example, light simultaneously displays the properties of being both matter and pure energy waveform. Here, sudden shifts of state, quantum shifts, instantaneously occur, all is interconnected and uncertainty reigns. We too exist on this level, part of this natural process, influencing it and being influenced by it at subtle levels where outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
Dreams are our personal experience of REM consciousness and very much embody the quantum reality described above. There are a number of interesting facts that have come to light from scientific studies of REM that suggest it is probably the mechanism or consciousness-state which underlie the healing power of the placebo. There are clues from these studies that suggest that REM-Consciousness may also help in forming the roots of our diseases.
The Chaos-REM Process of Natural Healing
The CRP (Chaos-REM or Consciousness Restructuring Process of natural healing) is a healing process that resembles the placebo effect. Studying of its mechanisms has led to understanding how placebos may operate. This process (CRP) uses imaginative sensory imagery in wakened REM state to follow dream symbol or action to its root consciousness structure. This structure, stored deep in the subconscious, is a primal, existential, sensory self-image and it defines personal reality both inner and outer. It is a personal existential hologram that underlies perceptions of self and world.
This deepest sense of self is imprinted on the brain as neural firing patterns which, as suggested by Karl Pribram, create the interference wave pattern of this self-hologram. Our disease structures are incorporated within it. Reaching this root image and activating it while in REM draws it into implicate or chaotic consciousness field, and at this pre-quantum level of reality, it dissolves. A quantum shift occurs and from free or unstructured chaotic consciousness a new, more easeful image forms and becomes a transformed existential hologram except minus the disease structure. The shift is deeply felt on sensory and pre-sensory levels. One model of how the brain operates is that any action or behavior is first imaged in the brain, e.g. to turn this page one first creates an image of doing so and the hand then conforms to the image. The healed image is externalized in this way.
Access to the consciousness dynamics (hologram) that underlie our self and diseases is best accomplished in the Consciousness State associated with their formation. In the CRP, we have found that this requires working in wakened REM consciousness. We have also found that the basis of many disease structures is in consciousness structures formed while still a fetus.
REM Consciousness in Disease and Healing
How REM helps form disease at fetal levels is implied in the work and findings of several scientists studying REM. Dr. Allan Hobson, a noted sleep and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, states that, "REM may stimulate immature brains while they're in utero." Dr. Mark Manhowald of the Minnesota REgional Sleep Disorder Center states that: "The fetus is in REM consciousness during most of its term in utero. Because the new baby's brain begins development with only the basics, like a new computer, the life process, [REM], programs the brain with capabilities in each developmental state and continues doing so after birth."
Dr. Stanley Krippner and Dr. Montague Ullman, in their work at Maimonides Dream Laboratory, demonstrated that REM consciousness is a psi-conductive state. They demonstrated that two people in REM could share common dream experiences, even when separated by walls and space. All this suggests that a fetus in REM shares its parent's dream states and is preprogrammed by them.
Dreams are known to be necessary for dealing with waking traumas and events. Through REM sharing a fetus is therefore exposed to the past and present traumas and experiences affecting its parents' lives. In this way programming the fetal development is determined by both parents, and the events in their lives that require dream (REM) processing. This is in addition to physiological conditioning through the chemical environment created in the womb by the mother's personal life choices.
Through REM, the fetus taps not only into co-consciousness with the parents, but also into the collective consciousness of the species. These experiences ae imprinted into the neural network and developing cells of the fetus and form the basis of its existential self-hologram. (Physicist Amit Goswami believes all structure in the Universe is based in consciousness). This mechanism continues after birth, except also incorporates the post natal life experiences of the individual.
All the above affects both biology and mind. REM is associated with womb experience such as the generation and development of the nervous system and tissue-cells. Nervous system and personality developments are very susceptible to mood and experience. These are matters with which depth psychiatry and psychology deal. Tissue and cell formation and functioning are also associated with mood and experiences.
Dr. Carl Simonton demonstrated this in relation to the development of cancer and its remission. For example, many cancers develop within two years of a major loss such as death of a relative or loss of one's career through retirement. He also identified a psychological profile based on childhood experiences that are associated with cancer. He found that remission of cancer was very much facilitated by visual imagery combined with other informational and therapeutic psychological techniques. Norman Cousins demonstrated that healing was induced through laughter, peace of mind and positive attitude.
The Role of Chaos in Natural Healing Process
We know from chaos theory that any complex system is very much influenced by minor perturbations or differences in its initial conditions. This is known as the "butterfly effect." The human organism is certainly a very complex system and so very much influenced in its formation by influences in its earliest developmental conditions. Early conditions of REM consciousness in the womb greatly influence our future physiology and personality.
We suggest that the potential for our future illnesses is programmed into our consciousness structure and also our neurological and tissue structure during these sensitive initial conditions. It is incorporated into the person existential hologram into outer reality creating the somatic and psychic presentations inherent in it.
Returning to these consciousness structures in the REM state in which they were formed allows restructuring of this hologram. We suggest this restructuring occurs in REM sleep, for example, when a placebo has been administered and expectations for its effectiveness are held. This is also the consciousness-state required for the profound self-healing observed in the CRP Journeys.
Further validation of the healing powers of REM comes from dream deprivation studies which show that the mind, the nervous system and eventually the body and physiology deteriorate when the organism is deprived of REM sleep. Also, it has long been an observation in medical therapy that sleep is regenerative, and that people recovering from illness or surgery need more sleep and thus REM than usual.
Studies in neurofeedback addressing the interface of chaos with the brain and its role in the brain's functioning also provide validation. Although measurements of brain waves result in their division and categorization into certain frequencies or states such as the alpha state, the theta state, and delta, etc, such is not really the case. The frequencies of the brain waves vary randomly within a given state. The distance between peaks is highly variable and disordered around the average. When these varied frequencies are used to program a fractal (the mathematics describing chaos theory) it becomes possible to measure the degree of chaos or complexity in the brain's functioning. These degrees of complexity are known as dimensions and the higher the dimensionality, the more complex or chaotic the neural firing patterns.
Lower dimensionality is associated with such dysfunction of the brain as epilepsy, comas and strokes. Similarly, dysfunction such as obsessive compulsive behavior may be associated with linearity or lower dimensionally. On the other hand, high dimensionally is associated with healthy brain functioning. Chaos theory itself implies that the more complex a system is, the more self-correcting it is. This is because disruption to a linear system will throw the whole system off, but only affects a portion of a complex system, which soon adjusts to "fill in the gap." In a way this is the reverse of the butterfly effect and operates in the complex system once past its initial conditions. It emphasizes the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e. at the organism's initial conditions. However, the important data to note here is that the highest level of dimensionality, complexity, or chaos measured in the brain, a dimensionality of nine, occurs only in REM consciousness.
The Chemistry of Natural Healing
Changing the neural firing patterns (hologram) of the brain through the aforementioned REM-chaos process affects the body's chemistry and the existential perceptions of the entire organism. Since the brain is known to operate holographically, change to any part affects the whole. Chemistry is modified through the pineal and pituitary glands, parts of the brain itself. These glands affect the release of neurotransmitters, which control mood, and the hormonal chemicals which control how our various organs function throughout the body. Messages sent to and received by the brain throughout the entire nervous system are also affected. Fundamental perceptions of self and reality change. Outer soon follows inner. Somatic and personality presentation changes.
In CRP journeys, we infer that this chaotic, implicate or complex (REM-Chaos) consciousness is the state in which the healing chemical transformations are initiated by changes in the primal existential hologram. This model suggests a similar process for placebos.
Implications of REM-Chaos Natural Healing Process
Spontaneous healing is closely associated with REM. These clues all imply the mechanism through which dreams, placebos, and the CRP do their healing and regenerative work. Chaos is always associated with change and is usually seen as its aftereffect. Chaos is actually the mechanism of the change itself. REM-Chaos consciousness is the most chaotic or complex state of dynamics in the brain. It is the state that most supports its self-correction (the homeostasis effect) and the natural transformation of any organism to healthy flow. It is the state that supports profound self-healing.
This information also implies a major change in the way we can view illness and healing. Seen from a consciousness viewpoint and consistent with the new physics of quantum holographic, and chaos theories, illness and wellness are more a matter of basic consciousness structure than mere chemistry. Chemical change are an effect rather than a cause, an associated phenomenon.
We can no longer view illness as merely the invasion of the body by carcinogens or germs and viruses and healing as the mechanistic or chemical correction of these conditions. Natural healing happens at quantum-implicate levels of reality. Accessing it through the REM-Chaos state brings about subsequent changes in brain chemistry and may be the mechanisms by which placebos heal. The CRP is an awakened means of doing this in REM-Chaos consciousness.
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy3/intro.html
CHAOSOPHY 2002 "Empathy, Resilience and Consciousness" Tao of Resilience
CHAOSOPHY 2002
EMPATHY, COMPASSION AND HEALING:
TAO of RESILIENCE
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/
Chaosophy4/Resilience/resilience.html
http://tao-of-resilience.iwarp.com
THE TAO OF RESILIENCE
by Peggie C. Southwick, M.A.
Asklepia Foundation, ©1998
[Edited and Updated by Iona Miller, 2002]
Editorial Note: On 9-11-01 our whole world changed; chaos prevails. Even though it was a vital survival quality before, 'resilience,' both personal and collective, has become even more important as we make our emotional and pragmatic adjustments to this new era. Issues of emotional support, empathy, compassion, and spirituality have become highlighted in a new, more immediate way. Survival skills of adaptation, creativity, optimism, self-talk, life-strategy, trust, risk-reward assessment, humor, recovery and problem-solving or coping are more important than ever. This is equally true for both adults and children.
Therefore, we offer this deep background on its nature and how to tap into its healing or renewing power through the mentoring and Dream Journey process of Consciousness Restructuring. This paper, in different form, was originally presented at Pacifica Graduate Institute for Ms. Southwick's Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology. Iona Miller has updated it to highlight its relevance to the Consciousness Restructuring Process, (CRP).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART I:
Psychological Resilience
Redefining Resilience in Terms of Consciousness
Restructuring Process
Developmental Theories
Piaget & Vygotsky
Wolin & Wolin
John Curtis Gowan
Developmental Self Psychology
Summary
Cognitive Theories
Emotional Intelligence
Left Brain, Right Brain
The Three Faces of Mind
Cognitive Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons
Summary
Psychodynamic Theories
Psychodynamics
Jungian Theories
Transpersonal Psychology
Consciousness Studies
Summary
Summary of Psychological Resilience Findings and CRP
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TAO OF RESILIENCE, Part I
Let go and fall into the river.
Let the river of life sweep you beyond all aid
from old and worn concepts.
I will support you.
Trust me.
As you swim from an old consciousness,
blind to higher realities beyond your physical world,
trust that I will guide you
with care and love
into a new stream of consciousness.
I will open a new world before you.
Can you trust me enough to
let go of the known
and swim in an unknown current?
Redefining Resilience in the Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP)
Resilience helps us bounce back or recover our spirit, energy, and harmonious way of being. Psychological resilience is that factor which heals us from the traumatic stress of modern life that we are all subjected to in a variety of forms. Resilience has many facets.
In honor of the resilience process at work in all of us, the overall format of this paper represents a harmonious shuttling back and forth between the vertical logic of Logos and the more horizontally integrative experience of Eros as it weaves the fabric of its new resilience metaphor upon the loom of these pages. Resilience is an implied state of being rather than any concretely definable "thing."
Yet, this resilient "state" also seems to represent the cohesive and stabilizing elemental matrix through which a unifying life force is resonantly evolving within us. It is made up of many underlying processes, as well as a quality or state of being. In those for whom this quality is in short supply, therapy can foster first its emergence, and then its stabilization as an intrinsic quality of being, by connecting us with the source of resilience.
What reduces or facilitates the resilient nature of consciousness? Each field of inquiry has its own theories and models of psychophysical resilience. Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologies offer "missing, invisible" factors that contribute to resilience and are described with psychodynamic metaphors.
The Consciousness Restructuring Process goes a step further than Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologies by offering more than a metaphor. It provides a means of direct participation in the emergent process of creating ever-newing resilience through psychophysical healing by facilitating REM and neural restructuring.
CRP is an interdisciplinary artform. Aspects of this living process can be described, modelled or experienced through such scientific concepts as Relativity Theory, Quantum Theory, Chaos Theory, the Holographic Model, Systems Theory, Synergetics, REM Dynamics, Personal Mythology, Genetics, Neurotheology and Physiology. The practice of CRP therapy is essentially Humanistic; it is rooted in Transactional Analysis and Gestalt Dreamwork, but takes these disciplines into the Transpersonal Realms where we connect with Source, with Creativity, with Healing, with Spirituality.
CRP draws inspiration from the mythical roots of the Asklepian tradition. The ancient Asklepian dream priests never interpreted dreams, but fostered a direct epiphany of the seeker with the archetypal shamanic healer, Asklepios. CRP connects with this ancient current through the dreamhealing process and the shaman/therapist model or co-conscious mentoring proceedure.
By directly entering into and engaging our dream imagery, symptoms, and emotions we can tap that healing energy by plumbing our depths and soaring to our own heights of potential. This immersive experience produces direct conscious participation in the stream of consciousness which brings psychophysical change, feelings of renewal or rebirth, and connection with Spirit; all of which help us bounce back from the chaos and tragedies life brings our way.
For example, dreams of the 911 destruction, or nightmares of other disasters provide immediate opportunities to enter directly into the source of those fears and insecurities, into the depth of the problem or symptom. Rather than contemplating what you believe, or what you know, the process allows you to travel into the very jaws of death in the journey, to make a pilgrimage into the "underworld" to retrieve our lost and suffering souls. What we find there we know to be True...to reflect our essence.
Many people avoid thinking about death, much less volutarily undergoing a symbolic ego-death experience. But we are supposed to think about it, to contemplate our personal dissolution, for that is what highlights what is important in life. Many people near death report that the most important issues for them are, "Am I loved; and have I loved well?" We might ask ourselves, "What is it that death doesn't take?" We don't need to wait for terminal illness to ask. And one answer to that is the capacity to love.
Instead of actively trying to avoid Chaos, we embrace it and dive into its very depths for the renewal it promises. We must look at the face of insecurity; it is always there but sometimes it just explodes, personally and/or collectively. Resilience is a function or quality of our consciousness and conscious participation in the universal flow state, whose essence is pure undifferentiated chaos, (also known scientifically as vacuum potential, zero-point energy, in CRP as consciousness field or chaotic consciousness). It is more fundamental than either energy or matter, psyche or soma. It is the groundstate from which all forms, order, and self-organization arises.
In CRP, the ego and personality structure, and with it any dis-ease structure, undergoes a process of dissolution back to our most primal state, and the resurrected personality emerges holistically re-organized with a generally healtier disposition and outlook which is the optimistic hallmark of resilience.
Trying times, both personal and collective, challenge our faith and existential resolve. The world can come to us in devastating and frightful ways. That is when we are especially called upon to work at faith, to find value and meaning. We need to reach deep within ourselves, listen to what emerges from inside, and find our resilience -- the ability to bounce back and press on.
One way we find this resilience is through service, the active expression of compassion. In difficult times, when troubles persist, we may come to suffer from compassion burn-out -- eventually shutting out the world with defense mechanisms. Yet, compassion is the absolute test of any spirituality.
Only our own suffering, our own journey, our own quest for healing, gives us insight into the suffering of others; empathy for the suffering of others. But suffering for its own sake, without pro-actively seeking transformation is essentially not having compassion for ourselves. Unremitting suffering leads to depression and hopelessness. However, through suffering consciously, we learn to go with the catastrophe and find the natural healing on the other side.
In "Empathy and Consciousness," (JSC, 2001), Evan Thompson makes five main points:
(1) Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective.
(2) The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy, understood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality.
(3) Empathy is the precondition (the condition of possibility) of the science of consciousness.
(4) Human empathy is inherently developmental: open to it are pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity.
(5) Real progress in the understanding of intersubjectivity requires integrating the methods and findings of cognitive science, phenomenology, and contemplative and meditative psychologies of human transformation.
We can experientially come to realize that our consciousness of ourselves as embodied individuals in the world is founded upon empathy -- on our empathic cognition of others, and others' empathic cognition or grasp of oneself. This is the antidote for the poison of mutual projection of negative traits onto others, which happens both personally and culturally. This projection of animosity lies at the root of war, which can only be weeded out individual by individual through experiential confrontation with Shadow elements.
Empathy is a basic emotional faculty. Empathy is an evolved psychobiological capacity. Empathic grasping of another, especially by sensing them as animated by their own fields of sensation, means sharing the same field of experience -- essentially a shared virtuality. According to Depraz (JSC, 2001), there are at least four possible kinds of empathy:
1) The passive association of my lived body with the lived body of the Other;
2) The imaginative transposal of myself to the place of the Other;
3) The interpretation or understanding of myself as an Other for you;
4) Ethical responsiblity in the face of the Other.
In empathy and compassion the values in question transcend personal concerns, sometimes transcending even the concern for our own continued existence and nonexistence. Compassion is not merely an expression of nonegocentric value-feeling, one that can emerge only as a result of inward meditative disembedding. It plays a guiding role in moving from one mode to another, in the expansion of the value-sensing repertoire. This is the reason that practices of compassion, benevolence, or love are emphasized so strongly right from the start in the practices of many wisdom traditions.
Empathy is not limited. The extension of empathy and compassion to the nonhuman world seems rather foreign to the Judaeo-Christian tradition (at least until recently), but is central to the Buddhist ideal of compassion for all sentient beings, and to the Neo-Confucian ideal of "forming one body with the Universe."
This understanding is the root of philosophical choices which are fundamental to continued quality of life on our planet. With empathy for the Earth we respond positively to such issues as vegetarianism, recycling, "living small" or "lightly on the land," humane treatment of animals, human rights, population control, conservation, environmental protection, deep ecology, right livlihood, health care and spiritual practice, among others.
CRP helps us identify with a myriad of forms from the inside out to experience first-hand what that is like. Compassion is the heart of interbeing, and is the superlative expression of the human capacity for empathy. The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity.
We've seen this commiseration in the U.S. since '911' in a myriad of ways, sharing fears and small triumphs. Somehow this disaster has brought us closer, and it is more than a trauma bond. People seem more open and inclined to speak with strangers on the street, to help one another. The question is, "What was preventing this easier flow prior to that time?" But it is rhetorical. Suffering is universal -- resilience is not. Sharing the burdens of our suffering and finding a way through fosters resilience.
Neuroscientist Arnold Mandell (Omni, 81) reports results from his own research that suggest agreement with the foundations of CRP. He cites the Hindu sacred poem, Bhagavad Gita as saying that transcendent action is possible through detachment with empathy. He goes on to assert that,
"Maybe dragging around yesterday's messages, maintaining old order in thought forms, is a lot sicker than reality that's an existential randomness. The whole idea underlying, say Buddha's enlightenment, transcendence, "no mind," may be a return to randomness, to a lack of order. Maybe letting go, religious surrender is the feeling equivalent of a loss of order -- the order Eastern philosophers say is, was, artificial in the first place.
Is this the unconscious, the disordered part of oneself? Before Homer, it was thought to be the voice of God. It's William James's mystical experience, the Quakers' inner light, Jung's universal unconscious, Hinduism's "that," St. Theresa's ecstasy, Roger Sperry's right hemisphere. There is order in randomness.
The brain is unstable and we all live on the edge of disorganization, whether we allow ourselves to be conscious of it or not. Knowing the limits is wisdom."
So, whether we like it or not, we all live an atmosphere, both inside and out, that can be characterized as the edge of chaos. William James's preconscious stream is back in full force. It's tumbling through our minds like the weather, and we're left in a position to observe, to explore, negotiate maybe, but not control.
We are complex organisms and chaos theory best describes this. In the new paradigm, our structure of self emerges from chaos in an environment of complex interacting systems, responsive to and shaped by that environment. What else is the moment of our conception? Eventually, the structure grows brittle, doesn't respond to the ever-evolving and changing environment and disintegrates back into chaos from which emerges new structure.
At the personal level we experienece this process as a life crisis or a disease, particularly if we fight the change, when the framework of our reality changes. It is this dance of evolution that is reality and healthy, not the temporary forms and structures that we fix on, nor the chaos that we avoid. They exist only in passing as our existential perceptions. Our true health is in being, becoming, and accepting this ever-evolving self -- in a word resilience.
Fundamental to CRP is that it works in REM with sensory elements of our dreams. Healing, as are dreams, is a sensory not an intellectual process. Senses inform us when we are sick or well. Our dreams also reveal disease, often before symptoms appear. Mind and intellect only deal with symbols of reality. Dreams alone are healing, as the havoc wrought from dream deprivation shows.
The deep illness image, when experienced, spontaneously self-destructs into chaotic and unbound consciousness. The new emergent sensory self image that is found in chaotic consciousness is a new easeful structure that has replaced the disease, for example, a deep-felt sense of warmth, flow, and boundarylessness.
The CRP teaches a new way of flowing through life, philosophically and experientially. It provides the experience of doing so in a virtual reality experience of wakeful REM, and directly alters self-image and reality perception that empowers us by making us more resilient.
PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF RESILIENCE
Developmental Theories of Resilience
According to most child-development experts, we are all born with no concept of "self." We construct a self-image, and our Primal Existential Self Image (PESI) is based in our earliest psychosensory experience, according to the Consciousness Restrucutring Process (CRP), (Swinney, 2001).
We construct a self-image first of our bodies and their capacities and limitations through experimentation, and then of our essential nature as we gaze into the "mirrors" of our caregivers. A child who generally receives positively reinforcing images of himself as they are reflected in the tender, loving gestures of his primary caregivers soon begins to associate these reflected subliminal messages with his own state of being in the world.
In other words, he correlates being loved with being lovable; having his needs met as being worthy of having his needs met. In troubled families, however, the mirroring process goes awry, and children are at risk of forming an inner self-representation that feels defective and unwanted. When they are psychologically "twisted" and "bent out of shape" themselves, dysfunctional caregivers can be like distorting mirrors that reflect grotesquely distorted images of reality onto their children, (Wolin & Wolin, 1993).
CRP, which incorporates the traditional re-parenting and mirroring processes of Transactional Analysis, Jacqui Schiff and Virginia Satir, helps remedy any distortions from childhood through the mentoring process. However, the spontaneous, self-organizing healing process facilitated by CRP can completely restructure the PESI at the most fundamental level, rather than simply "filling in the blanks" a child failed to receive.
The PESI is the primal experience of beingness; the primal self-image (hologram) that holds the primal dis-ease structure. It is existential in that it defines, at a very fundamental level, the nature of the self, the world and the relationship between them. Our beliefs conform to this dynamic image, and these dynamics of the PESI also limit or filter our sensosry input. It is the deepest level of consciousness dynamics in which there is still a defined self and not-self. It shapes our perceptions based on the input of our senses and nervous system.
Our earliest sense-images were experienced on the edges, or periphery of sensation and seem to go far beyond ordinary sensation. Our earliest awareness consists of these sensations, including those of conception and gestation. Dis-easful dynamic consciousness patterns can shape the more superficial levels of somatic and psychic structures. They lead to deeper state of self/not self, into which a dis-eased self disappears or dissolves, and arises transformed out of the underlying chaos. This type of renewal, restructuring, or rebirth of the deepest sense of self is precisely a demonstration of resilience.
Developmental theory maintains that occasionally a child will manage to distract himself from distorted images and will be drawn instead to more positively reinforcing image of herself in relation to her environment. For example, she might look to others outside her immediate family for emotional support (despite negative parental legacies), or might develop interests in activities which help develop a sense of personal efficacy and competence. When this happens the child transcends effects of the poor parenting skills of her caregivers by essentially learning to parent herself in order to get many of her emotional needs met, (Wilson & Gottman, 1995).
This resilient child and others like her teach us that psychopathology and neurosis are not the inevitable result of growing up in a troubled family. Children can also grow to be increasingly resilient as they encounter adversity, as the following developmental theorists will attest and attempt to further explain.
Piaget and Vygotsky
These classic developmental theorists laid the foundation upon which most subsequent psychology is based. Piaget, in particular, introduced several useful information processing concepts, and the three that this paper will look at are stimulus assimilation, accomodation, and equilibration.
Assimilation refers to the ways in which people transform incoming information so that it fits within their existing frames of reference. Accomodation, the reciprocal of assimilation, refers to the way in which people adapt their frames of reference in order to process and store new information. Equilibration encompasses both of the above terms. It refers to the overall balancing-act that occurs between existing frames of reference and novel experiences, ideally leading to a sense of coherent equilibrium between the child's subjective inner and objective outer world. This developmental concept, key to Piaget's "stages"-theory of child development, would predict resilient life coping skills from a child possessing an innately adaptive, harmoniously balanced internal frame of reference, (Siegler, 1991).
Wolin and Wolin
From THE RESILIENT SELF (1993) came "the seven resiliencies" that the authors claim are often developed by the more adaptive survivors of troubled families: insight, independence, relationship skills, initiative, creativity, humor, and morality. One can imagine Piaget explaining these traits as by-products of the children's "equilibration" processes.
Others describe these kinds of traits as evidence of an "internal locus of control", also known as "learned optimism," (Seligman, 1968, 1995); the result of innate, "positive personality characteristics," (Garmezey, 1983); or evidence of evolved "ego strength," as referenced by the following theorists.
John Curtis Gowan
Based on his work in creativity and with gifted children, John Curtis Gowan developed a model of development which bootstrapped off Piaget and Erikson, but included adult development beyond the ordinary or "normal" adult successes of career and family building, extending into the emergence and stabilization of extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness. He described the entire spectrum of available states in his classic Trance, Art, & Creativity (1975), with its different modalities of spiritual and aesthetic expression. He devised a test for Self-Actualization, called the Northridge Developmental Scale.
Gowan outlines a developmental theory whereby we may tap our latent creative potential and self-actualization, organically growing toward the psychedelic or soul-revealing and illuminative states. He describes these states most fully in Development of the Psychedelic Individual (1974) and in Operations of Increasing Order. His use of the term 'psychedelic' does not connote drug use; quite the contrary he is strongly opposed to the developmental forcing and disintegration drug-use brings.
He describes how dyplasias between cognitive and affective growth can bleed off developmental energies, resulting in dysphoria and displacements, leaving us feeling unintegrated, blocked or stuck. He carries developmental theory past the concept of a strong coping ego. Fearing the loss-of-control by our egos, we may be reluctant to enter the soul-revealing stage of psychedelia and remain content to re-experience successes at our familiar or comfortable level of experience--usually expressed by the metaphor of "the American Dream,"--a cultural myth.
Gowan considers plateauing out before these upper stages to be akin to lack of sexual maturation in an adolescent. Clearly, resilience as the ability to continually redefine oneself and experience are fundamental to this life-long process of connecting with Source and Spirit.
Developmental Self Psychology
Although it was Kohut (Rowe & MacIsaac, 1995) who authored the self-mirroring theory discussed above by Wolins, it was Wilson & Gottman (1995), among others, who investigated the concept of self-distraction, or attention shuttling as a positive coping mechanism in resilient children. Their work focuses around the idea that
"attentional processes play executive roles in organizing both cognition and emotion...provide a "shuttle" between the cognitive and the emotional realms, and that the abilities involved in being able to attend and to shift attentional focus are fundamental to emotion regulatory processes. Furthermore, we suggest that attentional processes not only organize both cognitive and emotional processes, but that there is a dual physiological basis for this organization, parasympathetic tone and the ability to self-soothe from sympathetic activation." (p.1)
The coalesced line of reasoning might go something like this: Since the parents did not fit the child's grandiose-mirroring-needs frame of reference, she did not identify with them as appropriate, dependable self-objects and their skewed reflections of her were not assimilated and accommodated into her psyche. Instead, she equilibrated, or "self-soothed" her imbalanced (possibly anxious) cognitive-emotional internal state by examining other available options for ones that might better meet her needs.
The related concept of objective-subjective self-reference as an adaptive "shuttle" mechanism was originally expounded upon by Vygotsky (1962) as he disagreed with Piaget's theory that children's self-talk was just so much egocentric babble whose usefulness dissipated with maturity. Vygotsky spoke of this "inner speech" as an important tool for children's and adults' problem-solving as it provides them with their own objective frame of reference from which to evaluate their subjective states.
Mary Watkins (1986) says that, "Far from revealing themselves as a primitive form of thought, these dialogues reveal the complexity of thought as it struggles between different perspectives, refusing to be simplified to a single standpoint," (p. 174). Blachowicz (1997) calls this healthy form of talking to oneself "The Dialogue of the Soul with Itself" (pp. 485-508). And Jung (Campbell, 1971) says that "The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity" because, to the extent that one acknowledges the "other" within himself, he will be able to acknowledge it in the outer world (p. 297).
Summary
It would seem that although many children enter the world without adequate self-objects through which their emotional needs can be met, some of them somehow fail to internalize or identify with the neglect and/or abuse to which they are subjected. Instead, through adaptive attention-shuttling mechanisms such as self-dialogue, then later, self-reflection, they resourcefully learn to somewhat objectively parent and thus subjectively soothe themselves, and grow up to be emotionally strong and healthy adults. What is it that gives these children their resiliently resourceful, attention-shuttling edge?
Cognitive Theories of Resilience
Cognitive science has revealed many means by which individuals can develop more resilient ways of processing information. Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence are gaining equal respect as essential for our individuation. They are fundamental to our relationships to self, others and universe.
Daniel Goleman's (1996) best-seller, Emotional Intelligence broke ground for Zohar & Marshall's (2000) Connecting with our Spiritual Intelligence. Goleman tagged emotional intelligence as an "invisible third" phenomenon at work in our psyches. He explained how some of the brain's parts combine their energies in order to synergistically give rise to this new facet of resilience, which can be briefly summarized.
When incoming stimuli are of sufficient salience and/or novelty to alter the body's arousal mechanism, the brain signals the adrenal glands to secrete hormones which then prepare the body for "fight or flight" via the vagus nerve, which in turn increases the heart rate and triggers a cascade of other physiological events.
Feedback from all of these events, comprising information about the current state of the body at any moment in time, is sent to the amygdal portion of the brain's limbic system. There, it is associately connected with similar kinds of information already stored there as "emotional memories" in order to assess the intensity of emotional valence. Meanwhile the factual content of this incoming information from the amygdala is associately sorted, evaluated and stored within the nearby hippocampus.
Since the September attacks, many of our systems are signaling us that we are in a perpetual state of emergency, and the body is kept in a continual state to respond to this perception. Thus, we suffer the legitimate and self-inflicted results of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). We may become subject to the symptoms of that disorder, including a sense of loss of control, unresolved fears, nervousness, anxiety, sleeplessness or hypervigiliance.
Much of the basis of how we are reacting to this change in world order and disorder comes from our childhoods and those traumas we sustained then and afterwards, as well as how we learned to grow beyond them. Our experiential associations condition our present and future responses. They condition the rationality with which we assess the amount of fear we feel and its relative proportion regarding the risks we are exposed to in our lifestyle choices. It conditions how we respond to chaos.
Based on feedback received from the body, these two aspects of associative memory work in tandem to provide both the emotional tone and the perceptual distinctions which define and categorize human experiences.
If incoming information is interpreted as an emergency by these two limbic partners, an "automatic" stress response is triggered which causes the body to respond in preset patterns of behavior before the rational functions of the neocortex have been allowed input into the situation.
Emotional intelligence is demonstrated by the individual who is able to interrupt the emotional feedback loop as needed in order to allow the brain's logical functions to assess the situation. The techniques by which this is adaptively and intelligently accomplished are what psychology calls "positive coping mechanisms." Maladaptive coping mechanisms include those which succeed in circumventing emotional over-reactions at a cost of psychophysiological health to the individual, (Goleman, 1995).
Goleman's expanded model of intelligence thus presents a compelling argument that it is actually intelligent emotions rather than intelligence alone which forms the core of human coping skills and thus makes it a "master aptitude," (p. 80). One reason some humans seem to possess more of this aptitude from birth, he explained, is because of genetic variance within the neural circuitry which controls arousal thresholds. These thresholds in turn determine limbic-cortical and left-right-hemispheric attention-shuttling capacities which regulate emotions.
However, these variances play only a part in the overall development of dispositional traits which, like the coping mechanisms to which they give rise, can be either adaptively or maladaptively shaped. So, what is it that controls the neurophysiology of emotional resilience and how can we make it work for us rather than against us?
We have two distinct hemispheres of our brains, termed Left and Right Brain, connected by a dense network called the corpus callosum. Springer & Deutsch (1993) have devoted themselves to studying the physiological mechanisms which underlie psychological processes by researching the specific effects that brain injuries have on mental processes.
Data is gathered through the use of split-brain experiments which test the cognitive skills of those who have had a part of one of their hemispheres removed or damaged or the tissue connecting them severed. Their extensive research dealing with left or right cerbral dominance effects has led to some fascinating findings about the hemispheric lateralization functions of the brain. For example,
Left hemisphere-injured patients have been reported to display feelings of despair, hopelessness, or anger (often referred to as a catastrophic-dysphoric reaction), whereas right-hemisphere damage produces what is known as an indifference-euphoric reaction, in which minimization of symptoms, emotional placidity, and elation are common...ordinarily the two halves of the brain exert inhibitory effects on each other in the area of emotional expression, thereby resulting in a normal balance that is free of uncontrollable outbursts of any kind. In the event of damage to one side, however, this mutual inhibition is disrupted and the damaged side no longer exerts the same degree of inhibition on its partner; hence, the other hemisphere is disinhibited, (pp. 194-196).
A summary of some of these relevant findings shows that individuals with right-hemispheric dominance (in the past, usually females) are more skilled at perceiving and conceptualizing spatial relationships, and are more attuned to their subcortical systems which are involved in arousal and attention, thus are more receptive to emotionally-charged stimuli. On the other hand, those with left-hemispheric dominance (previously, usually males) have deficits in these areas, but seem superior in perceiving and categorizing sequential, emotionally neutral stimuli.
Further research showed "an association between right hemisphere pathology (thus, left-hemispheric dominance) and abnormal heart rate response and skin conductance changes, both autonomic nervous system components," (p. 200).
Later in their book, Springer & Deutsch (1993) discussed recent data gathered demonstrating left and right directional biases ("spin") predominant in the life-generating activities of molecules and atoms. They quote French biologist Louis Pasteur as speculating that "Life is dominated by asymmetrical actions. I can even imagine that all living species are primordially, in their, structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic asymmetry," (p. 320).
They cite evidence that DNA's asymmetrical qualities might be a significant factor in genetically influencing other asymmetrical aspects of the human body, such as hemispheric differentiations, organ placement, and so on. Their rationale is as follows:
"The double strands of each DNA molecule encode genetic information in terms of the sequencing of component amino acids. The two long strands are wound around each other in a clockwise spiral; thus, the DNA molecule cannot be superimposed upon its mirror reflection," (p. 321).
In other words, its mirrored reflection represents a reversed image of the original DNA molecule rather than an image that could be placed identically onto its original; its right helix would be on the left, and its left helix would be on the right and its genetic codes would be read backwards. The laws of physics claim to work the same for any phenomenon's identically mirrored image as they do for the original phenomenon. Only sequencing information, such as written information--like the DNA codes--do not reflect symmetrically, and thus introduce asymmetry into the application of natural laws.
The authors cite evidence of other research that there is an "underlying cytoplasmic gradient operating during embryonic development that favors the left side of the body." They conclude that systematic asymmetries of morphology, molecular biology, and sub-atomic interactions are ultimately linked, and that there is, after all, an absolute, universal distinction between left and right, (p. 323). So, our question becomes, "can we use this information about our brains' asymmetrically functioning "parts" to become more resilient?"
The "triune brain" concept posits that we have three functional brains, not just--or two halves of one. The most primitive reptile-brain appeared in birds and retiles a hunred million years ago. It is the vicious, repetetive, instinctive territorial brain, that Pavlov and Skinner learned to condition. The mammalian brain, or limbic system was deposited over it, and originally tied in with olfaction. The neocortex is the third brain of higher primates and has produced human culture.
De Beauport (1996) divides "behavioral intelligences" into three categories: basic intelligence, pattern intelligence, and parameter intelligence. Later on in evolution, as creatures evolved from reptiles into mammals, the limbic brain as center of emotional intelligences came into being: affectional, mood and motivational intelligences. With development of the neocortex came a consciousness-generating partnership from which our rational, associative, spatial-visual and intuitiveintelligences were derived.
She speaks of the cerebral cortex as "having a split personality"--her way of pointing to the hemispheric asymmetries through which the functions of the other two parts of the brain usually filter their incoming sensory stimuli. Throughout her book, she describes a highly variable path of "learned" life experiences, from basic brain to limbic brain, to left and/or right cerebral hemispheres and then back out into the body, all of which, she implies, is designed to guarantee that information processing would be a highly variable and personalized phenomenon, not necessarily one that fits within the norms of someone's arbitrary IQ bell curve. The point is that engaging the emotions facilitates the learning process as alternative areas of intelligence come online.
Cogitive neuroscience speaks of Mirror Neurons asthe driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution. V.S. Ramachandran claims that the discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. He predicts that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
According to Ramachandran, there are many puzzling questions about the evolution of the human mind and brain:
1) The hominid brain reached almost its present size and perhaps even its present intellectual capacity about 250,000 years ago . Yet many of the attributes we regard as uniquely human appeared only much later. Why? What was the brain doing during the long "incubation "period? Why did it have all this latent potential for tool use, fire, art music and perhaps even language- that blossomed only considerably later? How did these latent abilities emerge, given that natural selection can only select expressed abilities, not latent ones?
2) Crude "Oldawan" tools - made by just a few blows to a core stone to create an irregular edge -emerged 2.4 million ago and were probably made by Homo Habilis whose brain size was half way (700cc) between modern humans (1300) and chimps (400). After another million years of evolutionary stasis aesthetically pleasing "symmetrical" tools began to appear associated with a standardization of production technique and artifact form; a smooth rather than jagged, irregular edge. And lastly, the invention of stereotyped "assembly line" tools (sophisticated symmetrical bifacial tools) that were hafted to a handle, took place only 200,000 years ago. Why was the evolution of the human mind "punctuated" by these relatively sudden upheavals of technological change?
3) Why the sudden explosionin technological sophistication, widespread cave art, clothes, stereotyped dwellings, etc. around 40 thousand years ago, even though the brain had achieved its present "modern" size almost a million years earlier?
4) Did language appear completely out of the blue as suggested by Chomsky? Or did it evolve from a more primitive gestural language that was already in place?
5) Humans are often called the "Machiavellian Primate" referring to our ability to "read minds" in order to predict other peoples' behavior and outsmart them. Why are apes and humans so good at reading other individuals' intentions? Do higher primates have a specialized brain center or module for generating a "theory of other minds" as proposed by Nick Humphrey and Simon Baron-Cohen? If so, where is this circuit and how and when did it evolve?
The solution to many of these riddles comes from an unlikely source... the study of single neurons in the brains of monkeys. Rama suggests that the questions become less puzzling when you consider Giaccamo Rizzollati's recent discovery of "mirror neurons' in the ventral premotor area of monkeys. This cluster of neurons, holds the key to understanding many enigmatic aspects of human evolution. Rizzollati and Arbib have already pointed out the relevance of their discovery to language evolution . But the significance of their findings for understanding other equally important aspects of human evolution has been largely overlooked.
Commenting on the emergence of language, Ramachandran says: it helps us communicate our thoughts and intentions. But the question of how such an extraordinary ability might have actually evolved has puzzled biologists, psychologists and philosophers at least since the time of Charles Darwin. The problem is that the human vocal apparatus is vastly more sophisticated than that of any ape but without the correspondingly sophisticated language areas in the brain the vocal equipment alone would be useless. So how did these two mechanisms with so many sophisticated interlocking parts evolve in tandem? Following Darwin's lead I suggest that our vocal equipment and our remarkable ability to modulate voice evolved mainly for producing emotional calls and musical sounds during courtship ("croonin a toon."). Once that evolved then the brain -especially the left hemisphere - could evolve language.
But a bigger puzzle remains. Is language mediated by a sophisticated and highly specialized "language organ" that is unique to humans and emerged completely out of the blue as suggested by Chomsky? Or was there a more primitive gestural communication system already in place that provided a scaffolding for the emergence of vocal language?
Rizzolatti recorded from the ventral premotor area of the frontal lobes of monkeys and found that certain cells will fire when a monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, grasping, picking up and putting a peanut in the mouth etc. different neurons fire in response to different actions. One might be tempted to think that these are motor "command" neurons, making muscles do certain things; however, the astonishing truth is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action, e.g. tasting a peanut!
With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: "mind reading" empathy, imitation learning, and even the evolution of language. Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."
Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene based evolution.
Moreover, as Rizzolati has noted, these neurons may also enable you to mime and possibly understand the lip and tongue movements of others which, in turn, could provide the opportunity for language to evolve. (This is why, when you stick your tongue out at a new born baby it will reciprocate! How ironic and poignant that this little gesture encapsulates a half a million years of primate brain evolution.) Once you have these two abilities in place the ability to read someone's intentions and the ability to mime their vocalizations then you have set in motion the evolution of language. You need no longer speak of a unique language organ and the problem doesn't seem quite so mysterious any more.
Mirror neurons were discovered in monkeys but how do we know they exist in the human brain? To find out we studied patients with a strange disorder called anosognosia. Most patients with a right hemisphere stroke have complete paralysis of the left side of their body and will complain about it, as expected. But about 5% of them will vehemently deny their paralysis even though they are mentally otherwise lucid and intelligent.
This is the so called "denial" syndrome or anosognosia. To our amazement, we found that some of these patients not only denied their own paralysis, but also denied the paralysis of another patient whose inability to move his arm was clearly visible to them and to others. We suggest that this bizarre observation is best understood in terms of damage to Rizzolatti's mirror neurons. It's as if anytime you want to make a judgement about someone else's movements you have to run a VR (virtual reality) simulation of the corresponding movements in your own brain and without mirror neurons you cannot do this .
The second piece of evidence comes from studying brain waves (EEG) in humans. When people move their hands a brain wave called the MU wave gets blocked and disappears completely. Eric Altschuller, Jamie Pineda, and I suggested at the Society for Neurosciences in 1998 that this suppression was caused by Rizzolati's mirror neuron system. Consistent with this theory we found that such a suppression also occurs when a person watches someone else moving his hand but not if he watches a similar movement by an inanimate object.
Ramachandran points out two major bifurcations in our evolutionary history:
The hominid brain grew at an accelerating pace until it reached its present size of 1500cc about 200,000 years ago. Yet uniquely human abilities such the invention of highly sophisticated "standardized" multi- part tools, tailored clothes, art, religious belief and perhaps even language are thought to have emerged quite rapidly around 40,000 years ago - a sudden explosion of human mental abilities and culture that is sometimes called the "big bang."
If the brain reached its full human potential - or at least size - 200,000 years ago why did it remain idle for 150,000 years? I suggest that the so-called big bang occurred because certain critical environmental triggers acted on a brain that had already become big for some other reason and was therefore "pre-adapted" for those cultural innovations that make us uniquely human. (One of the key pre-adaptations being mirror neurons.)
Inventions like tool use, art, math and even aspects of language may have been invented "accidentally" in one place and then spread very quickly given the human brain's amazing capacity for imitation learning and mind reading using mirror neurons. Perhaps ANY major "innovation" happens because of a fortuitous coincidence of environmental circumstances - usually at a single place and time. But given our species' remarkable propensity for miming, such an invention would tend to spread very quickly through the population once it emerged.
Once you have a certain minimum amount of "imitation learning" and "culture" in place, this culture can, in turn, exert the selection pressure for developing those additional mental traits that make us human. And once this starts happening you have set in motion the auto-catalytic process that culminated in modern human consciousness.
If its simply a matter of chance discoveries spreading rapidly, why would all of them have occurred at the same time? There are three answers to this objection. First,the evidence that it all took place at the same time is tenuous. The invention of music, shelters, hafted tools, tailored clothing, writing, speech, etc. may have been spread out between 100K and 5k and the so-called great leap may be a sampling artifact of archeological excavation. Second, any given innovation (e.g. speech or writing or tools) may have served as a catalyst for the others and may have therefore accelerated the pace of culture as a whole. And third, there may indeed have been a genetic change, but it may not have been an increase in the ability to innovate but an increase in the sophistication of the mirror neuron system and therefore in "learnability."
The resulting increase in ability to imitate and learn (and teach) would then explain the explosion of cultural change that we call the "great leap forward" or the "big bang" in human evolution. This argument implies that the whole "nature-nurture debate" is largely meaningless as far as human are concerned. Withthe genetically specified learnability that characterizes the human brain and culture that can take advantage of this learnability, human culture and human brain have co-evolved into obligatory mutual parasites without either the result would not be a human being. (No more than you can have a cell without its parasitic mitochondria).
THE SECOND BIG BANG
My suggestion that these neurons provided the initial impetus for "runaway" brain/ culture co-evolution in humans, isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds. Imagine a martian anthropologist was studying human evolution a million years from now. He would be puzzled by the relatively sudden emergence of certain mental traits like sophisticated tool use, use of fire, art and "culture" and would try to correlate them (as many anthropologists now do) with purported changes in brain size and anatomy caused by mutations. But unlike them he would also be puzzled by the enormous upheavals and changes that occurred after (say) 19th century - what we call the scientific/industrial revolution. This revolution is, in many ways, much more dramatic (e.g. the sudden emergence of nuclear power, automobiles, air travel, and space travel) than the "great leap forward" that happened 40,000 years ago!!
He might be tempted to argue that there must have been a genetic change and corresponding change in brain anatomy and behavior to account for this second leap forward. (Just as many anthropologists today seek a genetic explanation for the first one.) Yet we know that present one occurred exclusively because of fortuitous environmental circumstances, because Galileo invented the "experimental method," that, together with royal patronage and the invention of the printing press, kicked off the scientific revolution. His experiments and the earlier invention of a sophisticated new language called mathematics in India in the first millennium AD (based on place value notation, zero and the decimal system), set the stage for Newtonian mechanics and the calculus and "the rest is history" as we say.
It certainly did not happen because of a genetic change in the human brains during the renaissance. It happened at least partly because of imitation learning and rapid "cultural" transmission of knowledge. (Indeed one could almost argue that there was a greater behavioral/cognitive difference between pre-18th century and post 20th century humans than between Homo Erectus and archaic Homo Sapiens. Unless he knew better our Martian ethologist may conclude that there was a bigger genetic difference between the first two groups than the latter two species!)
Based on this analogy I suggest, further, that even the first great leap forward was made possible largely by imitation and emulation. This system of cells, once it became sophisticated enough to be harnessed for "training" in tool use and for reading other hominids minds, may have played the same pivotal role in the emergence of human consciousness (and replacement of Neandertals by Homo Sapiens) as the asteroid impact did in the triumph of mammals over reptiles.
Thus Ramachandran regards Rizzolati's discovery and his own speculative conjectures on their key role in our evolution - as the most important unreported story of the last decade. Mirror neurons certainly bear on our discussion of the critical importance of mirroring in infancy, empathy, "mindsharing," and our innate ability to adapt and change: resilience. Further, we see that technologies can facilitate resilience. And, not all technologies, such as language or consciousness engineering, are in themselves hardware or require hardware. The Consciousness Restructuring Process is one such "soft" technology.
Summary
We can fulfill the developmental process and develop our emotional intelligence to help us become more resilient. This facilitates information-shuttling between left and right hemispheres which intuitively facilitates the intelligent sequencing of information so that we more resiliently make use of our human emotions. From this enhanced state, intuitive information-sequencing facilitates evolution of resilient personality traits and adaptive coping styles. We become increasingly conscious of our own ability to effect positive outcomes within our worlds.
We can mirror the optimistic positive attitudes and aptitudes of our mentors. The process of co-consciousness or mindsharing involves a shared reality in which the integrity of the mentor stabilizes the journeyer even though they may be moving through the fear and pain in a highly emotional state. The empathic sensing, "mind reading," and compassionate reassurance of the mentor sustains the dynamic momentum of the process as it moves spontaneously toward natural healing.
Mindsharing comes down to us from the ancient shamanic tradition of spiritual healing.. "A shaman is someone whose specialty is induction of a well state, someone who may help either through research or treatment to induce a state in someone else's brain that will produce health," according to psychiatrist Arnold Mandell. "But the brain is an open, instrinsically unstable system, and its higher level order may be not just the wires and connection of a switchboard but all the turbulence and eddies of streams and waterfalls. And yet it has a statistical stability, an inertia. If it's perturbed enough, it gets more and more turbulent. It fractures, then organizes into a new regime. The brain is my cosmology. I sometimes think the rest of science is the brain's picture of itself."
CRP's dream journeys facilitate this restructuring through experiential process work. Inner journeys, using our dreams, symptoms, feelings, fears and pain as doorways to deeper levels of ourselves, allow us to exercise our right-brain functions much as intellectual pursuits exercise the rational mind. They also help us find and share our joy. We connect directly with our emotions, our non-linear irrational elements and the sensations that arise in our psychophysical being.
By directing our attention toward our inner process we connect with the eternal source of wisdom and our intuition comes to the fore. An inherent part of the process of changing from the inside out is that as the deepest self transforms, downline faculties such as beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as psychosomatic condition, automatically change as well. Thus, resilience can be seen as the ability to dynamically change at the most fundamental level toward a more adaptive way of being in the world.
Psychodynamic Theories of Resilience
This conscious resilience initiates change at the most fundamental levels of our psychophysical being, including the genetic, morphological, and quantum field levels of observation. This is the realm where psyche and matter meet, where physics and psychology merge. A variety of depth psychologies and sacred psychologies address the meaning of these microscopic, even subatomic processes for our very souls as well as for the personality. Notable among them are Psychodynamics, Jungian and Transpersonal psychologies and Consciousness Studies. They provide useful models for illuminating the nature of resilience.
Psychoanalytic theory was the first modern view of the psyche to bring order to the chaotic world of the psychiatric patient. It provided a means of plumbing the depths of normal and atypical behavior by cataloguing symptoms and using diagnostic labels for mental disorders. Pyschodynamics includes three inter-related theoretical parts: 1). the classical ego psychology of Freud, 2). the objects relations theory of Klein and others, and 3). the self psychology of Sullivan and Kohut.
Ego psychology conceptualizes the intrapsychic world as one of tension between the energy dynamics of the unconscious demands of the "superego," the conscious volition of the "ego," and the instinctual drives of the "id." This conflict produces anxiety, which brings forth a compromise between the needs of the id and the ego in the form of a defense mechanism such as a repression, suppression, denial or projection of the true facts of the situation to a place in the psyche where they no longer have to be consciously dealt with.
Object relations theory differs in that it views the conflicts as being generated more within the context of relationships with others rather than strictly within oneself. In the sense of this external agency of conflictual tension, it uses the term "object" to mean "person." According to Gabbard (1994), "object relations theory encompasses the transformation of interpersonal relationships into internalized representations of relationships." It is theorized that the individualized perceptions of these relational representations are psychically internalized, or "introjected." Thus, "at any one time different constellations of self-representations, object representations, and affects vie with one another for center stage in the intrapsychic theater of internal object relations."
Self psychology, on the other hand, focuses more on how the external relationships in one's life help develop and maintain a sense of self-esteem and self-cohesion through interaction with one's inner relationship with oneself. It is more of a "two person," self-object" psychology.
In Jungian psychology, science meets mysticism. The "missing, invisible third" seems to begin to reveal itself. The universe merges with the individual in notions such as the collective unconscious transcendent function, synchronicity and cosmic consciousness. Psyche and substance are seen as two aspects of more fundamental energy, which forms a universal substrate. The delineation between mind and body blurs.
Jung superceded traditional psychodynamic theories by pursuing five assumptions: 1). the autonomy of unconscious psychic contents; 2). the teleological significance of the dynamics involving those contents.; 3). our memories, personal and transpersonal, are contained in our unconscious; 4). the unconscious is a highly receptive intuiting agent for the conscious self, and 5). there is a "patterning force" inherent in the human unconscious psyche, (Campbell, 1971).
Jung's work provided a whole new frame of reference through which human behaviors can be explained. This more mystical branch of psychology made friends with other sciences and developed interdisciplinary field theories which bridged the gap of the Cartesian mind/body split. It focused its understanding on the apparently acausal, non-linear connecting principle which unites mind and body into one seamlessly coherent wholeness. Perhaps this more holistic paradigm can help explain how the dynamics of various resilience phenomena all fit together.
Transpersonal psychology went a step further, incorporating participation in spiritual practices as part of a healthy, holistic lifestyle. They drew from the currents of humanistic theory (Maslow), existential philosophy (Gestalt, Transactional Analysis), and the pernnial philosophy of the wisdom traditions. They emphasize being over becoming. Like Jungian psychology they are process-oriented, largely experiential practices which reflect the complex interaction of aspects of the dynamic whole. Creativity, growth, and emergence of potential are valued highly.
This more holistic spiritually-oriented theory represents a somewhat "neo-Jungian" way of experientially reframing the energy dynamics of life as "a healing endeavor that aims at the integration of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of well-being," (Vaughan, 1993).
Thus, individuals can develop a sense of wholeness on all three levels of their identity: 1). the egoic, which requires a more adaptively cohesive sense of self identity with and yet separate from the world; 2). the existential, which while encompassing the egoic state, also requires a more coherent sense of one's individuated state within the human conditions; and 3). the transpersonal, which requires that one transcend the egoic, existential identities and enter into a heightened awareness of essential unity with all human beings, living things, and perhaps the cosmos.
Thus the healing dynamic in transpersonal psychotherapy switches from one based on the beliefs and values of the therapist into a reciprocally interactive healing dynamic where the content of therapy is the client's experience. In the interaction both therapist and client participate in a healing process.
This orientation is very close to that embraced in the Consciousness Restructuring Process. Both mentor and journeyer share a co-consciousness during which both enter the mindscape and sojourn deeper into primal recesses of the psyche. On the journey each is subjected to both the chaos and emergent creativity and deep healing inherent in the process. Healing does not come through the therapist, but through contact with the deep well-springs of life which brings rejuvination.
The resilience-enhancing function of transpersonal healing lends greater meaning to the contents of one's life experiences. It provides a greater context for one's life and its meaning and honors the values of the soul. Life experiences are transpersonally assimilated as its dynamics are therapeutically processed and equilibrated. In CRP, the old, outworn existential self-image is dissolved and a new healthier self-image emerges from the deepest unstructured part of us, repatterned by primal creative forces.
Psychodynamics helps us understand where we are wasting our limited energies in life--in neuroses, in useless worry, in self-defeating patterns, in pathologies, in obsessions, in projections, anger, greed, vanities, denial and other negativedefences and habit patterns. Our psychic energies are distributed among many demands being placed upon them, from both without and within the body. Equilibration coping skills, such as defense mechanisms, help us budget our energy reserves so we can resiliently adapt to stressors as they arise. But when they outlive their usefulness, when they encroached when they are inappropriate, we feel stuck in developmental plateaus, depressions, or even may develop physical illnesses designed to disrupt or reinforce the status quo.
Consciousness Studies
Running concurrent with the thread of psychodynamic therapies is the current of Consciousness Studies which lately has taken the bedfellow of Complexity and Chaos Theory. Consciousness Studies are multidisciplinary inquires into the physical, psychological and social nature of consciousness, spirituality and the cosmos.
The realm of consciousness studies has shed light on the seamlessly welded relationship of mindbody, therefore many physicists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors have a strong presence in the field. The most avante-garde in this arena postulate, with the ancient Vedas, that it is ALL consciousness--that all we perceived and experience is a form of maya, the construct of our filtering senses and mind. The latest finding in Quantum Cosmology, for example, tell us counter-intuitively that at the cosmic scale nothing moves--rather, space is expanding rapidly from every so-called 'point.'
Physics ran into the same conundrum regarding subjectivity decades ago in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which required the observing presence of the experimenter to collapse the wave-function. This led to the development of the Uncertainty Principle, and the relationship has not yet been satisfactorily resolved. Now we find that chaotic systems do not respond statistically to probability, but with unpredictable yet deterministic turbulence.
Among the chief players are David Chalmers, Henry Stapp, Daniel C. Dennett, Karl Pribrahm, David Bohm, Charles Tart, Jean Houston, Stuart Hammeroff, Stanley Krippner, Alan Combs, Ben Goertzel, Ervin Lazslo, F. David Peat, Sally Goerner, Ruth Inge-Heinz, Jack Sarfatti, Timothy Leary, Jeffrey Mishlove, Rick Strassman, Michael Persinger, C.M. Anderson, Antonio Damasio, David Deutsch, Arnold Mandell, Arnold Mindell, Charles Laughlin, Eugene d'Aquili, Fred Alan Wolf, Roger Penrose, Ken Wilber and a host of others.
Perennial favorite journals include Journal of Consciousness Studies and PSYCHE, an online journal, as well as Proceedings of the Society for Chaos Theory in Life Sciences. Another notable conclave is the Tucson Conferences.
For links go to Iona Miller Homepage at www.geocities.com/iona_m/consciousness.html
Psychologists working in this field are bringing older concepts into the consciousness dialogue by updating their descriptions with new metaphors. For example, Jung's concept of archetypes (as primal foci for certain kinds of energies in ourselves, society, the world and universe) are now spoken of as "Strange Attractors," the cores of cohesion around which non-linear processes orbit in unpredictable yet deterministic fashion. Perhaps the most progressive group is Dyna-Psych, hosted by Ben Goertzel, a founding member, like Graywolf Swinney of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences.
Complexity and Chaos Theory describes the behavior of non-linear dynamic systems, fractal geometry, and the systematic behavior of nature as well as our nature, consciousness and health. It describes in eloquent equations deterministic inherently unpredictable yet ordered randomness, dimensionality, reflexive feedback loops, boundary conditions, and integration.
It is the realm of the irrational, of rich values and structure, of self-organizing emergent creativity, stretched time and folded space, global behavior, open systems, criticality, sensitive dependence, strange attractors, fluctuation, turbulence, perturbation, thresholds, trajectories, bifurcations, phase transitions, temporal density, reiteration, synchronicity, resilience, the "butterfly effect," subquantal chaos (ZPE), dynamic geometrization, probability, relativity, disruption, coherence and stochastic resonances, synergetics and tensegrity, self-reflection, nested cycles, the breakdown of order with sudden transitions, the creative and evolutionary "edge." The new self-organizing order always emerges from chaos.
The relationship of Consciousness and Chaos is being explored by psychonauts such as mathematician Ralph Abraham, biologist and morphogenetic fields proponent, Rupert Sheldrake, and psychedelic guru, Terence McKenna. They have spoken on the relationship of chaos and creativity and the resacralization of the world in Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992) and the Evolutionary Mind (1998).
David Chalmers has pointed out, quite rightly since it has been a sticking point for decades, that the so-called 'Hard Problem" in consciousness studies lies in the realm of human subjective experience. This non-linear, non-quantifiable, yet tangible phenomenology has perplexed science, since science likes to deal with measurement and repeatability.
To compound the subjectivity problem is that researchers are split in their commitment over whether to participate in experimental projects or not, just as during the 60s psychedelic revolution. Experiments can become hopelessly influenced by experimentor-bias, which must always be guarded against. Added to this mix comes a host of new brain/mind material from the emergent specialty of Neurotheology, where new technologies which allow us to "tweak" the brain are beginning to show how our spirituality may be hardwired. Scientists now know what types of mystical experiences are associated with which parts of the brain and neural pathways, or circuitry. See Iona Miller's paper, "Neurotheology 101," for a summary and update.
The relationship between brain physiology and human behavior is notoriously difficult to understand and easy to misapply. Obviously, consciousness, subjectivity and human religious experience isn't reducible merely to an explanation of neural pathways. It is a mystery whether our hard-wiring creates the God-Experience, or whether God creates our psychophysical wiring.
Today many researchers pursue both science and spirituality ignoring dictates that they are mutually exclusive. A false-dichotomy undergirds the dualistic perception of Dionysian vs. Apollonian, holistic vs. cognitive. It is the same dichotomy which falsely separates art and science, intuition and logic, spirituality and science. Neurotheology and Consciousness Studies, in general, respect both science and spirit. It is a move toward holism, not a reductionistic analysis.
Only when we embrace the functionally interconnected whole brain (dubbed Odyssean by physicist Murray Gell-Mann), not one artificially split in its functions into right and left can we move beyond mere conceptualization of a seamlessly welded quantum mindbody wedded or embedded in Cosmos. This, of course is the ineffable realm of mysticism and Mystery, reachable experientially only through the suspension of reason and intellect, by God's mercy and Grace.
The psychodynamics being developed in this complex field may eventually reveal even more deeply hidden aspects of resilience of the human body, mind, and spirit. Here, we tread on sacred ground, which has traditionally remained immune from the proddings of science. Chaos Theory shows us that forms, including our forms, emerge, dissolve and reform through the creative process known as autopoietic self-organization. This is the new direction in evolutionary forces. New mind/brain technologies such as electromagnetic manipulation show once again that technological interventions can facilitate resilience. In this pursuit of the deepest secrets of Nature and our nature, we may in fact find the way to our own soul, facilitating our own resilience.
Experiential therapy sessions have shown that as consciousness journeys deeper and deeper into the psyche, it eventually encounters a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images. Those emerging from this non-ordinary state of consciousness report an increased sense of well-being ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. We know that research has shown that imagery can affect the immune system. Imaginal journeys in the autonomous stream of consciousness may activate, through REM dynamics, psychosomatic healing forces, such as the placebo effect and the resilience response.
Summary of Psychological Resilience and CRP
Cause effect relationships about mental illness would seem to be the province of psychology, but how can that be when a plethora of theories prevail, and all these seemingly disparate models "work" to a greater or lesser degree. In psychology it is even difficult to define the terms sufficiently to even begin a reduction of mind to the underlying substrate of brain.
However a deductive cause and effect explanation for how higher cortical processes translate in "thoughts" is not the limit of the purview of the psychologist. Nor are inductive correlationist explanations the mainstays of psychology either. The successes of psychology are the many and myriad practical ones, some of which we are aware of from our daily lives. Yet, to be sure, like psychiatry, psychology holds a very powerful position in modern society.
One practical model from the repertoire of psychology is the concept or phenomenon of learned helplessness. Animals, can be experimentally discouraged from leaving their cages even with open doors after certain negative treatments and instilling fears. They narrow their sphere of response and freedom options creating an emotional response pattern. Learned helplessness is the opposite of resilience.
More resilient cognitions are translated into their functional, neurophysical equivalents in the body when we relearn or cognitively reframe our emotional response patterns. Somehow this functions to rearrange corresponding neurological structures in order to better compensate for their innate and learned asymmetrical imbalances. This equilibrative act of emotional intelligence allows the energy tensions within the body to become more resiliently balanced and the emotions to be more intelligently managed.
In this therapeutic model, the transpersonal process is facilitated by the balanced energies of the therapist providing an equilibratively therapeutic, empathic "container" within which the contents of the patient's experiential history can be placed, and from which newly assimilated, healing, transformative energies can emerge.
While this outside/in method is useful for healing at superficial levels, CRP operates in an inside/out process. The move inward comes when an emotionally intelligent choice is made to seek healing through the journey process, often beginning with a dream. The positive results, emotionally and cognitively, as well as behaviorally are the result of a fundamental shift in self-image which automatically gives rise to different thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The therapist assumes the role of co-adventurer or mentor at best to facilitate and deepen the process, to lead the client passed their fear and pain, so natural spontaneous healing can take place.
CRP bootstraps off the "alchemy" of Jung's transference and transcendent functions. Jung noticed that certain images and stories kept reoccuring in human experience and the myths of all cultures. Jung also discovered the healing power of the shamanic or "mana personality" or healer archetype and its potential to influence psychic change at a primordial level; he practiced the mentoring process as well. He postulated the existence of a "collective unconscious" from which archetypal or mythic patterns emerge. He noticed the correlation between the medieval language of alchemy, with its imagery of cooking and refining base metal into gold and the process of psychological transformation.
Jung identified archetypal images that play an important role in our psychological and cultural make up. These include such pervasive principles as the Shadow, anima-animus (female-male principle), and the Self. When these dynamics become unbalanced, Jung resorted to a variety of analytical and dream techniques, intuitively balancing left and right hemispheres. Comprehending the nature of archetypes as they play through our lives, helps us look at our ups and downs with a certain degree of philosophical detachment, such as that known in Buddhism as the Observer Self.
Jung pioneered exploring this level of consciousness dynamics; yet CRP goes even deeper all the way into undifferentiated chaos, though often exploring imagery related to these powerful psychic forces. CRP allows these emotional tensions a way to be heard, deeply felt, discharged and transformed in experiential process work, in a safe healing atmosphere. CRP invites full participation.
Campbell (1988), Krippner & Feinstein (1997) have pointed out how personal mythology can shape a life, at a level even deeper than that of the belief system. Journeys often cross the realms of both personal and collective mythology, and sometimes milestones of the higher levels of spiritual journeys or mystical experience appear spontaneously, even when the person is unaware of their archetypal meaning.
Journeys often reflect a spiritual essence, which transpersonal psychology attempts to embody. Sojourners often report experiences corresponding with descriptions of cosmic consciousness, of feeling at one with nature, God, or the universe. CRP invites full participation, and may be done on a regular basis to process issues as they arise...almost as a meditation. As this deeply transformative process works, the client experiences healing and becomes more highly conscious and individuated, more integrated, self-realized, more harmoniously balanced and possibly spiritually-oriented, and resiliently whole. It is more than an image or a metaphor; it is a new lived reality, a new sense of being.
What began as an exploration into developmental, cognitive and psychodynamic resilience frames of reference has now become an equilibrating act of conscious accommodation of, participation in and assimilation of the rich contents of a conceptual and experiential buffet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART II: THE TAO OF RESILIENCE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHYSIOLOGICAL RESILIENCE
Evolution and Natural Selection
Human Ethology
Ethnology and Mythology
Summary
Morphogenetic Engineering
Dispositional Types
Somatotypes
Genetic Alternations
Summary
Vagal Tone Measures and Resilience
Homeostasis an the Autonomic Nervous System
Stress Vulnerability of Infants
Stress Vulnerability in Children and Adults
Summary
Summary of Physiological Resilience Findings
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART III: THE TAO OF RESILIENCE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PSYCHOPHYSICAL RESILIENCE
The Psychobiology of Resilience
Information Transduction
State-Dependent Memory, Learning & Behavior
Ultradian Healing Response
Summary
The Neurochemistry of Resilience
Biochemistry of the Body-Mind
Bio-mechanics of the Body-Brain
Quantum Mechanics of the Body-Mind
Summary
The Alchemy of Conscious Resilience
Dynamics of Reciprocal Causality
Something-for-Nothing
Alchemical Therapies, Holistic Remedies
Summary of Psychophysical Resilience Findings
Summary of the Spectrum of Psychophysical Resilience Findings
Click here to go to "The Tao of Resilience," Part III:
A New Resilience Metaphor--Tao of Resilience, and References
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART IV: THE TAO OF RESILIENCE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A NEW RESILIENCE METAPHOR
Reply to Jung: Quantum Sermons to the Living
Functions of Distinctiveness
The Creative Evolution of Evolutionary Creation
Summary: Life is a Hologram of Holograms
Consciousness: A Reciprocal Function of Resilience
Making the Indistinct Distinct
Creating Adaptability
Summary: The Holographic "Enchanted Loom"
Resilience as "Tensegrity"
From Particles and Waves to Strings and Membranes
From Strings and Membranes to Struts and Cables
Summary: Energy Transducing Tensegrity Structures
Conclusions to Part III
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART V: THE TAO OF RESILIENCE, CONCLUSION
The Harmony and Order of Things
What is Resilience?
Tensegrity: The Finite Tension of Infinie Intention
Summary of the Known and Unknowable
REFERENCES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://tao-of-resilience.iwarp.com
EMPATHY, COMPASSION AND HEALING:
TAO of RESILIENCE
http://www.reocities.com/iona_m/
Chaosophy4/Resilience/resilience.html
http://tao-of-resilience.iwarp.com
THE TAO OF RESILIENCE
by Peggie C. Southwick, M.A.
Asklepia Foundation, ©1998
[Edited and Updated by Iona Miller, 2002]
Editorial Note: On 9-11-01 our whole world changed; chaos prevails. Even though it was a vital survival quality before, 'resilience,' both personal and collective, has become even more important as we make our emotional and pragmatic adjustments to this new era. Issues of emotional support, empathy, compassion, and spirituality have become highlighted in a new, more immediate way. Survival skills of adaptation, creativity, optimism, self-talk, life-strategy, trust, risk-reward assessment, humor, recovery and problem-solving or coping are more important than ever. This is equally true for both adults and children.
Therefore, we offer this deep background on its nature and how to tap into its healing or renewing power through the mentoring and Dream Journey process of Consciousness Restructuring. This paper, in different form, was originally presented at Pacifica Graduate Institute for Ms. Southwick's Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology. Iona Miller has updated it to highlight its relevance to the Consciousness Restructuring Process, (CRP).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART I:
Psychological Resilience
Redefining Resilience in Terms of Consciousness
Restructuring Process
Developmental Theories
Piaget & Vygotsky
Wolin & Wolin
John Curtis Gowan
Developmental Self Psychology
Summary
Cognitive Theories
Emotional Intelligence
Left Brain, Right Brain
The Three Faces of Mind
Cognitive Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons
Summary
Psychodynamic Theories
Psychodynamics
Jungian Theories
Transpersonal Psychology
Consciousness Studies
Summary
Summary of Psychological Resilience Findings and CRP
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TAO OF RESILIENCE, Part I
Let go and fall into the river.
Let the river of life sweep you beyond all aid
from old and worn concepts.
I will support you.
Trust me.
As you swim from an old consciousness,
blind to higher realities beyond your physical world,
trust that I will guide you
with care and love
into a new stream of consciousness.
I will open a new world before you.
Can you trust me enough to
let go of the known
and swim in an unknown current?
Redefining Resilience in the Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP)
Resilience helps us bounce back or recover our spirit, energy, and harmonious way of being. Psychological resilience is that factor which heals us from the traumatic stress of modern life that we are all subjected to in a variety of forms. Resilience has many facets.
In honor of the resilience process at work in all of us, the overall format of this paper represents a harmonious shuttling back and forth between the vertical logic of Logos and the more horizontally integrative experience of Eros as it weaves the fabric of its new resilience metaphor upon the loom of these pages. Resilience is an implied state of being rather than any concretely definable "thing."
Yet, this resilient "state" also seems to represent the cohesive and stabilizing elemental matrix through which a unifying life force is resonantly evolving within us. It is made up of many underlying processes, as well as a quality or state of being. In those for whom this quality is in short supply, therapy can foster first its emergence, and then its stabilization as an intrinsic quality of being, by connecting us with the source of resilience.
What reduces or facilitates the resilient nature of consciousness? Each field of inquiry has its own theories and models of psychophysical resilience. Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologies offer "missing, invisible" factors that contribute to resilience and are described with psychodynamic metaphors.
The Consciousness Restructuring Process goes a step further than Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologies by offering more than a metaphor. It provides a means of direct participation in the emergent process of creating ever-newing resilience through psychophysical healing by facilitating REM and neural restructuring.
CRP is an interdisciplinary artform. Aspects of this living process can be described, modelled or experienced through such scientific concepts as Relativity Theory, Quantum Theory, Chaos Theory, the Holographic Model, Systems Theory, Synergetics, REM Dynamics, Personal Mythology, Genetics, Neurotheology and Physiology. The practice of CRP therapy is essentially Humanistic; it is rooted in Transactional Analysis and Gestalt Dreamwork, but takes these disciplines into the Transpersonal Realms where we connect with Source, with Creativity, with Healing, with Spirituality.
CRP draws inspiration from the mythical roots of the Asklepian tradition. The ancient Asklepian dream priests never interpreted dreams, but fostered a direct epiphany of the seeker with the archetypal shamanic healer, Asklepios. CRP connects with this ancient current through the dreamhealing process and the shaman/therapist model or co-conscious mentoring proceedure.
By directly entering into and engaging our dream imagery, symptoms, and emotions we can tap that healing energy by plumbing our depths and soaring to our own heights of potential. This immersive experience produces direct conscious participation in the stream of consciousness which brings psychophysical change, feelings of renewal or rebirth, and connection with Spirit; all of which help us bounce back from the chaos and tragedies life brings our way.
For example, dreams of the 911 destruction, or nightmares of other disasters provide immediate opportunities to enter directly into the source of those fears and insecurities, into the depth of the problem or symptom. Rather than contemplating what you believe, or what you know, the process allows you to travel into the very jaws of death in the journey, to make a pilgrimage into the "underworld" to retrieve our lost and suffering souls. What we find there we know to be True...to reflect our essence.
Many people avoid thinking about death, much less volutarily undergoing a symbolic ego-death experience. But we are supposed to think about it, to contemplate our personal dissolution, for that is what highlights what is important in life. Many people near death report that the most important issues for them are, "Am I loved; and have I loved well?" We might ask ourselves, "What is it that death doesn't take?" We don't need to wait for terminal illness to ask. And one answer to that is the capacity to love.
Instead of actively trying to avoid Chaos, we embrace it and dive into its very depths for the renewal it promises. We must look at the face of insecurity; it is always there but sometimes it just explodes, personally and/or collectively. Resilience is a function or quality of our consciousness and conscious participation in the universal flow state, whose essence is pure undifferentiated chaos, (also known scientifically as vacuum potential, zero-point energy, in CRP as consciousness field or chaotic consciousness). It is more fundamental than either energy or matter, psyche or soma. It is the groundstate from which all forms, order, and self-organization arises.
In CRP, the ego and personality structure, and with it any dis-ease structure, undergoes a process of dissolution back to our most primal state, and the resurrected personality emerges holistically re-organized with a generally healtier disposition and outlook which is the optimistic hallmark of resilience.
Trying times, both personal and collective, challenge our faith and existential resolve. The world can come to us in devastating and frightful ways. That is when we are especially called upon to work at faith, to find value and meaning. We need to reach deep within ourselves, listen to what emerges from inside, and find our resilience -- the ability to bounce back and press on.
One way we find this resilience is through service, the active expression of compassion. In difficult times, when troubles persist, we may come to suffer from compassion burn-out -- eventually shutting out the world with defense mechanisms. Yet, compassion is the absolute test of any spirituality.
Only our own suffering, our own journey, our own quest for healing, gives us insight into the suffering of others; empathy for the suffering of others. But suffering for its own sake, without pro-actively seeking transformation is essentially not having compassion for ourselves. Unremitting suffering leads to depression and hopelessness. However, through suffering consciously, we learn to go with the catastrophe and find the natural healing on the other side.
In "Empathy and Consciousness," (JSC, 2001), Evan Thompson makes five main points:
(1) Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective.
(2) The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy, understood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality.
(3) Empathy is the precondition (the condition of possibility) of the science of consciousness.
(4) Human empathy is inherently developmental: open to it are pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity.
(5) Real progress in the understanding of intersubjectivity requires integrating the methods and findings of cognitive science, phenomenology, and contemplative and meditative psychologies of human transformation.
We can experientially come to realize that our consciousness of ourselves as embodied individuals in the world is founded upon empathy -- on our empathic cognition of others, and others' empathic cognition or grasp of oneself. This is the antidote for the poison of mutual projection of negative traits onto others, which happens both personally and culturally. This projection of animosity lies at the root of war, which can only be weeded out individual by individual through experiential confrontation with Shadow elements.
Empathy is a basic emotional faculty. Empathy is an evolved psychobiological capacity. Empathic grasping of another, especially by sensing them as animated by their own fields of sensation, means sharing the same field of experience -- essentially a shared virtuality. According to Depraz (JSC, 2001), there are at least four possible kinds of empathy:
1) The passive association of my lived body with the lived body of the Other;
2) The imaginative transposal of myself to the place of the Other;
3) The interpretation or understanding of myself as an Other for you;
4) Ethical responsiblity in the face of the Other.
In empathy and compassion the values in question transcend personal concerns, sometimes transcending even the concern for our own continued existence and nonexistence. Compassion is not merely an expression of nonegocentric value-feeling, one that can emerge only as a result of inward meditative disembedding. It plays a guiding role in moving from one mode to another, in the expansion of the value-sensing repertoire. This is the reason that practices of compassion, benevolence, or love are emphasized so strongly right from the start in the practices of many wisdom traditions.
Empathy is not limited. The extension of empathy and compassion to the nonhuman world seems rather foreign to the Judaeo-Christian tradition (at least until recently), but is central to the Buddhist ideal of compassion for all sentient beings, and to the Neo-Confucian ideal of "forming one body with the Universe."
This understanding is the root of philosophical choices which are fundamental to continued quality of life on our planet. With empathy for the Earth we respond positively to such issues as vegetarianism, recycling, "living small" or "lightly on the land," humane treatment of animals, human rights, population control, conservation, environmental protection, deep ecology, right livlihood, health care and spiritual practice, among others.
CRP helps us identify with a myriad of forms from the inside out to experience first-hand what that is like. Compassion is the heart of interbeing, and is the superlative expression of the human capacity for empathy. The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity.
We've seen this commiseration in the U.S. since '911' in a myriad of ways, sharing fears and small triumphs. Somehow this disaster has brought us closer, and it is more than a trauma bond. People seem more open and inclined to speak with strangers on the street, to help one another. The question is, "What was preventing this easier flow prior to that time?" But it is rhetorical. Suffering is universal -- resilience is not. Sharing the burdens of our suffering and finding a way through fosters resilience.
Neuroscientist Arnold Mandell (Omni, 81) reports results from his own research that suggest agreement with the foundations of CRP. He cites the Hindu sacred poem, Bhagavad Gita as saying that transcendent action is possible through detachment with empathy. He goes on to assert that,
"Maybe dragging around yesterday's messages, maintaining old order in thought forms, is a lot sicker than reality that's an existential randomness. The whole idea underlying, say Buddha's enlightenment, transcendence, "no mind," may be a return to randomness, to a lack of order. Maybe letting go, religious surrender is the feeling equivalent of a loss of order -- the order Eastern philosophers say is, was, artificial in the first place.
Is this the unconscious, the disordered part of oneself? Before Homer, it was thought to be the voice of God. It's William James's mystical experience, the Quakers' inner light, Jung's universal unconscious, Hinduism's "that," St. Theresa's ecstasy, Roger Sperry's right hemisphere. There is order in randomness.
The brain is unstable and we all live on the edge of disorganization, whether we allow ourselves to be conscious of it or not. Knowing the limits is wisdom."
So, whether we like it or not, we all live an atmosphere, both inside and out, that can be characterized as the edge of chaos. William James's preconscious stream is back in full force. It's tumbling through our minds like the weather, and we're left in a position to observe, to explore, negotiate maybe, but not control.
We are complex organisms and chaos theory best describes this. In the new paradigm, our structure of self emerges from chaos in an environment of complex interacting systems, responsive to and shaped by that environment. What else is the moment of our conception? Eventually, the structure grows brittle, doesn't respond to the ever-evolving and changing environment and disintegrates back into chaos from which emerges new structure.
At the personal level we experienece this process as a life crisis or a disease, particularly if we fight the change, when the framework of our reality changes. It is this dance of evolution that is reality and healthy, not the temporary forms and structures that we fix on, nor the chaos that we avoid. They exist only in passing as our existential perceptions. Our true health is in being, becoming, and accepting this ever-evolving self -- in a word resilience.
Fundamental to CRP is that it works in REM with sensory elements of our dreams. Healing, as are dreams, is a sensory not an intellectual process. Senses inform us when we are sick or well. Our dreams also reveal disease, often before symptoms appear. Mind and intellect only deal with symbols of reality. Dreams alone are healing, as the havoc wrought from dream deprivation shows.
The deep illness image, when experienced, spontaneously self-destructs into chaotic and unbound consciousness. The new emergent sensory self image that is found in chaotic consciousness is a new easeful structure that has replaced the disease, for example, a deep-felt sense of warmth, flow, and boundarylessness.
The CRP teaches a new way of flowing through life, philosophically and experientially. It provides the experience of doing so in a virtual reality experience of wakeful REM, and directly alters self-image and reality perception that empowers us by making us more resilient.
PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF RESILIENCE
Developmental Theories of Resilience
According to most child-development experts, we are all born with no concept of "self." We construct a self-image, and our Primal Existential Self Image (PESI) is based in our earliest psychosensory experience, according to the Consciousness Restrucutring Process (CRP), (Swinney, 2001).
We construct a self-image first of our bodies and their capacities and limitations through experimentation, and then of our essential nature as we gaze into the "mirrors" of our caregivers. A child who generally receives positively reinforcing images of himself as they are reflected in the tender, loving gestures of his primary caregivers soon begins to associate these reflected subliminal messages with his own state of being in the world.
In other words, he correlates being loved with being lovable; having his needs met as being worthy of having his needs met. In troubled families, however, the mirroring process goes awry, and children are at risk of forming an inner self-representation that feels defective and unwanted. When they are psychologically "twisted" and "bent out of shape" themselves, dysfunctional caregivers can be like distorting mirrors that reflect grotesquely distorted images of reality onto their children, (Wolin & Wolin, 1993).
CRP, which incorporates the traditional re-parenting and mirroring processes of Transactional Analysis, Jacqui Schiff and Virginia Satir, helps remedy any distortions from childhood through the mentoring process. However, the spontaneous, self-organizing healing process facilitated by CRP can completely restructure the PESI at the most fundamental level, rather than simply "filling in the blanks" a child failed to receive.
The PESI is the primal experience of beingness; the primal self-image (hologram) that holds the primal dis-ease structure. It is existential in that it defines, at a very fundamental level, the nature of the self, the world and the relationship between them. Our beliefs conform to this dynamic image, and these dynamics of the PESI also limit or filter our sensosry input. It is the deepest level of consciousness dynamics in which there is still a defined self and not-self. It shapes our perceptions based on the input of our senses and nervous system.
Our earliest sense-images were experienced on the edges, or periphery of sensation and seem to go far beyond ordinary sensation. Our earliest awareness consists of these sensations, including those of conception and gestation. Dis-easful dynamic consciousness patterns can shape the more superficial levels of somatic and psychic structures. They lead to deeper state of self/not self, into which a dis-eased self disappears or dissolves, and arises transformed out of the underlying chaos. This type of renewal, restructuring, or rebirth of the deepest sense of self is precisely a demonstration of resilience.
Developmental theory maintains that occasionally a child will manage to distract himself from distorted images and will be drawn instead to more positively reinforcing image of herself in relation to her environment. For example, she might look to others outside her immediate family for emotional support (despite negative parental legacies), or might develop interests in activities which help develop a sense of personal efficacy and competence. When this happens the child transcends effects of the poor parenting skills of her caregivers by essentially learning to parent herself in order to get many of her emotional needs met, (Wilson & Gottman, 1995).
This resilient child and others like her teach us that psychopathology and neurosis are not the inevitable result of growing up in a troubled family. Children can also grow to be increasingly resilient as they encounter adversity, as the following developmental theorists will attest and attempt to further explain.
Piaget and Vygotsky
These classic developmental theorists laid the foundation upon which most subsequent psychology is based. Piaget, in particular, introduced several useful information processing concepts, and the three that this paper will look at are stimulus assimilation, accomodation, and equilibration.
Assimilation refers to the ways in which people transform incoming information so that it fits within their existing frames of reference. Accomodation, the reciprocal of assimilation, refers to the way in which people adapt their frames of reference in order to process and store new information. Equilibration encompasses both of the above terms. It refers to the overall balancing-act that occurs between existing frames of reference and novel experiences, ideally leading to a sense of coherent equilibrium between the child's subjective inner and objective outer world. This developmental concept, key to Piaget's "stages"-theory of child development, would predict resilient life coping skills from a child possessing an innately adaptive, harmoniously balanced internal frame of reference, (Siegler, 1991).
Wolin and Wolin
From THE RESILIENT SELF (1993) came "the seven resiliencies" that the authors claim are often developed by the more adaptive survivors of troubled families: insight, independence, relationship skills, initiative, creativity, humor, and morality. One can imagine Piaget explaining these traits as by-products of the children's "equilibration" processes.
Others describe these kinds of traits as evidence of an "internal locus of control", also known as "learned optimism," (Seligman, 1968, 1995); the result of innate, "positive personality characteristics," (Garmezey, 1983); or evidence of evolved "ego strength," as referenced by the following theorists.
John Curtis Gowan
Based on his work in creativity and with gifted children, John Curtis Gowan developed a model of development which bootstrapped off Piaget and Erikson, but included adult development beyond the ordinary or "normal" adult successes of career and family building, extending into the emergence and stabilization of extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness. He described the entire spectrum of available states in his classic Trance, Art, & Creativity (1975), with its different modalities of spiritual and aesthetic expression. He devised a test for Self-Actualization, called the Northridge Developmental Scale.
Gowan outlines a developmental theory whereby we may tap our latent creative potential and self-actualization, organically growing toward the psychedelic or soul-revealing and illuminative states. He describes these states most fully in Development of the Psychedelic Individual (1974) and in Operations of Increasing Order. His use of the term 'psychedelic' does not connote drug use; quite the contrary he is strongly opposed to the developmental forcing and disintegration drug-use brings.
He describes how dyplasias between cognitive and affective growth can bleed off developmental energies, resulting in dysphoria and displacements, leaving us feeling unintegrated, blocked or stuck. He carries developmental theory past the concept of a strong coping ego. Fearing the loss-of-control by our egos, we may be reluctant to enter the soul-revealing stage of psychedelia and remain content to re-experience successes at our familiar or comfortable level of experience--usually expressed by the metaphor of "the American Dream,"--a cultural myth.
Gowan considers plateauing out before these upper stages to be akin to lack of sexual maturation in an adolescent. Clearly, resilience as the ability to continually redefine oneself and experience are fundamental to this life-long process of connecting with Source and Spirit.
Developmental Self Psychology
Although it was Kohut (Rowe & MacIsaac, 1995) who authored the self-mirroring theory discussed above by Wolins, it was Wilson & Gottman (1995), among others, who investigated the concept of self-distraction, or attention shuttling as a positive coping mechanism in resilient children. Their work focuses around the idea that
"attentional processes play executive roles in organizing both cognition and emotion...provide a "shuttle" between the cognitive and the emotional realms, and that the abilities involved in being able to attend and to shift attentional focus are fundamental to emotion regulatory processes. Furthermore, we suggest that attentional processes not only organize both cognitive and emotional processes, but that there is a dual physiological basis for this organization, parasympathetic tone and the ability to self-soothe from sympathetic activation." (p.1)
The coalesced line of reasoning might go something like this: Since the parents did not fit the child's grandiose-mirroring-needs frame of reference, she did not identify with them as appropriate, dependable self-objects and their skewed reflections of her were not assimilated and accommodated into her psyche. Instead, she equilibrated, or "self-soothed" her imbalanced (possibly anxious) cognitive-emotional internal state by examining other available options for ones that might better meet her needs.
The related concept of objective-subjective self-reference as an adaptive "shuttle" mechanism was originally expounded upon by Vygotsky (1962) as he disagreed with Piaget's theory that children's self-talk was just so much egocentric babble whose usefulness dissipated with maturity. Vygotsky spoke of this "inner speech" as an important tool for children's and adults' problem-solving as it provides them with their own objective frame of reference from which to evaluate their subjective states.
Mary Watkins (1986) says that, "Far from revealing themselves as a primitive form of thought, these dialogues reveal the complexity of thought as it struggles between different perspectives, refusing to be simplified to a single standpoint," (p. 174). Blachowicz (1997) calls this healthy form of talking to oneself "The Dialogue of the Soul with Itself" (pp. 485-508). And Jung (Campbell, 1971) says that "The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity" because, to the extent that one acknowledges the "other" within himself, he will be able to acknowledge it in the outer world (p. 297).
Summary
It would seem that although many children enter the world without adequate self-objects through which their emotional needs can be met, some of them somehow fail to internalize or identify with the neglect and/or abuse to which they are subjected. Instead, through adaptive attention-shuttling mechanisms such as self-dialogue, then later, self-reflection, they resourcefully learn to somewhat objectively parent and thus subjectively soothe themselves, and grow up to be emotionally strong and healthy adults. What is it that gives these children their resiliently resourceful, attention-shuttling edge?
Cognitive Theories of Resilience
Cognitive science has revealed many means by which individuals can develop more resilient ways of processing information. Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence are gaining equal respect as essential for our individuation. They are fundamental to our relationships to self, others and universe.
Daniel Goleman's (1996) best-seller, Emotional Intelligence broke ground for Zohar & Marshall's (2000) Connecting with our Spiritual Intelligence. Goleman tagged emotional intelligence as an "invisible third" phenomenon at work in our psyches. He explained how some of the brain's parts combine their energies in order to synergistically give rise to this new facet of resilience, which can be briefly summarized.
When incoming stimuli are of sufficient salience and/or novelty to alter the body's arousal mechanism, the brain signals the adrenal glands to secrete hormones which then prepare the body for "fight or flight" via the vagus nerve, which in turn increases the heart rate and triggers a cascade of other physiological events.
Feedback from all of these events, comprising information about the current state of the body at any moment in time, is sent to the amygdal portion of the brain's limbic system. There, it is associately connected with similar kinds of information already stored there as "emotional memories" in order to assess the intensity of emotional valence. Meanwhile the factual content of this incoming information from the amygdala is associately sorted, evaluated and stored within the nearby hippocampus.
Since the September attacks, many of our systems are signaling us that we are in a perpetual state of emergency, and the body is kept in a continual state to respond to this perception. Thus, we suffer the legitimate and self-inflicted results of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). We may become subject to the symptoms of that disorder, including a sense of loss of control, unresolved fears, nervousness, anxiety, sleeplessness or hypervigiliance.
Much of the basis of how we are reacting to this change in world order and disorder comes from our childhoods and those traumas we sustained then and afterwards, as well as how we learned to grow beyond them. Our experiential associations condition our present and future responses. They condition the rationality with which we assess the amount of fear we feel and its relative proportion regarding the risks we are exposed to in our lifestyle choices. It conditions how we respond to chaos.
Based on feedback received from the body, these two aspects of associative memory work in tandem to provide both the emotional tone and the perceptual distinctions which define and categorize human experiences.
If incoming information is interpreted as an emergency by these two limbic partners, an "automatic" stress response is triggered which causes the body to respond in preset patterns of behavior before the rational functions of the neocortex have been allowed input into the situation.
Emotional intelligence is demonstrated by the individual who is able to interrupt the emotional feedback loop as needed in order to allow the brain's logical functions to assess the situation. The techniques by which this is adaptively and intelligently accomplished are what psychology calls "positive coping mechanisms." Maladaptive coping mechanisms include those which succeed in circumventing emotional over-reactions at a cost of psychophysiological health to the individual, (Goleman, 1995).
Goleman's expanded model of intelligence thus presents a compelling argument that it is actually intelligent emotions rather than intelligence alone which forms the core of human coping skills and thus makes it a "master aptitude," (p. 80). One reason some humans seem to possess more of this aptitude from birth, he explained, is because of genetic variance within the neural circuitry which controls arousal thresholds. These thresholds in turn determine limbic-cortical and left-right-hemispheric attention-shuttling capacities which regulate emotions.
However, these variances play only a part in the overall development of dispositional traits which, like the coping mechanisms to which they give rise, can be either adaptively or maladaptively shaped. So, what is it that controls the neurophysiology of emotional resilience and how can we make it work for us rather than against us?
We have two distinct hemispheres of our brains, termed Left and Right Brain, connected by a dense network called the corpus callosum. Springer & Deutsch (1993) have devoted themselves to studying the physiological mechanisms which underlie psychological processes by researching the specific effects that brain injuries have on mental processes.
Data is gathered through the use of split-brain experiments which test the cognitive skills of those who have had a part of one of their hemispheres removed or damaged or the tissue connecting them severed. Their extensive research dealing with left or right cerbral dominance effects has led to some fascinating findings about the hemispheric lateralization functions of the brain. For example,
Left hemisphere-injured patients have been reported to display feelings of despair, hopelessness, or anger (often referred to as a catastrophic-dysphoric reaction), whereas right-hemisphere damage produces what is known as an indifference-euphoric reaction, in which minimization of symptoms, emotional placidity, and elation are common...ordinarily the two halves of the brain exert inhibitory effects on each other in the area of emotional expression, thereby resulting in a normal balance that is free of uncontrollable outbursts of any kind. In the event of damage to one side, however, this mutual inhibition is disrupted and the damaged side no longer exerts the same degree of inhibition on its partner; hence, the other hemisphere is disinhibited, (pp. 194-196).
A summary of some of these relevant findings shows that individuals with right-hemispheric dominance (in the past, usually females) are more skilled at perceiving and conceptualizing spatial relationships, and are more attuned to their subcortical systems which are involved in arousal and attention, thus are more receptive to emotionally-charged stimuli. On the other hand, those with left-hemispheric dominance (previously, usually males) have deficits in these areas, but seem superior in perceiving and categorizing sequential, emotionally neutral stimuli.
Further research showed "an association between right hemisphere pathology (thus, left-hemispheric dominance) and abnormal heart rate response and skin conductance changes, both autonomic nervous system components," (p. 200).
Later in their book, Springer & Deutsch (1993) discussed recent data gathered demonstrating left and right directional biases ("spin") predominant in the life-generating activities of molecules and atoms. They quote French biologist Louis Pasteur as speculating that "Life is dominated by asymmetrical actions. I can even imagine that all living species are primordially, in their, structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic asymmetry," (p. 320).
They cite evidence that DNA's asymmetrical qualities might be a significant factor in genetically influencing other asymmetrical aspects of the human body, such as hemispheric differentiations, organ placement, and so on. Their rationale is as follows:
"The double strands of each DNA molecule encode genetic information in terms of the sequencing of component amino acids. The two long strands are wound around each other in a clockwise spiral; thus, the DNA molecule cannot be superimposed upon its mirror reflection," (p. 321).
In other words, its mirrored reflection represents a reversed image of the original DNA molecule rather than an image that could be placed identically onto its original; its right helix would be on the left, and its left helix would be on the right and its genetic codes would be read backwards. The laws of physics claim to work the same for any phenomenon's identically mirrored image as they do for the original phenomenon. Only sequencing information, such as written information--like the DNA codes--do not reflect symmetrically, and thus introduce asymmetry into the application of natural laws.
The authors cite evidence of other research that there is an "underlying cytoplasmic gradient operating during embryonic development that favors the left side of the body." They conclude that systematic asymmetries of morphology, molecular biology, and sub-atomic interactions are ultimately linked, and that there is, after all, an absolute, universal distinction between left and right, (p. 323). So, our question becomes, "can we use this information about our brains' asymmetrically functioning "parts" to become more resilient?"
The "triune brain" concept posits that we have three functional brains, not just--or two halves of one. The most primitive reptile-brain appeared in birds and retiles a hunred million years ago. It is the vicious, repetetive, instinctive territorial brain, that Pavlov and Skinner learned to condition. The mammalian brain, or limbic system was deposited over it, and originally tied in with olfaction. The neocortex is the third brain of higher primates and has produced human culture.
De Beauport (1996) divides "behavioral intelligences" into three categories: basic intelligence, pattern intelligence, and parameter intelligence. Later on in evolution, as creatures evolved from reptiles into mammals, the limbic brain as center of emotional intelligences came into being: affectional, mood and motivational intelligences. With development of the neocortex came a consciousness-generating partnership from which our rational, associative, spatial-visual and intuitiveintelligences were derived.
She speaks of the cerebral cortex as "having a split personality"--her way of pointing to the hemispheric asymmetries through which the functions of the other two parts of the brain usually filter their incoming sensory stimuli. Throughout her book, she describes a highly variable path of "learned" life experiences, from basic brain to limbic brain, to left and/or right cerebral hemispheres and then back out into the body, all of which, she implies, is designed to guarantee that information processing would be a highly variable and personalized phenomenon, not necessarily one that fits within the norms of someone's arbitrary IQ bell curve. The point is that engaging the emotions facilitates the learning process as alternative areas of intelligence come online.
Cogitive neuroscience speaks of Mirror Neurons asthe driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution. V.S. Ramachandran claims that the discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. He predicts that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
According to Ramachandran, there are many puzzling questions about the evolution of the human mind and brain:
1) The hominid brain reached almost its present size and perhaps even its present intellectual capacity about 250,000 years ago . Yet many of the attributes we regard as uniquely human appeared only much later. Why? What was the brain doing during the long "incubation "period? Why did it have all this latent potential for tool use, fire, art music and perhaps even language- that blossomed only considerably later? How did these latent abilities emerge, given that natural selection can only select expressed abilities, not latent ones?
2) Crude "Oldawan" tools - made by just a few blows to a core stone to create an irregular edge -emerged 2.4 million ago and were probably made by Homo Habilis whose brain size was half way (700cc) between modern humans (1300) and chimps (400). After another million years of evolutionary stasis aesthetically pleasing "symmetrical" tools began to appear associated with a standardization of production technique and artifact form; a smooth rather than jagged, irregular edge. And lastly, the invention of stereotyped "assembly line" tools (sophisticated symmetrical bifacial tools) that were hafted to a handle, took place only 200,000 years ago. Why was the evolution of the human mind "punctuated" by these relatively sudden upheavals of technological change?
3) Why the sudden explosionin technological sophistication, widespread cave art, clothes, stereotyped dwellings, etc. around 40 thousand years ago, even though the brain had achieved its present "modern" size almost a million years earlier?
4) Did language appear completely out of the blue as suggested by Chomsky? Or did it evolve from a more primitive gestural language that was already in place?
5) Humans are often called the "Machiavellian Primate" referring to our ability to "read minds" in order to predict other peoples' behavior and outsmart them. Why are apes and humans so good at reading other individuals' intentions? Do higher primates have a specialized brain center or module for generating a "theory of other minds" as proposed by Nick Humphrey and Simon Baron-Cohen? If so, where is this circuit and how and when did it evolve?
The solution to many of these riddles comes from an unlikely source... the study of single neurons in the brains of monkeys. Rama suggests that the questions become less puzzling when you consider Giaccamo Rizzollati's recent discovery of "mirror neurons' in the ventral premotor area of monkeys. This cluster of neurons, holds the key to understanding many enigmatic aspects of human evolution. Rizzollati and Arbib have already pointed out the relevance of their discovery to language evolution . But the significance of their findings for understanding other equally important aspects of human evolution has been largely overlooked.
Commenting on the emergence of language, Ramachandran says: it helps us communicate our thoughts and intentions. But the question of how such an extraordinary ability might have actually evolved has puzzled biologists, psychologists and philosophers at least since the time of Charles Darwin. The problem is that the human vocal apparatus is vastly more sophisticated than that of any ape but without the correspondingly sophisticated language areas in the brain the vocal equipment alone would be useless. So how did these two mechanisms with so many sophisticated interlocking parts evolve in tandem? Following Darwin's lead I suggest that our vocal equipment and our remarkable ability to modulate voice evolved mainly for producing emotional calls and musical sounds during courtship ("croonin a toon."). Once that evolved then the brain -especially the left hemisphere - could evolve language.
But a bigger puzzle remains. Is language mediated by a sophisticated and highly specialized "language organ" that is unique to humans and emerged completely out of the blue as suggested by Chomsky? Or was there a more primitive gestural communication system already in place that provided a scaffolding for the emergence of vocal language?
Rizzolatti recorded from the ventral premotor area of the frontal lobes of monkeys and found that certain cells will fire when a monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, grasping, picking up and putting a peanut in the mouth etc. different neurons fire in response to different actions. One might be tempted to think that these are motor "command" neurons, making muscles do certain things; however, the astonishing truth is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action, e.g. tasting a peanut!
With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: "mind reading" empathy, imitation learning, and even the evolution of language. Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."
Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene based evolution.
Moreover, as Rizzolati has noted, these neurons may also enable you to mime and possibly understand the lip and tongue movements of others which, in turn, could provide the opportunity for language to evolve. (This is why, when you stick your tongue out at a new born baby it will reciprocate! How ironic and poignant that this little gesture encapsulates a half a million years of primate brain evolution.) Once you have these two abilities in place the ability to read someone's intentions and the ability to mime their vocalizations then you have set in motion the evolution of language. You need no longer speak of a unique language organ and the problem doesn't seem quite so mysterious any more.
Mirror neurons were discovered in monkeys but how do we know they exist in the human brain? To find out we studied patients with a strange disorder called anosognosia. Most patients with a right hemisphere stroke have complete paralysis of the left side of their body and will complain about it, as expected. But about 5% of them will vehemently deny their paralysis even though they are mentally otherwise lucid and intelligent.
This is the so called "denial" syndrome or anosognosia. To our amazement, we found that some of these patients not only denied their own paralysis, but also denied the paralysis of another patient whose inability to move his arm was clearly visible to them and to others. We suggest that this bizarre observation is best understood in terms of damage to Rizzolatti's mirror neurons. It's as if anytime you want to make a judgement about someone else's movements you have to run a VR (virtual reality) simulation of the corresponding movements in your own brain and without mirror neurons you cannot do this .
The second piece of evidence comes from studying brain waves (EEG) in humans. When people move their hands a brain wave called the MU wave gets blocked and disappears completely. Eric Altschuller, Jamie Pineda, and I suggested at the Society for Neurosciences in 1998 that this suppression was caused by Rizzolati's mirror neuron system. Consistent with this theory we found that such a suppression also occurs when a person watches someone else moving his hand but not if he watches a similar movement by an inanimate object.
Ramachandran points out two major bifurcations in our evolutionary history:
The hominid brain grew at an accelerating pace until it reached its present size of 1500cc about 200,000 years ago. Yet uniquely human abilities such the invention of highly sophisticated "standardized" multi- part tools, tailored clothes, art, religious belief and perhaps even language are thought to have emerged quite rapidly around 40,000 years ago - a sudden explosion of human mental abilities and culture that is sometimes called the "big bang."
If the brain reached its full human potential - or at least size - 200,000 years ago why did it remain idle for 150,000 years? I suggest that the so-called big bang occurred because certain critical environmental triggers acted on a brain that had already become big for some other reason and was therefore "pre-adapted" for those cultural innovations that make us uniquely human. (One of the key pre-adaptations being mirror neurons.)
Inventions like tool use, art, math and even aspects of language may have been invented "accidentally" in one place and then spread very quickly given the human brain's amazing capacity for imitation learning and mind reading using mirror neurons. Perhaps ANY major "innovation" happens because of a fortuitous coincidence of environmental circumstances - usually at a single place and time. But given our species' remarkable propensity for miming, such an invention would tend to spread very quickly through the population once it emerged.
Once you have a certain minimum amount of "imitation learning" and "culture" in place, this culture can, in turn, exert the selection pressure for developing those additional mental traits that make us human. And once this starts happening you have set in motion the auto-catalytic process that culminated in modern human consciousness.
If its simply a matter of chance discoveries spreading rapidly, why would all of them have occurred at the same time? There are three answers to this objection. First,the evidence that it all took place at the same time is tenuous. The invention of music, shelters, hafted tools, tailored clothing, writing, speech, etc. may have been spread out between 100K and 5k and the so-called great leap may be a sampling artifact of archeological excavation. Second, any given innovation (e.g. speech or writing or tools) may have served as a catalyst for the others and may have therefore accelerated the pace of culture as a whole. And third, there may indeed have been a genetic change, but it may not have been an increase in the ability to innovate but an increase in the sophistication of the mirror neuron system and therefore in "learnability."
The resulting increase in ability to imitate and learn (and teach) would then explain the explosion of cultural change that we call the "great leap forward" or the "big bang" in human evolution. This argument implies that the whole "nature-nurture debate" is largely meaningless as far as human are concerned. Withthe genetically specified learnability that characterizes the human brain and culture that can take advantage of this learnability, human culture and human brain have co-evolved into obligatory mutual parasites without either the result would not be a human being. (No more than you can have a cell without its parasitic mitochondria).
THE SECOND BIG BANG
My suggestion that these neurons provided the initial impetus for "runaway" brain/ culture co-evolution in humans, isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds. Imagine a martian anthropologist was studying human evolution a million years from now. He would be puzzled by the relatively sudden emergence of certain mental traits like sophisticated tool use, use of fire, art and "culture" and would try to correlate them (as many anthropologists now do) with purported changes in brain size and anatomy caused by mutations. But unlike them he would also be puzzled by the enormous upheavals and changes that occurred after (say) 19th century - what we call the scientific/industrial revolution. This revolution is, in many ways, much more dramatic (e.g. the sudden emergence of nuclear power, automobiles, air travel, and space travel) than the "great leap forward" that happened 40,000 years ago!!
He might be tempted to argue that there must have been a genetic change and corresponding change in brain anatomy and behavior to account for this second leap forward. (Just as many anthropologists today seek a genetic explanation for the first one.) Yet we know that present one occurred exclusively because of fortuitous environmental circumstances, because Galileo invented the "experimental method," that, together with royal patronage and the invention of the printing press, kicked off the scientific revolution. His experiments and the earlier invention of a sophisticated new language called mathematics in India in the first millennium AD (based on place value notation, zero and the decimal system), set the stage for Newtonian mechanics and the calculus and "the rest is history" as we say.
It certainly did not happen because of a genetic change in the human brains during the renaissance. It happened at least partly because of imitation learning and rapid "cultural" transmission of knowledge. (Indeed one could almost argue that there was a greater behavioral/cognitive difference between pre-18th century and post 20th century humans than between Homo Erectus and archaic Homo Sapiens. Unless he knew better our Martian ethologist may conclude that there was a bigger genetic difference between the first two groups than the latter two species!)
Based on this analogy I suggest, further, that even the first great leap forward was made possible largely by imitation and emulation. This system of cells, once it became sophisticated enough to be harnessed for "training" in tool use and for reading other hominids minds, may have played the same pivotal role in the emergence of human consciousness (and replacement of Neandertals by Homo Sapiens) as the asteroid impact did in the triumph of mammals over reptiles.
Thus Ramachandran regards Rizzolati's discovery and his own speculative conjectures on their key role in our evolution - as the most important unreported story of the last decade. Mirror neurons certainly bear on our discussion of the critical importance of mirroring in infancy, empathy, "mindsharing," and our innate ability to adapt and change: resilience. Further, we see that technologies can facilitate resilience. And, not all technologies, such as language or consciousness engineering, are in themselves hardware or require hardware. The Consciousness Restructuring Process is one such "soft" technology.
Summary
We can fulfill the developmental process and develop our emotional intelligence to help us become more resilient. This facilitates information-shuttling between left and right hemispheres which intuitively facilitates the intelligent sequencing of information so that we more resiliently make use of our human emotions. From this enhanced state, intuitive information-sequencing facilitates evolution of resilient personality traits and adaptive coping styles. We become increasingly conscious of our own ability to effect positive outcomes within our worlds.
We can mirror the optimistic positive attitudes and aptitudes of our mentors. The process of co-consciousness or mindsharing involves a shared reality in which the integrity of the mentor stabilizes the journeyer even though they may be moving through the fear and pain in a highly emotional state. The empathic sensing, "mind reading," and compassionate reassurance of the mentor sustains the dynamic momentum of the process as it moves spontaneously toward natural healing.
Mindsharing comes down to us from the ancient shamanic tradition of spiritual healing.. "A shaman is someone whose specialty is induction of a well state, someone who may help either through research or treatment to induce a state in someone else's brain that will produce health," according to psychiatrist Arnold Mandell. "But the brain is an open, instrinsically unstable system, and its higher level order may be not just the wires and connection of a switchboard but all the turbulence and eddies of streams and waterfalls. And yet it has a statistical stability, an inertia. If it's perturbed enough, it gets more and more turbulent. It fractures, then organizes into a new regime. The brain is my cosmology. I sometimes think the rest of science is the brain's picture of itself."
CRP's dream journeys facilitate this restructuring through experiential process work. Inner journeys, using our dreams, symptoms, feelings, fears and pain as doorways to deeper levels of ourselves, allow us to exercise our right-brain functions much as intellectual pursuits exercise the rational mind. They also help us find and share our joy. We connect directly with our emotions, our non-linear irrational elements and the sensations that arise in our psychophysical being.
By directing our attention toward our inner process we connect with the eternal source of wisdom and our intuition comes to the fore. An inherent part of the process of changing from the inside out is that as the deepest self transforms, downline faculties such as beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as psychosomatic condition, automatically change as well. Thus, resilience can be seen as the ability to dynamically change at the most fundamental level toward a more adaptive way of being in the world.
Psychodynamic Theories of Resilience
This conscious resilience initiates change at the most fundamental levels of our psychophysical being, including the genetic, morphological, and quantum field levels of observation. This is the realm where psyche and matter meet, where physics and psychology merge. A variety of depth psychologies and sacred psychologies address the meaning of these microscopic, even subatomic processes for our very souls as well as for the personality. Notable among them are Psychodynamics, Jungian and Transpersonal psychologies and Consciousness Studies. They provide useful models for illuminating the nature of resilience.
Psychoanalytic theory was the first modern view of the psyche to bring order to the chaotic world of the psychiatric patient. It provided a means of plumbing the depths of normal and atypical behavior by cataloguing symptoms and using diagnostic labels for mental disorders. Pyschodynamics includes three inter-related theoretical parts: 1). the classical ego psychology of Freud, 2). the objects relations theory of Klein and others, and 3). the self psychology of Sullivan and Kohut.
Ego psychology conceptualizes the intrapsychic world as one of tension between the energy dynamics of the unconscious demands of the "superego," the conscious volition of the "ego," and the instinctual drives of the "id." This conflict produces anxiety, which brings forth a compromise between the needs of the id and the ego in the form of a defense mechanism such as a repression, suppression, denial or projection of the true facts of the situation to a place in the psyche where they no longer have to be consciously dealt with.
Object relations theory differs in that it views the conflicts as being generated more within the context of relationships with others rather than strictly within oneself. In the sense of this external agency of conflictual tension, it uses the term "object" to mean "person." According to Gabbard (1994), "object relations theory encompasses the transformation of interpersonal relationships into internalized representations of relationships." It is theorized that the individualized perceptions of these relational representations are psychically internalized, or "introjected." Thus, "at any one time different constellations of self-representations, object representations, and affects vie with one another for center stage in the intrapsychic theater of internal object relations."
Self psychology, on the other hand, focuses more on how the external relationships in one's life help develop and maintain a sense of self-esteem and self-cohesion through interaction with one's inner relationship with oneself. It is more of a "two person," self-object" psychology.
In Jungian psychology, science meets mysticism. The "missing, invisible third" seems to begin to reveal itself. The universe merges with the individual in notions such as the collective unconscious transcendent function, synchronicity and cosmic consciousness. Psyche and substance are seen as two aspects of more fundamental energy, which forms a universal substrate. The delineation between mind and body blurs.
Jung superceded traditional psychodynamic theories by pursuing five assumptions: 1). the autonomy of unconscious psychic contents; 2). the teleological significance of the dynamics involving those contents.; 3). our memories, personal and transpersonal, are contained in our unconscious; 4). the unconscious is a highly receptive intuiting agent for the conscious self, and 5). there is a "patterning force" inherent in the human unconscious psyche, (Campbell, 1971).
Jung's work provided a whole new frame of reference through which human behaviors can be explained. This more mystical branch of psychology made friends with other sciences and developed interdisciplinary field theories which bridged the gap of the Cartesian mind/body split. It focused its understanding on the apparently acausal, non-linear connecting principle which unites mind and body into one seamlessly coherent wholeness. Perhaps this more holistic paradigm can help explain how the dynamics of various resilience phenomena all fit together.
Transpersonal psychology went a step further, incorporating participation in spiritual practices as part of a healthy, holistic lifestyle. They drew from the currents of humanistic theory (Maslow), existential philosophy (Gestalt, Transactional Analysis), and the pernnial philosophy of the wisdom traditions. They emphasize being over becoming. Like Jungian psychology they are process-oriented, largely experiential practices which reflect the complex interaction of aspects of the dynamic whole. Creativity, growth, and emergence of potential are valued highly.
This more holistic spiritually-oriented theory represents a somewhat "neo-Jungian" way of experientially reframing the energy dynamics of life as "a healing endeavor that aims at the integration of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of well-being," (Vaughan, 1993).
Thus, individuals can develop a sense of wholeness on all three levels of their identity: 1). the egoic, which requires a more adaptively cohesive sense of self identity with and yet separate from the world; 2). the existential, which while encompassing the egoic state, also requires a more coherent sense of one's individuated state within the human conditions; and 3). the transpersonal, which requires that one transcend the egoic, existential identities and enter into a heightened awareness of essential unity with all human beings, living things, and perhaps the cosmos.
Thus the healing dynamic in transpersonal psychotherapy switches from one based on the beliefs and values of the therapist into a reciprocally interactive healing dynamic where the content of therapy is the client's experience. In the interaction both therapist and client participate in a healing process.
This orientation is very close to that embraced in the Consciousness Restructuring Process. Both mentor and journeyer share a co-consciousness during which both enter the mindscape and sojourn deeper into primal recesses of the psyche. On the journey each is subjected to both the chaos and emergent creativity and deep healing inherent in the process. Healing does not come through the therapist, but through contact with the deep well-springs of life which brings rejuvination.
The resilience-enhancing function of transpersonal healing lends greater meaning to the contents of one's life experiences. It provides a greater context for one's life and its meaning and honors the values of the soul. Life experiences are transpersonally assimilated as its dynamics are therapeutically processed and equilibrated. In CRP, the old, outworn existential self-image is dissolved and a new healthier self-image emerges from the deepest unstructured part of us, repatterned by primal creative forces.
Psychodynamics helps us understand where we are wasting our limited energies in life--in neuroses, in useless worry, in self-defeating patterns, in pathologies, in obsessions, in projections, anger, greed, vanities, denial and other negativedefences and habit patterns. Our psychic energies are distributed among many demands being placed upon them, from both without and within the body. Equilibration coping skills, such as defense mechanisms, help us budget our energy reserves so we can resiliently adapt to stressors as they arise. But when they outlive their usefulness, when they encroached when they are inappropriate, we feel stuck in developmental plateaus, depressions, or even may develop physical illnesses designed to disrupt or reinforce the status quo.
Consciousness Studies
Running concurrent with the thread of psychodynamic therapies is the current of Consciousness Studies which lately has taken the bedfellow of Complexity and Chaos Theory. Consciousness Studies are multidisciplinary inquires into the physical, psychological and social nature of consciousness, spirituality and the cosmos.
The realm of consciousness studies has shed light on the seamlessly welded relationship of mindbody, therefore many physicists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors have a strong presence in the field. The most avante-garde in this arena postulate, with the ancient Vedas, that it is ALL consciousness--that all we perceived and experience is a form of maya, the construct of our filtering senses and mind. The latest finding in Quantum Cosmology, for example, tell us counter-intuitively that at the cosmic scale nothing moves--rather, space is expanding rapidly from every so-called 'point.'
Physics ran into the same conundrum regarding subjectivity decades ago in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which required the observing presence of the experimenter to collapse the wave-function. This led to the development of the Uncertainty Principle, and the relationship has not yet been satisfactorily resolved. Now we find that chaotic systems do not respond statistically to probability, but with unpredictable yet deterministic turbulence.
Among the chief players are David Chalmers, Henry Stapp, Daniel C. Dennett, Karl Pribrahm, David Bohm, Charles Tart, Jean Houston, Stuart Hammeroff, Stanley Krippner, Alan Combs, Ben Goertzel, Ervin Lazslo, F. David Peat, Sally Goerner, Ruth Inge-Heinz, Jack Sarfatti, Timothy Leary, Jeffrey Mishlove, Rick Strassman, Michael Persinger, C.M. Anderson, Antonio Damasio, David Deutsch, Arnold Mandell, Arnold Mindell, Charles Laughlin, Eugene d'Aquili, Fred Alan Wolf, Roger Penrose, Ken Wilber and a host of others.
Perennial favorite journals include Journal of Consciousness Studies and PSYCHE, an online journal, as well as Proceedings of the Society for Chaos Theory in Life Sciences. Another notable conclave is the Tucson Conferences.
For links go to Iona Miller Homepage at www.geocities.com/iona_m/consciousness.html
Psychologists working in this field are bringing older concepts into the consciousness dialogue by updating their descriptions with new metaphors. For example, Jung's concept of archetypes (as primal foci for certain kinds of energies in ourselves, society, the world and universe) are now spoken of as "Strange Attractors," the cores of cohesion around which non-linear processes orbit in unpredictable yet deterministic fashion. Perhaps the most progressive group is Dyna-Psych, hosted by Ben Goertzel, a founding member, like Graywolf Swinney of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences.
Complexity and Chaos Theory describes the behavior of non-linear dynamic systems, fractal geometry, and the systematic behavior of nature as well as our nature, consciousness and health. It describes in eloquent equations deterministic inherently unpredictable yet ordered randomness, dimensionality, reflexive feedback loops, boundary conditions, and integration.
It is the realm of the irrational, of rich values and structure, of self-organizing emergent creativity, stretched time and folded space, global behavior, open systems, criticality, sensitive dependence, strange attractors, fluctuation, turbulence, perturbation, thresholds, trajectories, bifurcations, phase transitions, temporal density, reiteration, synchronicity, resilience, the "butterfly effect," subquantal chaos (ZPE), dynamic geometrization, probability, relativity, disruption, coherence and stochastic resonances, synergetics and tensegrity, self-reflection, nested cycles, the breakdown of order with sudden transitions, the creative and evolutionary "edge." The new self-organizing order always emerges from chaos.
The relationship of Consciousness and Chaos is being explored by psychonauts such as mathematician Ralph Abraham, biologist and morphogenetic fields proponent, Rupert Sheldrake, and psychedelic guru, Terence McKenna. They have spoken on the relationship of chaos and creativity and the resacralization of the world in Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992) and the Evolutionary Mind (1998).
David Chalmers has pointed out, quite rightly since it has been a sticking point for decades, that the so-called 'Hard Problem" in consciousness studies lies in the realm of human subjective experience. This non-linear, non-quantifiable, yet tangible phenomenology has perplexed science, since science likes to deal with measurement and repeatability.
To compound the subjectivity problem is that researchers are split in their commitment over whether to participate in experimental projects or not, just as during the 60s psychedelic revolution. Experiments can become hopelessly influenced by experimentor-bias, which must always be guarded against. Added to this mix comes a host of new brain/mind material from the emergent specialty of Neurotheology, where new technologies which allow us to "tweak" the brain are beginning to show how our spirituality may be hardwired. Scientists now know what types of mystical experiences are associated with which parts of the brain and neural pathways, or circuitry. See Iona Miller's paper, "Neurotheology 101," for a summary and update.
The relationship between brain physiology and human behavior is notoriously difficult to understand and easy to misapply. Obviously, consciousness, subjectivity and human religious experience isn't reducible merely to an explanation of neural pathways. It is a mystery whether our hard-wiring creates the God-Experience, or whether God creates our psychophysical wiring.
Today many researchers pursue both science and spirituality ignoring dictates that they are mutually exclusive. A false-dichotomy undergirds the dualistic perception of Dionysian vs. Apollonian, holistic vs. cognitive. It is the same dichotomy which falsely separates art and science, intuition and logic, spirituality and science. Neurotheology and Consciousness Studies, in general, respect both science and spirit. It is a move toward holism, not a reductionistic analysis.
Only when we embrace the functionally interconnected whole brain (dubbed Odyssean by physicist Murray Gell-Mann), not one artificially split in its functions into right and left can we move beyond mere conceptualization of a seamlessly welded quantum mindbody wedded or embedded in Cosmos. This, of course is the ineffable realm of mysticism and Mystery, reachable experientially only through the suspension of reason and intellect, by God's mercy and Grace.
The psychodynamics being developed in this complex field may eventually reveal even more deeply hidden aspects of resilience of the human body, mind, and spirit. Here, we tread on sacred ground, which has traditionally remained immune from the proddings of science. Chaos Theory shows us that forms, including our forms, emerge, dissolve and reform through the creative process known as autopoietic self-organization. This is the new direction in evolutionary forces. New mind/brain technologies such as electromagnetic manipulation show once again that technological interventions can facilitate resilience. In this pursuit of the deepest secrets of Nature and our nature, we may in fact find the way to our own soul, facilitating our own resilience.
Experiential therapy sessions have shown that as consciousness journeys deeper and deeper into the psyche, it eventually encounters a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images. Those emerging from this non-ordinary state of consciousness report an increased sense of well-being ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. We know that research has shown that imagery can affect the immune system. Imaginal journeys in the autonomous stream of consciousness may activate, through REM dynamics, psychosomatic healing forces, such as the placebo effect and the resilience response.
Summary of Psychological Resilience and CRP
Cause effect relationships about mental illness would seem to be the province of psychology, but how can that be when a plethora of theories prevail, and all these seemingly disparate models "work" to a greater or lesser degree. In psychology it is even difficult to define the terms sufficiently to even begin a reduction of mind to the underlying substrate of brain.
However a deductive cause and effect explanation for how higher cortical processes translate in "thoughts" is not the limit of the purview of the psychologist. Nor are inductive correlationist explanations the mainstays of psychology either. The successes of psychology are the many and myriad practical ones, some of which we are aware of from our daily lives. Yet, to be sure, like psychiatry, psychology holds a very powerful position in modern society.
One practical model from the repertoire of psychology is the concept or phenomenon of learned helplessness. Animals, can be experimentally discouraged from leaving their cages even with open doors after certain negative treatments and instilling fears. They narrow their sphere of response and freedom options creating an emotional response pattern. Learned helplessness is the opposite of resilience.
More resilient cognitions are translated into their functional, neurophysical equivalents in the body when we relearn or cognitively reframe our emotional response patterns. Somehow this functions to rearrange corresponding neurological structures in order to better compensate for their innate and learned asymmetrical imbalances. This equilibrative act of emotional intelligence allows the energy tensions within the body to become more resiliently balanced and the emotions to be more intelligently managed.
In this therapeutic model, the transpersonal process is facilitated by the balanced energies of the therapist providing an equilibratively therapeutic, empathic "container" within which the contents of the patient's experiential history can be placed, and from which newly assimilated, healing, transformative energies can emerge.
While this outside/in method is useful for healing at superficial levels, CRP operates in an inside/out process. The move inward comes when an emotionally intelligent choice is made to seek healing through the journey process, often beginning with a dream. The positive results, emotionally and cognitively, as well as behaviorally are the result of a fundamental shift in self-image which automatically gives rise to different thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The therapist assumes the role of co-adventurer or mentor at best to facilitate and deepen the process, to lead the client passed their fear and pain, so natural spontaneous healing can take place.
CRP bootstraps off the "alchemy" of Jung's transference and transcendent functions. Jung noticed that certain images and stories kept reoccuring in human experience and the myths of all cultures. Jung also discovered the healing power of the shamanic or "mana personality" or healer archetype and its potential to influence psychic change at a primordial level; he practiced the mentoring process as well. He postulated the existence of a "collective unconscious" from which archetypal or mythic patterns emerge. He noticed the correlation between the medieval language of alchemy, with its imagery of cooking and refining base metal into gold and the process of psychological transformation.
Jung identified archetypal images that play an important role in our psychological and cultural make up. These include such pervasive principles as the Shadow, anima-animus (female-male principle), and the Self. When these dynamics become unbalanced, Jung resorted to a variety of analytical and dream techniques, intuitively balancing left and right hemispheres. Comprehending the nature of archetypes as they play through our lives, helps us look at our ups and downs with a certain degree of philosophical detachment, such as that known in Buddhism as the Observer Self.
Jung pioneered exploring this level of consciousness dynamics; yet CRP goes even deeper all the way into undifferentiated chaos, though often exploring imagery related to these powerful psychic forces. CRP allows these emotional tensions a way to be heard, deeply felt, discharged and transformed in experiential process work, in a safe healing atmosphere. CRP invites full participation.
Campbell (1988), Krippner & Feinstein (1997) have pointed out how personal mythology can shape a life, at a level even deeper than that of the belief system. Journeys often cross the realms of both personal and collective mythology, and sometimes milestones of the higher levels of spiritual journeys or mystical experience appear spontaneously, even when the person is unaware of their archetypal meaning.
Journeys often reflect a spiritual essence, which transpersonal psychology attempts to embody. Sojourners often report experiences corresponding with descriptions of cosmic consciousness, of feeling at one with nature, God, or the universe. CRP invites full participation, and may be done on a regular basis to process issues as they arise...almost as a meditation. As this deeply transformative process works, the client experiences healing and becomes more highly conscious and individuated, more integrated, self-realized, more harmoniously balanced and possibly spiritually-oriented, and resiliently whole. It is more than an image or a metaphor; it is a new lived reality, a new sense of being.
What began as an exploration into developmental, cognitive and psychodynamic resilience frames of reference has now become an equilibrating act of conscious accommodation of, participation in and assimilation of the rich contents of a conceptual and experiential buffet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART II: THE TAO OF RESILIENCE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHYSIOLOGICAL RESILIENCE
Evolution and Natural Selection
Human Ethology
Ethnology and Mythology
Summary
Morphogenetic Engineering
Dispositional Types
Somatotypes
Genetic Alternations
Summary
Vagal Tone Measures and Resilience
Homeostasis an the Autonomic Nervous System
Stress Vulnerability of Infants
Stress Vulnerability in Children and Adults
Summary
Summary of Physiological Resilience Findings
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART III: THE TAO OF RESILIENCE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PSYCHOPHYSICAL RESILIENCE
The Psychobiology of Resilience
Information Transduction
State-Dependent Memory, Learning & Behavior
Ultradian Healing Response
Summary
The Neurochemistry of Resilience
Biochemistry of the Body-Mind
Bio-mechanics of the Body-Brain
Quantum Mechanics of the Body-Mind
Summary
The Alchemy of Conscious Resilience
Dynamics of Reciprocal Causality
Something-for-Nothing
Alchemical Therapies, Holistic Remedies
Summary of Psychophysical Resilience Findings
Summary of the Spectrum of Psychophysical Resilience Findings
Click here to go to "The Tao of Resilience," Part III:
A New Resilience Metaphor--Tao of Resilience, and References
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART IV: THE TAO OF RESILIENCE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A NEW RESILIENCE METAPHOR
Reply to Jung: Quantum Sermons to the Living
Functions of Distinctiveness
The Creative Evolution of Evolutionary Creation
Summary: Life is a Hologram of Holograms
Consciousness: A Reciprocal Function of Resilience
Making the Indistinct Distinct
Creating Adaptability
Summary: The Holographic "Enchanted Loom"
Resilience as "Tensegrity"
From Particles and Waves to Strings and Membranes
From Strings and Membranes to Struts and Cables
Summary: Energy Transducing Tensegrity Structures
Conclusions to Part III
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART V: THE TAO OF RESILIENCE, CONCLUSION
The Harmony and Order of Things
What is Resilience?
Tensegrity: The Finite Tension of Infinie Intention
Summary of the Known and Unknowable
REFERENCES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://tao-of-resilience.iwarp.com
CHAOSOPHY 2003: THE EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM
CHAOSOPHY 2003
EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM
http://emergenthealing.50megs.com
FIND MOST OF ALL THREE EHP ARTICLES AT
http://emergenthealing.50megs.comhttp://spiritualphysics.iwarp.com
ALSO, under construction at http://cyberdoctv.com
"The Emergent Healing Paradigm: Progressive Medicine and Healing Arts in the 21st Century"
"Embodying the Emergent Healing Paradigm: Psi Mediated Exchange of Information"
"Disrupted Lives: Chaos Theory and the Healing Process:
Role and Value of Journey Work in the Process of Recovery"
______________________________________________
THE EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM
Intent Mediated Healing
Iona Miller, Asklepia Foundation, 2003
http://www.geocities.com/iona_m
You ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head,
Nor the head without the body,
So neither ought you attempt to cure the body without the soul."
for the part can never be well unless the whole is well.
--Plato: Charmides, 156e
MIND/BODY CONNECTION
For most of human history, healing has had to do with contact with spirit, with consciousness, with rituals intended to create a shared biofield with a shaman who seemingly could exert mind over matter. This spiritual technology has yielded to technological medicine governed by the rational protocols of science. But noting that medical intuition and therapeutic rapport are real forces in the healing process, many practitioners are moving toward a new paradigm or model of healing.
Anomalies such as the proven power of prayer, placebo effect, spontaneous remission, therapeutic intentionality, and remote healing hint that the irrational, the mysterious, is an inherent part of the natural healing process. When we become ill, the fundamental nature of consciousness is revealed as it relates to both mind and matter, psyche and soma. Consciousness may be more fundamental than either energy or matter, as the Vedas claimed centuries ago. At this sensitive threshold, miniscule changes in the situation can lead to large differences in the outcome.
THE QUANTUM SELF
We need to remold our healing institutions to conform with new physics to develop a contemporary understanding of the mind/body. A new model of the human organism is emerging ~ a holistic rather than mechanistic model that theorizes our basis in the quantum world; it means healing can happen in very subtle ways, perhaps even at the quantum level.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
HEALING PHILOSOPHIES
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine, and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical ~ essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixer of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality.
The emerging paradigm is a more subtle and energetic model of health. In the emergent healing paradigm, healing depends on the nonlocal principles of nature’s own self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mind/body of the organism. It appeals to spirit, soul, and body.
Recognizing the complexity of reality, the new paradigm includes a series of perspectives, which emphasize the positive rather than pathological, health rather than sickness, and a holistic approach to health care.
In this qualitative, rather than outcome-oriented approach, subjective experience and process are valued. The fusion of mind, emotions, body and spirit is recognized as central. In this ecological approach, the individual is embedded within larger systems, not isolated as a disease process. When we treat a symptom or disease rather than the whole person, we treat the part not the whole.
Interdependence of individuals, societies, and nature can be honored. As our knowledge of nature is increased, our knowledge of our own nature also grows correspondingly. Health, self-healing, and therapeutics is a balance supported by many disciplines, including physics, biology, and psychology as well as medicine.
We have all noticed that often the physical body is healed, but not the emotional trauma; or perhaps there is spiritual or psychological healing, but not physical cure. Therefore, it only makes sense to treat the whole person, rather than just the symptomology.
PARADIGM SHIFT
Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the conscious and unconscious, collective and individual level. These tacit belief systems act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception. Some perceptions arrive relatively undisturbed while others are subject to immediate characterization, distortions, and value-judgments.
Old ideas die hard. The established order, materialism, is entrenched. Establishment science is always resistant to new ideas. Science deals with models and metaphors of our perception of reality. We have had science less than 500 years, but in that time it has transformed much of the world technologically, intellectually and physically.
Scientific models change as exploration leads to the discovery of new facts and approaches that work. Still, new models are slow to be embraced. The dominant worldview hangs on as tenaciously as geocentric religious views did in the Dark Ages.
A paradigm is a working set of assumptions and postulates, (a disciplinarian matrix), about a field of inquiry or practice ~ such as healing. How we envision healing is as important as how we proceed to try to heal. It governs our protocols, what we notice and fail to notice, and how we evaluate the results. The theoretical construct defines our approach and methodology. It gains momentum over time.
Scientific exploration is not a linear process, but results from competition among theories. The best results of each system are then woven into a seamless fabric that, at least temporarily, defines the nature of that field. New observations can lead to complete revisioning of a discipline, like the emergence of quantum mechanics did in physics. Filling in theoretical gaps leads toward better explanations and solutions to problems.
Sometimes new paradigms coexist and develop alongside one another, until one supersedes the other. This is paradigm shift. Such has been the case in concurrent development of allopathic and alternative or energy medicine, also called integral medicine.
Both the conventional and integral approaches have long, noble histories, one rooted largely in western culture, the other in Asian systems. Allopathic doctors and patients themselves now recognize that strictly reductionistic and technologically-based medicine has its limitations in contemporary healthcare.
Objective science can be devoid of higher purpose and intentionality. Thus, we find ourselves with a host of ethical dilemmas in genetic engineering, transplant research, geriatrics, pharmacology, cloning, technological intervention, and molecular biology.
The relativism of postmodern deconstructionism has undermined all theoretical perspectives, turning them into or exposing them as social constructions. It is true that the healing arts are riddled with political, religious, and cultural biases. Health care has been delivered in terms of a power relationship over the body, superimposed on its biology.
There is a strong desire from the both the scientific community and public for a health system that values personal relationships, emotions, meaning, and beliefs. They connect body, mind, spirit, and society.
It is crucial to realize there is both rational and paradoxical healing, and both are vital to our well-being. Paradoxical thinking is unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, unrepeatable, and often indescribable. Breakthroughs are often paradoxical in nature, seemingly absurd, yet in fact true. Rational healing relies on doing, while paradoxical healing is rooted in ways of being. Physician Larry Dossey says it requires, “standing in the Mystery.”
There is a yearning to return “mystery” to the mechanistic arena of healing, so we can face illness and disease as whole organisms. Transpersonal forces have a valid place in healing, as they do in all areas of our existence. Many people have a sense of the importance of actively integrating spiritual principles with the material world.
The whole-systems approach co-exists with conventional medicine and is making inroads among its practitioners. Treating causes as well as symptoms, it mobilizes the patient’s will to live. It fosters the inner dimensions of the healing experience. The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations.
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
NEW CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
No science or healing is independent of the realities of our fundamental consciousness. Consciousness is a process not an object. Neuroscientists have begun to study consciousness, both in its functional and universal aspects.
Some scientists try to reduce matter (brain cells) to consciousness while others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter. Some suggest (Newell), echoing ancient philosophies, that Absolute Consciousness may be a field that is always everywhere.
We are not discrete entities but deeply embedded within the fabric of the universe. The essence we share, more fundamental than matter and energy, may well be primordial consciousness. It may be the very basis of materiality, as the Vedas implied centuries ago. Consciousness involves the integration of information, not just a passive array of information itself.
We have many ways, besides our senses, of interfacing with reality, including intentionality, intuition, somatic perception, and direct apprehension. The new integral model of health and mind/body healing recognizes and operates from this expanded perspective and innovative medical options.
Consciousness - the intersubjective dimension -- may be a stronger dynamic causal factor in healing than previously considered. Incorporating the full spectrum of human experience into healing promises new possibilities, new outcomes, which have been neglected in the biomedical model.
Conscious intentionality may influence subtle electromagnetic or quantum field energy processes. It affects the exchange of information at the cellular, organismic, and social level. Exceptional states of awareness (such as meditation, shamanic journeying, dreaming, dissociation, etc.) can lead to exceptional results, but they also require exceptional proof that may be difficult to produce in the laboratory or document objectively.
The emerging worldview extends our concepts beyond the domain of purely objective, reductionistic realism - materialism. The trend is moving from biophysical to psychophysical and psychospiritual dimensions without loss of scientific rigor.
Just as physics seeks a unified field theory, so the healing process needs a model that accounts for the mechanisms of natural healing and its anomalies such a placebo effect, spontaneous remission, even distant healing. Consciousness may just be an expression of such a universal field.
Models of healing in which disease is seen as an invasive process and the treatments are also invasive can give way to those following a natural, evolutionary course. Rather than comparing healing to a fight, or war on an external invader, we can imagine it as the creation of healthy processes. New forms emerge from adaptations after the breakdown of old forms. In this synergetic view, the organism interacts with its total environment.
EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM
http://emergenthealing.50megs.com
FIND MOST OF ALL THREE EHP ARTICLES AT
http://emergenthealing.50megs.comhttp://spiritualphysics.iwarp.com
ALSO, under construction at http://cyberdoctv.com
"The Emergent Healing Paradigm: Progressive Medicine and Healing Arts in the 21st Century"
"Embodying the Emergent Healing Paradigm: Psi Mediated Exchange of Information"
"Disrupted Lives: Chaos Theory and the Healing Process:
Role and Value of Journey Work in the Process of Recovery"
______________________________________________
THE EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM
Intent Mediated Healing
Iona Miller, Asklepia Foundation, 2003
http://www.geocities.com/iona_m
You ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head,
Nor the head without the body,
So neither ought you attempt to cure the body without the soul."
for the part can never be well unless the whole is well.
--Plato: Charmides, 156e
MIND/BODY CONNECTION
For most of human history, healing has had to do with contact with spirit, with consciousness, with rituals intended to create a shared biofield with a shaman who seemingly could exert mind over matter. This spiritual technology has yielded to technological medicine governed by the rational protocols of science. But noting that medical intuition and therapeutic rapport are real forces in the healing process, many practitioners are moving toward a new paradigm or model of healing.
Anomalies such as the proven power of prayer, placebo effect, spontaneous remission, therapeutic intentionality, and remote healing hint that the irrational, the mysterious, is an inherent part of the natural healing process. When we become ill, the fundamental nature of consciousness is revealed as it relates to both mind and matter, psyche and soma. Consciousness may be more fundamental than either energy or matter, as the Vedas claimed centuries ago. At this sensitive threshold, miniscule changes in the situation can lead to large differences in the outcome.
THE QUANTUM SELF
We need to remold our healing institutions to conform with new physics to develop a contemporary understanding of the mind/body. A new model of the human organism is emerging ~ a holistic rather than mechanistic model that theorizes our basis in the quantum world; it means healing can happen in very subtle ways, perhaps even at the quantum level.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
HEALING PHILOSOPHIES
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine, and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical ~ essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixer of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality.
The emerging paradigm is a more subtle and energetic model of health. In the emergent healing paradigm, healing depends on the nonlocal principles of nature’s own self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mind/body of the organism. It appeals to spirit, soul, and body.
Recognizing the complexity of reality, the new paradigm includes a series of perspectives, which emphasize the positive rather than pathological, health rather than sickness, and a holistic approach to health care.
In this qualitative, rather than outcome-oriented approach, subjective experience and process are valued. The fusion of mind, emotions, body and spirit is recognized as central. In this ecological approach, the individual is embedded within larger systems, not isolated as a disease process. When we treat a symptom or disease rather than the whole person, we treat the part not the whole.
Interdependence of individuals, societies, and nature can be honored. As our knowledge of nature is increased, our knowledge of our own nature also grows correspondingly. Health, self-healing, and therapeutics is a balance supported by many disciplines, including physics, biology, and psychology as well as medicine.
We have all noticed that often the physical body is healed, but not the emotional trauma; or perhaps there is spiritual or psychological healing, but not physical cure. Therefore, it only makes sense to treat the whole person, rather than just the symptomology.
PARADIGM SHIFT
Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the conscious and unconscious, collective and individual level. These tacit belief systems act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception. Some perceptions arrive relatively undisturbed while others are subject to immediate characterization, distortions, and value-judgments.
Old ideas die hard. The established order, materialism, is entrenched. Establishment science is always resistant to new ideas. Science deals with models and metaphors of our perception of reality. We have had science less than 500 years, but in that time it has transformed much of the world technologically, intellectually and physically.
Scientific models change as exploration leads to the discovery of new facts and approaches that work. Still, new models are slow to be embraced. The dominant worldview hangs on as tenaciously as geocentric religious views did in the Dark Ages.
A paradigm is a working set of assumptions and postulates, (a disciplinarian matrix), about a field of inquiry or practice ~ such as healing. How we envision healing is as important as how we proceed to try to heal. It governs our protocols, what we notice and fail to notice, and how we evaluate the results. The theoretical construct defines our approach and methodology. It gains momentum over time.
Scientific exploration is not a linear process, but results from competition among theories. The best results of each system are then woven into a seamless fabric that, at least temporarily, defines the nature of that field. New observations can lead to complete revisioning of a discipline, like the emergence of quantum mechanics did in physics. Filling in theoretical gaps leads toward better explanations and solutions to problems.
Sometimes new paradigms coexist and develop alongside one another, until one supersedes the other. This is paradigm shift. Such has been the case in concurrent development of allopathic and alternative or energy medicine, also called integral medicine.
Both the conventional and integral approaches have long, noble histories, one rooted largely in western culture, the other in Asian systems. Allopathic doctors and patients themselves now recognize that strictly reductionistic and technologically-based medicine has its limitations in contemporary healthcare.
Objective science can be devoid of higher purpose and intentionality. Thus, we find ourselves with a host of ethical dilemmas in genetic engineering, transplant research, geriatrics, pharmacology, cloning, technological intervention, and molecular biology.
The relativism of postmodern deconstructionism has undermined all theoretical perspectives, turning them into or exposing them as social constructions. It is true that the healing arts are riddled with political, religious, and cultural biases. Health care has been delivered in terms of a power relationship over the body, superimposed on its biology.
There is a strong desire from the both the scientific community and public for a health system that values personal relationships, emotions, meaning, and beliefs. They connect body, mind, spirit, and society.
It is crucial to realize there is both rational and paradoxical healing, and both are vital to our well-being. Paradoxical thinking is unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, unrepeatable, and often indescribable. Breakthroughs are often paradoxical in nature, seemingly absurd, yet in fact true. Rational healing relies on doing, while paradoxical healing is rooted in ways of being. Physician Larry Dossey says it requires, “standing in the Mystery.”
There is a yearning to return “mystery” to the mechanistic arena of healing, so we can face illness and disease as whole organisms. Transpersonal forces have a valid place in healing, as they do in all areas of our existence. Many people have a sense of the importance of actively integrating spiritual principles with the material world.
The whole-systems approach co-exists with conventional medicine and is making inroads among its practitioners. Treating causes as well as symptoms, it mobilizes the patient’s will to live. It fosters the inner dimensions of the healing experience. The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations.
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
NEW CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
No science or healing is independent of the realities of our fundamental consciousness. Consciousness is a process not an object. Neuroscientists have begun to study consciousness, both in its functional and universal aspects.
Some scientists try to reduce matter (brain cells) to consciousness while others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter. Some suggest (Newell), echoing ancient philosophies, that Absolute Consciousness may be a field that is always everywhere.
We are not discrete entities but deeply embedded within the fabric of the universe. The essence we share, more fundamental than matter and energy, may well be primordial consciousness. It may be the very basis of materiality, as the Vedas implied centuries ago. Consciousness involves the integration of information, not just a passive array of information itself.
We have many ways, besides our senses, of interfacing with reality, including intentionality, intuition, somatic perception, and direct apprehension. The new integral model of health and mind/body healing recognizes and operates from this expanded perspective and innovative medical options.
Consciousness - the intersubjective dimension -- may be a stronger dynamic causal factor in healing than previously considered. Incorporating the full spectrum of human experience into healing promises new possibilities, new outcomes, which have been neglected in the biomedical model.
Conscious intentionality may influence subtle electromagnetic or quantum field energy processes. It affects the exchange of information at the cellular, organismic, and social level. Exceptional states of awareness (such as meditation, shamanic journeying, dreaming, dissociation, etc.) can lead to exceptional results, but they also require exceptional proof that may be difficult to produce in the laboratory or document objectively.
The emerging worldview extends our concepts beyond the domain of purely objective, reductionistic realism - materialism. The trend is moving from biophysical to psychophysical and psychospiritual dimensions without loss of scientific rigor.
Just as physics seeks a unified field theory, so the healing process needs a model that accounts for the mechanisms of natural healing and its anomalies such a placebo effect, spontaneous remission, even distant healing. Consciousness may just be an expression of such a universal field.
Models of healing in which disease is seen as an invasive process and the treatments are also invasive can give way to those following a natural, evolutionary course. Rather than comparing healing to a fight, or war on an external invader, we can imagine it as the creation of healthy processes. New forms emerge from adaptations after the breakdown of old forms. In this synergetic view, the organism interacts with its total environment.
CHAOSOPHY 2004: Future Science
CHAOSOPHY 2004
NONLOCAL MIND PARADIGM
http://biopysics.50megs.com
2010 at http://spiritualphysics.iwarp.com
~SUPER SCIENCE~ Spiritual Physics
http://spiritualphysics.50megs.com
Virtual Physics
http://virtualphysics.50megs.com
My Zero Point
http://myzeropoint.50megs.com/
Photonic Human
photonichuman.50megs.com
http://photonichuman.iwarp.com
EmBEDded Holograms
embeddedholograms.iwarp.com
Psiona Parapsychology
psiona.50megs.com
Beyond MK Ultra - MRU
beyondmkultra.50megs.com
"The Universe Is Obsolete: A Gallery of Multiverse Theories," on parallel universes
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/parauniverses.htm
"How the Brain Creates God: the Emerging Science of Neurotheology"
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/magick/createsgod.htm
"Fear and Loathing In the Temporal Lobes: Epilepsy and Spirituality" - [awaiting publication]
"Schumann's Resonances and Human Psychobiology" or SRI
http://nexusmagazine.com
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/SciNews.1003.pdf
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/schumann/schumann.htm (longer version)
"HAARP's Threat to the Voice of the Planet" or SRII
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/HAARP-Resonance.1004.pdf
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/schuclimate.htm (longer version)
"From Helix to Hologram" on DNA bioholograms
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/Helix%20to%20Hologram.pdf
"Quantum Bioholography"; (longer version of above)
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/bioholography_a.htm
http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy4/bioholography/bioholography.html
http://www.emergentmind.org/MillerWebbI3a.htm
"New Millennium Psi Research: ESP, Hypnosis and Remote Viewing"
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/psi.htm
"The Dodecahedral Universe and the Qabalistic Tree of Life" -
"Apocalypse Soon: Economic Collapse in 2006"-
"Parapsychology: I Married the Wizard of Oz"
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/parapsychology.html
_______________________________________________
CHAOSOPHY 2004
A Transdisciplinary Review of Nonlocal Mind
The Nonlocal Mind Paradigm
A Transdisciplinary Revisioning of MindBody
Iona Miller, O.A.K., 8/2004
http://ionamiller.org
http://ionatopia.50megs.com
Unbound Consciousness
Synchronicity
Quantum Biophysics & Healing
Nonlocal Creativity
Discussion ~ Summary
“This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung
"By applying Ockham's razor to the basic epistemological question 'What is reality?' the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external reality is a 'superfluous hypothesis'" ~ Philip K Dick, in the introduction to "The Golden Man"
"There are no conditions to fulfill. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in the results of your efforts - the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration - all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it."
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
Unbound Consciousness: Beyond the Mind/Body Model
Alchemy, as the search for godhead in matter, argues that “there is one stone, one medicine to which nothing from outside is added, nor is it diminished, save that the superfluities are removed&rdquoas above, so below; as within, so without. Alchemists sought the Unus Mundus, the One World analogous to the modern search for a Grand Unified Theory in physics, or the Theory of Everything uniting all known forces.
The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. ‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the fundamental basis of all that is.
The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Hermetic and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
The Persians were even bolder in their view that the mind could escape the confines of the physical body and create effects in the outside world. Their physician Avicenna declared, “The imagination of man can act not only on his own body but even on others and very distant bodies. It can fascinate and modify them, make them ill, or restore them to health.”
These notions were superseded by later causal and mechanistic views that came to dominate Western science and medicine. The nonlocal mind paradigm suggests we can effectively operate with the realization that consciousness can free itself from the body and can act not only on our own bodies, but nonlocally on distant things, events, and people, even if they are unconscious of the intentionality. It also suggests a new emergent healing paradigm (Miller, 2003).
This nonlocal model is perhaps the basis of such phenomena as psychosomatics, remote healing, remote viewing, and dream initiations. Physicists use the term nonlocal to describe the distant interactions of subatomic particles such as electrons. We can experience nonlocal mind spontaneously, paradoxically, without losing our individuality. A creator can live in many universes instead of simply adhering to a prescribed worldview such as the outmoded causal paradigm or unscientific New Age beliefs.
It has been proven that human minds display similar interactions at a distance (Krippner, Mishlove, Radin, Dossey, May, Germine, Nelson, Motoyama, Sidorov, Swanson). These anomalies include therapeutic rapport, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, visions, prophetic dreams, breakthroughs, creativity, prayer, synchronicity, medical intuition, nonlocal diagnosis, spontaneous remission, and intent mediated or paradoxical healing. Nonlocal mind erupts spontaneously, surprising, even shocking us. The mind has ultradimensional qualities unlimited by physical constraints.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact. Fundamental physics is about observable and verifiable anticipation of possible relatively evolving quantities and/or qualities, including complementary wave/particle descriptions. We have tremendous empirical evidences that quantum mechanics is part of such a physics.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine (CAM), and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical - essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixir of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality.
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a nonlocal metaphysical context suggests such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
THE DEMIURGIC FIELD:
Its Patterning Role in Chaos, Creation, and Creativity
By Iona Miller and Paul Wildman, Ph.D., 2004
Abstract: The pre-scientific philosophical (Platonic) and archetypal (Biblical; Vedic, gnostic, pagan, etc.) notion of a Demiurge (cosmic maker or shaper) or creator-god can be contemporized in terms of the deterministic, self-organizing dynamics of Chaos Theory. “In the beginning” was Chaos, the negentropic Source. The creative edge of chaos is implicated in the creation of the universe, as well as in human creativity and learning processes. We propose a universal theory of creativity emerging from chaos theory.
The most primordial aspect of creation, the Demiurgic Field (DUF) as continuous creation, underlies and continues to influence energic/material and psychic processes. The DUF is cosmic “zero,” the negentropic source of emergent order or ground state the source of physical manifestation and our psychophysical being. We can employ procedures to connect with this source of inspiration and renewal in a holistic manner. An organic, rather than mechanistic paradigm for shaping modern culture and creative living for a more sustainable lifestyle emerges.
Subtle fluctuations in this creative ground state (DUF) may be pumped up by the ‘butterfly effect’ into perceivable effects. The human neurosystem may be responsive to fluctuations at the level of a single quantum. Shaking the system a little can jolt a sub-optimal state, causing it to roll down to a deeper hollow in the energy landscape (chreode), representing a better solution. Demiurgic intentionality acts through the medium of nature much like our human creative intentionality works as artificer on or through a medium.
We suggest chaotic excitability is a universal sense organ. The linkage mechanism of DUF to archetype to human perception or response may be a combination of fractal chaos and quantum mechanical fluctuation, patterned by the metaphysical virtual field ‘intentionality’ through chaotic excitability. Adaptation is actually a holistic model of a consciousness-expanding process (DUF), involving the mutual interaction of self-reflection and self-correction (shaping) at the individual and collective levels of our existence. The same essential dynamics that gave rise to the birth of the universe and evolution govern human creativity and learning.
Keywords: Chaos theory, negentropy, creativity, typology, archetypes, values and ethics, Demiurgic Field, information theory, sustainable lifestyles, learning, holism, depth psychology, transpersonal psychology, paradigm shift, complexity, imagination, vacuum potential, zero-point energy, quantum foam, noetics, consciousness studies.
THE WHOLE SUM INFINITY
Merging Spirituality and Integrative Biophysics
By Iona Miller, 8-2004
We all have a metaphysics - a worldview - whether we are aware of it or not. Science can and should contribute to that worldview of how things are and work, but should not monopolize it. We should locate scientific understanding within a wider view of knowledge that gives equally serious consideration to other metanarratives and forms of human insight and experience.
Perhaps we must learn to respect both domains to understand fully the world in which we live. We can conveniently call the scientific perspective “physics” and the stereoscopic view “metaphysics,” which goes beyond (“meta”) the purview of science alone. Both provide what we can call a “working” knowledge of reality for getting things done, whether they are an entirely accurate reflection of Reality, or not.
There is no unique way to go from physics to metaphysics. Although the reductionist scientific view does not determine the full nature of the existential field, it imposes certain requirements and restrictions on it. Both systems function as socially-structured language games. But even the most reliable map reveals virtually nothing about the detail of the terrain.
Both scientific and metaphysical theories or models must be beautiful: elegant, economical, and coherent, despite any application of their criteria. Metaphysics must explain the entire set of phenomena fundamental to human experience. This can be done, as in physics, from a top-down or bottom-up approach.
In science, top-down means from the cosmological to the subquantal level of observation. In metaphysics, we work from the biological/emotional/mental to transpersonal or archetypal levels of experience and expression. In physics, matter/energy is foundational, while metaphysics considers consciousness even more fundamental. Quantum or nonlocal mind models also reflect the later. We can examine a wide or narrow view of the nature of Reality and our own nature, both scope and detail.
Nature of Creativity; 9050 words
IMAGE STREAMING:
A Soulful Exploration of the Creative Mindfield
Part I: Imagination, Part II: Creativity
by Iona Miller, O.A.K., 3-2004
Summary: The image stream or imaginal process is our primary experience and permeates and conditions all facets of human life. We tend to take the background noise of the constant imaginal flux of the stream of consciousness for granted. We rarely focus our conscious awareness on this imaginal wellspring, but sometimes it intrudes on consciousness during our gaps in awareness day dreaming, fantasies, reverie, lacunae, inspiration, discovery. This slipstream of emergent dynamic imagery is often the subject of psychotherapy and the source of creativity and visionary art. It is the voice of our Muse, our genius, if we but listen instinctively and respond to the initiatory call.
Exploration of the soul or mindfield is possible through imagination. The dynamic mindscape underlies our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Imagination is both a realm or domain of experience and a human faculty. Images come in from the outside through our senses, and are also produced autonomously from the unconscious as a perpetual multisensory narrative of experience, immediate though often metaphorical in nature. Meaningful signals or mental forms emerge from the amorphous background.
Creative genius can express a momentary fusion or sustained connection with the unconscious fount of creativity that is then expressed and manifested in some form, dynamic or concrete. Researchers are discovering the neurobiology of the creative process, including latent inhibition, sleep patterns, temperament, neuropeptides, limbic system and nondominant hemisphere function. Chaos theory shows how unpredictable forces such as creativity manifest in self-organization within constraint.
___________________________________________________
PROFILING
PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES & TEMPERAMENTS:
Understanding the Differences in People
By Iona Miller, 2-2004
“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” --Anais Nin
Introduction
Everyone is unique and displays a variety of characteristics and qualities. But within that range certain patterns emerge. Type-theory is like a tool or convenient shorthand for gaining insight on self and others to improve relations, especially with those we find difficult. You can’t really know another person unless you know yourself. Ultimately, we should remember typology is merely a model of reality, not reality itself. There are no pure types.
Once you learn to recognize styles of being, it becomes second nature, rather than a conscious process, and you respond in ways that create greater rapport automatically. This skill can be used in personal and business life, especially if you work closely with or serve people in the helping professions.
Maintaining integrity of the personality implies being true to one’s type as well as one’s cultural ethics. Our type conditions our psychology, as well as our spiritual beliefs, emotional values, and overt behavior. Our type acts as either a clarifying or distorting lens for perceiving and reacting to the environment. We most readily see the factors that correspond with our own peculiarities.
The value of a classification system lies in its application. Through it we gain an understanding of the drives, thought processes, desires, motivations, methods, and values of ourselves and others whose primary modes differ from our own. We can learn to make more effective choices and develop our strengths and personality potential as well as tolerance for different styles. When we can accept that we embody the habit patterns of a “type” we gain a more objective view of ourselves.
A holistic approach means developing all sides of ourselves. Most people are mixtures of types, and some dynamic balance is considered ideal. Then we have the option of using whatever mode, function or attitude is appropriate to the situation. Moving toward wholeness we experience a wider range of experiences as we integrate all potential facets of personality. It is a form of self-realization.
No one really wants his or her essence reduced to a category. It doesn’t sound attractive, at first view. Nevertheless, a form of typing is often the practice of spiritual teachers when taking on a new aspirant. We all want to be considered special, but the seer can correctly ascertain the inner function of an individual. It is more reliable and more fundamental than astrology.
This revelation and its acceptance prevents run-away inflation of the ego, its narcissism. It mirrors the observer Self’s impartial view of the ego personality, with its typical qualities. What spiritual teacher isn’t besieged by interminable intellectual questions, emotional and adjustment problems, and illusory perceptions, visions and beliefs, or impulsive and compulsive behavior of his followers? People constantly seek advice on all these points. Some of the specific directions for rebalancing our particular paths lie in our typology.
The human repertoire is actually fairly limited in scope. It is conditioned by psychophysical differences such as whether one is primarily visual, auditory or kinesthetic [see endnote], by our temperament and character, and by the constant interplay of archetypal dynamics in every facet of our lives, to name a few. There is an ongoing debate around the dominance of trait- or state-based patterns.
____________________________________________________
EDGE ARTISTS AS ‘STRANGE ATTRACTORS’
A Source of Negentropy in Society
By Iona Miller, 3-2004
Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. ~ I Ching
Although science and art are social phenomena, an innovation in either field occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity. ~ J. Bronowski
The level of entropy is the degree of disorder in a given system.
This is the reverse of the degree of information that is present.
Hence negentropy is the build-up of information, increase of meaning.
~E.E.Rehmus
Introduction
Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,’ including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.
The beginning of the history of modern man traces back to primordial art, such as that found in the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. From the beginning, art spoke of magic, of the supernatural, of imagination the fantastic and disturbing. Always strong in content and aesthetic sophistication, it grew, hand in glove, with the emergence of technological skills.
The emergence of art was and continues to be an unparalleled innovation, confronting our psyches with a giant leap in human evolution whose transformative influence continues opening and exploring brave new worlds to this day. Art has been a driving force and living thread woven into the fabric of society since modern man emerged.
‘Homo Negentrop’
Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop. Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species’ of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.
Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown’ (Jung) has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, and even more arcane forms.
Chaos theory has its ‘strange attractors’ that never settle down into any normal rhythm. The strange attractor dances to the innovative beat of a different drummer. Artists, particularly edge artists, function much like these chaotic attractors whose boundaries are deterministic yet unpredictable. They draw from beyond the personality, from transpersonal resources, and the wellspring of the collective human unconscious.
___________________________________________________-
LUNCH: Beyond the Pale
A Review of “Memory and Madness”
By Iona Miller, December 2003
“The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.”
-- C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12: 439
“The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for the soul in the phallic parade, that all of our life force, including the polymorphic and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images.”
--James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 45
Hades and Depth
The imagorrhea, or through-flow of images with a hint of unpalatability, in “Memory and Madness” evokes mythic impressions of a soul perpetually held in thrall unable to escape the Hell of sex, violence, madness, obsession, and addiction. Myth doesn’t ground; it opens. Depth is a metaphor without a base. The depth of the simplest image is fathomless. In the soul’s labyrinth we can never go deep enough. When we go deep, soul becomes involved. The same themes repeat endlessly rotating in a myriad of variations, in different octaves of outrage and screams. Plato said souls in Hades are incurable.
Yet, Lydia Lunch somehow embodies the ability to intentionally transgress the boundaries to go beyond the pale of convention. For this among other reasons, she is referred to as the “queen of the underground.” Like the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone, Lydia moves at will between the conscious and the unconscious depths - a foot in both the world of the living and world of the dead. The fundamental image of the underworld is of a contained space with shrouded limits. The underworld is a psychological cosmos. The underground is a lifestyle and subculture undergird with and sustained by psychic imagery.
__________________________________________________
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
Artistic Vitality in Sexually Potent Art
Iona Miller, 4-2004
“New art is always shocking,
because you don’t know what you’re looking at. . .
It’s about boundaries being permeated and transgressed.
It makes people nervous when there aren’t any boundaries.”
~Lisa Phillips, Director, New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC
“...the number of perverts involved in the field of art is probably much
greater than the average for the population in general.... It can be supposed
... that the pervert inclines in some particular manner to the world of art.”
~Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, 1985
“With male nudes in full display, pornography a common source material,
and explicit imagery the norm in galleries and museums,
sex in art has become fun, disturbing, raunchy - even cerebral.”
~Linda Yablonsky, Art News, January 2004
Nakedness and Vulnerability
Many art forms over the centuries have centered around celebrating the body - both male and female, animalistic and spiritualized, and imaginative forms in-between. Like undertows along the shore, deep currents of eroticism have always pervaded the creative edge of the cultural ocean of art. To remain vital, art must stay in contact with the erotic element, the ground of our very psychophysical being. To deny it, is to deny life and the vulnerability of our naked awareness. Art gives form to the apparitions of our imaginations, and one of the most imaginative is the erotic form, expression of the erotic impulse, or raw libido. Both art and eroticism are forms of the epitome of human life, expressions of insight and deep feeling. Sexuality is one way of inducing ecstatic states that alter perception dramatically. It is simultaneously and paradoxically ordinary yet extraordinary. It embodies the very essence of dramatic tension, a finite act with infinite repercussions. Art is the spearhead of human development, both collective and individual. It was the seminal force and vanguard of cultural advance in Egypt, Greece, Europe, Africa, and Asia; all these cultures produced some extraordinarily erotic art. While the vulgarization of art is considered a sure sign of ethnic decline (Langer), erotic or vulgar art itself appears in all eras heralding new perceptions of our erotic drive, our sexual self-images. Even if perceived as an affront, art values rather than devalues the sexual image.
<
___________________________________________________
Adventures in Quantum Consciousness:
QUANTUM THEORIES OF RELATIONSHIP
Or,
‘What the %$$$#&^( )*~*@! Do We Know’ About Dating???
By Iona Miller, 6-04
Discoveries in physics cannot in themselves - so I believe - have the authority of forcing us to put an end to the habit of picturing the physical world as a reality. ~Erwin Schroedinger
We must be lifeall the way down, all the way out, and the I only an indexinto life, an image of the self cast into an instant;I, the constant truth that controls our innermost loop. The massless I, dilating at dreamspeed, grows coextensive with more and more selves.
~ Greg Keith
Abstract: What the BLEEP do we know about dating? A quick look at the title above offers a clue: the percentages are important, as is cash, and lots of it. Likewise pounds often come into play, as does the occasional conjunction. Sometimes we mistake an ever-dangling carat for the real thing. But if we aren’t careful, it could lead to parent-heses. When we are starry-eyed it’s hard to assess where we are at. But we always know clearly if we are digging it, or not, and are generally willing to exclaim it loudly, either way. Hence, the question, “Would you like a little whine with that cheese?”
Keywords: resonance, vectors, orbits, force, gravity, polarity, potential, vibration, magnetism, chemistry, wavelength, hard bodies, quantum foam, uncertainty, charge, spin, symmetry, color, superpositions, black holes, irreversibility, fuzzy attributes, sensitivity, complexity, randomness, unpredictability, catastrophe, bifurcation, degrees of freedom, decision theory, the hard problem, the strong and the weak, grand unification, infinities.
NONLOCAL MIND PARADIGM
http://biopysics.50megs.com
2010 at http://spiritualphysics.iwarp.com
~SUPER SCIENCE~ Spiritual Physics
http://spiritualphysics.50megs.com
Virtual Physics
http://virtualphysics.50megs.com
My Zero Point
http://myzeropoint.50megs.com/
Photonic Human
photonichuman.50megs.com
http://photonichuman.iwarp.com
EmBEDded Holograms
embeddedholograms.iwarp.com
Psiona Parapsychology
psiona.50megs.com
Beyond MK Ultra - MRU
beyondmkultra.50megs.com
"The Universe Is Obsolete: A Gallery of Multiverse Theories," on parallel universes
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/parauniverses.htm
"How the Brain Creates God: the Emerging Science of Neurotheology"
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/magick/createsgod.htm
"Fear and Loathing In the Temporal Lobes: Epilepsy and Spirituality" - [awaiting publication]
"Schumann's Resonances and Human Psychobiology" or SRI
http://nexusmagazine.com
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/SciNews.1003.pdf
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/schumann/schumann.htm (longer version)
"HAARP's Threat to the Voice of the Planet" or SRII
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/HAARP-Resonance.1004.pdf
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/schuclimate.htm (longer version)
"From Helix to Hologram" on DNA bioholograms
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/Helix%20to%20Hologram.pdf
"Quantum Bioholography"; (longer version of above)
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/bioholography_a.htm
http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Chaosophy4/bioholography/bioholography.html
http://www.emergentmind.org/MillerWebbI3a.htm
"New Millennium Psi Research: ESP, Hypnosis and Remote Viewing"
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/psi.htm
"The Dodecahedral Universe and the Qabalistic Tree of Life" -
"Apocalypse Soon: Economic Collapse in 2006"-
"Parapsychology: I Married the Wizard of Oz"
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/newphysics/parapsychology.html
_______________________________________________
CHAOSOPHY 2004
A Transdisciplinary Review of Nonlocal Mind
The Nonlocal Mind Paradigm
A Transdisciplinary Revisioning of MindBody
Iona Miller, O.A.K., 8/2004
http://ionamiller.org
http://ionatopia.50megs.com
Unbound Consciousness
Synchronicity
Quantum Biophysics & Healing
Nonlocal Creativity
Discussion ~ Summary
“This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung
"By applying Ockham's razor to the basic epistemological question 'What is reality?' the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external reality is a 'superfluous hypothesis'" ~ Philip K Dick, in the introduction to "The Golden Man"
"There are no conditions to fulfill. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in the results of your efforts - the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration - all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it."
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
Unbound Consciousness: Beyond the Mind/Body Model
Alchemy, as the search for godhead in matter, argues that “there is one stone, one medicine to which nothing from outside is added, nor is it diminished, save that the superfluities are removed&rdquoas above, so below; as within, so without. Alchemists sought the Unus Mundus, the One World analogous to the modern search for a Grand Unified Theory in physics, or the Theory of Everything uniting all known forces.
The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. ‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the fundamental basis of all that is.
The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Hermetic and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
The Persians were even bolder in their view that the mind could escape the confines of the physical body and create effects in the outside world. Their physician Avicenna declared, “The imagination of man can act not only on his own body but even on others and very distant bodies. It can fascinate and modify them, make them ill, or restore them to health.”
These notions were superseded by later causal and mechanistic views that came to dominate Western science and medicine. The nonlocal mind paradigm suggests we can effectively operate with the realization that consciousness can free itself from the body and can act not only on our own bodies, but nonlocally on distant things, events, and people, even if they are unconscious of the intentionality. It also suggests a new emergent healing paradigm (Miller, 2003).
This nonlocal model is perhaps the basis of such phenomena as psychosomatics, remote healing, remote viewing, and dream initiations. Physicists use the term nonlocal to describe the distant interactions of subatomic particles such as electrons. We can experience nonlocal mind spontaneously, paradoxically, without losing our individuality. A creator can live in many universes instead of simply adhering to a prescribed worldview such as the outmoded causal paradigm or unscientific New Age beliefs.
It has been proven that human minds display similar interactions at a distance (Krippner, Mishlove, Radin, Dossey, May, Germine, Nelson, Motoyama, Sidorov, Swanson). These anomalies include therapeutic rapport, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, visions, prophetic dreams, breakthroughs, creativity, prayer, synchronicity, medical intuition, nonlocal diagnosis, spontaneous remission, and intent mediated or paradoxical healing. Nonlocal mind erupts spontaneously, surprising, even shocking us. The mind has ultradimensional qualities unlimited by physical constraints.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact. Fundamental physics is about observable and verifiable anticipation of possible relatively evolving quantities and/or qualities, including complementary wave/particle descriptions. We have tremendous empirical evidences that quantum mechanics is part of such a physics.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine (CAM), and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical - essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixir of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality.
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a nonlocal metaphysical context suggests such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
THE DEMIURGIC FIELD:
Its Patterning Role in Chaos, Creation, and Creativity
By Iona Miller and Paul Wildman, Ph.D., 2004
Abstract: The pre-scientific philosophical (Platonic) and archetypal (Biblical; Vedic, gnostic, pagan, etc.) notion of a Demiurge (cosmic maker or shaper) or creator-god can be contemporized in terms of the deterministic, self-organizing dynamics of Chaos Theory. “In the beginning” was Chaos, the negentropic Source. The creative edge of chaos is implicated in the creation of the universe, as well as in human creativity and learning processes. We propose a universal theory of creativity emerging from chaos theory.
The most primordial aspect of creation, the Demiurgic Field (DUF) as continuous creation, underlies and continues to influence energic/material and psychic processes. The DUF is cosmic “zero,” the negentropic source of emergent order or ground state the source of physical manifestation and our psychophysical being. We can employ procedures to connect with this source of inspiration and renewal in a holistic manner. An organic, rather than mechanistic paradigm for shaping modern culture and creative living for a more sustainable lifestyle emerges.
Subtle fluctuations in this creative ground state (DUF) may be pumped up by the ‘butterfly effect’ into perceivable effects. The human neurosystem may be responsive to fluctuations at the level of a single quantum. Shaking the system a little can jolt a sub-optimal state, causing it to roll down to a deeper hollow in the energy landscape (chreode), representing a better solution. Demiurgic intentionality acts through the medium of nature much like our human creative intentionality works as artificer on or through a medium.
We suggest chaotic excitability is a universal sense organ. The linkage mechanism of DUF to archetype to human perception or response may be a combination of fractal chaos and quantum mechanical fluctuation, patterned by the metaphysical virtual field ‘intentionality’ through chaotic excitability. Adaptation is actually a holistic model of a consciousness-expanding process (DUF), involving the mutual interaction of self-reflection and self-correction (shaping) at the individual and collective levels of our existence. The same essential dynamics that gave rise to the birth of the universe and evolution govern human creativity and learning.
Keywords: Chaos theory, negentropy, creativity, typology, archetypes, values and ethics, Demiurgic Field, information theory, sustainable lifestyles, learning, holism, depth psychology, transpersonal psychology, paradigm shift, complexity, imagination, vacuum potential, zero-point energy, quantum foam, noetics, consciousness studies.
THE WHOLE SUM INFINITY
Merging Spirituality and Integrative Biophysics
By Iona Miller, 8-2004
We all have a metaphysics - a worldview - whether we are aware of it or not. Science can and should contribute to that worldview of how things are and work, but should not monopolize it. We should locate scientific understanding within a wider view of knowledge that gives equally serious consideration to other metanarratives and forms of human insight and experience.
Perhaps we must learn to respect both domains to understand fully the world in which we live. We can conveniently call the scientific perspective “physics” and the stereoscopic view “metaphysics,” which goes beyond (“meta”) the purview of science alone. Both provide what we can call a “working” knowledge of reality for getting things done, whether they are an entirely accurate reflection of Reality, or not.
There is no unique way to go from physics to metaphysics. Although the reductionist scientific view does not determine the full nature of the existential field, it imposes certain requirements and restrictions on it. Both systems function as socially-structured language games. But even the most reliable map reveals virtually nothing about the detail of the terrain.
Both scientific and metaphysical theories or models must be beautiful: elegant, economical, and coherent, despite any application of their criteria. Metaphysics must explain the entire set of phenomena fundamental to human experience. This can be done, as in physics, from a top-down or bottom-up approach.
In science, top-down means from the cosmological to the subquantal level of observation. In metaphysics, we work from the biological/emotional/mental to transpersonal or archetypal levels of experience and expression. In physics, matter/energy is foundational, while metaphysics considers consciousness even more fundamental. Quantum or nonlocal mind models also reflect the later. We can examine a wide or narrow view of the nature of Reality and our own nature, both scope and detail.
Nature of Creativity; 9050 words
IMAGE STREAMING:
A Soulful Exploration of the Creative Mindfield
Part I: Imagination, Part II: Creativity
by Iona Miller, O.A.K., 3-2004
Summary: The image stream or imaginal process is our primary experience and permeates and conditions all facets of human life. We tend to take the background noise of the constant imaginal flux of the stream of consciousness for granted. We rarely focus our conscious awareness on this imaginal wellspring, but sometimes it intrudes on consciousness during our gaps in awareness day dreaming, fantasies, reverie, lacunae, inspiration, discovery. This slipstream of emergent dynamic imagery is often the subject of psychotherapy and the source of creativity and visionary art. It is the voice of our Muse, our genius, if we but listen instinctively and respond to the initiatory call.
Exploration of the soul or mindfield is possible through imagination. The dynamic mindscape underlies our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Imagination is both a realm or domain of experience and a human faculty. Images come in from the outside through our senses, and are also produced autonomously from the unconscious as a perpetual multisensory narrative of experience, immediate though often metaphorical in nature. Meaningful signals or mental forms emerge from the amorphous background.
Creative genius can express a momentary fusion or sustained connection with the unconscious fount of creativity that is then expressed and manifested in some form, dynamic or concrete. Researchers are discovering the neurobiology of the creative process, including latent inhibition, sleep patterns, temperament, neuropeptides, limbic system and nondominant hemisphere function. Chaos theory shows how unpredictable forces such as creativity manifest in self-organization within constraint.
___________________________________________________
PROFILING
PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES & TEMPERAMENTS:
Understanding the Differences in People
By Iona Miller, 2-2004
“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” --Anais Nin
Introduction
Everyone is unique and displays a variety of characteristics and qualities. But within that range certain patterns emerge. Type-theory is like a tool or convenient shorthand for gaining insight on self and others to improve relations, especially with those we find difficult. You can’t really know another person unless you know yourself. Ultimately, we should remember typology is merely a model of reality, not reality itself. There are no pure types.
Once you learn to recognize styles of being, it becomes second nature, rather than a conscious process, and you respond in ways that create greater rapport automatically. This skill can be used in personal and business life, especially if you work closely with or serve people in the helping professions.
Maintaining integrity of the personality implies being true to one’s type as well as one’s cultural ethics. Our type conditions our psychology, as well as our spiritual beliefs, emotional values, and overt behavior. Our type acts as either a clarifying or distorting lens for perceiving and reacting to the environment. We most readily see the factors that correspond with our own peculiarities.
The value of a classification system lies in its application. Through it we gain an understanding of the drives, thought processes, desires, motivations, methods, and values of ourselves and others whose primary modes differ from our own. We can learn to make more effective choices and develop our strengths and personality potential as well as tolerance for different styles. When we can accept that we embody the habit patterns of a “type” we gain a more objective view of ourselves.
A holistic approach means developing all sides of ourselves. Most people are mixtures of types, and some dynamic balance is considered ideal. Then we have the option of using whatever mode, function or attitude is appropriate to the situation. Moving toward wholeness we experience a wider range of experiences as we integrate all potential facets of personality. It is a form of self-realization.
No one really wants his or her essence reduced to a category. It doesn’t sound attractive, at first view. Nevertheless, a form of typing is often the practice of spiritual teachers when taking on a new aspirant. We all want to be considered special, but the seer can correctly ascertain the inner function of an individual. It is more reliable and more fundamental than astrology.
This revelation and its acceptance prevents run-away inflation of the ego, its narcissism. It mirrors the observer Self’s impartial view of the ego personality, with its typical qualities. What spiritual teacher isn’t besieged by interminable intellectual questions, emotional and adjustment problems, and illusory perceptions, visions and beliefs, or impulsive and compulsive behavior of his followers? People constantly seek advice on all these points. Some of the specific directions for rebalancing our particular paths lie in our typology.
The human repertoire is actually fairly limited in scope. It is conditioned by psychophysical differences such as whether one is primarily visual, auditory or kinesthetic [see endnote], by our temperament and character, and by the constant interplay of archetypal dynamics in every facet of our lives, to name a few. There is an ongoing debate around the dominance of trait- or state-based patterns.
____________________________________________________
EDGE ARTISTS AS ‘STRANGE ATTRACTORS’
A Source of Negentropy in Society
By Iona Miller, 3-2004
Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. ~ I Ching
Although science and art are social phenomena, an innovation in either field occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity. ~ J. Bronowski
The level of entropy is the degree of disorder in a given system.
This is the reverse of the degree of information that is present.
Hence negentropy is the build-up of information, increase of meaning.
~E.E.Rehmus
Introduction
Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,’ including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.
The beginning of the history of modern man traces back to primordial art, such as that found in the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. From the beginning, art spoke of magic, of the supernatural, of imagination the fantastic and disturbing. Always strong in content and aesthetic sophistication, it grew, hand in glove, with the emergence of technological skills.
The emergence of art was and continues to be an unparalleled innovation, confronting our psyches with a giant leap in human evolution whose transformative influence continues opening and exploring brave new worlds to this day. Art has been a driving force and living thread woven into the fabric of society since modern man emerged.
‘Homo Negentrop’
Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop. Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species’ of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.
Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown’ (Jung) has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, and even more arcane forms.
Chaos theory has its ‘strange attractors’ that never settle down into any normal rhythm. The strange attractor dances to the innovative beat of a different drummer. Artists, particularly edge artists, function much like these chaotic attractors whose boundaries are deterministic yet unpredictable. They draw from beyond the personality, from transpersonal resources, and the wellspring of the collective human unconscious.
___________________________________________________-
LUNCH: Beyond the Pale
A Review of “Memory and Madness”
By Iona Miller, December 2003
“The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.”
-- C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12: 439
“The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for the soul in the phallic parade, that all of our life force, including the polymorphic and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images.”
--James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 45
Hades and Depth
The imagorrhea, or through-flow of images with a hint of unpalatability, in “Memory and Madness” evokes mythic impressions of a soul perpetually held in thrall unable to escape the Hell of sex, violence, madness, obsession, and addiction. Myth doesn’t ground; it opens. Depth is a metaphor without a base. The depth of the simplest image is fathomless. In the soul’s labyrinth we can never go deep enough. When we go deep, soul becomes involved. The same themes repeat endlessly rotating in a myriad of variations, in different octaves of outrage and screams. Plato said souls in Hades are incurable.
Yet, Lydia Lunch somehow embodies the ability to intentionally transgress the boundaries to go beyond the pale of convention. For this among other reasons, she is referred to as the “queen of the underground.” Like the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone, Lydia moves at will between the conscious and the unconscious depths - a foot in both the world of the living and world of the dead. The fundamental image of the underworld is of a contained space with shrouded limits. The underworld is a psychological cosmos. The underground is a lifestyle and subculture undergird with and sustained by psychic imagery.
__________________________________________________
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
Artistic Vitality in Sexually Potent Art
Iona Miller, 4-2004
“New art is always shocking,
because you don’t know what you’re looking at. . .
It’s about boundaries being permeated and transgressed.
It makes people nervous when there aren’t any boundaries.”
~Lisa Phillips, Director, New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC
“...the number of perverts involved in the field of art is probably much
greater than the average for the population in general.... It can be supposed
... that the pervert inclines in some particular manner to the world of art.”
~Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, 1985
“With male nudes in full display, pornography a common source material,
and explicit imagery the norm in galleries and museums,
sex in art has become fun, disturbing, raunchy - even cerebral.”
~Linda Yablonsky, Art News, January 2004
Nakedness and Vulnerability
Many art forms over the centuries have centered around celebrating the body - both male and female, animalistic and spiritualized, and imaginative forms in-between. Like undertows along the shore, deep currents of eroticism have always pervaded the creative edge of the cultural ocean of art. To remain vital, art must stay in contact with the erotic element, the ground of our very psychophysical being. To deny it, is to deny life and the vulnerability of our naked awareness. Art gives form to the apparitions of our imaginations, and one of the most imaginative is the erotic form, expression of the erotic impulse, or raw libido. Both art and eroticism are forms of the epitome of human life, expressions of insight and deep feeling. Sexuality is one way of inducing ecstatic states that alter perception dramatically. It is simultaneously and paradoxically ordinary yet extraordinary. It embodies the very essence of dramatic tension, a finite act with infinite repercussions. Art is the spearhead of human development, both collective and individual. It was the seminal force and vanguard of cultural advance in Egypt, Greece, Europe, Africa, and Asia; all these cultures produced some extraordinarily erotic art. While the vulgarization of art is considered a sure sign of ethnic decline (Langer), erotic or vulgar art itself appears in all eras heralding new perceptions of our erotic drive, our sexual self-images. Even if perceived as an affront, art values rather than devalues the sexual image.
<
___________________________________________________
Adventures in Quantum Consciousness:
QUANTUM THEORIES OF RELATIONSHIP
Or,
‘What the %$$$#&^( )*~*@! Do We Know’ About Dating???
By Iona Miller, 6-04
Discoveries in physics cannot in themselves - so I believe - have the authority of forcing us to put an end to the habit of picturing the physical world as a reality. ~Erwin Schroedinger
We must be lifeall the way down, all the way out, and the I only an indexinto life, an image of the self cast into an instant;I, the constant truth that controls our innermost loop. The massless I, dilating at dreamspeed, grows coextensive with more and more selves.
~ Greg Keith
Abstract: What the BLEEP do we know about dating? A quick look at the title above offers a clue: the percentages are important, as is cash, and lots of it. Likewise pounds often come into play, as does the occasional conjunction. Sometimes we mistake an ever-dangling carat for the real thing. But if we aren’t careful, it could lead to parent-heses. When we are starry-eyed it’s hard to assess where we are at. But we always know clearly if we are digging it, or not, and are generally willing to exclaim it loudly, either way. Hence, the question, “Would you like a little whine with that cheese?”
Keywords: resonance, vectors, orbits, force, gravity, polarity, potential, vibration, magnetism, chemistry, wavelength, hard bodies, quantum foam, uncertainty, charge, spin, symmetry, color, superpositions, black holes, irreversibility, fuzzy attributes, sensitivity, complexity, randomness, unpredictability, catastrophe, bifurcation, degrees of freedom, decision theory, the hard problem, the strong and the weak, grand unification, infinities.
CHAOSOPHY 2005: Nonlocal Mind Paradigm
CHAOSOPHY 2005
SPIRITUAL PHYSICS
http://spiritualphysics.iwarp.com
FREE STYLE: Art Without Frames, Science Without Boundaries (posting soon).
GOOD VIBRATIONS: Microvibrations and Micropulsations
THE NONLOCAL MIND PARADIGM: A Transdisciplinary Revisioning of MindBody
THE WHOLE SUM INFINITY: Merging Spirituality and Integrative Biophysics
THE DEMIURGIC FIELD: Its Patterning Role in Chaos, Creation and Creativity with Dr. Paul Wildman, Ph.D.
IMAGE STREAMING: A Soulful Exploration of the Creative Mindfield
PROFILING: Psychological Types & Temperaments; Understanding Differences in People
____________________________________________________
The Microchip
Granted, this is going to scare all those conspiracy types out there convinced the government has planted microchips in our brains. The reality is that some private companies are speeding toward a technology that implants medicine-carrying chips under the skin, where they slowly and reliably release their payload into the bloodstream.
MIT's Langer and his colleagues have already developed several prototypes, some no bigger than a matchstick. The first one, made of silicone and gold, held more than 400 tiny chambers, each bearing medication. This offers the possibility of repeated doses of one or several medicines. The rate of release can be altered at any time, because the chip is run by remote control. "The way you open a garage door," said Langer, "you can open up a well inside the chip."
ChipRx of Lexington, Ky., and MicroCHIPS of Bedford, Mass. are two biotech companies currently testing the microchip. Marketing "would all be at least two to five years away," according to Langer. Someday, said Langer, he sees the microchip "being swallowable." Patients may be able to get all their medications this way. One chip, one gulp -- instead of dozens of pills a day. "The chip," Langer predicts, "will deliver them when you want to."
____________________________________________
GOOD VIBRATIONS 2; NEXUStentialism; Energy Medicine, Bioelectronics, Biophysics; 4300 words.
1/15/05
GOOD VIBRATIONS
Human Microvibrations and
Magnetospheric Micropulsations in Plasmas
By Iona Miller, 1/2005
Hypothesis: human microvibrations are transduced from, analogous to and/or resonantly entrained to micropulsations in the common plasma medium. Bioelectronic processes may be treated as a plasma state within the solid state of organic compounds. Biophysicist Popp showed that cellular condition is related to electromagnetic emissions. Significantly, low-frequency biological rhythms display correlations with the geophysical environment. Rohracher (1950s) of Vienna described the phenomenon of microvibrations, oscillations in the frequency range of 7 to 13 Hz that can be observed on the surface of the body during complete muscle relaxation. Microvibrations are cardioballistic or heart-driven phenomena likely related to the cranial pump. Low frequency oscillations in the Earth’s magnetosphere are called magnetic micropulsation (ULF waves). 7.83 Hz is Schumann’s Resonance (SR); Earth’s electromagnetic heartbeat is 10 Hz. Alpha brainwaves are 7 to 12 Hz. Healers and meditators exhibit nearly identical EEG signatures during their healing moments: a 7.8-8Hz brainwave activity, which lasts from one to several seconds and is phase and frequency-synchronized with the earth's geoelectric micropulsations.
“Some researchers have measured electromagnetic (EM) signals emanating from the hands of healers which are within the same frequency range as human brain waves. There are some indications that a correlation exists between atmospheric oscillations, brain waves, and biological EM emissions.” ~ Leanne Roffey Line
Introduction
Czech electrical technician and biotherapist, Jaroslav Novak claims to have found a measurable relationship that he can monitor between Schumann Resonance (SR) and a biological parameter (BP). Though further research needs to be done, “Jarda” is confident that this strongly suggests that SR and ELF EM fields do have a provable and valuable influence on living organisms. SR changes over correlated circadian rhythms and other cycles of time (light/dark, hormonal and sleep cycles, seasonal, gravitational and subtle geophysical effects, etc.).
Novak keeps his biological parameter confidential at this time while developing an inexpensive home monitoring system. The BP is a weak signal that requires 100.000 amplification but demonstrates biological changes in confluence with changes in SR through field effects ~ standing field line, wave-guide and resonant cavity oscillators. But many biological signals can provide useful feedback.
A good model for this project is the Heartmath Institute http://heartmath.com, which uses heart monitoring via a simple software and a home program for stress management and personal growth. The classic “armchair” work on the relationship among heart-driven rhythms, psychophysical states and geophysical rhythms is Itzhak Bentov’s STALKING THE WILD PENDULUM (1977, Bantam).
The heart is our own pulsing center as the sun is that of the solar system. In The Heart’s Code, Paul Pearsall, PhD (1998) points out that “simple physics tells us that energy and information leave the body and go out into space. It reaches our loved ones and our pets and plants, it extends to the sky, and, yes, logically, the electromagnetic field expands into the “vacuum” of space at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. Though the signal strength will obviously be very tiny, each second after our heart beats our individual heart’s code has expanded and travelled 186,000 miles into space - through space forever.” (p. xi-xii) In this sense, perhaps we are immortal. However, waves from space also impinge upon us.
“As Above, So Below"
EM waves are our primary means of knowing and viewing the universe. We are integral products of our environment, an embedded lattice of pulsating, vibrating energy. What happens in the solar system, our electromagnetic environment, and at our cellular level are all intimately related. The classic Hermetic axiom, “As above; So below” reiterates the nonlinear fractal unfoldment of self-similar organization at different scales of magnitude, from cosmic to subatomic.
This metaphysical notion suggests analogies or intuitive correlations of macroscopic, meso-, and microscopic processes or dynamics. With that in mind, we can examine the micropulsations of the earth and its atmosphere as well as our own neuromusculature, including the reciprocal relationship of the brain and heart muscle.
Resonance occurs when the natural vibrational frequency of a body is amplified by vibrations (essentially shock waves) at the same frequency from another body. The earth and our human organism are in such a resonate relationship. Standing waves that resonate at SR frequencies can form in the heart and drive other resonate systems in the body.
The bifurcation of the aorta forms a resonate cavity oscillator where pressure pulses coincide in phase (Bentov). Echo and pulse leave the heart together and continue in synchrony. Amplitude increases to 3 times normal as the body moves up and down 7 times a second. When it approaches 7 Hz, a progressively amplified standing wave form is created, resonating as large oscillations that entrain body circuits. This drives the pulsation of our piezoelectric brain against the skull creating standing waves in the ventricles.
Earth’s magnetosphere is a spherical magnet. Like the brain, the plasma of Earth’s magnetosphere can be viewed as a stiff jelly that conveys subtle vibrations to all bodies within it. Our biofield couples to the isoelectric field of the planet. 7.5 range is the SR frequency compared with the micromotion of the body at 6.8 to 7.5 Hz. EM fields are the connecting links between the world of resonant patterns and form, a feedback pulse of information. SR actually exerts a slight pressure on the surface of the planet and its inhabitants.
Low frequency oscillations in the Earth’s magnetosphere are called magnetic micropulsation (ULF waves). There is a subtle yet pulsating disturbing force. This field and Earth’s magnetic plasma are fused. Two pulses appearing to propagate away from their origin are called Alven waves. Alven waves are only one wave mode that can propagate in a plasma. In magnetized plasma the two waves are coupled to the sound wave by the frozen in field. These waves are fast, intermediate, or slow with the slowest is closest to being a pure sound wave.
Many of the waves on Earth’s surface originate beyond the magnetosphere. Solar wind, space weather, pressure waves, foreshock, bow shock and magnetopause create ULF waves that pass through the magnetopause and propagate through the magnetosphere. Internally they interact with wave guides, cavities and field lines creating observable pulsations. Close to the ion foreshock ions in the field align and produce small amplitude 1 Hz waves, as recorded by Lonetree (2004) at .9 Hz and 1.82 Hz. 1.855 Hz also has been cited by scalar physics researcher Hodowanec (1999) as the prime cosmic resonant frequency, also noted by Schumann.
The magnetosphere itself functions as a resonant cavity and wave guide for waves that propagate through the system. These cavities resonate at discrete frequencies many of which have biological effects. The relation of magnetospheric micropulsations (Alven waves and SR) appears correlated with diurnal, circadian and other psychophysical rhythms in the human organism, in particular microvibrations.
Earth’s Magnetosphere
This leads to the hypothesis: human microvibrations are transduced from, analogous to and resonantly linked or entrained to micropulsations. Alven waves oscillate at the low end of the Delta (0.5 Hz - 4 Hz) brain wave frequency spectrum (deep dreamless sleep). In Delta the body is at rest and more susceptible to the subtle rhythm of the heart as a driver of psychophysical processes. It is well known that the brain can be driven by acoustic signals, sound and light, through the frequency-following response (Monroe). Even our DNA responds directly to biological coherent light and sound (Gariaev, 1993; Miller, Miller, Webb, 2002).
A strong 0.1 Hz signal traveling from the heart to the brain via the baroreceptor link might frequency-pull the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the ANS into this frequency range and also frequency-pull the respiratory system into the same range. It is not clear where this 0.1 Hz baroreceptor signal originates but this may be the source that pumps the initiating 0.1 Hz signal into the baroreceptor channel heading for the brainstem.
The heart drives the cranial pump, creating microvibrations. Biotherapist, Leanne Roffey says, “As to where they [microvibrations] originate, I'm pretty sure that would have to be in the "cranial pump" in our craniosacral systems. That is a hydraulic pump that can be thought of as magnetohydrodynamic. Connective tissue is very much piezoelectric, so signal is produced. Everything drives off the Cranial rhythm and there are quite a few factors, respiration included, hormones, blood flow, even perfusion, that go towards making up that sum.”
In between the cranial parts are situated the so-called cranial sutures. The cranial sutures are composed of an elastic substance connecting the various cranial parts. The cranial parts are continuously opening and closing, functioning as a pump system. This pump system takes care of the circulation of brain fluid that is located underneath the skull. The pressure caused by the pumping movement has an overall effect, reaching the tail-bone (the sacral part), and all the bones in the body. Thus, it is implicated in microvibration.
Rohracher in Vienna described the phenomenon of microvibrations in the 1950s. Microvibrations consist of oscillations in the frequency range of 7 to 13 Hz, which can be observed on the surface of the body during complete muscle relaxation. Not surprisingly, when astronauts began going into space, the absence of Earth rhythms sent their bodies out of kilter. Therefore, all missions include a generator that simulates SR frequencies for health.
Physiological coherence describes a physiological mode that encompasses entrainment, resonance, and synchronization, which are all distinct but related physiological phenomena that are frequently associated with more ordered and harmonious interactions among the body's systems.
From an energy medicine perspective, the heart is the most powerful electromagnetic organ serving important regulatory functions. An ongoing dialogue takes place between heart and brain. The heart’s EM field extends 12 to15 feet beyond the body, 50 times more powerful than EEG signals.
The heart is our most powerful organ.
The heart responds directly to the environment.
The heart is the conductor of the energy of the body’s cells.
The heart is a dynamic system.
The heart is the body’s primary organizing force.
The heart resonates with information-containing energy.
The heart is the body system’s core.
The heart speaks and sends information.
All hearts exchange information with all other hearts and brains. (Pearsall)
Every cell in the body is linked by electromagnetic contact with the toroidal-shaped magnetic field of the heart, mirroring the relationship of Earth with its organisms. Heart rate mediates stress response and balance of the relaxation response. The connective tissue matrix, with it semiconducting and liquid crystal holographic structure, resonates with these field changes.
Cells are fractals embedded in a holographic energetic matrix that extends beyond the skin boundary. The body is an energetic event, a self-organizing electromagnetically unified matrix. The living matrix continuum or tissue tensegrity matrix reaches inside each and every cell, all systematically interconnected parts of the body, even more so than the nervous system.
“Contrary to prevailing neuron doctrine, the glial substrate and other perineural structures of the central nervous system, through their sensitivity to extremely low levels of electric currents and magnetic fields, may directly control brain functions. The neuronal brain is not only supported by, but modulated by, the glial brain. (Becker)
Electromagnetism has effects on the "integration of brain function" in consciousness. Becker hypothesizes that DC and low-frequency extraneuronal electric currents generated in, or transmitted by, the glial components of the brain and may be the basis of perceptual awareness.”
Fear and Trembling
Frohlich (1988) found that our bodies primordial high-speed networks -- vibrate continuously at light frequencies, because of huge electrical potentials and the high degree of molecular order or crystallinity in our tissues. This living matrix is a mechanical, vibrational, energetic, photonic, and informational network. Communication breakdown can lead to systems failures in microcircuitry and regulative processes.
A simple model can demonstrate that microvibrations are due to mechanical resonance. The oscillations are apparently elicited by the heartbeat. Therefore it appears that microvibrations are cardioballistic phenomena. This force is transmitted through the bones to soft tissues such as relaxed muscles. Local resonance finally leads to the oscillations.
Resonance is an important mechanism in energy healing, whether with electronic devices or energy therapists. Molecules are resonant antennas, emitting characteristic signals and responding to tiny signals of the appropriate frequencies. Once the appropriate frequency and amplitude are discovered, virtually any physiological process can be influenced with a tiny signal.
Human tremor is concentrated in the 3 - 20 Hz spectrum. Though some researchers report a spread of 6-12 Hz, Comby et al (1992) report the peak frequency of human tremor between 5.85 and 8.80 Hz, which averaged coincides closely with Schumann Resonance (7.83).
Microvibrations correspond closely with adaptation to levels of stimulation and psychological states, particularly states of ergotropic (sympathetic) and trophotrophic (parasympathetic) arousal. Tremor increases with stress and anxiety yet this very mechanism may be the key means of restoring equilibrium. “Tremor at rest” is the minimal tremor, which remains in the absence of voluntary muscular activity.
Human tremor can be measured with an instrument that connects a piezoelectric (pressure electricity) accelerometer with an electronic circuit to display the results. This signal is analyzed and converted via computer from analog to digital signal. Standardization of a tremor scale and the piezoelectric ceramic has made fabrication of an inexpensive yet satisfactory system possible for home use. Tremor can be measured from a standard measuring position and scale (Comby, 1992) and correlated with SR fluctuations. Appropriate psychophysical drivers and feedback systems can be employed to encourage resonance or entrainment for health or personal growth.
Tremor at rest can be separated from kinetic tremor, which is of much higher amplitude and has the same frequency range. The problem is partially solved by adopting a standard position, which includes "standing still" in the instructions given to the subject. However, some kinetic tremor still remains which is of much higher amplitude than tremor at rest. The best way to ensure that only tremor at rest is measured is to take into consideration only the lowest amplitude reached during the time of measurement.
It is well known that physiological tremor increases in states of anxiety or during emotional stress (Haider et al.,1983), during which there is an increase in release of catecholamines from the adrenal medulla. Psychological stress increases tremor amplitude. Mental stress induces tremor even in healthy subjects. Panic attacks generate tremor from anxiety and psychophysical changes. Tremor can be experimentally produced in human subjects by stress-hormones such as adrenaline, coffee, tea or nicotine.
Comby’s results confirm a correlation between the impact on tremor of a relaxation session and the correlation between measured tremor and self-evaluated stress. His research links psychological stress (subjective "stress" or "nervousness") and tremor (objectively quantified).
Plasmas and Bioplasma
Plasma is the fourth state of matter (liquid, gaseous, solid). Living organisms are plasmas. Plasma physics has merged with biology; life is a highly energetic system, not just chemical processes. The optimal adaptation to receive any kind of information and relay it instantaneously to the entire mass of the system is found in plasma.
Plasma is a source of all types of waves, which feed back on the plasma and display mutual correlation. The manifestations of life may be ultimately summarized in terms of plasma and radiation. The secret of life lies in process control through small energy and with minimal noise. Plasma can be controlled only through fields, in particular magnetic fields.
The plasma approach to life points out that life is electric, however, its control takes place magnetically. Plasma is revealed by the emission of an electromagnetic field and is obedient only to this field, even a very weak one. The electronic processes of metabolism may be treated as a plasma state within the solid state of organic compounds.
Significantly, low-frequency biological rhythms display relations with the geophysical environment. The alpha rhythm of the human brain has a frequency of about 10 Hz, which is the same as the frequency of magnetohydrodynamic oscillations of the ionosphere, and of the vibrations of the Earth's crust.
Magnetohydrodynamics is based on magnetic transmission over a plasma carrier. The same frequency is found in the continuous vibrations of the entire organism's skeletal muscles in warm-blooded animals. For a human adult this frequency is 7 - 13 Hz, falling in the range of 8 - 12 Hz in 80% of subjects. The coincidence with the cerebral alpha waves lacks an explanation to date. The rhythm may be transmitted by waves through the organism as biological microvibrations.
Plasma unites in itself the phenomena of electrodynamics, electronics, and hydrodynamics, even in the absence of a fluid medium. One of the manifestations of this situation is given by the magnetohydroydnamic waves (MHD), that is, the wave propagation of magnetic field fluctuations in plasma, analogous to the transport of protuberance in a fluid medium, accompanied by real transport of magnetic energy.
Thus it seems that a biological system possesses its own magnetic information, highly sensitive to external field variations and unusually responsive to spin variations in organic structure. The magnetohydrodynamic wave is one of the electromagnetic effects, and so is weak radiation. It is however typical of plasma.
Plasma -- the fundamental background for the processes of life -- is maintained in a constantly agitated state of generation and decay through magnetohydrodynamic control. This state is correlated with other antagonistic situations, such as anabolism-catabolism, oxido-reductivity, dia-paramagnetism. It is moreover related to physiological currents and weakly luminescent effects. What is formed is a complex signaling system -- involving electric, magnetic, optical and acoustic effects.
This signaling system must operate not only on the level of single macromolecules like DNA, but also on that of groups of molecules, biological complexes such as cells, tissues, organs and the organism, and above all on the level of the metabolism, as an ensemble of chemical processes.
In a plasma medium with the features of a conducting liquid, control is effected by magnetic mechanisms. Here hydrodynamics combines with electrodynamics, yielding magnetohydrodynamic vibrations. The common factor of the entire system, namely the averaged-out electronic state of the metabolism, seems therefore to be a carrier and receptor of those controls. In more biological terms -- the metabolism forms the carrier for the entire fundamental control within a living system.
The most important point is the response of living organisms to low-frequency fields. Because the separation of an electro-magnetic field into electric and magnetic vectors is an involved problem, the effects are usually attributed to the electric vector. The sensitivity of living systems to fluctuations of weak magnetic fields of planetary origin indicates that magnetic effects are of greater importance.
A biological system displays not only an electronic "life" of its own, typical of protein semiconductors, but also a specific magnetic "life" endowed with a characteristic rhythm. Plasma repels magnetic field lines (or is itself repelled by them), or "freezes" field lines within itself.
Sedlak (1993) discusses how a living organism is not only an information detector and generator, but is also a transformer of electromagnetic energy. Biological systems generate their own magnetic mediums. Sedlak proposes that magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) can be used to model living bioplasma.
A plasma responds to magnetic and electric fields, acoustic waves, mechanical action, gravitational fields, and temperature; in addition it depends on chemical composition. Its exceptional selectivity and responsiveness, through alteration of its own state, make plasma the ideal carrier system of information within living organisms.
Bistolfi (1991) characterizes the borderline electronic-chemical reactions found in living tissue as a function of resonance. He offers a biophysical explanation for the acute sensitivity of living systems to electromagnetic influences in bioelectronic terms based on small and large groups of hydrogen bonds within molecular structures such as DNA and other nucleic acids.
Biochemical action and bioelectronic action meet at the quantum-junction. The keys to our physiology are also the keys to consciousness. Phenomena now considered esoteric may someday be explained in terms of bioelectronic interactions of energy and matter. What has been the realm of metaphysical healing may become a precise EM healing science. (Roffey)
“Some researchers have measured electromagnetic (EM) signals emanating from the hands of healers which are within the same frequency range as human brain waves. There are some indications that a correlation exists between atmospheric oscillations, brain waves, and biological EM emissions. Understanding the nature of this correlation may enable us to characterize and further utilize various types of "healing energies".
The paradigm for the application of these energies may develop into a basis for a variety of existing complementary medical practices. Integral portions of biological systems have been shown to be semiconducting, ferromagnetic and piezoelectric. The biosemiconductor, together with the drift of charges, ions, and radicals, may be considered as a form of "bioplasma". Bioplasma may be subject to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) control. The EM fields emitted by trained healers may be considered as coherent, resonant biomagnetic emissions by which a less coherent EM field of the patient is "tuned" to the specific frequency and phase, and through which homeostasis can be "aligned" to induce "healing". “ (Roffey)
Bio-resonance: resonant frequency therapies
Stanford cellular biologist, Bruce Lipton http://brucelipton.com characterizes the environment as awash in signals. Specific frequencies are informational signals. While the environment is in a sense "chaotic," with hundreds and thousands of simultaneously-expressed "signals," the cell can selectively read only those signals that are relevant to its existence.
Physiology reveals that most of the body's natural chemicals are released by an electrical signal or an electrochemical reaction. Can these same chemicals be released by applying an external electrical signal? Can different EM parameters stimulate different chemical systems?
Simply stated, can externally applied bioelectromagnetic fields influence cell and organismal behavior and expression? The answer is a clear, resounding, and unequivocal, YES! Through event-related synchronization and desynchronization.
Electromagnetic energy fields, which include energies in the ranges of microwaves, radio-frequencies, the visible light spectrum, ELF and even acoustic frequencies, have been shown to profoundly impact every facet of biological regulation. Specific frequencies and patterns of electromagnetic radiation regulate: cell division; gene regulation; DNA, RNA and protein syntheses; protein conformation and function; morphogenesis; bone growth, regeneration; and nerve conduction and growth.
As evidence has mounted that bioeffects of EM fields that are not only dwarfed by much larger intrinsic bioelectric processes, but may also be substantially below the level of tissue thermal noise. Theoretical and experimental studies now seek the first transductive steps. Answers to that important question are currently sought in EM field interactions with free radicals that have a role at electric power frequencies and at the other extreme in the EM spectrum in bioeffects of millimeter waves. (Adey)
If electromagnetic fields can affect enzymes and cells, there is no reason of principle why one should not expect to be able to tailor a waveform as a therapeutic agent in much the same way as one now modulates chemical structures to obtain pharmacological selectivity. The high specificity of electromagnetic signals may result in the "direct targeting" of activity, without many of the side-effects common to pharmaceutical substances.
Integrative Biophysics
We are primarily energetic and informational beings with field dependent chemical reactions. Typically, the treatment of biological effects of EM fields is restricted to ionizing radiation and membrane potentials. But Integrative Biophysics is more than a molecular-genetic approach to biology. It focuses on our intrinsic systemic holism, an inseparable whole with the environment, interconnection within and without the organism.
Professor Fritz-Albert Popp, a well-known biophysicist at Kaiserslautern University, Germany, states that:"All living organisms emit certain electromagnetic waves. If they are in a healthy condition, they emit more. If not, they emit less. This electromagnetic emission is called biophotons."
Biophotonics is a rapidly increasing field of current scientific research and applications, based on the discovery of biophotons, a permanent, weak photon current emanating from all living systems. The biophoton emission reflects some, if not all, of the essential biological and physiological activities in biological systems. Energy and information can move about the body through other means than nerve transmission and hormonal regulation via quantum coherence.
Biophotonics provides a powerful tool for investigating these electromagnetic interactions. The theoretical approach requires holistic models of living systems, rather than local analytical models. Consequently, these new insights into living matter create a new basis of "integrative biophysics" that is concerned with the questions of regulation, communication and organization of biological systems.
REFERENCES
Adey, Ross. WHISPERING BETWEEN CELLS: ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS AND REGULATORY MECHANISMS IN TISSUE. MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 50
VA Medical Center & University School of Medicine Loma Linda, California
Becker, Robert O. (1992). Modern Bioelectromagnetics & Functions of the Central Nervous System. ISSSEEM Journal Volume 3 Number 1 1992
Chouinard, Edmond (2004). “Mind-Matter Entanglement with Geomagnetic Fields”. Also, “Mind-Matter Entanglement with Telepathic Body Jerks”. MS, private correspondence with this author, 11/05/2004.
Comby, B. and M. Bouchoucha & al. (1992). A new method for the measurement of tremor at rest. International Archives of Physiology, Biochemistry, and Biophysics.
Frohlich, H. 1988. “Biological Coherence in Response to External Stimuli”. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Gariaev, P.P. (1994), Wave Genome, Public Profit, Moscow, 279 pages [in Russian].
Gariaev, P.P. (1993) Wave based genome, Depp. VINITI 15:12. 1993, N 3092?93, 278pp. [in Russian].
Lipton, Bruce, Ph.D. (831) 454-0606, videotape, titled THE SCIENCE OF INNATE INTELLIGENCE : also "The Science of Innate Intelligence", "The Biology of Belief" and "Nature, Nurture and the Power of Love".
Miller R.A., Miller I. And Webb B (2002). “Quantum Bioholography”. JNLRMI, Vol. ! No. 3, Oct. 2002; www.emergentmind.org/MillerWebb3a.htm
Oschman, James L (2000). Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance.
Popp, F.-A., et al (1979). Electromagnetic Bio-Information. Munich: Urban and Schwarzenberg.
Popp, F-A. (1989) "Biologie de la Lumiere", Ed. Pietteur, Liege.
Pearsall, Paul (1998). The Heart’s Code. New York: Broadway Books.
Roffey Line, Leanne E. (1994) "The bioelectronic basis for "healing energies"; charge and field effects as a basis for complementary medical techniques", in M.J. Allen, S. F. Cleary & A.E. Sowers (eds.) Charge and Field Effects in Biosystems -- 4, pp. 480-497. Singapore: World Scientific. www.bioelektronika.com As of the time of this review over 150 studies of "healing energies" have been reported in which the energy parameters were specified and controlled. More than half demonstrate statistical significance, p < 0.05.
SPIRITUAL PHYSICS
http://spiritualphysics.iwarp.com
FREE STYLE: Art Without Frames, Science Without Boundaries (posting soon).
GOOD VIBRATIONS: Microvibrations and Micropulsations
THE NONLOCAL MIND PARADIGM: A Transdisciplinary Revisioning of MindBody
THE WHOLE SUM INFINITY: Merging Spirituality and Integrative Biophysics
THE DEMIURGIC FIELD: Its Patterning Role in Chaos, Creation and Creativity with Dr. Paul Wildman, Ph.D.
IMAGE STREAMING: A Soulful Exploration of the Creative Mindfield
PROFILING: Psychological Types & Temperaments; Understanding Differences in People
____________________________________________________
The Microchip
Granted, this is going to scare all those conspiracy types out there convinced the government has planted microchips in our brains. The reality is that some private companies are speeding toward a technology that implants medicine-carrying chips under the skin, where they slowly and reliably release their payload into the bloodstream.
MIT's Langer and his colleagues have already developed several prototypes, some no bigger than a matchstick. The first one, made of silicone and gold, held more than 400 tiny chambers, each bearing medication. This offers the possibility of repeated doses of one or several medicines. The rate of release can be altered at any time, because the chip is run by remote control. "The way you open a garage door," said Langer, "you can open up a well inside the chip."
ChipRx of Lexington, Ky., and MicroCHIPS of Bedford, Mass. are two biotech companies currently testing the microchip. Marketing "would all be at least two to five years away," according to Langer. Someday, said Langer, he sees the microchip "being swallowable." Patients may be able to get all their medications this way. One chip, one gulp -- instead of dozens of pills a day. "The chip," Langer predicts, "will deliver them when you want to."
____________________________________________
GOOD VIBRATIONS 2; NEXUStentialism; Energy Medicine, Bioelectronics, Biophysics; 4300 words.
1/15/05
GOOD VIBRATIONS
Human Microvibrations and
Magnetospheric Micropulsations in Plasmas
By Iona Miller, 1/2005
Hypothesis: human microvibrations are transduced from, analogous to and/or resonantly entrained to micropulsations in the common plasma medium. Bioelectronic processes may be treated as a plasma state within the solid state of organic compounds. Biophysicist Popp showed that cellular condition is related to electromagnetic emissions. Significantly, low-frequency biological rhythms display correlations with the geophysical environment. Rohracher (1950s) of Vienna described the phenomenon of microvibrations, oscillations in the frequency range of 7 to 13 Hz that can be observed on the surface of the body during complete muscle relaxation. Microvibrations are cardioballistic or heart-driven phenomena likely related to the cranial pump. Low frequency oscillations in the Earth’s magnetosphere are called magnetic micropulsation (ULF waves). 7.83 Hz is Schumann’s Resonance (SR); Earth’s electromagnetic heartbeat is 10 Hz. Alpha brainwaves are 7 to 12 Hz. Healers and meditators exhibit nearly identical EEG signatures during their healing moments: a 7.8-8Hz brainwave activity, which lasts from one to several seconds and is phase and frequency-synchronized with the earth's geoelectric micropulsations.
“Some researchers have measured electromagnetic (EM) signals emanating from the hands of healers which are within the same frequency range as human brain waves. There are some indications that a correlation exists between atmospheric oscillations, brain waves, and biological EM emissions.” ~ Leanne Roffey Line
Introduction
Czech electrical technician and biotherapist, Jaroslav Novak claims to have found a measurable relationship that he can monitor between Schumann Resonance (SR) and a biological parameter (BP). Though further research needs to be done, “Jarda” is confident that this strongly suggests that SR and ELF EM fields do have a provable and valuable influence on living organisms. SR changes over correlated circadian rhythms and other cycles of time (light/dark, hormonal and sleep cycles, seasonal, gravitational and subtle geophysical effects, etc.).
Novak keeps his biological parameter confidential at this time while developing an inexpensive home monitoring system. The BP is a weak signal that requires 100.000 amplification but demonstrates biological changes in confluence with changes in SR through field effects ~ standing field line, wave-guide and resonant cavity oscillators. But many biological signals can provide useful feedback.
A good model for this project is the Heartmath Institute http://heartmath.com, which uses heart monitoring via a simple software and a home program for stress management and personal growth. The classic “armchair” work on the relationship among heart-driven rhythms, psychophysical states and geophysical rhythms is Itzhak Bentov’s STALKING THE WILD PENDULUM (1977, Bantam).
The heart is our own pulsing center as the sun is that of the solar system. In The Heart’s Code, Paul Pearsall, PhD (1998) points out that “simple physics tells us that energy and information leave the body and go out into space. It reaches our loved ones and our pets and plants, it extends to the sky, and, yes, logically, the electromagnetic field expands into the “vacuum” of space at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. Though the signal strength will obviously be very tiny, each second after our heart beats our individual heart’s code has expanded and travelled 186,000 miles into space - through space forever.” (p. xi-xii) In this sense, perhaps we are immortal. However, waves from space also impinge upon us.
“As Above, So Below"
EM waves are our primary means of knowing and viewing the universe. We are integral products of our environment, an embedded lattice of pulsating, vibrating energy. What happens in the solar system, our electromagnetic environment, and at our cellular level are all intimately related. The classic Hermetic axiom, “As above; So below” reiterates the nonlinear fractal unfoldment of self-similar organization at different scales of magnitude, from cosmic to subatomic.
This metaphysical notion suggests analogies or intuitive correlations of macroscopic, meso-, and microscopic processes or dynamics. With that in mind, we can examine the micropulsations of the earth and its atmosphere as well as our own neuromusculature, including the reciprocal relationship of the brain and heart muscle.
Resonance occurs when the natural vibrational frequency of a body is amplified by vibrations (essentially shock waves) at the same frequency from another body. The earth and our human organism are in such a resonate relationship. Standing waves that resonate at SR frequencies can form in the heart and drive other resonate systems in the body.
The bifurcation of the aorta forms a resonate cavity oscillator where pressure pulses coincide in phase (Bentov). Echo and pulse leave the heart together and continue in synchrony. Amplitude increases to 3 times normal as the body moves up and down 7 times a second. When it approaches 7 Hz, a progressively amplified standing wave form is created, resonating as large oscillations that entrain body circuits. This drives the pulsation of our piezoelectric brain against the skull creating standing waves in the ventricles.
Earth’s magnetosphere is a spherical magnet. Like the brain, the plasma of Earth’s magnetosphere can be viewed as a stiff jelly that conveys subtle vibrations to all bodies within it. Our biofield couples to the isoelectric field of the planet. 7.5 range is the SR frequency compared with the micromotion of the body at 6.8 to 7.5 Hz. EM fields are the connecting links between the world of resonant patterns and form, a feedback pulse of information. SR actually exerts a slight pressure on the surface of the planet and its inhabitants.
Low frequency oscillations in the Earth’s magnetosphere are called magnetic micropulsation (ULF waves). There is a subtle yet pulsating disturbing force. This field and Earth’s magnetic plasma are fused. Two pulses appearing to propagate away from their origin are called Alven waves. Alven waves are only one wave mode that can propagate in a plasma. In magnetized plasma the two waves are coupled to the sound wave by the frozen in field. These waves are fast, intermediate, or slow with the slowest is closest to being a pure sound wave.
Many of the waves on Earth’s surface originate beyond the magnetosphere. Solar wind, space weather, pressure waves, foreshock, bow shock and magnetopause create ULF waves that pass through the magnetopause and propagate through the magnetosphere. Internally they interact with wave guides, cavities and field lines creating observable pulsations. Close to the ion foreshock ions in the field align and produce small amplitude 1 Hz waves, as recorded by Lonetree (2004) at .9 Hz and 1.82 Hz. 1.855 Hz also has been cited by scalar physics researcher Hodowanec (1999) as the prime cosmic resonant frequency, also noted by Schumann.
The magnetosphere itself functions as a resonant cavity and wave guide for waves that propagate through the system. These cavities resonate at discrete frequencies many of which have biological effects. The relation of magnetospheric micropulsations (Alven waves and SR) appears correlated with diurnal, circadian and other psychophysical rhythms in the human organism, in particular microvibrations.
Earth’s Magnetosphere
This leads to the hypothesis: human microvibrations are transduced from, analogous to and resonantly linked or entrained to micropulsations. Alven waves oscillate at the low end of the Delta (0.5 Hz - 4 Hz) brain wave frequency spectrum (deep dreamless sleep). In Delta the body is at rest and more susceptible to the subtle rhythm of the heart as a driver of psychophysical processes. It is well known that the brain can be driven by acoustic signals, sound and light, through the frequency-following response (Monroe). Even our DNA responds directly to biological coherent light and sound (Gariaev, 1993; Miller, Miller, Webb, 2002).
A strong 0.1 Hz signal traveling from the heart to the brain via the baroreceptor link might frequency-pull the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the ANS into this frequency range and also frequency-pull the respiratory system into the same range. It is not clear where this 0.1 Hz baroreceptor signal originates but this may be the source that pumps the initiating 0.1 Hz signal into the baroreceptor channel heading for the brainstem.
The heart drives the cranial pump, creating microvibrations. Biotherapist, Leanne Roffey says, “As to where they [microvibrations] originate, I'm pretty sure that would have to be in the "cranial pump" in our craniosacral systems. That is a hydraulic pump that can be thought of as magnetohydrodynamic. Connective tissue is very much piezoelectric, so signal is produced. Everything drives off the Cranial rhythm and there are quite a few factors, respiration included, hormones, blood flow, even perfusion, that go towards making up that sum.”
In between the cranial parts are situated the so-called cranial sutures. The cranial sutures are composed of an elastic substance connecting the various cranial parts. The cranial parts are continuously opening and closing, functioning as a pump system. This pump system takes care of the circulation of brain fluid that is located underneath the skull. The pressure caused by the pumping movement has an overall effect, reaching the tail-bone (the sacral part), and all the bones in the body. Thus, it is implicated in microvibration.
Rohracher in Vienna described the phenomenon of microvibrations in the 1950s. Microvibrations consist of oscillations in the frequency range of 7 to 13 Hz, which can be observed on the surface of the body during complete muscle relaxation. Not surprisingly, when astronauts began going into space, the absence of Earth rhythms sent their bodies out of kilter. Therefore, all missions include a generator that simulates SR frequencies for health.
Physiological coherence describes a physiological mode that encompasses entrainment, resonance, and synchronization, which are all distinct but related physiological phenomena that are frequently associated with more ordered and harmonious interactions among the body's systems.
From an energy medicine perspective, the heart is the most powerful electromagnetic organ serving important regulatory functions. An ongoing dialogue takes place between heart and brain. The heart’s EM field extends 12 to15 feet beyond the body, 50 times more powerful than EEG signals.
The heart is our most powerful organ.
The heart responds directly to the environment.
The heart is the conductor of the energy of the body’s cells.
The heart is a dynamic system.
The heart is the body’s primary organizing force.
The heart resonates with information-containing energy.
The heart is the body system’s core.
The heart speaks and sends information.
All hearts exchange information with all other hearts and brains. (Pearsall)
Every cell in the body is linked by electromagnetic contact with the toroidal-shaped magnetic field of the heart, mirroring the relationship of Earth with its organisms. Heart rate mediates stress response and balance of the relaxation response. The connective tissue matrix, with it semiconducting and liquid crystal holographic structure, resonates with these field changes.
Cells are fractals embedded in a holographic energetic matrix that extends beyond the skin boundary. The body is an energetic event, a self-organizing electromagnetically unified matrix. The living matrix continuum or tissue tensegrity matrix reaches inside each and every cell, all systematically interconnected parts of the body, even more so than the nervous system.
“Contrary to prevailing neuron doctrine, the glial substrate and other perineural structures of the central nervous system, through their sensitivity to extremely low levels of electric currents and magnetic fields, may directly control brain functions. The neuronal brain is not only supported by, but modulated by, the glial brain. (Becker)
Electromagnetism has effects on the "integration of brain function" in consciousness. Becker hypothesizes that DC and low-frequency extraneuronal electric currents generated in, or transmitted by, the glial components of the brain and may be the basis of perceptual awareness.”
Fear and Trembling
Frohlich (1988) found that our bodies primordial high-speed networks -- vibrate continuously at light frequencies, because of huge electrical potentials and the high degree of molecular order or crystallinity in our tissues. This living matrix is a mechanical, vibrational, energetic, photonic, and informational network. Communication breakdown can lead to systems failures in microcircuitry and regulative processes.
A simple model can demonstrate that microvibrations are due to mechanical resonance. The oscillations are apparently elicited by the heartbeat. Therefore it appears that microvibrations are cardioballistic phenomena. This force is transmitted through the bones to soft tissues such as relaxed muscles. Local resonance finally leads to the oscillations.
Resonance is an important mechanism in energy healing, whether with electronic devices or energy therapists. Molecules are resonant antennas, emitting characteristic signals and responding to tiny signals of the appropriate frequencies. Once the appropriate frequency and amplitude are discovered, virtually any physiological process can be influenced with a tiny signal.
Human tremor is concentrated in the 3 - 20 Hz spectrum. Though some researchers report a spread of 6-12 Hz, Comby et al (1992) report the peak frequency of human tremor between 5.85 and 8.80 Hz, which averaged coincides closely with Schumann Resonance (7.83).
Microvibrations correspond closely with adaptation to levels of stimulation and psychological states, particularly states of ergotropic (sympathetic) and trophotrophic (parasympathetic) arousal. Tremor increases with stress and anxiety yet this very mechanism may be the key means of restoring equilibrium. “Tremor at rest” is the minimal tremor, which remains in the absence of voluntary muscular activity.
Human tremor can be measured with an instrument that connects a piezoelectric (pressure electricity) accelerometer with an electronic circuit to display the results. This signal is analyzed and converted via computer from analog to digital signal. Standardization of a tremor scale and the piezoelectric ceramic has made fabrication of an inexpensive yet satisfactory system possible for home use. Tremor can be measured from a standard measuring position and scale (Comby, 1992) and correlated with SR fluctuations. Appropriate psychophysical drivers and feedback systems can be employed to encourage resonance or entrainment for health or personal growth.
Tremor at rest can be separated from kinetic tremor, which is of much higher amplitude and has the same frequency range. The problem is partially solved by adopting a standard position, which includes "standing still" in the instructions given to the subject. However, some kinetic tremor still remains which is of much higher amplitude than tremor at rest. The best way to ensure that only tremor at rest is measured is to take into consideration only the lowest amplitude reached during the time of measurement.
It is well known that physiological tremor increases in states of anxiety or during emotional stress (Haider et al.,1983), during which there is an increase in release of catecholamines from the adrenal medulla. Psychological stress increases tremor amplitude. Mental stress induces tremor even in healthy subjects. Panic attacks generate tremor from anxiety and psychophysical changes. Tremor can be experimentally produced in human subjects by stress-hormones such as adrenaline, coffee, tea or nicotine.
Comby’s results confirm a correlation between the impact on tremor of a relaxation session and the correlation between measured tremor and self-evaluated stress. His research links psychological stress (subjective "stress" or "nervousness") and tremor (objectively quantified).
Plasmas and Bioplasma
Plasma is the fourth state of matter (liquid, gaseous, solid). Living organisms are plasmas. Plasma physics has merged with biology; life is a highly energetic system, not just chemical processes. The optimal adaptation to receive any kind of information and relay it instantaneously to the entire mass of the system is found in plasma.
Plasma is a source of all types of waves, which feed back on the plasma and display mutual correlation. The manifestations of life may be ultimately summarized in terms of plasma and radiation. The secret of life lies in process control through small energy and with minimal noise. Plasma can be controlled only through fields, in particular magnetic fields.
The plasma approach to life points out that life is electric, however, its control takes place magnetically. Plasma is revealed by the emission of an electromagnetic field and is obedient only to this field, even a very weak one. The electronic processes of metabolism may be treated as a plasma state within the solid state of organic compounds.
Significantly, low-frequency biological rhythms display relations with the geophysical environment. The alpha rhythm of the human brain has a frequency of about 10 Hz, which is the same as the frequency of magnetohydrodynamic oscillations of the ionosphere, and of the vibrations of the Earth's crust.
Magnetohydrodynamics is based on magnetic transmission over a plasma carrier. The same frequency is found in the continuous vibrations of the entire organism's skeletal muscles in warm-blooded animals. For a human adult this frequency is 7 - 13 Hz, falling in the range of 8 - 12 Hz in 80% of subjects. The coincidence with the cerebral alpha waves lacks an explanation to date. The rhythm may be transmitted by waves through the organism as biological microvibrations.
Plasma unites in itself the phenomena of electrodynamics, electronics, and hydrodynamics, even in the absence of a fluid medium. One of the manifestations of this situation is given by the magnetohydroydnamic waves (MHD), that is, the wave propagation of magnetic field fluctuations in plasma, analogous to the transport of protuberance in a fluid medium, accompanied by real transport of magnetic energy.
Thus it seems that a biological system possesses its own magnetic information, highly sensitive to external field variations and unusually responsive to spin variations in organic structure. The magnetohydrodynamic wave is one of the electromagnetic effects, and so is weak radiation. It is however typical of plasma.
Plasma -- the fundamental background for the processes of life -- is maintained in a constantly agitated state of generation and decay through magnetohydrodynamic control. This state is correlated with other antagonistic situations, such as anabolism-catabolism, oxido-reductivity, dia-paramagnetism. It is moreover related to physiological currents and weakly luminescent effects. What is formed is a complex signaling system -- involving electric, magnetic, optical and acoustic effects.
This signaling system must operate not only on the level of single macromolecules like DNA, but also on that of groups of molecules, biological complexes such as cells, tissues, organs and the organism, and above all on the level of the metabolism, as an ensemble of chemical processes.
In a plasma medium with the features of a conducting liquid, control is effected by magnetic mechanisms. Here hydrodynamics combines with electrodynamics, yielding magnetohydrodynamic vibrations. The common factor of the entire system, namely the averaged-out electronic state of the metabolism, seems therefore to be a carrier and receptor of those controls. In more biological terms -- the metabolism forms the carrier for the entire fundamental control within a living system.
The most important point is the response of living organisms to low-frequency fields. Because the separation of an electro-magnetic field into electric and magnetic vectors is an involved problem, the effects are usually attributed to the electric vector. The sensitivity of living systems to fluctuations of weak magnetic fields of planetary origin indicates that magnetic effects are of greater importance.
A biological system displays not only an electronic "life" of its own, typical of protein semiconductors, but also a specific magnetic "life" endowed with a characteristic rhythm. Plasma repels magnetic field lines (or is itself repelled by them), or "freezes" field lines within itself.
Sedlak (1993) discusses how a living organism is not only an information detector and generator, but is also a transformer of electromagnetic energy. Biological systems generate their own magnetic mediums. Sedlak proposes that magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) can be used to model living bioplasma.
A plasma responds to magnetic and electric fields, acoustic waves, mechanical action, gravitational fields, and temperature; in addition it depends on chemical composition. Its exceptional selectivity and responsiveness, through alteration of its own state, make plasma the ideal carrier system of information within living organisms.
Bistolfi (1991) characterizes the borderline electronic-chemical reactions found in living tissue as a function of resonance. He offers a biophysical explanation for the acute sensitivity of living systems to electromagnetic influences in bioelectronic terms based on small and large groups of hydrogen bonds within molecular structures such as DNA and other nucleic acids.
Biochemical action and bioelectronic action meet at the quantum-junction. The keys to our physiology are also the keys to consciousness. Phenomena now considered esoteric may someday be explained in terms of bioelectronic interactions of energy and matter. What has been the realm of metaphysical healing may become a precise EM healing science. (Roffey)
“Some researchers have measured electromagnetic (EM) signals emanating from the hands of healers which are within the same frequency range as human brain waves. There are some indications that a correlation exists between atmospheric oscillations, brain waves, and biological EM emissions. Understanding the nature of this correlation may enable us to characterize and further utilize various types of "healing energies".
The paradigm for the application of these energies may develop into a basis for a variety of existing complementary medical practices. Integral portions of biological systems have been shown to be semiconducting, ferromagnetic and piezoelectric. The biosemiconductor, together with the drift of charges, ions, and radicals, may be considered as a form of "bioplasma". Bioplasma may be subject to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) control. The EM fields emitted by trained healers may be considered as coherent, resonant biomagnetic emissions by which a less coherent EM field of the patient is "tuned" to the specific frequency and phase, and through which homeostasis can be "aligned" to induce "healing". “ (Roffey)
Bio-resonance: resonant frequency therapies
Stanford cellular biologist, Bruce Lipton http://brucelipton.com characterizes the environment as awash in signals. Specific frequencies are informational signals. While the environment is in a sense "chaotic," with hundreds and thousands of simultaneously-expressed "signals," the cell can selectively read only those signals that are relevant to its existence.
Physiology reveals that most of the body's natural chemicals are released by an electrical signal or an electrochemical reaction. Can these same chemicals be released by applying an external electrical signal? Can different EM parameters stimulate different chemical systems?
Simply stated, can externally applied bioelectromagnetic fields influence cell and organismal behavior and expression? The answer is a clear, resounding, and unequivocal, YES! Through event-related synchronization and desynchronization.
Electromagnetic energy fields, which include energies in the ranges of microwaves, radio-frequencies, the visible light spectrum, ELF and even acoustic frequencies, have been shown to profoundly impact every facet of biological regulation. Specific frequencies and patterns of electromagnetic radiation regulate: cell division; gene regulation; DNA, RNA and protein syntheses; protein conformation and function; morphogenesis; bone growth, regeneration; and nerve conduction and growth.
As evidence has mounted that bioeffects of EM fields that are not only dwarfed by much larger intrinsic bioelectric processes, but may also be substantially below the level of tissue thermal noise. Theoretical and experimental studies now seek the first transductive steps. Answers to that important question are currently sought in EM field interactions with free radicals that have a role at electric power frequencies and at the other extreme in the EM spectrum in bioeffects of millimeter waves. (Adey)
If electromagnetic fields can affect enzymes and cells, there is no reason of principle why one should not expect to be able to tailor a waveform as a therapeutic agent in much the same way as one now modulates chemical structures to obtain pharmacological selectivity. The high specificity of electromagnetic signals may result in the "direct targeting" of activity, without many of the side-effects common to pharmaceutical substances.
Integrative Biophysics
We are primarily energetic and informational beings with field dependent chemical reactions. Typically, the treatment of biological effects of EM fields is restricted to ionizing radiation and membrane potentials. But Integrative Biophysics is more than a molecular-genetic approach to biology. It focuses on our intrinsic systemic holism, an inseparable whole with the environment, interconnection within and without the organism.
Professor Fritz-Albert Popp, a well-known biophysicist at Kaiserslautern University, Germany, states that:"All living organisms emit certain electromagnetic waves. If they are in a healthy condition, they emit more. If not, they emit less. This electromagnetic emission is called biophotons."
Biophotonics is a rapidly increasing field of current scientific research and applications, based on the discovery of biophotons, a permanent, weak photon current emanating from all living systems. The biophoton emission reflects some, if not all, of the essential biological and physiological activities in biological systems. Energy and information can move about the body through other means than nerve transmission and hormonal regulation via quantum coherence.
Biophotonics provides a powerful tool for investigating these electromagnetic interactions. The theoretical approach requires holistic models of living systems, rather than local analytical models. Consequently, these new insights into living matter create a new basis of "integrative biophysics" that is concerned with the questions of regulation, communication and organization of biological systems.
REFERENCES
Adey, Ross. WHISPERING BETWEEN CELLS: ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS AND REGULATORY MECHANISMS IN TISSUE. MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 50
VA Medical Center & University School of Medicine Loma Linda, California
Becker, Robert O. (1992). Modern Bioelectromagnetics & Functions of the Central Nervous System. ISSSEEM Journal Volume 3 Number 1 1992
Chouinard, Edmond (2004). “Mind-Matter Entanglement with Geomagnetic Fields”. Also, “Mind-Matter Entanglement with Telepathic Body Jerks”. MS, private correspondence with this author, 11/05/2004.
Comby, B. and M. Bouchoucha & al. (1992). A new method for the measurement of tremor at rest. International Archives of Physiology, Biochemistry, and Biophysics.
Frohlich, H. 1988. “Biological Coherence in Response to External Stimuli”. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Gariaev, P.P. (1994), Wave Genome, Public Profit, Moscow, 279 pages [in Russian].
Gariaev, P.P. (1993) Wave based genome, Depp. VINITI 15:12. 1993, N 3092?93, 278pp. [in Russian].
Lipton, Bruce, Ph.D. (831) 454-0606, videotape, titled THE SCIENCE OF INNATE INTELLIGENCE : also "The Science of Innate Intelligence", "The Biology of Belief" and "Nature, Nurture and the Power of Love".
Miller R.A., Miller I. And Webb B (2002). “Quantum Bioholography”. JNLRMI, Vol. ! No. 3, Oct. 2002; www.emergentmind.org/MillerWebb3a.htm
Oschman, James L (2000). Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance.
Popp, F.-A., et al (1979). Electromagnetic Bio-Information. Munich: Urban and Schwarzenberg.
Popp, F-A. (1989) "Biologie de la Lumiere", Ed. Pietteur, Liege.
Pearsall, Paul (1998). The Heart’s Code. New York: Broadway Books.
Roffey Line, Leanne E. (1994) "The bioelectronic basis for "healing energies"; charge and field effects as a basis for complementary medical techniques", in M.J. Allen, S. F. Cleary & A.E. Sowers (eds.) Charge and Field Effects in Biosystems -- 4, pp. 480-497. Singapore: World Scientific. www.bioelektronika.com As of the time of this review over 150 studies of "healing energies" have been reported in which the energy parameters were specified and controlled. More than half demonstrate statistical significance, p < 0.05.
CHAOSOPHY 2006: PHOTONIC HUMAN
CHAOSOPHY 2006
PHOTONIC HUMAN
http://photonichuman.50megs.com
http://photonichuman.iwarp.com
new - http://photonichuman.iwarp.com
http://photonichuman.50megs.com
SOMA SOPHIA
Body Wisdom, Creativity & Psychic Energy
By Iona Miller, 10-2005
Introduction
"The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We can connect intentionally with well-being through our hearts, returning the human dimension to our technocratic society. We can align ourselves by implimenting changes in our beliefs to improve the flow of physical and psychic energy, creativity, the wisdom and well-being of our holistic selves as well as our quality of life. But how?
It is fashionable now, especially in energy medicine to talk of fields, and the field body in particular with a certain reverence. Fields are applied to the body for both diagnosis and treatment. Talk of the role of Consciousness in the journey of evolutionary wisdom is likewise popular. We speak in terms of fields, because that marks the boundary of our knowledge, the frontier of our observations and theories. But if there is a “consciousness field” science hasn’t discovered or recognized it.
As humans, we unceasingly pursue the manufacture of order out of chaos. It is not to be right, to prove ourselves right but just because we crave that understanding. We generate narratives, models, and myths. But that doesn’t mean that energy, consciousness, healing, or creativity is limited to those pathways in any way.
The truth behind the curtain is that we simply don’t know, though most practitioners have their heartfelt models about how it all works. Many stake their credibility on it. However, life, art and science imitate and are an extension of the technologies they use. But human beings rarely realize this cultural fact that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan).
Some experts will invoke the plenum (Comings), others extoll the Void (Bearden); some see a universe of sticky strings and membranes (Greene), others of chaotic attractors at the cosmological level (quantum chaos), a quantum handshake (Cramer; King), a plasma universe (Thornhill), density-matrix (Progogine), information field (Moles), toroid (Tenen; Young), or still others see an n-dimensional hologram (Miller; Gariaev).
Everyone chimes in on the chorus of mind/body buzzwords, and the nouveau version, Nonlocal Mind. Some speakers confound mutually-exclusive theories with one another, as if selecting “all of the above” as the answer to the Reality question. I can recall one well-meaning energy medicine researcher seriously trying to detect tachyons through his Ficus Benjamina! I was underwhelmed.
There are many dimensions of our consciousness, conditioning our experience also by how we think and believe. Observing our own selves in the mirror of the universe is a self-reflexive act. By definition, consciousness is always a scale-dependent collective event, whether conceived as an artifact of collective, cosmic, geomagnetic, biological, or quantum fields. But we are scientifically unsure it is a field phenomenon at all.
Consciousness studies have attracted the attention of mystics, philosophers, and scientists from many disciplines spanning new syntheses in physics, biology, neurology, psychology, energy medicine, and more. This multidisciplinary inquiry raises questions ranging from cellular to organismic perception to the subjective quality of our ordinary conscious and unconscious experiences, in addition to the phenomenology of transformation and transcendence.
Is there more to our consciousness than simple cognition? Should we use a capital C or small c when speaking of its dynamic? Does consciousness somehow relate to energy levels? The Chinese say the deeper the level of consciousness the higher the Qi energy it associates. They say the Tao gives rise to all forms, but has no form of its own; likewise, the Diamond Sutra says there is no form without void and no void without form. In cosmology, even cold dark matter is said to have structure at all magnitudes. Recent string theories propose dimensions larger than the universe.
Mystery and confusion enshroud our deepest experiences and observations. We don’t even know what ‘the self’ means much less the primal nature of the universe. We don’t clearly know how emotion differs from cognition, even when we perceive dissonance between them. Or we overlook the role of meta-emotion in choice, including worldview. Imagery plays a role in the models we create from our possibly hard-wired “love of truth.”
But it is a dramatic irony that emotion can also have distorting effects on cognition and reason, causing us to see what we want to believe (observer bias). Intentions and emotions arise together, but emotions compel us to pursue our goals even with colored perceptions.
Emotional investment can lead directly to episodes of goal obstruction rather than the emotional awareness of a comprehensive self in the world. Or, emotions, as perceptions of patterned changes in the body (William James), can help us toward greater understanding of self, others and world. When such perceptions are conscious, they qualify as emotions; unconscious unfelt emotions are feelings. Emotions condition our living experience of the present, the temporal stream of consciousness.
Every conscious state has an emotional quality; good or bad mood, energized or not. Existential feelings, (such as belonging, separation, power, control, being one with nature), can be bodily feelings and, at the same time, part of the structure of intentionality and the feeling of being.
Overt and concealed emotional experience permeates conscious life. Vigilance, emotional arousal, and attention mediate tensions associated with subjective states. They help us cope with dissonance, deploy intentional behavior, and stay motivated. Social bonds foster empathy, emotional/affective resonance with the internal distress of another individual and the intrinsic motivation to help relieve it. Empathic vision has to be part of the new paradigm that returns the human dimension to our plutocratic technocracy.
The more we learn, the clearer it becomes that we are clueless about the deep nature of reality. We might think or feel we do understand reality, either spiritually or scientifically, but it may be a conditioned illusion, a mirage of consensus. Why is it each new age or holistic health speaker or energy medicine practitioner has a pet theory of both physics and spirituality? Philosophically based, they can’t all be right. In the end, only a few will have accurately described the reality we inhabit.
Many traditions claim that when we experience pure consciousness that is the ground state of the universe. But there is nothing in the experience itself to substantiate evidence for anything beyond this experience being a state, physiological anomaly, or artifact of the nervous system, according to neurotheology research. Separate sorts of evidence are needed to highlight the experience itself from theories about it.
Comprehending our consciousness raises the fundamental question of the primal nature of the cosmos as well as our own nature. We evolved in cosmic and local environmental fields (like geomagnetic Schumann’s Resonance) that definitely condition our being and consciousness. The environment has molded our form.
Three forms of EM fields- wavefront, photon, and coupling mediator field, are able to exchange energy and information within each other immediately, as if they were one unique existent, or living in complete symbioses. They exist as a resonant coupling, represented in the quantum world as the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Complex information can be encoded in EM fields, as we all know from coding and decoding of television and radio signals. Even more complex information can be encoded in holographic images. DNA acts as a holographic projector of acoustic and EM information which contains the informational quintessence of the biohologram.
Some argue for a field of consciousness, morphic or dynamic self-organizing fields guiding organisms including ourselves. Some (Laszlo; Goswami) argue for an “informed Universe”, a Conscious Universe. Yet others (Deutsch) argue the universe is obsolete, the fabric of reality being a Multiverse.
We need a paradigm shift to effectively study consciousness: new concepts of matter, life and mind. Current theories of reality have gaps, and tend to overlap one another or treat existence at radically different scales. We can’t even reliably determine if Reality is smooth or lumpy.
Many naked assumptions are being made in science, which has become more like religion, a matter of faith and participant bias. When we look into the Abyss we find ourselves smiling back enigmatically.
We stand in Mystery, exemplified by the fact there is no consensus in physics, cosmology, consciousness studies, and certainly not metaphysics. Is information from the cosmic or subquantal realms really directly transducable? We don't even know what electricity is! Much less the definitive nature of a subquantal realm we cannot observe except by inferrence. We don’t know what energy is , except that it is "frozen mass and/or light" which another theory proves cannot 'exist', at least not objectively because all experience is subjective.
Too bad that for all our scientific pretentions to objectivity, we don’t have any viable understanding of either mass, light or time, either. This is compounded with notions of so-called dark matter and dark energy, more ‘smoke and mirrors’ explanations. It seems the great Light casts a long shadow. In holographic theory, that ‘shadow’ is related to the scalar field of the vacuum potential. Dark matter and energy are also implicated in structure formation, as is fractal dynamics.
There are continual revolutions in concepts and paradigms in physics, which later permeate society and beliefs mostly in a rather romanticised (often misunderstood) way. Life can be understood from the perspective of contemporary physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum theory or from metabolic domains like neurotransmitters, gene-expression (Rossi), liquid crystals (Ho), or dynamic cellular membranes (Lipton).
If we drop down another whole domain of observation from the juicy “wetware” described by chemistry and atomic structure, we enter the subatomic realm of quantum physics. At this level the behavior of matter, both organic and inorganic, is governed not by classical notions of cause and effect or even complex dynamics, but by those of quantum probability and the uncertainty principle, and perhaps quantum chaos.
Many theorists postulate quantum and subquantal imaginal fields for both the cosmos and ourselves. Some of these theories of interacting field bodies, (like Frolich’s quantum coherent photon fields), are more plausible than others. A model of the mind-body relationship is developed in which novel biophysical principles in genome function generate a dynamic possessing attributes consistent with both our psychophysical nature and consciousness.
One of the most promising coherent models (King, 2001) invokes a fractal link between neurodynamical chaos and quantum uncertainty. Transactional wave collapse (Cramer’s quantum handshake) allows this link to be utilized predictably by the excitable cell, in a way which bypasses and complements formal computation.
The formal unpredictability of the model allows mindbody to interact coherently with the brain, the predictability of consciousness in survival strategies being selected as a trait by organismic evolution. This theory may suggest quantum evolution is orchestrated by the information transduction of DNA.
Mindbody Wisdom
“Light and matter both behave like separate particles and also like waves. This . . . obliged us to abandon, on the plane of atomic magnitudes, a causal description of nature in the ordinary space-time system, and in its place to set up invisible fields of probability in multidimensional spaces.” ~ Wolfgang Pauli, Physicist
But, is consciousness a component of physics? Erwin Laszlo suggests that in an “informed universe”, everything that has ever happened is retained as holographic information in space and that it can be simultaneously downloaded from anywhere in the universe. So why aren’t we all “know it alls”? Because it exists enfolded or encoded or in potential? How can we embody that innate intelligence?
The problem of creativity is present in every field of science (Laszlo, 1995). He suggested that quantum-vacuum interactions play a significant role in the fields of cosmology, physics, biology and consciousness. Everyone wants to discuss the relationship of consciousness and cosmos at the scale or mode of their specialty.
Biologist Mae Wan Ho, Dr. James Oschmann, and cellular biologist Bruce Lipton speak of special energy relationships in the connective tissue (the skin, bones, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, various membranes covering major organs and linings of internal spaces), extracellular matrix, and cellular membranes of the body. Ordered water (Frost) is another popular theory.
Some speak of the heart and “belly brain” whose thoughts travel the Vagus highway (Porges). These are physical correlates of gut reactions, and perhaps psychism (Radin). Sentience, memory and intercommunication are distributed throughout the body; it may be our unconscious and holistic source of wisdom, Soma Sophia, for what can we know without our body and senses and their virtual analogs? We don’t have the metaphors to conceptualize otherwise.
This extracellular tissue acts like a dynamic liquid crystal, and is the basis of instantaneous (nonlocal) communication throughout the organism. Coherent energy is vital energy, arising from stored and mobilized coherent energy forms. Our systems are ultrasensitive to weak signals and can amplify them to global effects. Qi is called “coherent” energy. In addition to quantum vacuum interactions with the mind and cosmos, this ground substance of the body with ‘a mind of its own’ may be the basis of energy medicine and our well-being.
There is a dynamic, liquid crystalline continuum of connective tissues and extracellular matrix linking directly into the equally liquid crystalline cytoplasm in the interior of every single cell in the body (see Ho, 1997; Ho, 1998). Liquid crystallinity gives organisms their characteristic flexibility, exquisite sensitivity and responsiveness, thus optimizing the rapid, noiseless intercommunication that enables the organism to function as a coherent, coordinated whole. In addition, the liquid crystalline continuum provides subtle electrical interconnections which are sensitive to changes in pressure, pH and other physicochemical conditions; in other words, it is also able to register ‘tissue memory’. Thus, the liquid crystalline continuum possesses all the qualities of a ‘body consciousness’ that may indeed be sensitive to all forms of subtle energy medicines including acupuncture. (Mae Wan Ho)
In the quantum world, everything is in flux, including the subquantal virtual photons popping in and out of existence. The foamy Zero Point fluctuation determines the behavior of quantum systems likely by radiant EM fields. Radiation is absorbed from the zero-point background. The stability of matter itself is mediated by the zero point fluctuation phenomena. This hidden energy pool is invoked by new age physicists as plenum physics (Comings). And EM fields that correlate with matter are claimed to act as morphogenetic fields (Sheldrake).
This image of bubbling spacetime doesn’t exist in Einstein’s classical theory of relativity where space is absolutely smooth. Matter and energy have an equatable, quantifiable identity. But at the scale of atoms and electrons particles have no definite velocity and location. Einstein’s picture of reality breaks down at this smallest scale.
Quantum principles therefore dictate that spacetime is a seething foam. If gravity obeys relativity but matter obeys QM, clearly a theory of quantum gravity and a new description of quantum spacetime is required to resolve the conundrum. Are hyperspace and spacetime two views of the same domain or is the solution a whole new perspective on the deepest level of reality?
David Bohm (1980) expressed a view that the groundstate of human consciousness isbeyond neural states representing results of only activity related to aware consciousness. He proposed it may be very fast and related to pre-space, the implicate order behind space-time, to a creative factor, from which the whole phenomena and the space-time structure enfolds. These fast mental processes have characteristics common to microphysical processes (Bohm, 1986). Ultimately, thinking is related to the deep unconscious, the entire embedded organism.
These magical fields have been conceptualized because they work in the mathematics and the real world, but that doesn’t mean they are identical with it, necessarily. There are mathematical solutions for worlds that do not exist, imaginary realms. Likewise, string and M-theory have many solutions, most of which do not match our Reality.
They are a matter of faith, in some sense, whether we model them as EM fields, strong force fields, gravitational fields, strings, membranes, or subquantal scalar fields. The dogma of field theory has permeated the world of physics. Fields have taken on magical properties.
We can speak of a quantum vacuum “holographic information field”, but what is it; does it even exist as more than a mathematical abstraction? A recent Scientific American (Nov. 05), suggests solutions for holographic universes, but none of them match the observed flat, infinite nature of our own.
Fields or Holograms?
Maxwell is credited with establishing field theory. Maxwell combined a set of four field equations to describe electric and magnetic fields. These four simple and elegant equations describe behavior and provide means to calculate forces, but they shed no light on the actual physical mechanism of electric and magnetic fields and their interactions. As a result, we don't really know what is going on, and nobody seems to care.
Fields can materialize in empty space. Fields can bend and warp. Fields push and pull. Fields can change the speed of your clock. To help these magical fields we also have miraculous phantom particles and agents. We have photons for light and energy, gravitons for gravity, gluons for strong force, and super strings for string theory. They are all phantom because none of them were ever observed in nature or in any experiment. All but photons carry negative energy.
Yet, viable theories, such as the Holographic Concept of Reality don’t rely on field theory at all. In this concept, the 2-D holographic domain is one of information and resolution. The holographic domain conjures an extra dimension, projecting our apparently 3-D world. If the entire universe is a kind of hologram it may mean that even gravity is a persistent perceptual delusion operating only in higher dimensional spacetime.
The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a more fundamental reality. There is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
In this dynamic model there are no “things”, just energetic events. This “holoflux” includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all possible forms. All the objects of our world are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. This is the guiding matrix for self-assembly, and manipulating and organizing physical reality.
The holographic description is one of a frequency domain which doesn’t rely on fields to project itself. Each sample of that reality at any scale contains the information of the whole in greater or lesser resolution. The holographic model offers new options for resolution of profound mysteries such as quantum gravity and our hyperdimensional existence. We can speak of a self-organizing “holographic information field” but perhaps it is a misnomer. Does it even exist as more than a mathematical abstraction?
Criss-crossing patterns occur when two or more waves ripple through each other. In the transactional interpretation of quantum physics, waves of probability originate in the past, present, and future. Events manifest when waves from past and future interfere with each other in the present. That pattern creates matter and energy. The universe emerges from the rippling effects of immense numbers of criss-crossing interference waves. The geometry of the fields is more fundamental than the fields or emergent particles themselves.
Our brains mathematically construct ‘concrete’ reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension. This information realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality transcends time and space. Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images.
Interference patterns of waves can be visualized interacting like ripples on a pond. At the quantum level they create matter and energy as we perceive them, lifelike 3-dimenional effects. Consciousness and matter share the same essence, differing by degrees of subtlety or density. There is a strong correlation between modulations of the brain’s EM field and consciousness (Persinger,1987; McFadden, 2002). The universe is a continuously evolving, interactively dynamic hologram.
This “Holographic Concept of Reality” was first suggested by Miller, Webb, and Dickson in 1973, and later touted by David Bohm (1980), Ken Wilber (1982), Karl Pribram (1991), Michael Talbot (1991), and others. In this holistic theory, the Universe is considered as one dynamic holomovement, a grand Unity.
Research in Quantum Bioholography (Miller & Miller) strongly suggests that DNA is a holographic projector which manifests our embodiment through projection of biophotons and sound, a cymatic process known as acoustic holography. Fields are just ways of tuning subsystems.
Whatever this irreducible immaterial essence is, it a creative force recognized as identical with or an agent of Source. In heartful communities it has been linked with the groundstate of being (negentropic zero-point energy) by both physicists and psychologists.
Consciousness is multilayered. Our soulful intentionality can be a healing force for ourselves and others, coupling us whether or not we comprehend intellectually how that “works”. This “interactive excitement” may or may not have anything to do with the fields we attribute it to. Still, we all have a sense of inner direction that helps us know when we are on or off course in our life journey, whether we heed it or not.
We have suggested how the ethereal current concepts of the body have become, and certain ways ‘spirit’ embodies itself in matter. Mostly, the explanations depend on our level of observation, chemical, molecular, atomic, or subquantal. Because we lack a unified theory, clearly we have yet to observe the deepest levels of reality, which keep receding as our vision expands further toward the microscopic and macroscopic.
The Triple Union
“Unless bodies lose their corporeal state and unless bodies assume again their corporeal state, that which is desired will not be attained.”
~ Byzantine fragment, The Philosophical Egg
We are truly psychophysical beings, composed of bodymind and spirit, but even those who grasp the holistic concept often fail to live it from the heart. Arguably, Carl Jung (1911) was among the first to apply the recognized concepts of physical energy to show that libido, or psychic energy obeys the same laws and is not only analogous, but identical. Psychophysical and emotional energy is associated with instinctual biological drives.
Though psychic energy is neutral, it can be literalized, somatized, sexualized, emotionalized, socialized, mentalized, or spiritualized. Symptoms, thoughts, images, fantasies, beliefs, emotions, forms of expression or behaviour are all libidinal. Libido tends to flow inward or outward, a dynamic rhythm of introversion/extroversion. Jung attributed mana or personal power for a kind of shamanic or positive psychic contagion to those individuals who seem to have a charismatic influence on others.
Psychic energy tends to follow the same laws of physical conservation and entropy. Jung taught that within the psyche, libido: (1) creates entropy, (2) is generally conserved under the principle of equivalence, (3) flows through the psyche in channels that can be redirected, (4) can be either progressive or regressive, and (5) is transformed by symbols. In short, the psyche as, defined by Jung, is a complex system.
New physics, chaos theory, synergetics, and information theory describe our existence as complex dynamical systems. Entropy can only occur in system that is absolutely closed so no energy from outside can be fed into it. But the psyche is an open system, which exchanges energy and information with its environment and can be negentropic.
We can also have a negentropic influence on one another (Gladwell), perturbing, enlarging, creating new pathways and possibilities. Theoretically, behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" remains a metaphor. Yet, highly sociable or connective people often become revolutionary leaders, bringing others together with a new perspective, a broadened worldview.
Life includes chaos and order, good and bad experiences, even catastrophes that require us to adapt or die. The important thing is how we meet and react to chaos, finding ways to replenish our depletion. Observation of the subquantal domain reveals an inexhaustible realm of negentropy from which we can draw our psychophysical sustenance. When healthy, our entire system is designed to reduce entropy, in different scales and domains.
The same is true for the superorganism of society. We are irreducibly entangled with one another and the environment. We are healthy only to the extent we resonate with our environment. We maintain our integrity and identity as a dissipative system only because we are open to flows of energy, matter, or information from our environment (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984).
We live in a persistent delusion of separateness. However, we are all nonlocally connected in an ill-defined yet tangible way at the subatomic, individual, group and global level, connecting and diverging Psychic energy or libido is a psychosomatic phenomenon analogous to the paradoxical nature of energy/matter or wave/particle. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena.
We all experience visceral or gut reactions and know instinctively how our mental states affect our physical vitality, and vice versa. But often we loose the intimate relationship with our mindbody, with the source of our being, our aliveness, our passions. If we experience this flow at all, it ebbs and flows away. Our individual and collective creative potential remains largely unrealized.
How often do we pay attention to those vital signs, the innate wisdom of the body, inhabiting our minds rather than our flesh? We are increasingly not instinctual, but cultural, and we choose many of our behaviors for good or ill. We’re nearly all “sick and tired” of the way things are, but what do we do to change them?
We can learn simple techniques for self regulation, such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. Creativity, as an activity in several fields, brings many intrinsic health-promoting rewards. We can create new habits to help us cope with technocratic society that tone or recalibrate our systems and change our physical state. We all have to learn how to deal with personal and/or global catastrophe whether we want to or not.
The Golden Flesh
"The borders of our minds are ever shifting and many minds can flow into one another ... and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy" ~ William Butler Yeats
Do we actively value our psychic well being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?
Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.
When psychic energy is dammed up it manifests in unconscious or destructive ways, such as tension, withdrawl, alienation, anxiety, compulsions, depression, addictions, somatization, and suicidal tendencies. Some people learn early, even in the womb, that their world is not a safe place. Social patterns become maladaptive when an organism’s true needs are not met in a tangible, congruent way.
A confused person can react with pain, fear, hopelessness, cognitive dissonance, disturbed biorhythms, approach/avoidance, passive aggression, codependence, apathy, or self-defeating behavior patterns. Our biology and minds become confused. Fed enough negative self-talk the body will react with authentic symptoms, self-induced illness. This does not mean that all disease is self-inflicted nor that we are necessarily to blame for our ailments, in some version of “new age guilt”.
Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.
To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of mental and physical well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.
Soma Sophia
“To me it's very obvious that consciousness is not simply an epiphenomenon, not a byproduct of the brain; it's something that's pervading the whole universe. . . . Consciousness is not simply produced by a complex set of neurons. It's there, in the whole body, and in all of existence.” ~Ervin Laszlo, Philosopher
Sometimes we have to address the external realities of a situation and sometimes its spirit or essential nature. The same is true for our bodies and souls. Significance is extracted from the experiential responses of our whole being or soma significance, the felt-sense wisdom of the bodymind, which we can personify as Soma Sophia.
We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the gold, whether we call that essence health, art, flow, or inspiration. Psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.
That Source is the source of psychic energy, our libido, which becomes available for negentropic or entropic expression. Its tangible root lies within our very energy/matter as the plenum that science calls the vacuum fluctuation or zero-point energy, the groundstate of existence. It is a bit of the cosmos, of the universe that lies within our bodies, which are composed of elements cooked within the stars.
The body itself is the Hermetic vessel for the transformation of instinctual drives. That creative process can take place through trance, art, or meditation, or any combination of them. There are many techniques, which help us process pain, stress, trauma, or depression. Often therapies address higher levels of organization, often at the conceptual level, rather than reordering the physical core of distress, which inhibits our well-being.
A dynamic combination of focus, concentration and flow undergirds our conscious existence and how we relate to others and the world. In meditations such as biofeedback, Tai Chi or Yoga, we intentionally create dynamic changes in our psychophysiology. We temporarily drop our identification with the body only to reinhabit it with even more awareness or mindfulness. This is the artful life; creative fulfillment of our collective destiny.
The Field Body
“The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.” Laszlo
We can return to Nature and our nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory: physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs. We are a process of recursive self-generation. This continuum, which is our groundstate or creative Source, is directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment.
We are each a temple of living light. We arise from and are sustained by field phenomena, waves of biophotonic light and sound, which form our essential nature through acoustic holography (Miller & Miller), which is similar to the formation of matter via sound in cymatics. Cymatics is the science that describes how sound creates forms via resonance phenomena. Bioholography is thus a form of cymatics, acoustic holography.
Holography is the artform of producing virtual 3-D spatial images of objects. Its artifact is an ephemera, though the holographic plate which records the interference pattern is not. Projections are most compelling when they converge on the viewer. Virtuality is the condition of pure potential, non-actualization. Virtual images are created from diffracting lightwaves and reading the interference patterns.
But virtual particles from the vacuum potential (ZPE) pop in and out of our reality perturbing, even creating actual particles. Cybernetic virtuality involves interaction with a computer system to render certain potentialities actual within certain rules. In holographic systems, a body of fiction can potentially trigger future facts, opening new windows of reality. For example, rituals of quantum biofeedback, can manifest as nonlocal healing, whether through tangible interaction or the power of suggestion and placebo effect.
Our bodies are created from the virtuality of scalar field interactions with our 4-D reality of this spacetime. The mechanism is by projection via our DNA by biophotons or coherent light produced within the body. This coherent light transduces itself into radio waves, which carry sound as information that decodes the 4-D form as a material object, such as ourselves.
The study of this phenomenon of light and sound forming an organism using DNA as a holographic projector is called quantum bioholography (Miller). This process is true not only of formation of the body but also extends into its maintenance, a continual process of creation and renewal.
Light and sound carry the information that shapes us and our environment. In a sense we are essentially “frozen” light. Universe congeals within us each moment in a unique way, never to be repeated. Science now tells us this is so, that each of us extends nonlocally far beyond the skin boundary through our embedded field body (Pribram/Bohm, Wan-Ho).
Nature works through self-organization at the creative edge of chaos (Gleick, Peat), and so do we. Complexity is the fine line between chaos and order, "a chaos of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either" (Waldrop, 1992, p. 293). The creative edge of chaos is a transition phase.
Self-reinforcing, autopoeitic morphogenesis creates specific forms. Yet a meta-theory eludes us. We still don’t know exactly how that works; there is currently no consensus in quantum physics at the level of the unified field, but we have many working theories, which help us grope our way toward understanding. Likewise, there is no generally accepted paradigm in consciousness studies. Ambiguity surrounding our psychophysical Mystery also shows up in the split between conventional allopathic and energy medicine.
Mystics suggest even more subtle connections of soul and spirit through time and space, evolutionary intelligence. Even without a mystical approach, we can rest and refresh ourselves by aligning our intentionality with the very fabric of spacetime. Consciously participating in this universal process helps heal and integrate our mindbodies, psyche and matter. We can learn to self-soothe cumulative daily irritations by practicing self-regulation.
Cosmos resonates within each of us, but we have lost touch with that due to electromagnetic pollution and the distracting demands of modern life. But we can rediscover this integral context in which we are embedded as a field of timeless, radiant abundance. It is plausible that spacetime is a plenum rather than an empty vacuum. It abides not just outside us in the depths of space but within the fabric of our being. We are pulsating dynamos of cells, organs, and dynamic systems.
We can learn to wrap our minds around this quantum reality that we are not separate from the ongoing process of creation, even if an energetic field of information defies detection. The source of creation always flows through rhythmic pulsation or waves of energy/matter, perhaps even dark matter. The manifestation of each so-called particle of our being is orchestrated through a self-organizing process (Penrose/Hameroff).
This dance is a harmonic continuum from the smallest to the largest scales, permeating all domains of assembly and observation, subquantum, quantum, molecular, chemical, even cultural, global, and cosmological. The evolution of our dynamic system obeys universal laws. Likewise our behaviors flow into manifestation from our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, including our self-image.
By opening to system dynamics we can reorganize away from the entropic, reductionistic, destructive habit patterns that plague our species. We can make stress-reducing negentropic choices for structural and psychological adjustment, which improve our quality of life. Integration is a synergistic process rooted in primordial bodymind consciousness.
The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. Research suggests activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the DC field of the organism (Oschmann; Becker). Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes.
Hypnosis suggests the fabric of the body also helps store our memories, embodying our triumphs and traumas. Ideomotor signaling (Rossi) can elicit revelations about ourselves not available from our conscious minds. There is a reciprocal action between our inchoate perceptions, thoughts and the chemistry of our bodies, and therefore our current and future states.
Jung (1932) identified at least five kinds of drives: hunger, activity, sexuality, creativity, and reflection. But he gradually came to conceive of "libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy,” a more or less quantitative concept, which should not be defined in qualitative terms, though libido includes drives, love, desire, aspirations. The important point is that this energy is never destroyed, but flows throughout the psyche activating now this part and now another.
Psychology describes psychic contents, including the role of the body, with psychic means. Psyche, the realm of soul -- is subject and object, medium and message, source and goal; there is no relative point of observation outside the human psyche. When we get down to it, we find only unprovable but assumed beliefs, which seem to work and therefore seem meaningful. We tend to have experiences that confirm our view or perspective of the world.
Physics, by contrast, pursues material reality both via and, to the greatest degree possible, beyond the human experience, but it also uses the mental medium in both its conceptions and inventions. All models of reality are “soft” technologies, but our beliefs and worldview condition the reality we experience. Just as matter is in a constant process of redefinition, so too must psyche and spirit be continuously redefined.
The psychic energy that directs and motivates the personality is called libido, which is simply a generic form of psychic energy which can be redirected or "canalized" into both sexual and non-sexual activities. Psychic energy balances the energy flowing between spirit and instinct. This non-specific energy can consciously be deployed and channeled for self-transformation.
Go with the Flow
Research has shown (Csikszentmihalyi) that self-teaching is strongly correlated with quality of life and the ability to experience refreshing concentration and flow in ordinary activities. Maslow called this quality self-actualization, first as an emergent property which can becomes a stabilized steady-state of personality. The “good life” is not only enjoyable and growth promoting, it reduces the sum total of entropy in the world.
Yet finding flow in our busy lives can be elusive. Flow is neutral, as a source of psychic energy, focusing attention and motivating action. It can be used for constructive or destructive experiences. The more we allocate to the negative, the less we have available for the positive. So we need to become jealous of our spare energy, spending it wisely as our psychophysical organism tells us through bodytalk and feelings.
The amount of energy available to our consciousness and will varies. We can respond to stress by being active rather than reactive. Self-regulation means scanning, listening to, and intentionally recalibrating the mindbody. It requires focusing and concentration our attention, then “letting go”, seemingly releasing all effort, self-accepting, non-striving mindfulness.
Some suggest there is a Platonic field (Symposium) that restores our energy. It is compatible with the description of stages of pure consciousness described by the Yoga Sutras and other Eastern traditions (Buddhism, Taoism, etc.). The secret of the universe lies within “empty” space, which turns out to be a virtual plenum of potential. It is a nourishing essence, which feeds our psychophysical being.
Non-locality is regarded as accepted fact by physicists. They say that the twin photons are aware of each other instantaneously even if they are at opposite ends of the Universe. Laszlo says this new concept has primacy over matter. Puthoff says that matter is driven by this energy source (ZPE). And so is our matter. The interconnections among EM fields are not the external interactions described by Maxwell's four equations, the interconnection is "in the deep" inside those interacting fields, our own fields.
Inexhaustible psychic energy is the single most distinguishing trait of self-teaching individuals. Most creative people are self-taught, often achieving breakthroughs by investing surplus energy playing with the apparently trivial. No matter the subject, each of their new little discoveries parlays into excitement at the moment of discovery, in a self-reinforcing reward. These rewards build motivation to continue.
Have the “creatively gifted” learned a subtle secret for drawing on the essence of the cosmos by investing in their curiosity and delight? Some learn how to draw this surplus energy from the psychic well early in life and drink deeply through their attempts to understand, invent, express and solve problems. They manifest a determination to participate as fully as possible in life.
Self-actualizers pay more attention to what is going on around them with surplus energy to invest their attention in things or people for their own sake, rather than for strokes or gain. Most people hoard their attention in self-absorption, material or emotional advantage rather than growth, empathy and compassion.
Most guard their energy for immediate role or stress responses, or become bound by those factors, numb or apathetic. Those less concerned with themselves actually have more psychic energy to experience life. Everyday giving is an antidote for self-obsession and negativity.
It’s a free-floating type of attention pursued without recognition or support, easily captured temporarily by any subject or interest, rather than strictly tied to goals and ambitions. Wonder, novelty, surprise, awe, and transcendence are boundary breaking allowing us to move beyond ignorance, fear and prejudice. Often this experience becomes a valuable element of later full-blown realizations, new synthesis.
We can cultivate this quality and it’s intrinsic reward by 1) doing whatever needs to be done, even the routine, with concentrated attention and skill, rather than inertia, and 2) approaching them with the care it takes to make a work of art.
Instead of using our leisure energy wastefully we can learn to direct it from passive activity toward new experiences, which only become interesting once we devote attention to them. Time management and husbanding of psychic energy can be directed to create increased enjoyment of life, here and now. In flow we forget ourselves, rather than wallowing in the apathy, worry and boredom of unmet personality needs. Life is too short to remain depressed or exhausted.
We need time and psychic energy to pursue our curiosity. So, we have to be alert for those issues and people who would negatively feed on us, draining, subverting, or sabotaging our creative flow. We can complain, reflect on our stuckness, or actively invest our psychic energy in harmonious relations and goals, creating positive feedback. Having clear goals helps us focus and concentrate, whether we achieve them, or not.
Owning our own actions helps us focus desires and priorities for an improved life.
The self-motivated individual can concentrate more or less at will. Interest leads to focus and focus leads to interest. We take over ownership of our lives by learning to direct psychic energy toward our intentions. There is more consistency between inner desires and outer experience. When we learn to love what we have to do, the vector or arc of our development shifts.
When we learn to control attention, we learn to control experience, and therefore the quality of our lives. We invest less psychic energy in painful events and draining resentments, and more in self-affirming and rewarding activities, enjoying them for the control we acquire over our own attention. This simple process can lead to great leaps in transformation, and is also the basis of mystical practice simply for its own sake.
If you learn to love your fate, it reduces entropy not only in your own consciousness but for those you contact. In contact with source, you don’t have to feed on their energies in a negative way. We feel even better when creatively connected to something greater or more permanent than ourselves; it gives us energy. We can even find joy fighting a losing battle for a good cause.
Being in THE ZONE
Folklore has it that artists and sportsmen such as Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird can enter a state of consciousness where they are actively entangled with their surroundings and perhaps even the future. In tennis, the body must be in motion somehow anticipating trajectories even before the serve in order to return the volley. Surfing or boarding are also good examples. Gamers report a similar flow for their virtual states.
Likewise, artists enter a flow state in both inspiration and artistic production or performance. Artists, too, are often accused of anticipating expressing a symbolic change in collective culture, whether they are consciously aware of it, or not. They seem to have an uncanny knack for symbolizing the zeitgeist of the time.
Musicians speak of their own kind of telepathy among one another, especially when jamming or improvising. Someone playing a spirited fast musical break knows the flow is rolling on and at the same time they are aware of the details, although they couldn’t consciously decide each action.
Sudden alarm experiments explore how dominant field dynamics can happen faster than consciousness can respond, using purely internal physical mechanisms. Part of the role of consciousness as an overseer is to allow the conscious periphery to have immediate access in the case of a threatening signal.
We all know we can react with lightning speed automatically while only dimly aware of it. We are aware of it sufficiently to anticipate and react to save our lives. The critical advantage of subjective conscious comes in, even if it is almost subliminal and not consciously thought through.
The BITZ experiments explore the existence of entanglements beyond the human body. Books have been written on 'Being In The Zone' (BITZ). Most of us cannot repeat these super-athletic experiments. But, then, how many of us can smash an atom? We must trust the honesty and ethics of atom-smashing scientists. We just need a measure of BITZ that is not too subjective.
All of these examples are, in some sense direct verification of entanglement on a conscious level. But in practical terms we can still learn what qualities and practices lead to the flow state. In this subjective sense, BITZ has already been experimentally verified; indeed, we are all entangled with our environment, some more actively than others, but only a few can intentionally exploit it, though many have experienced it by accident or intent.
What we need to learn is how to deploy this capacity for creativity and/or healing. Anyone can learn through practices that require concentration in one area to translate that capacity to other areas, such as creativity. Certain orientations and qualities are involved and most of these can be adopted or developed. Many of them include the body, through kinesthetic muscle memory or other physical expressions that take learned behavior and put it on “auto-pilot”, making it seem virtually effortless.
Many activities elsewhere described as BITZ are actually products of a light trance state, such as flow state people report while driving a car. Others, such as sports and music, explicitly require skill development to achieve fluency.
We can most easily apply ourselves to those things, which inspire a passion in us, those things we cannot help but do because the drive is strong, so motive and opportunity are there. But if a person has no passion, creative flow will remain elusive. With passion you can always learn the techniques to accomplish your creative goals. Still, many wrestle with the experience of trying to maintain vitality, passion, and inspiration while getting caught up in the daily grind of paying the bills and other mundane necessities
Reports of solutions include:
“It's a matter of intention. I try to make a conscious choice every day to do everything the best I can. For me, this has been a self sustaining and exponentially growing energy source. The harder I work at doing things well, the better I do things, the better I feel about doing things, the more energy I have to work on doing things well, and so on, and so on.”
“For me, it's a matter of being Present, no matter what my external circumstances are. The loss of vitality comes not with the grinding work, but from the fact that we resist Life while doing that work. The only solution is to surrender to the moment, be present with what you are doing, and accept whatever comes as a result. Sometimes what comes won't be so pleasant, but as long as you accept that, then more and more often it will be pleasant things that come your way. “
“I feel like we can get through anything if we assert that it's only temporary. It's too easy to get dragged down by the slave paradigm, especially when you've got a higher mission you'd rather be tending to. We need to be that much stronger and clearer about our Great Work on this planet to get through the daily grind and seemingly endless servitude to the inane.”
There are two ways of looking at our predicament, one crippling, one liberating:
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: psychospiritual reality and mundane patterns are at odds with each other, bringing stress and a feeling of self-betrayal. This splits intent and energy, divides and conquers by lack of wholeness. Thwarted by a feeling of not living in sincere harmony with your true self Power (psychic energy) leaks away.
METANARRATIVE: realize that mundane activities are a result of will or intentionality, and that you are manifesting the mundane patterns that you see before you, either by conscious will or by default. The life you've created can manifest as a song, a poem, an art project, a great disovery. When you chose to make it surface, your full power and as a manifestation engine emerges.
Flow in intellectual and spiritual processes emerges from removal of blocks to creativity (such as competing activities and focus; poor self-image; poor judgment, thinking and work habits; conventionality, mediocrity; numbness; intolerance of complexity or solitude) and certain positive attitudes and behavior patterns, such as commitment to vision.
The most often cited examples facilitating creativity include the following: fluency, flexibility, sensitivity to problems, problems, originality, curiosity, openness to feelings and the unconscious, motivation, persistence and concentration, ability to think in images, ability to toy with ideas, ability to analyze and synthesize, tolerance of ambiguity, discernment and selectivity, ability to tolerate isolation, creative memory, background of fundamental knowledge, incubation, anticipation of productive periods, ability to think in metaphors, aesthetic orientation, etc.
If your desire to be creative is strong enough, nothing will prevent you from applying yourself if you have passion. Can the flow state be far behind? It is a form of transcendence, whether it comes through the physical flow of the body, the conceptual high of the A-ha state, the absorption and aesthetic satisfaction of the artistic process, or any conditions, which promote emotional flow. The latter might range from love, to the high encountered learning from one’s mentors, to the perception that Cosmos is facilitating your intention in a given direction, though the latter is a synchronicity, flow with the environment.
In trance states the process is largely automatic and unconscious; no “learning” is required. Trance possession and ‘white line fever’ arise from the same level, while the former includes a transpersonal experience. In artistic fervor the doors of the subconscious swing wide and there is mixing of the inner subjective world with the object world of tangible expression.
In pure creativity, including nonlocal healing and the bliss of meditative states, focus and concentration are consciously applied directly with intent. Trance, art and creativity are all forms of transcendence of the ego and connection with deeper than conscious levels of existence.
Exercising one’s talents helps remove the blocks mundane life would like to introject. Fluency, a creative ritual, a workstation, and making time available help increase the drive needed to carry a project to completion. Intentionality and a conducive environment increase the probability creativity will emerge.
But the secret is that connections or open channels to primordial SOURCE tend to provide a degree of flow, self-realization, or illumination. So, the real key to creativity in all its forms seems to be an enhanced capacity to connect tangibly with source bringing back some material or immaterial boon from that inspiration.
Conclusions
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries of the groundstate of energy/matter, consciousness, awareness and flow. It will likely be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present-is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, says Maxwell.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.
Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlate of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.
According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.
The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.
[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff
Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.
But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.
REFERENCES
http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/MaeWanHo/acupunc.html
*************************
CONNECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS:
Coherent, Psychophysical, Quantum and Otherwise
By Iona Miller, Nov 1, 2005
“To me it's very obvious that consciousness is not simply an epiphenomenon, not a byproduct of the brain; it's something that's pervading the whole universe. . . . Consciousness is not simply produced by a complex set of neurons. It's there, in the whole body, and in all of existence.” ~Ervin Laszlo, Philosopher
Quantum Consciousness?
The paths of Wolfgang Pauli, coming from the advanced edge of physics, and Carl Jung, from the advanced edge of the psyche, crossed with interesting results for their generation. Pauli came away rededicated to unifying psyche and matter, to finding "the irrational in matter and the subjective in physics" and convinced of "the resurrection of spirit in matter." Jung came away with the idea of acausal connections -- meaningful coincidences -- an idea developed with the help of Pauli.
This collaboration raised the question of what it means to live in a world of where synchronicity is part of our experience. Each of the physical and psychological theories that have arisen since have also addressed implications about our existence and interconnections, not just theories. It is quite different to be essentially an ethereal wave-front in space than a solid meat body. But we rarely even conceive of ourselves this way, much less wrap our minds around the implications. We live in a fantasy of solid objects and conscious awareness.
Consciousness is more than simple conscious awareness or self awareness. It’s ALL in your mind, but not necessarily merely in your head. Consciousness is distributed throughout the entire body. Though the brain is associated with the nervous system it is embedded in body consciousness and coupled to it.
Body and mind mutually inform and conditon one another as mindbody, or the psychophysical organism. The connective tissue of the body has its own form of coherent communication by conductance. The connective tissue acts a dynamic liquid crystal array, which conveys information many times faster than the nervous and hormonal systems. It is the basis of gut feelings and holistic responses.
The universe is literally holistically contained within the mindbody and is the context of mindbody. Both physicists and mystics now tell us that there is noTHING “out there.” The Vedas said centuries ago that it’s all “mindstuff” and modern science is now confronting that. Wave forms and particles derive their energy from the inside of space. That energy is dynamic, always interacting from the cosmic to subquantal realms.
"The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of Space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. It extends unbroken from star to star; and when a molecule of hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the medium receives the impulses of these vibrations, and after carrying them in its immense bosom for several years, delivers them, in due course, regular order, and full tale, into the spectroscope of Mr. Huggins, at Tulse Hill.", declared James Clerk Maxwell.
The vacuum energy or Zero Point Energy (ZPE) can be viewed as the Qi energy field according to the ancient Chinese Qi theory or worldview. In the very beginning there was Wu (Nothing or Void), then there was "Hun Tun" (the Great Chaos), later formed the "Tai Chi", then formed the "Tai Shih" (the Great Beginning) permeated with Qi.
The Qi then splitted into two, the Yin and Yang two complementary Qi forces. The interactions of the Yin Qi and Yang Qi evolves all things including Life. To the Chinese, Everything has Qi. Everything functions through Qi. It is the Qi that keeps us alive. To the Chinese, Life is not the end product of an evolutionary process, rather Life Force Qi's existence necessitates Physics and Chemistry being what it is.
Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness. Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.
But physicists and metaphysicists seem to talk about Consciousness as a primal essence, and consciousness as a neurological state of an organism, including human. Consciousness is equated by mystically-oriented physicists with the very essence of cosmos beyond energy/matter, residing within us as the groundstate of Being. The reductionistic view is that it is just a sequence of awareness interacting with the environment which can become complex as self-awareness arises; hierarchically stratified neural processes.
But no one seems to really know what Consciousness or consciousness is, anymore than they know what electricity actually is. For some it is cosmic, for others the most mundane result of our brain functions. The distinctions between so-called objective and subjective consciousness is now moot. Physics has shown there is only subjectivity, though facts can exist.
"Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness," says David Chalmers, a philosophy professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. "The question is what kind of explanation that will give you.
Chalmers wants more than correlation, alledging we want explanation: how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery.” The converse question would be how and why does Consciousness give rise to cosmos? The problem is, Consciousness and consciousness seem to be irreducible, try as we might.
According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is irreducible. It’s an aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass. According to this view, consciousness is primal.
A theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world. In another theory the boson involved is conformal gravity, aka dark energy, aka the vacuum, aka zero point energy. Anything that gets entangled (electrons, photons, etc) builds up consciousness. There are other theories of entanglement, coherence and decoherence.
Many say QM has the look and feel of consciousness. There are several types of explanation of quantum state reduction, an occasion of experience: Copenhagen (conscious observation causes collapse), multiple worlds (each possibility branches off to form a new universe), decoherence (interaction with environment contaminates superposition - though it doesn’t really cause reduction), some objective threshold for reduction (objective reduction - OR), or quantum gravity.
Popular QM notions seem to fall into two categories:
Copenhagen-esque--"old school" explanations which dwell on quantum theory's non-intuitiveness and in fact seem to celebrate the "leap of logic" needed to accept the observer-based wave-function collapse postulate;
New Agey Utopian idealism--"quantum theory is strange, consciousness is strange, therefore, consciousness is explained by quantum theory", entanglement is proof that "all points in the universe are connected by some underlying ineffable thing, so can't we all just get along", etc.
Quantum theory will probably play a role in explaining consciousness and its relationship
to the brain. In some theories (Greenfield), mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, while consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass. The electrical activity of the brain makes a `model' of a self in the world and our understanding of physical reality requires this `model' to exist `in the dark'. We don’t know if it’s basis is quantum or complexity, or some combination of quantum uncertainty and chaotic sensitivity.
There may be a link between chaotic sensitivity and quantum entanglement to create the ‘trick’ of consciousness (King, 2005). Synapses are making a potential energy landscape. High energy chaos explores the full phase space and attention lowers the energy until the dynamic either enters an existing attractor (recognition) or the system bifurcates to form a new attractor (new learned stimulus). It's a form of energy minimization.
Is there a link between global brain states and quantum phenoemena? Promising hypotheses link Freeman's model of chaos and bifurcation, Cramer's idea of transactional quantum entanglement, and Pribram's idea of the holographic brain and newer ideas of stochastic resonance and more theoretical ideas of quantum chaos. All these processes can interact together to make a viable basis for intentional subjective consciousness.
The brain is full of oscillations. The oscillations are chaotic in the time domain but holographic spatial oscillation in the space domain. Neural systems identify the oscillations that are in phase and they become the process that stands out from the out of phase noise. The in phase waves cause synaptic adaption and learning. When the brain goes from 'hunting' to 'eureka' there is a transition from chaotic out of phase excitation to phase correlated excitation.
This is the same process that happens in a quantum measurement, when we can only measure energy as frequency and can't directly sample wave amplitude of a quantum, so have to let enough beats pass to get an accurate frequency and thus don't know the time exactly. This is the uncertainty relation. The two processes are homologous.
Coherent oscillations in neurons are both the consequence of coupled areas and the cause of them over time. Chaotic excitations can, of course, be in or out of phase . It is the non-linearities which enable a number of harmonic oscillators to become mode-locked into phase or phase multiplicity, so non-linearity is the basis of all these phase locking phenomena, too (King).
According to Walter Freeman, "Consciousness may well be the subjective experience of this recursive process of motor command, reafference and perception. If so, it enables the brain to plan and prepare for each subsequent action on the basis of past action, sensory input and perceptual synthesis. In short, an act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stiinuIus. It is a step in a trajectory by which brains grow, reorganize themselves and reach into their environment to change it to their own advantage."
This `model' is an intellectual abstraction and in reality it is just spatial and temporal relationships between each piece of electrical activity. Every quanta is in the form of matter waves except at state reduction. The electromagnetic fields permeating neurons and synapses consist of real and virtual photons, in their wave states, and each of these are disturbances in the photon field.
Quantum Healing
Our experience of reality is based on mind and observation. Only our mental impressions, sensory filters, language categories, and concepts make us perceive things: things as separate from ourselves, the I and the not-I. But we are seamlessly welded to the Universe at the most fundamental levels. We cannot scientifically or spiritually distinguish ourselves from the subquantum ground of BEING, even if we feel separate or alienated.
But who among us has successfully abandoned the tendency to conceptualize observations as things, and compound that observation with qualitative attributions? We have experiences and later we say it was this or that. Some forms of meditation are based on disidentification from all aspects of existence and nominalism, neither this nor that.
But most of us still can’t wrap our quantum minds around it as a steady state of perception. Though science has extended our sight to the subquantal and cosmological levels, we still think provincially from the human scale of our natural senses. Our logic and metaphors are based in the senses. But our outer life comes from the invisible inner world, where we are literally in resonance with the Cosmos.
Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM). The world is quantum mechanical and we must learn to perceive it as such, but we don’t need to understand that to experience nonlocal healing, any more than we need to comprehend internal combustion to drive. Even physicists have a tough time reconciling what they know about the deep nature of reality with their mundane experience in the world of things.
So how does that mind and its underlying mechanisms relate to or produce consciousness? Is consciousness a quantum process, or does it underlie all process? Neurologists tell us it is a physical matter of wetware in the skull. However, the most we can say at the molecular level is that there are correlates of consciousness. The irreducible precursors of consciousness and matter are built into the universe. They just ARE, unified holistic process.
At the finest levels of observation, physicists contend the distinction between mind and matter becomes as paradoxical as the distinction between energy and matter, life and death (organic/inorganic). Quantum mechanics strongly suggests the Universe is mental. The substratum of everything, including our experience of being, has this mental character.
Healing theories, particularly nonlocal models, have drawn from theories in both new physics and consciousness studies, often compounding and confounding both disciplines. They mix levels of observation in theories, which seem to be largely conditioned by the favoritism of pet projects; thus each theory is generally associated with only one or two “brand” names of researchers.
Healers have been quick to parrot many of these ideas that support what they feel they have observed in intentional healing acts, or what validates the tenets of their school of practice. Often their comprehension of the scientific basis of the argument is slim to none. But this attribution is used to “explain” the phenomenon, with enough misapprehension to preserve the Mystery. However, it isn’t this confusion that makes it so. Are the enigmatic qualities of the quantum realm actually the same as the unity, coherence and other enigmatic qualities of the conscious one? The jury is still out.
There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling space-time. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam.
Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating energy field. This realization transforms our perception of life. Living systems constantly interact with the quantum vacuum, also called zero-point energy, vacuum fluctuation, or subspace. Wave-packets of matter are in a subtle interactive dance with the underlying vacuum field, a vast network of intimate interactions, extending into our biosphere and even Cosmos. Mind and matter both evolve from the cosmic womb of space.
According to Laszlo: “The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.”
He goes on to propose a poetic metaphor: “Everything that goes on in our mind could leave its wave- traces in the quantum vacuum, and everything could be received by those who know how to "tune in" to the subtle patterns that propagate there.” In a mechanistic throwback, he likens it to an antenna picking up signals from a transmitter that contains the experience of the entire human race, reminding strongly of Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious.
Worldviews color our perceptions of our Reality, even in science. Concepts are effective theories, useful not true. The universe is immaterial, mental and spiritual. The mind observes, but it doesn’t really observe “things”. It has a way of attributing certain qualities, subjective qualities and dynamics, to everything, even so-called “objective observation. This multisensory narrative becomes the content of our memories, how we remember what happens.
Our minds have a tendency to come up with reasons, whys and wherefores, for things as they appear to us. It is part of our survival mechanisms. However, physics has proven, through relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality, and Godel’s theorem, that there can be no objectivity, no order or creativity without chaos.
The mind produces narratives. Archetypal forces act as lenses that cause us to cherish certain beliefs, which lead to a class of thoughts, and patterns of emotions and behaviors. It doesn’t matter if you come down on the side of preferring order or chaos, nature has her way.
Ultimately, spontaneous or natural healing seems to by-pass this entire complex system, overriding our conscious perspectives in many cases. We may not “believe” in paradoxical healing, but it can still “work”, effecting psychophysical change at a deeper level through the emotional mind and through Mystery.
Healing is irrational. Perhaps the question we should really be asking is what causes us to imagine we are dissociated from a state of optimal health. This doesn’t mean our bodies will always work flawlessly. Chaos theory reveals that many systems in the body are self-organizing and regulated by stochastic processes that are naturally chaotic in nature. Chaos actually helps us reorganize, recalibrate our metabolism.
We can discuss it in terms of nested structured duality, superfluids, or an array of vortices, or a microtubule bank, or a dendritic cluster, hyper-neurons, glia and gap junction networks, or an entangled or collapsing wave function; still, we're merely talking about resonance between arrays -- patterns. This perspective leads to consideration of a Holographic concept of reality, the frequency domain, David Bohm’s implicate order.
Panpsychism aside, every bit of electrical activity is unaware of itself, is unaware of every other bit of electrical activity, and is unaware of all their relationships. This raises the question: why does consciousness exists at all and why is it a unity? What is synchronicity but a feedback between perceived reality and the emerging train of events. This is consistent with the transactional interpretation in which there is a handshaking between past emitters and future absorbers.
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries and it will be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
Conclusions
"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present - is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, said Maxwell.
Of course, that was then and this is now.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.
Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So, clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlates of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.
According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.
The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.
[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/ unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff
Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.
But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.
PHOTONIC HUMAN
http://photonichuman.50megs.com
http://photonichuman.iwarp.com
new - http://photonichuman.iwarp.com
http://photonichuman.50megs.com
SOMA SOPHIA
Body Wisdom, Creativity & Psychic Energy
By Iona Miller, 10-2005
Introduction
"The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We can connect intentionally with well-being through our hearts, returning the human dimension to our technocratic society. We can align ourselves by implimenting changes in our beliefs to improve the flow of physical and psychic energy, creativity, the wisdom and well-being of our holistic selves as well as our quality of life. But how?
It is fashionable now, especially in energy medicine to talk of fields, and the field body in particular with a certain reverence. Fields are applied to the body for both diagnosis and treatment. Talk of the role of Consciousness in the journey of evolutionary wisdom is likewise popular. We speak in terms of fields, because that marks the boundary of our knowledge, the frontier of our observations and theories. But if there is a “consciousness field” science hasn’t discovered or recognized it.
As humans, we unceasingly pursue the manufacture of order out of chaos. It is not to be right, to prove ourselves right but just because we crave that understanding. We generate narratives, models, and myths. But that doesn’t mean that energy, consciousness, healing, or creativity is limited to those pathways in any way.
The truth behind the curtain is that we simply don’t know, though most practitioners have their heartfelt models about how it all works. Many stake their credibility on it. However, life, art and science imitate and are an extension of the technologies they use. But human beings rarely realize this cultural fact that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan).
Some experts will invoke the plenum (Comings), others extoll the Void (Bearden); some see a universe of sticky strings and membranes (Greene), others of chaotic attractors at the cosmological level (quantum chaos), a quantum handshake (Cramer; King), a plasma universe (Thornhill), density-matrix (Progogine), information field (Moles), toroid (Tenen; Young), or still others see an n-dimensional hologram (Miller; Gariaev).
Everyone chimes in on the chorus of mind/body buzzwords, and the nouveau version, Nonlocal Mind. Some speakers confound mutually-exclusive theories with one another, as if selecting “all of the above” as the answer to the Reality question. I can recall one well-meaning energy medicine researcher seriously trying to detect tachyons through his Ficus Benjamina! I was underwhelmed.
There are many dimensions of our consciousness, conditioning our experience also by how we think and believe. Observing our own selves in the mirror of the universe is a self-reflexive act. By definition, consciousness is always a scale-dependent collective event, whether conceived as an artifact of collective, cosmic, geomagnetic, biological, or quantum fields. But we are scientifically unsure it is a field phenomenon at all.
Consciousness studies have attracted the attention of mystics, philosophers, and scientists from many disciplines spanning new syntheses in physics, biology, neurology, psychology, energy medicine, and more. This multidisciplinary inquiry raises questions ranging from cellular to organismic perception to the subjective quality of our ordinary conscious and unconscious experiences, in addition to the phenomenology of transformation and transcendence.
Is there more to our consciousness than simple cognition? Should we use a capital C or small c when speaking of its dynamic? Does consciousness somehow relate to energy levels? The Chinese say the deeper the level of consciousness the higher the Qi energy it associates. They say the Tao gives rise to all forms, but has no form of its own; likewise, the Diamond Sutra says there is no form without void and no void without form. In cosmology, even cold dark matter is said to have structure at all magnitudes. Recent string theories propose dimensions larger than the universe.
Mystery and confusion enshroud our deepest experiences and observations. We don’t even know what ‘the self’ means much less the primal nature of the universe. We don’t clearly know how emotion differs from cognition, even when we perceive dissonance between them. Or we overlook the role of meta-emotion in choice, including worldview. Imagery plays a role in the models we create from our possibly hard-wired “love of truth.”
But it is a dramatic irony that emotion can also have distorting effects on cognition and reason, causing us to see what we want to believe (observer bias). Intentions and emotions arise together, but emotions compel us to pursue our goals even with colored perceptions.
Emotional investment can lead directly to episodes of goal obstruction rather than the emotional awareness of a comprehensive self in the world. Or, emotions, as perceptions of patterned changes in the body (William James), can help us toward greater understanding of self, others and world. When such perceptions are conscious, they qualify as emotions; unconscious unfelt emotions are feelings. Emotions condition our living experience of the present, the temporal stream of consciousness.
Every conscious state has an emotional quality; good or bad mood, energized or not. Existential feelings, (such as belonging, separation, power, control, being one with nature), can be bodily feelings and, at the same time, part of the structure of intentionality and the feeling of being.
Overt and concealed emotional experience permeates conscious life. Vigilance, emotional arousal, and attention mediate tensions associated with subjective states. They help us cope with dissonance, deploy intentional behavior, and stay motivated. Social bonds foster empathy, emotional/affective resonance with the internal distress of another individual and the intrinsic motivation to help relieve it. Empathic vision has to be part of the new paradigm that returns the human dimension to our plutocratic technocracy.
The more we learn, the clearer it becomes that we are clueless about the deep nature of reality. We might think or feel we do understand reality, either spiritually or scientifically, but it may be a conditioned illusion, a mirage of consensus. Why is it each new age or holistic health speaker or energy medicine practitioner has a pet theory of both physics and spirituality? Philosophically based, they can’t all be right. In the end, only a few will have accurately described the reality we inhabit.
Many traditions claim that when we experience pure consciousness that is the ground state of the universe. But there is nothing in the experience itself to substantiate evidence for anything beyond this experience being a state, physiological anomaly, or artifact of the nervous system, according to neurotheology research. Separate sorts of evidence are needed to highlight the experience itself from theories about it.
Comprehending our consciousness raises the fundamental question of the primal nature of the cosmos as well as our own nature. We evolved in cosmic and local environmental fields (like geomagnetic Schumann’s Resonance) that definitely condition our being and consciousness. The environment has molded our form.
Three forms of EM fields- wavefront, photon, and coupling mediator field, are able to exchange energy and information within each other immediately, as if they were one unique existent, or living in complete symbioses. They exist as a resonant coupling, represented in the quantum world as the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Complex information can be encoded in EM fields, as we all know from coding and decoding of television and radio signals. Even more complex information can be encoded in holographic images. DNA acts as a holographic projector of acoustic and EM information which contains the informational quintessence of the biohologram.
Some argue for a field of consciousness, morphic or dynamic self-organizing fields guiding organisms including ourselves. Some (Laszlo; Goswami) argue for an “informed Universe”, a Conscious Universe. Yet others (Deutsch) argue the universe is obsolete, the fabric of reality being a Multiverse.
We need a paradigm shift to effectively study consciousness: new concepts of matter, life and mind. Current theories of reality have gaps, and tend to overlap one another or treat existence at radically different scales. We can’t even reliably determine if Reality is smooth or lumpy.
Many naked assumptions are being made in science, which has become more like religion, a matter of faith and participant bias. When we look into the Abyss we find ourselves smiling back enigmatically.
We stand in Mystery, exemplified by the fact there is no consensus in physics, cosmology, consciousness studies, and certainly not metaphysics. Is information from the cosmic or subquantal realms really directly transducable? We don't even know what electricity is! Much less the definitive nature of a subquantal realm we cannot observe except by inferrence. We don’t know what energy is , except that it is "frozen mass and/or light" which another theory proves cannot 'exist', at least not objectively because all experience is subjective.
Too bad that for all our scientific pretentions to objectivity, we don’t have any viable understanding of either mass, light or time, either. This is compounded with notions of so-called dark matter and dark energy, more ‘smoke and mirrors’ explanations. It seems the great Light casts a long shadow. In holographic theory, that ‘shadow’ is related to the scalar field of the vacuum potential. Dark matter and energy are also implicated in structure formation, as is fractal dynamics.
There are continual revolutions in concepts and paradigms in physics, which later permeate society and beliefs mostly in a rather romanticised (often misunderstood) way. Life can be understood from the perspective of contemporary physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum theory or from metabolic domains like neurotransmitters, gene-expression (Rossi), liquid crystals (Ho), or dynamic cellular membranes (Lipton).
If we drop down another whole domain of observation from the juicy “wetware” described by chemistry and atomic structure, we enter the subatomic realm of quantum physics. At this level the behavior of matter, both organic and inorganic, is governed not by classical notions of cause and effect or even complex dynamics, but by those of quantum probability and the uncertainty principle, and perhaps quantum chaos.
Many theorists postulate quantum and subquantal imaginal fields for both the cosmos and ourselves. Some of these theories of interacting field bodies, (like Frolich’s quantum coherent photon fields), are more plausible than others. A model of the mind-body relationship is developed in which novel biophysical principles in genome function generate a dynamic possessing attributes consistent with both our psychophysical nature and consciousness.
One of the most promising coherent models (King, 2001) invokes a fractal link between neurodynamical chaos and quantum uncertainty. Transactional wave collapse (Cramer’s quantum handshake) allows this link to be utilized predictably by the excitable cell, in a way which bypasses and complements formal computation.
The formal unpredictability of the model allows mindbody to interact coherently with the brain, the predictability of consciousness in survival strategies being selected as a trait by organismic evolution. This theory may suggest quantum evolution is orchestrated by the information transduction of DNA.
Mindbody Wisdom
“Light and matter both behave like separate particles and also like waves. This . . . obliged us to abandon, on the plane of atomic magnitudes, a causal description of nature in the ordinary space-time system, and in its place to set up invisible fields of probability in multidimensional spaces.” ~ Wolfgang Pauli, Physicist
But, is consciousness a component of physics? Erwin Laszlo suggests that in an “informed universe”, everything that has ever happened is retained as holographic information in space and that it can be simultaneously downloaded from anywhere in the universe. So why aren’t we all “know it alls”? Because it exists enfolded or encoded or in potential? How can we embody that innate intelligence?
The problem of creativity is present in every field of science (Laszlo, 1995). He suggested that quantum-vacuum interactions play a significant role in the fields of cosmology, physics, biology and consciousness. Everyone wants to discuss the relationship of consciousness and cosmos at the scale or mode of their specialty.
Biologist Mae Wan Ho, Dr. James Oschmann, and cellular biologist Bruce Lipton speak of special energy relationships in the connective tissue (the skin, bones, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, various membranes covering major organs and linings of internal spaces), extracellular matrix, and cellular membranes of the body. Ordered water (Frost) is another popular theory.
Some speak of the heart and “belly brain” whose thoughts travel the Vagus highway (Porges). These are physical correlates of gut reactions, and perhaps psychism (Radin). Sentience, memory and intercommunication are distributed throughout the body; it may be our unconscious and holistic source of wisdom, Soma Sophia, for what can we know without our body and senses and their virtual analogs? We don’t have the metaphors to conceptualize otherwise.
This extracellular tissue acts like a dynamic liquid crystal, and is the basis of instantaneous (nonlocal) communication throughout the organism. Coherent energy is vital energy, arising from stored and mobilized coherent energy forms. Our systems are ultrasensitive to weak signals and can amplify them to global effects. Qi is called “coherent” energy. In addition to quantum vacuum interactions with the mind and cosmos, this ground substance of the body with ‘a mind of its own’ may be the basis of energy medicine and our well-being.
There is a dynamic, liquid crystalline continuum of connective tissues and extracellular matrix linking directly into the equally liquid crystalline cytoplasm in the interior of every single cell in the body (see Ho, 1997; Ho, 1998). Liquid crystallinity gives organisms their characteristic flexibility, exquisite sensitivity and responsiveness, thus optimizing the rapid, noiseless intercommunication that enables the organism to function as a coherent, coordinated whole. In addition, the liquid crystalline continuum provides subtle electrical interconnections which are sensitive to changes in pressure, pH and other physicochemical conditions; in other words, it is also able to register ‘tissue memory’. Thus, the liquid crystalline continuum possesses all the qualities of a ‘body consciousness’ that may indeed be sensitive to all forms of subtle energy medicines including acupuncture. (Mae Wan Ho)
In the quantum world, everything is in flux, including the subquantal virtual photons popping in and out of existence. The foamy Zero Point fluctuation determines the behavior of quantum systems likely by radiant EM fields. Radiation is absorbed from the zero-point background. The stability of matter itself is mediated by the zero point fluctuation phenomena. This hidden energy pool is invoked by new age physicists as plenum physics (Comings). And EM fields that correlate with matter are claimed to act as morphogenetic fields (Sheldrake).
This image of bubbling spacetime doesn’t exist in Einstein’s classical theory of relativity where space is absolutely smooth. Matter and energy have an equatable, quantifiable identity. But at the scale of atoms and electrons particles have no definite velocity and location. Einstein’s picture of reality breaks down at this smallest scale.
Quantum principles therefore dictate that spacetime is a seething foam. If gravity obeys relativity but matter obeys QM, clearly a theory of quantum gravity and a new description of quantum spacetime is required to resolve the conundrum. Are hyperspace and spacetime two views of the same domain or is the solution a whole new perspective on the deepest level of reality?
David Bohm (1980) expressed a view that the groundstate of human consciousness isbeyond neural states representing results of only activity related to aware consciousness. He proposed it may be very fast and related to pre-space, the implicate order behind space-time, to a creative factor, from which the whole phenomena and the space-time structure enfolds. These fast mental processes have characteristics common to microphysical processes (Bohm, 1986). Ultimately, thinking is related to the deep unconscious, the entire embedded organism.
These magical fields have been conceptualized because they work in the mathematics and the real world, but that doesn’t mean they are identical with it, necessarily. There are mathematical solutions for worlds that do not exist, imaginary realms. Likewise, string and M-theory have many solutions, most of which do not match our Reality.
They are a matter of faith, in some sense, whether we model them as EM fields, strong force fields, gravitational fields, strings, membranes, or subquantal scalar fields. The dogma of field theory has permeated the world of physics. Fields have taken on magical properties.
We can speak of a quantum vacuum “holographic information field”, but what is it; does it even exist as more than a mathematical abstraction? A recent Scientific American (Nov. 05), suggests solutions for holographic universes, but none of them match the observed flat, infinite nature of our own.
Fields or Holograms?
Maxwell is credited with establishing field theory. Maxwell combined a set of four field equations to describe electric and magnetic fields. These four simple and elegant equations describe behavior and provide means to calculate forces, but they shed no light on the actual physical mechanism of electric and magnetic fields and their interactions. As a result, we don't really know what is going on, and nobody seems to care.
Fields can materialize in empty space. Fields can bend and warp. Fields push and pull. Fields can change the speed of your clock. To help these magical fields we also have miraculous phantom particles and agents. We have photons for light and energy, gravitons for gravity, gluons for strong force, and super strings for string theory. They are all phantom because none of them were ever observed in nature or in any experiment. All but photons carry negative energy.
Yet, viable theories, such as the Holographic Concept of Reality don’t rely on field theory at all. In this concept, the 2-D holographic domain is one of information and resolution. The holographic domain conjures an extra dimension, projecting our apparently 3-D world. If the entire universe is a kind of hologram it may mean that even gravity is a persistent perceptual delusion operating only in higher dimensional spacetime.
The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a more fundamental reality. There is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
In this dynamic model there are no “things”, just energetic events. This “holoflux” includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all possible forms. All the objects of our world are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. This is the guiding matrix for self-assembly, and manipulating and organizing physical reality.
The holographic description is one of a frequency domain which doesn’t rely on fields to project itself. Each sample of that reality at any scale contains the information of the whole in greater or lesser resolution. The holographic model offers new options for resolution of profound mysteries such as quantum gravity and our hyperdimensional existence. We can speak of a self-organizing “holographic information field” but perhaps it is a misnomer. Does it even exist as more than a mathematical abstraction?
Criss-crossing patterns occur when two or more waves ripple through each other. In the transactional interpretation of quantum physics, waves of probability originate in the past, present, and future. Events manifest when waves from past and future interfere with each other in the present. That pattern creates matter and energy. The universe emerges from the rippling effects of immense numbers of criss-crossing interference waves. The geometry of the fields is more fundamental than the fields or emergent particles themselves.
Our brains mathematically construct ‘concrete’ reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension. This information realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality transcends time and space. Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images.
Interference patterns of waves can be visualized interacting like ripples on a pond. At the quantum level they create matter and energy as we perceive them, lifelike 3-dimenional effects. Consciousness and matter share the same essence, differing by degrees of subtlety or density. There is a strong correlation between modulations of the brain’s EM field and consciousness (Persinger,1987; McFadden, 2002). The universe is a continuously evolving, interactively dynamic hologram.
This “Holographic Concept of Reality” was first suggested by Miller, Webb, and Dickson in 1973, and later touted by David Bohm (1980), Ken Wilber (1982), Karl Pribram (1991), Michael Talbot (1991), and others. In this holistic theory, the Universe is considered as one dynamic holomovement, a grand Unity.
Research in Quantum Bioholography (Miller & Miller) strongly suggests that DNA is a holographic projector which manifests our embodiment through projection of biophotons and sound, a cymatic process known as acoustic holography. Fields are just ways of tuning subsystems.
Whatever this irreducible immaterial essence is, it a creative force recognized as identical with or an agent of Source. In heartful communities it has been linked with the groundstate of being (negentropic zero-point energy) by both physicists and psychologists.
Consciousness is multilayered. Our soulful intentionality can be a healing force for ourselves and others, coupling us whether or not we comprehend intellectually how that “works”. This “interactive excitement” may or may not have anything to do with the fields we attribute it to. Still, we all have a sense of inner direction that helps us know when we are on or off course in our life journey, whether we heed it or not.
We have suggested how the ethereal current concepts of the body have become, and certain ways ‘spirit’ embodies itself in matter. Mostly, the explanations depend on our level of observation, chemical, molecular, atomic, or subquantal. Because we lack a unified theory, clearly we have yet to observe the deepest levels of reality, which keep receding as our vision expands further toward the microscopic and macroscopic.
The Triple Union
“Unless bodies lose their corporeal state and unless bodies assume again their corporeal state, that which is desired will not be attained.”
~ Byzantine fragment, The Philosophical Egg
We are truly psychophysical beings, composed of bodymind and spirit, but even those who grasp the holistic concept often fail to live it from the heart. Arguably, Carl Jung (1911) was among the first to apply the recognized concepts of physical energy to show that libido, or psychic energy obeys the same laws and is not only analogous, but identical. Psychophysical and emotional energy is associated with instinctual biological drives.
Though psychic energy is neutral, it can be literalized, somatized, sexualized, emotionalized, socialized, mentalized, or spiritualized. Symptoms, thoughts, images, fantasies, beliefs, emotions, forms of expression or behaviour are all libidinal. Libido tends to flow inward or outward, a dynamic rhythm of introversion/extroversion. Jung attributed mana or personal power for a kind of shamanic or positive psychic contagion to those individuals who seem to have a charismatic influence on others.
Psychic energy tends to follow the same laws of physical conservation and entropy. Jung taught that within the psyche, libido: (1) creates entropy, (2) is generally conserved under the principle of equivalence, (3) flows through the psyche in channels that can be redirected, (4) can be either progressive or regressive, and (5) is transformed by symbols. In short, the psyche as, defined by Jung, is a complex system.
New physics, chaos theory, synergetics, and information theory describe our existence as complex dynamical systems. Entropy can only occur in system that is absolutely closed so no energy from outside can be fed into it. But the psyche is an open system, which exchanges energy and information with its environment and can be negentropic.
We can also have a negentropic influence on one another (Gladwell), perturbing, enlarging, creating new pathways and possibilities. Theoretically, behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" remains a metaphor. Yet, highly sociable or connective people often become revolutionary leaders, bringing others together with a new perspective, a broadened worldview.
Life includes chaos and order, good and bad experiences, even catastrophes that require us to adapt or die. The important thing is how we meet and react to chaos, finding ways to replenish our depletion. Observation of the subquantal domain reveals an inexhaustible realm of negentropy from which we can draw our psychophysical sustenance. When healthy, our entire system is designed to reduce entropy, in different scales and domains.
The same is true for the superorganism of society. We are irreducibly entangled with one another and the environment. We are healthy only to the extent we resonate with our environment. We maintain our integrity and identity as a dissipative system only because we are open to flows of energy, matter, or information from our environment (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984).
We live in a persistent delusion of separateness. However, we are all nonlocally connected in an ill-defined yet tangible way at the subatomic, individual, group and global level, connecting and diverging Psychic energy or libido is a psychosomatic phenomenon analogous to the paradoxical nature of energy/matter or wave/particle. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena.
We all experience visceral or gut reactions and know instinctively how our mental states affect our physical vitality, and vice versa. But often we loose the intimate relationship with our mindbody, with the source of our being, our aliveness, our passions. If we experience this flow at all, it ebbs and flows away. Our individual and collective creative potential remains largely unrealized.
How often do we pay attention to those vital signs, the innate wisdom of the body, inhabiting our minds rather than our flesh? We are increasingly not instinctual, but cultural, and we choose many of our behaviors for good or ill. We’re nearly all “sick and tired” of the way things are, but what do we do to change them?
We can learn simple techniques for self regulation, such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. Creativity, as an activity in several fields, brings many intrinsic health-promoting rewards. We can create new habits to help us cope with technocratic society that tone or recalibrate our systems and change our physical state. We all have to learn how to deal with personal and/or global catastrophe whether we want to or not.
The Golden Flesh
"The borders of our minds are ever shifting and many minds can flow into one another ... and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy" ~ William Butler Yeats
Do we actively value our psychic well being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?
Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.
When psychic energy is dammed up it manifests in unconscious or destructive ways, such as tension, withdrawl, alienation, anxiety, compulsions, depression, addictions, somatization, and suicidal tendencies. Some people learn early, even in the womb, that their world is not a safe place. Social patterns become maladaptive when an organism’s true needs are not met in a tangible, congruent way.
A confused person can react with pain, fear, hopelessness, cognitive dissonance, disturbed biorhythms, approach/avoidance, passive aggression, codependence, apathy, or self-defeating behavior patterns. Our biology and minds become confused. Fed enough negative self-talk the body will react with authentic symptoms, self-induced illness. This does not mean that all disease is self-inflicted nor that we are necessarily to blame for our ailments, in some version of “new age guilt”.
Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.
To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of mental and physical well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.
Soma Sophia
“To me it's very obvious that consciousness is not simply an epiphenomenon, not a byproduct of the brain; it's something that's pervading the whole universe. . . . Consciousness is not simply produced by a complex set of neurons. It's there, in the whole body, and in all of existence.” ~Ervin Laszlo, Philosopher
Sometimes we have to address the external realities of a situation and sometimes its spirit or essential nature. The same is true for our bodies and souls. Significance is extracted from the experiential responses of our whole being or soma significance, the felt-sense wisdom of the bodymind, which we can personify as Soma Sophia.
We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the gold, whether we call that essence health, art, flow, or inspiration. Psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.
That Source is the source of psychic energy, our libido, which becomes available for negentropic or entropic expression. Its tangible root lies within our very energy/matter as the plenum that science calls the vacuum fluctuation or zero-point energy, the groundstate of existence. It is a bit of the cosmos, of the universe that lies within our bodies, which are composed of elements cooked within the stars.
The body itself is the Hermetic vessel for the transformation of instinctual drives. That creative process can take place through trance, art, or meditation, or any combination of them. There are many techniques, which help us process pain, stress, trauma, or depression. Often therapies address higher levels of organization, often at the conceptual level, rather than reordering the physical core of distress, which inhibits our well-being.
A dynamic combination of focus, concentration and flow undergirds our conscious existence and how we relate to others and the world. In meditations such as biofeedback, Tai Chi or Yoga, we intentionally create dynamic changes in our psychophysiology. We temporarily drop our identification with the body only to reinhabit it with even more awareness or mindfulness. This is the artful life; creative fulfillment of our collective destiny.
The Field Body
“The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.” Laszlo
We can return to Nature and our nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory: physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs. We are a process of recursive self-generation. This continuum, which is our groundstate or creative Source, is directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment.
We are each a temple of living light. We arise from and are sustained by field phenomena, waves of biophotonic light and sound, which form our essential nature through acoustic holography (Miller & Miller), which is similar to the formation of matter via sound in cymatics. Cymatics is the science that describes how sound creates forms via resonance phenomena. Bioholography is thus a form of cymatics, acoustic holography.
Holography is the artform of producing virtual 3-D spatial images of objects. Its artifact is an ephemera, though the holographic plate which records the interference pattern is not. Projections are most compelling when they converge on the viewer. Virtuality is the condition of pure potential, non-actualization. Virtual images are created from diffracting lightwaves and reading the interference patterns.
But virtual particles from the vacuum potential (ZPE) pop in and out of our reality perturbing, even creating actual particles. Cybernetic virtuality involves interaction with a computer system to render certain potentialities actual within certain rules. In holographic systems, a body of fiction can potentially trigger future facts, opening new windows of reality. For example, rituals of quantum biofeedback, can manifest as nonlocal healing, whether through tangible interaction or the power of suggestion and placebo effect.
Our bodies are created from the virtuality of scalar field interactions with our 4-D reality of this spacetime. The mechanism is by projection via our DNA by biophotons or coherent light produced within the body. This coherent light transduces itself into radio waves, which carry sound as information that decodes the 4-D form as a material object, such as ourselves.
The study of this phenomenon of light and sound forming an organism using DNA as a holographic projector is called quantum bioholography (Miller). This process is true not only of formation of the body but also extends into its maintenance, a continual process of creation and renewal.
Light and sound carry the information that shapes us and our environment. In a sense we are essentially “frozen” light. Universe congeals within us each moment in a unique way, never to be repeated. Science now tells us this is so, that each of us extends nonlocally far beyond the skin boundary through our embedded field body (Pribram/Bohm, Wan-Ho).
Nature works through self-organization at the creative edge of chaos (Gleick, Peat), and so do we. Complexity is the fine line between chaos and order, "a chaos of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either" (Waldrop, 1992, p. 293). The creative edge of chaos is a transition phase.
Self-reinforcing, autopoeitic morphogenesis creates specific forms. Yet a meta-theory eludes us. We still don’t know exactly how that works; there is currently no consensus in quantum physics at the level of the unified field, but we have many working theories, which help us grope our way toward understanding. Likewise, there is no generally accepted paradigm in consciousness studies. Ambiguity surrounding our psychophysical Mystery also shows up in the split between conventional allopathic and energy medicine.
Mystics suggest even more subtle connections of soul and spirit through time and space, evolutionary intelligence. Even without a mystical approach, we can rest and refresh ourselves by aligning our intentionality with the very fabric of spacetime. Consciously participating in this universal process helps heal and integrate our mindbodies, psyche and matter. We can learn to self-soothe cumulative daily irritations by practicing self-regulation.
Cosmos resonates within each of us, but we have lost touch with that due to electromagnetic pollution and the distracting demands of modern life. But we can rediscover this integral context in which we are embedded as a field of timeless, radiant abundance. It is plausible that spacetime is a plenum rather than an empty vacuum. It abides not just outside us in the depths of space but within the fabric of our being. We are pulsating dynamos of cells, organs, and dynamic systems.
We can learn to wrap our minds around this quantum reality that we are not separate from the ongoing process of creation, even if an energetic field of information defies detection. The source of creation always flows through rhythmic pulsation or waves of energy/matter, perhaps even dark matter. The manifestation of each so-called particle of our being is orchestrated through a self-organizing process (Penrose/Hameroff).
This dance is a harmonic continuum from the smallest to the largest scales, permeating all domains of assembly and observation, subquantum, quantum, molecular, chemical, even cultural, global, and cosmological. The evolution of our dynamic system obeys universal laws. Likewise our behaviors flow into manifestation from our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, including our self-image.
By opening to system dynamics we can reorganize away from the entropic, reductionistic, destructive habit patterns that plague our species. We can make stress-reducing negentropic choices for structural and psychological adjustment, which improve our quality of life. Integration is a synergistic process rooted in primordial bodymind consciousness.
The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. Research suggests activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the DC field of the organism (Oschmann; Becker). Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes.
Hypnosis suggests the fabric of the body also helps store our memories, embodying our triumphs and traumas. Ideomotor signaling (Rossi) can elicit revelations about ourselves not available from our conscious minds. There is a reciprocal action between our inchoate perceptions, thoughts and the chemistry of our bodies, and therefore our current and future states.
Jung (1932) identified at least five kinds of drives: hunger, activity, sexuality, creativity, and reflection. But he gradually came to conceive of "libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy,” a more or less quantitative concept, which should not be defined in qualitative terms, though libido includes drives, love, desire, aspirations. The important point is that this energy is never destroyed, but flows throughout the psyche activating now this part and now another.
Psychology describes psychic contents, including the role of the body, with psychic means. Psyche, the realm of soul -- is subject and object, medium and message, source and goal; there is no relative point of observation outside the human psyche. When we get down to it, we find only unprovable but assumed beliefs, which seem to work and therefore seem meaningful. We tend to have experiences that confirm our view or perspective of the world.
Physics, by contrast, pursues material reality both via and, to the greatest degree possible, beyond the human experience, but it also uses the mental medium in both its conceptions and inventions. All models of reality are “soft” technologies, but our beliefs and worldview condition the reality we experience. Just as matter is in a constant process of redefinition, so too must psyche and spirit be continuously redefined.
The psychic energy that directs and motivates the personality is called libido, which is simply a generic form of psychic energy which can be redirected or "canalized" into both sexual and non-sexual activities. Psychic energy balances the energy flowing between spirit and instinct. This non-specific energy can consciously be deployed and channeled for self-transformation.
Go with the Flow
Research has shown (Csikszentmihalyi) that self-teaching is strongly correlated with quality of life and the ability to experience refreshing concentration and flow in ordinary activities. Maslow called this quality self-actualization, first as an emergent property which can becomes a stabilized steady-state of personality. The “good life” is not only enjoyable and growth promoting, it reduces the sum total of entropy in the world.
Yet finding flow in our busy lives can be elusive. Flow is neutral, as a source of psychic energy, focusing attention and motivating action. It can be used for constructive or destructive experiences. The more we allocate to the negative, the less we have available for the positive. So we need to become jealous of our spare energy, spending it wisely as our psychophysical organism tells us through bodytalk and feelings.
The amount of energy available to our consciousness and will varies. We can respond to stress by being active rather than reactive. Self-regulation means scanning, listening to, and intentionally recalibrating the mindbody. It requires focusing and concentration our attention, then “letting go”, seemingly releasing all effort, self-accepting, non-striving mindfulness.
Some suggest there is a Platonic field (Symposium) that restores our energy. It is compatible with the description of stages of pure consciousness described by the Yoga Sutras and other Eastern traditions (Buddhism, Taoism, etc.). The secret of the universe lies within “empty” space, which turns out to be a virtual plenum of potential. It is a nourishing essence, which feeds our psychophysical being.
Non-locality is regarded as accepted fact by physicists. They say that the twin photons are aware of each other instantaneously even if they are at opposite ends of the Universe. Laszlo says this new concept has primacy over matter. Puthoff says that matter is driven by this energy source (ZPE). And so is our matter. The interconnections among EM fields are not the external interactions described by Maxwell's four equations, the interconnection is "in the deep" inside those interacting fields, our own fields.
Inexhaustible psychic energy is the single most distinguishing trait of self-teaching individuals. Most creative people are self-taught, often achieving breakthroughs by investing surplus energy playing with the apparently trivial. No matter the subject, each of their new little discoveries parlays into excitement at the moment of discovery, in a self-reinforcing reward. These rewards build motivation to continue.
Have the “creatively gifted” learned a subtle secret for drawing on the essence of the cosmos by investing in their curiosity and delight? Some learn how to draw this surplus energy from the psychic well early in life and drink deeply through their attempts to understand, invent, express and solve problems. They manifest a determination to participate as fully as possible in life.
Self-actualizers pay more attention to what is going on around them with surplus energy to invest their attention in things or people for their own sake, rather than for strokes or gain. Most people hoard their attention in self-absorption, material or emotional advantage rather than growth, empathy and compassion.
Most guard their energy for immediate role or stress responses, or become bound by those factors, numb or apathetic. Those less concerned with themselves actually have more psychic energy to experience life. Everyday giving is an antidote for self-obsession and negativity.
It’s a free-floating type of attention pursued without recognition or support, easily captured temporarily by any subject or interest, rather than strictly tied to goals and ambitions. Wonder, novelty, surprise, awe, and transcendence are boundary breaking allowing us to move beyond ignorance, fear and prejudice. Often this experience becomes a valuable element of later full-blown realizations, new synthesis.
We can cultivate this quality and it’s intrinsic reward by 1) doing whatever needs to be done, even the routine, with concentrated attention and skill, rather than inertia, and 2) approaching them with the care it takes to make a work of art.
Instead of using our leisure energy wastefully we can learn to direct it from passive activity toward new experiences, which only become interesting once we devote attention to them. Time management and husbanding of psychic energy can be directed to create increased enjoyment of life, here and now. In flow we forget ourselves, rather than wallowing in the apathy, worry and boredom of unmet personality needs. Life is too short to remain depressed or exhausted.
We need time and psychic energy to pursue our curiosity. So, we have to be alert for those issues and people who would negatively feed on us, draining, subverting, or sabotaging our creative flow. We can complain, reflect on our stuckness, or actively invest our psychic energy in harmonious relations and goals, creating positive feedback. Having clear goals helps us focus and concentrate, whether we achieve them, or not.
Owning our own actions helps us focus desires and priorities for an improved life.
The self-motivated individual can concentrate more or less at will. Interest leads to focus and focus leads to interest. We take over ownership of our lives by learning to direct psychic energy toward our intentions. There is more consistency between inner desires and outer experience. When we learn to love what we have to do, the vector or arc of our development shifts.
When we learn to control attention, we learn to control experience, and therefore the quality of our lives. We invest less psychic energy in painful events and draining resentments, and more in self-affirming and rewarding activities, enjoying them for the control we acquire over our own attention. This simple process can lead to great leaps in transformation, and is also the basis of mystical practice simply for its own sake.
If you learn to love your fate, it reduces entropy not only in your own consciousness but for those you contact. In contact with source, you don’t have to feed on their energies in a negative way. We feel even better when creatively connected to something greater or more permanent than ourselves; it gives us energy. We can even find joy fighting a losing battle for a good cause.
Being in THE ZONE
Folklore has it that artists and sportsmen such as Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird can enter a state of consciousness where they are actively entangled with their surroundings and perhaps even the future. In tennis, the body must be in motion somehow anticipating trajectories even before the serve in order to return the volley. Surfing or boarding are also good examples. Gamers report a similar flow for their virtual states.
Likewise, artists enter a flow state in both inspiration and artistic production or performance. Artists, too, are often accused of anticipating expressing a symbolic change in collective culture, whether they are consciously aware of it, or not. They seem to have an uncanny knack for symbolizing the zeitgeist of the time.
Musicians speak of their own kind of telepathy among one another, especially when jamming or improvising. Someone playing a spirited fast musical break knows the flow is rolling on and at the same time they are aware of the details, although they couldn’t consciously decide each action.
Sudden alarm experiments explore how dominant field dynamics can happen faster than consciousness can respond, using purely internal physical mechanisms. Part of the role of consciousness as an overseer is to allow the conscious periphery to have immediate access in the case of a threatening signal.
We all know we can react with lightning speed automatically while only dimly aware of it. We are aware of it sufficiently to anticipate and react to save our lives. The critical advantage of subjective conscious comes in, even if it is almost subliminal and not consciously thought through.
The BITZ experiments explore the existence of entanglements beyond the human body. Books have been written on 'Being In The Zone' (BITZ). Most of us cannot repeat these super-athletic experiments. But, then, how many of us can smash an atom? We must trust the honesty and ethics of atom-smashing scientists. We just need a measure of BITZ that is not too subjective.
All of these examples are, in some sense direct verification of entanglement on a conscious level. But in practical terms we can still learn what qualities and practices lead to the flow state. In this subjective sense, BITZ has already been experimentally verified; indeed, we are all entangled with our environment, some more actively than others, but only a few can intentionally exploit it, though many have experienced it by accident or intent.
What we need to learn is how to deploy this capacity for creativity and/or healing. Anyone can learn through practices that require concentration in one area to translate that capacity to other areas, such as creativity. Certain orientations and qualities are involved and most of these can be adopted or developed. Many of them include the body, through kinesthetic muscle memory or other physical expressions that take learned behavior and put it on “auto-pilot”, making it seem virtually effortless.
Many activities elsewhere described as BITZ are actually products of a light trance state, such as flow state people report while driving a car. Others, such as sports and music, explicitly require skill development to achieve fluency.
We can most easily apply ourselves to those things, which inspire a passion in us, those things we cannot help but do because the drive is strong, so motive and opportunity are there. But if a person has no passion, creative flow will remain elusive. With passion you can always learn the techniques to accomplish your creative goals. Still, many wrestle with the experience of trying to maintain vitality, passion, and inspiration while getting caught up in the daily grind of paying the bills and other mundane necessities
Reports of solutions include:
“It's a matter of intention. I try to make a conscious choice every day to do everything the best I can. For me, this has been a self sustaining and exponentially growing energy source. The harder I work at doing things well, the better I do things, the better I feel about doing things, the more energy I have to work on doing things well, and so on, and so on.”
“For me, it's a matter of being Present, no matter what my external circumstances are. The loss of vitality comes not with the grinding work, but from the fact that we resist Life while doing that work. The only solution is to surrender to the moment, be present with what you are doing, and accept whatever comes as a result. Sometimes what comes won't be so pleasant, but as long as you accept that, then more and more often it will be pleasant things that come your way. “
“I feel like we can get through anything if we assert that it's only temporary. It's too easy to get dragged down by the slave paradigm, especially when you've got a higher mission you'd rather be tending to. We need to be that much stronger and clearer about our Great Work on this planet to get through the daily grind and seemingly endless servitude to the inane.”
There are two ways of looking at our predicament, one crippling, one liberating:
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: psychospiritual reality and mundane patterns are at odds with each other, bringing stress and a feeling of self-betrayal. This splits intent and energy, divides and conquers by lack of wholeness. Thwarted by a feeling of not living in sincere harmony with your true self Power (psychic energy) leaks away.
METANARRATIVE: realize that mundane activities are a result of will or intentionality, and that you are manifesting the mundane patterns that you see before you, either by conscious will or by default. The life you've created can manifest as a song, a poem, an art project, a great disovery. When you chose to make it surface, your full power and as a manifestation engine emerges.
Flow in intellectual and spiritual processes emerges from removal of blocks to creativity (such as competing activities and focus; poor self-image; poor judgment, thinking and work habits; conventionality, mediocrity; numbness; intolerance of complexity or solitude) and certain positive attitudes and behavior patterns, such as commitment to vision.
The most often cited examples facilitating creativity include the following: fluency, flexibility, sensitivity to problems, problems, originality, curiosity, openness to feelings and the unconscious, motivation, persistence and concentration, ability to think in images, ability to toy with ideas, ability to analyze and synthesize, tolerance of ambiguity, discernment and selectivity, ability to tolerate isolation, creative memory, background of fundamental knowledge, incubation, anticipation of productive periods, ability to think in metaphors, aesthetic orientation, etc.
If your desire to be creative is strong enough, nothing will prevent you from applying yourself if you have passion. Can the flow state be far behind? It is a form of transcendence, whether it comes through the physical flow of the body, the conceptual high of the A-ha state, the absorption and aesthetic satisfaction of the artistic process, or any conditions, which promote emotional flow. The latter might range from love, to the high encountered learning from one’s mentors, to the perception that Cosmos is facilitating your intention in a given direction, though the latter is a synchronicity, flow with the environment.
In trance states the process is largely automatic and unconscious; no “learning” is required. Trance possession and ‘white line fever’ arise from the same level, while the former includes a transpersonal experience. In artistic fervor the doors of the subconscious swing wide and there is mixing of the inner subjective world with the object world of tangible expression.
In pure creativity, including nonlocal healing and the bliss of meditative states, focus and concentration are consciously applied directly with intent. Trance, art and creativity are all forms of transcendence of the ego and connection with deeper than conscious levels of existence.
Exercising one’s talents helps remove the blocks mundane life would like to introject. Fluency, a creative ritual, a workstation, and making time available help increase the drive needed to carry a project to completion. Intentionality and a conducive environment increase the probability creativity will emerge.
But the secret is that connections or open channels to primordial SOURCE tend to provide a degree of flow, self-realization, or illumination. So, the real key to creativity in all its forms seems to be an enhanced capacity to connect tangibly with source bringing back some material or immaterial boon from that inspiration.
Conclusions
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries of the groundstate of energy/matter, consciousness, awareness and flow. It will likely be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present-is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, says Maxwell.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.
Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlate of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.
According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.
The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.
[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff
Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.
But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.
REFERENCES
http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/MaeWanHo/acupunc.html
*************************
CONNECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS:
Coherent, Psychophysical, Quantum and Otherwise
By Iona Miller, Nov 1, 2005
“To me it's very obvious that consciousness is not simply an epiphenomenon, not a byproduct of the brain; it's something that's pervading the whole universe. . . . Consciousness is not simply produced by a complex set of neurons. It's there, in the whole body, and in all of existence.” ~Ervin Laszlo, Philosopher
Quantum Consciousness?
The paths of Wolfgang Pauli, coming from the advanced edge of physics, and Carl Jung, from the advanced edge of the psyche, crossed with interesting results for their generation. Pauli came away rededicated to unifying psyche and matter, to finding "the irrational in matter and the subjective in physics" and convinced of "the resurrection of spirit in matter." Jung came away with the idea of acausal connections -- meaningful coincidences -- an idea developed with the help of Pauli.
This collaboration raised the question of what it means to live in a world of where synchronicity is part of our experience. Each of the physical and psychological theories that have arisen since have also addressed implications about our existence and interconnections, not just theories. It is quite different to be essentially an ethereal wave-front in space than a solid meat body. But we rarely even conceive of ourselves this way, much less wrap our minds around the implications. We live in a fantasy of solid objects and conscious awareness.
Consciousness is more than simple conscious awareness or self awareness. It’s ALL in your mind, but not necessarily merely in your head. Consciousness is distributed throughout the entire body. Though the brain is associated with the nervous system it is embedded in body consciousness and coupled to it.
Body and mind mutually inform and conditon one another as mindbody, or the psychophysical organism. The connective tissue of the body has its own form of coherent communication by conductance. The connective tissue acts a dynamic liquid crystal array, which conveys information many times faster than the nervous and hormonal systems. It is the basis of gut feelings and holistic responses.
The universe is literally holistically contained within the mindbody and is the context of mindbody. Both physicists and mystics now tell us that there is noTHING “out there.” The Vedas said centuries ago that it’s all “mindstuff” and modern science is now confronting that. Wave forms and particles derive their energy from the inside of space. That energy is dynamic, always interacting from the cosmic to subquantal realms.
"The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of Space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. It extends unbroken from star to star; and when a molecule of hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the medium receives the impulses of these vibrations, and after carrying them in its immense bosom for several years, delivers them, in due course, regular order, and full tale, into the spectroscope of Mr. Huggins, at Tulse Hill.", declared James Clerk Maxwell.
The vacuum energy or Zero Point Energy (ZPE) can be viewed as the Qi energy field according to the ancient Chinese Qi theory or worldview. In the very beginning there was Wu (Nothing or Void), then there was "Hun Tun" (the Great Chaos), later formed the "Tai Chi", then formed the "Tai Shih" (the Great Beginning) permeated with Qi.
The Qi then splitted into two, the Yin and Yang two complementary Qi forces. The interactions of the Yin Qi and Yang Qi evolves all things including Life. To the Chinese, Everything has Qi. Everything functions through Qi. It is the Qi that keeps us alive. To the Chinese, Life is not the end product of an evolutionary process, rather Life Force Qi's existence necessitates Physics and Chemistry being what it is.
Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness. Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.
But physicists and metaphysicists seem to talk about Consciousness as a primal essence, and consciousness as a neurological state of an organism, including human. Consciousness is equated by mystically-oriented physicists with the very essence of cosmos beyond energy/matter, residing within us as the groundstate of Being. The reductionistic view is that it is just a sequence of awareness interacting with the environment which can become complex as self-awareness arises; hierarchically stratified neural processes.
But no one seems to really know what Consciousness or consciousness is, anymore than they know what electricity actually is. For some it is cosmic, for others the most mundane result of our brain functions. The distinctions between so-called objective and subjective consciousness is now moot. Physics has shown there is only subjectivity, though facts can exist.
"Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness," says David Chalmers, a philosophy professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. "The question is what kind of explanation that will give you.
Chalmers wants more than correlation, alledging we want explanation: how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery.” The converse question would be how and why does Consciousness give rise to cosmos? The problem is, Consciousness and consciousness seem to be irreducible, try as we might.
According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is irreducible. It’s an aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass. According to this view, consciousness is primal.
A theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world. In another theory the boson involved is conformal gravity, aka dark energy, aka the vacuum, aka zero point energy. Anything that gets entangled (electrons, photons, etc) builds up consciousness. There are other theories of entanglement, coherence and decoherence.
Many say QM has the look and feel of consciousness. There are several types of explanation of quantum state reduction, an occasion of experience: Copenhagen (conscious observation causes collapse), multiple worlds (each possibility branches off to form a new universe), decoherence (interaction with environment contaminates superposition - though it doesn’t really cause reduction), some objective threshold for reduction (objective reduction - OR), or quantum gravity.
Popular QM notions seem to fall into two categories:
Copenhagen-esque--"old school" explanations which dwell on quantum theory's non-intuitiveness and in fact seem to celebrate the "leap of logic" needed to accept the observer-based wave-function collapse postulate;
New Agey Utopian idealism--"quantum theory is strange, consciousness is strange, therefore, consciousness is explained by quantum theory", entanglement is proof that "all points in the universe are connected by some underlying ineffable thing, so can't we all just get along", etc.
Quantum theory will probably play a role in explaining consciousness and its relationship
to the brain. In some theories (Greenfield), mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, while consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass. The electrical activity of the brain makes a `model' of a self in the world and our understanding of physical reality requires this `model' to exist `in the dark'. We don’t know if it’s basis is quantum or complexity, or some combination of quantum uncertainty and chaotic sensitivity.
There may be a link between chaotic sensitivity and quantum entanglement to create the ‘trick’ of consciousness (King, 2005). Synapses are making a potential energy landscape. High energy chaos explores the full phase space and attention lowers the energy until the dynamic either enters an existing attractor (recognition) or the system bifurcates to form a new attractor (new learned stimulus). It's a form of energy minimization.
Is there a link between global brain states and quantum phenoemena? Promising hypotheses link Freeman's model of chaos and bifurcation, Cramer's idea of transactional quantum entanglement, and Pribram's idea of the holographic brain and newer ideas of stochastic resonance and more theoretical ideas of quantum chaos. All these processes can interact together to make a viable basis for intentional subjective consciousness.
The brain is full of oscillations. The oscillations are chaotic in the time domain but holographic spatial oscillation in the space domain. Neural systems identify the oscillations that are in phase and they become the process that stands out from the out of phase noise. The in phase waves cause synaptic adaption and learning. When the brain goes from 'hunting' to 'eureka' there is a transition from chaotic out of phase excitation to phase correlated excitation.
This is the same process that happens in a quantum measurement, when we can only measure energy as frequency and can't directly sample wave amplitude of a quantum, so have to let enough beats pass to get an accurate frequency and thus don't know the time exactly. This is the uncertainty relation. The two processes are homologous.
Coherent oscillations in neurons are both the consequence of coupled areas and the cause of them over time. Chaotic excitations can, of course, be in or out of phase . It is the non-linearities which enable a number of harmonic oscillators to become mode-locked into phase or phase multiplicity, so non-linearity is the basis of all these phase locking phenomena, too (King).
According to Walter Freeman, "Consciousness may well be the subjective experience of this recursive process of motor command, reafference and perception. If so, it enables the brain to plan and prepare for each subsequent action on the basis of past action, sensory input and perceptual synthesis. In short, an act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stiinuIus. It is a step in a trajectory by which brains grow, reorganize themselves and reach into their environment to change it to their own advantage."
This `model' is an intellectual abstraction and in reality it is just spatial and temporal relationships between each piece of electrical activity. Every quanta is in the form of matter waves except at state reduction. The electromagnetic fields permeating neurons and synapses consist of real and virtual photons, in their wave states, and each of these are disturbances in the photon field.
Quantum Healing
Our experience of reality is based on mind and observation. Only our mental impressions, sensory filters, language categories, and concepts make us perceive things: things as separate from ourselves, the I and the not-I. But we are seamlessly welded to the Universe at the most fundamental levels. We cannot scientifically or spiritually distinguish ourselves from the subquantum ground of BEING, even if we feel separate or alienated.
But who among us has successfully abandoned the tendency to conceptualize observations as things, and compound that observation with qualitative attributions? We have experiences and later we say it was this or that. Some forms of meditation are based on disidentification from all aspects of existence and nominalism, neither this nor that.
But most of us still can’t wrap our quantum minds around it as a steady state of perception. Though science has extended our sight to the subquantal and cosmological levels, we still think provincially from the human scale of our natural senses. Our logic and metaphors are based in the senses. But our outer life comes from the invisible inner world, where we are literally in resonance with the Cosmos.
Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM). The world is quantum mechanical and we must learn to perceive it as such, but we don’t need to understand that to experience nonlocal healing, any more than we need to comprehend internal combustion to drive. Even physicists have a tough time reconciling what they know about the deep nature of reality with their mundane experience in the world of things.
So how does that mind and its underlying mechanisms relate to or produce consciousness? Is consciousness a quantum process, or does it underlie all process? Neurologists tell us it is a physical matter of wetware in the skull. However, the most we can say at the molecular level is that there are correlates of consciousness. The irreducible precursors of consciousness and matter are built into the universe. They just ARE, unified holistic process.
At the finest levels of observation, physicists contend the distinction between mind and matter becomes as paradoxical as the distinction between energy and matter, life and death (organic/inorganic). Quantum mechanics strongly suggests the Universe is mental. The substratum of everything, including our experience of being, has this mental character.
Healing theories, particularly nonlocal models, have drawn from theories in both new physics and consciousness studies, often compounding and confounding both disciplines. They mix levels of observation in theories, which seem to be largely conditioned by the favoritism of pet projects; thus each theory is generally associated with only one or two “brand” names of researchers.
Healers have been quick to parrot many of these ideas that support what they feel they have observed in intentional healing acts, or what validates the tenets of their school of practice. Often their comprehension of the scientific basis of the argument is slim to none. But this attribution is used to “explain” the phenomenon, with enough misapprehension to preserve the Mystery. However, it isn’t this confusion that makes it so. Are the enigmatic qualities of the quantum realm actually the same as the unity, coherence and other enigmatic qualities of the conscious one? The jury is still out.
There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling space-time. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam.
Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating energy field. This realization transforms our perception of life. Living systems constantly interact with the quantum vacuum, also called zero-point energy, vacuum fluctuation, or subspace. Wave-packets of matter are in a subtle interactive dance with the underlying vacuum field, a vast network of intimate interactions, extending into our biosphere and even Cosmos. Mind and matter both evolve from the cosmic womb of space.
According to Laszlo: “The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.”
He goes on to propose a poetic metaphor: “Everything that goes on in our mind could leave its wave- traces in the quantum vacuum, and everything could be received by those who know how to "tune in" to the subtle patterns that propagate there.” In a mechanistic throwback, he likens it to an antenna picking up signals from a transmitter that contains the experience of the entire human race, reminding strongly of Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious.
Worldviews color our perceptions of our Reality, even in science. Concepts are effective theories, useful not true. The universe is immaterial, mental and spiritual. The mind observes, but it doesn’t really observe “things”. It has a way of attributing certain qualities, subjective qualities and dynamics, to everything, even so-called “objective observation. This multisensory narrative becomes the content of our memories, how we remember what happens.
Our minds have a tendency to come up with reasons, whys and wherefores, for things as they appear to us. It is part of our survival mechanisms. However, physics has proven, through relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality, and Godel’s theorem, that there can be no objectivity, no order or creativity without chaos.
The mind produces narratives. Archetypal forces act as lenses that cause us to cherish certain beliefs, which lead to a class of thoughts, and patterns of emotions and behaviors. It doesn’t matter if you come down on the side of preferring order or chaos, nature has her way.
Ultimately, spontaneous or natural healing seems to by-pass this entire complex system, overriding our conscious perspectives in many cases. We may not “believe” in paradoxical healing, but it can still “work”, effecting psychophysical change at a deeper level through the emotional mind and through Mystery.
Healing is irrational. Perhaps the question we should really be asking is what causes us to imagine we are dissociated from a state of optimal health. This doesn’t mean our bodies will always work flawlessly. Chaos theory reveals that many systems in the body are self-organizing and regulated by stochastic processes that are naturally chaotic in nature. Chaos actually helps us reorganize, recalibrate our metabolism.
We can discuss it in terms of nested structured duality, superfluids, or an array of vortices, or a microtubule bank, or a dendritic cluster, hyper-neurons, glia and gap junction networks, or an entangled or collapsing wave function; still, we're merely talking about resonance between arrays -- patterns. This perspective leads to consideration of a Holographic concept of reality, the frequency domain, David Bohm’s implicate order.
Panpsychism aside, every bit of electrical activity is unaware of itself, is unaware of every other bit of electrical activity, and is unaware of all their relationships. This raises the question: why does consciousness exists at all and why is it a unity? What is synchronicity but a feedback between perceived reality and the emerging train of events. This is consistent with the transactional interpretation in which there is a handshaking between past emitters and future absorbers.
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries and it will be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
Conclusions
"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present - is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, said Maxwell.
Of course, that was then and this is now.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.
Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So, clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlates of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.
According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.
The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.
[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/ unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff
Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.
But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.
MIND CONTROL 2007
CHAOSOPHY 2007: MIND CONTROL
http://mindcontrolfordummies.50megs.com
http://psiona.50megs.com
http://myzeropoint.50megs.com
http://mindcontrolfordummies.50megs.com
http://psiona.50megs.com
http://myzeropoint.50megs.com
CHAOSOPHY 2008: ENERGY MEDICINE
MEDITATION IN MEDICINE:
Calm Birth, Calm Parenting, Calm Healing, Congruent Practitioners
VIRTUAL PHYSICS
Consciousness is the highest order energy and affects our universe soley by its compressionall effect on quantized time-space. Timespace is spacetime where time is the more primary stuff. This can be modulated into infinite variety of secondary, tertiary effects and can be willed, directed - though with difficulty.
Sure, it is self-evident that observer state influences what observer sees -- BUT THAT IS UNRELATED TO OBSERVER EFFECT IN QM
To stay afloat and gain traction in Germany-the foremost country in all sciences- Heisenberg had to kiss up to the still-minority nazis. The result was uncertainty principle #1 which embodied crude observer effect which called GM into question by declaring that fine measurements couldnt be done without changing what was measured. Mathematical proofs by others soon showed that, even if we had perfect measuring instruments, uncertainty would still exist in the realm of the vey small due to limitations imposed by Planck length The avant garde quantum mechanics have mixed two invalid ideas and come up with a third invalid idea and promoted it for 30 years till they believe their own sales hype. The fact is that the event is the same whether observed or not---contary ideas are entirely due to grade school misunderstanding of uncertainty principle which is ITSELF bogus!
Coming soon:
Contextualization for use of meditation in a variety of integral medicine and experiential settings.
See http://medigrace.org
http://calmbirth.org
http://virtualphysics.50megs.com
NONLOCAL HEALING FIELD
Let us reconsider the energetic nature of the universal field as it pertains to the medium of long- distance healing (intercessory prayer).
When energies of healing intention are directed toward another who isn’t physically present, the energies are directed outwards into the greater life-field and are simultaneously directed inwards into the omnipresent universal field. The external universal field probably contains the results of power plant facilities, fossil fuel and possibly nuclear, and other large-scale industrial effects, which may impact regions beyond their local domain in the biosphere. Such industrial qualification of the earth-field may be impacting the human potential for nonlocal healing, with respect to both the healer and the person who is the object of a healing intention. At first this may seem unlikely, particularly if one considers that healing energy is nonphysical and may connect instantaneously with the objective it is directed to. But what if that is too simple an assumption? What if electrical and other man-made interferences act in as yet unknown/undefined interference with multidimensional human function and susceptibility?
In a paper dedicated to envisioning “what factors of consciousness may help to determine and develop healing potential” (Beal, 2004), James Beal investigates “recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns, processes, and temporal variations, influenced by the environment, - inherent in states of consciousness for better or worse (ibid, p.1). As far as indicating the range of concerns which may effect the ways in which environmental influences may be conditioned by the human body, Beal observes, “The human race shows great variability and tolerance to environmental elements, depending on age, gender, genetics, health, geographical location, culture, and personal belief systems, to name a few complexities!” (ibid). But though individual health may have such a range of responses both to environmental factors, generally local, and such nonlocal factors as energy changes and sun storms in nonlocal effective fields, it may well be that both opportunities for nonlocal healing and even the energetic resource for such healing work may be increasing in potential as the human species evolves into its emerging global awareness.
It has been noted (Dossey, 1993) that people demonstrating the capability of having a healing effect on others are often ordinary people, not notable for unusual (“anomalous”) capabilities and extraordinary consciousness. Rather, the demonstrate the fundamental genius of healing inherent in our immune system ability and the life force underlying it. Such demonstration is the sign of self-care at the heart of the emerging medical paradigm. Nonlocal and local environmental effects on the human species probably do not limit the human healing potential. Moreso, the potential negative effects of such fields may be diminished by practitioners of nonlocal healing intention, particularly when groups of people, or individuals in cogent unity with groups or organizations, such as IONS, act with the intention to counterbalance, ameliorate, and reduce the effects of potentially negative environmental influences by engendering nondeteriorating fields supporting emergent greater human capability.
Though we must take very seriously the considerations that an increasing number of people may be hypersensitive to EMF and other industrial factors, for which the human immune system may have insufficient adjustment response, since the world population is very large and increasing, increasing members of its population may be inevitably turning to powerful cognitive and functional abilities, based in global vision and panoramic healing directionality. These factors have been inherent in human nature and now are manifesting as powers which may help the species emerge as one whose primary characteristic is its ability to function in multidimensional light awareness, for the first time approaching full knowledge of its potential form and function and the whole potential of its healing nature. Such nature may realize both the potential of zero-point energy (ZPE) as the human potential and may positively influence the ZPE potential in the evolutionary potential of the universe. “Should we further consider the possibility that such random vacuum energy (ZPE) might be subject to influence by consciousness or attention, then, given that it is well understood by physicists that a restructuring or “cohering” of vacuum energy would have physical consequences for matter, animate and inanimate, such could provide a rational basis for healing or other processes that are part and parcel of the pre-scientific view. In such fashion the similarities, differences, and possible synthesis of the pre-scientific and modern concepts of an all-pervasive energy field can be considered” (Puthoff, in Beal, 2004, p.6).
Thus matter and consciousness can be observed to have both fundamental and evolutionary qualities. The present era of human history may be characterized by an accelerated witnessing of the emerging evolutionary potential of the human species, in which the realization of its nature as light correspondingly generates a new and more appropriate model for medical science, a model of the human body that anticipates new forms of therapy and diagnosis. (Newman, 2006)
Also,
CALM PRACTICE
Dissonance Resolution Meditation:
Medical Practitioners modelling Meditative Practice and Lifestyle
Multisensory exercises and consciousness skills also enhance learning and discussing salient points from various patient safety scenarios. The scenarios are blended with seven main categories of Wellness Medicine. Wellness Medicine is also known as CAM, or Complementary-Alternative Medicine. Nutrition, Exercise, and Self-Regulation makes up the fundamental “holy triad,” of wellness. The other four categories are: Neuromuscular Integration, Biomolecular Environment, Acupuncture/Nonallopathic Modalities, and Spiritual Attunement/Medical Intuition
DISSONANCE RESOLUTION is the central key and fulcrum for leveraging effective learning of both Patient Safety and Wellness within an integrated web-based curriculum.Patient safety and wellness are intimately related because the essence of patient safety rests on the fundamental precepts of wellness. Optimal medical care results from any approach that encourages the patient to be in the driver’s seat and to take an active, family-centered role in healthcare. Dissonance resolution can put the spotlight on patient relaxation. Dissonance resolution is also a conceptual way of understanding how a person achieves mastery over disease and debilitation. Although “conflict resolution” has been used in psychology and behavioral sciences, dissonance resolution is a way of also recognizing less severe degrees of conflict and emphasizing the finer tuning and adaptation which humans can achieve. Resolving the finer degrees of dissonance is another route to mastery of stress and achievement of high-level wellness. Musical, psychological, and neurophysiologic analogies are all useful for explaining how and why we use dissonance resolution to optimize both the content and process of our educational program series. (Gilula, 2006)
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF DISSONANCE RESOLUTION: The definition of Cognitive Dissonance and resolution of cognitive dissonance are important parts of psychology. “Cognitive dissonance is...discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation” (Atherton 2003). Insight about personal behavior arrives at the cost of significant discomfort. Sometime it’s better not to know. Dissonance resolution in psychotherapy can represent cognitive and emotional (affective) elements of some psychological growth techniques. Neighbor (1992) uses cognitive dissonance in the form of an “intellectual wedge” that is driven between learners’ current beliefs and “reality” as part of medical training. When this approach works, it involves dissonance resolution because the by-product of resolving dissonance is resonance and coherence.
NEUROLOGICAL ASPECTS OF DISSONANCE RESOLUTION: Dissonance Resolution within the nervous system is easy to demonstrate neurophysiologically because we can detect electrical fields and currents by analyzing neural activity with EKG (heart) and EEG (brain) techniques. Our program focuses particularly on the neurological aspects of the heart and of the brain. Basic science research has documented well the existence of afferent connecting pathways of information going from the heart to the central nervous system (Armour and Ardell 1994). The heart is therefore a source of incoming information that is received and decoded in the brain and then fed back to the heart itself. FFT (Fast Fourier Transforms) or other methods of frequency analysis with both the EKG and the EEG have shown a difference in the coherence of electrical frequencies during different emotional states. During states of focus, appreciation, love, and other positive feelings, the basic EKG frequencies tend to line up behind other waves of similar frequencies, and when this happens to a high degree, the person is said to be in a “coherent” state. (Tiller,WA, McCraty, R., Atkinson, M. 1996) Angry, hostile, disorganized states tend to show a lack of coherence in the basic EKG frequencies.
Characteristics of neurophysiologic tracings during states of significant empathy often show bioentrainnment and coherence. Bioentrainment is when a form of electrical activity in one individual matches or “drives” that of another individual. The entrainment does not have to involve peaceful or coherent activity. It has been shown electrophysiologically that feelings of anxiety, anger, and disorganization can be shared and entrained between two individuals. During dissonance resolution we may expect to find neurophysiologic evidence of coherence, resonance, and bioentrainment. Dissonance resolution is designed into our program to enhance learning, to enhance coherent and resonant states, and to make learning more pleasurable and occur at a progressively higher level.
Studies of coherence and biofeedback phenomena show that the human nervous system can be brought under voluntary control, but there is yet a deeper level of control which seems to operate just out of conscious awareness. If an individual is sufficiently relaxed, it is possible to communicate directly with one’s own wiring system. Biofeedback researchers have described a type of “passive volition” achieved by subjects who can control their EKG or EEG. Passive volition involves becoming deeply relaxed and then gently willing a change in the body/mind function that is being monitored such as EKG or EEG.
Neurological aspects of dissonance resolution include become more and more sensitive to very subtle levels of internal disharmony. Learning to identify the internal disharmony is similar to learning the “passive volition” of EEG or EKG control. Learning to type requires some focus and concentration, and the same is true for learning voluntary control over physiologic functions. It does not require special intellectual abilities to learn either typing or voluntary internal control.
Barriers to learning are illustrated by the concept of dissonance. Just how the dissonance gets resolved is not so easy to explain. Some neurophysiologic dissonance resolution seems to be self-correction on the part of the human nervous system, especially when there is some conscious awareness or attention focused on the problem at hand. One example would be when two or more individuals are doing EEG biofeedback and experience an entrainment of their brain wave frequencies. Various psychotherapies, yoga, and other types of meditation can promote the achievement of internal coherence. Exposing the human nervous system to dissonance in graded doses that are not overwhelming can do the same thing. Coherent states can correlate with relaxation, more efficient learning, and unique or creative problem-solving.
When gamers are exposed to alternating degrees of complexity, the nervous system goes through the process of resolving the cognitive conflicts that are presented by the program. However, becoming adapted to unfamiliar controls and keystrokes to achieve novel simulation behaviors invokes a self-tuning neurological mechanism as the end-user first experiences discomfort and then gradually becomes comfortable with the simulation controls and their results. This is not merely a matter of reducing a degree of cognitive dissonance or cognitive conflict, but actually relating to the core discomfort coming from a lack of familiarity with both neural controls and game controls.
The entire progression of focusing on static and then on animated, and then on variably animated visual objects accompanied by their corresponding musical patterns throughout the program’s modules ultimately makes it easier for the learner to continue focusing at the higher, more difficult and “more expert” levels of the program. Gaming programmers usually focus on making the levels increasingly more difficult to navigate, but do not focus on how to optimize the quality of the gamer’s learning and progressions. (Gilula)
Calm Birth, Calm Parenting, Calm Healing, Congruent Practitioners
VIRTUAL PHYSICS
Consciousness is the highest order energy and affects our universe soley by its compressionall effect on quantized time-space. Timespace is spacetime where time is the more primary stuff. This can be modulated into infinite variety of secondary, tertiary effects and can be willed, directed - though with difficulty.
Sure, it is self-evident that observer state influences what observer sees -- BUT THAT IS UNRELATED TO OBSERVER EFFECT IN QM
To stay afloat and gain traction in Germany-the foremost country in all sciences- Heisenberg had to kiss up to the still-minority nazis. The result was uncertainty principle #1 which embodied crude observer effect which called GM into question by declaring that fine measurements couldnt be done without changing what was measured. Mathematical proofs by others soon showed that, even if we had perfect measuring instruments, uncertainty would still exist in the realm of the vey small due to limitations imposed by Planck length The avant garde quantum mechanics have mixed two invalid ideas and come up with a third invalid idea and promoted it for 30 years till they believe their own sales hype. The fact is that the event is the same whether observed or not---contary ideas are entirely due to grade school misunderstanding of uncertainty principle which is ITSELF bogus!
Coming soon:
Contextualization for use of meditation in a variety of integral medicine and experiential settings.
See http://medigrace.org
http://calmbirth.org
http://virtualphysics.50megs.com
NONLOCAL HEALING FIELD
Let us reconsider the energetic nature of the universal field as it pertains to the medium of long- distance healing (intercessory prayer).
When energies of healing intention are directed toward another who isn’t physically present, the energies are directed outwards into the greater life-field and are simultaneously directed inwards into the omnipresent universal field. The external universal field probably contains the results of power plant facilities, fossil fuel and possibly nuclear, and other large-scale industrial effects, which may impact regions beyond their local domain in the biosphere. Such industrial qualification of the earth-field may be impacting the human potential for nonlocal healing, with respect to both the healer and the person who is the object of a healing intention. At first this may seem unlikely, particularly if one considers that healing energy is nonphysical and may connect instantaneously with the objective it is directed to. But what if that is too simple an assumption? What if electrical and other man-made interferences act in as yet unknown/undefined interference with multidimensional human function and susceptibility?
In a paper dedicated to envisioning “what factors of consciousness may help to determine and develop healing potential” (Beal, 2004), James Beal investigates “recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns, processes, and temporal variations, influenced by the environment, - inherent in states of consciousness for better or worse (ibid, p.1). As far as indicating the range of concerns which may effect the ways in which environmental influences may be conditioned by the human body, Beal observes, “The human race shows great variability and tolerance to environmental elements, depending on age, gender, genetics, health, geographical location, culture, and personal belief systems, to name a few complexities!” (ibid). But though individual health may have such a range of responses both to environmental factors, generally local, and such nonlocal factors as energy changes and sun storms in nonlocal effective fields, it may well be that both opportunities for nonlocal healing and even the energetic resource for such healing work may be increasing in potential as the human species evolves into its emerging global awareness.
It has been noted (Dossey, 1993) that people demonstrating the capability of having a healing effect on others are often ordinary people, not notable for unusual (“anomalous”) capabilities and extraordinary consciousness. Rather, the demonstrate the fundamental genius of healing inherent in our immune system ability and the life force underlying it. Such demonstration is the sign of self-care at the heart of the emerging medical paradigm. Nonlocal and local environmental effects on the human species probably do not limit the human healing potential. Moreso, the potential negative effects of such fields may be diminished by practitioners of nonlocal healing intention, particularly when groups of people, or individuals in cogent unity with groups or organizations, such as IONS, act with the intention to counterbalance, ameliorate, and reduce the effects of potentially negative environmental influences by engendering nondeteriorating fields supporting emergent greater human capability.
Though we must take very seriously the considerations that an increasing number of people may be hypersensitive to EMF and other industrial factors, for which the human immune system may have insufficient adjustment response, since the world population is very large and increasing, increasing members of its population may be inevitably turning to powerful cognitive and functional abilities, based in global vision and panoramic healing directionality. These factors have been inherent in human nature and now are manifesting as powers which may help the species emerge as one whose primary characteristic is its ability to function in multidimensional light awareness, for the first time approaching full knowledge of its potential form and function and the whole potential of its healing nature. Such nature may realize both the potential of zero-point energy (ZPE) as the human potential and may positively influence the ZPE potential in the evolutionary potential of the universe. “Should we further consider the possibility that such random vacuum energy (ZPE) might be subject to influence by consciousness or attention, then, given that it is well understood by physicists that a restructuring or “cohering” of vacuum energy would have physical consequences for matter, animate and inanimate, such could provide a rational basis for healing or other processes that are part and parcel of the pre-scientific view. In such fashion the similarities, differences, and possible synthesis of the pre-scientific and modern concepts of an all-pervasive energy field can be considered” (Puthoff, in Beal, 2004, p.6).
Thus matter and consciousness can be observed to have both fundamental and evolutionary qualities. The present era of human history may be characterized by an accelerated witnessing of the emerging evolutionary potential of the human species, in which the realization of its nature as light correspondingly generates a new and more appropriate model for medical science, a model of the human body that anticipates new forms of therapy and diagnosis. (Newman, 2006)
Also,
CALM PRACTICE
Dissonance Resolution Meditation:
Medical Practitioners modelling Meditative Practice and Lifestyle
Multisensory exercises and consciousness skills also enhance learning and discussing salient points from various patient safety scenarios. The scenarios are blended with seven main categories of Wellness Medicine. Wellness Medicine is also known as CAM, or Complementary-Alternative Medicine. Nutrition, Exercise, and Self-Regulation makes up the fundamental “holy triad,” of wellness. The other four categories are: Neuromuscular Integration, Biomolecular Environment, Acupuncture/Nonallopathic Modalities, and Spiritual Attunement/Medical Intuition
DISSONANCE RESOLUTION is the central key and fulcrum for leveraging effective learning of both Patient Safety and Wellness within an integrated web-based curriculum.Patient safety and wellness are intimately related because the essence of patient safety rests on the fundamental precepts of wellness. Optimal medical care results from any approach that encourages the patient to be in the driver’s seat and to take an active, family-centered role in healthcare. Dissonance resolution can put the spotlight on patient relaxation. Dissonance resolution is also a conceptual way of understanding how a person achieves mastery over disease and debilitation. Although “conflict resolution” has been used in psychology and behavioral sciences, dissonance resolution is a way of also recognizing less severe degrees of conflict and emphasizing the finer tuning and adaptation which humans can achieve. Resolving the finer degrees of dissonance is another route to mastery of stress and achievement of high-level wellness. Musical, psychological, and neurophysiologic analogies are all useful for explaining how and why we use dissonance resolution to optimize both the content and process of our educational program series. (Gilula, 2006)
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF DISSONANCE RESOLUTION: The definition of Cognitive Dissonance and resolution of cognitive dissonance are important parts of psychology. “Cognitive dissonance is...discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation” (Atherton 2003). Insight about personal behavior arrives at the cost of significant discomfort. Sometime it’s better not to know. Dissonance resolution in psychotherapy can represent cognitive and emotional (affective) elements of some psychological growth techniques. Neighbor (1992) uses cognitive dissonance in the form of an “intellectual wedge” that is driven between learners’ current beliefs and “reality” as part of medical training. When this approach works, it involves dissonance resolution because the by-product of resolving dissonance is resonance and coherence.
NEUROLOGICAL ASPECTS OF DISSONANCE RESOLUTION: Dissonance Resolution within the nervous system is easy to demonstrate neurophysiologically because we can detect electrical fields and currents by analyzing neural activity with EKG (heart) and EEG (brain) techniques. Our program focuses particularly on the neurological aspects of the heart and of the brain. Basic science research has documented well the existence of afferent connecting pathways of information going from the heart to the central nervous system (Armour and Ardell 1994). The heart is therefore a source of incoming information that is received and decoded in the brain and then fed back to the heart itself. FFT (Fast Fourier Transforms) or other methods of frequency analysis with both the EKG and the EEG have shown a difference in the coherence of electrical frequencies during different emotional states. During states of focus, appreciation, love, and other positive feelings, the basic EKG frequencies tend to line up behind other waves of similar frequencies, and when this happens to a high degree, the person is said to be in a “coherent” state. (Tiller,WA, McCraty, R., Atkinson, M. 1996) Angry, hostile, disorganized states tend to show a lack of coherence in the basic EKG frequencies.
Characteristics of neurophysiologic tracings during states of significant empathy often show bioentrainnment and coherence. Bioentrainment is when a form of electrical activity in one individual matches or “drives” that of another individual. The entrainment does not have to involve peaceful or coherent activity. It has been shown electrophysiologically that feelings of anxiety, anger, and disorganization can be shared and entrained between two individuals. During dissonance resolution we may expect to find neurophysiologic evidence of coherence, resonance, and bioentrainment. Dissonance resolution is designed into our program to enhance learning, to enhance coherent and resonant states, and to make learning more pleasurable and occur at a progressively higher level.
Studies of coherence and biofeedback phenomena show that the human nervous system can be brought under voluntary control, but there is yet a deeper level of control which seems to operate just out of conscious awareness. If an individual is sufficiently relaxed, it is possible to communicate directly with one’s own wiring system. Biofeedback researchers have described a type of “passive volition” achieved by subjects who can control their EKG or EEG. Passive volition involves becoming deeply relaxed and then gently willing a change in the body/mind function that is being monitored such as EKG or EEG.
Neurological aspects of dissonance resolution include become more and more sensitive to very subtle levels of internal disharmony. Learning to identify the internal disharmony is similar to learning the “passive volition” of EEG or EKG control. Learning to type requires some focus and concentration, and the same is true for learning voluntary control over physiologic functions. It does not require special intellectual abilities to learn either typing or voluntary internal control.
Barriers to learning are illustrated by the concept of dissonance. Just how the dissonance gets resolved is not so easy to explain. Some neurophysiologic dissonance resolution seems to be self-correction on the part of the human nervous system, especially when there is some conscious awareness or attention focused on the problem at hand. One example would be when two or more individuals are doing EEG biofeedback and experience an entrainment of their brain wave frequencies. Various psychotherapies, yoga, and other types of meditation can promote the achievement of internal coherence. Exposing the human nervous system to dissonance in graded doses that are not overwhelming can do the same thing. Coherent states can correlate with relaxation, more efficient learning, and unique or creative problem-solving.
When gamers are exposed to alternating degrees of complexity, the nervous system goes through the process of resolving the cognitive conflicts that are presented by the program. However, becoming adapted to unfamiliar controls and keystrokes to achieve novel simulation behaviors invokes a self-tuning neurological mechanism as the end-user first experiences discomfort and then gradually becomes comfortable with the simulation controls and their results. This is not merely a matter of reducing a degree of cognitive dissonance or cognitive conflict, but actually relating to the core discomfort coming from a lack of familiarity with both neural controls and game controls.
The entire progression of focusing on static and then on animated, and then on variably animated visual objects accompanied by their corresponding musical patterns throughout the program’s modules ultimately makes it easier for the learner to continue focusing at the higher, more difficult and “more expert” levels of the program. Gaming programmers usually focus on making the levels increasingly more difficult to navigate, but do not focus on how to optimize the quality of the gamer’s learning and progressions. (Gilula)
GRAYWOLF:
ON PSYCHOTHERAPY, CONSCIOUSNESS, HEALING AND CHANGE...
Tam: You wrote in, "Beyond the Vision Quest: Bringing it Back" that for much of your youth you'd been preoccupied with success, science and technology. How did those preoccupations shape your life?
Graywolf: I was always fascinated with science and math and in grade school it was the science demonstrations and lessons that challenged my mind and kept my interest. I had heard about Einstein and wanted very much to be able to contribute to science as he had. He became immediately (and still is) one of my heroes, along with Superman, the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid. (Add Freud, Perles, Berne and Bohm to that list now)This was in the late forties and early fifties. When I reached high school (in Toronto Canada) I was mostly drawn to my ninth grade chemistry and physics classes, and just put up with the other stuff because I had to.
The magic moment of total dedication came as follows: I was considering what seemed to me to be the most likely future problems that science might solve (meaning me) and the one most likely to provide me with fame and fortune. I saw that what we were very dependent on and what most supported our civilization was gas and oil. I reasoned that there was only so much buried under the ground and that it would eventually be all used up. In this I saw my chance. I decided to devise a synthetic replacement for it.
I took these considerations to my ninth grade science teacher (I even remember his name, Mr. Pickering) and asked him what career I should aim for to accomplish this. He advised me that becoming a chemical engineer would be best. That was it for me. From that point on my academic work was all directed to that end.
I was not a nerd, I was also very active as an all star football player and on the track team, president of the photography club, second in command of the school cadet corps, photography editor then editor in chief of the school yearbook, Piper and drummer in the Pipe band etc. etc. and I also played base guitar and sang in the first Toronto Rock Group. In this I was a revolutionary (which figures in my later willingness to also be so in psychology) since rock was considered the music of the devil back then.
My two favorite fairy tale heroes were the little boy in the Emperors New Clothes and David of David and Goliath which also speaks to my fundamental scripting. I also became an atheist or perhaps more correctly an agnostic in keeping with my quest to become a pure scientist.
I struggled to be as objective as I could in all circumstances and to a very large degree suppressed my feeling and emotional side. Consequently I was very susceptible to them and they would pop out much to my consternation. So I would work even harder to suppress them. Later, in the sixties, Mr. Spock of Star Trek represented my ideal (along with Scottie.) By then I had graduated from college as a Chemical Engineer (1963) and was working for a rubber and plastics raw material producer. I turned out a number of patents and was rising rapidly as a technical service and development engineer. I was working in the field of golf balls since we were developing synthetic rubbers to replace the natural ones used in their production. I dedicated myself to this and soon developed a reputation in the industry as a whiz kid. I soon moved to the U.S. (1966) where I designed and built a golf ball production factory for Ben Hogan. I continued on totally dedicated to my career and engineering, getting ahead very rapidly. By 1969 after several career moves I was appointed general manager (at age 29) of the Golf Ball division of Wilson Sporting goods. The position had much to offer, money, notoriety, country club membership, power, (lunches with people such as Jerry Ford shortly before he was president), connections to the white house (I made all the golf balls for the Nixon Administration).
Since I had succeeded in shelving all my emotions and feelings and was virtually a Mr. Spock, I had succeeded well in business but was failing miserably in my personal life.
My original goals of making a vital contribution to humanity had been lost along with my emotions and feelings. I was a robot and doing things (such as firing a close personal friend because we had to reduce overhead by 15%) which did not sit well with my humanity and the revolutionary in me. It set up an inner conflict of which I was not aware. I saw, as was required of good managers, the world as a function of the bottom line, and operated as a machine. The inner conflict and failure in my personal life had resulted in me being overweight (I ate to stuff the pain) and having a very driven (type A) personality.
My preoccupation led me to neglect my personal health and I had developed several executive syndrome disorders. I had hypertension, hypoglycemia, a fast developing ulcer, and my e.k.g. showed that I had already suffered from one or more heart attacks. There were indications of damage to one of the valves. I was overweight and well on my way, if not already, an alcoholic. I smoked about one and a half packs of cigarettes a day. I had missed the pain of the mild heart attacks through my ability to stuff my feelings and sensations. My sports career had also taught me how to do that. (I didn't mention that in college I was the intercollegiate wrestling champion in my freshman year and later became the player-coach of the team. I had won the championship match with torn ligaments in my right knee from an earlier match. I was on crutches for months after that. I was really good at stuffing stuff.)
However from my preoccupation with science I also leaned many positives: That world views can change when the old theories are replaced by new ones. That theories are at best models of reality and not the real thing. That one can often learn more from the failure of an experiment than if it had succeeded. And that many of the important breakthroughs in science came from the cracks, the nagging little things that the current theories didn't quite cover. From engineering I learned that you have to be adaptable in reality as nothing ever goes exactly as planned. That the theories of pure science are at best approximations, not to trust them completely nor take them as gospel, and finding what actually works is more important than holding on to a favorite theory or practice.
I also learned that I solved far more of my technical and management problems when I was asleep and dreaming than with my technical expertise, although I didn't admit that to anyone. I also noted that dreams were prominent in fundamental scientific breakthroughs. So to a large degree I was fascinated with the nature of dreams, and pursuit of this interest was a major part of my desire to become a psychologist after I left my career in engineering.
Tam: In 1971 you were informed by your doctor that you'd be dead within three years. I was hoping that you might share what impact his warning had on you?
Graywolf: I had been going through some particularly tricky management issues (i.e. contract negotiations with the Teamsters union) and technical problems at the factory. I had developed a headache that had lasted for three weeks and my usual remedies helped not at all. My wife at that time was a nurse, was worried and so set up an appointment for me with a doctor to which I reluctantly went. I was shocked when the doctor immediately scheduled me for a number of tests at the local hospital.
I put it out of my mind until a couple of days later when the results were available. He took me into his office and gave them to me. I was in shock. My mother had died of many of the things that he was saying afflicted me. I asked how serious it was and he told me that he expected I would be dead within three years. He went on to cite my life style, work pressure, marital problems, as contributing causes along with my genetic background, and reiterated that I would be dead within three year without treatment and addressing some of these issues. And it might not work; I was in pretty bad shape mentally and physically.
My shock continued walking out of his office. I had a very strict diet in hand, a prescription or two, and was to report for checkups regularly. But I was terrified. I was only 32 years old and had watched my mother die young as I might myself.
I didn't tell my wife and I didn't sleep that night. I called in sick for the first time next morning and stayed in bed and thought. I re-evaluated my priorities. That evening was when I told my wife about my condition. I decided, at the very least if I only had a little while to live, to start having fun and doing things that I had always wanted but never found the time for. Unfortunately many of these things she wasn't willing to share with me such as going dancing, learning to ski, reactivating my passion for music and playing the rock guitar. I decided that doing them might be more important than my marriage, so did then with her disapproval. Her idea was medication and a strict regimen of abstinence to heal me.
I began to leave my work at the plant and have fun evenings and weekends. I even began attending a non-denominational liberal church in town. I began to assess where I was and where I was going relative to my childhood ideals. I was falling far short of them. Soon my wife left me and I was in great pain over that. Her parting words were that I was going through a second childhood and she wanted nothing to do with it. I was in a major self identity crisis.
At that point neither my career nor my personal life satisfied me. The fun was fun but my health was still poor. Headaches, shortness of breath, etc. A concerned friend and business colleague took me out to lunch one day and recommended counseling for me. I wasn't too open to it so he told me to show up on Friday evening at a certain church. It turned out to be empathy training for perspective crisis phone line workers. I reluctantly started the three day training and became a convert by the time it was over. I rediscovered my emotions and sensitivity. I soon dedicated all my off work hours to this and to another program, drug crisis intervention work. Between the two I was spending all my off work hours in the alternative community. I took an introduction to TA at the free university. It described my life and offered hope. By then I had dramatically resigned my job. (That is an interesting story in itself.) and had free time. I started training in TA and in my own analysis discovered the patterns that had trapped me and how they contributed to my Type A personality and health problems. I lost about forty pounds and began to get into shape. I soon was totally dedicated to understanding healing from both psychological and medical perspectives. I wanted to become a healer and in the process heal myself. I also began to study dreams through the gestalt therapy and began attending all workshops on dreamwork at the psychology conferences I attended.
Tam: You've also indicated that during your studies and in your practice as a psychotherapist you came to believe that for the most part current psychotherapy models "didn't really address the full human condition" in your clients or yourself. Would you elaborate on that?
Graywolf: I had completed TA and Gestalt training by 1975. I had, as part of that, studied psychology in considerable depth including Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Behavioral and Reichian models, theories and practices as well as a number of fringe practices and several approaches to body work. I also studied medical models of healing with a thought of attending medical school. In these studies I encountered two phenomena that captured my interest, the Placebo Effect and Iatrogenic illness. The former became my interest and ideal for a healing model. However I could find no operational explanation of how they worked.
On returning from my written and oral exams in TA I met with my supervisor. I recall asking her "Is this all there is?" because I couldn't believe that this was the end state of psychological science. "What is beneath scripting?" I asked her along with other similar questions. She replied that I had all the basics, understood all the theories and practices and was fully qualified. "It's not enough." I told her. Engineers take pride in their tools and the ones I had mastered didn't seem enough.
However, I practiced for several years putting my concerns in context within myself. They are:
a.) Psychology and medicine ARE quite sophisticated in diagnosing and categorizing the various illnesses, but healing techniques are woefully inadequate and ineffective.
b.) Trained in hard sciences and working as an engineer I had experienced the limits of Newtonian science. I had expected that psychology and healing arts would have developed specific theories that would explain or deal with the complexities and synergy of the human condition. But all I saw was an attempt to make people fit into this mechanistic and reductionistic approach (Newtonian Mechanics) that didn't work all that well even with inert objects.
I even started developing a practice that I called "Relativity Therapy" based on Einstein's implications that all measurements depend on the frame of reference. I knew that this relativity theory was a better model than the Newtonian one and I found this approach more effective. (It basically involved not defining any absolutes of either health or proper functioning but understanding the client's frame of reference and working within that.) By the mid seventies I was also re-exposed to Quantum theory through "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" and began to speculate and explore how these theories might also be more applicable to the human condition and healing it.
During this time I also had my wolf experience which slowly opened me up to spiritual considerations. I found myself returning in some of my sessions to the state of consciousness of that experience. I soon discovered that the wolf state far more helped people to define and solve their issues than all my psychotherapy training accomplished. This was the beginnings of my co-consciousness model in which the therapist rather than being objective and separate from the client enters into co-consciousness with them.
c.) Although many of my colleagues and clients considered me to be a brilliant therapist, I didn't feel that we were really getting much fundamental healing done with conventional therapies. Client's would linger on, continuing on long after we had met their therapeutic contracts. "There's still something missing," they would say. I had to agree with them. Most of my most effective therapy interventions happened in the last minutes of a session when I might make some off hand remark seemingly entirely out of context. The client would return the next week marveling at how that remark had helped them to change dramatically.
d.) That was driving me along with the unanswered questions I had about the placebo effect. I was interested in how it worked and the implications from it; how intimately the mind, consciousness and body are bound in healing and wellness. Psychology and medicine had nothing to offer on this. Another factor was that I was also beginning to explore an emerging sense of my own spirituality through my Graywolf experiences. Although I wouldn't have labeled it as such then, I was feeling a deeper transpersonal self and connection.
e.) I continued my studies of psychology in Graduate school obtaining a Masters degree in it but chose to pursue shaman's studies rather than continue for a Doctorate. The Masters work was quite unsatisfying and Doctoral work looked like just a continuation of the same pap. I had specialized in schizophrenia and wrote my masters thesis on it. I was told by my advisor that it was worthy of being my Doctoral Dissertation with some minor additional work. But I didn't learn anything from that exercise in futility except to confirm how little is understood about the condition.
My own work in the field with schizophrenia taught me much more about it and my notion was that the important elements of it were ignored. The hypersensitivity of schizophrenics, the often extrasensory and psi experiences weren't addressed except to label them as pathology, hallucination or delusion. The very spiritual nature of the condition (religious fascination and fixations). Yet "Psychological Science and Medical Science ignored all this and presented dry mechanistic models of the condition. I also left out these considerations in my thesis on the advice of my advisor.
f.) I was attending two or three psychology conferences a year and many, many workshops. There was nothing new in them, just the same old theories and models warmed up and repeated using different words. That's still happening: codependency is just what we used to work with under the name symbiosis and then enabling; inner child work is a warmed up excerpt from TA, etc. etc.
g.) Humanistic psychology drew my interest because of the fundamental difference of philosophy. If you want to understand health you must study healthy people. I even became deeply involved with the AHP acting as an unofficial advisor to the Board and helping organize and manage conferences. I lost interest when the AHP began mainstreaming itself and seemed to lose its exploratory bent.
h.) Psychology seemed for the most part to ignore the full range of human experience. It ignored psi experiences, yet from personal experience I knew them to be facts. Its explanation of phenomena such as Deja-vu was trite and didn't really capture the flavor of it. Psychology was unable and seemed unwilling to explore and explain such things as love and intimacy, yet I knew them to be important in healing work, both as a support system and coming from the therapist.
i.) Exposure to fringe theories and practices made me aware of several other problems. For example "Radical Psychiatry" pointed out the inability of psychology to address social change.
j.) But the main issue was that psychology and its science had made no inroads to understanding or exploring the nature of consciousness. That seemed to me the most important element in understanding both the human condition and healing it. It seemed to be the basis of natural healing phenomena such as the placebo effect. It also seemed fundamental to an understanding of the foundations and perception of reality itself. Psychological science seemed for the most part to be withdrawing from exploring and understanding consciousness in favor of drug, behaviorist and emotional cathartic therapies. On the other hand leading edge physics was hot on the trail of consciousness.
I was drawn to Shamanic studies, in part because shamans seemed better versed in using and understanding consciousness. There was a twenty to fifty thousand year background of empirical studies and experience in it. I chose to study this rather than go on for my Doctorate degree. In the process I connected with Dr. Stanley Krippner as a mentor (and now colleague and close friend. I started a doctoral program with him as advisor but soon dropped it, with his full blessings, as irrelevant to my aims.
During this time I worked on what I called the Shaman-Therapist model. I still have an uncompleted book on the topic in my old abandoned computer. Its fundamental notion was that to have greater depth in healing you need two models or world-views operating simultaneously, much like you need two eyes for depth in visual perception. One eye is that of the scientist, analyst, therapist. The other eye is that of the shaman, mystic, spiritual healer. Both need to be operating at the same time for this depth to realize. This distinguished it from the methods I had seen practiced in Transpersonal Psychology which were like alternately opening one eye and then the other.
I could go on with the many other details but the above should give you a fairly complete idea of my concerns about psychological science and current treatments, and my discontent with them. At the conclusion of my shaman studies I went through a similar process with shamans practice. This led to my discovery of and development of the Chaos-REM Process of Natural Healing.
Tam: I'm struck by your adventurous spirit and both the professional and personal risks you've taken in your life. I'm wondering what in retrospect you might consider your greatest risk thus far to have been and what lessons the experience has taught you.
Graywolf: At the time I was "taking risks" they didn't seem like risks at all. In fact they seemed like the most reasonable thing to do at the time. In retrospect I see that they did appear to be risky but if I were to remain true to myself they were directions I had to follow. While going through them, it was often as though I were watching myself do what I was doing. It didn't feel like dissociation or denial so much as being guided and watched by a powerful and loving presence within which was a deeper and wiser self. Given that disclaimer I offer the following.
My dropping out as a business executive and engineer was very risky. I had an assured future but the cost of that assuredness was too high. Better to live on poor than to die soon wealthy and successful.
My venture into the North Woods of Canada where I met Graywolf was risky and life threatening. But it seemed less so than living with insecurity within myself about my ability to survive.
My abandoning my practice and career as a psychotherapist was also risky as was taking the name Graywolf. However I was drawn strongly to this path and knew it was the best thing for me to do to further my interests and studies of healing process.
I suppose, looking at my answers so far, I could summarize. I was always moving on to something more interesting and exciting in my life and was able to let go of the past very easily because of this draw. I was generally done with what I was leaving behind and the draw seemed to be coming from deep within (intuitive). I later found a guiding principle given me by Al Huang. He told me that the Chinese cipher for crisis is made up of two ciphers: one meaning danger, the other meaning opportunity. I guess also that I have a pretty deep level of self confidence that tells me "no matter what you can handle it!" So in all they weren't really risks at all but the only reasonable thing to do to get where I needed to go.
As for lessons this has taught me? I suppose I have always been adventuresome. From defying authority to play Rock Music in the fifties to taking on the task of changing the basis of healing sciences, I have always tended to follow the truth, as did the little boy in the Emperors New Clothes. And taking on giants is no problem for little David, he toppled Goliath with a small stone put in the right place. The main lesson is that this is a very viable and satisfying way to live one's life, and authority means nothing more than having power, it doesn't imply correctness or truth.
Tam: Recently you've managed it seems to combine your experience and training as an engineer, as a psychotherapist, and your ventures in the wilderness and utilize them in some fascinating ways in the study of consciousness. I would love to hear more about where this particular venture is leading you.
Graywolf: In a sentence it is leading me into REM studies, Holographic theory, combined with consciousness explorations. For example I am about to embark an a project to develop the mathematics of consciousness. I am attaching my two most recent articles which will provide more details.
I do offer comment on the important concepts in my work.
Graywolf Swinney (deceased) was a dream therapist, consciousness mentor, author, lecturer, scientist, and the founder and director of ASKLEPIA FOUNDATION and THE INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS SCIENCE. He operated Aesculapia Wilderness Retreat with Iona Miller in Southern Oregon where they offered training in the Creative Consciousness Natural Healing Process. He also offered the Creative Consciousness Natural Healing Process in the Puget Sound area as well. Graywolf was also a whitewater river guide on the lower wild & scenic Rogue River.
ON PSYCHOTHERAPY, CONSCIOUSNESS, HEALING AND CHANGE...
Tam: You wrote in, "Beyond the Vision Quest: Bringing it Back" that for much of your youth you'd been preoccupied with success, science and technology. How did those preoccupations shape your life?
Graywolf: I was always fascinated with science and math and in grade school it was the science demonstrations and lessons that challenged my mind and kept my interest. I had heard about Einstein and wanted very much to be able to contribute to science as he had. He became immediately (and still is) one of my heroes, along with Superman, the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid. (Add Freud, Perles, Berne and Bohm to that list now)This was in the late forties and early fifties. When I reached high school (in Toronto Canada) I was mostly drawn to my ninth grade chemistry and physics classes, and just put up with the other stuff because I had to.
The magic moment of total dedication came as follows: I was considering what seemed to me to be the most likely future problems that science might solve (meaning me) and the one most likely to provide me with fame and fortune. I saw that what we were very dependent on and what most supported our civilization was gas and oil. I reasoned that there was only so much buried under the ground and that it would eventually be all used up. In this I saw my chance. I decided to devise a synthetic replacement for it.
I took these considerations to my ninth grade science teacher (I even remember his name, Mr. Pickering) and asked him what career I should aim for to accomplish this. He advised me that becoming a chemical engineer would be best. That was it for me. From that point on my academic work was all directed to that end.
I was not a nerd, I was also very active as an all star football player and on the track team, president of the photography club, second in command of the school cadet corps, photography editor then editor in chief of the school yearbook, Piper and drummer in the Pipe band etc. etc. and I also played base guitar and sang in the first Toronto Rock Group. In this I was a revolutionary (which figures in my later willingness to also be so in psychology) since rock was considered the music of the devil back then.
My two favorite fairy tale heroes were the little boy in the Emperors New Clothes and David of David and Goliath which also speaks to my fundamental scripting. I also became an atheist or perhaps more correctly an agnostic in keeping with my quest to become a pure scientist.
I struggled to be as objective as I could in all circumstances and to a very large degree suppressed my feeling and emotional side. Consequently I was very susceptible to them and they would pop out much to my consternation. So I would work even harder to suppress them. Later, in the sixties, Mr. Spock of Star Trek represented my ideal (along with Scottie.) By then I had graduated from college as a Chemical Engineer (1963) and was working for a rubber and plastics raw material producer. I turned out a number of patents and was rising rapidly as a technical service and development engineer. I was working in the field of golf balls since we were developing synthetic rubbers to replace the natural ones used in their production. I dedicated myself to this and soon developed a reputation in the industry as a whiz kid. I soon moved to the U.S. (1966) where I designed and built a golf ball production factory for Ben Hogan. I continued on totally dedicated to my career and engineering, getting ahead very rapidly. By 1969 after several career moves I was appointed general manager (at age 29) of the Golf Ball division of Wilson Sporting goods. The position had much to offer, money, notoriety, country club membership, power, (lunches with people such as Jerry Ford shortly before he was president), connections to the white house (I made all the golf balls for the Nixon Administration).
Since I had succeeded in shelving all my emotions and feelings and was virtually a Mr. Spock, I had succeeded well in business but was failing miserably in my personal life.
My original goals of making a vital contribution to humanity had been lost along with my emotions and feelings. I was a robot and doing things (such as firing a close personal friend because we had to reduce overhead by 15%) which did not sit well with my humanity and the revolutionary in me. It set up an inner conflict of which I was not aware. I saw, as was required of good managers, the world as a function of the bottom line, and operated as a machine. The inner conflict and failure in my personal life had resulted in me being overweight (I ate to stuff the pain) and having a very driven (type A) personality.
My preoccupation led me to neglect my personal health and I had developed several executive syndrome disorders. I had hypertension, hypoglycemia, a fast developing ulcer, and my e.k.g. showed that I had already suffered from one or more heart attacks. There were indications of damage to one of the valves. I was overweight and well on my way, if not already, an alcoholic. I smoked about one and a half packs of cigarettes a day. I had missed the pain of the mild heart attacks through my ability to stuff my feelings and sensations. My sports career had also taught me how to do that. (I didn't mention that in college I was the intercollegiate wrestling champion in my freshman year and later became the player-coach of the team. I had won the championship match with torn ligaments in my right knee from an earlier match. I was on crutches for months after that. I was really good at stuffing stuff.)
However from my preoccupation with science I also leaned many positives: That world views can change when the old theories are replaced by new ones. That theories are at best models of reality and not the real thing. That one can often learn more from the failure of an experiment than if it had succeeded. And that many of the important breakthroughs in science came from the cracks, the nagging little things that the current theories didn't quite cover. From engineering I learned that you have to be adaptable in reality as nothing ever goes exactly as planned. That the theories of pure science are at best approximations, not to trust them completely nor take them as gospel, and finding what actually works is more important than holding on to a favorite theory or practice.
I also learned that I solved far more of my technical and management problems when I was asleep and dreaming than with my technical expertise, although I didn't admit that to anyone. I also noted that dreams were prominent in fundamental scientific breakthroughs. So to a large degree I was fascinated with the nature of dreams, and pursuit of this interest was a major part of my desire to become a psychologist after I left my career in engineering.
Tam: In 1971 you were informed by your doctor that you'd be dead within three years. I was hoping that you might share what impact his warning had on you?
Graywolf: I had been going through some particularly tricky management issues (i.e. contract negotiations with the Teamsters union) and technical problems at the factory. I had developed a headache that had lasted for three weeks and my usual remedies helped not at all. My wife at that time was a nurse, was worried and so set up an appointment for me with a doctor to which I reluctantly went. I was shocked when the doctor immediately scheduled me for a number of tests at the local hospital.
I put it out of my mind until a couple of days later when the results were available. He took me into his office and gave them to me. I was in shock. My mother had died of many of the things that he was saying afflicted me. I asked how serious it was and he told me that he expected I would be dead within three years. He went on to cite my life style, work pressure, marital problems, as contributing causes along with my genetic background, and reiterated that I would be dead within three year without treatment and addressing some of these issues. And it might not work; I was in pretty bad shape mentally and physically.
My shock continued walking out of his office. I had a very strict diet in hand, a prescription or two, and was to report for checkups regularly. But I was terrified. I was only 32 years old and had watched my mother die young as I might myself.
I didn't tell my wife and I didn't sleep that night. I called in sick for the first time next morning and stayed in bed and thought. I re-evaluated my priorities. That evening was when I told my wife about my condition. I decided, at the very least if I only had a little while to live, to start having fun and doing things that I had always wanted but never found the time for. Unfortunately many of these things she wasn't willing to share with me such as going dancing, learning to ski, reactivating my passion for music and playing the rock guitar. I decided that doing them might be more important than my marriage, so did then with her disapproval. Her idea was medication and a strict regimen of abstinence to heal me.
I began to leave my work at the plant and have fun evenings and weekends. I even began attending a non-denominational liberal church in town. I began to assess where I was and where I was going relative to my childhood ideals. I was falling far short of them. Soon my wife left me and I was in great pain over that. Her parting words were that I was going through a second childhood and she wanted nothing to do with it. I was in a major self identity crisis.
At that point neither my career nor my personal life satisfied me. The fun was fun but my health was still poor. Headaches, shortness of breath, etc. A concerned friend and business colleague took me out to lunch one day and recommended counseling for me. I wasn't too open to it so he told me to show up on Friday evening at a certain church. It turned out to be empathy training for perspective crisis phone line workers. I reluctantly started the three day training and became a convert by the time it was over. I rediscovered my emotions and sensitivity. I soon dedicated all my off work hours to this and to another program, drug crisis intervention work. Between the two I was spending all my off work hours in the alternative community. I took an introduction to TA at the free university. It described my life and offered hope. By then I had dramatically resigned my job. (That is an interesting story in itself.) and had free time. I started training in TA and in my own analysis discovered the patterns that had trapped me and how they contributed to my Type A personality and health problems. I lost about forty pounds and began to get into shape. I soon was totally dedicated to understanding healing from both psychological and medical perspectives. I wanted to become a healer and in the process heal myself. I also began to study dreams through the gestalt therapy and began attending all workshops on dreamwork at the psychology conferences I attended.
Tam: You've also indicated that during your studies and in your practice as a psychotherapist you came to believe that for the most part current psychotherapy models "didn't really address the full human condition" in your clients or yourself. Would you elaborate on that?
Graywolf: I had completed TA and Gestalt training by 1975. I had, as part of that, studied psychology in considerable depth including Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Behavioral and Reichian models, theories and practices as well as a number of fringe practices and several approaches to body work. I also studied medical models of healing with a thought of attending medical school. In these studies I encountered two phenomena that captured my interest, the Placebo Effect and Iatrogenic illness. The former became my interest and ideal for a healing model. However I could find no operational explanation of how they worked.
On returning from my written and oral exams in TA I met with my supervisor. I recall asking her "Is this all there is?" because I couldn't believe that this was the end state of psychological science. "What is beneath scripting?" I asked her along with other similar questions. She replied that I had all the basics, understood all the theories and practices and was fully qualified. "It's not enough." I told her. Engineers take pride in their tools and the ones I had mastered didn't seem enough.
However, I practiced for several years putting my concerns in context within myself. They are:
a.) Psychology and medicine ARE quite sophisticated in diagnosing and categorizing the various illnesses, but healing techniques are woefully inadequate and ineffective.
b.) Trained in hard sciences and working as an engineer I had experienced the limits of Newtonian science. I had expected that psychology and healing arts would have developed specific theories that would explain or deal with the complexities and synergy of the human condition. But all I saw was an attempt to make people fit into this mechanistic and reductionistic approach (Newtonian Mechanics) that didn't work all that well even with inert objects.
I even started developing a practice that I called "Relativity Therapy" based on Einstein's implications that all measurements depend on the frame of reference. I knew that this relativity theory was a better model than the Newtonian one and I found this approach more effective. (It basically involved not defining any absolutes of either health or proper functioning but understanding the client's frame of reference and working within that.) By the mid seventies I was also re-exposed to Quantum theory through "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" and began to speculate and explore how these theories might also be more applicable to the human condition and healing it.
During this time I also had my wolf experience which slowly opened me up to spiritual considerations. I found myself returning in some of my sessions to the state of consciousness of that experience. I soon discovered that the wolf state far more helped people to define and solve their issues than all my psychotherapy training accomplished. This was the beginnings of my co-consciousness model in which the therapist rather than being objective and separate from the client enters into co-consciousness with them.
c.) Although many of my colleagues and clients considered me to be a brilliant therapist, I didn't feel that we were really getting much fundamental healing done with conventional therapies. Client's would linger on, continuing on long after we had met their therapeutic contracts. "There's still something missing," they would say. I had to agree with them. Most of my most effective therapy interventions happened in the last minutes of a session when I might make some off hand remark seemingly entirely out of context. The client would return the next week marveling at how that remark had helped them to change dramatically.
d.) That was driving me along with the unanswered questions I had about the placebo effect. I was interested in how it worked and the implications from it; how intimately the mind, consciousness and body are bound in healing and wellness. Psychology and medicine had nothing to offer on this. Another factor was that I was also beginning to explore an emerging sense of my own spirituality through my Graywolf experiences. Although I wouldn't have labeled it as such then, I was feeling a deeper transpersonal self and connection.
e.) I continued my studies of psychology in Graduate school obtaining a Masters degree in it but chose to pursue shaman's studies rather than continue for a Doctorate. The Masters work was quite unsatisfying and Doctoral work looked like just a continuation of the same pap. I had specialized in schizophrenia and wrote my masters thesis on it. I was told by my advisor that it was worthy of being my Doctoral Dissertation with some minor additional work. But I didn't learn anything from that exercise in futility except to confirm how little is understood about the condition.
My own work in the field with schizophrenia taught me much more about it and my notion was that the important elements of it were ignored. The hypersensitivity of schizophrenics, the often extrasensory and psi experiences weren't addressed except to label them as pathology, hallucination or delusion. The very spiritual nature of the condition (religious fascination and fixations). Yet "Psychological Science and Medical Science ignored all this and presented dry mechanistic models of the condition. I also left out these considerations in my thesis on the advice of my advisor.
f.) I was attending two or three psychology conferences a year and many, many workshops. There was nothing new in them, just the same old theories and models warmed up and repeated using different words. That's still happening: codependency is just what we used to work with under the name symbiosis and then enabling; inner child work is a warmed up excerpt from TA, etc. etc.
g.) Humanistic psychology drew my interest because of the fundamental difference of philosophy. If you want to understand health you must study healthy people. I even became deeply involved with the AHP acting as an unofficial advisor to the Board and helping organize and manage conferences. I lost interest when the AHP began mainstreaming itself and seemed to lose its exploratory bent.
h.) Psychology seemed for the most part to ignore the full range of human experience. It ignored psi experiences, yet from personal experience I knew them to be facts. Its explanation of phenomena such as Deja-vu was trite and didn't really capture the flavor of it. Psychology was unable and seemed unwilling to explore and explain such things as love and intimacy, yet I knew them to be important in healing work, both as a support system and coming from the therapist.
i.) Exposure to fringe theories and practices made me aware of several other problems. For example "Radical Psychiatry" pointed out the inability of psychology to address social change.
j.) But the main issue was that psychology and its science had made no inroads to understanding or exploring the nature of consciousness. That seemed to me the most important element in understanding both the human condition and healing it. It seemed to be the basis of natural healing phenomena such as the placebo effect. It also seemed fundamental to an understanding of the foundations and perception of reality itself. Psychological science seemed for the most part to be withdrawing from exploring and understanding consciousness in favor of drug, behaviorist and emotional cathartic therapies. On the other hand leading edge physics was hot on the trail of consciousness.
I was drawn to Shamanic studies, in part because shamans seemed better versed in using and understanding consciousness. There was a twenty to fifty thousand year background of empirical studies and experience in it. I chose to study this rather than go on for my Doctorate degree. In the process I connected with Dr. Stanley Krippner as a mentor (and now colleague and close friend. I started a doctoral program with him as advisor but soon dropped it, with his full blessings, as irrelevant to my aims.
During this time I worked on what I called the Shaman-Therapist model. I still have an uncompleted book on the topic in my old abandoned computer. Its fundamental notion was that to have greater depth in healing you need two models or world-views operating simultaneously, much like you need two eyes for depth in visual perception. One eye is that of the scientist, analyst, therapist. The other eye is that of the shaman, mystic, spiritual healer. Both need to be operating at the same time for this depth to realize. This distinguished it from the methods I had seen practiced in Transpersonal Psychology which were like alternately opening one eye and then the other.
I could go on with the many other details but the above should give you a fairly complete idea of my concerns about psychological science and current treatments, and my discontent with them. At the conclusion of my shaman studies I went through a similar process with shamans practice. This led to my discovery of and development of the Chaos-REM Process of Natural Healing.
Tam: I'm struck by your adventurous spirit and both the professional and personal risks you've taken in your life. I'm wondering what in retrospect you might consider your greatest risk thus far to have been and what lessons the experience has taught you.
Graywolf: At the time I was "taking risks" they didn't seem like risks at all. In fact they seemed like the most reasonable thing to do at the time. In retrospect I see that they did appear to be risky but if I were to remain true to myself they were directions I had to follow. While going through them, it was often as though I were watching myself do what I was doing. It didn't feel like dissociation or denial so much as being guided and watched by a powerful and loving presence within which was a deeper and wiser self. Given that disclaimer I offer the following.
My dropping out as a business executive and engineer was very risky. I had an assured future but the cost of that assuredness was too high. Better to live on poor than to die soon wealthy and successful.
My venture into the North Woods of Canada where I met Graywolf was risky and life threatening. But it seemed less so than living with insecurity within myself about my ability to survive.
My abandoning my practice and career as a psychotherapist was also risky as was taking the name Graywolf. However I was drawn strongly to this path and knew it was the best thing for me to do to further my interests and studies of healing process.
I suppose, looking at my answers so far, I could summarize. I was always moving on to something more interesting and exciting in my life and was able to let go of the past very easily because of this draw. I was generally done with what I was leaving behind and the draw seemed to be coming from deep within (intuitive). I later found a guiding principle given me by Al Huang. He told me that the Chinese cipher for crisis is made up of two ciphers: one meaning danger, the other meaning opportunity. I guess also that I have a pretty deep level of self confidence that tells me "no matter what you can handle it!" So in all they weren't really risks at all but the only reasonable thing to do to get where I needed to go.
As for lessons this has taught me? I suppose I have always been adventuresome. From defying authority to play Rock Music in the fifties to taking on the task of changing the basis of healing sciences, I have always tended to follow the truth, as did the little boy in the Emperors New Clothes. And taking on giants is no problem for little David, he toppled Goliath with a small stone put in the right place. The main lesson is that this is a very viable and satisfying way to live one's life, and authority means nothing more than having power, it doesn't imply correctness or truth.
Tam: Recently you've managed it seems to combine your experience and training as an engineer, as a psychotherapist, and your ventures in the wilderness and utilize them in some fascinating ways in the study of consciousness. I would love to hear more about where this particular venture is leading you.
Graywolf: In a sentence it is leading me into REM studies, Holographic theory, combined with consciousness explorations. For example I am about to embark an a project to develop the mathematics of consciousness. I am attaching my two most recent articles which will provide more details.
I do offer comment on the important concepts in my work.
- The science that currently drives the healing professions is out of date and not really appropriate to complex systems. New science provides far better models for the human condition. I.e. relativity, quantum, chaos and holographic theories.
- Healing and disease are matters that involve senses more than mind and are matters of consciousness and its structures.
- Complex systems are self regulating (homeostasis principle) and will generally do so given the opportunity.
- Healing depends far more on the connection between the practitioner and client than it does on the particular practice.
- Symptoms are at their base attempts by the organism to solve problems. As such their isolated eradication can result in further symptoms arising in answer to the unsolved deeper issue.
- There are only self-healers, the best one can do is find and encourage that process in another.
- Consciousness prevails throughout all reality and is a basic field that is part of all structure in the space time continuum.
Graywolf Swinney (deceased) was a dream therapist, consciousness mentor, author, lecturer, scientist, and the founder and director of ASKLEPIA FOUNDATION and THE INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS SCIENCE. He operated Aesculapia Wilderness Retreat with Iona Miller in Southern Oregon where they offered training in the Creative Consciousness Natural Healing Process. He also offered the Creative Consciousness Natural Healing Process in the Puget Sound area as well. Graywolf was also a whitewater river guide on the lower wild & scenic Rogue River.
