Metamorphosis

Everyone's fond of saying that coastlines and forest distributions and all this stuff are fractal.

Well, doesn't this imply that there is then a global fractal?

There is a fractal dimension which, when you feed it into your computer and wrap the data around a sphere,

the continents and oceans of Earth should appear.

And in principle, again to the absurd level,

you should be able to then telescope in on that portion of this data that is wrapped around the sphere

that corresponds to Northern California.

And on your computer screen should appear Esalen hung on the cliffs of Big Sur

with us sitting in a room inside discussing the matter.

Rupert, Terence, I'm Ralph.

Creation.

Imagination.

My mask is chaos.

My early LSD experiences, I seemed to see motifs and structures that gave me an interest in Tibetan Buddhism.

And I went to India with the intent of studying the Tibetan language

and quickly found that the whole thing was just overwhelming.

And that I was just, you know, a human atom in the sea of India

and that the notion of encompassing or understanding what this was

was clearly the task of a lifetime.

And several times in my life I have acted out this sort of ricocheting relationship

between the humanities and the sciences.

At times,

you know, losing myself in the study of certain schools of poetry or literature or painting.

And then at other times spending years reading the philosophy of science

and epistemic basis of physics and this sort of thing.

Always trying to get a resolution on the content of my experience,

my lived experience.

Which included the psychedelic experience.

Which for me, from very early on,

was this kind of tremendous mystery or conundrum

which was set down in the middle of my being.

And it still continues like that.

I keep returning to that.

Testing all the ideas against the fullness of experience.

The main difference between our world

and the world that science tells us we're living in

is that science denies the quirky, freaky, cosmic giggle,

high plottedness, completely improbable, totally quirky humor

that binds everything together

and that makes it something other than an engine

in which atoms blindly run.

In Whitehead's phrase.

Schrodinger brilliantly anticipated the discovery of DNA

and then Joseph Needham and L.L. White

and, well, Eric Jansch should be mentioned actually

as a precursor of us all, I think.

I mean, Eric Jansch was a great pioneer, a great soul

and he saw very deeply into whole systems

as did Ilya Prigozhin,

the Belgian thermodynamicist.

And I think a lot of all of what we're doing

comes out of that.

What Prigozhin showed that just brought down the house

was that there could be perturbations of physical systems

that were unpredictable

and that would cause the whole system

to actually move to a more ordered state

than the initial state.

And this perturbation to higher states of order

looks suspiciously like a violation

of the supposedly inviolate second law of thermodynamics.

So that looks, you know, like a doorway

into an energetic hyperspace.

Well, when A New Science of Life came out in 1982 in America,

it came out a year earlier in England,

I came to California because it was published

in Los Angeles.

I found myself here at Esalen.

I found an extraordinary new range of things going on

I hadn't known about.

And when I was in San Francisco,

a friend who I knew from Europe said to me,

just the day before I left,

there's somebody you must meet.

He's called Terence McKenna.

I didn't know much about Terence,

so I went up there.

And in this large 1956 Buick,

we headed off into the woods in Sonoma County,

where Terence lives.

And there I met both Terence and Ralph,

who was there for the day.

I found that part of my interest

in these other realms of reality, of course,

like many people in this room,

was stimulated by experience with psychedelic substances.

This was before I went to India.

When I arrived in India,

I found that India is a kind of psychedelic realm anyway.

It's just an amazing place.

So in Terence I found somebody

who knew about that whole realm,

who shared with me an interest in India,

since it played an important part in his development,

and who had views about the nature of reality

which complemented my own in an extraordinary way.

My own theory is about memory and habit in nature.

Terence, I found, had developed a theory

about novelty and creativity in nature,

a theory about the quality of time

and the creative process

as it is related to the ongoing flux of events.

And Ralph had a kind of mathematical theory

which was just the kind of thing

that the view of nature I was trying to develop needed,

the idea of nature being drawn by goals or attractors.

In the mathematical science of dynamics

there's this model of reality being pulled from ahead

by things called attractors.

It's a teleological,

a thermo-mystic view of nature,

which dressed up in the guise of mathematical models,

which I found most fascinating.

And so for me,

the meeting with Ralph and Terence

was a step further towards seeing

how one could begin to dream of a world

in which nature was seen as alive,

in which the imagination permeated all reality,

in which animals and plants

are seen as part of the living texture,

of the world,

the living components,

the cells in the life of Gaia

and Gaia in the life of the cosmos as a whole.

In fact, a view of the world as alive

which recalls in some respects

the old cosmologies of the ancient world

where the cosmos was seen as a living organism,

where they thought of the whole cosmos as having a soul,

the soul of the world,

the anima mundi.

So I was brought up in a field of music,

but I was attracted to mathematics early.

And when I was 14,

I played in the State Symphony.

After that I started in mathematics

and I became a professor at Berkeley when I was 23.

I had an easy way in mathematics

and the way the system works,

the carpet is unrolled in front of you.

You have a few choices,

but basically before you even know what's happening,

the carpet is unrolled

and you're down the runnel

into whatever you can do

that's useful to the system.

In this process,

I lost nature.

But there was a great gain

because I love it out there.

I love to be off the planet.

I always did.

And to this day,

I spend very little time on planet Earth.

So it was,

it went on in this way.

And by 1967,

I was a professor at Princeton.

I had written three books on mathematics

that you need a microscope to read.

And I had been studying for a long while chaos,

but we didn't call it chaos then

and we didn't see in it

any role in the natural world

or in social transformation

or in the evolution of consciousness

because we didn't think about anything out there.

So one day after my third book was done

and I was exhausted

and I looked up

and all the students were out in the courtyard

demonstrating about the Vietnam War

and to open the university to women students

and so on.

I said,

what exactly is going on?

Here, they said,

take this.

And so,

like many people in that year

or around that time in 1967,

my career had a bifurcation.

So I went off the track

with psychedelics

with meditation,

but especially with searching,

with trying everything.

And eventually,

I was living in a cave in the Himalayas.

And when I returned to California,

I was standing on a street corner

in Santa Cruz

in white pajamas.

And a car stopped.

An old friend from a previous lifetime said,

there's somebody you have to meet.

Get in the car.

I had nothing to do.

It sounded okay.

And in that time,

I believed that everything goes perfectly.

You just go along.

You just go along with the flow,

as they said.

I didn't know it would be a two-hour drive.

So I got in the car.

There was the two-hour drive to Berkeley.

And I was literally dumped out of the car

on Terrence's front step.

I never heard of Terrence at that time.

1972.

And I went in.

And what happened then,

I would still say,

although we've had many wonderful talks

and exciting,

thrilling,

and nutritious times in the meanwhile,

that that was quite a miraculous chat.

Many subjects came up.

How to grow mushrooms,

outer space,

I don't know,

anything you could think of,

all passed by in the course of an hour or two.

In this way,

we became friends.

And this habit we had,

this activity that we do,

I mean,

we never go for a hike or something like that.

We sit in the evening and talk.

And what happens is

synergistic,

miraculous growth,

evolutionary.

And in this revitalization of my work

and eventually the whole field of mathematics,

my conversations with Terrence,

whereas I think we thought of them as just good fun,

that they did have a really fundamental influence

on everything I've done since.

So fun,

or I would say fun is insulting.

I mean,

thrilling because of going to the edge,

going beyond the edge,

having company there,

finding things which you can bring back and they work,

and become part of everything you're doing.

So it's opened up.

These complex phenomenon

characterized by chaotic irregular,

that is to say,

not well ordered in the previous paradigm

of space-time structure.

For example,

relationships among people,

the states and change of states of society,

the whole process.

The intimations of mysticism,

the intimation of a possibility of transcendence

is all firmly grounded.

We just have to now,

it's almost as though mathematics

is the extreme cutting edge of human understanding.

How can we quickly export

these new understandings

that release us from a need for closure,

that free us from an either or unity

in the universe?

How can we quickly export these models

from the realm of research mathematics

into the realm of daily life?

I really see it as politics

almost at the viral level

that we are trying to create

new languages and new concepts

and not only create them

but teach them to you

and we ourselves repeat them

over and over again

and you feed back into this

and then we refine the meme

and then a meme is like a gene.

It can be replicated

and we have not seen language

as the playing field

of the creation of the new paradigm

but that's really where it is.

We can transform ourselves

no more quickly

than we transform our language

and the way we transform

our language is by really pushing

on the envelope of the act

of communication.

You know the caterpillar

in Alice in Wonderland says

say what you mean

and mean what you say.

I do.

I'm a biologist by background.

I studied biology because

I was interested in animals and plants

and when I was studying it

at Cambridge

I began to have terrible doubts

about what I was doing

because everything that really interested me

about animals and plants

somehow vanished

when I got into the biochemistry laboratories.

I was majoring in biochemistry

and I did a PhD in biochemistry there.

But there's a curious thing about biochemistry

you're doing biochemistry to study

the molecular basis of life

yet the very first thing you do in the laboratory

is kill whatever you're studying

grind it up

extract the enzymes

and then in a test tube

study the properties of some of these molecules

extracted from this killed organism.

And it began to occur to me

that perhaps this wasn't the best way

to understand life.

But I didn't quite know what to do about it

because everybody else thought it was

definitely was the best way to study life

and in fact there was no other valid way.

So this set me thinking

and I began to see that

the science of biology could be reformed

that this idea that living organisms are truly alive

rather than being just machines

whereas the official doctrine

the mechanistic theory

says living organisms are just complicated machines

believe it or not

still the official doctrine of

academic biology and academic medicine.

These ideas went on developing.

I then saw how I could bring them all together

in a synthesis

into a new way of seeing

how biology could be done.

And I wrote a book while still in India

called A New Science of Life.

In it the basic idea I'm suggesting

is that there's a kind of inherent memory

in all kinds of animals and plants.

Each species has its own collective memory.

So each member of the species draws on this collective memory

and in turn contributes to it.

The instincts of animals for example

the behaviour of cuckoos

the spinning of webs by spiders

are like a memory, a habit of the species.

This inheritance takes place

by the process I call morphic resonance

by a kind of invisible, intangible memory.

A kind of resonance between

present and past organisms of the same kind.

The same theory helps explain

how our own memory works

by a resonance between our own past

and our present states.

It leads to the idea that

our memories aren't stored in our brains

but that we're tuning into them

by this process of morphic resonance.

Rupert's notions revision causality

that means induct you into an entirely new way

in which things happen.

And this is after all

where we're all spending a lot of our time.

The models that Ralph is working with

show that the world is not an engine

running down toward a heat death

but a tremendous kaleidoscope

of unpredictable, creative, open-ended activity

on every level.

I mean it's really a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic vision.

It's like a Sufi hierophany or something.

But we're seeing it on the screens

of computer simulations

of this mathematical domain

that is also the neural domain

that is also the social domain.

That is also the eco-planetary domain.

This is not air.

This is not mysticism.

This is the real facts of how it is.

How the world fits together.

It fits together through the infusion

of its invisible soul.

If nature is evolutionary

if all of nature is evolving

what about the eternal laws of nature

which scientists have taken for granted

for so many centuries?

It's going right back to Pythagoras

and the ancient Greeks.

Were all the laws of nature there

before the Big Bang?

Well, if they were there before the Big Bang

where could they possibly be?

There was nowhere to be.

There was no universe.

So if the laws of nature were all there

before the Big Bang

then they must be

non-physical, idea-like entities

dwelling in some kind of permanent

mathematical mind.

Be that thought of as the mind of God

or just the mind of a kind of

disembodied mathematician.

They were thought to be permanent

and all there before the universe.

This assumption is still held

by most of our modern cosmologists.

It's something that physicists have not yet

begun to question seriously.

But as you can see

it's like an idea that's had the carpet

taken from under it.

It's sort of hanging over an abyss.

Because there's no

real reason why we should assume

the laws of nature are permanent

in an evolving universe.

If the universe is evolving

then the laws of nature could be evolving as well.

And in fact the very idea

of the laws of nature may not be appropriate.

It may be better to think of the

habits of nature evolving.

The Big Bang is like the cracking

of the cosmic egg.

That's its mythological correlate.

The notion of the ancient mythological

idea of the cosmos beginning

through the hatching or the cracking

of the cosmic egg.

Followed by the growth of the organism

that comes out.

It's an embryological metaphor.

And we now have a kind of developmental

model of the whole universe.

It's like a developing organism.

It's not like a machine at all anymore.

The universe is a growing, developing organism

which is differentiating within itself

forming new forms and patterns.

An evolutionary process that on earth

has given rise to all the forms

of animal and plant life.

All the different kinds of microbes

in varied forms of human culture.

A theory of evolutionary habits

demands a theory of

evolutionary creativity.

How can we understand the creativity

that's given rise to new ideas,

to Beethoven's symphonies,

to theories in science,

to new works of art,

to new forms of culture,

to instincts in birds and animals,

to the forms of flowers and plants

and leaves, to the many kinds of

rocks and crystals,

and to all the forms of galactic and stellar

life.

What kind of creativity could underlie

all those processes?

One is the materialist view that says

the whole thing is entirely due to blind chance.

That there's nothing but a kind of

darkness of blind

material processes going on

and then by blind chance

new things happen.

The other model for understanding creativity

I think is provided by our own imaginations.

Our imaginations

are not full of

fixed platonic ideas

which are always the same,

like platonic minds.

They're ongoing, changing,

dynamical processes

with a kind of creative

richness that always surprises us.

So the question is

if nature is alive rather than

dead, if the

universe, if the earth

have a kind of mind or soul of their

own, if living organisms are

in some sense mind-like

or if there's a mind-like process

that work in nature,

then how does this express its creativity?

And so then the question is

could this creativity in nature

be a product of the imagination

of Gaia, of the Gaian mind?

Could it be a product

of the cosmic imagination?

Could there be a kind of imagination

working in nature

which is similar to our own

imaginations?

Could our own imaginations be just one

conscious aspect

of an imagination working through the whole

natural world, perhaps unconsciously

as it works underneath

the surface of our dreams,

perhaps sometimes consciously?

And could this ongoing imagination

be the basis of evolutionary

creativity in nature

just as it is in the human realm?

How would it be

or is it credible

that perhaps what the universe

is, is a kind of

system in which

more advanced forms

of order

actually influence

previous states

of organization?

This is what is emerging

in Ralph Abraham's work

with the chaotic

attractors. They are

attractors. That means

that they exert influence

on less organized

states and pull

them toward some

kind of end state.

And for me

the key to unlocking

what is going on

with history,

creativity, progressive

process

of all sorts

is to place

the state of completion

at the end, but to

see it as a kind of

higher dimensional object

which casts an enormous

and flickering shadow

over

the lower dimensions

of organization, of which

this universe is one.

So that for instance

in the human domain

when we look at history

what we see is

an endless series of anticipations.

The golden age

is coming. The messiah

is immediately around the corner.

Great change

is soon to be upon us.

These are intimations

of change. It's almost as

though the transcendental object

that is the great

attractor in many

many dimensions

throws out images

of itself

which filter down through

these lower dimensional matrices

and actually are the basis

of the

appetition of nature

for greater expression

of form, the appetition

of the human soul

for greater immersion in beauty,

the appetition

of human history for

greater expression

of complexity.

So when I think

about these terms

chaos, creativity,

imagination

I see them, it's like a

three-stroke engine

of some sort.

Each impels and runs

the other and sets up

a reinforcing

cycle

that then stabilizes

organisms, processes

that are caught up in this

in the phenomenon

of being. The phenomenon

of being is

this self-synergizing

engine of

out of chaos

through creativity

into the imagination

back into chaos

out into creativity

so forth and so on.

And it operates on many levels

simultaneously

so that the planet

is undergoing a destiny.

Deep time,

the time of geology

was only really discovered

around the turn of this century

and it is

cosmically

ennobling

to think of the universe

as a thing of great age

but I think that it's

time to put in

place next to the notion

of deep cosmic time

the notion of chaos

the notion of chaotic

sudden change

cusp flux

and sudden perturbation

because

what deep time has revealed

as we've pushed our

understanding of the career

of organic life back

65 million years

270 million years

what we see is

tremendous punctuation

built into the universe

in the case of the earth

in the case of astroidal impacts

this thing which happened

65 million years ago

nothing larger than a chicken

walked away from it

on this planet

so there's a strange paradox

where taking

deep time seriously

the message of deep time

is you may not have as much time

as you thought

that the universe is dynamic

capable of turning

sudden corners

so then the imagination

becomes a kind of beacon

the imagination

is as it were

a scout

sent ahead

or a

something which has preceded us

into history

and in fact

is a kind of eschatological

object

it is shedding

influence

the morphogenetic field

is not subject

to the inverse square law

of decreased influence

over distance

then I as a layman

don't see why Rupert

we couldn't locate it

at the conclusion

of process

because one of the things

that's always puzzled me

about the big bang

is it's a singularity

this is the term

physicists use for it

this means theory

cannot predict it

and yet it is necessary

to make everything which follows

from it happen

so you just say

there's no reason for this

we have no argument for this

but the rest of the theory needs it

so it's a singularity

and the immense improbability

which modern science rests on

but cares not to discuss

is this

the belief that the universe

sprang from nothing

in a single moment

well if you can make that leap

to believe that

it's very hard to see

what you couldn't believe

that is almost

the limiting case

of credulity

I would think

so

so in order to save

the phenomenon

it's a different idea

that

and I think it is eminently

reasonable and it is

that as the complexity

of a system increases

so too

does the likelihood

of its generating

a singularity

or an unpredictable perturbation

so the

pre-existent state

of the universe

I imagine to be extremely simple

an unflawed nothingness

in other words

the least likely situation

in which you would expect

a singularity to emerge

but now let's look at the other end

of the historical continuum

of the history of the universe

let's look at the

world we are living in

which is full of

106 elements

tremendous

gradients of energy

ranging from the

what's going on inside pulsars

and quasars

to what is going on inside

viruses and cells

tremendous organizational

capacity

at the atomic level

at the molecular level

at the level of molecular polymerization

at the level of

membranes and gels

at the level of

cells and organelles

organisms

societies

and so forth and so on

in other words the universe

at this moment

is a tremendously

complicated integrated

multi-leveled dynamic thing

and every passing moment

it becomes more so

this is what evolution

history

compression of time

what all these things are attempting to indicate

is the increasing complexity

of reality

if a singularity is necessary

in this universe

that singularity must emerge

rather near the end

of the complexification process

rather than

its beginning

you see we simply have to reverse

our preconceptions

about the flow of cause and effect

and then we get

a great attractor

that pulls

all organization and structure

toward itself

over several billion years

the objects

of its attraction

grow closer to its proximity

they somehow

interpenetrate

they set up

standing wave patterns

of interference

new properties

become emergent

and the entire thing

complexifies

well to my mind this is

the divine

imagination

this is the only way

I can conceive of it

time is the theater

of God's becoming

but it's also

from the point of view

of a higher dimensional manifold

a kind of

and this is no contradiction

or if it is

it's all right

because in these realms

of higher ontology

you're always asked

to avoid closure

or to avoid

a union of opposites

the thing is both

what it is

and what it is not

and yet it somehow

escapes contradiction

and that's how

the open system is maintained

that's how

the miracle of life

is possible

so I sort of think

of the divine imagination

as

of all things

both possible and beautiful

it's a kind of reverse

platonism

the attractor is at the bottom

of a very deep pit

into which all phenomena

is cascading

what is taught

in modern universities

these days

is that these tracks in the snow

are going nowhere

the technical term is

trendlessly fluctuating

you're told that history is

this kind of process

it's trendlessly fluctuating

it goes here

it goes there

it's called a random walk

in information theory

it means you just wander around

well it's very interesting

now we begin to see

through the marvel of

the new mathematics

that random walks

are not random at all

that a sufficiently long

walk becomes a fractal

structure of extraordinary

depth and beauty

so you see really what

has to happen

is for us to see chaos

not as something

that degrades information

and is somehow

the enemy of order

but rather chaos is

the birthplace

of order

chaos is not the problem

chaos is the answer

I think a factor

which changes everything

is the discovery of dark matter

the fact that 90 to 95

99% of the matter in the universe

is utterly unknown to us

this recent discovery effectively

tells us that the whole cosmos

and every material thing in it

has a kind of unconscious

an unknown dark realm

which conditions everything

that happens

the shapes of the galaxies

their interactions

are awake on the side

that's in the sunlight

and in the side that's in the darkness

as it rotates dreaming

at night are the plants

the animals the whole ecosystems

the oceans in some sense

in the dream state

when dreams and spontaneous images

of what might be possible

come to them

so is there a kind of

Gaian dreaming

and does it happen

or what form would a Gaian

psychedelic experience take

the psychedelic experience

it's preposterous to attempt

to analyze it in terms of human motivation

at its intense levels

it seems rather to be

an ontological

reality of its own

that the human being has simply

been privileged to briefly

observe

but it says no more

your deep psychedelic experiences

say no more about

your personality

than that the continent of Africa

is making a statement about

your personality

they are in fact independent

objects

to my mind the divine imagination

or the imagination

is this

the source of all creativity

in our dreams

in our psychedelic experiences

in the jungles

in the currents of the ocean

in the organization of

microzoan and microbial life

wherever there is

large scale integration

rather than simply

raw physics

but integration

of laws of physics

integration of properties

of membranes and electrophoresis

and this sort of thing

it is the creative principle

so do you think then

that in psychedelic experiences

you're actually tapping into

tuning into or experiencing

absolutely

and I think that psychedelic experiences

and dreams

are only different in degree

that they are chemical cousins

somehow

and this is why I could see

human history as a Gaian dream

because I think every night

when you descend into dream

you are potentially open

to receiving Gaian

corrective tuning

of your life state

you will

the whole thing is

an enzyme driven process

we are like an organ of Gaia

we are the

organ which binds

and releases energy

I mean a liver cell

doesn't need to understand

why it binds and releases

enzymes of the liver

we bind and release energy

for reasons perhaps never

to be clear to us

but which place us firmly

within the context

of the Gaian mind

we have been chosen out

and this is not something to

have great hubris about

I mean indolecetic acid

has been chosen out

in plant metabolism

to play certain roles

we have a role

but our role seems to be

a major one

we are like a triggering system

out of the general background

of evolutionary processes

mediated by

incoming radiation

to the surface of the earth

and then natural selection

suddenly we come

with an epigenetic capability

we write books

tell stories

dance, sing, carve

paint

these are not genetic processes

these are epigenetic processes

and they bind information

and express the Gaian mind

very well

as an example

of how willing I am

to introduce

or to entertain this idea concretely

I've been talking to a lot of people

about ecological crisis

and the fate of the world

and this sort of thing

well imagine in hindsight

the wisdom

that we would impute to Gaia

if we were to suddenly realize

that what is happening

on this planet

is that nature knows

that there are

a lot of things

that the sun is going to explode

and what we are

is a kind of response

to the anticipation

of a wounding

that 50,000

5 million years ago

the geo heliocentric

relationships began

to vibrate

out of tune

and

as a consequence

of this a species was called

and we are it

in other words

we are in a divine play

in line with this

and what made me

even entertain these ideas

is I had a very bizarre

experience recently

I was in Hawaii

and

in our botanical garden

there is a very large

dead tree

and one limb of this tree

sticks far out

over the land

and Banisteriopsis

copy a large

hallucinogenic South American vine

is planted at the

bottom of this tree

and it just has

swarmed up this tree

and covered it with greenery

but it wouldn't go out

onto this one limb

that stuck out

and it bothered my sense of symmetry

that this vine would not

completely cover this tree

and I even thought about

trying to climb up into the tree

and thread it out onto this limb

to get it to do what I wanted

so I was sitting

looking at this tree

and this situation

and actually thinking about it

and suddenly

the limb fell

it broke off

and then I thought

and I thought

the vine sensed

it was unstable

it would not invade

this domain

that it sensed

was structurally unstable

well then I said to myself

how could it

what is the mechanism

of this sensing

of instability

and a friend of mine said

well perhaps the wind

impacts on weakened wood

differently than on unrotted wood

and perhaps rhythms in the tree

and then I realized

if one plant

has that kind of sensitivity

to the entering into

a domain of danger

what must the ecosystem

of this planet

be doing in reaction

to what we are doing

to the planet

so I see

the reason this relates to the imagination

is because I see

ourselves

in communication

with the imagination

it is sending images

back into the past

to try and direct us

away from areas

of instability

it really is

the guy in mind

is a real mind

its messages are real messages

and our task

through discipline

psychedelics

attention to detail

whatever we have going

is from the message

so that we then can

see the face of the other

the field of chaos

the certain setting of the parameter

form will emerge out of

the field of chaos

and where this happens reliably

we've explored the ocean all over

and we've found a few favorite regions

and they're called the Apache Rift

the Calico Mountain

and the Scroll Reef

so the submarine is dragging along

a thousand iterations depth

in the ocean of chaos

comes across these regular patterns

this is the first

wing of

the uh

Apache Valley

this is Apache Valley

I think so

we've got another field of chaos

Calico Mountain

these are just snapshots of different

starting positions if you like

later on we drill a deep hole in this area

and all other interesting areas

instead of this quaternary structure

that is the question

this is a scroll reef

now it's a little presumptuous

to call this chaos theory

because as a matter of fact

there is no theory

we're in the exploration phase now

and this is experimental mathematics

that we are doing with supercomputers

this video was made out of these

simplest possible dynamical systems

called the logistic equation

and it just produces

it's very similar to a dripping flood

so you could just as well imagine

that we have 16,000

dripping faucets

in an array of

128 by 128

and

the time between drops

is represented as a color on the screen

now do you think

that if you had 16,000 dripping faucets

you could get out of them

a pattern like Calico Mountain

it relates

to waterfalls

for example when the spray

from a waterfall

here's another example of a chaotic system

could you write some equations

and obtain a computer program

that simulated the spray from a waterfall

I doubt it

and from this totally chaotic data

viewed in this particular way

which is called chaoscopy

you get these points in the planes

that if the data was really

random

the dots would be all over the plane

instead they lie on a curve

a smooth curve

which is called the chaotic attractor

well it happens

I mean there's a lot of theory

behind this enough to suggest

that it's not some kind of artifact

no matter what kind of artifact it is

it's an interesting artifact

and

I guess I'd like to call this

a mathematical law

it has to do with the emergence

of form from a field of chaos

we don't know what else to call it

it's not a mathematical law

that was known to Pythagoras

I don't know if it was always there

since the beginning of time

long before the big bang

or if it just emerged

into the evolving field of the guy in mind

through the fact that computers make it visible

I mean I don't know

but the theory can tell you

certain transformations you'll expect

and others not

for example Terence had pointed to

the punctual aspect of evolution

that many transformations are

saltatory

they are catastrophic, they are abrupt

as for example in the emergence of form

as for example in the neolithic revolution

as for example in the crystallization of the planets

as the temperature drops

in the developing universe

according to standard models

more and more form comes into being

first you get atoms

then stars and galaxies condense

then you get solar systems

and through the cooling of matter

you can get planets

the planets are the cooled remnants

of exploding stars

the elements in us and in our planet

and in the novi

one way of looking at this

is to see the expansion and cooling process

and indeed the flow of events

as being

thinking of it in terms of the flux of energy

and one of the great unifying concepts

of 19th century physics

is a unified conception of energy

now it's not entirely clear

what energy is

energy in some senses

is the principle of change

the more there is the more change

that can be brought about

it's a causative principle

and it's a causative principle

which exists in a process

in this process

the energetic flux of the universe

underlies time

change, becoming

and the flux process

itself seems to have

an inherent indeterminism

to it

this flux process

the universal flux

is organized into forms

by fields

as energy bound within fields

the quantum matter fields

and the fields of molecules

and so on

I think there are many of these organizing fields

the morphic fields

and nature is the theatre of these

habitual fields organizing the

indeterminate flux of energy

fields themselves by

having this energy within them

have this indeterminate quality too

so even organized systems

of a high level of complexity

still have this probabilistic quality

to organize this energy

to give rise to material and physical forms

are themselves probabilistic

chaos is never eliminated

there's always this indeterminism

or spontaneity at all levels of organization

so there's a formative principle

which is the fields

and there's an energetic principle

which I think has the chaos inherent in it

it's a kind of change

which left as pure change

would be chaos

one way of thinking of these

is in terms of the Indian notion

is the energy indeterminate principle

and Shiva is the formative principle

working together

in a kind of tantric union

to give the world that we know

creation begins in chaos

progresses in chaos

and ends in chaos

and in Hesiod

this word chaos

appears in a piece called

Theogony which is a theogony

that is to say more or less a creation tale

but the stories of the creation of the

gods and goddesses one by one

well they're not gods and goddesses really

they're abstract principles

the three main ones are

chaos, Gaia, and Eros

and they're

the most abstract earliest

proto

concepts of sky

earth and the creative tension

in between

now the meaning of chaos

the first time the word appeared

in literature

has got nothing whatsoever apparently

superficially

to do with what we mean by

chaos in the English language

and in ordinary life

it meant only to Hesiod

according to the lexicon

the gaping void

left

the gaping void

sort of the gaping void between heaven and earth

out of which the creation

came so creation out of chaos

yes but the chaos

did not mean disorder or anything negative

it only meant this gaping void

well after understanding that

you look up

you think of these different interpretations

sky, god concept

the gap and the opening and so on

when you look at the sky

the most obvious

chief characteristic feature of the sky

is the milky way

and it does appear as a kind of a gap

between this and that

the royal road of the gods traveling

between the underworld and the overworld

understanding that

you can then connect the word

concept

or god or goddess

meaning the same thing

as what you visually see represented

in the milky way itself

and that is in one of its

most popular representations

Tiamat

the goddess of chaos

from Enuma Elish

the creation poem

the greatest epic poem

of Babylonian literature

discovered in the library

of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh

a recent discovery

there was

this story of

the origin of the gods

and the creation of the world

by Tiamat

and Apsu

the god and goddess of chaos

who lived in the water

one more sweet water and the other salt water

and they created then the whole pantheon

and the whole world and so on

but eventually along came

Marduk

Marduk was a younger generation of gods

and there was a conflict

between the older and the younger

gods over how the world

ought to be run

and apparently this conflict

was taking place in the form

of a social transformation

a transformation represented

in the mythological

by the demotion of Apsu and Tiamat

from the pantheon of Babylon

the city Babylon

and the replacement by Marduk

eventually became the god

Mr. Big

the city of Babylon

around 2000 BC

coinciding

with a sweep of patriarchy

over that city

propelled on a new type of war chariot

with spoked wheels instead

of solid wheels

am I digressing too much?

no, you've reached the wheel

laughter

well I've reached the spoke wheel

and its association with

is this accidental? I don't know

with the patriarchy and the fact that the wheel itself

is a mathematical model

is the paradigm

of order

a divine mathematical form

according to Plato

as the planets were supposed

to move before

Kepler

who introduced the ellipse

fantastic transformation

punctual

catastrophe

in the history of consciousness

in short

according to this epic

Tiamat was killed

in the most violent way

ripped to pieces

creating the world

creating a new order

by our hero of Babylon

Mr. Marduk

also Bell, Bow and so on

his new year's celebration

was honored

at the new year time

all over old Europe

including at Stonehenge

at the new year's festival

this epic poem was read

so annually

was the reminder

that chaos is bad

chaos has been killed

chaos has been replaced by order

an order associated with

perfect periodic

the wheel

the cycle

the perfect roundness

and so on

whereas in Mino and Crete

you find according to

the evidence of the excavators

the fluorescence

of partnership culture

with no domination

by a male god

it's established that there's

the diffusion from Crete to Greece

and the last remainder

of Cretan culture

which is a very interesting one

must have been

the last vestige of the Garden of Eden

we're talking about

the tremendous happiness

and fluorescence

of beauty in all aspects

the importance of

the chaos revolution now

is that chaos has recovered

from being demoted

from being banished

to the unconscious

in around 2000 BC or so

from then up to now

four or maybe five thousand years

of the repression of chaos

I mean chaos is to this day

in our culture a bad word

we have to watch out for chaos

it ruins your love life

it has to be replaced by order

and so on

the fact that scientists of all people

in the temple of science

that Tiamat has to be accepted

as a friend and replaced upon her throne

this is big news

I believe that the importance

of the psychedelics

is primary here

and that it doesn't simply

have to do with the fact

that they synergize cognition

which they do do

and the synthetics

as well as

the natural ones

but it's deeper than that

it's that we have a secret history

knowledge of which has been

lost to us

and only is now recoverable

in the light

of the kind of mindset

that becomes possible to us

if we accept

the new paradigm

and what this secret history

is and has to do with

and how it relates to the

human mind and the world soul

is that

we are

the victims

of an instance

of traumatic abuse

in childhood

as a species

because a symbiotic relationship

with

the world girdling

intelligence of the planet

which was mediated

through plants

through shamanism

I mean it wasn't an abstraction

it was an experience

was eventually

broken up and disrupted

by

progressive climatic

drying of

the Eurasian and African

land mass

and so this is

literally the fall into history

the expulsion from Eden

all these primary myths of a golden age

found and lost

have to do with the fact that

once we lived

in dynamic balance

with nature

not as animals do

but as human beings

only could

but in a way that we have

now lost

well how have we lost it

and what have we lost

how we have lost it is

the way in which

these

psychoactive compounds

that were being brought into the diet

were acting

is they were

psycholytic upon the formation of the ego

they literally

suppressed the formulation

of the

the formation of the ego

and promoted instead

collectivist tribal

partnership values

which were operating

intuitionally

in a resonance relationship

with the

feminine vegetable matrix of the planet

everything was

fertilized, everything was felt

everything was

intuited and regularly

at the new and full moon

these small groups of hunter gatherers

later pastoralists

gathered and

took these hallucinogenic

plants and

dissolved boundaries

and engaged in

group sex and

annealed

a new word that we've brought in here

the irregularities

that had cropped up in people's

personal self imaging

in the interval since the last

session

and this kept everything

grounded

on the

plane of that which is

important, i.e. the values

of the group, of the species

of dynamic balance

with the ecosystem and so forth and so on

well when this was disrupted

and the supplies of

these plants were diminished

and new religious forms arose

and the time between

the great festivals grew

longer and longer

the ego

begins to

take hold, first as a

kind of cancerous aberration

but then quickly becoming a new

style of behavior

which quickly then

eliminates all other styles

of behavior by

suppressing

access to the chaos

and this is the point I want to make

that there is between

the ego and

full understanding

of reality a barrier

a problem

the fear of the ego

to surrender to

the fact of chaos

chaos

is what we have lost

touch with, this is why

it has been given a bad name

because it is feared

by the dominant archetype

of our world

which is the ego

which clenches

because its existence

is defined

in terms of

control

and the furious

modeling process

and this will now sound like a knock on modeling

the furious modeling process

that the ego endlessly

carries out is an effort

to fight

the absence of closure

the ego wants closure

it wants a complete explanation

the beginning of wisdom

I believe

is the ability to accept

an inherent messiness

in

your explanation of what's

going on because nowhere

is it writ that human

minds should be able to

give a full accounting of

creation in all dimensions

and on all levels

and I think that

Wittgenstein had this idea

that philosophy should be

what he called

true enough

and I think that's a great idea

let's just make it true enough

because that's as true as it can

be gotten

well so

the imagination

is chaos

new forms

are fetched out of this chaos

for me the creative act

is the letting down

of the net

of human imagination

into the ocean of chaos

on which we are suspended

and the attempt

to bring out of it

ideas

to bring out of it

you know sometimes

and this is my model for

the psychedelic experience

that it is the night sea journey

that it is the lone fisherman

on a tropical sea

in which there are nets

and you let these nets down

and sometimes

something tears through them

that leaves them in shreds

and you just row for shore

and put your head under your bed

and pray

and at other times

what slips through are the minutia

the minnows of this

ichthyological metaphor

of idea chasing

but sometimes

you know

it becomes something

that is food

for the human community

that we can sustain ourselves on

and go forward

so we haven't talked that much

about art

and aesthetics

but I think in the human world

the

the appetition

is for beauty

to my mind

and this is another place

that we have to go

immediately through

because Plato held

that the good was the true

and that both were the beautiful

and this is a very quaint

idea from the point of view

of modern philosophy

but I think

it's in the bones

when you actually connect yourself

up to the planet

that's why chaos

is capable of being

the tremendous repository

of ordered beauty

that it is

because there is no chaos

in the old definition

that

which is to say

that which by any definition

or any test

is found to be disordered

that is just a kind of

a hell notion

a kind of

hypostatization

of an ultimate state of disorder

but nowhere

in the world

that is deployed

through space and time

do you encounter that

instead what you encounter

is embedded order

upon embedded order

this fractal thing

and then finally

for me the imagination

is the goal

of history

I see culture

as an effort

to literally realize

collective dreams

and you know it's on a very crude level

when it's you make your mask

and I make my mask

and then we dance around together

and it's even at a very crude level

when it's you design

your shopping mall

and I'll design my world trade center

and we'll put them on the same piece

of real estate

but we're coming now into

through media I believe

through virtual reality

and human machine integration

into a situation

where the imagination

is going to be something

that we can share

that the path of mind

through its own meanderings

will become something

that can be recorded

and played back

we will have the possibility

of living in our own past

or creating and trading

realities as art

and art

as life

life lived in the imagination

is the great archetype

which rears itself up

at the end of history

life in the imagination

the imagination is

this auric field

which surrounds

the transcendental object

at greater and greater depth

as you approach

the transcendental object

and as we now close distance

with it

all of

our cultural expression

all of our self awareness

is taking on

this curiously designed

quality

I mean you must have noticed this

that the world is

very heavily designed

in a way that it never was before

morphogenetic fields

of great size

and scope

which our international schools

of architecture and design

touch whole continents

certain ambiances

this is the summoning

of the imagination

into the human scale

it's like a god

that we wish to call down

and draw to earth

I mean this is why William Blake

called it the divine imagination

because it is

the four gated city

it is the flying saucer

we are on a journey

to meet

this great attractor

and as we close distance with it

it is more and more

a multifaceted mirror

of our images

of beauty

so it's like an ascending learning curve

that becomes so asymptotic

and at that point

you're face to face

with

a mystery

a living mystery

that is within each and all of us

it's the imagination

that argues

the divine spark

in human beings

it's absolutely confounding

if you try to get biology

to produce it for you

as a necessary quantity

it isn't that

it's an emanation from above

it is literally

a descent of the world soul

into all of us

we then become

the atoms

of the world soul

and our channel to it

is by closing our eyes

and obliterating our

immediate personalized space time

locus and falling

into the imagination

which is running

like a river

through all of us

endlessly driven by

the

hydraulic

momentum

of the cataracts of chaos

which

usher into the creativity

of the imagination

I mean these river metaphors

are just endlessly applicable

to this

the flowing of forces over landscapes

the pressure of chaos

on the imagination to create

creativity

and it's looping back

into the same

these

these things are

the icons for the world

that wants to be

but the key is surrender

and dissolution

of boundaries

dissolution of the ego

and a trust

in the love

of the goddess

which transcends rational understanding

there will come a moment

which will be an absolute leap

into space

and we will simply have to have the faith

that there is something waiting there

because the dominator style

has left us no

choice