Synopses & Reviews
Three of the most original thinkers of our time explore issues that call into question our current views of reality, morality, and the nature of life.
• A wide-ranging investigation of the ecology of inner and outer space, the role of chaos theory in the dynamics of human creation, and the rediscovery of traditional wisdom.
In this book of "trialogues," the late psychedelic visionary and shamanologist Terence McKenna, acclaimed biologist and originator of the morphogenetic fields theory Rupert Sheldrake, and mathematician and chaos theory scientist Ralph Abraham explore the relationships between chaos and creativity and their connection to cosmic consciousness. Their observations call into question our current views of reality, morality, and the nature of life in the universe. The authors challenge the reader to the deepest levels of thought with wide-ranging investigations of the ecology of inner and outer space, the role of chaos in the dynamics of human creation, and the resacralization of the world. Among the provocative questions the authors raise are: Is Armageddon a self-fulfilling prophecy? Are we humans the imaginers or the imagined? Are the eternal laws of nature still evolving? What is the connection between physical light and the light of consciousness?
Part ceremony, part old-fashioned intellectual discussion, these trialogues are an invitation to a new understanding of what Jean Houston calls "the dreamscapes of our everyday waking life."
Review
"One finishes Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness with a sense of heightened awareness and wonder." ForeWord, 2003, Volume 6, number 2
Review
"A book for all those who seek to quest beyond the limits of the ordinary. Three fine thinkers take us plunging into the universe of chaos, mind, and spirit. Instead of leaving us lost, they bring us back with startling insights and more wonder than we knew we had." Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing
Review
"Should be required reading for anyone who believes that science and spirituality cannot and should not interact."
Review
andquot; . . . represent[s] a very innovative and exciting new way of understanding life as we know it.andquot;
Review
"A book for all those who seek to quest beyond the limits of the ordinary. Three fine thinkers take us plunging into the universe of chaos, mind, and spirit. Instead of leaving us lost, they bring us back with startling insights and more wonder than we knew we had."
Review
" Records the exciting intellectual friendship of three amazing minds pushing to the edge of history in search of a new consciousness blending scientific observation, mythical imagination, and visionary speculation." Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade
Review
"Should be required reading for anyone who believes that science and spirituality cannot and should not interact."
Review
"One finishes Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness with a sense of heightened awareness and wonder."
Review
andquot;One finishes andlt;iandgt;Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousnessandlt;/iandgt; with a sense of heightened awareness and wonder.andquot;
Review
" . . . represent[s] a very innovative and exciting new way of understanding life as we know it." Gunnel Minett, breathe issue 89 - Sept., Oct., Nov. - ' - 02
Synopsis
Rupert Sheldrake, the author of several books, including
Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, A New Science of Life, and
The Rebirth of Nature, lives in England. The late Terence McKenna was the author of
Food of the Godsand
The Archaic Revival. Ralph Abraham is the author of
Dynamics: The Geometry of Behavior; he lives in California.
Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Jean Houston
Preface
Chapter 1: Creativity and the Imagination
The new evolutionary cosmology. The regularities of nature as evolvinghabits. The basis of cosmic creativity. The cosmic imagination as a higher-dimensionalattractor drawing the evolutionary process toward itself. The Omega Point.Imagination welling up from the womb of chaos. Psychedelic experience andthe mind of Gaia. Gaian dreams and human history. Dark matter as the cosmicunconscious.
Chapter 2: Creativity and Chaos
The chaos revolution. Chaotic attractors as eternal mathematical realities.Indeterminism in nature. Chaos and the evolution of order. Form in thecooling process. The organizing fields of nature as related to mathematicsand the cosmic imagination. Mathematical models. Attractors, attraction,and motivation. The freezing of information in crystals and in writtenlanguage. The primacy of spoken language and abstraction.
Chapter 3: Chaos and the Imagination
Chaos in Greek mythology. The myth of the conquest of chaos. Fear ofchaos and the suppression of the feminine. The partnership society andthe rise of patriarchy. Seasonal festivals of the repression of chaos,and the creation of the unconscious. The inhibition of creativity and itsrelation to global problems. The Eleusinian mysteries. Creativity and Christology.Plans for the recovery of chaos and the imagination. The significance ofthe chaos revolution.
Chapter 4: The World Soul and the Mushroom
Randomness in the evolutionary process. The limited nature of models.The computer and chaos revolutions. Coevolution of mathematics and thematerial world. The mathematical landscape. Sensory qualities in the cosmicimagination. The similarities of souls and fields. The primal unified fieldand the fields of nature. Rebirth of the world soul. Interplanetary transferof the human psyche via the psychedelic experience and the spores of magicmushrooms.
Chapter 5: Light and Vision
Physical light and the light of consciousness. Light and vision. Thelocation of visual images. Mind extending from the eyes.The sense of beingstared at: a new kind of field or the electromagnetic field? Hierarchyof fields in nature. Coupling between electromagnetic and mental fields.Physical light and self-luminous visions. Tryptamine hallucinogens. Theworld soul. Fields as the medium of divine omniscience. Gaian mind andthe light of the sun.
Chapter 6: Entities
Discarnate intelligences and nonhuman entities: creatures within thehuman mind or truly Other? Entities and shamans. The use of language byentities. Angelic communication in the birth of modern science. The dreamdimension and entities. The effect of science and humanism on entities.Nature magically self-reflecting and aware.
Chapter 7: The Unconscious
The three great bifurcations. Creation of the unconscious, the originof evil, and the rejection of chaos. Escape from evil by the resurrectionof chaos. The suppression of psychedelics, the patriarchy, and the riseof booze. Partnership and dominator drugs; the addiction to addictions.Habits and the formation of the unconscious. Holidays and the reinforcementof awareness. Prayer, magic, and astrology for enlightenment.
Chapter 8: The Resacralization of the World
Ralph's religious background. The sacred in India. Rediscovering thesacred in the West. The revival of ritual and the resacralization of music.Feminism and the archaic revival. Gothic cathedrals and animistic Christianity.The green movement, saving the Earth, the greening of God. Psychedelicchurches. The resacralizing of science.
Chapter 9: Education in the New World Orderandnbsp;
Education as initiation. The dominance of rationalism and humanism.Rites of passage. Summer camps. Testing and accreditation. Institutionsand administrations. Workshops as a model for a new pluralistic and decentralizedsystem of education. Religious initiations. Reform of existing professions.A possible pilot project.
Chapter 10: The Apocalypse
The apocalyptic tradition: a mythic model motivating religious historyor an intuition of the ending of history or time? Modern millenarianismand scientific versions of the apocalypse. The possible end in 2012. Theself-fulfilling quality of apocalyptic prophecy. The speeding up of historyand the inevitability of planetary metamorphosis. Death and transformationon a cosmic scale. Intensifying conflict and the power of faith.
Glossary
Bibliography
About the Authors
From Chapter 3 "Chaos and the Imagination"
TERENCE: The psychedelic revival is an effort to find our way back tosomething like the [Eleusiniam] mysteries. We are not the first nor themost eminent to suggest this kind of reengineering of the human animal..I call attention to the words of Arthur Koestler, the great anticommunistfreedom fighter and scientific intellectual. In a book called The Ghostin the Machine, he concluded that there has to be mass pharmacologicalintervention to change human behavior. He envisioned a drug that inhibitsterritoriality. Our reflexes and our mental set are highly and well adaptedto the stoning to death of woolly mastodons, but, since we so rarely dothat, we need to retool for living in peace while managing limited resources.The dissolving of boundaries by psychedelics certainly makes them candidatesfor antiterritoriality drugs.
RALPH: Do you think that some of our existing national holidays couldbe changed, or that a mythological mutation could be introduced that wouldgo in this direction? For example, in Switzerland, they recently inventedFastnacht. They previously had no rituals at all, barely Christmas, andthere was a suffering of enormous boredom among people there. It was saidthat there was no known way to make a new friend in Switzerland. So, justa few years ago, they instituted Fastnacht, in February. It is three daysand nights of alcoholic revelry around the fantastic reenactment of a medievaldrama. It involves people marching in the streets in parades led by musicianswho have practiced a medieval song on medieval instruments all year longjust for this three-day ceremony. Now it is said that, during Fastnacht,you can make a new friend.
TERENCE: Something along that line that I've advocated-sometimes facetiously,sometimes seriously-is calendrical reform, and I have just the calendarall worked out. I won't lay it all out here, but the basic notion is thatit's a lunar calendar of thirteen lunar cycles. It has three hundred andeighty-four days, and consequently it precesses nineteen days against thesolar year. This would have the effect of taking the great yearly eventsof the calendar and slowly moving them through the seasons. For instance,if we kept Christmas on December 25, and you as child celebrated Christmasin winter, then as a teenager you would celebrate it in spring, and asa young adult you would celebrate it in high summer. As an older person,it would occur in autumn, and then, when you were truly old, Christmaswould return again to the winter.
The notion is to overcome the really bad dominator idea that the calendarshould be anchored rigidly at the equinoctial and solstitial points sothat the heliacal rising of the equinoctial sun is always in the same place.Our current calendar sends the message that there is stability. The calendaris the largest framework there is; in it, all other contexts are somehowsubsets. The solar calendar is an effort to deny humanity's mortality byreinforcing a false notion of permanence. What we actually want is a calendarthat says to us, "All is flow; all is flux; all relationships are in motionto everything else." This is a truer picture of the world. This may seemtrivial, and exemplary of why we eggheads are harmless. But, think aboutit.
If we yield the structure of the calendar to the dominator culture,letting it tell us what kind of calendar we shall have, then we shall alllive within the context of the dominator framework. Changing the calendarwould have tremendous consequences, and it would not be opposed by thedominant culture until it was too late. It would be regarded as some kindof a crank thing, because it wouldn't be realized that we were twiddlingwith the dials of our whole civilization's image of time and change.
The year 2000 provides a built-in opportunity to switch the train toa new track because at these millennial moments there's a certain uncertaintyin the mass mind about how to proceed. If you just jump up onto the stageand say, "This is it, folks!" you might be able to pull it off.
RUPERT: The first thing that occurs to me is that your idea of a lunarcalendar in which the months and festivals move around the year is alreadyin place. It's the calendar of the Islamic world. For example, Ramadan,the fasting month, retrogresses around the year., so people experienceit both in winter and in summer in the course of their lives. This is notexactly a confirmation of your theory about such a calendar breaking thedominator mode.
TERENCE: Your point is certainly, um . . . unwelcome.andquot;A book for all those who seek to quest beyond the limits of the ordinary. Three fine thinkers take us plunging into the universe of chaos, mind, and spirit. Instead of leaving us lost, they bring us back with startling insights and more wonder than we knew we had.andquot; Matthew Fox, author of <>i > Original Blessing <>/i > andquot; Records the exciting intellectual friendship of three amazing minds pushing to the edge of history in search of a new consciousness blending scientific observation, mythical imagination, and visionary speculation.andquot;"
<>strong > Riane Eisler <>/strong > , author of <>i > The Chalice and the Blade <>/i >
andquot;Should be required reading for anyone who believes that science and spirituality cannot and should not interact.andquot;
<>strong > Larry Dossey, M.D. <>/strong > , author of <>i > Space, Time and Medicine <>/i > andquot;One finishes Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousnesswith a sense of heightened awareness and wonder.andquot;
<>i > ForeWord <>/i > , 2003, Volume 6, number 2 andquot; . . . represent[s] a very innovative and exciting new way of understanding life as we know it.andquot;
<>span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold" > Gunnel Minett <>/span > , <>span style="FONT-STYLE: italic" > breathe <>/span > issue 89 - Sept., Oct., Nov. '02 Are the eternal laws of nature still evolving? In this book of andquot;trialogues,andquot; the late psychedelic visionary Terence McKenna, biologist and author of the morphogenetic field theory Rupert Sheldrake, and mathematician and chaos theory scientist Ralph Abraham explore the relationships between chaos and creativity, and their connections to cosmic consciousness.
Synopsis
In this book of "trialogues," the late psychedelic visionary and shamanologist Terence McKenna, acclaimed biologist and originator of the morphogenetic fields theory Rupert Sheldrake, and mathematician and chaos theory scientist Ralph Abraham explore the relationships between chaos and creativity and their connection to cosmic consciousness. Their observations call into question our current views of reality, morality, and the nature of life in the universe.
About the Author
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist, a former research fellow of the Royal Society at Cambridge, a current fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco, and an academic director and visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University and was a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, where he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells. He is the author of more than eighty scientific papers and ten books, including Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home; Morphic Resonance; The Presence of the Past; Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness; The Rebirth of Nature; and Seven Experiences That Could Change the World.McKenna was a scholar of shamanism, ethno-botanist, psychedelic researcher and author of many books.Ralph Abraham is the author of Dynamics: The Geometry of Behavior. He lives in California.Jean Houston and Robert Masters are well-known pioneers of modern consciousness research and were both among the founders of the Human Potentials Movement. They also coauthored Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space and The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. Jean Houston is also the author of A Passion for the Possible, Godseed, and A Mythic Life. She resides in New York.
Table of Contents
Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Jean Houston
Preface
Chapter 1: Creativity and the Imagination
The new evolutionary cosmology. The regularities of nature as evolving habits. The basis of cosmic creativity. The cosmic imagination as a higher-dimensional attractor drawing the evolutionary process toward itself. The Omega Point. Imagination welling up from the womb of chaos. Psychedelic experience and the mind of Gaia. Gaian dreams and human history. Dark matter as the cosmic unconscious.
Chapter 2: Creativity and Chaos
The chaos revolution. Chaotic attractors as eternal mathematical realities. Indeterminism in nature. Chaos and the evolution of order. Form in the cooling process. The organizing fields of nature as related to mathematics and the cosmic imagination. Mathematical models. Attractors, attraction, and motivation. The freezing of information in crystals and in written language. The primacy of spoken language and abstraction.
Chapter 3: Chaos and the Imagination
Chaos in Greek mythology. The myth of the conquest of chaos. Fear of chaos and the suppression of the feminine. The partnership society and the rise of patriarchy. Seasonal festivals of the repression of chaos, and the creation of the unconscious. The inhibition of creativity and its relation to global problems. The Eleusinian mysteries. Creativity and Christology. Plans for the recovery of chaos and the imagination. The significance of the chaos revolution.
Chapter 4: The World Soul and the Mushroom
Randomness in the evolutionary process. The limited nature of models. The computer and chaos revolutions. Coevolution of mathematics and the material world. The mathematical landscape. Sensory qualities in the cosmic imagination. The similarities of souls and fields. The primal unified field and the fields of nature. Rebirth of the world soul. Interplanetary transfer of the human psyche via the psychedelic experience and the spores of magic mushrooms.
Chapter 5: Light and Vision
Physical light and the light of consciousness. Light and vision. The location of visual images. Mind extending from the eyes.The sense of being stared at: a new kind of field or the electromagnetic field? Hierarchy of fields in nature. Coupling between electromagnetic and mental fields. Physical light and self-luminous visions. Tryptamine hallucinogens. The world soul. Fields as the medium of divine omniscience. Gaian mind and the light of the sun.
Chapter 6: Entities
Discarnate intelligences and nonhuman entities: creatures within the human mind or truly Other? Entities and shamans. The use of language by entities. Angelic communication in the birth of modern science. The dream dimension and entities. The effect of science and humanism on entities. Nature magically self-reflecting and aware.
Chapter 7: The Unconscious
The three great bifurcations. Creation of the unconscious, the origin of evil, and the rejection of chaos. Escape from evil by the resurrection of chaos. The suppression of psychedelics, the patriarchy, and the rise of booze. Partnership and dominator drugs; the addiction to addictions. Habits and the formation of the unconscious. Holidays and the reinforcement of awareness. Prayer, magic, and astrology for enlightenment.
Chapter 8: The Resacralization of the World
Ralph's religious background. The sacred in India. Rediscovering the sacred in the West. The revival of ritual and the resacralization of music. Feminism and the archaic revival. Gothic cathedrals and animistic Christianity. The green movement, saving the Earth, the greening of God. Psychedelic churches. The resacralizing of science.
Chapter 9: Education in the New World Order
Education as initiation. The dominance of rationalism and humanism. Rites of passage. Summer camps. Testing and accreditation. Institutions and administrations. Workshops as a model for a new pluralistic and decentralized system of education. Religious initiations. Reform of existing professions. A possible pilot project.
Chapter 10: The Apocalypse
The apocalyptic tradition: a mythic model motivating religious history or an intuition of the ending of history or time? Modern millenarianism and scientific versions of the apocalypse. The possible end in 2012. The self-fulfilling quality of apocalyptic prophecy. The speeding up of history and the inevitability of planetary metamorphosis. Death and transformation on a cosmic scale. Intensifying conflict and the power of faith.
Glossary
Bibliography
About the Authors