Chaos Consciousness

http://www.asklepia.org/chaosophy/chaosophy2.html

Chaos Consciousness in Psychotherapy: An Experienial Approach to Healing & Creativity

by Iona Miller & Graywolf Fred Swinney, M.A.

Asklepia Foundation, Grants Pass, Oregon

Prepared for the Proceedings of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology.  Presented at Saybrook Institute, Summer, 1991.

ABSTRACT:  Experiential therapy sessions and mysticism demonstrate that as we journey deeper and deeper into the psyche we eventually encounter a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images.  In a therapeutic context, chaos is experienced as a consciousness state--the ground state.  This state is related to healing, dreams, and creativity.  Shamanic approaches to healing involve co-consciousness states which lead to restructuring both physical and emotional-mental senses of self.

Dreams, creativity, and healing arise from this undifferentiated "chaotic consciousness."  Dreamhealing uses images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes.  Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect.  Chaos-oriented consciousness journeys suggest these states reflect complex phase space, fractal patterns, strange attractors, "the butterfly effect," sensitivity, complex feedback loops, intermittency, and other general dynamical aspects suggested by chaos theory.  More than an experiential process, this is a philosophy of treatment--"Chaosophy."

 

"I'm just asking you to hear yourself.  Listen to what you're really saying and to what you think you're saying.  Control, control, control.  When are you going to realize that nothing can be controlled?"

"We live in chaos; it's the central issue in everyone's life.  Mack, look around you.  Everyone in this parking lot is struggling for control.  And you know what it is they're trying to control, each and everyone of them?  Fear--they're trying to control their fear."

                                           --Steve Martin character in the film, GRAND CANYON

Creative Chaos

We all instantly recognize the fundamental nature of chaos in our lives.  The archetypal creation myth posits that all originates in Chaos.  We all "get it," intuitively.  But generally we are enculturated to fear chaos, to hold it at bay through so-called "control."  Chaos is a very personal experience.  We relate to it viscerally as well as emotionally and intellectually.  When chaos intrudes on our lives, we feel pain, and defend against that pain with fear, rather than embracing the chaotic dynamic.

In psychology, we have had the idea that we need a "strong ego," that we need a stable structure in order to function and cope.  But nothing exists in complete order or complete randomness.  We live in a chaotic universe.  When we are "far from equilibrium" change becomes inevitable.  Like a bifurcation point in chaos theory, the old system either falls apart or emerges with a higher degree of order.  Our bifurcations state changes are personal crossroads, decision points, initiated by perturbations of our systems.

Chaos theory applied to experiential psychotherapy shows us we actually need to cooperate with chaotic dynamics, to enter a less-rigid process of flow, submitting outworn aspects of the ego to dissolution, which increases our adaptability, helping us evolve.

The phase space of non-linear dynamics is analogous to psychic space--our psychophysical construct of our experience of reality.  This complex inner landscape can be mapped and has all the features of phase space: stability, chaos, bifurcation points, and catastrophic changes.

This virtual reality is the world of virtual experience.  The landscape of information is richly structured with attractor basins, valleys, and mountains with peaks, saddles, and passes.  And it is also hyperdimensional containing a vast amount of implicate or enfolded information.

This landscape (self-scape) can be explored with experiential psychotherapy by faithfully sticking to the imagery emerging from the autonomous imaginal flow.  It is a dynamic "ocean of active information" in wave form, with which we can commune, transcending conventional boundaries.  The inner journey is one of movement without motion--stretching and folding spacetime.

Imagination is the voice of creativity.  It is the primary way we experience soul.  Creativity expressed in imagination means experiencing multiple states of consciousness.  There is an infinity of realities and states of consciousness.  Imagination embodies it's own reality.  It is self-revelatory.  Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.

We are learning from chaos theory that physically and mentally we need chaotic disorder to function smoothly.  Dipping into that disorder shakes everything loose and allows creative restructuring to occur.  Self-organizing systems, both organic and inorganic, naturally evolve toward the "edge of chaos."  Many natural systems develop their own dynamic stabilities.  Dynamic stability applies to development in chaos theory, and research shows that living systems are naturally self-correcting.

Strength is a measure of what force it takes to destroy or break a rigid structure.  True power, on the other hand, is a measure of readily-available energy for immediate use.  Strength is rigid, while power is flowing.  Empowerment flows forth naturally when we come into intimate therapeutic contact with our stream of consciousness.  This stream is most easily observed as our dreams, and manifests in our symptoms.

Water is a natural metaphor of consciousness.  The turbulent stream of consciousness flows through the labyrinth of the psyche.  It is the source of dis-ease and our healing as indicated by its importance in the cult of Asklepios, the god of dreams and healing.  In Greece, the springs of his shrine were channeled into circular labyrinths, forming a concrete metaphor of the healing process.  Healing "springs" from deep within.  However, first the old rigid images must be dissolved, and the "universal solvent" is chaos.

Dreams bridge the gap between the spiritual and scientific worldviews.  Most would agree that dreams are a truly chaotic phenomenon.  Object of scientific inquiry and healing tool of the psychotherapist, they are firmly entrenched in the scientific worldview, although on the fringe. On the mystical side, most religions teach that God, or the nature of the transpersonal Source is revealed through dreams and visionary experience.

Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.  Supreme insights are always metaphorical in expression. But the relationship of chaos and psychotherapeutic effects may be more than metaphorical and subjective.  The empirical connection may lie in the mystery of the true nature of consciousness and creativity.

Dreamhealing

One of the authors, Graywolf, discovered a way to journey and guide others into the deepest layers of the psyche while practicing Gestalt dreamwork and shamanism.  Therapy at its very best is a matter of changing consciousness and so is shamanism.  In dream guiding, all the action lies in going just beyond the boundary from the known and comfortable toward the fear and challenge.

Following the images below the ego deeper into more fundamental consciousness states, he found that clients could easily be guided to the level of chaotic consciousness with therapeutic results.  Mapping these levels below behavior, emotional-mental process, belief systems, and mythic zones of imagery, he refined the technique and directions for guidance.

This process (Dreamhealing or Creative Consciousness Process) was not originally based on chaos theory, but observed directly in working with dreams, symptoms, feelings, and healing.  The theory came later as an analogy for describing the observations.  But chaotic dynamics may be the actual mechanism of its action, rather than merely a metaphor of the transformative process, as were the hydraulic and cybernetic models.

Dreamhealing is not an interpretive or analytical way of understanding a dream, but is a non-linear consciousnesness journey into its healing heart.  Dreamhealing  is not guided imagery.  The guide follows the autonomous flow of psychic imagery, while guiding the focus to deeper, more primal imagery.  Then letting go of  that form, and entering a yet deeper one, much like entering deeper into a fractal image to find yet deeper images.

In dreamhealing one "becomes" the image which leads to sensing, identifying, empathizing with the essence of a color, shape, form, or pattern--then letting go of form.  It is a process of initiation--becoming, sharing, feeling, releasing, yielding, accepting, deepening, intensifying, surrendering, healing, and integrating.

Everything in the dreamtime occurs in the present tense--it is happening.  But it is linked in a non-linear fashion--through association--with the past and the future.  Becoming the image creates the experience of a new state of consciousness, new sensations, awarenesses, feelings, visceral and kinesthetic reactions, responses, acceptances.

Dreams are chaotic by nature and so is much of shamanic practice.  Both evoke the irrational, and of all the healing modalities, these two reflect chaos theory.  The forte of shamans is the dream journey or consciousness journey, based on the assumed ability to experience multiple consciousness states other than ordinary consensus reality.

The shaman/therapist acts as guide by entering a co-consciousness state or shared experience with the journeyer.  This virtual experience has the ability to create natural consequences or results in real-time.  The experience of multiple states of consciousness leads away from egocentricity toward a biocentric perspective.  A larger sense of participation counteracts existential alienation.

Small changes in initial conditions (sensitivity) are pumped-up into larger changes, via the "butterfly effect."  There is a complementary notion in psychotherapy that one traumatic event can shape a life, and a therapeutic event or experience can re-shape it.  Small changes can make phenomenal differences in outcome.

A dream is a stream of chaos, a river of turbulent, undifferentiated consciousness and creativity, flowing through the self-scape of the psyche.  It is shaped by the frozen states and complex feedback loops of consciousness, the existential images and patterns that define and mold the self and the reality of our perceptions.  When it finally emerges into awareness, the images and plots that are presented to our almost-waking self are reflections of these states.  They are another way of seeing the self and the reality we create that is less prejudiced by the ego.

The dream is also much like a hologram.  The passage of the consciousness stream through the psyche, and its encounter with the frozen consciousness states, causes ripples and patterns that create images of the deeper self that formed them.  Like a hologram or fractal, the whole is contained and re-iterated within any part of the dream, though details may be fuzzy.

Our primal existential image of who and what we are begins with conception (universal, undifferentiated consciousness) and is conditioned by our internal and external experiences.   But, of course, not all disease originates here.  Trauma at any point can trigger a disruption in the primal self image, setting the "butterfly effect" in motion as the consequences of that trauma permeate the life.  There may be multiple, or re-iterated trauma.  This deep existential image contains the essence of our dis-ease.

Chaos permeates our existence from the sub-atomic to universal level, and we react to it with fear and pain.  The primal image is revealed in the ongoing process of imagery:  dreams, visions, visceral reactions, symptoms, feelings, beliefs, and behavior.  Dreams are shaped by these existential images much as they also shape our lives and destinies.

Chaos Consciousness

During consciousness journeys, participants report encountering a place, after moving through the fears and pains, that is totally disorienting, chaotic.  They, for example, enter into a gray cloud, and becoming that cloud the mind goes totally blank.  Or they enter into a spiral, and giving over to the motion of that spiral, they become so totally disoriented that there is nothing to hang onto.

This experience is what we call "chaotic consciousness," observed within the therapeutic context--undifferentiated, or universal consciousness.  It is virtually a place of "all and no structure," a no-boundaries condition, pure potential, the source of creativity.  It appears paradoxically as a plenum or a void.  The plenum represents hyperarousal; the void hypoarousal.  Direct experience of the transpersonal means going back below the ego, into this infinite place, back into this basic formless consciousness--the void or chaos of pre-existence.

Chaotic consciousness is the crucible of our creative spirit.  Creativity emerges from chaos.  This negentropic, or syntropic principle is the matrix of evolution.  Infinite process is constantly creating itself and destroying itself at all levels.  Nature repeats herself at all levels of organization, and whatever it is we are that.

Dreams reflect this self-generating, self-iterating and self-organization of patterns, and so does the natural philosophy emerging from the New Sciences.  This deterministic philosophy incorporates the human condition, rather than vilifying or pushing it away.  Chaos helps us feel our way through a complex, unstable world.

Like the supercritical state of chaotic dynamics, "chaotic consciousness" may be characterized as dynamic, non-linear, paradoxical, self-generating, self-iterating, and self-organizing.  It could be likened to an infinite complex of manifolds potentially enfolding infinite information--vortices within vortices within vortices--exploding limitless detail.

There is an essential relationship between healing and irrational consciousness.  Irrational consciousness "works" the cure.  Somehow that chaotic consciousness, the giving up of the old order, the letting go of the old structure to chaos changes things fundamentally.  The next set of imagery emerging out of that chaotic consciousness is always a healing one.  So chaos, as the matrix of transformation, seems vitally important at the existential level.

The process of creativity is one of new forms emerging from the void, new forms that have not existed previously.  Not merely a juggling of existing forms or ideas into a new configuration, it is more of a quantum leap, a disruption of the old perception into new levels of consciousness and awareness.  Chaos theory provides an apt metaphor for this process.  In a nutshell, chaos theory states that in all apparent structure is hidden chaos and in chaos there are hidden forms.

We exist in a twilight zone between chaos and order.  We flow back and forth between them and that keeps us healthy.  Consciousness always strives to take on form.  We build a structure and it begins to develop flaws and rigidities.  Our illness comes when we hang onto that worn-out structure.  But when we let go, we let ourselves flow back into that primal chaos and into total freedom.  It is like a heart that periodically develops a chaotic beating pattern to renew itself.  We seem to need that within our consciousness, too.

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