RHA Books, Kindle

Books by Ralph H. Abraham

This is the comprehensive list of English editions. The most recent editions in reverse chronological order, with links to Amazon Kindle.

Books, Kindle

Schism: The Madness of Crowds, Toxicity of Social Media, Social Polarization, and Political Violence; A Cybernetic Approach,
Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY, 2023.

This book targets the crisis in regulating the mechanisms of violence. It's goal is to bring modern mathematics, specifically catastrophe theory, to bear on the problems of social polarization, division, and the onset of civil war in the United States of America at the time of writing, Fall 2022. We will try to connect catastrophe theory to these problems with a minimum of mathematical mystification.

Vibrations and Forms: Finding from Psychedelic Adventures,
Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY, 2021.

This book is a collection of writings, from 1973 to 2018, on a vibrational theory of mind. Here, mind includes higher mind, or cosmic cosciousness. The word vibrations is a material metaphor applied to an immaterial realm. This way of thinking is sometimes called emanationism. The material metaphor is derived from cymatics, a branch of acoustic physics dealing with the emergence of form from sonic vibrations forced upon a fluid.

Hip Santa Cruz: First-person accounts of the Hip Culture of Santa Cruz in the 1960s,
Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY, 2016.
Thirteen stories of the creation of the hip miracle.

By Pat Bisconti, Rick Gladstone, Max Hartstein, Peter Demma, Bob Hall, Fred McPherson, Paul Lee, Judy Hill, Leon Tabory, Joe Lysowski, Ralph Abraham, and Rivkah Barmore.

Chaos, Gaia, Eros: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Three Great Streams of History,
Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY, 2011. Reprint of the 1994 edition.

This book collects evidence for a theory. Rather than expand this collage of information into a pretense of normal narrative, for you to recondense in your own mind, I have kept it in condensed form. The information is not in linear (one-dimensional) order. Its natural order is multidimensional: one-dimensional time, twodimensional space, plus many-dimensional ideas. Thus the same theme may be traced through time, over space, or through an evolution of ideas or myths. Wittgenstein wrote in the Preface to his Philosophical Investigations, The very nature of the investigation . . . compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. Thus this book is really only a collection.

The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination, and Spirit, ***
Monkfish Books, Rhinebeck, NY, 2005. Reprint of the 1999 edition.
Joint with Rupert Sheldrake and Terence McKenna.

We have called this book The Evolutionary Mind because this title best summarizes the common themes of our discussions. Most are strongly influenced by the idea of evolution — of life, science, technology, culture, and indeed the entire cosmos — and also by the prospects for a greatly enlarged understanding of minds, expansion of experience, and transformations of consciousness beyond anything we can at present conceive. An earlier version of this book, called The Evolutionary Mind: Trialogues at the Edge of the Unthinkable, was published by Trialogue Press, Santa Cruz, in 1998.

Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness, ***
Park Street Press, Rochester, VT, 2001.
Joint with Rupert Sheldrake and Terence McKenna.

What is this book? A concerto of cosmologists? An atelier of thought dancers? A marching society of the ancient Gnostic order of metaphysical inebriates? Or have the spirits of Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, and Saint Bonaventure come back to run rampant through the polymorphous parade of intellectual possibilities felt and known by each of these fellows? These trialogues are surely a minefield of mind probes, a singular sapient circle of gentlemen geniuses at their edgiest of edges. Their metaphors alone would leave a Muse in a muddle. Meeting yearly and, more recently, publicly with each other at Esalen, they raise through their conversations the rheostat of consciousness of them selves and their listeners. They cut loose from whatever remains of ortho dox considerations and become minds at the end of their tethers, who then re-tether each other to go farther out in their speculations. In so doing, they have figured out how to achieve one of the best of all possible worlds: the sharing of mental space and cosmic terrains over many years of deep friendship and profound dialogue. From the Foreword by Jean Houston.

The Foundations of Mechanics, 1967, 1978. ***
With Jerrold E. Marsden.
First edition 1967 by Benjamin Press.
Second edition 1978 by Addison-Wesley
Also online at: Cal Tech
Recently reprinted by the AMS (Chelsea Series)
AMS Catalog (scroll down about one third)

Transversal Mappings and Flows, 1967. ***
With Joel Robbin. Publ. 1967 by Benjamin Press.

Revised 1 March 2024 by Ralph: Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY, 2023.; This book targets the crisis in regulating the mechanisms of violence. It's goal is to bring modern mathematics, specifically catastrophe theory, to bear on the problems of social polarization, division, and the onset of civil war in the United States of America at the time of writing, Fall 2022. We will try to connect catastrophe theory to these problems with a minimum of mathematical mystification.