Esalen, Eccentric Thinking Workshop, January 1992, Ralph Abraham
Let me deal first with ** in * thinking. I believe that everyone has experience of this and it reads **. But when you're ***x thinking it's not actually an option to move the box or to visit temporarily in a different box slightly shifted to the right to gain a slightly different perspective, to take an elevator ride from one sphere to another sphere where you get out and can look down to see the overall pattern. All the techniques we listed yesterday are in a book that Jimmy has already written. These techniques substitute a different kind of order for a current order ** because what we like to do is to escape order, at least for a moment. We have to set order aside. I'm thinking of a dyad, a binary dichotomy between chaos and order where chaos becomes another word for disorder.
However, I don't like to use the word "disorder", because that suggests, as it has been doing for 6,000 years, that order is correct and disorder is disorder -- you go to a doctor for a disorder. Chaos is used as a synonym for a pathological state of disorder, but I prefer to regard it as the normal state, and order as the pathological state. Instead of saying order, I would say "dischaos". I know that Bill will attack that, so maybe I'll just say right away say that, alright, there's partnership between chaos and order. This partnership is essential. It is essential for creative work, x thinking, problem-solving, the evolution of consciousness and therefore the evolution of society, as well as the evolution of all and everything and the creation of the future. Even the possibility of having a future requires the freedom to move along the axis between order and chaos.
When we experience a moment of x thinking, we have struggled with an experience of chaos in which there is not formlessness but a lot of form -- the encyclopedia of all forms -- and it's very confusing. In our culture, order has unfairly dominated the dyad of order and chaos, and it has repressed chaos into the collective unconsciousness. So we'll drive down a highway, take psychedelic drugs, stay up all night and drink too much. We use all these tricks just to find chaos, which is the natural state of nature. We happen to have been born into this pathological patriarchal society which has celebrated for at least 3,000 years the murder, the dissection, and the absolute dematerialization of chaos in its New Year's festivals. By contrast, it was celebrated in Sumer, Babylon, Canaan, Egypt, Crete, Greece, North Africa, Spain --- you know, from Ur to now. We've had this New Year's festival in which St.George kills the dragon, * kills * [Chanat?]. Chaos is destroyed, order is renewed, and the seasons are invited to provide food. Agriculture is sort of the epitome of order, especially monoculture, which epitomizes the human obsession with order that has come to dominate the planet.
The suppression of chaos began with the arrival of the patriarchy. And since there are always people like us who are escaping from the pathological obsession with order, like in that movie "Brazil", all we have to do is leave town, and when we get to the outskirts, nature is still there, not quite dead yet. People hardly ever go back voluntarily into the pathology of the inner city. But somehow, through a New Year's festival, through the organized church, through all the literature and all the powers of conformity which are applied to the individual, people are dragged kicking and screaming back into, for example, kindergarten. You sit in a chair facing front and say, I refuse to do this, I'm not going to stand up here and talk because everybody's already been trained into passivity and I'm not going to personally participate.
There are these centric forces, and then there are these eccentric desires. * yesterday described this partnership of the center and the edge as the basic paradigm into which x thinking fits. There's a bridge between x thinking and chaos. There are two lanes on this bridge, they participate in creating kind of a vortex, and this is one of them. To do x thinking you have to go to chaos and come back. Chaos is a fundamental principle in a triad of three principals in *'s * [Theogamy?] and it is the source of all form. Chaos is a fundamental aspect of everything. Creativity comes from chaos, and so does terra firma and all the familiar things, and so do all our structures of order, which are essential to how we define ** . Order is good too, and it comes about by the selection of forms out of chaos. Chaos is the source of creativity, it is an important resource for major creativity, which is what we mean by extension. That's one lane of the bridge. (What's the other?)
My personal experience is not with chaos, but with the chaos revolution -- a social transformation that is currently in progress. There's always a major paradigm shift going on; if you look in enough nooks and crannies you'll always find one, only this one is going on in the world of science, which is not just another nook and cranny. Science -- or maybe I should call it scientism -- is the religion of our time. Many people look to science, scientists, science literature and science popularizers for guidance in matters for which they used to look to the church, because it seems the most appropriate source of authority for our way of thinking. Furthermore, science is opposed to nature in that one of the main ideas of the religion of scientism is order: not to impose order but to see the order, to worship order, and therefore chaos has been anathema to science.
Science is relatively new; chaos was the religion of the goddess in the thousands of years preceding the patriarchal takeover. Science was born as a new religion in a context in which the suppression of chaos had already become the order of the day. Science is a temple, it's the temple of order, and so a paradigm shift in the sciences has special importance for us. If the paradigm shift within the sciences involves replacing chaos on her proper throne which she occupied in the early evolution of the human mind, then it's all the bigger an event.
Chaos theory, as a branch of mathematics, is not the same as the chaos we experience in everyday life. Chaos theory is a much smaller thing. It's a branch of mathematics which creates intellectual models for chaos, communicative strategies for chaos, an encyclopedia of technical terms to aid us in speaking about chaos, empowering us to restore to our consciousness the missing part for which there are no words. Before Chaos Theory there were no models or drawings of it. We couldn't share our experience. There has been, in a small way, an empowerment in the discovery of mathematics. Inescapably, in the pursuit of whatever it is, another sphere, a landscape of its own, was found. Some people who were particularly attracted to that sphere went there to live and didn't come back. They dug around in the landscape and found models for chaos about a century ago. This is empowering to the chaos revolution, yet not a part of it. Mathematics is not science. It's a world apart from science. Science is active in the sensible sphere, in ordinary reality. Mathematics is somewhere else. People who are attracted to mathematics have a kind of psyche and personality type which is opposite to the personality type that is attracted to science.
The chaos revolution started in the sciences. It's been going on for exactly twenty years, and these twenty years happen to be in my lifetime. There's been a step-by-step development in which, because of some peculiar historical accident, I've had a personal role. I didn't create it; I was simply invited to be in, let's say, the botany department the day that a shift happened in the botany department. Then I was invited by the astronomy department, and so on. I just happened to be, by historical accident, at the dinner table when this discovery was made in all these homes all over the world, and that's why I have a personal experience of what has been described in "Chaos and Infinite Order" as a paradigm shift process.
A lot of people object to the paradigm shift concept for good reasons. They may have read the book written by Thomas, who was my colleague at Princeton. We used to talk about it when I was teaching there. At that time I didn't have the experience I have now, and neither did he. He still doesn't. He got the idea for this book because he was a scientist and was led into an x thought of the past, namely the Copernican revolution. From that exemplary case he evolved a theory that he applied to every other shift, maybe inappropriately, because it was a special case that happened very long ago and could only be examined via very poor historical records. It can't exactly compare with the personal experience of a shift such as we've all had. Let me
The first step, as I remember it, happened when two friends of mine, * and David, a mathematician and a physicist, got together in 1969, the last days of the golden age of chaos theory as a branch of mathematics. The mathematician was talking about his walk in the woods that morning, about the mathematical landscape and about the incredible models of mathematics. His friend was not the first physicist to hear that, but it clicked, he made a connection. Oh, a mathematical model, oh, the waves crashing on the beach. The mathematical model kind of looks like the waves crashing on the beach. Could there be an actual connection between them? It gave him the idea of a theoretical chaos model based on an attempt to model the motion of the planet Pluto a hundred years ago. This model could actually be employed to understand the froth and the waves when they crash on the beach. And so the two of them wrote up the idea of a mathematical model for fluid dynamical turbulence and sent it off to a physics journal. It was rejected. They sent it to another one, it was again rejected, and finally they found one where they had a friend who was an editor and got him drunk, and so it appeared in 1973.
That was the beginning of the chaos revolution as a historical phenomenon in the community of scientists twenty years ago. During the time that elapsed between their conversation and the publication of the paper I was essentially out of town as far as the mathematical community was concerned. I had gone on a psychedelic journey and was involved in a process of discovery of my own. When I came back in 1973, I found that the connection I had been dreaming about for a long time had taken place. No connection was made with the biological sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, the study of history, of chemistry or astronomy -- only with physics. The physicists were able to get it first. It created a sensation in physics, and it took hardly a year for the main physicists of the world -- there aren't that many -- to get the idea. They were really excited. Articles started appearing. There were so many they had to start several new journals.
Suddenly Poppo, an astronomer who really had been a physicist and migrated to astronomy, got the idea that in the formation of galaxies there is a turbulent motion and the stars are moving around...So he worked out the mathematical model and applied it to astronomy. Within a year, a conference was held at the New York Academy of Sciences, specializing in shifting [what?] A conference on chaotic phenomena in astrophysics and in practical or observational astronomy followed later. It went step-by-step, it was all kind of **. I got invited for dinner and asked to please give some instruction in chaos theory because all these people had the need to learn about it. Fortunately, I was invited for dinner to only one house per year, because I can draw chaos models with colored chalk on the floor.
By the time ten years had passed I was invited by the chemists. They have the pure chemical of the something ** one molecule. They hit it with lasers, which is supposed to give back a light of a single frequency, and they're * at the whole bunch and they wondered, could this be chaos? The model is like a worm eating its way through the scientific establishment, eating out the foundations. Everybody thought, well, this is going to simply extend our toolbox and allow us to understand bigger dimensions. They didn't realize that the foundation of the thing was being eaten away and they were going to plummet into the bowels of the earth. They would have to deal with the whole establishment being eaten away, because it depends on an idea of order which is not observed in nature. When you rule out the observations that don't fit the religious principle and only observe the order, and then you suddenly perceive the chaos and start looking at --- well, this fuzzy stuff, the whole concept of the establishment breaks down.
By 1983, the breaking wave reached the beach of biology. Medical physiologists were the first to get on to it. They started calling up and saying, we've got to have some instruction, we need to see chaos models drawn with colored chalk. The first [conference?] was in Dubrovnik, which at that time was a wonderful place. There were a few medical physiologists who got the idea, but the others felt extremely threatened and uncomfortable about chaos because they had a huge investment in order and in a particular idea of order. Chaos is order too, but the magnitude of the investment of an entire career devoted to laboratory science with years of expensive experimentation, huge grants, with animal sacrifices and so on cannot be easily jetisoned. They didn't feel they could publish the new data because if they did, they would be branded heretical or perhaps schizophrenic and would be punished by losing their grant. Which means that if you're a laboratory scientist, you can do nothing. You'd have to learn to *, or write. It is tremendously exciting to explore and be able to personally make a discovery. When you hold in your hand something that's never been seen by human eyes, that's wonderful, especially if it could result in saving a lot of suffering and millions of lives.
By the time the wave reached the beach of earth science, I had already been through about twelve steps and had seen that the pattern is invariably exactly the same. I'm always the first person they call on the phone. They don't sent a letter, they call me on the phone. They say, I've got a paper that's been rejected for publication and I'm afraid to discuss it with anyone. They warn me not only that I shouldn't publish it, but that I shouldn't show it to anybody else. They're going to give me a break by not telling anybody that I'd seen this paper. "Am I crazy?" is what they always want to know. "Am I crazy, or is there something to this? I've got the hand calculator and I'm doing these numbers." They're always rediscovering the mathematical models of chaos theory for themselves because the way it came to them was sort of telepathic...Is this too chaotic?
Because I could see the pattern, I could say to Herb Shaw who called me, "Herb, what you're going through is like a paradigmatic case of a paradigm shift. Your paper will be published, but the fact that you made the discovery which will revolutionize your field is going to be forgotten. You'll never get any credit for it because the second person who gets the idea thinks he found it, and the third person thinks she did, and every person is going to deny that anybody discovered it before them. I don't know why --- it's the pattern of the thing."
This is very different from Thomas Kuhn's approach. He tried to figure it out by reading the reports from 400 years later. (??) Sir Flinders Petrie, after studying the accumulated artifacts of 3,000 years of Egyptian civilization saw that it fell into eight different layers and that a transition between one layer and another always took place in about one century flat and went through the different fields of order, always beginning with mathematics, then science, then economics. After that the commercial enterprise of the civilization got heavy and immoral, and then it collapsed -- and then another civilization began.
It was only a couple of years ago that the economists called up. One of them got the idea, but he didn't dare to publish it; it was discovered that there was a whole community of people who had the idea and had been wise enough not to mention it. But as soon as you did, and didn't get killed by Marmaduke who created order by killing * [Chandra?] with a sword, slicing her in half * -- horrible--(Can't make this out -nina)
The fear, the terror of dealing with chaos may be a socio-cultural thing, it's been around so long that it's very difficult to escape. Fortunately, some people don't mind wrestling with demons. So it passed through economics and the social sciences --- anthropology, psychotherapy, psychology of all sorts, learning theory, neurophysiology -- field by field, always the same story. Each case is so isolated from all the others...That's part of the cause of the intellectual community's suffering worldwide. We see the division into different fields as a necessity for progress in science, but it is also a serious problem leading to the destruction of the environment, because once people are sufficiently specialized in their box they are actually empowered to work in that box by virtue of their separation from the rest of the universe. If you had all these connections in your mind, you'd get distracted from the specialty in your box. There seems to be in the human psyche a natural polarity between specialization and synthesis. We need specialists and we need synthesists, but right now we've got only specialists because the synthesists can't feed themselves.
When it reached the humanities, literary critics realized that a novel is the same as a scientific observation, that is, a sequence of data. If the time series of data in the field of medical physiology could reveal that a chaotic pattern in the heartbeat is a healthy state, and that's an important observation, then the novel could also be studied from that point of view. Is there a different degree of chaos or order in the sequence of ideas presented on the successive pages of a novel? As soon as they got this idea, they went with it. They described William Faulkner as a very chaotic author, and this other person as very organized. They even recognized that novelists and artists of all sorts are actually the priests and priestesses in the temple of chaos. They were preserving this suppressed part. It was literary criticism that caused the explosion of the chaos revolution into the humanities and all the arts.
Say you're the botanist who figured out that a chaotic state is the essential transition from the caterpillar to a butterfly, like the metamorphosis or the embryogenesis from the chicken egg to a chicken, which is pretty fantastic. The passage through chaos is essential to form once you begin thinking about it. You're the first chicken farmer in history to really think about that. We know now who did think about it maybe 6,000 years ago, (who?Plato?) but nobody you've ever talked to did. It wasn't just the embryogenetic process, but actually chaos itself. And you realize that you're in chaos. You get the idea, but in chaos there's a circularity which is more disorienting than any other transition, and that gives an idea of the vortex, the special vortex in the relationship between x thinking and chaos.
And now I want to pass the wand to Bill, and after that we'll have questions on all and everything, so don't forget.
BILL: I think the year '73 is important, because just as '72-'73 is the watershed in the emergence of a new consciousness that you've described, '72 is also the year when Jim Lovelock's first paper on seeing the planet as a living, self-organizing system was published. It's Forrester in the meadows doing a computer model for planetary dynamics with limits to growth, and it's kind of the beginning of a lot of cultural shifts of new institutions in America. There are alternative institutions that lead the center. It's also the year that I founded the Lindisfarne Association, so * and the Santa Fe Institute and places like that are classical examples of how throughout history, cultural change has come by what Margaret Mead used to call * circles, small groups --- sometimes cafes, not even institutes.
I was a professor at MIT trying to create a center to bring artists, scientists and mystics together to study the mystical roots of Western science as an alternative to the ecological crisis, and I was saying that the ecological crisis comes from the mis-education of engineers. If you have this view of nature, you're going to fuck up in this particular way, so let's go back to Boyle, Cabalan, Newton, Descartes' dreams, Pascal's dreams, and let's really look at the * [orchid?] tradition in science. They said no, you're nuts, we're about power, we're trying to produce a new President for the United States, we're busy with the Vietnam War, we don't have time for this kind of crap. So you reach a point of thinking, how do you relate to that as a social phenomenon? Their way of trying to buy me out was to promote me every year I was there.
You reach a point where you say, am I crazy, am I really seeing that there is an ecological crisis, or are they right and I should just play ball? I come from the Irish working class, so I was the first in my family to get an Ivy League Ph.D. and to make it into Cambridge right at the time when Cambridge in the '60's was the capital of the world, the technocratic Vatican. There was no more important place in the world for the technological society than Route 128 in Cambridge. So there I was right in the middle, and I had to make a decision. I was raised a Catholic and knew that if I was going to quit the Church I was risking my immortal soul and would be going to hell. Catholics play hardball. They don't mess around with ideas, they take them very seriously. So I said you're wrong and I'm right: I quit. I won't take the promotion, thank you.
I was an Associate Professor at 29 or 30, something like that, and I quit and started wandering around the world. I saw that there is a new culture in the world, it's called planetary culture, and it ain't the multi-national corporations. These guys have got it wrong. Then you discover the collegiality of the fellowship with all the other people who are thinking in the new paradigm. You run into Gregory Bateson, you run into Marshall McLuhan and *, you run into Lynn Margulis in biology -- you run into all these people who have adopted this new way of thinking, and they're artists, scientists, mystics -- all the people I wanted to get together at MIT: Zen masters and Sufis and neuroscientists like Francisco Varella. This was impossible to do in the Vatican of technology at MIT. So you're going to have to take a risk.
This weekend we've had the constant theme of "I'm being punished for being eccentric". It goes with the territory. If we pat ourselves on the back for being risk-takers, that means these risks are real. You're going to lose your money, you're going to lose your tenure, you're not going to be able to have a BMW, and it really is going to hurt. Tough shit, that's life. The next thing is you have to be willing to go absolutely to your own edge. You have to lose everything. You lose your savings, you lose your security, you lose your tenure, you don't have anything left. And then, absolutely at your own edge, the topology begins to get complicated and you find it's a polycentric universe, and then all of a sudden all these colleagues start appearing, all these friends. You'd have never met them if you had just stayed in MIT. So a very complex multi-dimensional topology begins to emerge, it's a collaboration where everybody begins to see that it's larger than individuals, and that this is really a kind of ensemble which needs a lot of people to bring forth what you described.
So we'd all come together, and there would be Gregory Bateson and Jim Lovelock --- well, actually Jim and Greg didn't come to the same meeting, they were sequential, but people came who would otherwise never meet. For example, at one of the * meetings we had here in California, which created the * mass by Paul Winter that was performed at Stanford and all over, Jim Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Francisco Varella, Roberto Monteroni from Chile and all the * from Paris and Israel met for the first time. Ordinarily, they would never have met because at specialized scientific conferences you go to a hotel and you meet with just the people in your specialty. When they all came together in the context of a Zen monastery and people meditating and the rest of it, it just exploded in all kinds of directions. It changed the cathedral and helped bring forth the new bioshelter. It changed the architectural design --- John * was there. Paul Winter got inspired and produced the *, and that changed American pop music and ecological thinking.
These kinds of things have their own chemistry, their own cafe[?] overlapping. And when that happened, we were able to look around the room and see the complex geometry of behavior in the phase portrait of just who was in the room and what kind of thought created this overlapping architecture, and you realized that it wasn't just research, it was performing a new culture.
It radiated in every direction. You'd have people like Walter Freeman doing chaos dynamics on the sniffing of the nose, and then * getting interested in the immune system and how to model it -- this was in about '85. ** began doing work on chaos attractors in the organization of the immune system, and Lynn Margulis was working on the cell, and Lovelock was trying to model the atmosphere and planetary dynamics and **. So when they all came together, we could see that it's a much larger picture. Some of the time these patterns emerge.
I think your social patterns are really correct, but I want to add two footnotes. Flinders Petrie was just re-discovering *'s wheel. * discovered in the new science in 1725 that these cultural changes, the way you described them, go through the age of gods, which is visionary and angelic down to heroic, then the age of man where things are commercialized, and then comes chaos, where commercialization strains the system, builds up the noise and then implodes, and we **. That's just the older Draconian wheel. Kuhn is a class example of the pattern you're describing, because he took the credit and got the fame for an idea that a very obscure Polish-Israeli doctor named Ludwig Fleck discovered not long ago. It's the Copernican system, but he discovered it on the Wasserman test and ??? the social construction of syphilis as a disease. In 1938 Thomas Kuhn read and discovered an obscure little volume in the Harvard Library called Genesis and Development of the Scientific Fact, and then he popularized it in the structure of the scientific revolution, and then it got popularized by Fritjof Capra's new paradigm thinking. But no one's ever heard of the real guy, and his is a better book than Kuhn's. In the same way John * is better than Ken Wilbur, but nobody's ever heard of * because Wilbur has popularized all his stuff.
There's a major change in the evolution of consciousness coming. It's curious that Poincare, Proust, Eriksson, Cezanne, and the early cubists were all working at the same time, all dealing with a kind of spacialization of time. *'s idea that time is time isn't necessarily a quantitative line but a human subjective * called "la duree", and durational time is quite different from linear, extensive, quantitative time, which comes from the idea of the Renaissance and linear perspective. Cezanne comes in with his revolution of the spacialization of time and the melting down of linear perspective, of subject/object, lines of sight and everything that has been created in the metal[?] revolution, and then Picasso and the cubists pick up a little more from Cezanne and deal with the relativisation of time, so that time is seen simultaneously in the painterly space. Other persons who saw it were some of the great psychotic painters like Otto Bwolfli. This guy was totally nuts, we're talking real nuts, this guy was a child molester and a violent psychotic, but he was one of the most brilliant psychotic painters in history. There's a wonderful collection of his work in Berne. He painted a bridge from all points of view simultaneously, so that the relativisation and the spacialization of time we were seeing in his canvas were a concretization of time very much the same as the way Ralph is working in his concert.
There's a book called "Madness in Art", it's available in hardcover. Bwolfli, an illiterate peasant from the Bearnese * , was clueing in to stuff that was also going on with Picasso and *, having to do with the relationship of relativity. Now think that at the same time you have Poincare stepping up into the tram and having the * explode in his face by letting go, by going unconscious. There is Proust and the recovery of memory and the spacialization of time through all factions and smell[?]. And you've got Eric Satie and Claude Debussy creating an electromagnetic field with tone, where time is getting spacialized --- where you're not in such a hurry -- da da da da to have some melody. They're creating a tone space where suddenly the music creates an interactive field that's acoustically resonant and kinesthetic --- it begins to interact with your body. Now all these dudes were hanging out in Paris and just sort of grokking, and they were bopping off each other. So Satie, Proust, Poincare and Debussy are all coeval emergences. It's exactly the same thing with our age. If you look at history, that's how it works.
It seems that there are four big stages in the evolution of consciousness. There's the emergence of the arithmetic mentality in 3500 B.C. When people begin to store, quantify and engrave consciousness in writing, the old consciousness becomes charismatic and it's called shamanism, and it gets repressed. Henceforth the prophetic and the charismatic will be those people who prophetically hold on to the old shamanic function and don't become routine bureaucrats in the temple. The next great revolution is the shift from the arithmetic to the geometric, which is where we should go into Plato. What happens then is the real suppression of the female. The geometric revolution is killing Tiamat, so that in Plato the Diatima is a kind of Eleusinian mystery mystic priestess. She's used as a sort of whipping boy, as a kind of woman who's talking down to Socrates, and so at one level there's the charisma of feminine mysteries, and on the other hand the agenda is to control them and routinize them and have the masculine revolution take over.
By the time you go from Plato's Primaeus to the total geometrization of the world, and you move up to, say, Dido and Annaeus and the Enead, the woman is the sacrifice. She's this Jewess, priestess, Phoenician who has to perish on her own funeral pyre, and Annaeus is the big guy going off to create the empire.
Thus the geometrical mentality slices the world. There's empire and ecology, male and female, conscious, rational management and control, and there's unconsciousness, wild and chaotic, and the chaotic is the victim that's always screaming in pain to recover the repressed and the lost. So all the way up to Galileo and Descartes you have the notion that the feminine is charismatic and prophetic, and that she has the old mentality but it's not accessible -- it's repressed, it's pushed off, and the woman is constantly being killed, being sacrificed. Then comes, finally, the dynamical mentality, which is all about motion and calculus with anything but decimals, and the industrial revolution and capitalism intensifies the investment of consciousness into ego, objects, manipulation, technology, and it reaches its peak right around 1900.
And then you get Poincare and Einstein, and you get Max Planck and the meltdown of matter, and that's when a really passionate return of the repressed occurs. The Romantics tried to bring it up earlier in the 19th century with people like William Blake and Swedenborg, who was an excellent mathematician, but they never really carried the day. They gave a critique of society, and society basically said, "The hell with you guys --- we're going to industrialize the planet. We want empire, not ecology." It reached its peak, but the noise began to accumulate, and so it moved to a kind of climax.
Finally, after the second World War, with the planetization of violence, the thing played into its opposite. The structure of the planet was created by systems of organizations of violence, and then something weird happened. It was the rise of the youth culture, and it happened here in California.
In the industrial revolution, everybody had been dragged off the land and was stuck into factories, and they looked around and said, "Hey, we're the proletariat, let's have a revolution," and you got Marx. Then all the young institutionalized students in the humongous University of California looked around and said, "Youth culture". The campuses were youth reservations for people who were being kept in suspended animation called eternal adolescence. They were locked in, and they said, "Hey, we're something new," and they declared the kind of revolution that became the 60's. And then came the recovery of the repressed. The recovery of shamanism was the role of Esalen in that cultural play, and so was the recovery of myth with Joe Campbell, and Jung, and the recovery of the feminine.
You couldn't have ecology without feminism, and this is where Riane Eisler and Charlene Spretnak and Marija Gimbutas come in. In the evolution of consciousness, as you shift from the dynamical mentality to the morphological, what happens is that all the other mentalities of history become co-present with one another. It isn't a question of just moving to one and sacrificing the other. You have all of them equally penetrating and requiring a re-conceptualization. Now the interesting thing about Poincare is that he got his award for trying to create a model for the King of Sweden of the solar system, and he discovered that the solar system is actually a chaotic system -- the Keplerian one doesn't really work. It's a three-body problem, and the three-body problem is ultimately indescribable. So the mathematics get pretty tricky, and Poincare is the guy who shifts.
If one moves from the linear line of history, of looking at the evolution of consciousness from the arithmetic mentality, the geometrical, the dynamical (Galileo and Newton) to the morphological, which is chaos dynamics --- phase portraits of geometry --- that's a kind of evolution of consciousness where the last one is all of them together, because it studies motion geometrically --- the dripping faucet --- not in terms of Plato or Pythagoras' geometry, but very complex, multi-dimensional phase portraits of geometry with the enumerative descriptions of algebra still included. So you don't lose any of this kind of wholeness, or what Gessler would call "integral." Now I think it's the same thing with the body as a version of the solar system. Some of the Renaissance drawings show the body as a solar system, and each of the chakras in the Indian Yogic system was identified with one of the classical seven planets. But it's not a stable system; it's actually a very complex chaotic system where each of these chakras is a vortex of energy and has very complicated multi-dimensionality.
If one begins to think about this as recapitulating, in our own growth of consciousness, all of history, then we ourselves are achieving a kind of new integration of all the previous levels of consciousness: the shamanic, the priestly, the scientific, the artistic. Every time there is a shift, the old function gets charismatic, so if the priest and the knight are powerful, the shaman is charismatic. If the priest and the knight lose power to, say, the capitalist and the scientist, then the poets begin to be very religious, you get something like romanticism and they take on the priestly function. Now we're at this other shift where the scientists, who are the priests of our time, are losing their charisma --- they're basically bureaucrats. They're routine, operational people, they're functionaries in the temple, and we have a sense that the new culture isn't coming from them. We've given charisma to the psychotic --- that's what R.D.Laing and Esalen is all about. The shaman is what Joan is all about. The mythic is what Jung and Joe Campbell are all about. Those are archaic functions --- they're not prophetic of the future. They're the step back before you take the leap forward, and I think it's already finished. When you look in the library here at Esalen you're not looking at the new paradigm, you're looking at the old paradigm. Everything up there is the summer of 1967.
According to the chakra system, it would seem that eccentric thinking is thinking with all the subtle bodies. To think with the etheric body --- and there are technical, sensitive terms for all of these bodies --- is to generate images. When you watch your mind go into the hypnagogic stage, you'll see an image come up. This is what happened with * and the benzine ring, this is what happened with Darwin when he was on the top of the Andes and saw that we're all netted together, this is what happened to Poincare when he put his foot up on top of the tram. But that isn't the end of it, because pure imagistic thinking is very chaotic in the old-fashioned sense. You have to return to a disciplined mind and have the mathematics to work out the benzine ring.
The next level up is the psychic level of the astral body. In it, there's no time --- you're in the reverie and the seductive world of infinite consciousness. You can get trapped, which is what happened to most of the hippies. They got trapped in it and became its victims; they would just smoke dope and write shitty poetry and say, "Wow, man, this is great stuff", and it was crap. So the psychic is really dangerous. It's the place of the psychotic, the hippie, the self-indulgent, the narcissistic, the cosmically autistic person. It's dimensionality in time; it's so much larger than the ego that most people want to stay in there forever, but it's also the level of Jung, the archetypal patterns, the world soul, a lot of stuff that's fascinating. You can stay in there for a long, long time --- for several incarnations.
The top of the physical body is the bottom of the etheric body, and the bottom of the astral body is the top of the etheric body. The top of the astral body is the bottom of the mental body, and this mental body is the realm of the cathedral of Chartres and the music of Bach. It's mathematical, musical, angelic structures of intelligence that have very, very complicated mental functions but are endowed with a rapturous beauty. The cathedral at Chartres and the music of Bach are almost the highest things that humanity has ever achieved, but the danger at that level is genius and inflation. You can have psychic inflation. If you get mental inflation with geniuses, you get Wagner, you get just egomaniacs. Bach was able to avoid that, being the father of twenty-odd kids, teaching Latin in the local grammar school church of St. Thomas * choir in Leipzig, and creating great art that was accessible to everybody in the Sunday service. In the universality of the religious vision, where in a compassionate way the unique and the universal come together, Bach was always serving the humble carpenter of Nazareth.
So at the top of the mental body you have to let go and then offer everything up, and when you let go, you reach this universal, spiritual level where the art is accessible to everybody, and it can work as a fairy tale or an equation, or a song or a sonata. Learning how to think on all those levels is how to involve your whole being, and each one of the transitions requires a sacrifice and loss. This isn't necessarily a goal-oriented activity where you get to the end and you win and suddenly you get the Nobel Prize and Buddhist enlightenment and become a billionaire. It's not an accretive form of growth. It's a system of loss, where as you lose the dimensionality of finiteness, you gain the suppleness of multi-dimensionality. To swim in the ocean you don't have to drink it.
RALPH: So, I hate to be constantly telling people not to go too long, because I'm never sure if it really isn't too long. I'm an extremely patient person, I'm used to talking all the time and I never listen, so it's hard for me. I think it would be fun to have the largest possible number of statements with the shortest possible expression. Not the shortest possible meaning, simply exert yourself for brevity, precision and economy.
BILL: If you don't have any spaces between your words and don't say "ah," you're going to get twice to three times as much said.
RALPH: Okay, I have a question, not a comment. What * has proven, I've probably ** already, maybe I please. Roger?
ROGER: Has anybody studied crowd behavior from a chaos point of view? It seems to me that crowds of people are oftentimes set off by a very minor incident, and the result is a sudden wave of violence that sweeps through the crowd. It seems to me that this is characteristic of the onset of chaos in physical systems, and I wondered if anybody had studied it.
RALPH: The entry of chaos theory into the social sciences has resulted in a huge organization called The Society for Chaos Theory and Psychology, and in this group the social psychologists are a large component. Anthropologists are also interested, and they're calling themselves the field of Cultural Studies. So that's exactly what's going on. The onset of chaos is not always sudden; there are different sorts, and these are paradigmatic models for social transformation. There's a journal called "The Social Dynamicist", so if you give me a note or something I can send you information on that.