The Chaotic Sea

 

 

THE CRYSTALLINE CHAOTIC SEA:

 

 

Pre-material Existence, Alchemy & the Chaotic Art

by Iona Miller, 4/2009

We don't need a solution to chaos; it is the means by which infinite potential solutions emerge.

 

 

 

"The Ain Soph at first was filling All and then made an absolute concentration into Itself which produced the Abyss, Deep, or Space, the Aveer Qadmon or Primitive Air, the Azoth; but this is not considered in the Qabbalah as a perfect void or vacuum, a perfectly empty Space, but is thought as the Waters or Crystalline Chaotic Sea, in which was a certain degree of Light inferior to that by which all the created (worlds and hierarchies) were made." (Isaac Myer) -- Manly Palmer Hall, Secret Teachings of the Ages, CXVII

Natural Philosophy

Both spiritual and experimental alchemy are participatory arts. The alchemist leads him/her self by following nature with the Hermetic spirit. The alchemical world is composed of the three primal components of the chaotic base matter or prima materia: Mercury, Sulphur and Salt. As spiritual qualities, Mercury is spirit, Sulphur is soul and Salt, the body.

There is psyche in nature and nature in psyche. In alchemy we mine the soul for emergent phenomena and refine our experience. We re-forge our essential elements by recycling our consciousness in the ecology of the soul. We discover the universal solvent in resonant flow states. In each creative cycle alchemical gold is generated in the vessel. "Heating" is necessary to intensify consciousness and kindle the Light of intuitive illumination and divine inspiration -- the legendary Stone.

Natural and human processes are the matrix of action. Recognizing action, bipolar opposition (polarity), and connection (bonds) as the three components of creation in natural processes provides tools for creation and the incentive to take the initiative. These abc's are the raw materials of Mercury, Sulphur and Salt in chaos theory. The unimaginably vast and the infinitesimal are simply connected. Nature is self-referential like fractals. Connection is as fundamental as structure.

Alchemy is an accelerated path to enlightenment, a state or phase change to a higher order adaptation and function. Mortality (and suffering) is the overarching strange attractor, including a vision of life beyond death. This primordial awareness improves living in the here and now whether it is "true" or not, for death/rebirth is with us in each and every instant as our primal clarity.

Each moment arises and passes, yet somehow we remain, breath after breath. Magic happens in the gaps between breaths. Realizing this moment neither begins nor ends, we realize deathlessness. That which is never born, never dies; deathless, timeless eternity.

To embody the Philosopher's Stone, we reiterate the whole process of creation. In the beginning there was no mass / energy. Like the observer in modern physics, we can discover a great deal about nature by discovering the nature of ourselves. New research in biophysics and photon physics sheds light on our subject. Quantum alchemy suggests there are new properties to discover about non-locality and unusual states of matter and the nature of pure nothingness -- primordial chaos.

Quantum Transmutation

The holy grail of alchemy is the biological equivalent of cold fusion. In chemistry and spagyrics (plant alchemy), the Elixir is a liquid and the Stone is a solid. In physics these opposites take on paradoxical properties. Paradoxically, the Stone is described as a superfluid (universal solvent) and a crystalline supersolid (Diamond Body).

Such properties have been claimed for monoatomic gold and ORMUS -- the naturally healing edible powder of gold. This "etherium" embodies the myth or promise of longevity and superimmunity, even perfection of DNA. Such null particles are said to facilitate energy and light flow in the body by creating spinning or spiralling light vortexes with zero momentum. Bio-superconductors promote light conductivity.

Superfluids and supersolids have unusual effects like tunneling, lasering, quantum coherence and superconductivity -- frictionless superflow without entropy or resistence. Experiments have used superfluids to trap light and slow its speed. A superfluid is modulated by sound and quantized vortex rings. DNA reacts to laser and radio waves (Miller, "Quantum Bioholography").

The Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) is a gaseous state of matter where quantum effects become visible at the macroscopic scale. In BEC, atoms behave as waves, superfluid properties of a gas. BEC behaves as a single atom but is a lattice of quantized vortices, a quantum fluid. It can perform gravity-defying types of flow. Under a magnetic field, it shrinks, then explodes in a "Bosenova" where much of its mass does an unexplainable disappearing act. Lene Hau and her associates at Harvard have successfully transformed light into matter and back into light using Bose-Einstein condensates, (Nature, 8 February 2007).

Supersolids are spatially ordered materials with crytalline and superfluid properties. They have a restricted geometry of nanochannels. The vacuum is the fundamental magnetizing field of the enigmatic photon in extended electromagnetic theory in vacuo. The vacuum, which acts as a superfluid, can also be modeled as a primordial supersolid of collisionless dark matter (Roy, 2008). "Dark Matter and Supersolidity" http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0801/0801.2024v1.pdf [also see Endnote, this article on aether physics]

Alchemy advocated self-regulation and meditation as well as "deliberate creation" centuries before such generic self-help practices became branded. The alchemist naturally develops the power to mold mind and matter, overcome resistence and expand energy flow. We learn to balance and channel thoughts and emotions to resonate and flow with the creative process.

Body of Light

The alchemist learns to identify less and less with the ego and more strongly with absolute space as the vehicle of consciousness. The spiritual or Diamond Body is a vessel of immortality -- the Soma Athanaton. Thus, "attainment of immortality" takes place by transformation of the physical body and the energy body, or hyperdimensional field body. Identification is expanded into cosmic consciousness, the ground state of being.

Like alchemy, meditation (meditatio) is a psychic transformation process. Psyche or soul is the vital life energy, the living essence of the body, expressed as images. The alchemist feeds the incorruptible field body on the dew of pure life force, pure limitless Light. The breath-body harmlessly consumes the surplus negentropic energy radiantly shed by all creative process in the Universe. Physically, the inhibitors that prevent full pineal function are deregulated, allowing the spirit molecule, DMT, to flow.

An utterly new, naturally-psychedelic phase-state first glimmers in awareness then stabilizes with the union of the personal and the transpersonal. This deep consciousness is also known as the Golden Flower, vajra, awakened kundalini, resurrection body, rainbow body, supercelestial body, the Elixir and the Stone. The indestructible core, the sacred form of the truly spiritual body emerges.

The Diamond Body is a Mystery, but one whose building we can conceptually unpack for greater understanding of the process/goal. This bioplasmic double, the etheric body is literally a Body of Light, rooted in the subquantal ether or scalar physics. We can decode the cryptograms of alchemy in contemporary scientific terms.

Diamond Sea of Scintillae

They are more than symbolic. Jung linked them to the Sun, luminosity and numinosity. We labor in the dark of the unconscious until we see these glittering "fishes eyes" that herald the solar light. These multiple eyes reflect our many facets back to ourselves. Comparable with archetypes, these multiple intensities herald psyche's reunification with the unconscious, sparkling in the margins of astral vision. The union of the scintillae form gold. Sparks shining in the dark solution are the first glimmers of immortality.

In essence, consciousness is located everywhere in the universe at the center of origin of every radiant energy field and fundamental particle. The universe and every field and form in it originates from and rests on its infinite zero-points of timeless and dimensionless (thus "empty" and "eternal") absolute or "ground space." Each zero-point (acting contiguously with all other zero points, as one thing, like a BEC) contains the total potential mass energy of the entire cosmos. All the energy and structural information of the entire cosmos is contained in every zero point and every standing wave particle center field.

The universe is a hologram. All its information accessible to consciousness is carried as wave interference patterns on radiant harmonic (fractal involved) energy fields, between near zero and near infinite frequency phase orders. It is transmitted from field to fields by some sort of phase conjugate adaptive resonance process, and detected by consciousness by reflection of a coherent energy willfully radiated. "Empty" absolute space (located at the zero-point origin of every particle and radiant field) -- must be as substantial and potentially mass-energetic as the entire metric spacetime universe that arises out of it. (Maurer)

Vacuum Expectation Energy

The singularity is not near; it's here, everywhereallthetimeforever, and we are not separate from that. This is the point. The deepest part of our essential nature abides as the groundstate of being, our cosmic zero point. Connection to this primordial nature is the essence of deathlessness, the elixir of immortality. The plenum is pregnant with possiblity and we are always expecting.

Those who realize alchemical deathlessness in this life, transcend the concept of death. It is a realization of open awareness, of Life without deterioration or entropy. The essence of life is unobstructed radiance. Such purified life force, the radiance of all cosmic life, is nourishment for the energy body.

Pre-existing absolute space, (a BEC) is more fundamental than visible space which is embedded within it. Energetically and informationally, the physical universe is contained in absolute space, as emergent phenomena in numinal and spatial fields. In visible space, points have the capacity to draw charge. Likewise, the one-pointed concentration of focus creates an influx.

In the continuous creation, the center of the universe is everywhere, a seething cauldron of potential. Everything manifests from temporal interaction with the local nonlinear vacuum of spacetime. The interaction of time and negative time extracts massergy from the limitless ocean of roiling subspace. The temporal potential of force and form manifests in each and every instant at each and every point of being.

Naughtiness

Scalar waves are real even if unobservable. These oscillations of the stress energy tensor of the vacuum, the dense energy potential of the vacuum plays a key role in structuring the Universe. Energy moves from a free to a bound state via the dynamic structure of the vacuum. The vacuum contains randomly fluctuating electromagnetic fields with infinite zero-point energy. A quantum fluctuation is the appearance of equal but opposite particles out of vacuum.

The engine of the universe runs by consuming the negentropy of highly compressed spacetime. So do we. We don’t feed on energy, but on negentropy. Both mysticism and science describe it in their different vocabularies for the deep nature of Reality. The Great Work is personal and cultural. It happens in the world at large, hiding in plain sight. Nature oscillates incessantly, in a dance of electromagnetic dipole dynamics.

More than abstractions, self-organizing processes and fractal organization are results of dynamic interactions. Alchemy is a self-organizing activity and artform that epitomizes open-ended process, intentionally engaging the natural tendency toward self-organizing process. We don't really know when we're going to cross thresholds.

There are conventional truths and there are ultimate truths. We practice to experience ultimate truth. This poetry-science recognizes the universe in man and man in the universe. We learn to know our own nature. The universe is reborn within us in various forms, including our image being, pre- and post-existence, and the secret medicine Azoth, the elixir of energetic healing. We make the Universal Medicine from nothing but morning dew. Morning dew is life force.

Our Crystalline Chaotic Sea

The 'Crystalline Chaotic Sea' of alchemy is synonymous with the zero point energy Dirac Sea of virtual vacuum fluctuation. A dissorderly structure is a chaotic sea, a jumble of superimposed waveforms. Mixing is enhanced in the chaotic sea giving rise to self-similar emergent properties as information becomes more complex.

Chaotic mixing states have a fractal structure. The chaotic sea applies equally to psyche and substance. It is the root of our being, including the gaps or void between our particles [sic]. A mighty fractal Dragon consuming its tail lives in this turbulent sea. A dragon curve is the generic name for any member of a family of self similar fractal curves, which can be approximated by recursive methods. Like the dragon, we are part of Eternity and it is part of us.

Nature is continuous with what is revealed to us. Nature penetrates us even as we penetrate nature through our own nature. Currents can be generated in dissipative systems. Transportable islands of stability exist in the chaotic sea. These islands come and go. Such islands can be flooded by chaotic states.

Main resonance islands of stability persist. Regular-chaotic motions abound in transition states. An initial point in the chaotic sea will explore the whole sea. Its motion is characterized by periods of frequent extraction and reinjection interspersed with long arcing forays away from the singularities. Our chaotic orbit is determined by the strength of surrounding attractors.

Crystalline Grid

The chaotic prima materia and the Stone also have a crystalline nature. Buckminster Fuller described an omnitriangulated grid as the Isotropic Vector Matrix and vector equilibrium matrix -- essentially a Diamond Body. (Miller, 1992)

Energy "crystallizes" into matter in the womb of empty space, a dynamic Void. Mass is simply a form of energy. This process is structured by an underlying, invisible, geometrical lattice. Actually, it is pre-geometric. Because it has no true physical existence, it is metaphysical (beyond physics). This threshold of matter, where nothing becomes something, is of great philosophical and existential interest.

The fields that fill space turn out to be quantum fields, which spontaneously, unpredictably fluctuate. These quantum fluctuations are known as virtual particles. Along with virtual particles, space is filled with the residues of invisible interactions among elementary particles such as quarks, bosons, and leptons. The residues, called condensates, are "ethers {that} "condense spontaneously out of empty space as the morning dew or an all-enveloping mist might condense out of moist, invisible air." Space is not empty after all; "the cosmos is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor," with weight and density. Its name is "Grid." http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2008/11/23/so_you_think_you_can_do_theoretical_physics/

Over the past few decades, physicists’ ideas of reality have changed dramatically. Matter is like light, and mass comes from energy. The dynamic “Grid” hums as it creates and destroys particles. Perhaps QCD is the contemporary version of the alchemical peacock's tail. Quantum chromodynamics is a gauge theory describing strong interaction of color forces.

Quantum vacuum charge. The grid is the vacuum that theoretically seethes with quantum activity, a conceptual descendant of ether, that mysterious substance scientists once believed filled empty space. In this theory space is highly structured by the grid, which is the primary ingredient of physical reality and the substance from which all physical matter is formed. (Wilczek)

The phion field (Bose-Einstein condensate) has been proposed as the quintessential force. Squeezing and entanglement are properties of phion condensate. A "fifth force," a phion is a neutral vector particle in a vector field. This vector field, phion condensate fluid, curls into a skewed symmetric field that couples to matter. (Moffet)

The deepest nature of Reality is nonlinear and nonlocal. These aspects of contemporary chaos theory and subquantal physics are metaphorically relevant to our Opus. We have to think like chaos, beyond the sealed retort in 'open-systems.' It doesn't just take place 'in here," because we are the same as "out there," despite any persistent cultural delusions. We have to open ourselves to the Universe and the depth of our interconnections. Alchemy suggests we can find our virtual oasis, our resonant islands in the chaotic sea of reflection points, in the serenity of the One World.

Nothing is Impossible

Alchemy allows us to 'kick' the system. Kicked systems can implement changes in quantum dynamics. There is a coupling matrix between regular and chaotic states. Things propagate in this matrix. We learn to dynamically tunnel with resonance-assisted thought experiments from ordinary states to the chaotic sea of infinite potential. In the language of chaos theory, as the strength of the perturbation is increased, the resonance zones grow, and can overlap and form a chaotic sea. Elements mix chaotically into flow.

The Book of Lambspring says, "Two fish swim in our Sea," - the opposites of spirit and soul, the conscious and unconscious, positive and negative. We live in a cosmic psychic sea. We are in psyche, not psyche in us. Individual psyches are ultimately illusory. In the process of reexamining for what we know about ourselves, we realize most of our imagery is pre-conscious or never conscious.

Solid objects are composed of atoms but the subatomic and pre-geometric subquantal nature is metaphysical, etheric, vaporous, and above all chaotic. The phase space of mixed systems consist of resonant islands in a chaotic sea connected dynamically by quantum tunneling.

Dynamic entanglement is a signature of chaos. Random states are highly, even maximally entangled. The typical entanglement, agrees with the long-time-averaged entanglement for initial states in the chaotic sea. In all cases the dynamically generated entanglement is that of a random complex vector. The micro-ether is a universal fluid whose constant turbulence perturbs the quantum domain. This is more than poetic license or metaphor.

We see through the transparent phenomenal experience of the world. It is how we know what we know. But that can only ever be a belief, a model, a construction, ultimately an illusion much like a dynamic n-dimensional hologram. There are vortexes of activity in this endless chaotic sea -- virtual wave upon interpenetrating wave of the patterns of pattern and form. A similar process happens in the chaotic processing of the holographic brain.

Our commonsense distinction between "subjective" and "objective" experience is an obsessive delusion created by the brain. Neurology research shows all the contents of consciousness are social constructs. We don't originate our own thoughts, much less feelings and proprioception. Most of our action potentials are decided without conscious intervention. Our decisions are made before questions are formulated. Nothing matters; psyche matters. Paradoxically, "Nothing is impossible."

Chaotic Attractors

An archetype is a "dynamic action plan" shaping consciousness, emotions, behaviour and relationships as well as the realm of matter. Creation myths describe the evolution of an archetypal system from the undifferentiated homeostasis of equilibrium to the symmetry-breaking perturbation of the primordial matrix and on through the increasing differentiation, coupling and complexity of the unfolding system. Psychologically, creation myths symbolize the origin of consciousness, the process of individuation, and the dynamics of creativity, each closely associated with the archetype of the self, regulator of the human psyche (von Franz, 1972).

Creativity is characterized by psychological openness to inner and outer experiences. We engage this tendency in a purposeful way and learn to flow with the energy and creativity within the system leading to insights and applications by breakthroughs in information barriers. Reducing the dataglut of massa confusa to alchemical channels of information flow expedites the process. Tiny inputs can lead to cascades of events -- embodying logically necessary relations.

Alchemical operations delineate discontinuous levels of consciousness as robust methods for seeking novel solutions with non-consensus coherence via synchronized chaos. Finding such adaptive solutions demonstrates survival and system resilience by maintaining tension of opposites, rather than resolution. In the coherence model learning is a process of transformation, or self-organization. Complexity and freedom are actually coextensive with one another.

Engagement Learning

A discipline such as alchemy engages us in a way that promotes a deeper understanding of the concepts, issues and ideas that drive us, including sensitive dependence on initial conditions, iteration, fractal nature, and the presence of strange attractors. Commited to the irrational process, we are "in over our heads." We embody our internal transformation states.

Alchemy is not an orderly, single-path progression to a conclusion. Emergence is naturally a self-transcending construct. The creative individual in the process of alchemical acceleration must experiences states of disequilibrium. We must and do trust the process that we are at the creative edge, not the verge of obsession or psychosis.

1. Creativity develops under conditions of emotional fluctuations, tensions, and external as well as internal conflicts. 2. Creativity is "self-organizing dissipative structure," an open system that can survive only through a constant exchange of matter/energy and information with its environment. 3. Creativity continuously creates disequilibria and bifurcations, breaks barriers of routine, to liberate from automatic experiences in order to achieve inner autonomy. 4. Creativity can be regarded as desire to build a new reality through an expanded awareness. 5. Creativity is an important outlet for the increased tension of inner conflicts and defense force against mental illness. (Laycraft)

Alchemy is a virtual training environment where nature shows the nonlinear, interactive way. Noise can be embedded signal in nonlinear feedback systems. Control mechanisms operate over many time scales. Thus, what first appears as sporadic or emergent qualities can stabilize over time. There is a connection between arts skills learning and broader learning.

What we learn in the alchemical art compliments, validates and suppliments what we learn elsewhere. The mind normally follows learned trajectories. But a change in parameters or modification of the link structure produces bifurcations leading toward novel organizational states. These dynamical networks present idiosyncratic organizations, involving more or less lability and chaos, ranging from spiral-point attractors to chaotic ones.

Personality is a reciprocally-interactive complex system. Recursive distinctions give rise to complex fractals in personality. Recursion relates directly to self-reference, through which logic loops back upon itself like the alchemical Ouroboros as well as fractal geometry. These perspectives are attractor states that divide the observed from the observer. They give rise to the laws of physics, the deep structure of language and the controversies of social science.

Adaptation and adaptive behaviors are central themes of practical importance in the study and function of personality. Adaptation is an important non-linear, dynamic and complex concept and system involved in evolution and survival of our species. It is related to "holding the tension of the opposites":

As a state of being, the uroboros represents fused opposites: self/other, inside/outside, good/bad, feminine/masculine which we modeled well by fractal dynamics. As a cycle of activity, the uroboros symbolizes seeds of creative growth and self-renewal. By looping around and feeding upon itself, the uroboros relates to recursion, whereby the end products of experience are fed back into the beginning. As an ongoing cycle, recursion eventuates in conscious processes of self-reflection and self-control over impulses. Although the separation of opposites, or making of distinctions, is necessary for survival, the symbol of the uroboros suggests that our paradoxical core remains buried deep within the psyche for life. (Marks-Tarlow)

Alchemy creates catastrophe shelves or bifurcation points in a deliberate way. This advances interaction through the first two levels of chaos ultimately reaching the third level, or deep chaos. This enables us to move from the known with its certainties and predictable solutions to the unknown.

We construct our own belief systems and knowledge from direct experience. Anomalous experience emerges from chaotic systems. They inject novelty into the system. They include everything from deja vu to high weirdness. How we react to them, depends on how we contextualize them. Traditions tell us they can be wrathful or beatific, horrifying or blissful.

For example, fear is the driving force behind paranormal delusions because high fear levels invert the effect of experience on fear, thereby creating a positive feedback loop in which belief, experience, and fear mutually reinforce each other in a perceptual "contagion" process. The excellent fit of the cusp model implies that, at least at high levels of paranormal experience, we face the dilemma of choosing between believing in the paranormal or experiencing fear.

Paradox Logic

Play is a crucial element for discovery of fluid connections, physicosocial dynamics and prescriptive information and control for more efficient self-regulation -- adaptive solution finding. Thus, alchemy represents a dynamic synthesis that is always occuring at the critical edge of the merger of inner life and "external" [sic] environment. It is always happening in the NOW, the cusp of self-discovery.

There is only One World. It is our work to see art in all intrinsic form and holographic process - eidetic experience, perceptive transparency. LIGHT is the basis of all appearances and differences. In this view conceptual categories become literally senseless except as heterogeneous interacting agents.

Entropy and dissipation are the core thermodynamic insight, leaving the creation and evolution of living systems as ignorable mysteries. A deeper appreciation of the wholeness of human occupation emerges within a spiritual paradigm reflecting the fundamental complexity, organizational fitness, nonlinear processes, and pattern flow formation of dynamic human occupation.

Individual Innovation

Self-similarity and self-affinity are newly recognized symmetries by which transformations in time and/or space leave the central pattern unchanged. Attending to fractal complexity is fascinating yet effortless. Gell-Mann (2002) defines effective complexity as regularities or schema found or judged to be useful. They appear as equations, genotypes, laws and traditions, and best practices. Chaos is synergistic, guided by preferential attraction.

Multidimensional information implies higher dimensional chaos. The folding dimension can describe time evolution of fractal structure with no relation to time scale. Data or information then appears nonlocal, synchronous, or entangled. A fractal conception of time injects the infinite into the finite, with open-ended possibilities for nested temporal cycles.

Fractal structure is the result of repeated nestings of temporal intervals into the window of the present now. This iterative embedding process shapes the world/observer interface by increasing its complexity with every new temporal nesting. Simultaneity supercedes succession explaining the structure of temporal interface.

Fractal time results in complexification and decomplexification of our perceptions. Fractal time may account for the depth dimension of symbolic perception. Inside/outside are entrained and the outer structure locks onto the internal dynamics of the observer/participant.

From a fractal point of view we can pack an infinite number of activities into the same period of time and still leave room for more. Perturbations of current focus in unfolding existence are fractal catalysts permiting us to overcome structural constraints.

Positive maladjustment is a phase transition from chaos to order. Spontaneous multilevel disintegration is described by the chaotic attractor. As soon as a person feels that some modes of thinking, feeling, and acting are higher, conflicts of a vertical nature arise.

Emotional, unconscious and slightly conscious forces dominate the spontaneous multilevel disintegration. Epistemology addresses how we know what we know. A deep question for epistemology is how (without a homunculus) sentient beings discover new ideas that are within their structural capacity but beyond previous experience. Innovative crystallization can be understood as synchronized coupling between two or more chaotic systems.

Nonlinear Thinking

A stable worldview is one that reinforces thought trajectories that enhance individual wellbeing. Many factors can interfere with this stability. Metaphors reflect two parallel systems, each stable in their own right. Mapping across destabilizes each system, leading to entropy and an emergent self organizing system.

This re-organization produces new insights, consciously or unconsciously. Metaphoric meaning produces different perceptions, reframing or a solution to a problem. One metaphor can alter perspective, attitude, self concept, motivation, learning and behavior, just as one trauma or therapeutic intervention can change us utterly.

Chaos theory and alchemy are both about systems trajectories. Chaos and complexity theories merge at the point where they focus on fractals. Developmental stage change has a fractal nature, including increasing task complexity. The sequence of tasks in transition is identical from order to order.

Problem solving is a dynamical process where nonlinearity is expected. Pattern variables are the key to choices. Critical states, small and big disruptions, influence our learning. Bifurcations or changes in pattern, changes in our mind and views, are intrinsic to our stability. Fluid boundaries are critical to growth. Thus, solutio is the key to the alchemical process. Chaos is the Universal Solvent.

A dynamical systems approach to cognitive systems is a multimodal model of creative thinking. The levels include semantics (or sense transformation level), logics and grammar. Dynamical patterns are used as substitutions for representations in cognitive theories. The dynamics of each level, which is supposed to be chaotic, allows for the generation of new information not presented by initial conditions.

The transition steps pattern is also fractal. The transition steps result in increasingly less partial organization of combinations of elements at the next order. At the same time, those elements increase in complexity from one order to another, with fractal similarities to the overall model. Levels of organization, from physics to psychology and alchemy, display homologous features. They are fractal.

Although the concept of ‘a self’ is a hypothetical construct, it has proven useful as a psycho-social construct. Usually perceived as a central or core part of an individual's identity, there are many variations of what the idea of self system is like. The self is almost always considered an organized system.

Recursion gives rise to self-similarity. Since all properties enter consciousness, all of them are in this sense recursive. A particular property emerges as a result of a given combination, or new sequence revealing a new property from the total set available. Emergent phenomena are constituted by and generated from underlying phenomena, and at the same time they are autonomous from those underlying phenomena. Emergent phenomena are ubiquitous in living systems across scales and domains.

As part of human dynamical organization, self-image is considered non-linear. Different initial points of origin lead to different trajectories and outcomes. Fractals may play a significant role in self-concept and self esteem. Developmentally, the self evolves into increasingly complex self-organization continuing through whole-life learning. Alchemy brings infinite possibilities for meaning, so conclusion of an operation or cycle of refinement does not imply closure of fractally reiterating processes, since alchemists are recursive paradoxical thinkers.

Divergent Perspectives

A paradigm is a prevailing point of view or way of thinking about an issue that exemplifies an entire scientific culture, such as the "new" nature of nature. Science changes as our perceptions and patterns change. The universe is a complex web of relations. The radically novel comes into existence through emergence.

Nonlinear wisdom emerges through several important themes: the necessity of living in the dark with chaos; the self-organizing quality of nature, both inner and outer; interpenetrating, fractal boundaries between self, world, and other; and the paradoxical essence of psyche, where only through separation and individuation can we open ourselves to love and vital interconnection with self, others and world.

Chaos and complexity have made militant anti-humanistic models of spirituality obsolete, opening the way for intentional facilitation of emergent positive internal resources. Whether you come to chaos theory from a scientific, artistic or philosophical portal, at some point the concepts take root in you and proliferate. Changes in shared beliefs, expectations, perceptions, norms and patterns of reciprocal behavior among individuals who interact with one another lead toward cultural shift.

Emergent perceptions about life-meaning, purpose, and identity are understood through the model of intention, meaning, and perception, influencing the system-wide changes that occur during spiritual occupation. Complexity is the mother of new ideas and forms. Alchemy opens flows of information across scales, from smaller biological processes up to larger scale social processes.

We can view spiritual occupation as both the creative process (means) and as engagement in spiritual activities (ends), which sustain and support life and health. This is a nonlinear view of the spiritual dimensions of personal growth through the process of self-organization and self-transcendence.

Hyperdimensional Experience

Hyperdimensional experience (HDE) is psychological awareness of a dimension beyond that experienced previously, or normally and in everyday life. Sometimes it is unexpected or fleeting, the result of a drug, temporary circumstances or a physiological state such as illness. Sometimes it is sought as an abiding frame of mind by means of a program of training like alchemy, religious discipline or meditation, or as a successful outcome of psychotherapy. (Marks-Tarlow)

By its nature the experience of hyperdimensionality means the sense of a further or higher dimension in perception, thought and feeling. As such it may be distinguished from other altered states of consciousness (ASCs), which may be positive, negative or even pathological in their effect. As distinct from ASCs in general, the HDE is felt as a liberating, expansive or life-changing experience.

Often it is linked with intellectual and/or emotional insights, which again may be evanescent or may be capable of subsequent articulation and elaboration in a productive sense. Coherent narratives of our life-journeys is a reiterated aspect of self-concept. We gain the capacity to sink beneath everyday surface events to the very origins of consciousness. In this zone of expanded awareness, external events of life are seen as meeting and fitting the internal contours of psyche like hand and glove. Oceanic experience leaves a sense of expanded perception in its wake that is more or less persistent..

Elimination of all clear distinctions between inside/outside, self/other, mind/matter, grants a wholeness to experience, a sense of "rightness" about how character and destiny intersect, even when this fit appears perfectly horrific. A state of "primordial confusion" at the base of consciousness can be modeled via re-entry dynamics by fractal boundaries between psyche and world. Within this paradoxical state, boundaries are simultaneously opened and closed, and opposites are equated. This is the stuff either of madness or higher consciousness, depending upon the strength of the therapeutic container (alembic, retort).

Chaos theory and alchemy are aligned methodologies. Emergent wholeness is qualitatively different than holism. Critical dynamics are "constructed" according to a specific meaning. Positive and negative hedonic categories are perceived as subjective categories of distress (fear, anger, sadness, etc) and eustress (joy, love, wonder, etc).

Their accompanying approach/avoidance action tendencies offer perceptual guidance concerning self-preservationary and self-developmental adaptive responses to environmental changes. Our behavioral choices must align to ensure optimal biological harmony---a naturally harmonious state of homeostatic balance with cognitive and emotional fluctuations.

The transitional conditions at each interpenetrating operative level may be identified as phase states, occurring by analogy within nonlinear dynamical systems, and involving iterations, feedback, and strange attractors. They may also be represented as fractal loops. The resulting condition of wholeness unfolds a fractal or "in-between" ontology which hyper-dimensionally marries living and dying, order and chaos. Alchemy and chaos means levels without hierarchy and wholes without holism.

Rationality is not always capable of dealing with the complex situations we encounter in the real world. Irrational decision-making processes have evolved over time and are rooted in the deepest functions of the brain/mind. Nonlinear dynamic systems modeling of broad and deep spiritual occupations further validates the theory and practice of alchemy by addressing the full complexity of occupation as an embodied process of spirit-mind-body and world. Linear and nonlinear thinking are required for creativity, healing and innovation.

The Age of Information is the Age of Turbulence

The traditional scientific view is to regard matter, information and energy as basically different. Knowledge from the theory of relativity, and especially from quantum physics, shows that at the micro-level, matter appears to be energy if considered from the appropriate point of view. Information has not yet been considered or discussed in this connection, or at least not adequately.

For the process of self-organization, every complex system requires, in addition to matter, (materially compressed energy), various types of energy, as well as information of appropriate quality and quantity. No system can function or exist without this information. (Karl, Toifil).

If consciousness is pure information it is not limited to physical form; its patterning may emerge from chaotic dynamics operating at the quantum level, where the "no-thing" of pure information becomes a structured "some-thing," through intentionality coupled with chaotic determinism (self-organized emergent order). The so-called "software of consciousness" is unlike the matter and energy of classical understanding, but exerts a measureable effect on the physical world, apparently through quantum chaos.

Fractal therapies, including alchemy, allow us to penetrate deeply into the psyche--into the vortex of the internal structuring process--through progressively de-structuring patterns of organization. The undecomposable level of chaotic consciousness is experienced as the pure, unconditioned imprint of the whole, resulting in a new primal self image and sense of relationship to the greater whole which emerges through nonunitary transformation.

Information patterns randomness. Even though information is beyond physical reality as we know it, it is nevertheless "real" and even more fundamental than the world of matter. The functionalist definition of consciousness is not based on the measurement of a substance or energy, but on a measure of pure information. This implies that consciousness interpenetrates the entire universe, but at a level more fundamental than field theory or QM.

There are characteristics of quantum systems that can be tied to chaotic behavior in classical systems. When the dynamics is chaotic, these quantum fluctuations and virtual vacuum fluctuations grow very large. Disorder is not an ultimate fate from which nothing can escape, but is actually the progenitor of order. A more ordered state arises out of apparent disorder. At this moment of crisis for a system a "bifurcation point" a system has two options. Either it will be destroyed by the fluctuation and disintegrate into chaos, or it will suddenly leap to an entirely new level of organization, a new internal order.

At bifurcation the stability of steady states and cycle changes becomes supercritical--far from equilibrium. Repatterning of the whole by the natural chaotic dynamic leads to new emergent order within the framework of personality--ego is transformed and "reborn" anew. Repatterning may occur through harmonic resonance of certain informational content within the general perception of overwhelming white noise or blankness, the results of "downloading" informational overload. The information contact that is "in phase" with the participant is fed back into the system through synchronization.

Quantum Potential

The occult secret of alchemy is that we carry a bit of chaos and a bit of the Universe in us. The universe is fractal in the expression of the forces of nature and biological tissue is the ultimate fractal form it adopts (King). Matter is not inert but "alive and active." Further, the vacuum state is teeming with nonobservable "life"; a turbulent froth which conditions the emergence of probabilities in quantum fluctuation. The vacuum is not an empty stage, but the domain of violent upheavals in nothingness, where new particles are constantly being created and destroyed.

Bohm has posited a multidimensional common ground for consciousness and matter. He alleges that the superholographic level of the universe has a staggering number of dimensions, and that it may be a "mere stage" beyond which is "an infinity of further development." Bohm calls it, "vast, rich, and in a state of unending flux of enfoldment and unfoldment, with laws most of which are only vaguely known." In this view nature itself is a living organism whose diversity encompasses all the diversity of form emerging from the superhologram. It is "purposive" and possesses "deep intentionality."

To the ancients Chaos was the unknown, the spirit world, which displayed the discontinuous monstrosities created by the erratic side of nature, as well as her beauty. When we look into the face of nature, we see ourselves reflected back with an eye not jaundiced by the bias of the ego. Dreams, nightmarish visions, and the dynamic imagery process all reveal the state of our consciousness at the deepest level--depicting the nature of our relationship to the whole of consciousness network.

Recycling consciousness allows emergent order to crystallize in a more-adapted primal self image--a new steady-state, a new system of values. Transformation takes place as one configuration or expression dynamically changes into another in accordance with chaotic dynamics, global repatterning. Bonds are the force of attraction. They make matter matter.

We inhabit an ocean of "active information"--the ever-flowing, ever-changing pattern of the meaning of life itself. The entire inner and outer environment includes the whole field of electromagnetic information, which patterns our electronic bodies. But we also are subject to the patterning effects of the whole of existence, a global pool of information, a pool of being, which is paradoxically rooted in non-existence.

Novel processes and elements emerge that are in no way implicit in anything that has gone before. They permit the totally new to enter the universe, superceding historic determinism. They are like gaps or intermittancy in the scintillating fabric of spacetime, from which creation emerges. Inside gold is the sun.

Non-existence underlies existence, and we fluctuate between them. Existence is discontinuous. Just where are we when we don't exist--between moments--at the bottom of our breath? We have dissolved into the matrix of unconditioned creativity, unconditioned process--the spirit world, the realm of the dead, eternity. And we are reborn in each and every nanosecond. This is the quintessence of alchemy.

Self-Cure

Alchemists are explorers of consciousness and matter. Alchemy is traditionally associated with chemistry, but matter is more fundamental than chemistry; it is electronic -- electromagnetic potential. Therefore, physics is even more fundamental to alchemy as it describes the deepest knowable domain -- Zero Point singularity.

ZPE is the source of electrodynamic laws down to the subquantal domain of virtual standing waves, including all spatial and hyperdimensional fields. Life is a particular form of order related to local limitation of symmetry (chaos). Information can be transmitted from one harmonic fractal involved field to the other, by phase conjugate adaptive resonance.

Everything is interconnected at the level of zero-point consciousness, as well as (on the level of information) through inter-field resonance. Therefore, right from the primal beginning, everything (including spacetime itself) is electrodynamic in fundamental nature, and all the laws of electricity, harmony, resonance, capacitance, resistance, inductance, etc, as well as thermodynamics (on the metric physical material levels) universally underlie all the laws of nature. (Maurer) http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/4

Consciousness is a Point of View (POV) with significance. A "potential POV" is innate, pervading everything and existing everywhere at once, arising implicitly in every moment of spatial extent. Every point is connected to each other point unavoidably and intrinsically by holistic entanglement. We live in a self-centered virtual reality. Through spiritual technology we learn to still the turbulence within by resting in the restorative state of cosmic zero. We are impelled by our very being toward self-cure.

 

ENDNOTE ON AETHER PHYSICS

Endnote: For a long time the concept of an aether as a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic
waves has been discredited, even though Maxwell’s equations were originally derived based
upon the assumption of an aether. Today the need for something like aether is acknowledged in
physics by invoking terms such as “quantum vacuum,” “vacuum fluctuations,” or “zero-point
fluctuations.” In fact Grossing has recently shown how the Schrodinger equation can be derived
by invoking such zero-point fluctuations.

Allen Rothwarf has reviewed the objections to an aether and concluded that it was indeed
needed to explain many problems in physics such as wave-particle duality; the nature of spin; the
derivation of Hubble’s law; electric fields; Zitterbewegung; inflation in cosmology; the arrow of
time; the Pauli exclusion principle; the nature of the photon; neutrinos; redshifts; and several
other ideas. In that paper he referred to previous aether models but finally chose to explore a
model based upon a degenerate Fermion fluid composed of polarizable particle-antiparticle pairs,
e.g., electron-positron pairs. This leads to a big bang model of the universe, where the velocity of
light varies inversely with the square root of cosmological time, t.

He was motivated in part by Dirac’s 1951 letter to Nature titled “Is There an Aether?” in which
Dirac showed that the objections to an aether posed by relativity were removed by quantum
mechanics, and that in his reformulation of electrodynamics the vector potential was a velocity.Dirac concludes his letter with “We have now the velocity at all points of space-time, playing a
fundamental role in electrodynamics. It is natural to regard it as the velocity of some real physical
thing. Thus with the new theory of electrodynamics we are rather forced to have an aether.” (Sisir Roy, Quantum Vacuum and a Matter - Antimatter Cosmology http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0703/0703280.pdf

Endnote on Bose-Einstein Condensate: Static excitation of the vacuum is the basis of force. Atoms lock into the lowest energy wave to make a novel superfluid BEC system locked into an orchestrated grid. Since a BEC consists of ultracold atoms all in the same quantum state, it exhibits wavelike behavior. Spread out in space, they become superimposed on one another, each indistinguishable from the other, creating what has been called a "superatom." In quantum-dynamic terms, the same "wave function" describes them all.

Phase coherent BEC (a cloud of atoms and subatomic particles),driven by harmonic fields form a frictionless flow called superfluidity. Atomic BEC support macroscopic excitations in the form of bright solitons, dark solitons, and quantized vortices. When this matter is subjected to strong magnetic fields it oscillates between alternating waves of attraction and repulsion. Increasing the magnetism creates an anomalous implosion-explosion, a mini-supernova, called a Bosenova. Matter appears to disappear and turn into energy. Such extreme vibrations are the root of nuclear fusion, and near absolute-zero might include the transformative power of cold fusion.