THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST
by Iona Miller, (c)2009-2012
Spiritual Technology, Chaos Theory & Dynamics in Personal Transformation
Physics for Alchemists
Can We Ever Discover the Fabric of Reality?
Physics for Alchemists
Can We Ever Discover the Fabric of Reality?
ALCHEMICAL TRANSFORMATION
"Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things." -- C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation Whole Person Transformation
A perennial theme of humankind, transformation as a basic change in character, cognition, and direction has been explored in religion, psychology and art. Rites of passage, as a summons to wisdom, can include a psychological and sacred dimension. It addresses the question of how a person finds a personal path worthy of the soul. We're taught to strive for this mythic "thing" at the physical, mental, and spiritual level. Transformation is thorough, radical and dramatic -- a power that can be deployed for good or ill.
Classically, 'transformation' describes the path from initiation to liberation from social conformity, helping us let go of the worn out to find deep dialogue with psyche, adventure and renewed life. The process is mediated by symbols and imagery. If they arise organically ego is transformed; if they are imposed ego is hijacked. Solitude is the furnace of authentic transformation. Personal growth is an individual process of self-determination. In this sense, it is incompatible with group programming. But the real self as divergent perceptions and dynamic understanding of interrelationships is dangerous to tradition, the church, the state, and the crowd.
In psychology, transformation has been curiously defined as "the procedure used when unconscious desires or urges are costumed in order to emerge in consciousness." Psychobiological transformation is a key theme in depth psychologies. It begins at the point where there is no hope and lead through overwhelming challenges, fraught with depression, fragmentation, resistance, symptoms, pain and anxiety. We are at our most vulnerable at the threshold of transformation.
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Imaginal psychology urges us to move beyond the monotheistic myth of self-domination by the abstract concepts of a rational heroic ego, self, or god. James Hillman noted the ego too is an image. It makes problems to solve them with will and intentionality, but that is an illusory perspective. Consciousness is not based on concepts of ego or self, though it has been identified as such. Archetypes generate the transformational images and the universal material of myth and drama, but they bear the mark of personal and cultural conditioning. They provide archaic and timeless meaning.
Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
Jung (CW 12, par. 32) cautioned that we must be alone to find out what it is that supports us when we can no longer support ourselves. Only this experience, he said, gives us an indestructible foundation. "Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt." He concludes, "we must be able to stand alone vis a vis the unconscious for better or worse." (Letters, Vol 1, p. 458-459) Jung also notes, "Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of." (Letters, Vol. 1, pg. 442) It isn't rare, but it is a move toward self-actualization or self-realization.
The path from the oblivious to self-aware life is beset with obstacles. How do we know what a genuine transformative experience is? We transform ourselves by every act of self-knowing. Jung felt that self-realization was a natural process of transformation, orchestrated by the unconscious. The infinite depth of dynamic reality informs our worldview and personal sovereignty. Such is the journey of meaningful solitude into silence, ratified by the perennial wisdom.
Krishnamurti said, "To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, of dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on. . . .What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is not conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories -- to understand all of that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no "how" to be free. If you ask 'how' to be free, you are not listening."
Kahlil Gibran claimed, "Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms." Yogananda suggests that self-realization is "to know truth through yourself, and not through others." Ramana Maharshi says, "your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world."
The Dalai Lama says, "With realization of one's own potential and self-confidence in one's ability, one can build a better world." Rumi was poetic: "I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul." Hermann Hesse and others, such as Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, echo this approach in their own writings.
Hesse felt that, "We must become so alone, so absolutely alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul, we know ourselves to be one with all beings."
“Transformation connotes a more-or-less dramatic shift in the context of an individual's meaning system, beyond any attempts to re-brand or commercialize the field. Real transformation takes place in the furnace of the heart. However, institutional transformation can mean an imposed or enforced social change. In McLuhan's vernacular, the "invisible" environment of new technologies creates an "erosion", not enhancement, of the conscious and unconscious -- by means of "audience as workforce." We unconsciously conform to such environments. The subconscious works on emotion. Business strategy is transformed into emotion.
Transformation is a model of a process. In this theory, personal and social transformation promotes self-actualization and compassionate service. Radical change involves new habits, range of emotions, and worldview -- concerns, interests, goals, ambitions, and behaviors. A reordering of values can change the basis of self-identity. Significant transformation can mean a radical reorganization of one’s identity, meaning, and purpose in life -- a turning point -- transformations of earlier worldviews. Embodied transformation sustains over time. Wisdom to know the difference between one’s ego and one’s Self is embodied in your individuality.
Or, does holistic repatterning just mean structural transformation of old elements into a new configuration in the internal landscape -- a restructuring of psychic space? Only a profound change in structure creates something new. Infiltrated consciousness is such a result, changing how we perceive the world and act on those perceptions.
Organizational strategies and state or corporate coercive transformation don't serve the individual. For them, imposed transformation means collaborative, consultative, directive and coercive manipulations. Ultimately, it means international competition and state formation. The state exerts coercion for control.
"Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things." -- C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation Whole Person Transformation
A perennial theme of humankind, transformation as a basic change in character, cognition, and direction has been explored in religion, psychology and art. Rites of passage, as a summons to wisdom, can include a psychological and sacred dimension. It addresses the question of how a person finds a personal path worthy of the soul. We're taught to strive for this mythic "thing" at the physical, mental, and spiritual level. Transformation is thorough, radical and dramatic -- a power that can be deployed for good or ill.
Classically, 'transformation' describes the path from initiation to liberation from social conformity, helping us let go of the worn out to find deep dialogue with psyche, adventure and renewed life. The process is mediated by symbols and imagery. If they arise organically ego is transformed; if they are imposed ego is hijacked. Solitude is the furnace of authentic transformation. Personal growth is an individual process of self-determination. In this sense, it is incompatible with group programming. But the real self as divergent perceptions and dynamic understanding of interrelationships is dangerous to tradition, the church, the state, and the crowd.
In psychology, transformation has been curiously defined as "the procedure used when unconscious desires or urges are costumed in order to emerge in consciousness." Psychobiological transformation is a key theme in depth psychologies. It begins at the point where there is no hope and lead through overwhelming challenges, fraught with depression, fragmentation, resistance, symptoms, pain and anxiety. We are at our most vulnerable at the threshold of transformation.
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Imaginal psychology urges us to move beyond the monotheistic myth of self-domination by the abstract concepts of a rational heroic ego, self, or god. James Hillman noted the ego too is an image. It makes problems to solve them with will and intentionality, but that is an illusory perspective. Consciousness is not based on concepts of ego or self, though it has been identified as such. Archetypes generate the transformational images and the universal material of myth and drama, but they bear the mark of personal and cultural conditioning. They provide archaic and timeless meaning.
Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
Jung (CW 12, par. 32) cautioned that we must be alone to find out what it is that supports us when we can no longer support ourselves. Only this experience, he said, gives us an indestructible foundation. "Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt." He concludes, "we must be able to stand alone vis a vis the unconscious for better or worse." (Letters, Vol 1, p. 458-459) Jung also notes, "Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of." (Letters, Vol. 1, pg. 442) It isn't rare, but it is a move toward self-actualization or self-realization.
The path from the oblivious to self-aware life is beset with obstacles. How do we know what a genuine transformative experience is? We transform ourselves by every act of self-knowing. Jung felt that self-realization was a natural process of transformation, orchestrated by the unconscious. The infinite depth of dynamic reality informs our worldview and personal sovereignty. Such is the journey of meaningful solitude into silence, ratified by the perennial wisdom.
Krishnamurti said, "To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, of dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on. . . .What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is not conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories -- to understand all of that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no "how" to be free. If you ask 'how' to be free, you are not listening."
Kahlil Gibran claimed, "Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms." Yogananda suggests that self-realization is "to know truth through yourself, and not through others." Ramana Maharshi says, "your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world."
The Dalai Lama says, "With realization of one's own potential and self-confidence in one's ability, one can build a better world." Rumi was poetic: "I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul." Hermann Hesse and others, such as Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, echo this approach in their own writings.
Hesse felt that, "We must become so alone, so absolutely alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul, we know ourselves to be one with all beings."
“Transformation connotes a more-or-less dramatic shift in the context of an individual's meaning system, beyond any attempts to re-brand or commercialize the field. Real transformation takes place in the furnace of the heart. However, institutional transformation can mean an imposed or enforced social change. In McLuhan's vernacular, the "invisible" environment of new technologies creates an "erosion", not enhancement, of the conscious and unconscious -- by means of "audience as workforce." We unconsciously conform to such environments. The subconscious works on emotion. Business strategy is transformed into emotion.
Transformation is a model of a process. In this theory, personal and social transformation promotes self-actualization and compassionate service. Radical change involves new habits, range of emotions, and worldview -- concerns, interests, goals, ambitions, and behaviors. A reordering of values can change the basis of self-identity. Significant transformation can mean a radical reorganization of one’s identity, meaning, and purpose in life -- a turning point -- transformations of earlier worldviews. Embodied transformation sustains over time. Wisdom to know the difference between one’s ego and one’s Self is embodied in your individuality.
Or, does holistic repatterning just mean structural transformation of old elements into a new configuration in the internal landscape -- a restructuring of psychic space? Only a profound change in structure creates something new. Infiltrated consciousness is such a result, changing how we perceive the world and act on those perceptions.
Organizational strategies and state or corporate coercive transformation don't serve the individual. For them, imposed transformation means collaborative, consultative, directive and coercive manipulations. Ultimately, it means international competition and state formation. The state exerts coercion for control.
A state-of-the-art empirical foundation is essential for any well-grounded philosophy of life and realistic self-concept. We have limited subjective fantasies about ourselves and the nature of the universe all the time. Usually we do not examine our a priori beliefs which condition those notions. We grasp our beliefs as though they were the most precious of gemstones, rather than just models or constructs, only a simulation of ourselves and the world-at-large.
From our worldview come symbols and images which a small part of our brain, and an even smaller part of our mind and consciousness clings to, attempting to structure reality out of chaos. Understanding the poetry and art, we can still pursue our sacred science, amplifying and updating our terms with contemporary metaphors.
Alchemy is a mode of perception equally concerned with psyche and substance, mind and matter. In alchemy all matter has soul. Alchemy frees our creative magination -- esoterically-trained imagination -- by providing a matrix within which we can dissolve and transcend our old boundaries. Chaos is a bridge for unfolding "heaven on earth," a means of manifesting spiritual energy that is not only creative but inherently healing.
From our worldview come symbols and images which a small part of our brain, and an even smaller part of our mind and consciousness clings to, attempting to structure reality out of chaos. Understanding the poetry and art, we can still pursue our sacred science, amplifying and updating our terms with contemporary metaphors.
Alchemy is a mode of perception equally concerned with psyche and substance, mind and matter. In alchemy all matter has soul. Alchemy frees our creative magination -- esoterically-trained imagination -- by providing a matrix within which we can dissolve and transcend our old boundaries. Chaos is a bridge for unfolding "heaven on earth," a means of manifesting spiritual energy that is not only creative but inherently healing.
Otto Geist
“Nothing is possible without love, not even the processes of alchemy, for love puts one in a mood to risk everything and not to withhold elements.”
--C.G. Jung
--C.G. Jung
Spiritual Alchemy
More Alchemy by Iona Miller
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"The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call a 'field of force.' The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-a-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work." ~ Fulcanelli, 1937
The alchemists tried not only to change base metals into gold but also rejuvenate their bodies, integrate their personalities, and perfect the very essence of their souls. Although they spoke of retorts, furnaces, and chemicals, they were really talking about synchronous changes taking place in their own bodies, minds, and souls.
We should now proceed to find a neutral, or unitarian, language in which every concept we use is applicable as well to the unconscious as to matter, in order to overcome this wrong view that the unconscious psyche and matter are two things. --Professor Wolfgang Pauli
The Transmodern Alchemist, like his or her medieval or Renaissance counterpart, is rightly concerned with the true nature of reality.
The great enigmas of our existence remain the riddle of matter, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the human mind or consciousness. Since matter remains a paradox, our Work means learning more than the Standard Theory of physics. New research and heterodox theories stimulate our imaginative and spiritual thinking. Each theory adds another piece to the puzzle of existence and meaning and might potentially lead to breakthrough on the bench or in consciousness. They describe novel transformations and transmutations, how we might find longevity, rejuvenation, regeneration and even "immortality."
IONA MILLER PERMANENT HOME/MENU/ARCHIVE:
http://ionamiller.weebly.com
SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY
http://spiritualalchemy.iwarp.com
THE MODERN ALCHEMIST
http://the-modern-alchemist.iwarp.com
"The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call a 'field of force.' The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-a-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work." ~ Fulcanelli, 1937
The alchemists tried not only to change base metals into gold but also rejuvenate their bodies, integrate their personalities, and perfect the very essence of their souls. Although they spoke of retorts, furnaces, and chemicals, they were really talking about synchronous changes taking place in their own bodies, minds, and souls.
We should now proceed to find a neutral, or unitarian, language in which every concept we use is applicable as well to the unconscious as to matter, in order to overcome this wrong view that the unconscious psyche and matter are two things. --Professor Wolfgang Pauli
The Transmodern Alchemist, like his or her medieval or Renaissance counterpart, is rightly concerned with the true nature of reality.
The great enigmas of our existence remain the riddle of matter, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the human mind or consciousness. Since matter remains a paradox, our Work means learning more than the Standard Theory of physics. New research and heterodox theories stimulate our imaginative and spiritual thinking. Each theory adds another piece to the puzzle of existence and meaning and might potentially lead to breakthrough on the bench or in consciousness. They describe novel transformations and transmutations, how we might find longevity, rejuvenation, regeneration and even "immortality."
The Transmodern Alchemist
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST by Iona Miller 2009
New Renaissance Psychophysics /
Alchemical EDGEucation
"Quaro non pomo, nihil hic determino dictans; coniucio, conor, confero, tento, rogo..."
"I inquire, I do not assert; I do not determine anything with final assurance; I conjecture, try, compare, attempt, ask..."
FIELD & FLOW
"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")
Transmodern Alchemy & Chaos
Alchemy is a science-art and tradition of participatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, nor to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical or New Age jargon. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them.
Like the cryptic tomes and dense texts of alchemy, unfamiliar scientific or philosophical theories require thoughtful reflection until they take root in our awareness. Models from many disciplines weave together to amplify the meaning of alchemical process and patterns. Old experiments can be revisioned in a new light while new dynamical phenomena remain to be discovered. We can even revision the alchemical formula for surviving death.
Each technical or symbolic language seems like learning a foreign language, but becomes second-nature once we sense the overall gestalt. It takes contemplation and consideration of implications. We unpack them one metaphor at a time as we descend into finer domains of existence, from particles to the subquantal world of the microcosm.
Motivation theory suggests if we adopt a mastery orientation to our subjects, we exhibit all the productive learning behaviors we know will work. If we believe we have the natural ability to learn something, we adopt a mastery orientation even if challenged in that area. As in alchemy, we simply keep at it and understanding grows. Simple concepts, not mathematical details, from dynamics and physics are all that is required for illuminating alchemical practice.
Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. As in the alchemical dictum, "As Above, So Below," a satisfactory theory must explain both cosmogenesis and microphysics. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and the physics of his day, shedding new light on an old science.
THE MODERN ALCHEMIST, (1994) describes the process of individuation -- the transformation of personality and Self. Searching for the hidden structure of matter, the alchemists discovered that of the psyche. Depth psychology continues to redefine itself beyond postmodern notions as new research emerges in nonunitary consciousness, the fractal nature of archetypes and complexes and new models in microphysics mirroring cosmos and co-creator. The alchemical process is its own solution.
Jung's notions of a heroic, striving Self have been transcended with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and metanarratives as healing fictions. If new theories in astrophysics, quantum physics and depth psychology supersede the old, can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself? The esoteric pursuit for the arcane nature of matter continues.
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST (2009) describes the secrets of matter in scientific terms and those of the alchemical worldview. Unfold the dynamic blueprints of nature as we comprehend them today, stripping away Nature's etheric veil, revealing naked awareness. As we deconstruct our old notions, new realities emerge. The Philosopher's Stone is awakened consciousness.
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST hacks the undifferentiated potential, exploring the theoretical usefulness of Dynamics for modeling processes in the alchemical art. Dynamics is an organic model, an alternative to mechanistic or cyber- models of process. It prioritizes life as the root science. Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on mystic technologies, spagyrics, healing, life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics.
Transmodern alchemy is a new Renaissanc science-art -- a treasury of psychophysical meaning. Alchemists sought the experience of Unus Mundus, the one world united through material, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects. Science illuminates the spiritual quest, and spiritual tech illuminates the deep nature of matter and our nature.
Universal Meta-Syn
Alchemy is a metanarrative, a way of framing all our experience. Alchemy begins and ends in the quest for eternal life. It is a spiritual technology of rebirth using natural methods that in their effect transcend nature by amplifying that which is immortal within us. It does not exist in nature but must be prepared by Art. Art is a form of manifesting, making and objectifying the world - spiritual physics.
Artists and mystics are aware of their own internal space and thus able to enter it, playing the mindbody like a musical instrument. Looking inside, they see the true nature of reality and can express that literally and symbolically. We all possess the creative potential. All creative acts are a marriage of spirit and matter, reaching down into the body as the source of our essential being and becoming.
Today, we might describe this resonance as accessing energy that regenerates the mindbody. Healing is an aspect of creativity; nature is within and without us. The Magus does not dominate reality but develops embodied psychophysical equilibrium, clarity, wisdom and compassion.
Creative work originates in the body and is projected out into the world. The projections are then internalized into awareness. The bodymind of the artist is an alchemical vessel containing the creative flux and lux during the process of transformation.
Awareness and consciousness form a continuous alchemical movement. The creative gold is generated and embodied in the alembic of the mindbody. The mindbody is the same substance as the Cosmos and contains and reveals its mysteries.
Alchemy reduces all to the first state, the ground state of being - original experience that is timeless, infinite. The classical Void, the quantum vacuum is a carrier of information.
The energy body or the field body, along with the scalars of our holographic blueprint, connect us directly with the negentropic potential of the zero-point field. Radiant light literally emerges from this mystic void. Primordial structuring processes are common to both psyche and matter, working in the gap or empty interval between intention and action.
So, alchemy refines the way the mindbody generates and processes inherent light as medicine. It refines the aspirant's ability for tapping and amplifying Medicine Light. This primordial state is the luminous ground of our being, hidden deep in the heart of things.
All other goals are subordinate to this prime directive which includes meditative techniques for continuing consciousness after death. This Philosopher's Stone is also the Universal Medicine, the regenerative Elixir of Life. The greatest mystery is Life After Death: we don't die but continue in transcendent form. This is the secret of man and nature.
Paradoxically, when we look into the depths of matter, we look into the depths of ourselves. Scientists and mystics report similar phenomena in their models and phenomenology. Spiritual technologies, the software of sacred penetration and amplification, virtually predicted the fine nature of matter as nothing but a complex illusion - what we have come to understand as a hologram. Mystics have also always emphasized the primal nature of Light, and claimed that we are in fact made of light itself. Science has confirmed this in numerous ways.
Ambient Vacuum is a Plenum of Transformation
Light is an excitation of empty space. "Aether" means shine in Greek. Scalar physics tells us the ambient void is omnipresent, yet inherently nonobservable -- it is an omnipresent field of radiant energy potential emanating from every zero-point in the cosmos. But we can observe and infer results of this virtual vacuum fluctuation. Quantum Mechanics demonstrates no discrete particle or solid chunk of anything exists in metric space -- the whole Physical Universe.
Everything is made of Light. Only light matters. Nothing arises but standing waves from the seething zero-point field created by cosmic beings like ourselves. How we do so is a mystery to ourselves. But we are getting closer to non-religious descriptions of reality that curiously have profound mystical overtones.
The properties of mass, inertia, charge and gravity -- and those who observe them -- are the result of space resonances produced by zero-point scalar waves. At zero-point, waves pass through waves without interference. We come from, are sustained by, and are returning to to the radiant light of our mass. All electromagnetic force is mediated by virtual photons.
The void is not devoid. In the absence of "solid" matter, we can take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process using Chaos Theory, and related sciences to inform our search. We are indivisibly wedded to our earthly and cosmic environment through zero point field phenomena and resonance. Could consciousness order the world?
Alchemy's prima materia and 'sensitive initial conditions' of chaos are the same. Initiation recalibrates our "initial conditions" and sets transformational "butterfly effects" in motion. The potential of enfolded time energy is transduced into dynamic spatial energy as cosmic jitter (ZPE, Isotropic Vector Matrix). Zero represents the Cosmic egg, the primordial Androgyne merging positive and negative charge - the Plenum. Zero point creative process manifests cosmos, nature and consciousness from roiling quantum flux.
Biophysics tells us we are brilliantly disguised photonic humans -- Homo Lumen -- if we but realize that awareness. The quantum vacuum is a radiant sea of light, encrypted information waves, a dynamic matrix of energy exchange. Our bioplasmic energy pulsates along with this matrix. Because it is ubiquitous, inside and outside, we are blind to it. It is the groundstate of our being.
Transmodernity is the synthesis of modernity and postmodern philosophy, reflected in alchemical notions of transcendence, transformation and transmutation. It transcends the construction and deconstruction of recent historical eras by re-enchanting the Millennial world. So what might a chaos-informed Transmodern Alchemy look like? First and foremost our existential state space is in flux. We arise from an infinite ocean of quantum foam. Phenomena no longer correspond with old-paradigm frameworks. Anomalies, the strangest phenomena have the most to teach us.
Philosophy can be part of everyday life. Alchemy sought the hidden structure of matter. Our inner emptiness is full of promise. Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating. At the subquantal range of virtual photon flux, this is literally true and the metaphysical substrate of manifestation. At the virtual level, the fiction of ‘reality’ as substantive is revealed and the transparent veil is ripped away.
Nonlinear Recursive Process
Paradoxically, chaos is the essence of order. That order is inherent. Dynamics has successfully explained many natural phenomena and been heralded as a new scientific paradigm. The quintessence is now found in nonlinear dynamics, the holographic field and the virtual vacuum of absolute space. Only when we comprehend the groundstate of being can we fathom reality. It fundamentally changes our alchemical and scientific notions about transformations in ourselves, matter, systems, patterns and structure.
Psychology and neurology now recognize the psyche and brain as a dynamic dissipative system. Therapeutic techniques lead to reorganization of the individual at a higher level of order. Medicine realizes chaos is essential to health. Biophysics recognizes the primacy of light in life processes. The artworld recognizes the aesthetic appeal, rhythm and beauty of fractals. But the poetic science of alchemy made a workable theoretical and experimental system in which chaos was central centuries ago. Each era views nature from the paradigm of its time.
Chaos Theory has been associated with every aspect of human behavior. Alchemy is an irreducible fusion of mysticism, science and art that also happens to be therapeutic or growth-promoting and tantalizingly hints at illumination. The process begins with doubts and lack of conviction but time spent on self-knowledge, experiments and spiritual exercises is amply rewarded. Chaos keeps the process fluid. Alchemy calls chaos the "universal solvent." Virtual Physics describes jitterbugging quantum subspace plasma as a superconducting superfluid.
Alchemy is a nonlinear organizational framework, a model to make sense of our experience, and a means of facilitating transformation. The universe without and within is our alchemical laboratory. The fire is kindled and stoked in the ‘magic theatre’ of the mind and the retort vessel of the body. Alchemy plants virtual fractal seeds in the gaps or intervals of consciousness. We are the portal for the fractal seed to unfold its liberating potential. But we must remain open.
Cosmic Zero
The universe is our "parent fractal" from the cosmological to microcosmic scale. Matter and consciousness share deep unity. The outer world we observe through our senses is nothing more than a consistent series of mental images that exists in our mind. Matter itself is an image in the mind, and mental images are the natural phenomena of consciousness. Mining the soul, we disassemble ourselves to reorganize in more refined form, reintegrating at a holistic level.
Alchemy calls Chaos the prima and ultima materia. The prima materia is ubiquitous, everywhere all the time. As we practice spiritual and practical alchemy, we come to understand the deep nature of chaos as the source of all transformative energy. In this chaosophical philosophy, all systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos.
Solve et Coagula: Chaos is the essence of self-organization. Chaos Theory allows us to follow the Hermetic Spirit deep into the heart of matter and beyond into the subquantal realm in our quest for Nature's secrets. The undecomposable domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source -- a bornless nothingness from which all form emerges.
Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception - the stream of consciousness. The cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction appears at the heart of modern chaos theory and alchemy.
The Vedas identify all creative intent and substance as a manifestation of primal consciousness, which is considered the basis of all manifestation. In this worldview, there is nothing but consciousness. Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of "waves of unborn nothingness". Healing is the biological equivalent of creativity. The more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is.
The objective (Sol, Frater) and subjective (Luna, Soror Mystica) are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. They marry in the mystic, in entanglement with Cosmos. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that transcends the tension of opposites. Synthesizing and transcending opposites is the theme of alchemy.
Truth of the Matter
Alchemy, quantum mysticism and the holographic paradigm reveal the secrets of nature's subquantal realm. Metaphors are instructive. They are a Way of leaping the chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. They can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs -- our spirit and soul.
Alchemy is a science-art, a tool to describe and mold reality using experimental and meditative techniques. As an art medium, alchemy helps us illustrate nature and our own nature in contemporary terms by creating new paradigms and environments.
Matter has lost its central role in physics to dynamics. Alchemy can be informed by this new physics. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person. Organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory illuminate the alchemical art.
The many theories of reality are the Post-Millennial version of the alchemical PEACOCK'S TAIL that heralds the beginnings of integration, the Unus Mundus -- the Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything in physics. The search for the Stone is a long rite of initiation, culminating in the cauda pavonis which signals the perfect transmutation. It is a dazzling synthesis of all qualities and elements much like rainbow colors unite as white light. The iridescent tail represents all the colors of light while the "eyes" symbolize all potential universes.
The Peacock's Tail is the central part of the alchemical process. The myriad eyes in the tail suggest the highly-chromatic view includes multiple perspectives of imaginal vision. The kaleidoscopic vision is a metaphor for the spiritual rebirth that awakens the Third Eye and consciousness of the deeper subtle and field bodies.
The universe informs our awareness and being. Sometimes the universal laws of nature lead us beyond ordinary science. Subjects in isolation don't provide enough to accurately describe our complex world. More disciplines, more tools, better technologies. In theoretics we build up and tear down relentlessly, questioning our own underpinnings, adhering to no stale theory: "Solve et Coagula."
Since matter remains a paradox, our Work, comprehending the spirit of matter, means learning more than the Standard Theory of physics. Both orthodox and heterodox theories stimulate our imaginative and spiritual perception. Energy and information fields, not just genetics, drive human psychophysiology. Libido (psychic energy) drives the imagination. When we speak of Mercury, Sulphur and Salt, we mean our spiritual, energetic and physical bodies as well as the elements.
Each theory adds another piece to the puzzle of existence and meaning and might potentially lead to breakthrough on the bench or in consciousness. Such a brief, conceptual survey of alternate theories in physics cannot do them justice, but it can provide leads for further contemplation and research for the esoteric physics of lab work. We study the nature of being and our own being, the essence of inner reality. Consciousness is a timeless transformative force unfolding in nature. Alchemy, art and physics are modes of inquiry. So are symbolic contemplation and interaction, transformation of the material and immaterial self. Engineering the Vacuum
Process Physics more than hints at outrageous alchemical potentials that may be just over our scientific horizon. Local vacuums are tunable in both frequency and signal to noise ratio. Information is relative to signal to noise ratio. Squeezed vacuums lead to potentials for energy extraction, quantum computing, fine-tuning quarks and Higgs fields, engineering the vacuum to manifest virtually any "thing," and to even engineer consciousness.
New Renaissance Psychophysics /
Alchemical EDGEucation
"Quaro non pomo, nihil hic determino dictans; coniucio, conor, confero, tento, rogo..."
"I inquire, I do not assert; I do not determine anything with final assurance; I conjecture, try, compare, attempt, ask..."
FIELD & FLOW
"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")
Transmodern Alchemy & Chaos
Alchemy is a science-art and tradition of participatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, nor to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical or New Age jargon. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them.
Like the cryptic tomes and dense texts of alchemy, unfamiliar scientific or philosophical theories require thoughtful reflection until they take root in our awareness. Models from many disciplines weave together to amplify the meaning of alchemical process and patterns. Old experiments can be revisioned in a new light while new dynamical phenomena remain to be discovered. We can even revision the alchemical formula for surviving death.
Each technical or symbolic language seems like learning a foreign language, but becomes second-nature once we sense the overall gestalt. It takes contemplation and consideration of implications. We unpack them one metaphor at a time as we descend into finer domains of existence, from particles to the subquantal world of the microcosm.
Motivation theory suggests if we adopt a mastery orientation to our subjects, we exhibit all the productive learning behaviors we know will work. If we believe we have the natural ability to learn something, we adopt a mastery orientation even if challenged in that area. As in alchemy, we simply keep at it and understanding grows. Simple concepts, not mathematical details, from dynamics and physics are all that is required for illuminating alchemical practice.
Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. As in the alchemical dictum, "As Above, So Below," a satisfactory theory must explain both cosmogenesis and microphysics. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and the physics of his day, shedding new light on an old science.
THE MODERN ALCHEMIST, (1994) describes the process of individuation -- the transformation of personality and Self. Searching for the hidden structure of matter, the alchemists discovered that of the psyche. Depth psychology continues to redefine itself beyond postmodern notions as new research emerges in nonunitary consciousness, the fractal nature of archetypes and complexes and new models in microphysics mirroring cosmos and co-creator. The alchemical process is its own solution.
Jung's notions of a heroic, striving Self have been transcended with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and metanarratives as healing fictions. If new theories in astrophysics, quantum physics and depth psychology supersede the old, can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself? The esoteric pursuit for the arcane nature of matter continues.
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST (2009) describes the secrets of matter in scientific terms and those of the alchemical worldview. Unfold the dynamic blueprints of nature as we comprehend them today, stripping away Nature's etheric veil, revealing naked awareness. As we deconstruct our old notions, new realities emerge. The Philosopher's Stone is awakened consciousness.
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST hacks the undifferentiated potential, exploring the theoretical usefulness of Dynamics for modeling processes in the alchemical art. Dynamics is an organic model, an alternative to mechanistic or cyber- models of process. It prioritizes life as the root science. Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on mystic technologies, spagyrics, healing, life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics.
Transmodern alchemy is a new Renaissanc science-art -- a treasury of psychophysical meaning. Alchemists sought the experience of Unus Mundus, the one world united through material, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects. Science illuminates the spiritual quest, and spiritual tech illuminates the deep nature of matter and our nature.
Universal Meta-Syn
Alchemy is a metanarrative, a way of framing all our experience. Alchemy begins and ends in the quest for eternal life. It is a spiritual technology of rebirth using natural methods that in their effect transcend nature by amplifying that which is immortal within us. It does not exist in nature but must be prepared by Art. Art is a form of manifesting, making and objectifying the world - spiritual physics.
Artists and mystics are aware of their own internal space and thus able to enter it, playing the mindbody like a musical instrument. Looking inside, they see the true nature of reality and can express that literally and symbolically. We all possess the creative potential. All creative acts are a marriage of spirit and matter, reaching down into the body as the source of our essential being and becoming.
Today, we might describe this resonance as accessing energy that regenerates the mindbody. Healing is an aspect of creativity; nature is within and without us. The Magus does not dominate reality but develops embodied psychophysical equilibrium, clarity, wisdom and compassion.
Creative work originates in the body and is projected out into the world. The projections are then internalized into awareness. The bodymind of the artist is an alchemical vessel containing the creative flux and lux during the process of transformation.
Awareness and consciousness form a continuous alchemical movement. The creative gold is generated and embodied in the alembic of the mindbody. The mindbody is the same substance as the Cosmos and contains and reveals its mysteries.
Alchemy reduces all to the first state, the ground state of being - original experience that is timeless, infinite. The classical Void, the quantum vacuum is a carrier of information.
The energy body or the field body, along with the scalars of our holographic blueprint, connect us directly with the negentropic potential of the zero-point field. Radiant light literally emerges from this mystic void. Primordial structuring processes are common to both psyche and matter, working in the gap or empty interval between intention and action.
So, alchemy refines the way the mindbody generates and processes inherent light as medicine. It refines the aspirant's ability for tapping and amplifying Medicine Light. This primordial state is the luminous ground of our being, hidden deep in the heart of things.
All other goals are subordinate to this prime directive which includes meditative techniques for continuing consciousness after death. This Philosopher's Stone is also the Universal Medicine, the regenerative Elixir of Life. The greatest mystery is Life After Death: we don't die but continue in transcendent form. This is the secret of man and nature.
Paradoxically, when we look into the depths of matter, we look into the depths of ourselves. Scientists and mystics report similar phenomena in their models and phenomenology. Spiritual technologies, the software of sacred penetration and amplification, virtually predicted the fine nature of matter as nothing but a complex illusion - what we have come to understand as a hologram. Mystics have also always emphasized the primal nature of Light, and claimed that we are in fact made of light itself. Science has confirmed this in numerous ways.
Ambient Vacuum is a Plenum of Transformation
Light is an excitation of empty space. "Aether" means shine in Greek. Scalar physics tells us the ambient void is omnipresent, yet inherently nonobservable -- it is an omnipresent field of radiant energy potential emanating from every zero-point in the cosmos. But we can observe and infer results of this virtual vacuum fluctuation. Quantum Mechanics demonstrates no discrete particle or solid chunk of anything exists in metric space -- the whole Physical Universe.
Everything is made of Light. Only light matters. Nothing arises but standing waves from the seething zero-point field created by cosmic beings like ourselves. How we do so is a mystery to ourselves. But we are getting closer to non-religious descriptions of reality that curiously have profound mystical overtones.
The properties of mass, inertia, charge and gravity -- and those who observe them -- are the result of space resonances produced by zero-point scalar waves. At zero-point, waves pass through waves without interference. We come from, are sustained by, and are returning to to the radiant light of our mass. All electromagnetic force is mediated by virtual photons.
The void is not devoid. In the absence of "solid" matter, we can take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process using Chaos Theory, and related sciences to inform our search. We are indivisibly wedded to our earthly and cosmic environment through zero point field phenomena and resonance. Could consciousness order the world?
Alchemy's prima materia and 'sensitive initial conditions' of chaos are the same. Initiation recalibrates our "initial conditions" and sets transformational "butterfly effects" in motion. The potential of enfolded time energy is transduced into dynamic spatial energy as cosmic jitter (ZPE, Isotropic Vector Matrix). Zero represents the Cosmic egg, the primordial Androgyne merging positive and negative charge - the Plenum. Zero point creative process manifests cosmos, nature and consciousness from roiling quantum flux.
Biophysics tells us we are brilliantly disguised photonic humans -- Homo Lumen -- if we but realize that awareness. The quantum vacuum is a radiant sea of light, encrypted information waves, a dynamic matrix of energy exchange. Our bioplasmic energy pulsates along with this matrix. Because it is ubiquitous, inside and outside, we are blind to it. It is the groundstate of our being.
Transmodernity is the synthesis of modernity and postmodern philosophy, reflected in alchemical notions of transcendence, transformation and transmutation. It transcends the construction and deconstruction of recent historical eras by re-enchanting the Millennial world. So what might a chaos-informed Transmodern Alchemy look like? First and foremost our existential state space is in flux. We arise from an infinite ocean of quantum foam. Phenomena no longer correspond with old-paradigm frameworks. Anomalies, the strangest phenomena have the most to teach us.
Philosophy can be part of everyday life. Alchemy sought the hidden structure of matter. Our inner emptiness is full of promise. Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating. At the subquantal range of virtual photon flux, this is literally true and the metaphysical substrate of manifestation. At the virtual level, the fiction of ‘reality’ as substantive is revealed and the transparent veil is ripped away.
Nonlinear Recursive Process
Paradoxically, chaos is the essence of order. That order is inherent. Dynamics has successfully explained many natural phenomena and been heralded as a new scientific paradigm. The quintessence is now found in nonlinear dynamics, the holographic field and the virtual vacuum of absolute space. Only when we comprehend the groundstate of being can we fathom reality. It fundamentally changes our alchemical and scientific notions about transformations in ourselves, matter, systems, patterns and structure.
Psychology and neurology now recognize the psyche and brain as a dynamic dissipative system. Therapeutic techniques lead to reorganization of the individual at a higher level of order. Medicine realizes chaos is essential to health. Biophysics recognizes the primacy of light in life processes. The artworld recognizes the aesthetic appeal, rhythm and beauty of fractals. But the poetic science of alchemy made a workable theoretical and experimental system in which chaos was central centuries ago. Each era views nature from the paradigm of its time.
Chaos Theory has been associated with every aspect of human behavior. Alchemy is an irreducible fusion of mysticism, science and art that also happens to be therapeutic or growth-promoting and tantalizingly hints at illumination. The process begins with doubts and lack of conviction but time spent on self-knowledge, experiments and spiritual exercises is amply rewarded. Chaos keeps the process fluid. Alchemy calls chaos the "universal solvent." Virtual Physics describes jitterbugging quantum subspace plasma as a superconducting superfluid.
Alchemy is a nonlinear organizational framework, a model to make sense of our experience, and a means of facilitating transformation. The universe without and within is our alchemical laboratory. The fire is kindled and stoked in the ‘magic theatre’ of the mind and the retort vessel of the body. Alchemy plants virtual fractal seeds in the gaps or intervals of consciousness. We are the portal for the fractal seed to unfold its liberating potential. But we must remain open.
Cosmic Zero
The universe is our "parent fractal" from the cosmological to microcosmic scale. Matter and consciousness share deep unity. The outer world we observe through our senses is nothing more than a consistent series of mental images that exists in our mind. Matter itself is an image in the mind, and mental images are the natural phenomena of consciousness. Mining the soul, we disassemble ourselves to reorganize in more refined form, reintegrating at a holistic level.
Alchemy calls Chaos the prima and ultima materia. The prima materia is ubiquitous, everywhere all the time. As we practice spiritual and practical alchemy, we come to understand the deep nature of chaos as the source of all transformative energy. In this chaosophical philosophy, all systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos.
Solve et Coagula: Chaos is the essence of self-organization. Chaos Theory allows us to follow the Hermetic Spirit deep into the heart of matter and beyond into the subquantal realm in our quest for Nature's secrets. The undecomposable domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source -- a bornless nothingness from which all form emerges.
Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception - the stream of consciousness. The cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction appears at the heart of modern chaos theory and alchemy.
The Vedas identify all creative intent and substance as a manifestation of primal consciousness, which is considered the basis of all manifestation. In this worldview, there is nothing but consciousness. Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of "waves of unborn nothingness". Healing is the biological equivalent of creativity. The more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is.
The objective (Sol, Frater) and subjective (Luna, Soror Mystica) are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. They marry in the mystic, in entanglement with Cosmos. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that transcends the tension of opposites. Synthesizing and transcending opposites is the theme of alchemy.
Truth of the Matter
Alchemy, quantum mysticism and the holographic paradigm reveal the secrets of nature's subquantal realm. Metaphors are instructive. They are a Way of leaping the chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. They can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs -- our spirit and soul.
Alchemy is a science-art, a tool to describe and mold reality using experimental and meditative techniques. As an art medium, alchemy helps us illustrate nature and our own nature in contemporary terms by creating new paradigms and environments.
Matter has lost its central role in physics to dynamics. Alchemy can be informed by this new physics. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person. Organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory illuminate the alchemical art.
The many theories of reality are the Post-Millennial version of the alchemical PEACOCK'S TAIL that heralds the beginnings of integration, the Unus Mundus -- the Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything in physics. The search for the Stone is a long rite of initiation, culminating in the cauda pavonis which signals the perfect transmutation. It is a dazzling synthesis of all qualities and elements much like rainbow colors unite as white light. The iridescent tail represents all the colors of light while the "eyes" symbolize all potential universes.
The Peacock's Tail is the central part of the alchemical process. The myriad eyes in the tail suggest the highly-chromatic view includes multiple perspectives of imaginal vision. The kaleidoscopic vision is a metaphor for the spiritual rebirth that awakens the Third Eye and consciousness of the deeper subtle and field bodies.
The universe informs our awareness and being. Sometimes the universal laws of nature lead us beyond ordinary science. Subjects in isolation don't provide enough to accurately describe our complex world. More disciplines, more tools, better technologies. In theoretics we build up and tear down relentlessly, questioning our own underpinnings, adhering to no stale theory: "Solve et Coagula."
Since matter remains a paradox, our Work, comprehending the spirit of matter, means learning more than the Standard Theory of physics. Both orthodox and heterodox theories stimulate our imaginative and spiritual perception. Energy and information fields, not just genetics, drive human psychophysiology. Libido (psychic energy) drives the imagination. When we speak of Mercury, Sulphur and Salt, we mean our spiritual, energetic and physical bodies as well as the elements.
Each theory adds another piece to the puzzle of existence and meaning and might potentially lead to breakthrough on the bench or in consciousness. Such a brief, conceptual survey of alternate theories in physics cannot do them justice, but it can provide leads for further contemplation and research for the esoteric physics of lab work. We study the nature of being and our own being, the essence of inner reality. Consciousness is a timeless transformative force unfolding in nature. Alchemy, art and physics are modes of inquiry. So are symbolic contemplation and interaction, transformation of the material and immaterial self. Engineering the Vacuum
Process Physics more than hints at outrageous alchemical potentials that may be just over our scientific horizon. Local vacuums are tunable in both frequency and signal to noise ratio. Information is relative to signal to noise ratio. Squeezed vacuums lead to potentials for energy extraction, quantum computing, fine-tuning quarks and Higgs fields, engineering the vacuum to manifest virtually any "thing," and to even engineer consciousness.
Contents Preview
In H.P. Blavatsky’s book The Voice of the Silence, the secret fire of the Alchemists is described as kundalini, the “serpentine” energetic power in the body of those trained in these arts. “It is an electric fiery occult or fahatic power, the great pristine force which underlies all organic and inorganic matter”.
April-May, 2009 work-in-progress
CHAOS THEORY IN 21st CENTURY ALCHEMY
Alchemy is an artform. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on esoteric science. TRANSMODERN ALCHEMY can be viewed as a dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. Dynamics is a revolutionary universal tool, a novel practice which helps us grasp the processes of development in ourselves, in nature, in our world and the cosmos.
Dynamics is a synthesis of recent scientific advances and theories: system dynamics, living systems, general systems, chaos, edge-of-chaos, complexity, emergence, complex adaptive systems, quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, attractors, homeodynamics, and self-organization. Scalar physics, vacuum fluctuation, Zero Point Energy (ZPE) and holographic paradigm are also relevant for describing emergence and drawing back the Mystic Veil on nature's processes.
"CHAOS THEORY & DYNAMICS IN TRANSMODERN ALCHEMY" Transmodernity is a synthesis of overlapping paradigms of modernity and postmodern philosophy. Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating, as in transformation and transmutation. Medieval alchemy was couched in archaic language, but we are not limited to that. New discoveries, long anticipated by alchemy, inform our practice.
Dynamics is a universal tool, a novel practice which helps us grasp the primordial groundstate of being through processes of emergence, self-organization, coherence and nonlinear development. Chaos, the prima and ultima materia is integrated in the new paradigm where real and unreal are no longer opposed. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us. Alchemy is a spiritual technology of transmutation, which like the Philosopher’s Stone, can take on the projections of theories from psychology to life sciences to physics. Mindbody is the same substance as Cosmos and contains and reveals its mysteries, including natural healing.
*****
"CHAOTIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE ALCHEMICAL ART"
Because chaos theory addresses disequilibrium, discontinuities, and the emergence of new states of being, it offers metaphoric models of "creative illness" that profoundly affects the person and the work produced. Evidence suggests that it is not only the illness, but a person's resilient response that leads to a new stage of life and new work. We emerge from the ordeal with personality transformed, new coping strategies and the conviction that a great truth or a new world has been discovered.
We turn inward to be born again by unblocking the energy formerly contained in the symptoms. Imagery and art are therapeutic mechanisms. Old stresses and traumatic imprints are released and a new multidimensional identity is discovered. The inner physician heals thyself. It is a transformational healing experience, an influx of creative ideas and a permanent personality change -- spiritual transformation. 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.
*****
“NOVUM LUMEN NATURAE”
As Homo Lumen we intentionally cultivate and realize the Body of Light, the diamond vehicle of consciousness. Alchemy is the sensuous science through which we love that natural light into being, even as Lumen Naturae kindles ourselves. The light is our connection to all that is wholly existant and our own immortality. In fact, there is nothing else but this light of grace and glory that complements the celestial light. Mending this division makes us whole.
*****
“CRYSTALLINE CHAOTIC SEA: Pre-existence, Chaos Theory & Soma Athanaton”
The unimaginably vast and the infinitesimal are simply connected at Zero Point. 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. Magic happens in the gaps between breaths. Realizing this moment neither begins nor ends, we realize deathlessness. That which is never born, never dies. To embody the Philosopher's Stone, we reiterate the whole process of creation.
*****
“CHAOS, SOLVENT & STONE”
The Stone is a psychic lodestone or vortex. It 'magnetically' orders the contents of our consciousness around it through reflexive feedback loops in chaotic yet meaningful fashion. Instinctual attraction toward processes that dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness leads to transpersonal experience via symbolic death/rebirth. We experience deep states of emotional turbulence in initiation ordeals and in the merger of subject (soror mystica) and object (frater). It implies a flowing state of consciousness, facilitating feedback with Source or the groundstate of consciousness via creative regression. Chaos Theory, as well as alchemy, provides a more than metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
*****
“CHAOS NATURAE: Chaos, Complexity & Alchemy”
We are agents of chaos. Alchemy and complexity bridge the gap between psychology, the arts and sciences. By applying contemporary perspectives of chaos theory, complexity theory and fractal geometry we can discard outworn conceptions of health based on ideals of regularity, set points and normative statistics in favour of models that emphasize unique moments, variability, and irregularity. We can explore philosophical and spiritual implications of contemporary science for life sciences at the interface between artistic, scientific and spiritual aspects of therapy, healing and personal development.
Alchemy is chiefly concerned with transmutation of metals into gold and discovery of the Universal Medicine in a psychophysical science. It is a comprehensive mythological system of symbols and metaphors, beings and stories, geometries and diagrams, elements and heavenly bodies, designed to represent aspects of the human psyche and spirit, as well as providing deep awareness of the nature of the Universe.
The alchemist used simple instruments: an oven for heating, retorts for distilling, and materials such as ores and minerals to make acids. The earthy apparatus and the phases of the process generated a dynamic group of living symbols and metaphors. Fire stands for both destruction and life force, the retorts are a reflection of both body and cosmos, because in these the creation is re-enacted. Vapors rise in distillation. Refined spirits condense into matter -- the body becomes a spirit. A process of death and resurrection/rebirth takes place in the retort. Jung showed it is possible to unpack correspondences between alchemy and mysticism. The alchemist himself reiterates the process of transmutation, and become transformed through universal meaning.
“…I am a soul… I am a star of gold…” Osiris, the Pharaoh announces in the Pyramid Texts, Line 886-9. The soul “ba,” has a precise meaning. It is the wave nature, the flow of the breath, of the spirit, the khu. The Hebrew word Ruach, breath or spirit, preserves this meaning. In Genesis, we are told that God’s breath, “His Ruach” moved across the waters of chaos to begin the process of creation.
Ensouled, the flow of spirit is self-sustaining, self-referencing and self-aware. To be such a soul is to have the possibility of immortality. One of the deepest held secrets of the Egyptian mysteries was how to rearrange the Nuit Star to create an infinite nest of Phi ratios, a body of light animated by DMT, the spirit molecule -- the Light of the Horus from the pineal gland. In Egypt, the priestly class worked and refined gold. Ptah was the patron of smelters and goldsmiths. His temple was a "goldsmithy," with priests called "Great Wielder of the Hammer," and "He who knows the Secret of the Goldsmiths."
The fundamental alchemical operations are: blackening, whitening, yellowing and reddening. This corresponds to the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire -- the four qualities: cold, hot, moist, and dry. Ritual processes using mercury, sulphur, water, and fire transmute the practitioner and the elements; through dissolution, coagulation, distillation, condensation, disintegration and bonding.
Pythagoras called the physical world a quaternity. Aristotle added fifth element, the quintessence. Light is the primordial element. Bioplasma is a transmodern analog of quintesence. We are truly photonic humans - homo lumen. The alchemists seek to bring this fifth element down to Earth, through the repeated transmutations of matter. Alchemy is an observation of the process of creation revealing the secrets of divine genesis. Alchemy is a dynamic process revealing a way of enlightening the soul. TRANSMODERN ALCHEMY is a new Renaissance in psychophysics.
In H.P. Blavatsky’s book The Voice of the Silence, the secret fire of the Alchemists is described as kundalini, the “serpentine” energetic power in the body of those trained in these arts. “It is an electric fiery occult or fahatic power, the great pristine force which underlies all organic and inorganic matter”.
April-May, 2009 work-in-progress
CHAOS THEORY IN 21st CENTURY ALCHEMY
Alchemy is an artform. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on esoteric science. TRANSMODERN ALCHEMY can be viewed as a dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. Dynamics is a revolutionary universal tool, a novel practice which helps us grasp the processes of development in ourselves, in nature, in our world and the cosmos.
Dynamics is a synthesis of recent scientific advances and theories: system dynamics, living systems, general systems, chaos, edge-of-chaos, complexity, emergence, complex adaptive systems, quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, attractors, homeodynamics, and self-organization. Scalar physics, vacuum fluctuation, Zero Point Energy (ZPE) and holographic paradigm are also relevant for describing emergence and drawing back the Mystic Veil on nature's processes.
"CHAOS THEORY & DYNAMICS IN TRANSMODERN ALCHEMY" Transmodernity is a synthesis of overlapping paradigms of modernity and postmodern philosophy. Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating, as in transformation and transmutation. Medieval alchemy was couched in archaic language, but we are not limited to that. New discoveries, long anticipated by alchemy, inform our practice.
Dynamics is a universal tool, a novel practice which helps us grasp the primordial groundstate of being through processes of emergence, self-organization, coherence and nonlinear development. Chaos, the prima and ultima materia is integrated in the new paradigm where real and unreal are no longer opposed. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us. Alchemy is a spiritual technology of transmutation, which like the Philosopher’s Stone, can take on the projections of theories from psychology to life sciences to physics. Mindbody is the same substance as Cosmos and contains and reveals its mysteries, including natural healing.
*****
"CHAOTIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE ALCHEMICAL ART"
Because chaos theory addresses disequilibrium, discontinuities, and the emergence of new states of being, it offers metaphoric models of "creative illness" that profoundly affects the person and the work produced. Evidence suggests that it is not only the illness, but a person's resilient response that leads to a new stage of life and new work. We emerge from the ordeal with personality transformed, new coping strategies and the conviction that a great truth or a new world has been discovered.
We turn inward to be born again by unblocking the energy formerly contained in the symptoms. Imagery and art are therapeutic mechanisms. Old stresses and traumatic imprints are released and a new multidimensional identity is discovered. The inner physician heals thyself. It is a transformational healing experience, an influx of creative ideas and a permanent personality change -- spiritual transformation. 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.
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“NOVUM LUMEN NATURAE”
As Homo Lumen we intentionally cultivate and realize the Body of Light, the diamond vehicle of consciousness. Alchemy is the sensuous science through which we love that natural light into being, even as Lumen Naturae kindles ourselves. The light is our connection to all that is wholly existant and our own immortality. In fact, there is nothing else but this light of grace and glory that complements the celestial light. Mending this division makes us whole.
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“CRYSTALLINE CHAOTIC SEA: Pre-existence, Chaos Theory & Soma Athanaton”
The unimaginably vast and the infinitesimal are simply connected at Zero Point. 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. Magic happens in the gaps between breaths. Realizing this moment neither begins nor ends, we realize deathlessness. That which is never born, never dies. To embody the Philosopher's Stone, we reiterate the whole process of creation.
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“CHAOS, SOLVENT & STONE”
The Stone is a psychic lodestone or vortex. It 'magnetically' orders the contents of our consciousness around it through reflexive feedback loops in chaotic yet meaningful fashion. Instinctual attraction toward processes that dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness leads to transpersonal experience via symbolic death/rebirth. We experience deep states of emotional turbulence in initiation ordeals and in the merger of subject (soror mystica) and object (frater). It implies a flowing state of consciousness, facilitating feedback with Source or the groundstate of consciousness via creative regression. Chaos Theory, as well as alchemy, provides a more than metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
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“CHAOS NATURAE: Chaos, Complexity & Alchemy”
We are agents of chaos. Alchemy and complexity bridge the gap between psychology, the arts and sciences. By applying contemporary perspectives of chaos theory, complexity theory and fractal geometry we can discard outworn conceptions of health based on ideals of regularity, set points and normative statistics in favour of models that emphasize unique moments, variability, and irregularity. We can explore philosophical and spiritual implications of contemporary science for life sciences at the interface between artistic, scientific and spiritual aspects of therapy, healing and personal development.
Alchemy is chiefly concerned with transmutation of metals into gold and discovery of the Universal Medicine in a psychophysical science. It is a comprehensive mythological system of symbols and metaphors, beings and stories, geometries and diagrams, elements and heavenly bodies, designed to represent aspects of the human psyche and spirit, as well as providing deep awareness of the nature of the Universe.
The alchemist used simple instruments: an oven for heating, retorts for distilling, and materials such as ores and minerals to make acids. The earthy apparatus and the phases of the process generated a dynamic group of living symbols and metaphors. Fire stands for both destruction and life force, the retorts are a reflection of both body and cosmos, because in these the creation is re-enacted. Vapors rise in distillation. Refined spirits condense into matter -- the body becomes a spirit. A process of death and resurrection/rebirth takes place in the retort. Jung showed it is possible to unpack correspondences between alchemy and mysticism. The alchemist himself reiterates the process of transmutation, and become transformed through universal meaning.
“…I am a soul… I am a star of gold…” Osiris, the Pharaoh announces in the Pyramid Texts, Line 886-9. The soul “ba,” has a precise meaning. It is the wave nature, the flow of the breath, of the spirit, the khu. The Hebrew word Ruach, breath or spirit, preserves this meaning. In Genesis, we are told that God’s breath, “His Ruach” moved across the waters of chaos to begin the process of creation.
Ensouled, the flow of spirit is self-sustaining, self-referencing and self-aware. To be such a soul is to have the possibility of immortality. One of the deepest held secrets of the Egyptian mysteries was how to rearrange the Nuit Star to create an infinite nest of Phi ratios, a body of light animated by DMT, the spirit molecule -- the Light of the Horus from the pineal gland. In Egypt, the priestly class worked and refined gold. Ptah was the patron of smelters and goldsmiths. His temple was a "goldsmithy," with priests called "Great Wielder of the Hammer," and "He who knows the Secret of the Goldsmiths."
The fundamental alchemical operations are: blackening, whitening, yellowing and reddening. This corresponds to the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire -- the four qualities: cold, hot, moist, and dry. Ritual processes using mercury, sulphur, water, and fire transmute the practitioner and the elements; through dissolution, coagulation, distillation, condensation, disintegration and bonding.
Pythagoras called the physical world a quaternity. Aristotle added fifth element, the quintessence. Light is the primordial element. Bioplasma is a transmodern analog of quintesence. We are truly photonic humans - homo lumen. The alchemists seek to bring this fifth element down to Earth, through the repeated transmutations of matter. Alchemy is an observation of the process of creation revealing the secrets of divine genesis. Alchemy is a dynamic process revealing a way of enlightening the soul. TRANSMODERN ALCHEMY is a new Renaissance in psychophysics.
Fractal Cosmos
PHILOSOPHICAL SONNET by Saint-Germain
"Curious scrutator of all nature,
I have seen gold thick in the depths of the double mercury.
I have seized its substance and surprised its changing.
I explain by that art the soul with the womb of a mother,
Make its home, take it away, and as a kernel
Placed against a grain of wheat, under the humid pollen;
The one plant and the other vine-stock, are the bread and wine.
NOTHING was, God willing, NOTHING became something,
I doubted it, I sought that on which the universe rests,
NOTHING preserves the equilibrium and serves to sustain.
Then, with the weight of praise and of blame.
I weighed the eternal, it called my soul,
I died, I adored, I knew NOTHING more."
--trans. Manley Palmer Hall in Sages & Seers, from original ms. in British Museum
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST by Iona Miller, 2009 transmodernalchemy.iwarp.com
"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")
"Alchemy posits an original unitary energy which separated in space-time into distinct physical elements, "falling apart" and differentiating in the four directions. Perceived as transmutable through shared qualities or correspondences, these elements could one day be reunited in a reconstituted wholeness. The dicta—"Return to chaos is essential to the work," "Volatize the fixed and fix the volatile," and "Dissolve and Coagulate"—express a dialectic process between complements and opposites in analysis and synthesis." (Psychoanalysis Dictionary)
"The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call a 'field of force.' The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-a-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work." ~ Fulcanelli, 1937
Transmodern Alchemy & Chaos
Alchemy is a science-art and tradition of participatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, or to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical or New Age jargon. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them.
Like the cryptic tomes and dense texts of alchemy, unfamiliar scientific or philosophical theories require thoughtful reflection until they take root in our awareness. Models from many disciplines weave together to amplify the meaning of alchemical process and patterns. Old experiments can be revisioned in a new light while new dynamical phenomena remain to be discovered. We can even revision the alchemical formula for surviving death.
Each technical or symbolic language seems like learning a foreign language, but becomes second-nature once we sense the overall gestalt. It takes contemplation and consideration of implications. We unpack them one metaphor at a time as we descend into more rarefied domains of existence, from particles to the subquantal world of the microcosm.
Motivation theory suggests if we adopt a mastery orientation to our subject, we will exhibit all the productive learning behaviors we know will work. If we believe we have the natural ability to learn something, we adopt a mastery orientation even if challenged in that area. Simple concepts, not mathematical details, from dynamics and physics are all that is required for illuminating alchemical practice.
Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and the physics of his day, shedding new light on an old science [see THE MODERN ALCHEMIST, Miller, 1994]. This describes the transformation of personality and Self framed on alchemical principles. But both disciplines continue to redefine and refine themselves. The alchemical process is its own solution.
Jung's notions of the centrality of a heroic, striving Self have been transcended with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and healing fictions. Can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself? THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST describes the dynamic blueprints of nature, stripping away Nature's etheric veil, revealing naked awareness.
We get out of that contemplative process what we put in. Once you get it you see the basic concepts are pretty simple. Absolute space is the cosmic zero of our being and when we understand identity with that primordial awareness we have the quintessence. It dwells within us and sustains us from the core of each and every radiant particle of our being and the virtually infinite space between. We need to live every moment from that place, that realization.
Transmodernity is the synthesis of modernity and postmodern philosophy, reflected in alchemical notions of transcendence, transformation and transmutation. So what might a chaos-informed Transmodern Alchemy look like? First and foremost our existential state space is in flux. We've moved beyond our chemical skin bags into growing awareness of our energy bodies and the first glimmerings of our nonlocal virtual nature.
Phenomena no longer correspond with old-paradigm frameworks. Take, for example, our subject experience of time. In Fabric of Reality, physicist David Deutsch explains that we do not experience time flowing, or passing. Instead, we experience differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. He states that we interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. However, we also interpret them incorrectly as evidence that our consciousness or the present or something else moves through time.
Philosophy can be part of everyday life. Alchemy sought the hidden structure of matter. Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating. At the subquantal range of virtual photon flux, this is literally true and the metaphysical substrate of manifestation. At the virtual level, the fiction of ‘reality’ as substantive is revealed and the transparent veil is ripped away.
Self-organizing dynamic transactions combine the positive momentum of the modern philosophy with the emptiness of the Postmodern, the longing for unity of the former and the fragmentation of the latter. Our comprehension of the physical world has been transformed. We are wavefronts in local space, undergird by the vacuum fluctuation of absolute space.
More than one researcher is now suggesting we may find mini-blackholes at the core of all subatomic particles. Material reality, as formation, atom, mass, power, space, time, etc. is an outworn concept that brought order to a Newtonian universe. We are now less concerned with the figurative contents of space than with the dynamic fields of the hyperdimensional creative groundstate itself.
Nature herself calls us toward a deeper understanding, some of which is poetic and some of which is scientific. She requires us to make the experiment on ourselves to penetrate her Mystery. If we seek knowledge through occult means, that is because Nature literally still hides her secret self from direct observation. But magus Aleister Crowley saw her becoming vision when he declared, "Infinite Space is the Goddess Nuit."
The Nature of Nature
Physics defines the nature of nature. There are two branches of physics: theoretical physics predicts and explains the physical behavior of nature, while experimental physics gathers data by observation of physical phenomena using controlled and natural experiments.
Theory provides guidance to experiments. The results of either are not always so clear-cut and are subject to interpretations and scientific revolutions. Thus, we have the Standard Model, Multiverse, M-theory, Holographic, Transactional and various Aether theories, to name a few. A comprehensive theory has to account for both cosmogenesis and quantum weirdness. There is no consensus in physics. Further, some science around zero-point energy has been actively suppressed.
Concerned with different aspects of nature, theory and experiment have a symbiotic relationship as do the spiritual and practical branches of alchemy. Theoretical advances overturn old paradigms. Generally, theory proposes and experiment disposes. But spiritual alchemy is more than theoretical. It is a form of gnosis or direct knowing and observation through meditatio (meditation). What could be more focused than riding a photonic beam down to cosmic zero and on through the looking glass?
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST explores the theoretical usefulness of Dynamics for modeling processes in the alchemical art. Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on mystic technologies, spagyrics, healing, life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics. Like science, it uses thought-experiments and benchwork. The absence of "solid" matter invites us to take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process using Chaos Theory and its related sciences to inform our search.
Dynamics has successfully explained many natural phenomena and been heralded as a new scientific paradigm. The quintessence is now found in nonlinear dynamics, the holographic field and the virtual vacuum of absolute space. In human terms, we find it in our own photonic emissions - bioplasma. Only when we comprehend the groundstate of being can we fathom reality. It fundamentally changes our alchemical and scientific notions about transmutation and transformations in ourselves, matter, systems, patterns and structure.
Psychology and neurology now recognize the psyche and brain as a dynamic dissipative system. Its holographic nature has also been described. Therapeutic techniques lead to reorganization of the individual at a higher level of order. Medicine realizes chaos is essential to health. The artworld recognizes the aesthetic appeal, rhythm and beauty of fractals.
However, the poetic science of alchemy made a workable theoretical and experimental system in which chaos was central centuries ago. Each era views nature from the paradigm of its time. Chaos now means more than it ever did. Paradoxically, it has finally revealed its higher order emerging from the complexity of life.
Modulation Instability
Chaos theory, interdependence of energy and event, is part of process philosophy. Time, contingency, emergence, novelty, creativity and change are metaphysical. As in alchemy, alteration, striving, passage, and novelty-emergence become important in our functional understanding of the real. The initiatory process sets up the initial conditions. Single-minded focus on awareness is gnosis.
Alchemy prescribes a deeply-coherent triple-process remedy, first addressing stress, anxiety and depression. It addresses them with a fundamentally different worldview, that they are essential to kick-start the process. This coherent process self-channels psychodynamic energy toward self-healing.
This nigredo, and the pro-active response to it -- the alchemical intervention -- is the initial condition that drives the alchemical process. This is the purpose, value, meaning and promise in depression or breakdown. Without this lowly ingredient, all comes to naught. Lapses in consciousness teach us as much or more than integration. Gaps in awareness open us to instant insight and intuition -- quantum leaps amplified by the "butterfly effect."
"The alchemists might quicken this process through their outer intervention in matter and their interior practice of soul and spirit. The opus is the work of persons or couples, whose integration or dissociation are operative. While using common references, it values the individual and dynamic over the collective and dogmatic. Through the interior change of the adept and his soror mystica (mystical sister) and the chemical changes in the "well closed vessel" of the retort, the microcosm and macrocosm affect and reflect each other." (Psychoanalysis Dictionary)
Research shows that synchronized chaos may be engineered through perturbation and operational amplification, creating flexibility among many different behaviors. Isolated chaotic systems cannot synchronize, but parts can synchronize through supporting subsystems, like a phase-locked loop. Chaotic signals are generated which drive stable periodic behavior. The presence of chaos appears to be an advantage in controlling dynamic behavior, leading to flexibility and stability.
In an initiatory process, just as small disturbances in chaotic systems radically alter their behavior (”butterfly effect”), tiny adjustments can stabilize behavior. In one form of mind over matter, changing attitudes can change our biochemistry and our subjective outlook. Chaos is the fertile soil of energetic translations of waves of unborn nothingness, the relentless flow of consciousness in search of embodiment and formlessness. Events are more fundamental than things. Novel events are possible in this esoteric paradigm that are unachievable in others.
Solutions are not found as this or that, but in terms of degrees of fractional transformation, relative and novel relationships and fuzzy logic. Focus remains on unsolved problems and unfinished tasks, even if the destination of our journey remains undefined.
Alchemy provides a complex system of imaginatively describing, symbolizing, testing and verifying results. Naturally, we should double-check our confirmation bias, which leads many practitioners to believe they have made the Stone. No two alchemists agree on what this idiosyncratic Stone might be. Jung understood it as transformational consciousness, the means and the goal of the process.
Alchemy is an experiential creative ritual, an amplifier for superconducting consciousness. Small psychoenergetic perturbations, like our alchemical operations, can lead to large changes in the system. The chaos of relative nothingness becomes paramount. Process philosophy holds the promise of inexhaustible capacity for universal creativity and renewal, resacralization, and even sanity from chaos.
More than an experiential process, this is a healing philosophy creating meaning and destiny. What is base within us dies as the more precious is resurrected. Or it comes back as a thing of many colors, sometimes described as a peacock's tail, a symbol of immortality.
Chaos, Art & Transformation
Chaos theory has emerged as a transdisciplinary study. Chaos is the synergistic science of change with constrained randomness. It describes the relationship of order, disorder and self-renewal. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes. They are more than metaphorical and illuminate our Transmodern quest for the Stone. Chaos demands we open to new possibilities, to the unknown, to mystery.
Chaos is the hyperdimensional manifold of all potential orders. Chaos Theory has been associated with every aspect of human behavior. Alchemy is an irreducible fusion of mysticism, science and art that also happens to be therapeutic or growth-promoting and tantalizingly hints at illumination. The process begins with doubts and lack of conviction but time spent on self-knowledge, experiments and spiritual exercises is amply rewarded. Chaos keeps the process fluid. Alchemy calls chaos the "universal solvent."
Alchemy is a nonlinear organizational framework, a model to make sense of our experience, and a means of facilitating transformation. The universe without and within is our alchemical laboratory. The fire is kindled and stoked in the ‘magic theatre’ of the mind and the retort vessel of the body. Alchemy plants virtual fractal seeds in the gaps or intervals of consciousness. You are the portal for the fractal seed to unfold its liberating potential.
The universe is our "parent fractal". Matter and consciousness share deep unity. The outer world we observe through our senses is nothing more than a consistent series of mental images that exists in our mind. Matter itself is an image in the mind, and mental images are the behavior of consciousness.
All conscious states are resonant states. Resonant states enable brains to learn about a changing world throughout life. Resonance arises when bottom-up and top-down feedback processes reach an attentive consensus between what is expected and what is in the world. Mining the soul, we disassemble ourselves to reorganize in more refined form, reintegrating at a holistic level. There are many ways to extract light from chaos.
Chaos Theory & Alchemy
Alchemy calls Chaos the prima and ultima materia. As we practice spiritual and practical alchemy, we come to understand the deep nature of chaos. In this chaosophical philosophy, all systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos. Chaos Theory allows us to follow the Hermetic Spirit deep into the heart of matter and beyond into the subquantal realm in our quest for Nature's secrets. The undecomposible domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source -- a bornless nothingness from which all form emerges.
The void of philosophy and the vacuum state of science is an unmanifest fundamental reality, a virtual field, which is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. In this dynamic model, there are no "things", only energetic events. This holoflux includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all that forms therein. This subquantal domain marks the limit of our ability to peer into the Mystery of nature at cosmic zero.
At the human scale, we are blinded to this primal creative field -- virtual photon flux. Chaos theory as holism without wholes allows us to describe both psyche and matter in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. Chaos provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.
Because interconnectivity is more than metaphorical, realizations translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. The events and experiences of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism. We might call this nonlocal entangled embodiment "metaphorms."
Physics deals with the energetic aspect of the world. Information theory deals with the communicational or patterning aspect. Fractals, nature's dynamic self-organizing pattern, exist in the paradoxical space between dimensions, levels and forces of existence. They arise at the interface between processes, at boundary zones where they serve both to connect and separate multiple levels. They translate information/energy, structuring dimensions by adding or recursively removing structure, embodying process.
Fractal dynamics escalate change from tiny to large scales. Self-organization is an emergent property of systems and organisms, from the cosmos to human beings. Chaotic dynamics governs the emergence of this new order from apparent randomness. The deep coherence of the overall process implies hidden or missing information for holistic patterning within the apparent "noise" or randomness of chaotic patterns.
Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception - the stream of consciousness. The cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction appears at the heart of modern chaos theory and alchemy.
Borrowed Knowledge
The Vedas identify all creative intent and substance as a manifestation of primal consciousness, which is considered the basis of all manifestation. In this worldview, there is nothing but consciousness. Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of "waves of unborn nothingness". Healing is the biological equivalent of creativity. The more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is.
The objective (Sol, Frater) and subjective (Luna, Soror Mystica) are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. They marry in the mystic, in entanglement with Cosmos. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that transcends the tension of opposites. Synthesizing and transcending opposites is the theme of alchemy.
The metaphors of science have increasing relevance in the artworld and transmodern mysticism. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. The same holds true for alchemy. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines. There is a dimension of reality that transcends mind and matter.
The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
Myths are like collective dreams; ritual is an enactment of myth; art is its expression. We create new philosophical and scientific myths to satisfy our need to understand our environment and give us some sense of control and understanding of our place in it. In science we call them ‘models’. Like metaphors, they provide a reference point without defining a reality.
Alchemy is unbound. It evolves like any science or artform through revolutionary paradigm shifts that revision or reframe its philosophy of practice. Chaos theory is an organic model of creation. Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.
Alchemists seek understanding of the relationships between all the elements -- fire, earth, air and water which merge in the quintessence or fifth element. Holistic vision is developed with experiments on matter and self, fantasy and meditation. In alchemy, meditation is an act of imagination fired by awareness and libido, "an inner colloquy with one's good angel." Creative insight, a new perspective on reality, emerges through transpersonal experience.
Alchemy is also a thought experiment that plunges one into the upwelling spring of Nature feeding the roots of matter and psyche. Ultimately, these cycles of experimentation and reflection are warming acts of love that keep the gentle fires of the alchemical transformation going. The formula "VITRIOL" encodes the various operations of the alchemical process.
Creativity is Healing
Alchemy, quantum mysticism and the holographic paradigm reveal the secrets of nature's subquantal realm. Metaphors are instructive. They are a Way of leaping the chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. They can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs -- our spirit and soul.
Alchemists are contemplative researchers versed in the science of personal transformation and the art of inner magic. Alchemical insight ultimately short-circuits self-referential feedback loops, leading to breakthroughs in perception and quality of being. At the groundstate, mind is utterly emptied of all contents. Both physical and mental space dissolve in this exploration.
A dynamic vacuum state of consciousness opens paranormal states of awareness and healing. In much ado about Nothing, the bubble of illusion (all mental and physical phenomena) bursts in primordial awareness. In the highest potential energy state, space, time, mind and matter dissolve into their Source -- the "melted vacuum" of physics, the "clear water" of the alchemists.
Alchemy is a science-art, a tool to describe and mold reality using experimental and meditative techniques. As an art medium, alchemy helps us illustrate nature and our own nature in contemporary terms by creating new paradigms and environments.
Matter has lost its central role in physics to dynamics. Alchemy can be informed by this new physics. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person. Organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory illuminate the alchemical art.
In "Little Essays Toward Truth," Crowley declares that making the Stone is a continuous process of uniting the opposites. In fact, if we just take him quite literally at his word, perhaps he knew more than he let on: The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers—by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work—is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility.
"New avenues of brilliant possibility" is one possible way of saying "radiant potential" of Zero Point Energy -- the luminiferous ether.
“There was something undefined and complete, existing before Heaven and Earth. How still it was, how formless, standing alone and undergoing no change, reaching everywhere with no danger of being exhausted. It may be regarded as the mother of all things. Truthfully it has no name, but I call it Tao.” (Tsu, 1972)
Science-Art Mystics
"We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).
“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).
"Any given state of consciousness is permeated by the clear light of primordial awareness. However solid ice may be, it never loses its true nature, which is water. In the same way, even very obvious concepts are such that their 'place', as it were, their final resting place, does not fall outside the expanse of primordial awareness. They arise within the expanse of primordial awareness and that is where they dissolve." (Dalai Lama)
"To summarize, I have spoken of seven major aspects of Solutio symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego's confrontation with the unconscious that brings about Solutio."(Edinger, 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche)
"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic re-patterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")
"Curious scrutator of all nature,
I have seen gold thick in the depths of the double mercury.
I have seized its substance and surprised its changing.
I explain by that art the soul with the womb of a mother,
Make its home, take it away, and as a kernel
Placed against a grain of wheat, under the humid pollen;
The one plant and the other vine-stock, are the bread and wine.
NOTHING was, God willing, NOTHING became something,
I doubted it, I sought that on which the universe rests,
NOTHING preserves the equilibrium and serves to sustain.
Then, with the weight of praise and of blame.
I weighed the eternal, it called my soul,
I died, I adored, I knew NOTHING more."
--trans. Manley Palmer Hall in Sages & Seers, from original ms. in British Museum
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST by Iona Miller, 2009 transmodernalchemy.iwarp.com
"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")
"Alchemy posits an original unitary energy which separated in space-time into distinct physical elements, "falling apart" and differentiating in the four directions. Perceived as transmutable through shared qualities or correspondences, these elements could one day be reunited in a reconstituted wholeness. The dicta—"Return to chaos is essential to the work," "Volatize the fixed and fix the volatile," and "Dissolve and Coagulate"—express a dialectic process between complements and opposites in analysis and synthesis." (Psychoanalysis Dictionary)
"The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call a 'field of force.' The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-a-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work." ~ Fulcanelli, 1937
Transmodern Alchemy & Chaos
Alchemy is a science-art and tradition of participatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, or to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical or New Age jargon. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them.
Like the cryptic tomes and dense texts of alchemy, unfamiliar scientific or philosophical theories require thoughtful reflection until they take root in our awareness. Models from many disciplines weave together to amplify the meaning of alchemical process and patterns. Old experiments can be revisioned in a new light while new dynamical phenomena remain to be discovered. We can even revision the alchemical formula for surviving death.
Each technical or symbolic language seems like learning a foreign language, but becomes second-nature once we sense the overall gestalt. It takes contemplation and consideration of implications. We unpack them one metaphor at a time as we descend into more rarefied domains of existence, from particles to the subquantal world of the microcosm.
Motivation theory suggests if we adopt a mastery orientation to our subject, we will exhibit all the productive learning behaviors we know will work. If we believe we have the natural ability to learn something, we adopt a mastery orientation even if challenged in that area. Simple concepts, not mathematical details, from dynamics and physics are all that is required for illuminating alchemical practice.
Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and the physics of his day, shedding new light on an old science [see THE MODERN ALCHEMIST, Miller, 1994]. This describes the transformation of personality and Self framed on alchemical principles. But both disciplines continue to redefine and refine themselves. The alchemical process is its own solution.
Jung's notions of the centrality of a heroic, striving Self have been transcended with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and healing fictions. Can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself? THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST describes the dynamic blueprints of nature, stripping away Nature's etheric veil, revealing naked awareness.
We get out of that contemplative process what we put in. Once you get it you see the basic concepts are pretty simple. Absolute space is the cosmic zero of our being and when we understand identity with that primordial awareness we have the quintessence. It dwells within us and sustains us from the core of each and every radiant particle of our being and the virtually infinite space between. We need to live every moment from that place, that realization.
Transmodernity is the synthesis of modernity and postmodern philosophy, reflected in alchemical notions of transcendence, transformation and transmutation. So what might a chaos-informed Transmodern Alchemy look like? First and foremost our existential state space is in flux. We've moved beyond our chemical skin bags into growing awareness of our energy bodies and the first glimmerings of our nonlocal virtual nature.
Phenomena no longer correspond with old-paradigm frameworks. Take, for example, our subject experience of time. In Fabric of Reality, physicist David Deutsch explains that we do not experience time flowing, or passing. Instead, we experience differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. He states that we interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. However, we also interpret them incorrectly as evidence that our consciousness or the present or something else moves through time.
Philosophy can be part of everyday life. Alchemy sought the hidden structure of matter. Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating. At the subquantal range of virtual photon flux, this is literally true and the metaphysical substrate of manifestation. At the virtual level, the fiction of ‘reality’ as substantive is revealed and the transparent veil is ripped away.
Self-organizing dynamic transactions combine the positive momentum of the modern philosophy with the emptiness of the Postmodern, the longing for unity of the former and the fragmentation of the latter. Our comprehension of the physical world has been transformed. We are wavefronts in local space, undergird by the vacuum fluctuation of absolute space.
More than one researcher is now suggesting we may find mini-blackholes at the core of all subatomic particles. Material reality, as formation, atom, mass, power, space, time, etc. is an outworn concept that brought order to a Newtonian universe. We are now less concerned with the figurative contents of space than with the dynamic fields of the hyperdimensional creative groundstate itself.
Nature herself calls us toward a deeper understanding, some of which is poetic and some of which is scientific. She requires us to make the experiment on ourselves to penetrate her Mystery. If we seek knowledge through occult means, that is because Nature literally still hides her secret self from direct observation. But magus Aleister Crowley saw her becoming vision when he declared, "Infinite Space is the Goddess Nuit."
The Nature of Nature
Physics defines the nature of nature. There are two branches of physics: theoretical physics predicts and explains the physical behavior of nature, while experimental physics gathers data by observation of physical phenomena using controlled and natural experiments.
Theory provides guidance to experiments. The results of either are not always so clear-cut and are subject to interpretations and scientific revolutions. Thus, we have the Standard Model, Multiverse, M-theory, Holographic, Transactional and various Aether theories, to name a few. A comprehensive theory has to account for both cosmogenesis and quantum weirdness. There is no consensus in physics. Further, some science around zero-point energy has been actively suppressed.
Concerned with different aspects of nature, theory and experiment have a symbiotic relationship as do the spiritual and practical branches of alchemy. Theoretical advances overturn old paradigms. Generally, theory proposes and experiment disposes. But spiritual alchemy is more than theoretical. It is a form of gnosis or direct knowing and observation through meditatio (meditation). What could be more focused than riding a photonic beam down to cosmic zero and on through the looking glass?
THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST explores the theoretical usefulness of Dynamics for modeling processes in the alchemical art. Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on mystic technologies, spagyrics, healing, life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics. Like science, it uses thought-experiments and benchwork. The absence of "solid" matter invites us to take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process using Chaos Theory and its related sciences to inform our search.
Dynamics has successfully explained many natural phenomena and been heralded as a new scientific paradigm. The quintessence is now found in nonlinear dynamics, the holographic field and the virtual vacuum of absolute space. In human terms, we find it in our own photonic emissions - bioplasma. Only when we comprehend the groundstate of being can we fathom reality. It fundamentally changes our alchemical and scientific notions about transmutation and transformations in ourselves, matter, systems, patterns and structure.
Psychology and neurology now recognize the psyche and brain as a dynamic dissipative system. Its holographic nature has also been described. Therapeutic techniques lead to reorganization of the individual at a higher level of order. Medicine realizes chaos is essential to health. The artworld recognizes the aesthetic appeal, rhythm and beauty of fractals.
However, the poetic science of alchemy made a workable theoretical and experimental system in which chaos was central centuries ago. Each era views nature from the paradigm of its time. Chaos now means more than it ever did. Paradoxically, it has finally revealed its higher order emerging from the complexity of life.
Modulation Instability
Chaos theory, interdependence of energy and event, is part of process philosophy. Time, contingency, emergence, novelty, creativity and change are metaphysical. As in alchemy, alteration, striving, passage, and novelty-emergence become important in our functional understanding of the real. The initiatory process sets up the initial conditions. Single-minded focus on awareness is gnosis.
Alchemy prescribes a deeply-coherent triple-process remedy, first addressing stress, anxiety and depression. It addresses them with a fundamentally different worldview, that they are essential to kick-start the process. This coherent process self-channels psychodynamic energy toward self-healing.
This nigredo, and the pro-active response to it -- the alchemical intervention -- is the initial condition that drives the alchemical process. This is the purpose, value, meaning and promise in depression or breakdown. Without this lowly ingredient, all comes to naught. Lapses in consciousness teach us as much or more than integration. Gaps in awareness open us to instant insight and intuition -- quantum leaps amplified by the "butterfly effect."
"The alchemists might quicken this process through their outer intervention in matter and their interior practice of soul and spirit. The opus is the work of persons or couples, whose integration or dissociation are operative. While using common references, it values the individual and dynamic over the collective and dogmatic. Through the interior change of the adept and his soror mystica (mystical sister) and the chemical changes in the "well closed vessel" of the retort, the microcosm and macrocosm affect and reflect each other." (Psychoanalysis Dictionary)
Research shows that synchronized chaos may be engineered through perturbation and operational amplification, creating flexibility among many different behaviors. Isolated chaotic systems cannot synchronize, but parts can synchronize through supporting subsystems, like a phase-locked loop. Chaotic signals are generated which drive stable periodic behavior. The presence of chaos appears to be an advantage in controlling dynamic behavior, leading to flexibility and stability.
In an initiatory process, just as small disturbances in chaotic systems radically alter their behavior (”butterfly effect”), tiny adjustments can stabilize behavior. In one form of mind over matter, changing attitudes can change our biochemistry and our subjective outlook. Chaos is the fertile soil of energetic translations of waves of unborn nothingness, the relentless flow of consciousness in search of embodiment and formlessness. Events are more fundamental than things. Novel events are possible in this esoteric paradigm that are unachievable in others.
Solutions are not found as this or that, but in terms of degrees of fractional transformation, relative and novel relationships and fuzzy logic. Focus remains on unsolved problems and unfinished tasks, even if the destination of our journey remains undefined.
Alchemy provides a complex system of imaginatively describing, symbolizing, testing and verifying results. Naturally, we should double-check our confirmation bias, which leads many practitioners to believe they have made the Stone. No two alchemists agree on what this idiosyncratic Stone might be. Jung understood it as transformational consciousness, the means and the goal of the process.
Alchemy is an experiential creative ritual, an amplifier for superconducting consciousness. Small psychoenergetic perturbations, like our alchemical operations, can lead to large changes in the system. The chaos of relative nothingness becomes paramount. Process philosophy holds the promise of inexhaustible capacity for universal creativity and renewal, resacralization, and even sanity from chaos.
More than an experiential process, this is a healing philosophy creating meaning and destiny. What is base within us dies as the more precious is resurrected. Or it comes back as a thing of many colors, sometimes described as a peacock's tail, a symbol of immortality.
Chaos, Art & Transformation
Chaos theory has emerged as a transdisciplinary study. Chaos is the synergistic science of change with constrained randomness. It describes the relationship of order, disorder and self-renewal. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes. They are more than metaphorical and illuminate our Transmodern quest for the Stone. Chaos demands we open to new possibilities, to the unknown, to mystery.
Chaos is the hyperdimensional manifold of all potential orders. Chaos Theory has been associated with every aspect of human behavior. Alchemy is an irreducible fusion of mysticism, science and art that also happens to be therapeutic or growth-promoting and tantalizingly hints at illumination. The process begins with doubts and lack of conviction but time spent on self-knowledge, experiments and spiritual exercises is amply rewarded. Chaos keeps the process fluid. Alchemy calls chaos the "universal solvent."
Alchemy is a nonlinear organizational framework, a model to make sense of our experience, and a means of facilitating transformation. The universe without and within is our alchemical laboratory. The fire is kindled and stoked in the ‘magic theatre’ of the mind and the retort vessel of the body. Alchemy plants virtual fractal seeds in the gaps or intervals of consciousness. You are the portal for the fractal seed to unfold its liberating potential.
The universe is our "parent fractal". Matter and consciousness share deep unity. The outer world we observe through our senses is nothing more than a consistent series of mental images that exists in our mind. Matter itself is an image in the mind, and mental images are the behavior of consciousness.
All conscious states are resonant states. Resonant states enable brains to learn about a changing world throughout life. Resonance arises when bottom-up and top-down feedback processes reach an attentive consensus between what is expected and what is in the world. Mining the soul, we disassemble ourselves to reorganize in more refined form, reintegrating at a holistic level. There are many ways to extract light from chaos.
Chaos Theory & Alchemy
Alchemy calls Chaos the prima and ultima materia. As we practice spiritual and practical alchemy, we come to understand the deep nature of chaos. In this chaosophical philosophy, all systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos. Chaos Theory allows us to follow the Hermetic Spirit deep into the heart of matter and beyond into the subquantal realm in our quest for Nature's secrets. The undecomposible domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source -- a bornless nothingness from which all form emerges.
The void of philosophy and the vacuum state of science is an unmanifest fundamental reality, a virtual field, which is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. In this dynamic model, there are no "things", only energetic events. This holoflux includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all that forms therein. This subquantal domain marks the limit of our ability to peer into the Mystery of nature at cosmic zero.
At the human scale, we are blinded to this primal creative field -- virtual photon flux. Chaos theory as holism without wholes allows us to describe both psyche and matter in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. Chaos provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.
Because interconnectivity is more than metaphorical, realizations translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. The events and experiences of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism. We might call this nonlocal entangled embodiment "metaphorms."
Physics deals with the energetic aspect of the world. Information theory deals with the communicational or patterning aspect. Fractals, nature's dynamic self-organizing pattern, exist in the paradoxical space between dimensions, levels and forces of existence. They arise at the interface between processes, at boundary zones where they serve both to connect and separate multiple levels. They translate information/energy, structuring dimensions by adding or recursively removing structure, embodying process.
Fractal dynamics escalate change from tiny to large scales. Self-organization is an emergent property of systems and organisms, from the cosmos to human beings. Chaotic dynamics governs the emergence of this new order from apparent randomness. The deep coherence of the overall process implies hidden or missing information for holistic patterning within the apparent "noise" or randomness of chaotic patterns.
Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception - the stream of consciousness. The cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction appears at the heart of modern chaos theory and alchemy.
Borrowed Knowledge
The Vedas identify all creative intent and substance as a manifestation of primal consciousness, which is considered the basis of all manifestation. In this worldview, there is nothing but consciousness. Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of "waves of unborn nothingness". Healing is the biological equivalent of creativity. The more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is.
The objective (Sol, Frater) and subjective (Luna, Soror Mystica) are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. They marry in the mystic, in entanglement with Cosmos. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that transcends the tension of opposites. Synthesizing and transcending opposites is the theme of alchemy.
The metaphors of science have increasing relevance in the artworld and transmodern mysticism. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. The same holds true for alchemy. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines. There is a dimension of reality that transcends mind and matter.
The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
Myths are like collective dreams; ritual is an enactment of myth; art is its expression. We create new philosophical and scientific myths to satisfy our need to understand our environment and give us some sense of control and understanding of our place in it. In science we call them ‘models’. Like metaphors, they provide a reference point without defining a reality.
Alchemy is unbound. It evolves like any science or artform through revolutionary paradigm shifts that revision or reframe its philosophy of practice. Chaos theory is an organic model of creation. Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.
Alchemists seek understanding of the relationships between all the elements -- fire, earth, air and water which merge in the quintessence or fifth element. Holistic vision is developed with experiments on matter and self, fantasy and meditation. In alchemy, meditation is an act of imagination fired by awareness and libido, "an inner colloquy with one's good angel." Creative insight, a new perspective on reality, emerges through transpersonal experience.
Alchemy is also a thought experiment that plunges one into the upwelling spring of Nature feeding the roots of matter and psyche. Ultimately, these cycles of experimentation and reflection are warming acts of love that keep the gentle fires of the alchemical transformation going. The formula "VITRIOL" encodes the various operations of the alchemical process.
Creativity is Healing
Alchemy, quantum mysticism and the holographic paradigm reveal the secrets of nature's subquantal realm. Metaphors are instructive. They are a Way of leaping the chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. They can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs -- our spirit and soul.
Alchemists are contemplative researchers versed in the science of personal transformation and the art of inner magic. Alchemical insight ultimately short-circuits self-referential feedback loops, leading to breakthroughs in perception and quality of being. At the groundstate, mind is utterly emptied of all contents. Both physical and mental space dissolve in this exploration.
A dynamic vacuum state of consciousness opens paranormal states of awareness and healing. In much ado about Nothing, the bubble of illusion (all mental and physical phenomena) bursts in primordial awareness. In the highest potential energy state, space, time, mind and matter dissolve into their Source -- the "melted vacuum" of physics, the "clear water" of the alchemists.
Alchemy is a science-art, a tool to describe and mold reality using experimental and meditative techniques. As an art medium, alchemy helps us illustrate nature and our own nature in contemporary terms by creating new paradigms and environments.
Matter has lost its central role in physics to dynamics. Alchemy can be informed by this new physics. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person. Organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory illuminate the alchemical art.
In "Little Essays Toward Truth," Crowley declares that making the Stone is a continuous process of uniting the opposites. In fact, if we just take him quite literally at his word, perhaps he knew more than he let on: The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers—by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work—is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility.
"New avenues of brilliant possibility" is one possible way of saying "radiant potential" of Zero Point Energy -- the luminiferous ether.
“There was something undefined and complete, existing before Heaven and Earth. How still it was, how formless, standing alone and undergoing no change, reaching everywhere with no danger of being exhausted. It may be regarded as the mother of all things. Truthfully it has no name, but I call it Tao.” (Tsu, 1972)
Science-Art Mystics
"We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).
“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).
"Any given state of consciousness is permeated by the clear light of primordial awareness. However solid ice may be, it never loses its true nature, which is water. In the same way, even very obvious concepts are such that their 'place', as it were, their final resting place, does not fall outside the expanse of primordial awareness. They arise within the expanse of primordial awareness and that is where they dissolve." (Dalai Lama)
"To summarize, I have spoken of seven major aspects of Solutio symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego's confrontation with the unconscious that brings about Solutio."(Edinger, 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche)
"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic re-patterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")
Science-Art Mystics
"The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call a 'field of force.' The field acts on the observer and puts him in a priveleged position vis-a-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work." ~ Fulcanelli, 1937
"We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).
“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).
"Any given state of consciousness is permeated by the clear light of primordial awareness. However solid ice may be, it never loses its true nature, which is water. In the same way, even very obvious concepts are such that their 'place', as it were, their final resting place, does not fall outside the expanse of primordial awareness. They arise within the expanse of primordial awareness and that is where they dissolve." (Dalai Lama)
"Somewhere in the welter of Quantum Theory & Chaos Theory the paradigm is already bom, & waits for us to assist at the mystery of its naming, of its transmutation from potentiality to actuality. In this action poets & physicists may play equal parts, for the glory of Quantum Theory is that by restoring consciousness to its theorems it has turned science once again into a type of "Natural Philosophy" -- or alchemy." (Hakim Bey)
"To summarize, I have spoken of seven major aspects of Solutio symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego's confrontation with the unconscious that brings about Solutio."(Edinger, 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche)
"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")
Emanation: Creative Source
Alchemy calls Chaos the prima and ultima materia. In this chaosophical philosophy, all systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos. The trancendent principle "emanation" is primordial. All derived or secondary things proceed or flow from the primal Source. It eliminates will from the theory of creation. There is no hand of a supreme artisan who finds matter at his or her disposal. All things, actually or only apparently material, emerge or flow from the dynamic primal principle.
Unlike evolution, the process of development, emanation declares the immutability of the first principle. Emanation involves a series of descending stages, a subjective gnosis, not a developmental evolution that goes from less to more perfect. Thus, chaotic excitability is a paradigm of emergence, transcendent yet immanent potential. The undecomposable domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source -- a bornless nothingness from which all form proceeds.
There is an unmanifest fundamental reality, a virtual field, which is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. In this dynamic model, there are no "things", only energetic events. This holoflux includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and also of that which forms therein. This subquantal domain marks the limit of our ability to peer into the Mystery of nature at cosmic zero, the undifferentiated matrix.
At the human scale, we are blinded to this primal creative field, virtual photon flux. Chaos theory as holism without wholes allows us to describe both psyche and matter in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. Chaos provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.
Global recruitment is characteristic of chaotic patterning. It allows the best balance between random fluctuations, permitting discoveries and innovations. Changing the activity of just one element can unleash an avalanche of changes in the patterns that might have otherwise occurred (“butterfly effect”). A structural perturbation is a permanent transmutation for the functions of a network.
"When nature must correctly respond to a sequence of events whose nature and arrival time are essentially random, then nature uses the richness of chaos to nondeterministically solve its problem, probability one. Using direct or indirect feedback, nature uses and controls chaos to achieve its goals. But should not this fact embolden us to accept the challenge: 'What nature can do; man can do better'? Indeed, man has already begun to use and control chaos..." (Joseph Ford, The New Physics)
Metaphorms
Because interconnectivity is more than metaphorical, realizations translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. The events and experiences of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism.
We might call this nonlocal entangled embodiment "metaphorms." Fractals are a new way of thinking about structure and form. Soul is made in the imaginal field, in the fractal reiteration deepening experience by muting or facilitating expression and inhibiting or modulating participation or choice.
Our universe is a system of interactive field phenomena, consisting of princples, domains or levels of observation (biology, physics, chemistry, etc.). Our anatomical shape displays motion (digestion, respiration, growing, moving, reproducing, thinking, etc) and emotion (open, closed, animated, repressed). Experience is sensuous. We see, feel, hear, taste and use metaphors of sensory experience to describe our emotions, thoughts, desires, intentions, and the processing and storing of the elements of experience itself.
Mind is metaphysical, a reflection of experience in which we store and sort information in the form (shape) of our experiences. Experience is primary, our only test for truth, our only standard of knowledge. We want knowledge so we can improve our experiences by understanding the principles governing them. Metaphors are how we know what we know and what it's "like." Metaphoric language helps us intuit there is ‘more to the picture’ than we ‘real’ize. So do science, art and Hermetics with its system of correspondences.
A metaphorm is any object, image, concept, or process that we compare to something else in the whirling chaos of unprocessed elements. Metaphorms imply relationships between things that we cannnot explicitly compare nor literally equate. It matters little whether a metaphorm is literally true or not. What is important is that it binds our lives to the vast unconsumable life of the universe, giving us a taste of immortality. Intuition involves both discovering new connections and innovative solutions. This is a synergetic process.
Metaphorming encompasses all forms of metaphor including analogy, allegory, allusion, symbolism, and figures of speech. Compressed i nformation is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols. Illustrative art in alchemy uses reiteration to solidify meaning. Each image contains a fractal-like representation of the past. We can involve all of our physical senses in a synesthesia using every mode of thinking and felt-sense (stomach, abdomen, chest, throat) of our sensory-motor nervous system to create an identification or state change.
Outer Body Experience
An outer body experience is one of vastly expanded awareness. We aren't out of the body but recognize our vast potential connections as oceanic experience. We are wave upon interpenetrating waves of virtually infinite potential. Alchemy is all about enhancing psychophysical imaginal capacity. We can tap the holographic memories of our existential blueprint, becoming transparent to transcendence, rather than operating well below our optimal capacity at the plateau of consensus reality or 'normalcy.'
Felt-sense is our physical awareness of life processes. The body takes precedence in bottom-up processing. Felt-sense helps us know what is at the edge of our thinking. We learn to articulate our implicit knowing. Focusing attention inward in the body, we learn to sense fear, tensions or openness in centers in our energy body. There is no disowning, but a re-embracing and expansion of the body in amplified identification, including cosmic zero-point.
Old Millenium notions, (medieval, classical and Theosophical), of astral projection meant consciousness left the physical body in the subtle body of light and was free to roam the astral plane or travel to other places on Earth. It involved dissociation from the physical body to which the aspirant remained attached by a Silver Cord. It probably developed from Near-Death Experiences (NDE), the shutting down of certain brain processes in biological crisis, commonly including a tunnel of light.
New Millennium soul travel is a slightly different approach, requiring no disowning of the gross material body in order to incorporate subtle aspects of the universal. In this sense, it stays perhaps closer to the alchemical phase state, One World. Rather than entering a trance state, the aspirant remains lucid, engaging in breathing and visualization practices. To journey outward or inward is essentially the same. Transmodern "etheric travel" means folding space and time, travelling without moving about one's conceptually expanded Being. It has been called cosmic consciousness.
We can view ourselves as all parts of the gestalt, including the primordial ground as well as any systems within it. There is simply no sense of separation. It is a subtle but important shift in awareness. We can experience the whole spectrum of the taxonomy of altered or discreet states of consciousness (Tart), the "heavens and hells" or bardo states (Leary, et al) of other models. The field patterns of the finest organization of energy and matter also affect the evolution of the cosmos.
You are a nonlocal quantum field entity in coherent connection with All. The energy “rush” of meditation comes when either the hyperarousal or hyperquiescent state “spills over” into stimulating its complementary system. When both parts (sympathetic and parasympathetic) of the autonomic nervous system go online simultaneously, the limbic system goes wild with emotion, total absorption and oceanic bliss.
This phase space is reflected in the transgender reunion of male-female imagery of the kundalini serpent power and the yin and yang of the Tao and the royal wedding of Frater and Soror Mystica in alchemy. When both systems go into maximal discharge, this neurochemical flux is subjectively perceived as Absolute Unity of Being, boundlessness, timelessness, and sacredness. Our relationship to humans, earth, and cosmos is no longer one of a relationship to the Other. All sense of false self evaporates as ego dissolves.
The unfathomable ocean of our virtuality is a dynamic energetic infusion, an expanded sense of NowHere, a leap of faith into the Abyss. We are challenged to fully comprehend the truth of our existence. This is how we become more than we formerly thought we were. As William James said, "My experience is what I attend to." Negative time extracts massergy from the limitless ocean of roiling subspace making negentropic or syntropic transformation in a nanosecond a real potential.
The quantum vaccum is a highly anomlous universal energy realm of pure potential. We are that nondual dynamic "ocean of active information" in wave form. It is both the source and destination of all matter in the universe, and thus of any form of consciousness which may emerge through its autopoeitic process. The human brain, with its pronounced and constant state of chaos, could receive and amplify such signals, expressed both consciously and unconsciously in our biophsyical self and our ephemeral thoughts and intuitions.
We integrate through our immediate experience of paranormal potential. We can live as uncollapsing quantum superpositions in that bountiful ocean of soul and spirit. Distractions cease, replaced by the direct impact of oceanic expansion of the energetically superdense quantum vacuum -- purely informational scalar force.
We are modified physically in this way by breathing as the negentropic potential (bioplasma) of cosmos. Scalars are massless and vectorless -- neither ‘light’ nor ‘matter’, but longitudinally propagating fluctuations below the energy-threshold of particle pair-creation. This produces a self-generating cosmological feedback cycle which translates into interference patterns created by the motion of charged particles modifying the local topology of the vacuum. The modified vacuum field modifies in turn the motion of the particles and your being is transmuted.
In a system driven beyond equilibrium, the subtle interconnectedness beneath its surface emerges to reshape the system itself. Even visual images can be derived from non-visual sources. Metaphorms are ways of implying likeness between things, such as the macrocosm and microcosm, the cosmos and the weird world of the quantum and subspace domains. Alchemy tells us, "As Above, So Below." In this way it anticipated our discovery of scale-invariant fractals. What is true for subspace is true for superspace.
Our brain imposes its dynamics on everything we make--from concepts about the universe to techniques used to test or represent these concepts, from chaos to order. Process morphs connect us with everything we create and are influenced by. Metaphorming is a principal means of exploring the world, relating information from one discipline to another, connecting potentially all sources and forms of information. Metaphorms are expressions of nature's unity.
Science also uses metaphorms. In Bohm's causal interpretation of QM, 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.
Physicists, artists and alchemists are metaphorming when tthey create words or images for describing novel relationships or creative visualization. Visual metaphorms, in particular, inspire hypotheses, and vice versa. Alchemists, scientists and artists take two facts or experiences that seem separated, and find a likeness in them, and create a unity by showing the likeness.
All science-art is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. Somtimes they reveal themselves in synchronicities. Synchronicity is a bubbling up of ever-fresh forms, patterns, and connections that transcend all boundaries between mind and matter, the physical and the spiritual.
Dynamics
Physics deals with the energetic aspect of the world, how elements bond together and interact. Information theory deals with the communicational or patterning aspect. Fractals, nature's dynamic self-organizing pattern, exist in the paradoxical space between dimensions, levels and forces of existence. They arise at the interface between processes, at boundary zones where they serve both to connect and separate multiple levels. They translate information/energy, structuring dimensions by adding or recursively removing structure, embodying process.
Fractal dynamics escalate change from tiny to large scales. Self-organization is an emergent property of systems and organisms, from the cosmos to human beings. Chaotic dynamics governs the emergence of this new order from apparent randomness. The deep coherence of the overall process implies hidden or missing information for holistic patterning within the apparent "noise" or randomness of chaotic patterns.
Feedback creates pathways in fractal generation. Fractal patterns produce complicated networks as a result of the propagation of signals through them. Networks can be thrown into chaotic behavior in response to the propagation of complex input. Human beings are systems with many functions and feedback and feedforward paths. Transformation takes place as one configuration or expression changes into another in accordance with chaotic dynamics, global repatterning.
Transformation can involve several, nonlinear phase changes. When a complex signal is propagated through a network with feedback or feedforward paths, some networks remain stable, and other network values "explode." The art of the therapeutic transformation means using "controlled accidents" in the ever-changing context of resonating mental spaces. The "accidentals" are intuitive communication from the unconscious, from the whole. The concepts of chaos and chance just describe our gaps in awareness, the phenomena of which we are ignorant.
Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception - the stream of consciousness. The cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction appears at the heart of modern chaos theory and alchemy
The Vedas identify all creative intent and substance as a manifestation of primal consciousness, which is considered the basis of all manifestation. In this worldview, there is nothing but consciousness. Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of "waves of unborn nothingness". Healing is the biological equivalent of creativity. The more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is.
Coniunctio
The objective (frater) and subjective mode (soror mystica) are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. They marry in the mystic, in entanglement with Cosmos. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that lies beyond the dialectic in the tension of opposites. Synthesizing and transcending opposites is the theme of alchemy.
The metaphors of science have gained increasing relevance in the artworld and transmodern mysticism. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. The same holds true for alchemy. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines. There is a dimension of reality that transcends mind and matter.
The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence.
The alchemical operation Solutio, the Universal Solvent is called "the root of alchemy," corresponding with the element water. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It is a dissolution that precedes recrystallization.
It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns--a psychedelic, expanded state. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual, and philosophy. These texts were based on sympathetic magic, that like substances sharing an essence could influence one another through resonance effects, synchronicities. Like cures like.
As the god who presides over boundaries, Hermes is able to transcend them. He is therefore also the ruler of ceremonial magic, which transcends the limits of ordinary consciousness, communing with the divine. Identification with a given energy is accomplished by a three-fold ritual, which echoes the generic creative process:
1). Separation from the profane or ordinary state of consciousness. Dissolution of the ordinary state of conscious.
2). The transition stage, or twilight zone which lies between them. Creative or chaotic consciousness.
3). The new order or perception of reality which occurs in the sacred time of the soul. Identification with ehanced sense of self, greater well-being.
Hermes is The Magus, the magician, the lord of boundaries, or doorways, the threshold or liminal area. The inbetween, or twilight zone, enables a state of receptivity to become established. It allows an emptying process, a letting go. Ritual acts reawaken deep layers of the psyche. This brings the mythological or archetypal ideas back to memory.
Myths, according to d’Aquili, present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death. Because of a basic function of the brain he calls that ‘binary operator.’ This function abstracts qualities of things and arranges them as pairs of opposites, or dyads, whose meaning is intimately related to its partner. He conjectures that it is located on the inferior parietal lobe of the dominant side, and is one way the mind seeks to understand the world. Myths play on these antinomies and propose solutions to them.
Myths are like collective dreams; ritual is an enactment of myth. So, we create myths to satisfy our need to understand our environment and give us some sense of control over it, or an understanding of our place in it. A given myth has stability of structural relationship and meaning. In science we call them ‘models’. Like metaphors, they provide a reference point without defining a reality.
What's New with My Subject? Meditatio, Imaginatio, OperatioAlchemy is an irreducible fusion of mysticism, science and art that also happens to be therapeutic or growth-promoting and tantalizingly hints at illumination. The process begins with doubts and lack of conviction but time spent on self-knowledge and spiritual exercises is amply rewarded.
Alchemy is unbound. It evolves like any science or artform through revolutionary paradigm shifts that revision or reframe its philosophy of practice. Chaos theory is an organic model of creation. Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.
The Universe is a fractal manifestation of the interaction or interdependence of chaos and order. Nature and evolution are complimentary systems evolving at the edge of chaos the source of the genesis of new forms. Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree. We are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings we are both/and psychobiological.
Alchemists seek understanding of the relationships between all the elements. Holistic vision is developed with experiments on matter and self, fantasy and meditation. In alchemy, meditation is reflection, inner dialogue and an extended act of active imagination fired by awareness and libido, "an inner colloquy with one's good angel." Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that lead to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.
Both perception and cognition can be modeled as a transition from a state of chaos representing the unrecognized condition, or the unresolved problem, to a state of order. Creativity or learning can emerge spontaneously, from exploring states of confusion, to the instantaneous insight of a “Eureka” moment, or knowing state through bifurcation to a new attractor, to chaotic resolution. The trick is experiencing "emptyness" as the initial condition of consciousness. The openness of empty awareness is the key.
At supercritical junctions we either breakdown (emergency) or increase adaptation (emergence) with more creative solutions. Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both informational content and the rate of information processing. Creative holistic repatterning is introduced into the human system through the psyche as nonmanifest yet phenomenological images, symbols, and patterning information.
Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the creative process. It is knowing through living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy. Imagination is the voice of creativity. It is the primary way we experience soul; imagination embodies it’s own reality. It is self-revelatory. Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.
Alchemy is also a thought experiment that plunges one into the upwelling spring of Nature feeding the roots of matter and psyche. Ultimately, these cycles of experimentation and reflection are warming acts of love that keep the gentle fires of the alchemical transformation going. The formula "VITRIOL" encodes the various operations of the alchemical process.
In the Transmodern union of opposites, the real and the unreal are no longer opposed. The concept of reality emerges, no longer bound to the material world but turned into fiction because of it. Reality and existence are no longer synonymous – it is a type of reality that continues to “be” even when it may not “exist” and does not comply with the simple status of simulacrum -- virtuality. Thus alchemy shares much in common with quantum mysticism and the holographic paradigm which seek the secrets of nature's subquantal realm. Doing so creates a hyperreality, revealing a glimpse of the future.
The problem becomes not one of how to know something radically new, but how to learn something radically new. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphors help us makes this leap, help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by this metaphor.
We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. The possibilities for concepts and thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it, especially the sensory-motor system. Conceptual metaphors appear to be neural maps that link sensory-motor domains in the brain to regions where more abstract reasoning is done. This allows sensory-motors structures in the brain to play a role in abstract reasoning (Lakoff, 1999).
In fact, when metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.
The problem becomes not one of how to know something radically new, but how to learn something radically new. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphors help us makes this leap, help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by this metaphor.
We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. The possibilities for concepts and thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it, especially the sensory-motor system. Conceptual metaphors appear to be neural maps that link sensory-motor domains in the brain to regions where more abstract reasoning is done. This allows sensory-motors structures in the brain to play a role in abstract reasoning (Lakoff, 1999).
In fact, when metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.
Melting Point of Formation
Alchemists are contemplative researchers versed in the science of personal transformation and the art of inner magic. Alchemical insight ultimately short-circuits self-referential feedback loops, leading to breakthroughs in perception and quality of being. At the groundstate, mind is utterly emptied of all contents. Both physical and mental space dissolve in this exploration.
A dynamic vacuum state of consciousness opens paranormal states of awareness and healing. In much ado about Nothing, the bubble of illusion (all mental and physical phenomena) bursts in primordial awareness. In the highest potential energy state, space, time, mind and matter dissolve into their Source -- the "melted vacuum" of physics, the "clear water" (Cole, 2001) of the alchemists (Lambspring). This unencumbered non-dual state is innate radiant potential. The upwelling geyser of all internal and external phenomena emerge from this dynamic absolute space beyond all internal structure.
According to King, ‘If a series of small bifurcations occur resulting from successive [quantum] computational steps, we would say the conclusion was arrived at deductively, but if however a major global bifurcation is required to reach self-consistency, an intuitive leap of understanding may result.'
The transition from chaos models the sudden moment of insight -- the "a-ha" or "eureka", deductive cognition, sensory recognition and decision-making -- or the bursting bubble into primordial awareness. Computational predictivity is thus complemented by conscious anticipation enabled through quantum transaction and manifested in the transition from chaos.
The fear, danger, anxiety and stress produced during confrontation with the transpersonal psyche can create a personal catastrophe, a spiritual emergency. Catastrophic chaos usually leads to what is called a bifurcation or splitting of the energy in two different directions. The experience may be shattering. The interface of the conscious ego and the numinous must be effected with some care so the later doesn’t take over.
But sometimes regression serves the process of evolution and leads to creative transformation and renewal of the self on a higher level. Therefore, the potential benefits of the transformative path make the risks worthwhile. Rather than breakdown, it may lead to artistic, scientific, or spiritual breakthrough, creativity and expression.
Alchemy is a science-art, a tool to describe and mold reality using experimental and meditative techniques. As an art medium, alchemy helps us illustrate nature and our own nature in contemporary terms by creating new paradigms and environments. Alchemists manufactured and articulated theories of reality and healing fantasies of the body/soul/spirit, as well as dyes, paints, and medicines or improving the quality of metals and glass.
Alchemy is a tradition of particpatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, nor to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical or New Age jargon. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them.
Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on an old science. But that discipline continues to redefine itself. Jung's notions of a heroic, striving Self have been transcended with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and healing fictions. Can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself?
Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on mystic technologies, life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics. We can take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes, some of which are more than metaphorical.
Emergence
Metaphor is Nature’s language. Matter has lost its central role in physics. Mass/energy and light are interacting abstract oscillating excitations of the vacuum. Nothing actually oscillates. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person.
We can draw from the organic metaphors of illumination, quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts. Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature’s own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.
Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. The "melted vacuum" of absolute space, where quarks, electrons, gravity and electromagnetism are the same, is an infinite supply of radiant energy -- virtual photon flux. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic.
Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.’ It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole. Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow.
In the artistic process, collapse is consistent with focus; focus is consistent with selection; selection is consistent with the resonance or stimulus. The stimulus is consistent with the physical reality and reality is consistent with collapse. In quantum chaos, this collapse is a cascade leading to an entirely new organization – to emergent creativity.
The whole process is a flow or condensation of potential of consciousness. The gauge is the perspective of consciousness or imagination. We are free to choose our perspective. The essence of our time-bound experience is receptivity to experience, to flow within the vortex. When we experience our timeless nature – our unbound self -- there is no flow, only resonance. We have the freedom to choose our point of focus or resonance. We can be stimulated by probability or chance, by the chaotic creative process underlying all reality itself.
We cannot predict what will come of it, what will emerge from entering that creative vortex, nor should we even try. All we can do is let go and open ourselves to the morphing power of the transcendent imagination, to bring our awareness into resonance with it. As we transcend the vortex we narrow our freedom to select our perceptual view of the physical world.
Starting from an essential primal singularity containing the fundamental cyclic cause of electrodynamic and geometric laws, governing the mutually dependent arising (out of the ZPE singularities in ubiquitous absolute space) of both subjective consciousness and objective matter... Leading to their ultimate phenomenal interconnections (on the informational level) of radiant mind and memory fields that surround every zero-point of absolute space, centered within every radiant field and form of ponderable matter within our total physical spacetime gravitational field. (This is in addition to the higher order precursor fields at the meta- or hyper-physical super-cosmic level). See:
http://leonmaurer. info/ABCimages/ Cyclic-paths- cosmogenesis. jpg
It's only when the cosmic fields descend to the fourth lowest order physical spacetime field that the QED laws of physics come into play -- which governs the nature and interrelationships of the fundamental particle-wave forms and their combinations into atoms, molecules, etc.
In this model (of fundamental physical/material reality within overall cosmic reality) if we follow its analogous fractal involved hyperspace progression, it becomes patently obvious that both mind and memory are coenergetic (resonant) information carrying fields that act as the medium between the sensory processing mechanisms (neural correlates) and the unconditioned awareness/will (as potential phenomenal functions of unconditioned absolute or primal space).
Thus, the difference between the latent consciousness of a stone, and the active or phenomenal consciousness of an organic, self replicating sentient being -- is the ability (or inability in the case of the stone) to link sensory information with awareness/will through a chain of electrochemical (neural) processing stages and their resultant, assembled EM information field, coupled with higher frequency phase order, fractal involved harmonic (wave interference patterned information carrying, phase conjugate adaptive, resonant) radiant energy fields -- that are generated, along with the neural field, from a common (or holonomically entangled) zero-point center of consciousness.
"The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call a 'field of force.' The field acts on the observer and puts him in a priveleged position vis-a-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work." ~ Fulcanelli, 1937
"We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).
“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).
"Any given state of consciousness is permeated by the clear light of primordial awareness. However solid ice may be, it never loses its true nature, which is water. In the same way, even very obvious concepts are such that their 'place', as it were, their final resting place, does not fall outside the expanse of primordial awareness. They arise within the expanse of primordial awareness and that is where they dissolve." (Dalai Lama)
"Somewhere in the welter of Quantum Theory & Chaos Theory the paradigm is already bom, & waits for us to assist at the mystery of its naming, of its transmutation from potentiality to actuality. In this action poets & physicists may play equal parts, for the glory of Quantum Theory is that by restoring consciousness to its theorems it has turned science once again into a type of "Natural Philosophy" -- or alchemy." (Hakim Bey)
"To summarize, I have spoken of seven major aspects of Solutio symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego's confrontation with the unconscious that brings about Solutio."(Edinger, 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche)
"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")
Emanation: Creative Source
Alchemy calls Chaos the prima and ultima materia. In this chaosophical philosophy, all systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos. The trancendent principle "emanation" is primordial. All derived or secondary things proceed or flow from the primal Source. It eliminates will from the theory of creation. There is no hand of a supreme artisan who finds matter at his or her disposal. All things, actually or only apparently material, emerge or flow from the dynamic primal principle.
Unlike evolution, the process of development, emanation declares the immutability of the first principle. Emanation involves a series of descending stages, a subjective gnosis, not a developmental evolution that goes from less to more perfect. Thus, chaotic excitability is a paradigm of emergence, transcendent yet immanent potential. The undecomposable domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source -- a bornless nothingness from which all form proceeds.
There is an unmanifest fundamental reality, a virtual field, which is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. In this dynamic model, there are no "things", only energetic events. This holoflux includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and also of that which forms therein. This subquantal domain marks the limit of our ability to peer into the Mystery of nature at cosmic zero, the undifferentiated matrix.
At the human scale, we are blinded to this primal creative field, virtual photon flux. Chaos theory as holism without wholes allows us to describe both psyche and matter in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. Chaos provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.
Global recruitment is characteristic of chaotic patterning. It allows the best balance between random fluctuations, permitting discoveries and innovations. Changing the activity of just one element can unleash an avalanche of changes in the patterns that might have otherwise occurred (“butterfly effect”). A structural perturbation is a permanent transmutation for the functions of a network.
"When nature must correctly respond to a sequence of events whose nature and arrival time are essentially random, then nature uses the richness of chaos to nondeterministically solve its problem, probability one. Using direct or indirect feedback, nature uses and controls chaos to achieve its goals. But should not this fact embolden us to accept the challenge: 'What nature can do; man can do better'? Indeed, man has already begun to use and control chaos..." (Joseph Ford, The New Physics)
Metaphorms
Because interconnectivity is more than metaphorical, realizations translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. The events and experiences of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism.
We might call this nonlocal entangled embodiment "metaphorms." Fractals are a new way of thinking about structure and form. Soul is made in the imaginal field, in the fractal reiteration deepening experience by muting or facilitating expression and inhibiting or modulating participation or choice.
Our universe is a system of interactive field phenomena, consisting of princples, domains or levels of observation (biology, physics, chemistry, etc.). Our anatomical shape displays motion (digestion, respiration, growing, moving, reproducing, thinking, etc) and emotion (open, closed, animated, repressed). Experience is sensuous. We see, feel, hear, taste and use metaphors of sensory experience to describe our emotions, thoughts, desires, intentions, and the processing and storing of the elements of experience itself.
Mind is metaphysical, a reflection of experience in which we store and sort information in the form (shape) of our experiences. Experience is primary, our only test for truth, our only standard of knowledge. We want knowledge so we can improve our experiences by understanding the principles governing them. Metaphors are how we know what we know and what it's "like." Metaphoric language helps us intuit there is ‘more to the picture’ than we ‘real’ize. So do science, art and Hermetics with its system of correspondences.
A metaphorm is any object, image, concept, or process that we compare to something else in the whirling chaos of unprocessed elements. Metaphorms imply relationships between things that we cannnot explicitly compare nor literally equate. It matters little whether a metaphorm is literally true or not. What is important is that it binds our lives to the vast unconsumable life of the universe, giving us a taste of immortality. Intuition involves both discovering new connections and innovative solutions. This is a synergetic process.
Metaphorming encompasses all forms of metaphor including analogy, allegory, allusion, symbolism, and figures of speech. Compressed i nformation is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols. Illustrative art in alchemy uses reiteration to solidify meaning. Each image contains a fractal-like representation of the past. We can involve all of our physical senses in a synesthesia using every mode of thinking and felt-sense (stomach, abdomen, chest, throat) of our sensory-motor nervous system to create an identification or state change.
Outer Body Experience
An outer body experience is one of vastly expanded awareness. We aren't out of the body but recognize our vast potential connections as oceanic experience. We are wave upon interpenetrating waves of virtually infinite potential. Alchemy is all about enhancing psychophysical imaginal capacity. We can tap the holographic memories of our existential blueprint, becoming transparent to transcendence, rather than operating well below our optimal capacity at the plateau of consensus reality or 'normalcy.'
Felt-sense is our physical awareness of life processes. The body takes precedence in bottom-up processing. Felt-sense helps us know what is at the edge of our thinking. We learn to articulate our implicit knowing. Focusing attention inward in the body, we learn to sense fear, tensions or openness in centers in our energy body. There is no disowning, but a re-embracing and expansion of the body in amplified identification, including cosmic zero-point.
Old Millenium notions, (medieval, classical and Theosophical), of astral projection meant consciousness left the physical body in the subtle body of light and was free to roam the astral plane or travel to other places on Earth. It involved dissociation from the physical body to which the aspirant remained attached by a Silver Cord. It probably developed from Near-Death Experiences (NDE), the shutting down of certain brain processes in biological crisis, commonly including a tunnel of light.
New Millennium soul travel is a slightly different approach, requiring no disowning of the gross material body in order to incorporate subtle aspects of the universal. In this sense, it stays perhaps closer to the alchemical phase state, One World. Rather than entering a trance state, the aspirant remains lucid, engaging in breathing and visualization practices. To journey outward or inward is essentially the same. Transmodern "etheric travel" means folding space and time, travelling without moving about one's conceptually expanded Being. It has been called cosmic consciousness.
We can view ourselves as all parts of the gestalt, including the primordial ground as well as any systems within it. There is simply no sense of separation. It is a subtle but important shift in awareness. We can experience the whole spectrum of the taxonomy of altered or discreet states of consciousness (Tart), the "heavens and hells" or bardo states (Leary, et al) of other models. The field patterns of the finest organization of energy and matter also affect the evolution of the cosmos.
You are a nonlocal quantum field entity in coherent connection with All. The energy “rush” of meditation comes when either the hyperarousal or hyperquiescent state “spills over” into stimulating its complementary system. When both parts (sympathetic and parasympathetic) of the autonomic nervous system go online simultaneously, the limbic system goes wild with emotion, total absorption and oceanic bliss.
This phase space is reflected in the transgender reunion of male-female imagery of the kundalini serpent power and the yin and yang of the Tao and the royal wedding of Frater and Soror Mystica in alchemy. When both systems go into maximal discharge, this neurochemical flux is subjectively perceived as Absolute Unity of Being, boundlessness, timelessness, and sacredness. Our relationship to humans, earth, and cosmos is no longer one of a relationship to the Other. All sense of false self evaporates as ego dissolves.
The unfathomable ocean of our virtuality is a dynamic energetic infusion, an expanded sense of NowHere, a leap of faith into the Abyss. We are challenged to fully comprehend the truth of our existence. This is how we become more than we formerly thought we were. As William James said, "My experience is what I attend to." Negative time extracts massergy from the limitless ocean of roiling subspace making negentropic or syntropic transformation in a nanosecond a real potential.
The quantum vaccum is a highly anomlous universal energy realm of pure potential. We are that nondual dynamic "ocean of active information" in wave form. It is both the source and destination of all matter in the universe, and thus of any form of consciousness which may emerge through its autopoeitic process. The human brain, with its pronounced and constant state of chaos, could receive and amplify such signals, expressed both consciously and unconsciously in our biophsyical self and our ephemeral thoughts and intuitions.
We integrate through our immediate experience of paranormal potential. We can live as uncollapsing quantum superpositions in that bountiful ocean of soul and spirit. Distractions cease, replaced by the direct impact of oceanic expansion of the energetically superdense quantum vacuum -- purely informational scalar force.
We are modified physically in this way by breathing as the negentropic potential (bioplasma) of cosmos. Scalars are massless and vectorless -- neither ‘light’ nor ‘matter’, but longitudinally propagating fluctuations below the energy-threshold of particle pair-creation. This produces a self-generating cosmological feedback cycle which translates into interference patterns created by the motion of charged particles modifying the local topology of the vacuum. The modified vacuum field modifies in turn the motion of the particles and your being is transmuted.
In a system driven beyond equilibrium, the subtle interconnectedness beneath its surface emerges to reshape the system itself. Even visual images can be derived from non-visual sources. Metaphorms are ways of implying likeness between things, such as the macrocosm and microcosm, the cosmos and the weird world of the quantum and subspace domains. Alchemy tells us, "As Above, So Below." In this way it anticipated our discovery of scale-invariant fractals. What is true for subspace is true for superspace.
Our brain imposes its dynamics on everything we make--from concepts about the universe to techniques used to test or represent these concepts, from chaos to order. Process morphs connect us with everything we create and are influenced by. Metaphorming is a principal means of exploring the world, relating information from one discipline to another, connecting potentially all sources and forms of information. Metaphorms are expressions of nature's unity.
Science also uses metaphorms. In Bohm's causal interpretation of QM, 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.
Physicists, artists and alchemists are metaphorming when tthey create words or images for describing novel relationships or creative visualization. Visual metaphorms, in particular, inspire hypotheses, and vice versa. Alchemists, scientists and artists take two facts or experiences that seem separated, and find a likeness in them, and create a unity by showing the likeness.
All science-art is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. Somtimes they reveal themselves in synchronicities. Synchronicity is a bubbling up of ever-fresh forms, patterns, and connections that transcend all boundaries between mind and matter, the physical and the spiritual.
Dynamics
Physics deals with the energetic aspect of the world, how elements bond together and interact. Information theory deals with the communicational or patterning aspect. Fractals, nature's dynamic self-organizing pattern, exist in the paradoxical space between dimensions, levels and forces of existence. They arise at the interface between processes, at boundary zones where they serve both to connect and separate multiple levels. They translate information/energy, structuring dimensions by adding or recursively removing structure, embodying process.
Fractal dynamics escalate change from tiny to large scales. Self-organization is an emergent property of systems and organisms, from the cosmos to human beings. Chaotic dynamics governs the emergence of this new order from apparent randomness. The deep coherence of the overall process implies hidden or missing information for holistic patterning within the apparent "noise" or randomness of chaotic patterns.
Feedback creates pathways in fractal generation. Fractal patterns produce complicated networks as a result of the propagation of signals through them. Networks can be thrown into chaotic behavior in response to the propagation of complex input. Human beings are systems with many functions and feedback and feedforward paths. Transformation takes place as one configuration or expression changes into another in accordance with chaotic dynamics, global repatterning.
Transformation can involve several, nonlinear phase changes. When a complex signal is propagated through a network with feedback or feedforward paths, some networks remain stable, and other network values "explode." The art of the therapeutic transformation means using "controlled accidents" in the ever-changing context of resonating mental spaces. The "accidentals" are intuitive communication from the unconscious, from the whole. The concepts of chaos and chance just describe our gaps in awareness, the phenomena of which we are ignorant.
Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception - the stream of consciousness. The cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction appears at the heart of modern chaos theory and alchemy
The Vedas identify all creative intent and substance as a manifestation of primal consciousness, which is considered the basis of all manifestation. In this worldview, there is nothing but consciousness. Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of "waves of unborn nothingness". Healing is the biological equivalent of creativity. The more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is.
Coniunctio
The objective (frater) and subjective mode (soror mystica) are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. They marry in the mystic, in entanglement with Cosmos. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that lies beyond the dialectic in the tension of opposites. Synthesizing and transcending opposites is the theme of alchemy.
The metaphors of science have gained increasing relevance in the artworld and transmodern mysticism. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. The same holds true for alchemy. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines. There is a dimension of reality that transcends mind and matter.
The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence.
The alchemical operation Solutio, the Universal Solvent is called "the root of alchemy," corresponding with the element water. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It is a dissolution that precedes recrystallization.
It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns--a psychedelic, expanded state. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual, and philosophy. These texts were based on sympathetic magic, that like substances sharing an essence could influence one another through resonance effects, synchronicities. Like cures like.
As the god who presides over boundaries, Hermes is able to transcend them. He is therefore also the ruler of ceremonial magic, which transcends the limits of ordinary consciousness, communing with the divine. Identification with a given energy is accomplished by a three-fold ritual, which echoes the generic creative process:
1). Separation from the profane or ordinary state of consciousness. Dissolution of the ordinary state of conscious.
2). The transition stage, or twilight zone which lies between them. Creative or chaotic consciousness.
3). The new order or perception of reality which occurs in the sacred time of the soul. Identification with ehanced sense of self, greater well-being.
Hermes is The Magus, the magician, the lord of boundaries, or doorways, the threshold or liminal area. The inbetween, or twilight zone, enables a state of receptivity to become established. It allows an emptying process, a letting go. Ritual acts reawaken deep layers of the psyche. This brings the mythological or archetypal ideas back to memory.
Myths, according to d’Aquili, present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death. Because of a basic function of the brain he calls that ‘binary operator.’ This function abstracts qualities of things and arranges them as pairs of opposites, or dyads, whose meaning is intimately related to its partner. He conjectures that it is located on the inferior parietal lobe of the dominant side, and is one way the mind seeks to understand the world. Myths play on these antinomies and propose solutions to them.
Myths are like collective dreams; ritual is an enactment of myth. So, we create myths to satisfy our need to understand our environment and give us some sense of control over it, or an understanding of our place in it. A given myth has stability of structural relationship and meaning. In science we call them ‘models’. Like metaphors, they provide a reference point without defining a reality.
What's New with My Subject? Meditatio, Imaginatio, OperatioAlchemy is an irreducible fusion of mysticism, science and art that also happens to be therapeutic or growth-promoting and tantalizingly hints at illumination. The process begins with doubts and lack of conviction but time spent on self-knowledge and spiritual exercises is amply rewarded.
Alchemy is unbound. It evolves like any science or artform through revolutionary paradigm shifts that revision or reframe its philosophy of practice. Chaos theory is an organic model of creation. Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.
The Universe is a fractal manifestation of the interaction or interdependence of chaos and order. Nature and evolution are complimentary systems evolving at the edge of chaos the source of the genesis of new forms. Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree. We are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings we are both/and psychobiological.
Alchemists seek understanding of the relationships between all the elements. Holistic vision is developed with experiments on matter and self, fantasy and meditation. In alchemy, meditation is reflection, inner dialogue and an extended act of active imagination fired by awareness and libido, "an inner colloquy with one's good angel." Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that lead to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.
Both perception and cognition can be modeled as a transition from a state of chaos representing the unrecognized condition, or the unresolved problem, to a state of order. Creativity or learning can emerge spontaneously, from exploring states of confusion, to the instantaneous insight of a “Eureka” moment, or knowing state through bifurcation to a new attractor, to chaotic resolution. The trick is experiencing "emptyness" as the initial condition of consciousness. The openness of empty awareness is the key.
At supercritical junctions we either breakdown (emergency) or increase adaptation (emergence) with more creative solutions. Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both informational content and the rate of information processing. Creative holistic repatterning is introduced into the human system through the psyche as nonmanifest yet phenomenological images, symbols, and patterning information.
Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the creative process. It is knowing through living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy. Imagination is the voice of creativity. It is the primary way we experience soul; imagination embodies it’s own reality. It is self-revelatory. Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.
Alchemy is also a thought experiment that plunges one into the upwelling spring of Nature feeding the roots of matter and psyche. Ultimately, these cycles of experimentation and reflection are warming acts of love that keep the gentle fires of the alchemical transformation going. The formula "VITRIOL" encodes the various operations of the alchemical process.
In the Transmodern union of opposites, the real and the unreal are no longer opposed. The concept of reality emerges, no longer bound to the material world but turned into fiction because of it. Reality and existence are no longer synonymous – it is a type of reality that continues to “be” even when it may not “exist” and does not comply with the simple status of simulacrum -- virtuality. Thus alchemy shares much in common with quantum mysticism and the holographic paradigm which seek the secrets of nature's subquantal realm. Doing so creates a hyperreality, revealing a glimpse of the future.
The problem becomes not one of how to know something radically new, but how to learn something radically new. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphors help us makes this leap, help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by this metaphor.
We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. The possibilities for concepts and thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it, especially the sensory-motor system. Conceptual metaphors appear to be neural maps that link sensory-motor domains in the brain to regions where more abstract reasoning is done. This allows sensory-motors structures in the brain to play a role in abstract reasoning (Lakoff, 1999).
In fact, when metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.
The problem becomes not one of how to know something radically new, but how to learn something radically new. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphors help us makes this leap, help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by this metaphor.
We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. The possibilities for concepts and thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it, especially the sensory-motor system. Conceptual metaphors appear to be neural maps that link sensory-motor domains in the brain to regions where more abstract reasoning is done. This allows sensory-motors structures in the brain to play a role in abstract reasoning (Lakoff, 1999).
In fact, when metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.
Melting Point of Formation
Alchemists are contemplative researchers versed in the science of personal transformation and the art of inner magic. Alchemical insight ultimately short-circuits self-referential feedback loops, leading to breakthroughs in perception and quality of being. At the groundstate, mind is utterly emptied of all contents. Both physical and mental space dissolve in this exploration.
A dynamic vacuum state of consciousness opens paranormal states of awareness and healing. In much ado about Nothing, the bubble of illusion (all mental and physical phenomena) bursts in primordial awareness. In the highest potential energy state, space, time, mind and matter dissolve into their Source -- the "melted vacuum" of physics, the "clear water" (Cole, 2001) of the alchemists (Lambspring). This unencumbered non-dual state is innate radiant potential. The upwelling geyser of all internal and external phenomena emerge from this dynamic absolute space beyond all internal structure.
According to King, ‘If a series of small bifurcations occur resulting from successive [quantum] computational steps, we would say the conclusion was arrived at deductively, but if however a major global bifurcation is required to reach self-consistency, an intuitive leap of understanding may result.'
The transition from chaos models the sudden moment of insight -- the "a-ha" or "eureka", deductive cognition, sensory recognition and decision-making -- or the bursting bubble into primordial awareness. Computational predictivity is thus complemented by conscious anticipation enabled through quantum transaction and manifested in the transition from chaos.
The fear, danger, anxiety and stress produced during confrontation with the transpersonal psyche can create a personal catastrophe, a spiritual emergency. Catastrophic chaos usually leads to what is called a bifurcation or splitting of the energy in two different directions. The experience may be shattering. The interface of the conscious ego and the numinous must be effected with some care so the later doesn’t take over.
But sometimes regression serves the process of evolution and leads to creative transformation and renewal of the self on a higher level. Therefore, the potential benefits of the transformative path make the risks worthwhile. Rather than breakdown, it may lead to artistic, scientific, or spiritual breakthrough, creativity and expression.
Alchemy is a science-art, a tool to describe and mold reality using experimental and meditative techniques. As an art medium, alchemy helps us illustrate nature and our own nature in contemporary terms by creating new paradigms and environments. Alchemists manufactured and articulated theories of reality and healing fantasies of the body/soul/spirit, as well as dyes, paints, and medicines or improving the quality of metals and glass.
Alchemy is a tradition of particpatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, nor to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical or New Age jargon. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them.
Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on an old science. But that discipline continues to redefine itself. Jung's notions of a heroic, striving Self have been transcended with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and healing fictions. Can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself?
Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on mystic technologies, life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics. We can take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes, some of which are more than metaphorical.
Emergence
Metaphor is Nature’s language. Matter has lost its central role in physics. Mass/energy and light are interacting abstract oscillating excitations of the vacuum. Nothing actually oscillates. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person.
We can draw from the organic metaphors of illumination, quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts. Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature’s own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.
Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. The "melted vacuum" of absolute space, where quarks, electrons, gravity and electromagnetism are the same, is an infinite supply of radiant energy -- virtual photon flux. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic.
Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.’ It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole. Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow.
In the artistic process, collapse is consistent with focus; focus is consistent with selection; selection is consistent with the resonance or stimulus. The stimulus is consistent with the physical reality and reality is consistent with collapse. In quantum chaos, this collapse is a cascade leading to an entirely new organization – to emergent creativity.
The whole process is a flow or condensation of potential of consciousness. The gauge is the perspective of consciousness or imagination. We are free to choose our perspective. The essence of our time-bound experience is receptivity to experience, to flow within the vortex. When we experience our timeless nature – our unbound self -- there is no flow, only resonance. We have the freedom to choose our point of focus or resonance. We can be stimulated by probability or chance, by the chaotic creative process underlying all reality itself.
We cannot predict what will come of it, what will emerge from entering that creative vortex, nor should we even try. All we can do is let go and open ourselves to the morphing power of the transcendent imagination, to bring our awareness into resonance with it. As we transcend the vortex we narrow our freedom to select our perceptual view of the physical world.
Starting from an essential primal singularity containing the fundamental cyclic cause of electrodynamic and geometric laws, governing the mutually dependent arising (out of the ZPE singularities in ubiquitous absolute space) of both subjective consciousness and objective matter... Leading to their ultimate phenomenal interconnections (on the informational level) of radiant mind and memory fields that surround every zero-point of absolute space, centered within every radiant field and form of ponderable matter within our total physical spacetime gravitational field. (This is in addition to the higher order precursor fields at the meta- or hyper-physical super-cosmic level). See:
http://leonmaurer. info/ABCimages/ Cyclic-paths- cosmogenesis. jpg
It's only when the cosmic fields descend to the fourth lowest order physical spacetime field that the QED laws of physics come into play -- which governs the nature and interrelationships of the fundamental particle-wave forms and their combinations into atoms, molecules, etc.
In this model (of fundamental physical/material reality within overall cosmic reality) if we follow its analogous fractal involved hyperspace progression, it becomes patently obvious that both mind and memory are coenergetic (resonant) information carrying fields that act as the medium between the sensory processing mechanisms (neural correlates) and the unconditioned awareness/will (as potential phenomenal functions of unconditioned absolute or primal space).
Thus, the difference between the latent consciousness of a stone, and the active or phenomenal consciousness of an organic, self replicating sentient being -- is the ability (or inability in the case of the stone) to link sensory information with awareness/will through a chain of electrochemical (neural) processing stages and their resultant, assembled EM information field, coupled with higher frequency phase order, fractal involved harmonic (wave interference patterned information carrying, phase conjugate adaptive, resonant) radiant energy fields -- that are generated, along with the neural field, from a common (or holonomically entangled) zero-point center of consciousness.
Subspace
