Concepts in Chaos

Chaos refers to an underlying interconnectedness that exists in apparently random events. Chaos science focuses on hidden patterns, nuance, the sensitivity of things, and the rules for how the unpredictable leads to the new.

Underlying themes of Chaos:

1. Control - The predicament of all life is uncertainty and contingency. Chaos theory demonstrates that being in control is and illusion. Chaotic systems lie beyond all our attempts to predict, manipulate and control them. Chaos suggests that instead of resisting lifes uncertainties, we should embrace them. Creativity - Making a pact with chaos gives us the possibility of living not as controllers of nature but as creative participators. Most creativity blossoms when we are participating in chaos, when we lose control and our characters take on lives of their own. Subtlety - To sacrifice control and live creatively requires attention to the subtle nuances and irregular orders going on around us. The categories and abstractions that constitute our human knowledge are certainly necessary for practical survival, but our categories can dominate us to the point where we ignore the finer, uncategorizable inner nature of human situations. Chaos shows that beyond our attempts to control and define reality lies the rich, perhaps infinite, realm of subtlety and ambiguity where life is lived. Chaos theory shows us how apparently tiny and insignificant things can end up playing a major role in the way things turn out. By paying attention to subtlety, we open ourselves to creative dimensions that make our lives deeper and more harmonious.

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Lessons of Chaos:
1. Being Creative self-organization out of chaos - occurs when chaotic activity suddenly branches off into order, such as vortices in rivers and streams. The bifurcation point refers to the point where chaotic activity suddenly branches off into order. Systems that self-organize out of chaos survive only by staying open to a constant flow-through of energy and material. The self-organized patterns remain stable as long as the conditions out of which they were created are kept within certain limits. Chaos is natures creativity. Truth - Creativity is about getting beyond what we know, getting to the truth of things. Often, our habits of thought, opinions, and experiences, the supposed certainties of our knowledge about the world, produced distortions and deceptions about reality. More important, the opinions and facts that constitute our conditioning may end up obscuring a deeper authenticity and truth about our individual experience of being in the world. Truth lies in constantly questioning what we see and think about the world. Making the Vortex 1: Turbulence- Open up to doubts and uncertainties to access degrees of freedom that can spur new self-organization. Use the painful experiences of life to lead you to new truths. Step back from the experiences of life, momentarily dissolve all knowledge (the left side of the brain) of what you are experiencing, and see them for what they really are, for their truths. Seeing an experience beyond its abstraction in the mind involves entering into doubts and uncertainties and allowing our abstractions and mental constructions to die or be transformed. When this happens, creative insight self-organizes, catching us unaware with the shock or delight of the unexpected truth, essence, or being lurking even within the objects of the ordinary and familiar world around us. For this you must have a high tolerance for ambiguity, ambivalence, and a tendency to think in opposites. To be creative you need to give yourself to sensations of knowing but not knowing, inadequacy, uncertainty, awkwardness, awe, joy, horror, being out of control, and appreciating the nonlinear, metamorphosing features of reality and their own thought processes. Making the Vortex 2: Bifurcation and Amplification - Bifurcation points are moments of truth that amplify and begin to self-organize the work. Bifurcation points may come about through mistakes, chance, or failure. These can be thought of as seeds from which creativity flowers. This is a point at which perception shifts and the chaos begins to self-organize. Some moments of insight occur when we see or hear something that would be meaningless, nonsensical, or trivial to someone else, but which seem to set in

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motion a significant change in our perception, to get to the truth of our perception, the authenticity of our experience of life. Making the Vortex 3: The Open Flow - Flow is the period is the period in the creative process when selfconsciousness disappears, time vanishes or becomes full, and there is total absorption in the activity. There is an intense clarity about the moment and a clear movement, and there is little or no concern for failure. The Vortex and the Paradox of Individuality - A vortex is a distinct and individual entity, and yet it is indivisible from the river that created it. The vortex suggests the paradox that the individual is also universal: Our creative moments - whether it is looking freshly at a tree or coming to a new understanding about our lives - are moments when we are in touch with our own authentic truth, when we experience our unique presence in the world. But paradoxically, the experience of a unique presence is also often coupled with a sensation of ourselves as indivisible from the whole. Creativity Means Each of Us - Chaos theory teaches that when our psychological perspective shifts through moments of amplification and bifurcation - our degrees of freedom expand and we experience being and truth. The key to creative activity lies in the self-organization of available materials. This means we must literally create with our lives. Deep creative appreciation of life comes only when there is enormous uncertainty. In each moment we have the opportunity to die psychologically by letting go of prejudices, mechanical habits, isolation, precious ego, images of self and the world, and conceptions of the past and future. In this way we set in motion the possibility of a creative, self-organizing perception that puts us in touch with the magic that gave us birth. A sense of newness seems an inevitable characteristic of creativity, because when we enter the vital turbulence of life, we realize that, at bottom, everything is always new. Creativity is lost in our obsessions with control and power; in our fear of mistakes; in the constricted grip of our egos; in our fetish of remaining within comfort zones; in our continuous pursuit of repetitive or merely stimulating pleasure; in our restricting our lives to the containers of what other people think; in our adherence to the apparent safety of closed orders; and in our deep-seated belief that the individual exists in an irreducible opposition to others and the world outside the self.

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