Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness

What this source is

Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness is a three-way conversation — the participants call it a "trialogue" — between the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the ethnobotanist and psychedelics writer Terence McKenna (1946–2000), and the mathematician Ralph Abraham of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The book first appeared in 1992 from Bear & Company as Trialogues at the Edge of the West, and was reissued in 2001 by park-street-press, a division of Inner Traditions, with a foreword by Jean Houston. The 2001 printing carries a dual copyright line naming all three authors for both 1992 and 2001.

The material available here is a selected excerpt set, not the whole book. Its own scope note is explicit that it contains selected excerpts only and that chapter summaries should not be invented for omitted passages. Several stretches are marked as intervening text not supplied, including a truncation inside Chapter 2, "Creativity and Chaos." What follows therefore describes only the arguments and examples the excerpts actually contain. Where the excerpts are silent, this guide is silent too.

The book's structure, as far as the excerpts reveal it, runs through chapters on creativity and the imagination, creativity and chaos, entities, education "in the new world order," and the apocalypse, closing with a glossary and bibliography. The glossary entries — superspace, superstring theory, superconductivity, teleology, temponaut, theosophy, the uroboric symbol, world soul — are reference apparatus rather than argument, and are not treated here.

The central argument: two tectonic plates

Sheldrake opens the book with a claim about the state of science rather than a claim about nature. Western science, he says, is an unstable combination of two great tectonic plates of theory that are crashing into each other, producing major theoretical earthquakes and disruptions and volcanoes of speculation.

The first plate is the worldview of permanence. In Newtonian physics this permanence is twofold: the eternal mathematical laws of nature, conceived by Newton and Descartes as ideas in the mind of God, and the unchanging atoms of matter in motion. These are summed up in the conservation principles — the total quantity of matter and of energy never changes, and neither do the laws. The second plate is the evolutionary worldview, which Sheldrake traces from the Judeo-Christian account of development in history, through its seventeenth-century secularization as human progress, through nineteenth-century biological evolution, to the point where, in his telling, only in the 1960s did physicists finally abandon their eternal or static cosmology and come to an evolutionary conception of the universe. With the Big Bang, the universe itself became evolutionary.

Sheldrake's conclusion — that this conflict constitutes a profound crisis in the scientific world that is going to change science as we know it — is a claim about the discipline, not a demonstrated result. It is the frame for the rest of the book, and it restates the evolving-habits thesis already documented on habits-of-nature and laws-of-nature-critique: if the universe has a history, the regularities of nature may themselves be historical rather than eternal.

The progression visible in the excerpts

The excerpts move through a recognizable sequence, though the gaps mean the sequence is reconstructed from fragments rather than read continuously.

Creativity and the imagination. Abraham supplies the book's most quoted formulation of chaos, which he calls Chaos, or the Gaian unconscious — not form but the source of form, the energy of form, the form of form, the material that form is made of. He describes the Divine Imagination as the class of all things both possible and beautiful, a kind of reverse Platonism, with the attractor at the bottom of a very deep well into which all phenomena are cascading. History, on this account, is the track in the snow left by creativity wandering in the Divine Imagination — set against the historians' trendlessly fluctuating random walk. Abraham's move is to argue that random walks are not random at all, that a sufficiently long random walk becomes a fractal structure of extraordinary depth and beauty, so that chaos is the birthplace of order rather than its enemy.

McKenna adds the Gaian mind: the Gaian mind is a real mind, its messages are real messages, and the task is to try to extract its messages and eliminate our own interference. He treats this as a political and practical problem, not a philosophical one. Writing, language and art he classifies as epigenetic rather than genetic processes that bind information and express the Gaian mind very well.

Chaos and modeling. Abraham's contribution here is methodological. He describes a three-level scheme — the physical world, a computer simulation, and a mathematical model — and illustrates it with Rob Shaw's study of a dripping faucet. Shaw placed a microphone in the sink, converted the drop impacts to electronic beeps, recorded the time intervals, and analyzed them (level one). He then built a mathematical model in which the drop grows until its mass reaches a critical value and it falls (level three), wrote a simulator for it (level two), and found the simulated data almost exactly like the experimental data from the actual faucet. Opening the model's tap moved the simulated data from periodic to chaotic through a bifurcation. Abraham frames the whole exercise as a hermeneutic circle: observe, model, fail, observe differently, improve the model.

This is the one concrete empirical demonstration in the excerpts. It is a worked example of a modeling method, not a controlled experiment testing any of the book's larger claims.

Entities. The excerpts include a discussion of discarnate entities and Jungian archetypes — the spectrum of representations corresponding to a single entity being essentially what Jung called an archetype. McKenna argues that such entities would be but dancing hallucinations before us if not for their ability to address us in languages that we can understand. He offers a historical claim about the doctrine of purgatory: that it was introduced by Saint Patrick to align Christian doctrine with Celtic folk belief in dead souls coexisting invisibly in ordinary space, and only later written into general church dogma by theologians in Rome. Abraham counters that the Underworld view already existed in Babylonian, Sumerian, and Ugaritic models, citing the Sumerian myth of Inanna and Dumuzi and burials with flowers in an Iraqi cave before 40,000 BC, and suggests the purgatory myth is a displacement from the middle realm of spirit between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. These are interpretive historical claims offered in dialogue; the excerpts supply no citations for them beyond the speakers' assertions.

Education. Sheldrake proposes that much of the present educational system could be transformed if we consciously recognized its initiatory quality. His examples: medical students would still dissect a corpse but would prepare themselves with a meditation on death, as in Tantric traditions where a practitioner spends a night alone in a graveyard; computer modeling would be part of initiation into mathematics, exposing the initiate to the vivid visual imagination, which is where creative mathematicians realize the magic is; rites of passage at puberty would take place at new-style summer camps with a vision quest of at least twenty-four hours alone in the wilderness. He identifies the workshop system — explicitly naming Esalen — as the principal model for an alternative educational system that could replace the present one, while conceding that practically no one under thirty goes to workshops, so that it is a system of education entirely for the middle-aged.

Apocalypse. McKenna's timewave is described as fitting all this millenarian and apocalyptic pressure at the turn of the millennium, with the Mayan calculations as another coincidence — the Maya and the Christians within twelve years of each other if the year 2000 is taken as the turn of the eon. McKenna himself flags this as the slippery realm of human judgment and data evaluation. Sheldrake adds a speculative extension: if there is life on other Earthlike planets, cosmic development has particular phases that are roughly synchronous throughout the universe, and he reports asking "Brian" for an estimate of how close such planets' development might be to our own — perhaps within 50,000 to 500,000 years — concluding that morphic resonance between similar planets could produce cosmic synchronization and a possible cosmic apocalypse.

How observations connect to conclusions

The evidentiary base in the excerpts is thin and unevenly distributed. The dripping-faucet study is a genuine piece of experimental and modeling work, but it demonstrates a method for finding structure in apparently irregular data; it does not establish the Gaian mind, the Divine Imagination, or the timewave. The historical claims about purgatory and the Underworld are interpretive and uncited in the excerpts. The education proposal is programmatic, and the excerpts record no implementation. The 2012 material is presented by its own author as a coincidence in a domain of human judgment and data evaluation.

The book's own participants acknowledge this. When Sheldrake extends the Gaian mind toward a hierarchy of cosmic minds, McKenna objects that there should always be some physical stuff to hang these things on, and asks hard questions about galactic thought — how long it takes, what transduces it, whether it travels by morphogenetic fields or by light. Sheldrake's reply is a concession: we do not know enough to begin to answer these questions. He then points to dark matter — 90 to 99 percent of the matter in the universe being utterly unknown — as a factor that changes everything, which is an appeal to ignorance as much as an argument.

Internal disagreements the guide should preserve

The trialogue format means the book's positions are not unified, and several disagreements are left unresolved in the excerpts.

• Cosmic Christ. Sheldrake asks how the Gaian imagination relates upward through solar system, galaxy, cosmos, to the Omega Point, or the Cosmic Christ. McKenna refuses: he is not sure he wants to follow Sheldrake into the Cosmic Christ. Sheldrake concedes ignorance. The exchange ends without resolution.
• Calendar reform. McKenna proposes replacing the solar calendar with a lunar one, arguing that the solar calendar is an effort to deny humanity's mortality by reinforcing a false notion of permanence, and that the year 2000 offers a built-in opportunity to switch the train to a new track. Sheldrake's counterexample is direct: the Islamic calendar already moves its months and festivals around the year — Ramadan retrogresses through the seasons — which is not exactly a confirmation of the theory that such a calendar breaks the dominator mode. McKenna's reply is that the point is certainly unwelcome. He does not rebut it.
• Apocalypse and paranoia. Abraham calls the Bible somebody's paranoid fantasy put down in a book and refuses credibility to Saint John the Divine, while conceding that from the morphogenetic-field point of view there are quite a number of people believing in Saint John the Divine, which has to be taken seriously. McKenna defends paranoia: in a very dynamic and unsteady universe, paranoia may well be a true sensitivity to the facts of the matter. Abraham's riposte is that paranoids always say that. Abraham redirects to what he considers the more likely threat: a serious ecological crisis and evolutionary challenge of unprecedented magnitude, citing James Lovelock's statement that the present extinction rate is one of the eight largest catastrophes in the planet's lifetime.
• Randomness and openness. Abraham expects that with better models the amount of so-called random behavior — in the sense of our ignorance of any structure in it — would be in sharp decline, and says he does not think randomness is needed in order to have the evolution of new forms. Sheldrake insists on the opposite requirement: what is needed is a universe sufficiently open and undetermined for new forms to have space to arise in. McKenna locates the resolution in resonance: the novelty wave would arise out of its resonance with its own past.

These are not editorial disagreements imposed on the text; they are the text. Any summary that flattens them into a single "the authors argue" voice misrepresents the book.

Limits of this source text

Three limits should be kept in view when using this guide.

First, coverage. The excerpts are selected, Chapter 2 is truncated mid-sentence, and multiple passages are marked as intervening text not supplied. The chaos argument in particular may be developed further in the omitted material; this guide cannot say whether it is.

Second, attribution. Because the book is a conversation, every claim belongs to a named speaker. The distinction between Sheldrake's evolving-habits thesis, McKenna's Gaian mind and timewave, and Abraham's chaos mathematics and three-level modeling is not a stylistic nicety — the three men disagree with each other on the record, and the disagreements are among the most informative parts of the excerpts.

Third, evidentiary status. The material is speculative and programmatic. Nothing here should be read as an established scientific finding, and the excerpts contain no independent verification of any of the participants' claims.

Where to read next

The book itself is the primary source; the PDF is recorded at [source note 5], and a scanned copy is held by the Internet Archive (digitized 2022 with funding from the Kahle/Austin Foundation).

Within this wiki, the closest companions are Morphic Resonance and the related concept pages habits-of-nature and laws-of-nature-critique, which document Sheldrake's evolving-habits argument in its own right. Rupert Sheldrake covers his biography and body of work, and park-street-press covers the publisher. The same dossier is represented by Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation, a guide to a different packet, and by the repair packet on Sheldrake's 2009 edition. Abraham's Divine Imagination and reverse Platonism are adjacent to, but distinct from, David Bohm's implicate order as documented elsewhere in this wiki; the two should not be merged.

Open questions

• The identity of "Brian," cited for the 50,000–500,000-year estimate of parallel-planet developmental proximity, is not confirmed in the excerpts. Brian Goodwin is a plausible candidate given the context, but the text does not name him.
• Whether the omitted Chapter 2 material develops the chaos argument beyond the dripping-faucet example cannot be determined from these excerpts.
• Whether the 2001 Park Street Press edition adds material beyond the 1992 Bear & Company original is not resolvable from the excerpts, which show only the dual copyright line.

Keep reading

• The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit — Develops a related question.
• Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation — Develops a related question.
• The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet — Develops a related question.