Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Jean Houston

Preface

Creativity and the Imagination

The new evolutionary cosmology

The regularities of nature are evolving habits

The basis of cosmic creativity

The cosmic imagination as a higher-dimensional attractor drawing the evolutionary process toward itself

The Omega Point

Imagination welling up from the womb of chaos

Psychedelic experience and the mind of Gaia

Gaian dreams and human history

Dark matter as the cosmic unconscious

Creativity and Chaos

The chaos revolution

Chaotic attractors as eternal mathematical realities

Indeterminism in nature

Chaos and the evolution of order

From in the cooling process

The organizing fields of nature as related to mathematics and the cosmic imagination

Mathematical models

Attractors, attraction, and motivation

The freezing of information in crystals and in written language

The primacy of spoken language and abstraction

Chaos and the Imagination

Chaos in Greek mythology

The myth of the conquest of chaos

Fear of chaos and the suppression of the feminine

The partnership society and the rise of patriarchy

Seasonal festivals of the repression of chaos, and the creation of the unconscious

The inhibition of creativity and its relation to global problems

The Eleusinian mysteries

Creativity and Christology

Plans for the recovery of chaos and the imagination

The significance of the chaos revolution

The World Soul and the Mushroom

Randomness in the evolutionary process

The limited nature of models

The computer and chaos revolutions

Coevolution of mathematics and the material world

The mathematical landscape

Sensory qualities in the cosmic imagination

The similarities of souls and fields

The primal unified field and the fields of nature

Rebirth of the world soul

Interplanetary transfer of the human psyche via the psychedelic experience and the spores of magic mushrooms

Light and Vision

Physical light and the light of consciousness

Light and vision

The location of visual images

Mind extending from the eyes

The sense of being started at: a new kind of field or the electromagnetic field? Hierarchy of fields in nature

Coupling between electromagnetic and mental fields

Physical light and self-luminous visions

Tryptamine hallucinogens

The world soul

Fields as the medium of divine omniscience

Gaian mind and the light of the sun

Entities

Discarnate intelligences and nonhuman entities: creatures within the human mind or truly Other? Entities and shamans

The use of language by entities

Angelic communication in the birth of modern science

The dream dimension and entities

The effect of science and humanism on entities

Nature magically self-reflecting and aware

The Unconscious

The three great bifurcations

Creation of the unconscious, the origin of evil, and the rejection of chaos

Escape from evil by the resurrection of chaos

The suppression of psychedelics, the patriarchy, and the rise of booze

Partnership and dominator drugs; the addiction to addictions

Habits and the formation of the unconscious

Holidays and the reinforcement of awareness

Prayer, magic, and astrology for enlightenment

The Resacralization of the World

Ralph's religious background

The sacred in India

Rediscovering the sacrd in the West

The revival of ritual and the resacralization of music

Feminism and the archaic revival

Gothic cathedrals and animistic Christianity

The green movement, saving the Earth, the greening of God

Psychedelic churches

The resacralizing of science

Education in the New World Order

Education as initiation

The dominance of rationalism and humanism

Rites of passage

Summer camps

Testing and accreditation

Institutions and administrations

Workshops as a model for a new pluralistic and decentralized system of education

Religious initiation

Reform of existing professions

A possible pilot project

The Apocalypse

The apocalyptic tradition: a mythic model motivating religious history or an intuition of the ending of history or time? Modern millenarianism and scientific versions of the apocalypse

The possible end in 2012

The self-fulfilling quality of apocalyptic prophecy

The speeding up of history and the inevitability of planetary metamorphosis

Death and transformation on a cosmic scale

Intensifying conflict and the power of faith

Glossary

Bibliography

About the Authors

Resources