Indra's Net: Alchemy and Chaos Theory as Models for Transformation

Indra's Net: Alchemy and Chaos Theory as Models for Transformation

Indra's Net: Alchemy and Chaos Theory as Models for Transformation

Indra's Net: Alchemy and Chaos Theory as Models for Transformation

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Overview

In this clear, engaging book, Robin Robertson draws parallels between alchemy and chaos theory and shows how to apply them to our inner development. He is not proposing they replace traditional spiritual paths, but rather that they reflect deep structures in the psyche that any inner journey awakens. The model they provide necessarily underlies all paths of spiritual transformation and describes a framework for the stages through which any seeker goes. No matter what your particular calling, these insights enrich understanding of the transformative process, whether outside in the world, or within your life.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780835608626
Publisher: Quest Books
Publication date: 06/30/2009
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Robin Robertson is a psychologist with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and MA in Counseling Psychology, a mathematician and the author of 16 books on subjects on Jungian psychology, science, chaos theory, and the arts. His books include Beginner's Guide to Revelation, Mining the Soul from the Inside Out, and The Beginner's Guide to Jungian Psychology.

Read an Excerpt

Indra's Net

Alchemy and Chaos Theory as Models for Transformation


By Robin Robertson

Theosophical Publishing House

Copyright © 2009 Robin Robertson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-0862-6



CHAPTER 1

The Story of Alchemy and Chaos Theory


History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

—Étienne Gilson


In this chapter, we are going to follow a tangled history from the development of alchemy to its near demise with the rise of science. At that pivot point stands Isaac Newton, arguably the most important person in the history of science, and also a practicing alchemist. His story will be told in the final chapter of this book, when we discuss the philosopher's stone. After Newton, science advanced into territory far, far removed from the hermetic ideas at the core of alchemy, but strangely enough, in that place, with the discovery of chaos theory, ideas similar to those of alchemy began to reappear.


A SHORT HISTORY OF ALCHEMY

The process in alchemy has always been more central than the visible results, which can only be historically and culturally defined. In that sense, alchemy belongs, with astrology, healing, and music-mathematics, to the collegiums of planet sciences that survive civilizations.

—Richard Grossinger


Speeding Up Nature

In most histories of thought, alchemy has been presented as a primitive predecessor to chemistry. This view is a deep misapprehension, one resulting from our modern inability to understand a time when the surrounding world was still regarded as holy. The historian of religions Mircea Eliade was the first to recognize that alchemy evolved out of the mystery tradition that underlay mining and metallurgy. The men who mined and processed iron and gold and silver regarded themselves as something of a priesthood, possessed of secret knowledge about Nature (with a capital "N"). Metals were believed to be living organisms that slowly developed and changed within the body of the earth, much as a baby grows within a woman's belly. The miners who brought the ore forth from the earth, along with the metalworkers who then processed the ore, were serving as midwives who helped speed up the birth process of the metal. It's critical to understand that this belief system could arise and continue only so long as nature is viewed as alive. It is the modern scientific view of nature as a "thing" that makes this earlier view seem so strange to us. Native Americans still hold the view of the natural world as not only a living being, but a sacred living being. Increasingly, in these days of pollution and global warming, many are turning to these older traditions, no longer dismissed as primitive, for guidance on how to live in harmony with nature.

The alchemists took this tradition of metallurgical midwifery one step further, since their goal was to transform lesser elements into gold through a complex series of cyclic operations (figure 1.1). They felt that they were simply speeding up the process that took place in nature. A large part of their effort depended on heating mixtures with the proper application of fire, whether over an open flame in containers of various shapes, both functional and symbolic, or in a furnace, where the least mistake would ruin the operation. In nature, transformation of metal occurs over epochs of time through the heating of the sun or the natural heat deep in the earth; since the alchemists had to accomplish the same task in a tiny fraction of the time, they had to become masters of the processes involved. Just as nature cycles its operations over and over, feeding the results of each operation back for the next, so too the alchemist had to couple a mastery of fire with cyclic operation. In Eliade's words: "In taking upon himself the responsibility of changing Nature, man put himself in the place of Time; that which would have required millennia or eons to 'ripen' in the depths of the earth, the metallurgist and alchemist claim to be able to achieve in a few weeks."


Western Alchemy

In both the East and the West, the "metallurgical mysteries" evolved over time into alchemy. The first mention of alchemy may have occurred in China as early as the fourth century BC, and the art had definitely been noted there by the first century BC. Alchemy first appeared in the Western world at much the same time, at a place where West met East: Alexandria, Egypt. When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 330 BC, he founded the city of Alexandria. Why that location? According to Plutarch, the greatest biographer of ancient times, it was because of a dream. Alexander's favorite author was Homer, and wherever he went he carried a copy of the Iliad, annotated by Aristotle. One night, at a time when Alexander was considering where to build a great new Greek colony, Homer appeared in a dream to tell him to build it on an island called Pharos, on the Egyptian shore. And so he did.

Unfortunately, Alexander died before he could see the great city he had begun. But soon afterward, the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy I, who had been a close friend of Alexander's since childhood, created the famed library of Alexandria, the Museion, with the goal of bringing together all recorded thought in one place. It was further expanded by his son, Ptolemy II.

At its peak, the library had an enormous collection of manuscripts, which may have reached 700,000 papyrus scrolls. "The building was equipped for reading and copying, for quiet study, and for comparison of objects and specimens of the material world with the written works of the past. There is nothing quite like it in the modern world, though it must have been somewhat akin to the British Museum in London." Perched as it was between the East and the West, this library offered a place where cutting-edge thinkers from all cultures could gather and share ideas that ranged across many traditions previously isolated from one another: the abstract philosophy of the Greeks for the first time intermingled with the practical metallurgical and chemical knowledge of the Egyptians and the complex mysticism of the Chaldeans and Persians. Three products of that mixture of cultures and thought were Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Western alchemy. These three strains of thought tended to intertwine, so that many alchemists were also Gnostics or Neoplatonists.

It was a charmed moment that didn't last. Legend has it that the library was largely burned in 48 BC, when Caesar set fire to the ships in the harbor to protect his garrison from invasion by the Macedonians. But like many legends, this one is unlikely, as several people wrote of visiting the library after 48 BC. Other accounts of the library's destruction exist and are debated among scholars. The most likely explanation for its disappearance is that most of its contents were destroyed in the third century, when the Roman emperor Aurelian invaded Alexandria, and the remaining contents and the Museion itself were destroyed over the next several centuries.

Even after its partial destruction, the library remained a magnet for scholars and mystics, alchemists prominent among them. They came to Alexandria from all over the world, then left, taking with them the secrets they had learned. Many of those secrets they were forced to keep hidden, shared only with others who understood the mysteries. Muslim scholars in particular took these new ideas back to their own countries, where they flourished underground at a time when they almost disappeared in the West. When Arabs conquered Spain during the seventh and eighth centuries, Arabian alchemy moved back into the Western world. Since Spain was, at the time, also one of the central gathering places for Jews, including Jewish mystics, alchemical ideas were incorporated into Jewish mystical thought; the result was the tradition known as Qabalah. It was only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, that these ideas spread beyond Spain to the rest of Western Europe. By the late thirteenth century, Europeans were writing their own alchemical texts, the most notable among these authors being Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Raymond Lull. In his rich book Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art, Danish historian Johannes Fabricius comments on the position of the alchemists:

Because the alchemists originated in a pre-Christian cultural world, they had to establish themselves as a subculture in medieval Christianity. Here they occupied a strange position, religiously as well as scientifically. The alchemists were mystics without being orthodox Catholics, scientists without following the learning of their time, artisans unwilling to teach others what they knew. They were sectarians, the problem-children of medieval society, and their contemporaries were ever hesitant about deciding whether to regard them as pure sages or sacrilegious impostors.


Western alchemy reached its peak in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and still existed in some form during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (persisting underground even into our time). For example, Isaac Newton, who changed the world forever with his scientific discoveries in the seventeenth century, was a practicing alchemist who regarded his alchemical studies as being of equal or greater importance than his scientific studies. In his alchemical notes, he commented that "just as the world was created from dark Chaos through the bringing forth of light and the separation of the aery firmament and of the waters from the earth, so our work brings forth the beginning out of black Chaos and its first matter through the separation of the elements and the illuminations of matter."

Newton saw no discrepancy between the two positions of alchemist and scientist. Although the world he presented in his science was a world of absolutes, he saw the deeper world revealed by alchemy as perpetually changing, constantly transforming. Mircea Eliade commented that "Newton sought in alchemy the structure of the small world to match his cosmological system"; though he was unsuccessful in his search, he remained convinced that there had been and could continue to be secret revelations about nature's most intimate secrets, "nor did he reject the principle of transmutation, the basis of all alchemies ... In a sense the whole of his career after 1675 may be seen as one long attempt to integrate alchemy and mechanical philosophy." We need to follow the winding trail that led from Newton to a science that ignored the older traditions but eventually culminated in chaos theory. But, as so often happens in the history of thought, if you scratch the surface of chaos theory, underneath you'll find the old metal of alchemical ideas, as we'll see in the next section.


A SHORT HISTORY OF CHAOS THEORY

The word chaos traditionally denotes a formless void that is pregnant with forthcoming order. Now we see that disorder in an individual or a society can precede the emergence of new structure instead of leading inevitably to mere anarchy in accordance with the laws of entropy.

—Walter J. Freeman


From Ptolemy to Poincaré

The first men and women who stared upward at the night sky must have wondered about those points of lights. Surely they felt themselves at the center of the universe; everything else was "out there." It would hardly occur to them to think otherwise. In the second century AD, the Greek astronomer Ptolemy made that feeling explicit, constructing a model of the universe in which a series of clear, perfectly formed, nesting spheres surrounded the earth. The sun, the planets, and the stars rested on those spheres. Since astronomical observations are critical for agriculture, a great deal was already known about the actual positions and movements of the heavenly bodies. But observations had to fit theory, not the other way around. Since calculations based on Ptolemy's perfect spheres did not fit those observations, more and more complex rationalizations had to be made to preserve earth's central position.

Early in the sixteenth century, Copernicus had the brilliant realization that perhaps the earth was not central but was, in fact, moving around the sun. His view seemed sacrilegious to sixteenth-century churchmen, who were convinced that God had created the world and everything in it in six days. From Creation on, in their view, the world had been static and unchanging, apart from a few known exceptions, such as the Flood, that were recorded in the Bible. For them and for most educated Europeans, Ptolemy's views were merely a scientific explication of what they already knew from the Bible. Knowledge of the world didn't need to come from observation; that knowledge was already contained in the Bible. Eventually, though, Copernicus' view won out. But calculations about the positions and movements of the planets still remained less accurate than desired, in large part because it was still assumed that planets moved in circular orbits. True accuracy required the elliptical orbits later specified by Newton's laws of motion.

Newton, using his new insights, was able to completely solve what mathematicians and astronomers call the "two-body problem." In a universe consisting of only two bodies, say the sun and the earth, Newton could predict exactly the movement of those two bodies. Another century passed, and French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, in his Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics), attempted the "n-body problem": describing the movements of all the planets in the solar system. To a great extent, he succeeded. But there were anomalies that didn't always fit the calculations. Still another century was to pass before the problem led to the beginnings of chaos theory.

In 1887, to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of King Oscar of Sweden and Norway, a prize was offered for solving the n-body problem. The complete solution proved beyond the power of any mathematician of the time, but the great mathematician Henri Poincaré won the prize in 1899 for his essay on an important piece of the puzzle: the three-body problem, that is, a complete description of the movement of, for example, the earth, sun, and moon. Just as the essay was being prepared for publication in the journal Acta Mathematica, Poincaré realized that it contained a deep and critical error. In correcting this error, Poincaré was able to prove that the complete movement of even three bodies was inherently unpredictable. This discovery shook him so badly that he declared, "These things are so bizarre that I cannot bear to contemplate them." Without realizing it, Poincaré had discovered mathematical chaos in the movement of the planets. As with so many seminal discoveries, it was too early for the implications to be fully understood. A new tool was needed: the computer. With it, chaos descended to the earth.


The Computer Changes Everything

The world of mathematics is traditionally a timeless one, in which equations have no future or past. With Darwin's discovery of evolution by natural selection, however, scientists realized that they lived in a world in which time could no longer be ignored. Once the "arrow of time" moves forward, it cannot be reversed. The problem was that scientists lacked the mathematical tools to deal with the arrow of time. Before computers, the only mathematical tool for dealing with change over time was calculus. But calculus is itself composed of equations that can be calculated either forward or backward. If you differentiate an equation for distance, you get velocity. Differentiate again and you get acceleration. Conversely, though, you can equally well start with acceleration and integrate to get first the equation for velocity, then for distance. Thus, calculus by itself cannot capture the one-way nature of time.

With the development of the modern digital computer, a new mathematical world opened up for science. Even the primitive early computers were amazing: not only could they calculate complex equations much faster than any human being, they also could create new types of equations in which the result of each calculation was fed back into the equation over and over, many millions of times (and now billions and even trillions). Now, rather than having to calculate a final outcome directly, scientists could mathematically model a natural phenomenon (such as the weather or fluid dynamics) that changed over time. This powerful new method allowed scientists to cause a model of a natural phenomenon to "evolve" in much the way it would evolve in nature.

Another factor also proved crucial: scientists could now see the results changing. In our short history we've now reached the early 1960s. Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had programmed a simple model of the weather. Numbers representing initial weather conditions were put into the program, which then calculated what the weather would be after some interval of time. These results were fed back as initial conditions for the next run, and so on. By using this technique, the computer could predict weather conditions over an extended period of time. (It is important to stress, however, that this was a very simple early model, hardly sufficient to deal with all the variables of the weather.) All this was happening long before computers could present true graphics, but programmers used clever tricks to make images out of strings of letters. Lorenz used a similar technique to create a continuous paper line graph of the output of his model, the numbers describing weather conditions. The line would rise or fall in ways that looked like the movement of the winds or other meteorological phenomena over months or even years.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Indra's Net by Robin Robertson. Copyright © 2009 Robin Robertson. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Foreword,
Introduction,
1 The Story of Alchemy and Chaos Theory,
2 As Above, So Below,
3 Feedback,
4 Take Apart, Put Together,
5 Chaos and Emergence,
6 The Philosopher's Stone,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Illustration Credits,

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