Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change
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If you have ever felt your life was out of control and headed toward chaos,science has an important message: Life is chaos, and that's a very exciting thing!In this eye-opening book, John Briggs and F. David Peat reveal sevenenlightening lessons for embracing the chaos of daily life.Be Creative:engage with chaos to find imaginative new solutions and live more dynamicallyUse Butterfly Power:let chaos grow local efforts into global resultsGo With the Flow:use chaos to work collectively with othersExplore What's Between:discover life's rich subtleties and avoid the traps of stereotypesSee the Art of the World:appreciate the beauty of life's chaosLive Within Time:utilize time's hidden depthsRejoin the Whole:realize our fractal connectedness to each other and the worldLife is impossible to control—instead of fighting this truth, Seven Life Lessons of Chaos shows you how to accept, celebrate, and use it to live life to its fullest. Publishers Weekly Attempting to extract lessons for daily living from the emerging science of chaos theory, Briggs, a professor of English at Western Connecticut State University, and Peat, a British physicist, have produced an often frustrating, intermittently suggestive guide. Chaos scientists seek hidden patterns underlying apparently random events. By heeding their example, the authors maintain, ordinary folk can learn to appreciate the interconnectedness of all things, to go with the flow of events, to unlock creativity through heightened tolerance for ambiguity and ambivalence, to pay attention to subtlety, to act according to one's internal rhythms. Skipping fluidly from irrational numbers to Zen paradoxes, from Vaclav Havel's notion of "the power of the powerless" to the I Ching to the egalitarian, "self-organizing" interactions of an Ojibway Indian community and Manhattan's food distribution system, the authors use chaos as an overworked metaphor in a barrage of analogies, speculative leaps, platitudes and anecdotes. Their unconvincing manual is riddled with sentences like, "Positive butterfly power involves a recognition that each individual is an indivisible aspect of the whole and that each chaotic moment of the present is a mirror of the chaos of the future." Scores of intriguing photographs (66 b&w; eight pages color), which form an integral part of the book, reinforce points about the dynamics of change and the liberating potential of chaos with images of colliding galaxies, Ice Age cave paintings, a traffic jam, a craggy British coastline, plots of heart rhythms. (Feb.)
AcknowledgmentsBefore Words: The Metaphor of Chaos Theory1Lesson 1Being Creative11Lesson 2Using Butterfly Power31Lesson 3Going with the Flow53Lesson 4Exploring What's Between79Lesson 5Seeing the Art of the World99Lesson 6Living within Time125Lesson 7Rejoining the Whole143After Words: Lesson 7.1325 ...167Notes177Index195
