A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology: Bridging the Personal with the Transpersonal

Description

Fractal dynamics provide an unparalleled tool for understanding the evolution of natural complexity throughout physical, biological, and psychological realms. This books conceptual framework helps to reconcile several persistent dichotomies in the natural sciences, including mind-brain, linear-nonlinear, subjective-objective, and even personal-transpersonal processes. A fractal approach is especially useful when applied to recursive processes of consciousness, both within their ordinary and anomalous manifestations. This novel way to study the interconnection of seemingly divided wholes encompasses multiple dimensions of experience and being. It brings together experts in diverse fieldsneuropsychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, physiologists, psychoanalysts, mathematicians, and professors of religion and music compositionto demonstrate the value of fractals as model, method, and metaphor within psychology and related social and physical sciences. The result is a new perspective for understanding what has often been dismissed as too subjective, idiosyncratic, and ineffably beyond the scope of science, bringing these areas back into a natural-scientific framework. Table of Contents Advance Praise for the Book Contributors Foreword • Richard Taylor Introduction: Towards Fractal Foundations for Transpersonal Science • Terry Marks-Tarlow, Harris L. Friedman, Yakov Shapiro, and Katthe P. Wolf PART 1: TRANSPERSONAL EPISTEMOLOGY 1 A Fractal Epistemology for Transpersonal Psychology • Terry Marks-Tarlow 2 More than Merely a Model or Metaphor? The Contributions a Fractal Epistemology Might Make to Transpersonal Psychology • Katthe P. Wolf and Harris L. Friedman 3 Towards a Naturalistic Science of Transpersonal Experience: Fractal Evolution and Nonlocal Neurodynamics • Yakov Shapiro 4 Transpersonal Psychology and Fractal Evolution • J. Rowan Scott 5 Fractal Epistemology and the Biology of Emotion • Katherine Peil Kauffman 6 Epistemology of the Neurodynamics of Mind • Frederick David Abraham 7 Fractals Transcendent: Bridging the Transpersonal Chasm • William Sulis 8 On the Mathematical and Transpersonal Foundations and Dynamics • Jonathan Root PART 2: FRACTAL APPLICATIONS 9 Dreams, Synchrony, and Synchronicity • Terry Marks-Tarlow 10 A Fractal Topology of Transcendent Experiences • Sally Wilcox and Allan Combs 11 Fractal Boundaries: A Subjective Approach • Robert M. Galatzer-Levy 12 How Fractals Help Us See and Understand the World • Larry S. Liebovitch 13 How the Cerebellum and Cerebral Cortex Collaborate to Compose Fractal Patterns Underlying Transcendent Experience • Larry Vandervert 14 Hidden Plain Sight as the Sky Holds a Cloud: Fractals in Ancient Chinese Philosophy • Anthony S. Wright 15 All the Inbent Fractals of Connection • William J. Jackson 16 The Fractal Qualities of Hallucinatory Phenomena: On Form Constants and Their Implication for the Psyche • Jesus-Mario Serna 17 Cracked Orlando: Dramma per Musica e Fractals, Dimensions of a Fractal Baroque Opera • Jonathan Dawe Afterword • Yakov Shapiro, Terry Marks-Tarlow, Harris L. Friedman and Katthe P. Wolf Index