The Principle of Chaos
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In my opinion, all so-called dysfunctional feelings and behaviors -- all those things that cause us emotional and mental suffering and cause us to seek therapy, personal growth programs, self-help approaches, and so on -- are really coping mechanisms we use in an attempt to deal with the stress of being pushed past our personal threshold for what we can handle coming at us from the world.
When our threshold is too low for our environment, stress and chaos happen, and we exhibit these various ways of suffering.
These coping mechanisms are an attempt to keep our internal map of reality (which is really what is being stressed when one's personal threshold is exceeded) from falling apart.
What we fail to recognize as we try to defend this map is that after falling apart, a new and better map will take its place.
This natural process, the identification of which led to a Nobel Prize for scientist Ilya Prigogine, involves this map (our concept of who we are and what our relationship is to the rest of the universe) going into temporary chaos in response to too much input, finally falling apart (when the chaos becomes so much the old map cannot hold itself together), and then instantly and simultaneously reforming itself at a higher level that CAN handle the environmental input that previously was too much for it.
Unless the system completely ceases to exist (the odds of which are one chance out of an infinite number of situations), this reorganization always results in a new system/map that can handle what the old system/map could not handle.
The only reason we try to protect the old system and keep it from falling apart (and then reorganizing at a higher level) is that we think that map is who we are, rather than just a handy conceptual tool we use to help us through life.
We get so used to using our concept of reality when making decisions about what to do, how to feel, how to act, and so on, that we forget it's just a tool and that who we really are is much more.
Because we think we are this map, we think WE are falling apart when the map begins to fall apart, and we then try to protect it, even though the deficiencies of this map are the real problem in the first place, and a new a better one will instantly allow everything to work better.
So what is the practical application of this model of how things change and why people create dysfunctional feelings and behaviors and other kinds of resistance?
How does this work in real life?
I'm glad you asked. First of all, you have to acknowledge to yourself that chaos precedes change.
Whenever there is chaos (or stress) in your life (I don't mean usually or occasionally, I mean WHENEVER) it means your current map is not able to handle the environment you're in, is not quite able to handle the journey you're on at the moment.
At this point you might remind yourself that a new map would be nice right now, and would, in fact, solve the problems the old map can't handle, chaos is a sign I'm getting ready to create a new map, and if I get out of the way it's creation will happen easier and faster.
It is helpful, therefore, to recognize when you are in the initial chaos state, and to remind yourself that this is the prelude to positive change -- if you know how to get out of the way and let it happen.
Many (most?) people cannot recognize when they are in chaos. Why? Several reasons. Many people instantly self-medicate whenever they begin to feel stressed.
They reach for a drink, a joint, a cigarette, food, a sexual partner, or some kind of adrenaline rush -- anything to mask what they are feeling. They do this unconsciously and automatically.
They do not realize that the chaos they feel is a growth opportunity and that by not taking advantage of it they are condemning themselves to repeat the stress and chaos over and over, since every time life pushes at their current map, it will always be stressful. A new and more highly evolved map, however, could handle what the current map cannot.
Second, most people do not take responsibility for the chaos or stress they feel. They project it onto something outside of themselves. They find something to blame. "I'm stressed because of him." "I'm stressed because I lost my job." "I'm stressed because of the terrorist attacks." "I'm stressed because of my kids/parents/partner/finances/health/whatever."
The real reason you are stressed, however, isn't any of these. The one and only reason you are stressed or in chaos is that your threshold for what you can handle is too low for the environment you're currently in.
And the one and only real solution is to raise that threshold higher.
Not taking responsibility and instead blaming something outside of yourself is yet another way of going unconscious and of avoiding being an active participant in creating personal evolution.
So first, you have to notice that there is chaos. "Here I am, in chaos."
Then, you have to acknowledge why it is happening. "My threshold for what I can handle is too low."
Then you have to remind yourself that since chaos is the first step in reorganizing your map of reality at a higher level -- one that will work much better than the old one and handle much more -- this is actually a big opportunity.
"Hallelujah! I am about to evolve, and once I make the leap to the next level, I'll be able to handle more, and a lot of things that cause me to suffer now will fall away!"
Then, you have to let it be okay that you are going through the interim period of chaos, and just watch what happens (more about that in a future article). Resisting will at best make the process painful, and at worst will keep the reorganization from happening at all.
Few people in the world really understand how change works, which is why most people fight it. And, because they often "win" this battle over the change trying to happen, they lose the war.
By fighting off change, you get to be pushed past the same old low threshold over and over until you finally allow it to reorganize itself at a higher level.
But you DO understand how change works, which will save you untold suffering, if you will only take advantage of your knowledge.
Change is a natural process. You don't need to know "how" to do it. The entire universe has been evolving for God only knows how long by this very mechanism.
All you have to do is get out of the way. Here are the steps once more:
Notice and acknowledge that you are in chaos or stress.
Realize it is happening not because of something outside of you (yes, there is a stimulus, but it is not the CAUSE) but because your threshold for what you can handle is too low to handle your current environment.
Remind yourself that this is a good thing, and means you are about to evolve to the next level, where many current problems will disappear.
Let it be okay that this is happening.
Watch with curiosity and don't resist.
Isn't life simple?
Well, it is if you follow the above. Or, you can avoid being in any situations where you get pushed past your threshold (good luck).
You can stay home, isolate yourself, do your best to not participate in life, don't take in any new information, etc.
Or, you can develop all kinds of ways to blow off steam when the pressure builds. You can be angry a lot, worry a lot, compulsively talk, or exercise, or eat, or have sex (or whatever you like to do).
Of course, you'll continue to have the same threshold in that case, with the same limitations. You already know what that's like.
This principle is of one of those deceptively simple things in life. At first it seems difficult, but once you master it you can't figure out why you ever did it any other way.
One of the great things about the Centerpointe program (you knew I'd bring this in eventually, didn't you?) is that not only does it push your threshold for what you can handle higher and higher (and higher), but it also gives you the clarity to be able to go through the five steps I've outlined above. As people progress in the program, this process gets easier and easier.
If your life is anything like mine, you have one opportunity after another to master this principle, so decide right now you will master it. After all, you'll keep getting opportunities, one after another, until you do.
Finally, if you're not in the program yet, what are you waiting for? How long do you want to wait to get started in making your life easier and your suffering smaller?
Regards, William Harris, Director
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ARTICLE 2 on Stress Management:
"You Push Me Past My Threshold, Baby!" By Bill Harris
or "Your Stress Management Threshold and How You Can Raise It"
I've been mulling over the following ideas about stress management for many months, and I finally thought it was time to share them with you.
What finally prompted me to put these ideas down on paper was new research information regarding stress and early life trauma, and the fact that this new information confirmed something I've intuitively felt was true for many years, based on my observations of thousands of Holosync® program participants.
Quite frankly, I think this may well be the most important Special Report I have written. I hope you will read it carefully, thoughtfully digest what it contains, apply it to your own personal situation, and occasionally come back to it.
I'm always trying to fine-tune the models I use to describe how the Holosync® sound technology affects the brain, and therefore our personal growth and evolution.
As you probably know, models and theories are only as good as their ability to describe reality and to predict what will/should happen in a given situation.
One of the most gratifying things about my "discovery" of Nobel Prize-winner Ilya Prigogine and his description of how complex systems evolve and grow has been to watch this model successfully predict pretty much everything that happens as we use the Holosync® technology on a daily basis to push our brains to reorganize at higher levels of functioning and higher levels of awareness. (See the East Meets West article on the web site, Support Follow-Up Letter #2 which is sent via snail mail to all new participants, or The Management of Evolutionary Change book that comes with the second level of the program for more information about Prigogine's work and how it applies to what we do at Centerpointe.)
I honestly have not seen any response to this technology that does not make sense within this model of change. This, of course, has led me to greater and greater confidence that this theory accurately describes reality, and that we can rely on it to predict what will happen as we use the Holosync® sound technology and move through The End® program.
I don't want to give an extensively detailed description of Prigogine's work here, as I have done so in several of my other writings, but I will briefly summarize the high points, since they are pertinent to the main points I want to make in this Special Report.
(When I use the word "system" below, remember that physically, emotionally and mentally you are a system and that system obeys all the laws discussed below just like any other complex system.)
We start with the Law of Increasing Entropy (the second law of thermodynamics), which states that all things tend, over time, to break down and become less ordered - unless energy is added in some way.
This is one of the most basic laws of the universe. It has been scientifically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt and has been accepted by the scientific community for over a hundred years.
Systems that maintain their orderliness instead of breaking down, or even become more ordered (as happens with human beings), do so because they have the ability to get rid of entropy by dissipating it to the environment.
But each system has an upper limit of how much entropy it can dissipate, based on its degree of complexity: the greater the complexity of the system, the greater the amount of entropy it can dissipate.
Since each system (or, for our purposes, each person) is really an on-going flow of energy, this upper limit of how much entropy can be dissipated puts an upper limit on how much input the system can handle.
As long as the input level does not exceed the ability to dissipate the resulting entropy, everything is fine and the system remains stable.
When this upper limit is exceeded, however, the entropy that cannot be dissipated instead begins to build up in the system. As this happens, a breakdown of order begins and the system becomes increasingly more chaotic.
If this continues, at a certain point, which Prigogine called a bifurcation point, the system either totally breaks down and ceases to exist as an organized system or, more often, spontaneously makes what is known as a quantum leap, reorganizing itself at a higher level - one that can handle the input that was too much for the old system.
The most important characteristic of this new system is its ability to dissipate more entropy to its environment and therefore handle more input from the environment.
I have been developing a theory for several months that is an off-shoot of this Prigogine/chaos theory view of looking at change. The prevailing view in personal development circles is that if you are traumatized, especially in childhood, you then have all this "stuff" buried in the unconscious mind that is causing all kinds of problems for you and that this "stuff" needs to come up to the surface and be "healed."
I'm not so sure any more that I think this description reflects what's really happening. So here's another way to look at this subject.
Every person has a threshold for how much they can handle coming at them from their environment (including their internal environment).
If that threshold is exceeded by whatever is happening in that environment, they begin to feel stressed. If things continue in the same manner long enough, they eventually become overwhelmed.
When people begin to feel stressed, they begin attempting to cope with the feeling of stress in various ways (most of which actually don't work) they learned while growing up.
My contention is that all the neurotic, addictive, obsessive/compulsive, dysfunctional, etc., etc. feelings and behaviors that send us to therapists, personal development seminars, self-help books, and all the many other ways we seek help, are all attempts to cope with being in an environment that gives us more input than we can handle.
Another way to look at this is that people who have been traumatized in some way have a lower threshold for stress than do other people who are able to handle their environment more easily.
What, then, is responsible for this "lower threshold"?
I believe that when people experience some kind of trauma in their upbringing they do not mature in the same way as they would have without the trauma, and part of this lack of normal maturation is a failure to develop a "normal" threshold for stress.
These people are bothered by aspects of their environment more often, and to a greater degree, than these same things bother people who have not suffered the same degree of trauma.
Because of this, these people are more frequently exhibiting their own personal coping behaviors (and experiencing the uncomfortable feelings that go with them).
These include anxiety, confusion, withdrawal, depression, anger, plus all kinds of neurotic behaviors such as alcohol and drug use, sexual acting out, eating disorders and even more severe problems such as personality disorders and psychosis.
A recent article in Psychology Today, "Stress...It's Worse Than You Think," discusses this increased sensitivity to stress:
"...we can become sensitized, or acutely sensitive to stress. Once that happens, even the merest intimation of stress can trigger a cascade of chemical reactions in brain and body that assault us from within."
Psychologist Michael Meaney, Ph.D., of McGill University has said: "What happens is that sensitization leads the brain to re-circuit itself in response to stress. We know that what we are encountering may be a normal, everyday episode of stress, but the brain is signalling the body to respond inappropriately."
Everyone, it seems, has a built-in gauge that controls our reaction to stress, a kind of biological thermostat that, when working properly, keeps the body from launching an all-out response literally over spilled milk. Sensitization, however, lowers the thermostat set-point, according to psychologist Jonathan C. Smith, Ph.D., founder and director of the Stress Institute at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
"Years of research," says Seymore Levine, Ph.D., of the University of Delaware, "has told us that people do become sensitized to stress and that this sensitization actually alters physical patterns in the brain.
That means that once sensitized, the body just does not respond to stress the same way in the future. We may produce too many excitatory chemicals or too few calming ones; either way we are responding inappropriately."
Another researcher, Jean King, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts Medical Schools, believes that when certain stresses occur during developmental periods may be more damaging than stress suffered at other times.
"The psychological events that are most deleterious probably occur during infancy and childhood - an unstable home environment, living with an alcoholic parent, or any other number of extended crises...What we now believe is that a stress of [great] magnitude occurring when you are young may permanently rewire the brain's circuitry, throwing the system askew and leaving it less able to handle normal, everyday stress."
This, of course, is where all the various coping behaviors and feels begin to pop out, causing all the various life-problems that lead people to therapy and other personal growth/personal development solutions and stress management techniques.
Traditional approaches for dealing with all of this have always seemed to me to be symptom-oriented, including the prevailing therapeutic methods I mentioned previously dealing with the so-called unhealed "stuff" "down there" that must be brought to the surface and healed; or the increasingly popular method of using drugs that will "retune" the neurochemical system in the brain (though I'm not a fan of drug therapy, it can certainly be effective and sometimes is a welcome emergency alternative to the suffering caused by the symptoms themselves).
But as I have administrated The End® program over the years, a more basic and more effective solution has occurred to me: what if we could raise the threshold at which these dysfunctional feelings and behaviors are triggered?
If this could be done, these feelings and behaviors would fall away because they would never, or at least rarely, be triggered. The new and higher threshold where these feelings and behaviors are triggered would be reach less often or perhaps not at all.
As those who have been in The End® program for any length of time and who have spoken to me on the telephone or read my writings know, I firmly believe that when we are exposed to the Holosync® sound technology it brings about the whole Prigoginian process of change described at the beginning of this article.
The technology slows electrical brain wave patterns, which causes electrical fluctuations in the brain that the brain cannot handle as it is currently structured (in other words, the system experiences input beyond its ability to dissipate the resulting entropy). In response, the brain reorganizes itself at a higher level to create a new structure that can handle this input. It is in this process that the threshold for stress is raised.
This is the reason why people in this program have such dramatic positive changes and why all kinds of neurotic and dysfunctional feelings and behaviors fade away as people progress through the program.
It explains why people in the program often successfully go off their depression medication after ten or twelve months, or why problems with anger or anxiety disappear, or why a whole list of other complaints fade away as people move through the program.
These responses are all coping methods gone awry, and once coping is no longer needed (or needed less often) because the system is no longer so easily stressed, the coping strategies are called into play less and less often.
I see the Centerpointe program and Holosync® technology as a very effective method for undoing the traumas that caused the threshold for stress to be set too low in the first place. This method attacks the problem at the root and bypasses the short-term treatment of symptoms.
By pushing the nervous system to reorganize itself at higher levels of functioning, we give the person a second chance at creating a more normal coping system that does not rely on coping through dysfunctional feelings and behaviors.
In fact, after completing several levels of the program, participants typically begin to develop what might be called a "super-normal" coping system, where very little bothers them. Life zooms to and fro around them, but they remain an island of serenity in the center of it all and life becomes more than just coping, leaving room for exploration, fun, vision, creativity, and the making of dreams into realities. Be well.
The Principle of Chaos and Reorganization By Bill Harris Director, Centerpointe Research Institute
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