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Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOSEPH DILLARD

Building Blocks of The Dreaming Kosmos

The Dreaming Kosmos, Chapter 2

Joseph Dillard

What is The Dreaming Kosmos?

Imagine your consciousness as one of a billion stars in a glowing, radiant night sky, a part of one of innumerable constellations, forming patterns that guide and inspire. Like Orpheus's lyre charting Hades, the starry sky fosters collective wisdom, harmonizing your personal goals with transpersonal insights from the edge of chaos. The Dreaming Kosmos envisions our waking reality as a fluid, co-created process shaped by experience, culture, and systems, akin to a dream where perceptions feel real, yet carry tangible consequences, unlike typical dreams.[1]

What are the primal, dynamic forces that shape The Dreaming Kosmos? This chapter introduces key concepts—chaos theory, attractor basins, entropy, negentropy, emergence, holons, and polycentrism, elaborated in later chapters for their interdependent roles in fostering evolutionary awakening. Together, as Hindu mythology teaches us, they churn the kosmic ocean:

In ancient times, the gods, led by Indra, found their divine powers waning due to a curse from the sage Durvasas, who had been offended by Indra's arrogance. The curse drained the nectar of immortality from their essence, leaving them vulnerable to their eternal rivals, the demons. Emboldened by their strength, the demons threatened to dominate the universe. To restore balance and reclaim their immortality, the gods sought the counsel of Lord Vishnu, the preserver of the cosmos.

Vishnu advised a daring plan: churn the primordial ocean to extract the nectar of immortality and other divine treasures hidden within its depths. However, the task required cooperation between the gods and demons, a rare alliance born of necessity rather than goodwill. This act of churning would symbolize the interplay of chaos and order, with the ocean as a chaotic matrix yielding emergent gifts.

The gods and demons gathered at the edge of the cosmic ocean, a vast, uncharted primordial void. They chose Mount Mandara as the churning rod, its peak piercing the sky and the mighty serpent king Vasuki as the rope to wrap around the mountain. The gods took Vasuki's tail, while the gods grasped his head, pulling in opposite directions to rotate the mountain.

As the churning began, the ocean roiled with chaotic waves, disorder threatening to overwhelm the effort. The mountain began to sink into the soft ocean bed, but Vishnu, in his avatar as Kurma the tortoise, descended to support it. The tension between the rival factions, combined with Vishnu's guidance, generated order, yielding a series of divine treasures, each a manifestation of emerging potentials from the primordial disorder.[2]

The demons, greedy for the nectar of immortality, attempted to seize it, leading to a fierce struggle. Vishnu, foreseeing this, transformed into the enchanting Mohini, a female avatar of irresistible beauty. Mohini distracted the demons and distributed the nectar only to the gods, ensuring the restoration of divine order. Some demons, tricked into drinking poison instead, perished, while others retreated, their alliance with the gods dissolving.

The churning concluded with the gods regaining their immortality, the cosmos restored to balance, and the treasures enriching the universe. Yet, the myth suggests an ongoing cycle: the ocean's depths remain a source of potential, to be revisited in future churnings.

Unlike Eastern traditions, such as illusory Hindu and Buddhist maya, which view life as unreal, The Dreaming Kosmos frames life as real but partial, experienced through delusions due to misperceived perspectives rooted in waking assumptions and physiological, familial, cultural, and social scripting.[3]

Chaos Theory

Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics and science that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, yet revealing underlying patterns, such as weather or neural networks.[4] Complex systems are governed by rules or equations that evolve over time, such as weather patterns, population dynamics, or neural networks. Prigogine's work shows systems evolve through chaotic transitions toward new order, reflecting reality's dreamlike fluidity.[5] Small changes, like reframing life issues via dream character interviews, can shift attractor basins, challenging rigid perspectives and fostering emergent possibilities. Chaos theory grounds The Dreaming Kosmos's evolutionary emergence, enabling novel patterns at the edge of chaos across physical, self, dreaming, cultural, and trans-cultural basins called emerging potentials.[6]

Toss a pebble into a pond, and ripples spread unpredictably, influenced by tiny disturbances, such as the wind, a fish, or a dropping autumn leaf, yet forming intricate, overlapping patterns. The “butterfly effect” illustrates how minor inputs, such as a butterfly's wings, yield large outcomes, such as a tornado, as seen in 2025 climate models where slight temperature shifts amplify weather chaos.[7] This mirrors chaos theory's sensitivity to initial conditions that can produce complex outcomes, like weather that is impossible to accurately predict a few days hence. Our dreams form in a realm with fewer of the neurological and cognitive restraints of waking perception, meaning that small changes can produce unexpected or creative results. They participate in a reality that is closer to the edge of chaos.

In our ocean churning myth, the primordial sea is “the edge of chaos” that we enter every night in our dreams and also in transpersonal experiences like visitations or of mystical oneness. Our entry into chaos is generally precipitated by conflicts between our gods and demons, our likes and dislikes, our strengths and weaknesses, our hopes and our resistances. However the edge of chaos itself is not a product of our conflicts nor does it care about their resolution. Rather, it is a field in which conflict, as well as time, space, and relationships, are relatively absent. The result is the creation of a space for creative reframings and the surfacing of emerging evolutionary potentials.

The problem we confront at the edge of chaos is twofold: First, we have to recognize elements at the edge of chaos for how they present and interpret themselves instead of misperceiving them by running them through our cognitive filters. We need to set aside, at least temporarily, blocking delusions. The gods and demons have to get beyond their “eternal” confrontation and cooperate in order to stabilize the world and surface its treasures. Second, we have to have some method of finding out if they are real, useful, and dependable. The gods and demons have to organize some effective means of cooperating. We need a falsifiable yoga, a disciplined structure by which we can determine the reliability and trustworthiness of emerging potentials accessed at the edge of chaos.

The gods and demons within us, personified as dream and visitation entities, as well as by our relationships with our family members and associates, are in conflict at least in part due to the partiality and self-interest biases of our perspectives, called “psychological geocentrism” in The Dreaming Kosmos. Our self-centeredness is itself a product of our lack of multi-perspectivalism, that is, our inability to empathize with the perspectives and agendas of our demons, whether interior fears, exterior abuse by others, or our life circumstances.

Attractors and Attractor Basins

In The Dreaming Kosmos, following evolutionary, systems, and chaos theory, reality is comprised of processes masquerading as stable entities, “things,” and substances, like people, rocks, snowflakes, and Jesus, in Saul's vision on the Road to Damascus. These processes are called attractors. Attractors are stable patterns, such as rivers and cyclones, where systems settle, as Lorenz identified in 1963.[8]

Each attractor has a basin of attraction, a set of conditions converging to that pattern.[9] They form dynamic patterns like whirlpools that stabilize identity and experience, making it look substantial and permanent when it is actually in flux and in flow. These attractor basins have characteristics and perspectives of whole/parts, called “holons.” Sand dunes, formed by the wind's action, are stable holons, seemingly fixed shapes, as are our habits, beliefs, and physical presence, yet in reality, impermanent, transitory processes. The wind, blowing unpredictably across a desert, sculpts patterns through its chaotic dance. This is analogous to attractors as fluid processes like our moods, memories, impulsive behaviors, and addictions. One moment they are real and demanding. In the next, when satisfied, they have evaporated into nothingness.

Orpheus's song is like the wind as a shape-forming process, reshaping Hades's forms, analogous to dune-like basins. The churning of the primordial sea by the gods and demons is the generation of emerging potentials in the sea of chaos, analogous to the many treasures that are uplifted by their churning. IDL character identification in interviews similarly transforms symbolic projections, our gods and demons, into autonomous potentials.

The dynamic formation of attractor basins is analogous to weather patterns, such as clouds forming from vapor. Memories, intentions, and emotions condense into identities and culture via the processes of transforming chaos into order described below as negentropy.[10] Picture attractor basins, yourself included, as swirling whirlpools in a shimmering river, each whirlpool pulling in unique emotions, memories, intentions, and beliefs in the form of colors and shapes. Picture your habits as smaller whirlpools within the river attractor basin, pulling you into familiar patterns, smaller whirlpools that feed into cultural norms, which are larger whirlpools. In our Hindu analogy, Mount Mandara and Vasuki serve as examples of stabilizing attractor basins. Rigid basins mirror delusion borne of partiality of perspective, while flexible ones at the edge of chaos foster creativity and evolutionary shifts, like moving from stress to resilience in dreams, just like the gods and demons churning the primordial ocean.[11]

In dreams and altered states attractor basins in the form of dream characters or visions of angels, demons, tunnels, and light, provide flexibility due to the suspension of the structures of time and space, allowing transitions to new basins, such as from fear to hope, doubt to belief, stress to resilience, or from reactivity to equilibrium. The fundamentals of evolution, self-organization, adaptation, and energy utilization can be enhanced. The Dreaming Kosmos counters static delusions by promoting adaptability.

Fractal Patterns

Despite their unpredictability, attractors exhibit fractal patterns, self-similar structures across scales, revealing order.[12] A tree's branches mirror its roots and trunk, repeating patterns from trunk to twig. This is a fractal: order across scales, like waking hopes and fears being surfaced and explained by recounting the myth of the churning of the primordial ocean or Orpheus' journey to Hades and his ultimate demise.

Fractal patterning is seen in the coriolis effect, whether occurring in the swirling of water in our bathtub drain or in the monstrous winds of hurricanes. Dream snakes, like small branches, reflect the whole tree of waking and cultural motifs, revealing emergent unity. Jung caught this fractal nature of reality by demonstrating the continuity between personal relationships, including respected mentors and cultural archetypes, like heroes, crones, and wizards.

The fractal nature of attractors means that they can duplicate and resonate across time and space in important ways. A shout in a canyon echoes back in layered, self-similar waves, distorting yet repeating the original sound. The chaotic echoes of dream images replicate our waking dramas at an entirely different scale. Dream characters, entities, relatives, and deities can replicate in fractal fashion in our waking lives as transformative visitations of love and power. Memories traverse sleep to “reincarnate” as repetitive dream images, or dormant skills, such as the ability to play an instrument, resurface years later, as Orpheus's song echoes in Hades's caverns.

Entropy

The tendency of all things toward disorder and energy dissipation, entropy drives evolution. The primordial ocean is in a state of entropy until the gods and demons stir it to life. An echo in a hall starts strong but fades into silence, dissipating energy. Ordered sound is like waking stability that disperses into disorder, like a dream narrative dissolving upon awakening, fostering balance by clearing space for new patterns.

The fading of entropy allows emergence as new echoes, as Orpheus's song echoes fade in Hades, enabling ascent. Orpheus' life course portrays the final ascendency of entropy, in both the abandonment of Eurydice due to his own doubts and to his own eventual demise. That traces of his legacy of harmony continue to exist among the stars as the constellation Lyra implies that echoes of earthly events remain as latent potentials within the trans-cultural attractor basin as part of the fundamental fabric of the universe.

Snowflakes, intricate and ordered, melt into water, losing structure. You and I grow old and die, disintegrating into nothingness, our acts while alive leaving fractal echoes across future generations in our genes, preferences, and behaviors. Due to entropy, ordered forms and identities dissipate, enabling fluid change, like cultural delusions breaking down for collective renewal. As Max Plank said, “Science advances one funeral at a time.” (Paraphrase) While cognitively, entropy is the fragmentation we see in confusion and groupthink, in a transpersonal sense it is formless oneness and potentially the doorway to non-dual interdependent emergence. Without entropy there would be no movement toward evolutionary emergence, from which we can conclude that those who view entropy as the antithesis of development are fundamentally mistaken. Without the primordial ocean there would be nothing to churn and no treasures to surface.

Negentropy

Negentropy is the organization of energy into complex, ordered systems, such as life and awareness, based on self-organization, adaptation, and energy utilization.[13] As a self-organizing adaptive response to entropy, negentropy drives evolutionary emergence. In open systems like the Earth, matter as well as organisms self-organize to offload excessive energy input, generally in the form of heat. In dreams and waking life, neuronal firings, emotions, and intentions form patterns, exporting waste via dissipative processes, akin to cellular health.[14]

Negentropy organizes chaos into structure, adaptability, and meaning. It fosters growth and evolution, organizing chaotic dream elements into coherent narratives.[15] From a chaotic solution, a crystal forms ordered structures, as Orpheus's chaotic grief organizes into harmonious song. It is a growing seed, building order and life. Imagine a seed sprouting into a plant, weaving light and thriving, as in Egyptian Osiris's rebirth or the Mayan corn god.[16] The surfacing of treasures from the churning of gods and demons is a vivid portrayal of the evolutionary power of negentropy.

In The Dreaming Kosmos, negentropy organizes chaotic dreams into meaningful waking narratives, like fear of an attacker reframed via IDL into transformative wisdom. Loose threads in chaos weave into a tapestry. Negentropy is the loom's action, creating order from disorder, like cultural myths emerging from shared dreams, balancing individual and collective perspectives.

Evolutionary Emergence

Emergence is negentropy in action. It creates novel properties from simpler components, unpredictable from their parts alone and not reducible to their component elements.[17] Built into the evolutionary processes of self-organization, adaptation, and energy utilization, emergence can be explained naturalistically, without recourse to creative consciousness or teleology.[18] A seedling sprouts from a single seed in dark soil, emerging into a towering tree that reshapes the forest, creating new niches for birds and insects. This mirrors emergence: simple components, such as genes and the environment, yield complex organisms and ecosystems through self-organization.

Like Orpheus's song emerging harmony from chaos, the seedling's process of growth creates a very real and useful flora canopy, benefiting the collective forest, fostering reciprocity among species. Emergence shapes attractor basins, such as molecules, dreams, and cultures through negentropic interactions.

Complexity Jumps

Evolutionary development driven by complexity jumps are sudden leaps in system organization.[19] Churning up treasures from within the primeval ocean of chaos is a complexity jump. You interview a hyper-active wolf you met in a dream. It is always pacing, stressed, never dropping its preparedness. The wolf says it is a personification of your constant vigilance due to childhood trauma. Now, imagine that you ask the wolf if it wants to change. It responds by saying it wants to have a safe cave where it can retreat to in order to rest, so it can regenerate and not always be vigilant.

We can think of the wolf as a visual metaphor for an attractor basin of hyper-vigilance existing within the larger attractor basin of your core identity attractor basin. What has been created metaphorically is a complexity jump in your hyper-vigilant attractor basin. Whenever you become the resting wolf in its cave you are reconfiguring your hyper-vigilant attractor basin in a realistic way. You aren't imagining you can magically eliminate your hyper-vigilance. Instead, you are redefining it in a complexity jump to include the emerging potential of life balance. This won't change your core identity attractor basin itself because your hyper-vigilance is only one component of it, but it will move your identity toward health and balance. You are priming concrete changes to your central nervous system, rebalancing it away from sympathetic activation toward parasympathetic relaxation and balance. This is an example of how IDL dream yoga supports evolutionary emergence by generating complexity jumps through accessing emerging potentials.

Complexity jumps are rare due to the gravitational” pull of highly adaptive entrenched attractor basins we call habits, that can exert great, overpowering inertia. It is not unusual for people to have breakthroughs in therapy, believe that they have escaped their past, only to find both dreams and waking life pulling them back into old feelings and habits. This can be very discouraging. However, understanding how and why this happens is a first important step toward compensating for it.

Theta Waves

Prominent in both dreaming and meditation, Theta waves (4-8 Hz), correlate with integrative processes and altered states.[20] The ocean's tides ebb and flow in a steady, hypnotic rhythm, connecting shore, analogous to connecting your waking self to the vast sea of your dreaming and deep sleep self. This mirrors Theta waves: a gentle oscillation facilitating dreaming and transpersonal access at the edge of chaos, balancing waking and altered states. Like Orpheus's lyre producing vibrations harmonizing Hades, Theta's rhythm bridges waking delusions and dream emerging potentials, fostering creativity and beneficial reframings through shared resonance. Training Theta balances alertness and relaxation, supporting life balance and access to emerging potentials. Theta is elevated during psi, implying increased access to the edge of chaos and to the trans-cultural attractor basin.[21]

Holons

A term coined by Arthur Kostler in The Ghost in the Machine, 1967, holon (a part/whole), was adopted by Ken Wilber to refer to the four quadrants of reality that we introduced in the first chapter: “I” (subjective), “It” (behavioral), “We” (cultural), “Its” (systemic). Attractor basins emerge from interactions across those four quadrants.[22] As an example, coral polyps are individual organisms (wholes) forming reefs, themselves parts of a greater whole, an ecosystem, each sustaining and sustained by the collective. In the churning of the primeval ocean, each treasure is a whole within the cosmic whole. Like Orpheus's lyre uniting Hades's shades, polyps (holons) balance individual survival with collective reef harmony, fostering reciprocity. This reflects holons: individuals or dream images contributing to larger systems.

Attractor basins present processes as stable “things” like souls or objects.[23] Language and our need to objectify experience fuel this delusion borne of partiality, separating us from life, balance, and transformation. Holons are the personal and collective interiors and exteriors of all things as well as the particular balance of subjectivity and objectivity that exists in every life experience. They anchor The Dreaming Kosmos in multi-perspectival development, honoring diverse cultures and systems.[24] Attractors, as naturalistic processes with holonic perspectives, generate identity, narratives, and potentially non-local experiences, like dreams.[25] This model is testable via Theta neuroscience, negentropic emergence, and IDL practice.[26]

Polycentrism

A central organizational principle of The Dreaming Kosmos, polycentrism is both a worldview and a practice of embracing multiple perspectives, such as maps or models of reality, or of becoming perspectives that are “other,” through a process of identification with dream characters, life issues of central importance to you, or transpersonal elements. Polycentrism reflects cosmology, recognizing that in the universe there is no center but rather that every point is the center. A kaleidoscope mirrors polycentrism. As it rotates it blends multiple colored shards into diverse, harmonious patterns, each view valid yet part of a unified whole. In the Hindu churning myth, the cooperation among rivals reflects polycentrism.

When we interview the “other,” whether it is a dream antagonist or the personification of life issue, such as a fear of rejection, or a national enemy, we are creating a cooperative and respectful relationship where alienation, ignorance, and defensiveness previously existed. Dream characters, personifications of life issues, aspects of transpersonal experiences, and cultural motifs and events are all integrated into a cohesive yet pluralistic understanding. Like Orpheus's lyre harmonizing Hades's shades, the kaleidoscope's shifting perspectives balance individual viewpoints for collective wisdom, fostering empathy through relational unity.

Empathetic Multi-perspectivalism

Polycentrism is another word for multi-perspectivalism, the ability to constructively dissociate and see the world from multiple, non-self-centered, positions. There are two varieties of polycentrism. Valuing multiple perspectives fosters cognitive multi-perspectivalism. It is analogous to map reading, which allows you to survey and navigate a territory. Actually becoming multiple perspectives and viewing experience from their worldview, not ours, develops empathetic multi-perspectivalism. It is analogous to becoming the features on the map—roads, buildings, fellow travelers, animals, pastures, mountains, rivers, and viewing the territory from their perspectives. The distinction is between understanding and transformation.

This variety of empathy is much more profound than “normal” empathy, which is to assume we know what another person is feeling and acknowledging it. The descent of a muse, whose perspective possesses the recipient, is a classical example of fully embodying an alternative perspective. In Oedipus Rex, Tiresias, the blind seer, embodies male and female perspectives, seeing truths others miss.

Empathetic multi-perspectivalism requires validation, that is, the other party must confirm that we hear them. This confirmation is fundamental to both multi-perspectivalism and listening in a deep and integral way. In IDL, that is done through the answers given by interviewed perspectives to questions in the interviewing protocols and character validation of our daily application of their recommendations. The ability to empathize at this depth is a skill that must be developed, and there are several good reasons why it does not come naturally, which will be explained below.

Tetra-Mesh

Tetra-mesh is the dynamic interplay of AQAL's quadrants and eight zones, such as phenomenology and empiricism, weaving self, others, facts, and systems like Indra's Net.[27] An ecosystem interweaves individual organisms (I), species interactions (We), physical resources (It), and environmental systems (Its), forming a balanced whole. This reflects the tetra-mesh: quadrants co-evolve dynamically.

As a form of polycentrism, tetra-mesh fosters balance and higher-order integration, approximating attractor basins with limited ingredients, akin to weather's deterministic chaos.[28] Tetra-mesh can also be thought of as a “recipe,” or combination of “ingredients” that produce a particular attractor basin. The ingredients are not of an equivalent amount and they are relatively few, just as only a few ingredients, moisture, temperature, mass, and gravity combine to produce the chaotic attractor of weather.

In the worldview of The Dreaming Kosmos, some degree of tetra-mesh is required to establish the balance necessary to maintain some higher level of advancement. Because mystical experiences rarely tetra-mesh with our waking lives, they usually fade away, just as does normal dream recall. IDL attempts to develop tools and strategies to support tetra-mesh so that transformation is authentic and lasts.

Trans-Cultural Attractor Basin

The trans-cultural attractor basin is a hypothetical overarching informational network unifying physical, self, dream, and cultural basins, integrating memories, emotions, and intentions for healing and transformation.[29] An analogy is multiple rivers from different regions converging into a single, stable delta, blending unique cultures as diverse waters into a shared ecosystem while retaining distinct currents. This mirrors a trans-cultural attractor basin: diverse cultural perspectives, such as values and myths, stabilize into a cohesive pattern through empathetic integration.

The myths that are used throughout The Dreaming Kosmos to illustrate its concepts, together create a tapestry that transcends any one culture, generating a trans-cultural level of awareness and understanding. Like all attractors, the trans-cultural attractor basin has objective and subjective faces. The latent subjective face is hypothesized to be the ground that allows for telepathy, precognition, and access to lost knowledge. The objective face is emergent and reflects human transpersonal potentials.

Psychological Geocentrism and Heliocentrism

Our normal waking perspective is generally referred to as “ego-based,” or “self-centered.” The Dreaming Kosmos does not use either of these terms because they imply either selfishness or the dynamic psychology of Freud and Jung. Instead, it uses “psychological geocentrism,” to indicate reality that orbits around our own self-definition, like the sun, planets, and stars orbiting the Earth. This is analogous to a garden walled off from the world, where the owner tends only familiar plants. Ignoring outside diversity mirrors geocentrism's self-focused security, providing balance through control but hindering collective good by excluding others' perspectives. Myths like Eden's expulsion highlight how such isolation leads to stagnation and alienation.

Psychological heliocentrism refers to a worldview in which self is transcended by a Self that is one with all, analogous to the sun being the source of all light and life. The Self as a radiant center illuminates all but remains the pivot. Sunflowers turn toward the sun, drawing life from it but fixed in their orientation. Psychological heliocentrism provides balance through unity but limits collective good by assuming, since it is one with truth and goodness and one with all, that it knows what is true, good, and right for others. This is grandiosity disguised as enlightenment. Like the gods and demons cooperating at churning the primeval ocean to surface treasures, polycentrism balances both, in congruence with the Einsteinian shift toward multi-perspectival clarity.[30] Like a diverse ecosystem, polycentrism allows multiple centers for reciprocity and interdependent co-origination.

Core Identity Attractor Basin

This term refers to identity primarily as process rather than substance. “Thingness,” or holonic characteristics and perspectives, are attributes of processes.[31] The goal is not enlightenment or “self-actualization,” but lucidity—waking out of the delusions generated by partial perceptions of reality into an awareness of life's dreamlike nature. Beyond that is the balancing of objectivity, as lucidity, and subjectivity, as profound receptivity. IDL fosters both objectivity and balance, like Ra's rebirth or IDL pranayama's dawn-like awakening..[32] A river's flow carves a stable yet evolving riverbed, shaped by water as experience, rocks as beliefs, and river banks as relationships, forming a unique path. This mirrors the core identity attractor basin, in which personal experiences and relationships stabilize into a dynamic self-pattern, adaptive yet stable.

Life Compass

When multiple perspectives, called “emerging potentials,” are interviewed by IDL, recurring patterns and themes are elaborated. These shared interests point us toward underlying, organic priorities of core processes which The Dreaming Kosmos and IDL call “Life Compass.” It evolves as you do, guiding you on like the North Star. Conceptualized as one facet of the trans-cultural attractor basin, life compass is itself an attractor basin that aligns your waking goals with holonic evolution.

Four Fundamental Principles

Process contextualizes substance.

The churning of the ocean by the gods and demons is a dynamic process, not a static event, yielding emergent treasures from chaos. Holons are emergent properties, characteristics, and perspectives of processes. They can be conceptualized as the stable and “frozen” basins of processes whose chief function is the maintenance of life stability. However, some basins are more transformational than others. Dream and altered state attractor basins are relatively “fluid,” functioning at the edge of chaos. While attractor basins tend to emphasize stability in biological, self, dream, and cultural domains, the attractors themselves tend toward the edge of chaos, because they are relatively undefined and unlimited. A rule of thumb is that where holonic aspects of attractors predominate, circumstances favor evolutionary adaptability. Where attractors themselves predominate, circumstances favor evolutionary transformation, because attractors themselves are by nature relatively unconditioned.

Balance contextualizes development.

The Dreaming Kosmos prioritizes balance over development, as stability enables dialectical growth.[33] Theta's efficiency and Yin-Yang harmony counter entropic fragmentation, aligning with non-Western perspectives like Taoist wu wei and Buddhist anatta.[34] The cooperation between Devas and Asuras, balanced by Vishnu's intervention, prioritizes harmony over linear progress. Prioritizing development leads to line imbalances that tend to collapse the entire developmental enterprise sooner or later, on both individual and collective levels. Typically, lines of cognition and professional competencies race ahead of moral development. This is generally hidden or unrecognized until stressed or challenged. In replicated studies in the 1960's, Stanley Milgram showed that some two-thirds of experimental subjects would shock someone to death when told to by an experimenter.[35]

For healing and transformation to last, emphasis needs to be placed on securing a stable and broad foundation, one that has to get broader the higher you want to climb. Emphasizing balance shifts framing from “higher and lower” and “raising your vibration” to adaptive adequacy, much more in line with evolutionary theory. An emphasis on balance is also in alignment with dialectical theory, in which thesis must be established before synthesis can be maintained, as well as with basic principles of Taoism, as we shall see.

An emphasis on balance as a priority complements developmental and spiritual models, like Integral AQAL, that view “higher” states and “faster” vibration as better than “lower” stages of development and “slower” rates of vibration. Similarly, because a secure foundation is a pre-requisite for stable dialectical development, The Dreaming Kosmos emphasizes adaptation over growth and transformation. We can see this prioritization throughout the natural world in the proliferation of generated potentials representing possible futures, with almost all of this energy and potential sacrificed for maintenance of species survival. When balance is prioritized, focus shifts from who you want to become or comparing your level of development to others to the maximization of who, where, and what you are now. This is in alignment with fundamental transpersonal principles. When you focus on attaining and maintaining balance, tetra-mesh, emergence, and attractor basins functioning at the edge of chaos, like those in dreams and transpersonal experiences, you move toward higher order integration, supported by transpersonal openings, countering entropic fragmentation.

Collective goods contextualize individual benefits and needs.

The surfaced treasures in our Hindu creation myth benefit all creation, reflecting polycentrism and collective wisdom. Evolution occurs due to species-wide, collective alterations, and individual survival is subordinated to that end. This is an evolutionary adaptational principle that has largely been ignored by those emphasizing individual freedom, rights, and prosperity.

Justice contextualizes personal intent.

It is common for us to justify our actions based on our intentions. Our argument is basically, “Because my intentions were honorable and serve a greater good, my actions are justified.” That greater good may be national, religious, or spiritual. It doesn't matter. The argument is the same.

While in some cases human collectives, whether formal, like courts, or informal, as in public opinion, will accept such arguments, when justifications based on intent excuse actions that threaten fundamental interests of collectives, intent is overruled.[36] Justice contextualizes personal intent in general, but acceptance of minor infractions leads individuals and groups, including corporations and governments, to believe that intent supersedes justice. This can end up being a fatal miscalculation.

Justice does not exist in pre-human evolution. Like it or not, physical laws like gravity and forces like sunlight are amoral and care not at all about human existence. Humans can either adapt to an amoral natural order and move into flow with it or not, and then experience naturalistic consequences. Nature says, in effect, “Nothing personal, but you are going to die.”

Similarly, social laws, representing justice, exist for pragmatic, utilitarian purposes to serve collectives, often to the detriment of individuals. As a consequence, justice contextualizes personal intent and individual goods. Justice is an evolutionary emergent necessitated by the complexity of human relationships.[37] Ethical integrity both supports justice and determines what is experienced as just or unjust. In human relationships, ethical integrity manifests as core qualities that appear to drive evolutionary unfolding, including respect, trustworthiness, empathy, and reciprocity.[38] Both physical and social laws cannot be ignored without diminishing human evolutionary emergence, just as Darwin could not ignore the fundamental nature of cooperation for the emergence of species.[39]

Practical Applications: Continue developing your transpersonal dream yoga

The Dreaming Kosmos is rooted in four testable mechanisms: 1) the neuroscience of Theta waves, supporting the analogy of life as dreamlike, 2) the negentropic processes of evolutionary emergence, and 3) your own life practice of a transpersonal, phenomenalistic dream yoga, by which you can test the model, and 4) the falsifiability of its assumptions, encouraging research to generate peer-reviewed assessments of its credibility. However, credibility and validity are finally determined by what makes sense to you and what proves useful in your life for promoting your healing, balancing, and transformation.

To this end, begin to experiment with IDL dream yoga in your life. Begin by interviewing a dream character of your choice using the Dream Interviewing Protocol in Appendix H. Choose at least one recommendation to apply and track in your daily life in order to test the trustworthiness of the recommendation and the methodology.

Set intent: Before going to sleep, resolve to be vigilant and remember a dream or two, writing it down upon awakening.

NOTES

1. Tart, C. T. (2009). The End of Materialism. New Harbinger Publications.
2. Halahala (Poison): First, a deadly poison arose, threatening to destroy all creation. The gods and demons panicked, but Shiva, the destroyer, drank it to save the universe, his throat turning blue (earning him the name Neelkanth). This symbolizes the necessity of confronting chaos to unlock higher potentials.
   Kamadhenu (Wish-Fulfilling Cow): A divine cow emerged, granting abundance, representing the practical benefits of cooperative effort.
   Uchchaihshravas (Seven-Headed Horse): A celestial steed appeared, symbolizing strength and mobility, a gift to the gods.
   Airavata (White Elephant): Indra's mount emerged, embodying wisdom and royalty, reinforcing divine order.
   Kaustubha (Jewel): A radiant gem arose, adorning Vishnu, symbolizing inner light and truth.
   Apsaras (Celestial Dancers): Beautiful nymphs emerged, representing art and beauty, enriching the cosmic tapestry.
   Varuni (Goddess of Wine): The deity of soma (sacred drink) appeared, offering spiritual intoxication and insight.
   Parijata (Wish-Fulfilling Tree): A divine tree emerged, granting desires, symbolizing nature's bounty.
   Dhanvantari (Physician of the Gods): The god of medicine rose, holding the pot of Amrita, the ultimate goal of the churning, representing healing and immortality.
   Lakshmi (Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity): The most radiant treasure, Lakshmi, emerged on a lotus, choosing Vishnu as her consort. She embodies abundance, beauty, and the relational harmony that sustains the cosmos.
   The emergence of these treasures illustrates a holonic process—each is a whole (a deity or object) yet part of the greater cosmic order—reflecting polycentrism as the Devas and Asuras contribute diverse perspectives to the outcome.
3. Shankara. (8th century). Vivekachudamani. Translated by Swami Madhavananda (1921). Advaita Ashrama.
4. Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. Vikings.
5. Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos. Bantam Books.
6. Kauffman, S. A. (1995). At Home in the Universe. Oxford University Press.
7. IPCC. (2025). Climate Change 2025: Synthesis Report. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
8. Lorenz, E. N. (1963). “Deterministic nonperiodic flow.” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 20(2), 130-141.
9. Strogatz, S. H. (1994). Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Addison-Wesley.
10. Kauffman, S. A. (1995). At Home in the Universe. Oxford University Press.
11. Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos. Bantam Books.
12. Mandelbrot, B. B. (1982). The Fractal Geometry of Nature. W. H. Freeman.
13. Schrödinger, E. (1944). What is Life? Cambridge University Press.
14. Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos. Bantam Books.
15. Hobson, J. A., & Pace-Schott, E. F. (2002). “The cognitive neuroscience of sleep.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(9), 679-693.
16. Tedlock, B. (1987). Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Cambridge University Press.
17. Holland, J. H. (1998). Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Addison-Wesley.
18. Deacon, T. W. (2011). Incomplete Nature. W. W. Norton.
19. Kauffman, S. A. (1995). At Home in the Universe. Oxford University Press.
20. Vaitl, D., et al. (2005). “Psychobiology of altered states.” Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), 98-127.
21. Walker, M. P. (2017). Why We Sleep. Scribner.
22. Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology. Shambhala Publications.
23. Koestler, A. (1967). The Ghost in the Machine. Macmillan.
24. Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology. Shambhala Publications.
25. Tart, C. T. (2009). The End of Materialism. New Harbinger Publications.
26. Dillard, J. (2017). Integral Deep Listening. Integral Deep Listening Publications.
27. Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology. Shambhala Publications.
28. Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos. Bantam Books.
29. Kauffman, S. A. (1995). At Home in the Universe. Oxford University Press.
30. Rahula, W. (1959). What the Buddha Taught. Grove Press.
31. Kauffman, S. A. (1995). At Home in the Universe. Oxford University Press.
32. Dillard, J. (2017). Integral Deep Listening. Integral Deep Listening Publications.
33. Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology. Shambhala Publications.
34. Laozi. (6th century BCE). Tao Te Ching. Translated by S. Mitchell (1988). Harper Perennial.
35. Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.
36. For instance, the Nuremberg trials.
37. See Wilson & Sober, 1994 on cooperation in group selection.
38. Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology. Shambhala Publications.
39. See Diamond, 2012 on early legal systems and Tomasello, 2009, on cooperation.