Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Timeless Wisdom from the Science of Change [Hardcover]

John Briggs (Author), F. David Peat (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 1999

The predicament of all life is uncertainty.

While humans have had to deal with chaos since ancient times, only recent has science recognized it as a fundamental force in the universe.

Chaos, theory, originally used to understand the movements that create thunderstorms, raging rivers, and hurricanes, is now being applied to everything from medicine to warfare to social dynamics and theories about how organizations form and change. Chaos is evolving from a scientific theory into a cultural metaphor. As a metaphor it allows us to query some of our most cherished assumptions and encourages us to ask fresh questions about reality.

Our modern society has been obsessed with conquering and scientifically controlling the world around us. However, chaotic, nonlinear systems--such as nature, society, and our individual lives--lie beyond all our attempts to predict, manipulate, and control them. Chaos suggests that instead of resisting life's uncertainties, we should embrace the possibilities they offer.

In this groundbreaking new book, John Briggs and F. David Peat unfold seven lessons for embracing chaos in daily life:

Be Creative: how to engage with chaos to find imaginative new solutions and live more dynamically

Use Butterfly Power: how to let chaos grow local efforts into global results

Go with the Flow: how to use chaos to work collectively with others

Explore What's Between: how to discover life's rich subtleties and avoid the traps of stereotypes

See the Art of the World: how to appreciate the beauty of life's chaos

Live Within Time: how to utilize time's hidden depths

Rejoin the Whole: how to realize our fractal connectedness to each other and the world If you 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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

There would have been no Jurassic Park without it. There is a perfume named after it. It is chaos, whose theory is the hottest one in science since relativity. The most powerful part of its allure is the relevance of chaos theory to human life struggles, yet no earlier book more than alluded to that connection. Briggs and Peat, whose Turbulent Mirror (1990) is one of the best popular books on the science of chaos (Briggs also wrote the lavish Fractals [1992] on chaos art), now give us a book that introduces the major ideas of chaos and shows how they can be used metaphorically. For instance, sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, or the butterfly effect, is the phenomenon of a tiny action, when amplified throughout a system, having unexpectedly disproportionate effects. (It is called butterfly after the chaos theory canard that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a thunderstorm--or hurricane--in New York.) Apply this to politics, say, and apparently small initiatives can produce enormous changes. Briggs and Peat are careful to differentiate between scientific fact and metaphor, unlike some popular but often inaccurate self-help writers. The combination of factual exactitude and imaginative application makes this the best book on chaos yet. Patricia Monaghan

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (January 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060182466
• ISBN-13: 978-0060182465
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #870,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #86 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Chaos Theory

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creative Transformation, March 14, 1999

By 

Nicole Henderson ([e-mail]) (Boston, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Timeless Wisdom from the Science of Change (Hardcover)

Seven Life Lessons of Chaos is the only book I have ever finished and begun again. This is not a "how to" book, but a piece of literature -- one that does not end, but continues to begin again. I began this book expecting "lessons" in the ordinary sense. Thinking I would be "shown how to do something," I braced myself for the pointer and the lectern and the maps. A non-scientist (to say the least), my only understanding of chaos was "messy and disordered." But like any good student, I waited for Briggs and Peat to teach me, in an orderly, structured way, their "lessons." What happened, though, was something else entirely. Instead, by using chaos theory as a metaphor, Briggs and Peat offered a series of overlapping and merging lenses through which I began to see the world in new ways. Like a great piece of literature, the words began to fall away and as I glanced to watch them tumble, the world appeared in sometimes fleeting, sometimes sustained glimpses -- a world that is at once more chaotic and more possible to be with. This is not a book that "tells you" how to give up control, but one that offers shifting glances into the relieving realization that you didn't have it in the first place. In the end (which is also the beginning), what remains is an oddity so beautiful you will want to touch it. And when you do, you will realize it is your life.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for Control Freaks, June 15, 2005

By 

B. H. Stewart (Cincinnati, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change (Paperback)

Seven Life Lessons shows us that the control we humans think we have on everything is mostly an illusion. The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. To me this spontenaeity is a wonderful thing. I love the fact that it sometimes rains when the weather bureau has predicted sunny skies--or vice versa. It makes me understand that the universe is magnificent and is beyond control of any kind. I believe there is a line in E. M. Forster's Passage to India when the character Mrs. Moore says about Ganges River: "What a beautiful river! What a terrible river!" She makes this observation right after the calm beauty of the river has exploded with the sudden splash of a crocodile in the middle of the river. What a boring world if everything were predictable and controllable. This book does indeed offer some suggestions on how to use the scientific discoveries about chaos to enrich our lives and to appreciate the complexity and beauty of the planet Earth. I return to it again and again when I'm feeling barren and dry.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practice Positive Butterfly Power, April 21, 2000

By 

John W. Pollard (Brisbane, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change (Paperback)

This book will not change your life - but it will enlighten you to the possibilities of how to view life in the future. This is not eastern mysticism by scientists, but rather a clear statement of how uncertainty is the most certain of all things - we live in a world of opposites and that alone provides limitless opportunity.

You should read this book - just once will be enough to 'get it'.