This book offers a paradigm shift in the way emotion is conceptualized. There is, at a minimum, the paradigm shift from seventeenth-century Newtonian models of cause and effect, antecedents and outcomes, toward twentieth-century dynamic systems models. The latter are characterized by self-organization through iterative feedback processes that afford the possibility of both stability and change, dynamic pattern formation and emergent innovation, order and chaos, determinism and indeterminism. Dynamic systems models generalize to supernovas, insect communication, the growth of cities, and economic cycles. This should be plenty of paradigm possibilities for anyone.

When dynamic systems ideas are used in psychology, however, scientists get more than just the principled application of those ideas. All the other disciplines that partake of dynamic systems thinking deal with concrete and measurable entities. The pulsing of stars and insect wings, the disposition of shopping malls and market swings have two things in common: (1) they can be counted, quantified, and reduced to numbers, and (2) they are substantiated in actual entities of flesh and stone. The psyche – the complexity of human experience – is none of that, neither commensurate nor substantial. Psyche coexists with matter, lives in bodies and ecosystems, but it is fundamentally nonmaterial. Psyche is emergent at the very core of its ontology whether we have dynamic systems ideas about it or not.

Every spiritual discipline in human history has been created to account for the mysterious transcendence of the psyche.