Rambling narrative on bifurcation theory, religious ecstasy, and anecdotal anecdotes

regime of a schizophrenic break down, critical slowing can be both global and literal as the patient freezes in catatonic postures. In the neighborhood of the bifurcation set, big jumps in the stock index, up or down, are possible under almost the same surrounding conditions. This stock analyst-humbling phenomenon is called bimodality. Jimmy Swaggert’s Saturdays were often spent watching the show at naked dance parlors and buying videos at the pornography shops of Metairie Highway near Schwegmann’s Grocery outside New Orleans. Sundays found him on national television engaged with infectiously real, transcendent experiences in the public arena of the pulpit. The ecstatic congregation was deeply moved by his eloquent and tearful sermons about sin and salvation. Counter to most suspicions, this is less conscious fakery than the genuinely felt alternating states intrinsic to the bimodality in neighborhoods of spiritually unstable, born again transitions. Similarly, beginning with nearly the same initial values near the boundary of the bifurcation set, very similar motions lead to dramatically different results. This counter-intuitive behavior has been called divergence. At UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, | interviewed a pair of lively teenage, genetically identical male twins raised by a loving family in Los Angeles’s Valley. One was president of his high school class, a Sunday school nursery school volunteer and a Saturday soup server to the poor. The other twin sold pot and cocaine to support his habit. Deep and potentially dark mysteries live in these spiritual bifurcation sets. They leave us pondering child sexual abuse by deeply religious clergy and the massacre by mass suicide of a New Christian congregation by James Jones. We wonder why it is that fundamentalists (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) have the most ecstatic and direct validating experiences of God and do the most shooting and bombing of other people. In Burt Lancaster's portrayal of bifurcation set dweller, Elmer Gantry, charismatic believer and exploitative psychopath, were simultaneous and both credibly real. Another feature of the occupancy of this bifurcation region in control space is that the values producing a sudden jump that occur passing through going one way along the “normal” dimension usually jump back much further along when moving 60 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013560