If you are interested in the Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness as conceived by Timothy Leary and developed and popularized by Robert Anton Wilson, have a gander at Michael Johnson's "Improvisations Off Leary and Wilson's 5th Circuit," over at his blog. (Michael modestly calls his piece "improvisations," but everything he posts seems to be based on books by Harvard professors, stacks of articles, out of print books that stuff in the shelves of his personal library, etc.)
See also the comments, where Eric Wagner talks about activating the Fifth Circuit with classical music.
6 comments:
Happy Mozart's birthday! I wonder what role Beethoven would have played in The World Turned Upside Down and the other historical novels Bob contemplated writing. I remember his telling me in 2000 that he had intended to take the Historical Illuminatus Series all the way up to the twentieth century.
Happy Monday as well. I loved Mike's blog on the fifth circuit, and it got me thinking about the days of the week and the first seven circuits. Today many folk head back to work, helping them get those first circuit tickets. Tomorrow seems a good day to breathe and nurture the second circuit. Wednesday, humpday, gimel day, I try to post on my Zukofsky blog and nurture my third circuit. Thursday, love and do as thou wilt. Dank God es Freitag ist! Saturday night seems alright for fighting and/or activating the morphogenetic circuit. On Sunday football fans get to use the Superbowl, its commercials and halftime show to help them metaprogram the next year.
"Eight Days a Week" seems a clue to the link between the days of the week and the eighth circuit, as does this comment by Messiaen on the Quartet for the End of Time:
"This quartet contains eight movements. Why? Seven is the perfect number, the creation of six days made holy by the divine Sabbath; the seventh in its repose prolongs itself into eternity and becomes the eighth, of unfailing light, of immutable peace."
Thanks for the shout-out, Tom. And it gave space for Prof Wagner to riff on the 8CB model's hermetic correspondences and idio-whimsic-intrinsic affinities.
If we trace Leary's thought back to the source of the model, Eight-ness begins to arise, and it's up to us to sleuth through and figure out why Eight, and then patterns of Eight-ness that were incorporated later.
I like Leary's model of Three-ness worked into the Eight-ness, but it came later. Take each circuit (8) and apply the metaphor of the individual neuron, receiving electrical impulses/neurotransmission, then incorporating this "info", then sending electrical impulses via open ion calcium ion channels and neurotransmission (3 steps): 8x3 = 24, and a further opening of intellectual "space" in the 8CB Model for further science and science-fiction speculations about human evolution...most of the riffs covering ideas that were marginalized by Academe.
RAW, being more of a True Generalist intellectual Adept, did not adopt Leary's 8x3 extrapolation, and rather, like a virtuoso jazzman, took off and soloed with his own chops.
Re:Monday: Montag. Moon Day. Simon and his Clan.
Luna.
Sun-day and left-hemispherical dominance in Authoritarian culture, literacy. Moon-day and the Moon, the dark side, mysterious, right-brain-holistic, thinking in pictures not language, neo-tribalist, novel ideas arriving in a flash. The opportunity to implement New Ways of thinking.
PS: As of this date, I think Leary was very impressed with the Russian chemist Mendeleev's intuitions and his incredible then-neocartographical Periodic Table. I think this infl. Eight-ness more than anything else, but someone please chime in and prove me wrong.
I think Wilson explored along with Leary 8x3 circuit model in the book The Game of Life.
What do you think about Antero Alli and his contribution in 8-C model in Angel Tech and The Eight-Circuit Brain?
I red only Angel Tech and it helped me a lot of understanding my consciousness.
Leary gave credit to RAW and other friends for writing in Game of Life, but I really don't think anyone wrote that book except Tim.
I like Antero's book and wrote a tiny bit about it at the end of the blogspew Tom linked to, above. Antero's interpretation of the 8CB seems to me long-thought-out and experimented with, and so it appears QUITE different from RAW and Leary. I like Antero's exercises a lot. Markedly: he does not discuss drugs and the circuits.
Antero thinks RAW and Leary had an improperly deflationary view of emotions and the body, which I think is a legitimate critique, but I don't agree in the case of RAW. Antero has a wonderful sense of the power of imagery and film. I've found him a mesmerizing speaker in person, and yet he seems a tad Bodhisattva-ish: no ego trips at all.
I wish his films were more readily available; his own filmmaking - from what I've seen - makes Kenneth Anger's use of magick in film look primitive. I find Antero Alli a potent artist, and that's what's cool about his very nuanced reading of the 8CB: he's a visual artist; RAW was a novelist-intellectual; Leary a scientist.
Love the days of the week qabala.
Heard, "Saturday in the park, I think it was the 4th of July" in the gym this am and it made me think of that.
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