As promised in an earlier announcement, the latest Hilaritas podcast, above, features Mike Gathers as the person being interviewed, by guest host Zach West. It's the Maybe Day release. The topic is the Eight Circuit model, as created by Timothy Leary and developed by Robert Anton Wilson and Antero Alli; Mike relates in the course of the interview how he's studied it for years. I thought the podcast was quite interesting.
Mike is a therapist who says the model's main usefulness for him is as an overarching framework that he can use in incorporating the various psychological theories and forms of therapy he has studied. (As an aside, I enjoyed the description of what it was like to attend Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.) Listening to the podcast, I better understood why Mike is such a Grateful Dead fan. There was no discussion of James Heffernan's book, and I wondered if Mike had read it.
Toward the end, Mike mentions wanting to write a book about the model. I hope he does. I hope someone offers him a book contract, or that he offers himself a contract, so to speak, and gets to work. I would buy it.
Here are some Mike Gathers links. And also here is a playlist for Mike's Eight Circuit videos posted on YouTube.
1 comment:
Thanks, Tom. As someone who has voiced skepticism of the 8C model, I appreciate your interest. I will always be my own worst critic, and I didn't sleep well the night before this interview. In hindsight, it felt raw and unfiltered.
In all honesty, I have not read Heffernan. My interest in recent years has been to create space for my own ideas to take shape, and I've deliberately avoided diving into the newer material that's out there. Probably time for that to change.
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