Read the rest of this lengthy excerpt.The Eight-Circuit Brain
Antero Alli
The following is an excerpt from The Eight-Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body, forthcoming from Vertical Pool Publishing.
"We soared, we crashed, we burnt out, we're tuning back in."
We are all walking through the pages of our own stories every day, stories that intersect the stories of others, dead and alive, as chapters in the larger Book of Life. If you are friends with writers, your story will probably end up in their writings or in their books some day, whether you like it or not. Even if you have never met the author of a book or read the book itself, your story is probably already captured. This happens all the time. And no matter how much certain authors write from their own personal experience, they cannot help but also reveal the greater truths innate to the collective milieu we are all expressions of. Some of these writers seem to have built-in broadband antennae for picking up those signals and decoding them for the rest of us; Timothy Leary was one of these big antennae writers.
Large collective shifts have ways of grabbing our personal lives by the scruff of the neck and tossing us about as if we were plastic action figure replicas of ourselves. Sometimes these greater forces erupt from deep within our own genetic makeup and shock us with diseases unexpectedly inherited from our ancestors. Other times, we get lucky and the chaos gods of the zeitgeist decide it's our turn to win the lottery. Or when Aphrodite Love comes to town and turns our lives upside down in the name of Polymorphous Rapture.
These "outside shocks" can be humbling to any naive ego still in denial of the objective truths (and shocks) of Ecstasy, Uncertainty, Indivisibility and Impermanence. Thanks to Dr. Leary's Eight-Circuit Brain model, I learned to see these shocks as activation points for what he calls fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth circuits, respectively. As it turns out, we all have antennas to pick up the big signals. We only have to learn how to unwrap them from ourselves, our self-absorption, and point them outwards again.
In video-blogger Brian Shields' interview with Lisa Ferguson (2/8/2009 at the Timothy Leary reunion party, 111 Minna gallery in S.F.), she shares a startling message from Leary himself, spoken to her personally three days before his death. "We were right," he told her, "all the ideas and dreams we had back then, we were right. It's time to tune back in." Lisa took his message to heart as a boost to complete her documentary film, "Children of the Revolution." Inspired by her own Millbrook childhood stories where her baby sitters were none other than Tim Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), the film also features interviews with other sixties luminaries and what they are tuning into today. Watch for it!
Those who were not alive to witness or participate in the sixties cultural revolution first hand may feel a sense of having missed out on something important and/or harbor the more cynical belief that the world is worse off thanks to Baby Boomer's self-indulgent delusions of entitlement that got us into the mess we're in today. As with many polarized views, the truth often lies somewhere in between. It is now well documented that the American media and government created and maintained the illusion that the sixties were a failed experiment in drug abuse, sexual debauchery, and impossible utopian ideals. And in one sense they were right. Literally millions of participants in this cultural experiment soared, crashed, burnt out, and lost all perspective by pursuing overly inflated, narcissistic visions of changing the world with more peace, love, sex, and LSD.
I can only assume that most utopian visions fail from apathy due to a lack of the consistent self-discipline necessary to embody the vision and "become the change we want to see in the world." Any full-blown spiritual event, with or without LSD, can naturally expose the futility and the illusion of ego. In a naive attempt to preserve spiritual revelation, many ego-trashing dogmas have been created. Taken to heart, any anti-ego hippie belief can easily lead to a "why bother?" apathy masked by a "just mellow out and go with the flow" fatalism. As it turns out, a strong, flexible ego is necessary to manifest our innermost dreams in the external world at large. Any attempt to hold onto a dream, without the self-work to embody it, keeps that dream alive in the mind alone. And in the sixties, LSD opened up millions of minds and more specifically, millions of third eyes (sixth circuit). This powerful cultural and psychic event also catalyzed equally potent somatic, body-centered experiences through the sixties' sexual revolution. LSD can also make us very horny.
The sixties were not a failed experiment. The sixties wrote the first chapter in an ongoing book of how culture transforms itself starting at the level of the individual. In this chapter, an all-encompassing epiphany of self-awareness explodes in the brain and exposes the nature of reality itself. This event can easily overwhelm the existing means to contextualize and apply this knowledge, especially if we are spiritually starved and cannot stop eating fruit from the tree of cosmic knowledge. We eat, we rest, we talk and dream of future societies, and then we eat some more and talk some more. The more forbidden fruit we eat, the more our minds expand and enflame the search for what it all means, ad infinitum and ad nauseum.
"Existence itself may be considered an abyss possessed of no meaning. I do not read this as a pessimistic statement but a declaration of autonomy for my imagination & will and their most beautiful act of bestowing meaning upon existence itself." -- Hakim Bey
The use of LSD and other psychoactive agents not only shocks the ego with exposure to the void but also shocks the very core of our being with a direct experience of void as true nature, who we are at essence, a stunning revelation brought to collective consciousness centuries ago by Gautama Buddha (and given collective context through the creation of various schools of Buddhist meditation practice, doctrine and dogma. I think of Timothy Leary as a Buddha or, as he might prefer to be called, an MVP (Most Valuable Philosopher) of the 20th Century. And like other great philosophers before him, it's reasonable to assume that his seminal contribution may take forty or fifty years to find a collective and cultural context.
Even though Leary indirectly turned millions of people on to LSD, that phenomenon was clearly beyond his control. It was not his central contribution. His seminal offering persists as his Eight-Circuit Brain model for Intelligence Increase, a user-friendly grid designed for anyone exploring higher consciousness as a means not merely to get high, but for designing and creating new contexts for their lives. At the heart of the Eight-Circuit Brain model we find the two most important questions any self-aware person can ask: 1) What is intelligence?, and 2) According to your definition, how would you increase this intelligence?
I first encountered Leary's Eight-Circuit Brain model in Bob Wilson's ground-breaking book, Cosmic Trigger. Leary's grid struck me with awesome potential. Here was a way of redefining "intelligence" through eight different yet related modalities that -- when fully absorbed, integrated and transmitted -- could possibly increase one's intelligence as eight brains in a neurological clusterfuck of Eternal Humming Delight. My twenty-seven year old mind was set ablaze as the seed was planted for writing my first book, Angel Tech.
Berkeley, California 1979-82: During one of Robert Anton Wilson's many Discordian Salons, I shared with him my passion for Leary's circuit system. I told him I'd like to write a book about it and apply my background in theatre to create rituals to help activate these "circuits" for the reader. Bob laughed and said it was a great idea. He then proceeded to tell me that he was writing a book along similar lines called Prometheus Rising, and that it might be the most important book he had written so far. I sat there dumbfounded as Bob's gaze shifted towards his good friend, Greg Hill (author of Principia Discordia) who winked back at him. The Famous Published Author was writing his next masterpiece while an unknown theatre rat was in the wings scribbling notes for his, as of yet, unwritten and unpublished first book. A confusion of emotions. How could I feel so damn self-important and utterly insignificant at the same time? Operation mindfuck was in full swing.
I went home that night and started reading Leary's book, Exo-Psychology. About seventy pages in, Circuit 3 intellect stuttered and choked before it finally shut down. Information overdose. So many theories, so little application. If I can't apply knowledge in some way, it feels useless to me. For all of Leary's brilliance and innovation, I was annoyed by what felt like a serious imbalance between theory and praxis. I asked Bob about this and he said "people might understand Tim better if they knew his nickname during his Harvard days: Theory Leary; he had reams and reams of them." I decided that Angel Tech had to include numerous ways to substantiate a more direct experience of what the "circuits" symbolized. Direct experience trumps the armchair philosophy of abstract rationalizations. The Dogma of Direct Experience. I found my new dogma, though I didn't know it was a dogma back then. Dogmas can be like that.
Four years later, Prometheus Rising is published. Bob's encyclopedic funhouse genius advances Leary's theories by linking them to a web of isomorphic systems, memes, and paradigms like Quantum Mechanics, B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism, Korzybski's Semantics, Sarfatti's Superluminal Physics, Alan Watts' Zen, Freud, Rattray Taylor's Patrist/Matrist Sociology, and Toffler's Third Wave. Bob also broke the Theory Leary Barrier by slyly inserting a series of tasks, word games, exercises and meditations aimed at triggering a more direct experience of the sources of intelligence inferred by the Eight-Circuit Brain model. In this book, Bob advances Leary's theories for the postmodern Western central nervous system. This breakthrough also meant that in writing Angel Tech, I had to carry the ball further into terra incognito and descend deeper and deeper into the flesh and blood embodiment of these ideas.
Though Timothy Leary is publicly credited with the creation of the Eight-Circuit Brain model, he actually did not originate it but popularized his own updated version of an ancient Eastern spiritual code and practice. In the preface of his 1976 book, What Does Woman Want?, Dr. Leary explains how "Dr. Adams," a Hindu scholar from Rutgers University, arrived at his Millbrook estate in the early sixties and initiated him to an esoteric practice of the Hindu Chakra System. Dr. Leary fully absorbed and assimilated this new teaching by replacing "chakra" with the modern term "circuit" and adding Western scientific terms plus recent breakthroughs in Genetics and Quantum Physics towards the transmission of his opus, Exo-Psychology (Starseed Press; updated to Info-Psychology, New Falcon).
The ancient yoga of the Hindu Chakra system aims at trans-substantiating consciousness through the energy centers of the body's spinal column and brain. From the coarsest, densest, and slowest vibrational frequencies of the Muladhara root chakra (the coccyx) to the most refined, subtle and fastest vibrations of the Sahasrara crown chakra (the skullcap), a vertical pathway has been thoroughly and meticulously mapped out centuries ago infusing a priori status on the crown chakra as a final resting place for "The Enlightened." Over years of meditation and yoga practice, the yogi learns to ignite the fiery kundalini coiled in the root chakra. When activated, its white-hot liquid fire pulses and hisses its way up the spinal column, blissfully burning through each chakra on its serpentine pathway toward the crown where it explodes into a "thousand-petalled lotus," a luminous fountain of cosmic consciousness, establishing spiritual Guru status for the aspiring yogi.
This distinctly Eastern process of trans-substantiation moves consciousness beyond the finite domain of the physical body toward communion with The Infinite, an act that sanctions a disembodied spirituality in many Guru/Sunyasin traditions. The Guru's expansive presence magnetizes scores of sunyasins, or devotees, who act as his "anchors" in the material world to assist the business of daily survival and to act as vessels for his vision, message, and spiritual presence. A deeply symbiotic bond develops as a mutually embraced dependency; the guru needs disciples as much as the disciples need the guru. Examples include Da Free John, Rajneesh (Osho), Muktananda, Maharaji Ji and many others.
Far from these Eastern religious traditions of trans-substantiation, western classical mythology points to the wily Titan Prometheus who steals fire from the chief god Zeus and gives it away to mortals for their personal use. This "stealing fire from the gods" story also appears in Native American tribal dreams and myths. According to the Cherokees, when Possum and Buzzard failed to steal fire, Grandmother Spider used her web to steal the fire, hiding it in a clay pot. Fire was also stolen and given to humans by Coyote, Beaver, or Dog. To the Creek Indians, Rabbit stole fire from the Weasels. Timothy Leary embodied this promethean mythos by stealing the fire from the Eastern gods and passing it onto the more materialistic and rebellious Western mind.
Beside updating archaic terms to postmodern sciences and terminologies, Leary introduced a significant breakthrough that bridged the Eastern bias of trans-substantiation to the Western substantiation bias, or materialization, of energies. He did this by basing his definition of intelligence on the biological model of the neuron. As the most basic unit of biological intelligence, the neuron functions by absorbing signals, storing or integrating them, and transmitting the results. He suggested that each of the eight functions of intelligence, symbolized by the Eight-Circuit Brain, could only be fully experienced through their absorption, integration, and transmission, and on their own terms.
He also suggested that intelligence would remain latent or repressed to the degree that we were unable or unwilling to fully absorb, integrate, and transmit it. This implies that simply absorbing data or experience alone cannot advance intelligence. Or put another way, who will know how intelligent we really are until we have integrated our experiences enough to express, share, and articulate them? If we apply this tertiary principle -- of Absorb, Integrate and Transmit -- to all eight functions of this model, the implications are staggering.
If all perceptions are gambles, as Bob suggests, the Eight-Circuit Brain model remains one of the most eloquent and thrilling ways to play the cards I've been dealt. Bob also used to say, "The future is up for grabs. It's too late for anything but Magick." I think the future has already happened. The future is now. Spread the word. Prometheus has risen. Life itself is the guru.
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