You can see a description of Leary's original model here, but Wilson's model is slightly different from his, and both of them tread some pretty tripped out ground that I don't necessarily buy into. So this is my version of it, minus most of the trippy stuff.


Circuit 1: Bio-survival Circuit or Basic Consciousness (Freud’s "Id")
Imprinted in infancy, it's designed to deal with basic instinctual survival requirements; food, shelter, warmth, fight or flight etc. and in "domesticated apes" (humans) the acquisition of "bio-survival tickets" (money).

Circuit 2: Emotional/territorial Circuit (Freud’s "Ego")
Imprinted in the toddling stage, deals with pack position, hierarchy, dominance/submission, protection of territory etc.

Circuit 3: Symbolic/semantic Dexterity Circuit (The "rational" mind)
Imprinted by human models of thought and semantic systems, deals with logical thinking, scientific examination, invention, semantic map making etc.

Circuit 4: Domestic or Moral/social/sexual Circuit (Adult Personality or Freud’s "Super-ego")
Imprinted by human moral codes and the first sexual experiences, deals with morals, ethics, social limitations, sexual taboos etc.

Circuit 5: Neuro-somatic Circuit (Zen mind)
Deals with hedonistic feelings of total bliss as experienced when in love, "filled with the love of God", during tantric orgasms etc., summed up by the Zen proverb "It's just like normal life, but lived a foot above the ground".

Circuit 6: Meta-programming Circuit (True self-awareness or The "self-aware" mind)
Deals with re-imprinting and re-programming all the previous circuits, unlocking permits the user to access new "reality tunnels" (the set of beliefs through which we see the world) or to put it another way re-definition of your entire perspective on life becomes available at will. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is an example of this circuit in action.

(This is where things get really weird. ).

Circuit 7: Neuro-genetic Circuit (Buddha mind)
Deals with things like "evolutionary consciousness, DNA-RNA-brain feedbacks, Jung’s “Collective unconscious” etc. As I understand it (which I don't), unlocking this circuit not only produces awareness of the perpetual cycle of existence; that everything that exists now has existed and will always exist in one form or another, we are just one link on the chain (a concept that also applies to more meta -physical concepts such as ideas: "If I have seen farther, it is only by standing on he shoulders of giants."), but also to the inner essence and fundamental archetypes of reality. According to Wilson it is the source of the kinds of multi-level language such as James Joyce uses in Finnegan’s Wake, where (as Wilson puts it): “Finnegan is Finn-again, Finn Mac Cool of Irish legend reborn and Huck Finn again also, sailing down "Missus Liffey," both the river Anna Liffey in Ireland and Huck Finn's Mississippi;...".

Circuit 8: Quantum Non-local or Psycho-atomic Circuit (Over-mind)
Deals with things like "quantum consciousness, non-local awareness (information from beyond ordinary space-time awareness which is limited by the speed of light, see "Bell's Theorem"), out-of-body experiences etc. As I understand it (which I really don't) unlocking grants a fundamental and experiential awareness of the web of existence; that all things effect all other things because we are all connected in some way (the six degrees of separation is a very real example of this truth, and this also seems to be what enlightened types are talking about when they say stuff like "There is no me, there is no you, there is only the universe" and all that kind of jazz). According to Leary and Wilson it also grants awareness of these events as they transpire (hence the "out-of-body-experience" stuff) allowing for a truly holistic understanding of reality.


These circuits all operate simultaneously within the psyche and in every individual (except the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th which have to be "unlocked" first), but in most people these circuits operate on an unconscious "unaware" level because we are imprinted with a particular set of beliefs on those circuits as we grow up into adults and stick with these beliefs until something happens to jar us out of them. It is only when we become "self-aware" (when we unlock circuit 6) that we can take conscious control of these circuits and decide for ourselves which "reality tunnel" we wish to use.

It also seems to be the case that in "unconscious" individuals, that one of these circuits is "dominant". The bulk of the individual’s focus is directed towards the issues that the circuit is designed to deal with and all the other "lower" 4 circuits are used (unconsciously) to meet its demands. For example, someone who is circuit 2 dominant will only use circuit 1 bio-survival interests, circuit 3 rational analysis and circuit 4 moral and social interests to improve or maintain their position within their chosen hierarchy.


The theory goes that if we apply this model to human cultural development, you can see parallels with the system. For example, when humans were still hunter-gatherer societies, human culture as a whole was a dominantly circuit one consciousness - basic bio-survival. When we made the jump to a farmer-builder society, we also made the jump to dominant circuit 2 "hierarchical/territorial" consciousness; borders became less nebulous and more absolute, and authoritative hierarchies also became more developed and structured (monarchies for example). When the age of enlightenment began we started making the switch from circuit 2 thinking to circuit 3 "rational mind/symbolic dexterity" consciousness, structured hierarchies became less important and began to be replaced with systems and models based on rational analysis, science began its rise to its current ascendancy.
I think that according to this model we are probably still in this dominant circuit 3 thinking, but the switch to dominant circuit 4 thinking is not very far off. We can already see hints of it in things like environmentalism (and to a degree the civil rights movements), mentalities that seek to place ethical and/or moral limits on pure scientific thought (also think the debate over stem cell research and animal testing). If we follow on from there then the idea is that eventually mankind will evolve (culturally speaking) a completely holistic level of understanding and awareness of reality.


So, what do you guys think? All in all, I quite like this model (and Wilson in particular is very clear to state that it is just a model). The first 6 circuits make a lot of sense to me, I can definitely see them in action both in me and around me, but the last two circuits however are, well, pretty weird.
But somehow I can imagine them being true too, to a degree anyway. It's pretty safe to say that enlightened types like the Buddha or Jesus or the rest of those guys were/are on a more developed level of consciousness than most of us, but were they milling around on the 7th and 8th circuits, or did they just have a deeper level of understanding and a better control of the other 6 circuits?

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

I don't know if this is what happens in the 7th circuit of consciousness, but the above reminded me of something I realized during a pretty traumatic experience I had. I nearly lost all consciousness, and as I struggled against the fading away of my senses and of perception, I had a strange epiphany that ALL is, transcending time.

From this realization, I started to develop my ideas on the "Sincerity of Existence", the utter irrevocability of what exists in the present, transcending both the past and the future. The word 'sincerity' came to me together with the imagination of existence as an undying tree, an organic fractal - propagating its 'essence' - and manifesting 'self' in similar ways, below and above ground. I tend to think a lot in symbols...



Believe it or not ... my mother ... and her grandmother ... I'll see if I can sneak that into my Serendipity Dream Thread. This also reminds me of St. Paul's concept of the church being the Mystical Body of Christ - very wholistic - and like this model of consciousness, socio-anthropological. And also, the mystic, Pio of Pietrelcina, who reminded someone : once you are 'awake', never sleep again...

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Wow, thanks for posting this, DC. Just want to say that for now, because from a brief read through it seems very interesting, and I want to read it over more carefully before I even attempt to try to post anything. Interesting stuff, though.

Came back to comment on how the model can apply to human cultural development. I tend to like socio-anthropological models, and I thought it was brilliant for them to see how social consciousness develops similarly to individual consciousness. I think there may have been brief historical sparks, short-lived manifestations, of the Zen mind, which echoes in modern culture, and I think that mass media and the web are the vehicles taking us faster to this kind of euphoric mental state.

Edit : Well, the above was already mentioned in the Wiki article...


(I was wondering if this were the sort of thing Bailiwick would respond to. I have certain suspicions (good ones) about Bailiwick. Sorry, but my Ne likes to ponder people...)

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Wow, that is a really interesting model. My initial reaction is something like, "yeah...yeah...that makes sense." Where by "sense" I mean, well, sense in my own way and not a deeper understanding.

I'm not sure I agree with relating it to cultural development, though, at least in an evolutionary sense. A lot of early thinking (you can say cultural thought) seems more in tune with higher levels than some cultures have today. Then again, perhaps I'm just not reading and relating to the idea properly. It seems to me, though, that the ideas in Circuit 8 were more readily believed and accepted (and thereby lived?) by cultures that embraced mystical relations with the world/universe. I'm not too familiar with it, but aren't shamanic societies pretty much all about Circuit 8 type thinking and experiences? It also seems to me pretty much the idea of Tao which the Chinese have been contemplating for thousands of years.

LIke I said, perhaps I'm just not understanding the context properly. Perhaps you could expand on that if you feel like it, DC.



Crap, my cover is blown...*looks around nervously*...

AGGGGHHH...now you know you are going to have to share with me what those suspicions are.

I was thinking about this last night and I decided that I think Leary and Wilson are partially wrong about the 5th circuit, I think that it operates like the 4 previous circuits. That is, that it is imprinted by certain events in your life (probably your first hedonistic experiences) and then operates unconsciously from then on until you "unlock" circuit 6 and become "self-aware" (in terms of the context of the model).

If you look around at Western culture in particular you can see many people chasing those hedonistic experiences, from sex to drugs to extreme sports to many other things. Partly this can be explained by the nature of Se, and its prevalence as a dominant or secondary function in a large portion of society. But I think also that there is a marked difference between those who simply enjoy such experiences as they present themselves and those who make it their goal in life to seek out these experiences, no matter where or even what they may be (dominant circuit 5 thinking).

It's possible that we see a greater degree of this in Western culture because we simply have more hedonistic leisure resources available to us than those in the developing nations, therefore we in the West are more likely to have an imprinting experience than they are. That's just pure conjecture on my part though.


Something else I'd like to comment on is Leary and Wilson's suggestion that certain drugs can temporarily elicit certain circuit responses (that is, can temporarily put you into the mindset that that circuit represents). Far be it from me to suggest that people use illicit substances to help them along the path of spiritual growth ( ), but I think there may be some weight to their suggestion.

Circuit 1 can supposedly be "activated" (temporarily) by the use of opiates (morphine, opium, heroin etc.). I have no personal experience of any of these and seeing as "becoming a junkie" is not on my to do list right now, it'll probably stay that way.
However, if anyone here has had experiences of these substances (morphine for example is pretty commonly used in hospitals as a painkiller, so you don't have to by an a struggling addict to have experience of opiates) then I'd love to know if your experiences tie in with circuit 1 thinking in any way.

Circuit 2 can be activated by excessive amounts of alcohol (IMO, you just have to look around a town centre on a Friday night to see that this is true).

Circuit 3 can apparently be activated by things like caffeine, speed, cocaine etc.. Which makes sense to me, I'm only personally familiar with the effects of caffeine but from what I understand of the others they all have the effect of making your thoughts move at a million miles a second (semantic dexterity).

Circuit 4 is a bit of an unknown, but it's been suggested that oxytocin may be able to activate this circuit:



Circuit 5 is supposedly activated by things like cannabis and MDMA (Ecstasy), but also through meditation and yoga. Again, I have no real personal experiences of these (I've tried cannabis a couple of times, but only in small doses and I'd been drinking at the time too, so I'm not sure whether what I was feeling was from the booze or the weed) so if anyone has done any of these things, your input would be most welcome.

Circuit 6 is activated by things like peyote (an hallucinogen commonly used by Native American shamans), psilocybin (the active ingredient in "magic" mushrooms), MDA, Yage and (apparently) computer games!
I can't speak for the psycho-active substances on this list, but I think I can see where they're coming from regarding computer games. Circuit 6 is really all about seeing things from different perspectives, and realising that you can choose which perspective you view things from. Most (or at least many) video games are all about viewing things from different perspectives and altering your own view to achieve further progress in the game.

Circuit 7 is apparently activated by LSD and the deeper forms of yoga (particularly Raja yoga). Again, I can't comment from any first hand experience but the yoga makes some sense to me as yoga is a form of meditation, a method of deep, contemplative self awareness and examination that's designed to help you discover and uncover the deeper truths of existence (the fundamental archetypes of Jung's collective unconscious).

According to Leary, circuit 8 can be activated by large doses of LSD, Ketamine and DMT, but also through things like severe shock and near-death experiences. I have no idea whether this is so beyond that some people report out-of-body experiences during near-death experiences.

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

From what little I understand of the 7th and 8th circuits, the experiences you described certainly sound like them. Perhaps the 7th circuit can be described as the perception or realisation that existence and reality transcend time?

I look forward to reading about your other experiences in your dreams thread, should you choose to post about them. And as for Padre Pio, I'll just quote the quote that I quoted in the quotes thread:



Great minds and all that (assuming Pio wasn't a fraud like some claim).



I'll try.

I think the idea of using it as a model of cultural development is that it's meant to reflect the dominant thinking of the particular culture it is applied to. For example, while native American culture has certain aspects that reflect circuit 8 thinking, that thinking was mostly restricted to their shamanistic rituals. The dominant thinking of the culture was that of hunter-gatherer, circuit 1 bio-survival. Their culture's prime concern was staying alive.

Compare that to ancient China, where the circuit 8-ish concept of Indra's Net was present, but the Chinese culture itself was predominantly based upon circuit 2 hierarchical/territorial thinking (a person's place in society was very strictly observed, peasants were peasants, merchants were merchants, lords were lords, and any movement between the various ranks of society was not only virtually unheard of but virtually unthinkable).

In India today (and also China), they are on the verge of a shift from dominant circuit 2 thinking with it's strictly observed social ranks to dominant circuit 3 thinking, where science and "logical" thinking (semantic dexterity) are king. This is despite the fact that aspects of Indian culture are very spiritual and often touch on higher circuit concepts.

A more global example is that some Western nations (particularly the Scandinavian nations, and also New Zealand it seems) are further along in the progress to dominant circuit 4 thinking than the rest of us, they are looking at the moral and social questions that the scientific and technological advances circuit 3 thinking presents (green energy is an example of this: using circuit 3 semantic dexterity to meet the demands and/or needs of circuit 4 social and moral responsibility).
This progress from circuits 3 to 4 is still occurring despite the fact that there are elements of Western culture that still reflect negative (or "unconscious") circuit 2 thinking (particularly in business, where the dominant thinking is still that of "the boss is boss, the workers are workers, bosses tell the workers what to do, the workers do it, and there shalt be no mixing of the two!").
But, in the balance, I'd say that (for now) Western culture's main concern is still that of using circuit 3 thinking to create new and better things, regardless of their social impact, but this is very rapidly changing, I really do believe we're on the very verge of a major cultural shift in this respect.

I think it's worth pointing out that none of these circuits are inherently "good" or "bad", it's just that unconscious use of these circuits tends to lead to more destructive (or at least non-constructive) thinking than does concious use of the mental states that these circuits represent.

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

Well, here's an example of what I think might be 8th-circuit non-local and non-linear awareness (it's a sad story, though) : One time, my great grandma warned one of her female neighbors not to take a particular street on her way to the market. She had warned her neighbor out of concern : she 'saw' the woman's death in that lonely alley. The woman, instead of thanking her, became livid and smashed her on the head. The next day, the woman was found stabbed to death in that very alley.

Definitely an intuitive lady.

_________________

A very good analysis, but I'm not sure if it all adds up. I think Circuit 3 and Circuit 7 are the same thing for example. I haven't read it all yet, but saying that the human mind evolved as technology and civilization progressed is one of the parts I'm referring to when I say I things don't add up. If it did, circuit 4 would've came in and dominated at the time many of the world's religions first began...right?



If I ever met James Joyce, I would probably kill him and have sex with him at the same time. I read "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man" for an AP English 12 report where you got to choose a classic novel. I liked it and I loved "Ulysses". But "Finnegans Wake" was just a pure raping of the English language if you ask me. I can appreciate the experimentation, but some experiments are failures. Writers like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace used Joyce's avant-garde style, but they used it to enhance their storytelling, not make some almost completely inaccessible sea where finding any literary nutrition is almost impossible.

_________________
"It is a melancholy fact that massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality." -Paul Johnson

INFP, 4w5 sx/sp

I think that based on the model, Circuit 7 would be the right-brain-based parallel of the left-brain-based Circuit 3. Evolution of consciousness would be based on the development of each cerebral hemisphere, with the development of the left hemisphere being more dominant earlier in the history of man, despite all 8 circuits having already been present in homo sapiens sapiens.

When I first read about the model on this thread, my first reaction was to look for a physical and physiological basis for the model (much like Howard Gardner's theory on Multiple Intelligences which have an organic basis). I am pleased to find out that it is based on a study of brain function lateralization. Will try to read this more closely now...

_________________

In my understanding, circuit 3 is about seeing things from a logic oriented, rationalist perspective, hence its connection to semantic map-making (or "coming up with ways to describe how things work").

Circuit 7 is about seeing things from a trans-time perspective, that is, seeing things not only as they are but also as they have been and how they will be. Leary and Wilson claim that this isn't just in terms of using the relevant known facts to imagine how a particular "reality point" (whether it be an object, a system, an idea or whatever) progresses over time but to actually see it, as in the example that crystal gave about her great grand-mother.

This is not necessarily as far out as it might sound (though it is pretty far out), if we use Rob Bryanton's model of the ten dimensions according to string theory* (which you can see here** ) then the 4th dimension is a trans-time dimension, one that would allow someone observing from it to see the progress of a particular reality point through both time and space (or "spime" as it's also known).

in essence, they are arguing that "unlocking" the 7th circuit permits an individual to gain a 4th dimension perspective of reality (as opposed to our current 3rd dimension perspective).

They are also arguing that "unlocking" the 8th circuit permits an individual to gain a 5th dimension perspective, one that allows people to observe the progress of a particular reality point not only across our own space and time but across all possible spaces and times (in other words, it allows you to view alternate realities). It's worth noting here that both Einstein and Theodor Kaluza agreed that the 5th dimension would be the place where the contradictions of gravitation and electromagnetism (the sciences of the very big and the very small respectively) would be resolved.

*(NB. This model is quite controversial and is not the one currently accepted by the majority of theoretical physicists).

**(For those who haven't seen this video before, I recommend watching it through once without the annotations, and then once with. There are just too many annotations and they often go into too much detail to be able to both watch and read at the same time).



This is another one of the places where I disagree with both Leary and Wilson. Our current understanding is that the human brain is unchanged since Homo Sapiens first walked the planet, you could take a cave-man baby and drop it into a suburban family in London (or whatever) and it would grow up as a perfectly "normal" suburban kid. Because of this I think that the 8 circuits have always been present, but as human civilisation has grown and advanced it has permitted us as a species greater opportunities to progressively develop cultures that reflect these circuits (there's much more time to explore circuit 5 hedonistic experiences when you don't have to worry about circuit 1 bio-survival, for example).

As for the circuit 4/religion connection, I'd argue that religious teachings (especially in ancient cultures) have often been used to justify the establishment of new (or justify the existence of already established) hierarchies of the nations in which they exist. There is also the point to be made that more than a few organised religions have been prone to this thinking themselves, the Catholic Church for example is a very hierarchical institution and at times in its history has almost wilfully abused their own religious teachings to prop up their own authority.

In terms of the model that means that religious (socio-moral) circuit 4 thinking was being "enslaved" by dominant circuit 2 thinking.



Finnegans Wake happens to be right at the top of my current "to read" list.

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

I don't know superstring theory that well yet, but I had been reading explanations for its multi-dimensional theories since several years ago, in an attempt to understand how it is that some individuals seem to have insight into our future (my great grandma for example). When I had a cicuit-7-esque experience of the "Sincerity" of existence, it was tangential to Bryanton's visual metaphor for the space-time tree. The "path of observation" that we choose among a multitude of other possible realities becomes irrevocable as we step through time in our limited 3D existence. The reality of our actual path of choice only becomes revocable through the power of another being able to transcend our limited experience of this space-time Tree of possibilities. This also fits well with the Christian notion of Jesus being able to redeem mankind through the cross - our "sins" or "choices" are "forgiven" or "revoked."

I chose the specific word "revocable/irrevocable" because of its Latin root word meaning "to call." I intuit that our choices reverberate through our limited dimensional experience, through our brane/womb-like borders, and into a higher dimension where an "unseen eye" can observe our reality or interact with us from a greater level of freedom. The unseen eye views us from a "Maternal" perspective, where our dimensionality exists in a womb enfolded by "her" dimensionality. This is my Kabbalist-like intuition of our existence. I like to anthropomorphize "Being." It is "Personal Being" for me, similar to Moses's experience of the voice from Mt. Sinai saying "I Am Who Am."

This is also how I understand St. Paul's vision of humankind when he says that we see reality as it were, through a "veil" (lower dimension), but that some day, we shall see reality "face to face" (fuller dimensionality). Face to face like an infant that once born, is able to look at his Mother's face. Another anthropomorphic/kabbalistic understanding of inter-dimensional interactions for me.

Prior to watching Bryanton's video blogs, I had already been toying around with the idea of a mobius-strip existence where we perceive that we are walking on a straight line, but are actually moving through a curved, liminocentric (this word should look familiar to Bailiwick in his thread "Let's Argue!!!") reality - where in is out, and out in. Over the weekend, I was experimenting with inter-dimensional point-of-view in a work of short fiction I entitled "Romantic Irony" which I will be posting in my short story graveyard.... (Plugging! )

Wilson makes the analogy that from a certain perspective, the evolutionary process can appear to have a concious mind. Up close, it's just a series of random mutations and interactions with local environmental forces that combine to permit species to more successfully interact with their surroundings. But from further away, the process can appear to be making complex decisions about which alterations will be the most advantageous.

In a similar way, a group of well-informed people will tend to make better decisions than any one equally informed individual (for example, Einstein avoided the Jewish holocaust and is responsible for some of the greatest ideas known to mankind. The Jews as a group have come up with thousands of great ideas and have survived many attempts to eradicate them).

It's like the Gaia hypothesis, a collection of individual components doing their own individual things can, from further away, seem to be one organism capable of much more complex thoughts than its constituent parts. The human body acts in the same way, up close it's just a bunch of cells making unconscious, instinctual choices about its conditions, from further away they combine into one larger organism that is capable of making much more complex choices about its own conditions.

If we take this idea and apply it not just to an individual or a group or a single world but to the entire universe, if we could step outside the universe and look at it from the outside, from further away, it's possible that we would see the same thing. The universe might appear to be a being capable of making far more complex decisions about its conditions than any one of its component parts.

This is not to say that this force would necessarily be concious. There are many creatures on this world alone that are made up of many distinct individual cells, and none of them appear to be concious in the same way that we as human beings appear to be. But, that force would theoretically be viewing itself from the perspective of a much higher dimensionality than humans. Even in an unconscious state it would have a far deeper understanding of itself than we would have of it.

Fun stuff, eh? Now try applying this concept to the multiverse and wait for your head to explode.

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

Yesterday, I went to the hardware shop to buy some electrical parts to re-wire an old lamp. When I disassembled the wiring, I discovered that it was set up as a parallel circuit, and was considering re-wiring it in series, but parallel won.

When I came on the site and read this -



- I couldn't help but think of a circuit analogy : Parallel vs. Series. The Jewish group would be thinking in parallel, whereas Einstein would only be thinking in series or also in parallel, but with less wires.



If you go to the site hosting the above image, and scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see an equation for the total effective resistance of a circuit in parallel.







Since we are talking circuits here, I'd like to use that equation to express what I intuit about Wilson's take on the evolutionary process having an apparent conscious mind, by quoting what Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his book, Weaving the Web (Note that the WWW is another information circuit.) :



The more individual minds are added to that one cosmic mind wired in parallel, the more ideas and solutions to problems can be formed through group intuition. More current or intellectual currency (information/ideas) flows through this parallel circuit (of information) as the total effective resistance decreases with each additional resistor (mind).

ohmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..... *pauses as my resistor brain levitates*






DC, look up: you were having an unconscious conversation with Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web.

Nice analogy.

Speaking of "resistances", in something of a coincidence (or perhaps a moment of synchronicity, if you prefer) I just finished reading Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" today, and this bit jumped out at me:







IIRC, Wilson mentions something in "Prometheus..." about Jung (amongst others) saying that moments of coincidence like this are really moments of synchronicity, where either the universe or humanity (through the collective unconscious) is trying to send us a message.

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

And so it was Bergson that Dr. Maria Montessori (remember her from your unschooling thread?) was quoting in one of her books, The Absorbent Mind or Discovery of the Child. She mentioned how autistic savants did not (yet fully) develop that part of the brain that acts as a filter for sense perception. She almost put it bluntly that higher brain development actually makes you dumber – for a practical purpose, of course.

So part of her goal in non-intervention (unschooling) was to allow the child to reach a state of relative calm that allows his unconscious, “absorbent mind,” to do the work of learning for him. Through calm, voluntary activity, the learner enters a state of passive learning, which because it is effortless, accomplishes more than the conscious, logical mind.

Synchronizing with the “collective unconscious,” the child's mind also finds its own “inner guide” to life in the cosmos. With this instinctive and intuitive mindset, he hears that cosmic life-giving “message,” like an inner-directive that points him in the direction of his “Great Work,” his unique contribution to humanity. (Otherwise, how can you possibly find yourself, in that din of formal education where everyone else is telling you what you should do?)

The point is to allow the child to find out for himself through his own natural appetites (through experimentation with various sensorial experiences). Self-discovery is a largely unconscious process that only after a period of silent incubation makes itself known to the conscious mind in a Eureka moment. Then when he's found his “thing” (as Iolanthe calls it), the child will sink his teeth like a hungry vampire into the marrow of cosmic existence. He will live and breathe for that “thing,” and you can't easily shake him off or distract him or discourage him. He will have entered a circuit-5-esque state of “oneness” or euphoria, that will feed him, energize him, from within.

This is what Montessori calls “giving” the child the “keys to the cosmos.” The child holds the key to his own cosmic education. The cosmos is his classroom...for Life...for life. He will unlock the mysteries of the universe with the power of his own mind. With the intellectual zeal of a scientist or the spiritual hunger of a poet.

I like how you put it that a bit of Huxley's text impinged itself upon your consciousness -- “jumped out at” you. Synchronicity is a very trippy concept. It is also the only way I can make sense of all these hyper-intuitive leaps that I've been having, short of believing in an imminent Personal Being guiding humanity (read: God).

The God explanation sounds simpler though – out with all those mysteries with just a wave of the hand! And yet, when One becomes the explanation for everything, it ceases to explain anything. It only further adds to the mystery. So maybe, the best explanation is no explanation at all. It is only mystery.

And yet, with our limited consciousness, we can still use analogs to form an abstract model of that mystery. We call this metaphysics. And from these analogs, we can work out the abstract dynamics, the logic of the system, intrapolating and extrapolating from the physical, in search of ontology and teleology – and hope. Or maybe, just fiction.

Your posts about parallel circuits got me thinking and I'm amazed I didn't realise this before but I think the best way to look at the model itself is probably as 8 parallel circuits. That way it's not about working your way up from circuit 1 thinking to circuit 8, it's about getting all the circuits operating together in unison so that you have a balanced and unrestricted view on life.

The "unlocking" stuff is just about becoming consciously aware of the different perspectives those circuits represent, and therefore freeing yourself up from the potentially damaging (or at least restrictive) circuit perspectives that we have up to that point been unconsciously programmed with.

It's just that to do that you have to become consciously aware of circuit 6's reprogramming perspective first, before you can deal with the earlier circuits and move on to "unlocking" the later more difficult/deeper circuits.

Which, come to think of it, along with fixing up the more recalcitrant examples of my earlier programming is the next step for me. I have to learn how to quiet my mind's noise, to silence the din and learn how to listen to my inner voice (just like Montessori was talking about with her teaching approach).

In another moment of apparent synchronicity, I just stared reading Bruce Lee's "The Tao of Jeet Kune Do"* last week, and a quote from that got me thinking about the circuit 7 perspective.



I've been thinking that maybe that's what circuit 7 is really all about: hushing the noise and connecting with your inner self. The future sight stuff (assuming it's legit) is maybe, at least to a degree, kind of a side-effect. The main focus is the shift in perspective away from the din and towards the silence, or in other words quieting the concious mind to connect with the sub/unconscious (which is where Jung's collective unconscious resides, assuming it too is legit).

I've also been toying with the idea that these circuit 7 "flash-forwards" (to steal a phrase from the very circuit 7-esque premised TV show of the same name) are (at least in part) moments of pure unfiltered Ni, using the quiet inner voice of the subconscious and conceivably the inner archetypes of Jung's collective unconscious as reference points to make hyper-intuitive leaps about the future state of various reality-points without being weighed down or disrupted by the "din" of the concious mind. I'm not sure how that would tie in with the idea of tapping into the 4th dimension though.

Regardless, if I'm going to try to hack into my subconscious I'll probably have to start meditating. Maybe I should start with Tai chi? The more physical nature of it might help distract my concious mind better than just sitting still and imagining a candle or whatever.


*(There's a whole bunch of stuff in that book that ties in with the general principles of this model and the unschooling approach to learning, I'll probably post some of them over in that thread).

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

DC, try this for ten to fifteen minutes...

Sit down comfortably, spine erect. Close your eyes, and empty your mind of all thoughts.

Breathe in. Hold it for a few seconds. Breathe out. Compress the muscles of your diaphragm after you breathe in. Hold it. Then release your muscles as you exhale. You should feel an exploding, tingly sensation down your neck and spine when you exhale.

Become aware of your physical state. Start releasing the tension from your head, face, neck, back, chest, arms, and legs.

Imagine colors here: Breathe in positive feelings (happy colors). Breathe out negative feelings (dark colors).

Enjoy the rhythm. You will notice your heart pounding more heavily, but at a slow steady pace.

If you have a favorite song or quote or poem that relaxes you, repeat it in your mind as you inhale.
Imagine yourself letting go of sad feelings and memories as you exhale. Imagine those sad thoughts fading away.

I used to do this with a group (of nuns) as part of our eastern meditation. A process of emptying. The goal was to bring the mind down to alpha-level (to trigger alpha brain waves and quiet the beta brain waves). Then we'd chant (Gregorian style). Very soothing. Then we'd write in our journals. Lotsa creative output. The repeated words activated the left brain, and then the right. The irony is that the quickest way to gamma (intuitive bursts) is by going back to alpha (or an even deeper calm). Come to think of it, maybe this is what writing those silly sentences does when it gets rid of writer's block!

Compared to Tai Chi, this alpha-level meditation was a lot more stress-free. I'm gonna go back to doing it today!

Tried your technique earlier today (I even put on a CD of alpha waves to help), but it was...not successful.

I suspect I (currently) lack the self-discipline to stop myself from becoming aware of what I'm doing, rather than just doing what I'm doing, if that makes sense.

There were moments that might have been what it's supposed to achieve, but I really don't know, they didn't last very long at all before I blew it (usually by ruining the moment by troubling myself with the thought that the whole thing might be a colossal waste of time).

After about 20 mins. or so I just gave up, it wasn't making me feel relaxed or creative at all, just annoyed with myself for not being able to do it.

I'll try again at some point though (I'm not giving up that easily), but that's why I have my eye on Tai Chi, I'm hoping the physical part of it might tip the scales more in my favour.

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

^Aww. I'm sorry it didn't work out for you....Not that I'm pushing, but it did take me one month of doing it every morning until I felt relaxed enough to just flow with it. Hope Tai Chi works well for you, if not, then maybe, something else. +