From ihe Auihor of ”Ange1 Te(h and Towur:Is an Archeology ox‘ the Soul
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MWERO Alia

THE EIGHT—CIRCUIT BRAIN
Nai/z'gatz'onal Strategies fior the Energetic Body
ANTERO ALLI
Vertical Pool Publishing
Berkeley, California U.S.A.
wWw.verticalpoo1.com

THE EIGHT-CIRCUIT BRAIN
Navz'gatz'onal Strategies for the Energetic Body
© 2009 Antero Alli All rights reserved.
No part of this book (in part or in whole) may be reproduced, trans-
mitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or me-
chanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except for brief quotations embedded in critical articles
and reviews.
2009. Limited First Edition Printing: 1000 copies.
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 0-9657341-3-7
SYLVI & ANTERO ALLI
proof-reading, editing, layout design
Font: Calisto MT
JAMES KOEHNLINE
www.koehnline.com
front cover artwork
Address all correspondence to:
VERTICAL POOL PUBLISHING
P. O. Box 7518 Berkeley, California 94707
info@verticalpool.com www.verticalpool.com

J79?’ Sylvi

Books and Films by Antero Alli
BOOKS
www.vertica1pool.com/ books.html
“THE EIGHT-CIRCUIT BRAIN” (2009)
“TOWARDS AN ARCHEOLOGY OF THE SOUL” (2003)
“ASTROLOGIK; Rewritten and Abridged” (1999)
“THE VERTICAL ORACLE” (w/ Sylvie Pickering; 1996)
“LETTERS, ESSAYS & PREMONITIONS” (1993)
“ASTROLOGIK” (1990)
“PREGNANT UNIVERSE” (w/ Dr. C.S. Hyatt; 1988)
“THE AKASHIC RECORD PLAYER” (1988)
“ALL RITES REVERSED” (1987)
“ANGEL TECH” (1985)
v
FILMS AND VIDEOS (on DVD)
www.vertica1po01.com/dvd.htm1
“THE EIGHT-CIRCUIT BRAIN” (2009; 87 min.)
“THE INVISIBLE FOREST” (2008; 111 min)
“THE MIND IS A LIAR AND A WHORE” (2007; 92 min)
“THE GREATER CIRCULATION” (2005; 93 min.)
“ORPHANS OF DELIRIUM” (2004; 84 min.)
“UNDER A SHIPWRECKED MOON” (2003; 96 min.)
“HYSTERIA” (2002; 83 min.)
“TRAGOS” (2001; 105 min.)
“ROADKILL” (2000; 27 min.)
“LOADED VISIONS: VIDEOPOEMS” (2000; 74 min.)
“CRUX” (1999; 80 min.)
“LILY IN LIMBO (1996; 27 min.)
“THE DRIVETIME” (1995; 88 min.)
“ARCHAIC COMMUNITY (1991; 77 min.)
Complete list of Vertical Pool products:
www.vertica1pool.com/ store.htm1

ll
”Integrz'ty has no need of rules.
- Albert Camus

CONTENTS
Section 1: Theorem
2 ..... ..“What Is This Book?”
4 ..... ..“Children of the Revolution”
12 ..... ..“The Circuits: Leary, Wilson, & Alli”
27 ..... ..“Metaprogramming”
3 3 ..... . . “Paratheatre”
Section 2: Praxis
37 ..... .. THE E] GH T-CIRCUI T BRAIN COURSE
38 ..... ..Week One: Overview
46 ..... ..Week Two: Circuits 1 and 5
65 ..... ..Week Three: Circuits 2 and 6
97 ..... ..Week Four: Circuits 3 and 7
135 .... ..Week Five: Circuits 4 and 8
173 .... ..Week Six: Chapel Perilous
191 .... ..Week Seven: Progress Evaluation
and Week Eight: Review
Section 3: Forum
197 .... ..Featuring inquiries from those who
completed the Praxis Course
Section 4: How I Got This Way
236 .... ..“A Neurological Autobiography”
268 .... ..“The Eight-Circuit Brain Interview”
284 .... ..“The Magus and the Mystic”
290 .... ..“The Cosmic Trigger Effect”
302 .... ..Artist Credits
304 .... ..Suggested Reading

Section 1
THEOREM
“What Is Thzk Boole?”
“Children of the Re120lutz'on ”
“The Cz'rcuz'ts.' Leary, I/Vilson, & Alli”
‘Metapr0gramming”
“Parathecztre”

What Is This Book?
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
Artwork by Sol
This book advances the material of my first book ANGEL TECH
(Original Falcon, 1986), which tested and applied Dr. Timothy
Leary’s 8-Circuit Brain model through a heady mix of exercises,
esoteric meditations, and rituals. After twenty—plus years of research
and experimentation it was time to update my earlier findings and
publish them. This book has guts, a heart, and a mind. The mind
resides in the THEOREM section where inquiring readers can
ruminate on the basic ideas and principles behind the circuits. The
guts live in the PRAXIS section where more adventurous readers can
apply the model for themselves in a comprehensive 8-week course
(also included, in the FORUM section, is a Q&A with some of those
who completed an online version of this course sponsored by Maybe
Logic Academy). The heart of this book beats in the back section,
HOW I GOT THIS WAY, where I reluctantly disclose the real life
events that led me to this point, including my personal experiences
with Robert Anton Wilson and Christopher S. Hyatt.

The subtitle, ‘Navigational Strategies fl)r the Energetic Body”, refers to
the intention behind this book. Navigation means how we get around,
how each of us traverses time, space, and beyond. In context to the
eight-circuit model, we get around in the multiple vehicles of our
Physical, Emotional, Intellectual, Social, Somatic, Psychic, Mythic,
and Nonlocal bodies. The energetic body expresses the totality of all
these vehicles interacting with each other. The overall health, strength,
flexibility, power, presence, intelligence, and attributes innate to this
energetic body depend on how well each of its vehicles are integrated
or not. Some navigate with complex social bodies, others get around
with graceful somatic bodies. Some of us are dragged down by
weaknesses in the emotional body or are disoriented by mental
body confusion. Between the changing conditions of our internal
weather patterns and the wind chill factors of the world around us,
we learn to navigate the chaos of life if we are to stay afloat. If and
when we capsize, hopefully we have prepared enough to survive the
catastrophe and continue on to further shores.
Navigational goals and strategies differ for each of us depending on
which bodies need attention, stimulation, and/ or relaxation. Some
of us navigate our lives by improvising with minimum reliance on
relief maps and weather reports, while others track the same terrain
with meticulous plans, methods, and techniques. Whichever way we
go all navigation requires a seaworthy vessel and, as we well know,
Mother Ocean can be unpredictable, deep, and even treacherous.
The vast sea of consciousness can also liberate, unify, and empower
us, given that we can employ the appropriate navigational strategies
to meet the challenges that face the energetic body on a daily, and
even moment—t0-moment, basis.
Whatever this book says may not be as important as how its words
and images act on you, the ideas it spurs in your mind, the feelings
it arouses in your heart, and the actions these internal events inspire.
At the end of the day it may not matter how much we know or think
we know, as much as how honestly we have lived our lives and how
openly we have loved, and been loved by, those who matter to us.
This book is a labor of love and a gzfi to those who put it to use.

Children of the Revolution
“We Soared, We Crashed, We Burnt Out,
T/Ve’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 ex-
pressions 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.
Larger collective shifts have ways of grabbing our personal lives by
the scruff of the neck and tossing us about as if we were plastic ac-
tion figure replicas of ourselves. Sometimes these greater forces erupt
from deep within our own genetic make-up and shock us with dis-
eases 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 de-
nial of the objective truths (and shocks) of Ecstasy, Uncertainty, Indi-
visibility, and Impermanence. Thanks to Dr. Leary’s 8-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 have only 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, Timothy Leary reunion party, 111 Minna Gallery, S.F.),
she shares a startling message from Leary himself, spoken to her per-
sonally three days before his death. “We were right, he told her, “all
the ideas and dreams we had back then, we were right. Its time to time
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 cul-
tural revolution firsthand 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 the Baby Boomers’ self-indulgent delu-
sions 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 ex-
periment in drug abuse, sexual debauchery and impossible utopian
ideals. And in one sense they were right. Millions in this cultural
experiment soared, crashed, burnt out and lost all perspective by pur-
suing 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 of self—centered beliefs and the illusion of ego. In a naive
attempt to preserve spiritual revelation, many ego-trashing dogmas
were 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 inner-
most 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. We become legends in our own minds. In the sixties,
LSD opened up millions of minds and more specifically, millions of
third eyes (sixth circuit). With all that synapse-popping electromag-
netic energy charging up all those nervous systems, sex became the
most direct outlet to anchor hallucinogenic psychic experiences in the
body. The psychedelic cultural revolution also catalyzed the equally
potent fifth circuit somatic hedonism in the sixties’ sexual revolution.
LSD does not make us horny; the circuit six psychic intelligence that
LSD activates makes us horny.
The sixties were not a failed experiment. The sixties wrote the first chap-
ter in the post-atomic bomb era of how culture transforms itself
starting at the level of the individual. In this justifiably self-centered
chapter, for all new beginnings naturally start with unbridled self-
discovery, 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, use, and apply
this knowledge, especially if we are spiritually starved and cannot
stop eating the fruit from the tree of cosmic knowledge. This is what
happened in the sixties. We ate, we got laid back, we talked and
dreamt of future societies and then, we ate some more and talked
some more; we ate and talked and got more laid back. The more
forbidden fruit we ate, the more our minds expanded and the more
enflamed our search for what it all meant -— ad z'rzfirzz’tum, ad nauseum.
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 Guatama Buddha and given collective context through the
creation of various schools of Buddhist meditation practice, doctrine
and dogma. Buddhism saw a sudden expansion in the west during
the sixties for this very reason -- it provided a context through which
to live with the expanded states of consciousness brought about by
LSD. We must also credit philosopher Alan Watts for simplifying
the more complex principles of traditional Buddhism for the western
mind.

Though it is not yet fully accepted, I believe that Timothy Leary will
eventually earn the status of the MVP (Most Valuable Philosopher)
of the 20th Century. Like other great philosophers before him, it's
reasonable to assume that his seminal contribution may take forty
or fifty years to find its true collective and cultural context. Even
though Leary indirectly turned (literally) millions of people onto
LSD, that phenomenon was clearly beyond his control. LSD was
not his central contribution. His seminal offering would be his Eight-
Circuit Brain model, a user—friendly grid designed for anyone explor-
ing higher consciousness as a means not merely to get high, but to
design and create new contexts for their lives. At the heart of the
8-Circuit Brain model we find the two most important questions any
self-aware person can ask:
I) What is intelligence?
2) According to your definitz'on, how would you increase this intellzgence.7
I first encountered Leary’s Eight-Circuit model in Robert Anton
Wilson’s groundbreaking 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
flilly absorbed, integrated and transmitted — might increase one’s intel-
ligence; picture eight brains in a neurological clusterfuck of Eternal
Humming Delight. Staggered by this vision, I was inspired to begin
experimenting with ways to actualize Leary’s theories in a more real-
ity-based metaphysics by drawing on my own background in theatre,
ritual, and meditation (see ‘A Neurological Autobiography”; HOW I
GOT THIS WAY).
Berkeley, CA, I979-82. During one of Robert Anton Wilson’s many
Discordian Salons, I shared with him my passion for Leary’s 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 PRO-
ME THE US RISING and that it might be the most important book
he had written so far. I sat there dumbfounded as Bob’s gaze shifted
away from me and towards his good friend, Greg Hill (author, PRIN-
CIPIA DIS CORDIA) 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 self-important and completely insig-
nificant at the same time? Operation mindfuck was in full swing. I
went home that night and started reading Leary’s book, EXO-PSY-
CHOLOGY 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 zf they knew
his nickname during his Harvard days: Theory Leary; he had reams and
reams of them.” I decided that my book had to include numerous
ways to substantiate a more direct experience of what these “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, PROME THE US RISING is published. Bob’s ency-
clopedic funhouse genius advances Leary’s theories by linking them
to a web of isomorphic systems, memes, and paradigms like Quan-
tum Mechanics, B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism, Korzybski’s Semantics,
Sarfatti’s Superluminal Physics, Alan Watts’ Zen, Freud, Rattray
Taylor’s Patrist/Matrist Sociology, Toffler’s Third Wave. Bob also
broke the Theory Leary barrier by slyly inserting a series of tasks,
word games, and exercises aimed at triggering a more direct experi-
ence of the circuits. In this book, Bob begins the advancement of
Leary’s theories for the postmodern Western nervous system. Bob’s
breakthrough also meant that in writing my book I had to carry the
ball further into terra incognita, and descend deeper into the flesh
and blood embodiment of these ideas and memes. There was al-
ready enough talk about it, maybe too much talk.

Though Timothy Leary is publicly credited with the creation of the
Eight—Circuit Brain model, he actually did not originate it but popu-
larized his own updated version of an ancient Eastern spiritual code
and practice. In the preface of his 1976 book, “WHATDOES WOM-
AN WANT?”, Dr. Leary explains how “Professor Adams”, a Hindu
scholar from Rutger’s University, arrived at his Milbrook estate in
the early sixties and initiated him to an esoteric praxis of the Hindu
Chakra System. Dr. Leary fully assimilated this new teaching by re-
placing “chakra” with the modern term “circuit” and adding Western
scientific ideas plus recent breakthroughs in Genetics and Quantum
Physics towards the transmission of his opus, “EXO—PSYCHOLOG Y”
(Starseed Press; updated to INF O-PS YCHOLOG Y; New Falcon).
The ancient yoga of the Hindu Chakra system aims at trans-substan-
tz'atz'ng consciousness through the energy centers aligned with the
spinal column and brain. From the coarsest, densest and slowest vi-
brational 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 was meticulously mapped
out many centuries ago infusing a priori status to the crown chakra as
a final resting place for “The Enlightened”. Through years of medi-
tation and yoga practice, the yogi or yogini learns to ignite the fiery
kundalini coiled in the root chakra. When activated, its white-hot
liquid fire pulses and blissfully hisses its way up the spinal column,
burning through each chakra on its serpentine path to the crown
where it explodes into a “thousand-petalled lotus, a luminous foun-
tainhead of cosmic consciousness, establishing spiritual Guru status
for the aspiring yogi.
This Eastern process of trans-substantz'atz‘on fixates consciousness be-
yond the finite domain of the physical body towards communion with
The Infinite and sanctions a disembodied spz'ritualz'ty in the Guru/Sun-
yasin traditions. The Guru's expansive presence magnetizes scores of
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 deep symbiotic bond develops as a mutu-
ally embraced dependency; the guru needs disciples as much as the
disciples need the guru. Examples include Da Free John, Rajneesh
(Osho), Mutkananda, Maharaji J i, 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 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 Chero-
kees, 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. In Creek
lore, Rabbit stole fire from the Weasels. Timothy Leary was a Coyote
figure who embodied the promethean mythos when he stole the fire
from the Eastern gods and passed it on to the materialistic, rebellious
Western mind.
Besides updating archaic terms to postmodern scientific terminolo-
gies, Leary bridged the Eastern bias of trans-substantiaton to the
Wild West substantiation bias of materialization of energies. He did
this by basing his very definition of intelligence on a dynamic pro-
cess of absorbing, integrating and transmitting information and/ or
energy, a process reflecting the tertiary function of the most basic
unit of biological intelligence, the neuron. Leary also suggested that
consciousness could evolve itself by the absorption, integration and
transmission of one’s experience through eight functions of Intelli-
gence, as symbolized by the Eight-Circuit Brain model.
Leary goes on to suggest that intelligence can remain latent or re-
pressed to the degree it is not fully integrated or, interpreted through
the context and truth of one’s own direct experience, i.e., accord-
ing to each Central Nervous System. Absorbing data or experience
alone cannot advance intelligence. Who will know how intelligent
we are until we have integrated our experiences enough to articulate
them? When this trinary principle of -— Absorb, Integrate and Transmit
-- is applied to all eight functions of Intelligence, the implications are
unfathomable. What infuses this model with mystery and magick is
its function as an empty vehicle awaiting the living presence of the
user, that’s you dear reader, to define your terms according to how
your own Central Nervous System absorbs, integrates, and transmits
your experiences.
10

I view perceptions as gambles. This outlook encourages my intuition
to take flight and not be too weighed down by the quest for rock solid
certitudes, proofs or dogmas. Though some perceptions can be very
seductive and express very strident tendencies, I still prefer to view
them as tendencies. This reminds me of something Robert Anton
Wilson used to say: The future is up fiar grabs. It’s too late for anything
but Magic/e. I think what he meant by this was what Joseph Campbell
suggested years earlier when he said, “The best was to predict the future
is to create z't.” The future does not belong to those who predict it; the
future belongs to those who create it. And to create, we need energy.
We need energy to revolt and to subvert whatever has been under-
mining our innate integrity, autonomy, and authority.
To do this, we must summon the courage to expose and bypass the
sources of oppression and power loss in our lives. In doing so we re-
store and expand our capacity for direct experience -- our true source
of integrity, autonomy, and authority. This is also the overall arching
aim of this book: to encourage and challenge your integrity, autonomy,
and authority. It’s too late for any generalized analysis of the human
condition. The world is burning and the planet is alive and well.
The planet does not need saving. We need saving; we need saving
from ourselves. It is time for the resurrection of the energetic body to
regenerate the power for dreaming ourselves awake. The future has
already happened. The future is now. Spread the word. Prometheus
has risen. Life itself is the guru.

The Circuits: Leary, Wilson, & Alli
Here we begin the review of the 8-Circuit model as it has developed
through the processes of three very different individuals -- Leary
the theoretical philosopher, Wilson the social scientist, and Alli the
esoteric ritualist. All three approaches reflect the distinct biases
of their interpreters and each one offers a valuable and unique
contribution to the whole.’
Timothy Leary’s theories on the 8-Circuit Brain underwent a series
of changes and adjustments that he published in several obscure
booklets before arriving at his 1977 opus, EXO-PSYCHOLOGY(later
updated to INFO—PSYCHOLOGY). In 1983, Robert Anton Wilson’s
PROME THE US RISING stayed true to Leary’s basic ideas but linked
them to a web of isomorphic systems, memes, and paradigms while
introducing a series of exercises the reader could perform to activate
the circuits themselves.
In 1985, my book ANGEL TECH bypassed the theoretical route
almost entirely by plunging the reader into immersive experiences
such as designing your own Tarot, performing rituals, and doing
psychic meditations, to directly engage states of consciousness
symbolized by the circuits. Beginning with Leary, moving through
Wilson, and ending with Alli, the Eight—Circuit Brain undergoes its
evolution from abstract theorem into embodied existential praxis. We
turn now to the following distillation of Leary’s interpretations of
the eight circuits in his own words and turns of phrase.

Part 1: TIMOTHY LEARY
There is no death. Death is a Cz'rcuz't Three symbol fiar fear. When
the body stops functioning, consciousness advances to the nervous
system where it belonged all the time. When the nervous system stops
fitnctioning then, consciousness goes home (via the neuron cell) to the
DNA genetic code where it belongs. — Timothy Leary
1. The Bio-survival Circuit is concerned with the earliest modes
of survival and separation of objects and events into either harmful
or safe. This circuit is said to have first appeared in the earliest
evolution of the invertebrate brain. It is the first to be activated in an
infant’s mind with the mother imprint. This circuit introduces a one-
dimensional perception: forward and backward (i.e., forward towards
food, nourishment and what is trusted as safe, and backwards away
from danger, toxicity and predators). The oral stage from Freudian
Psychology.
2. The Emotional Circuit expresses raw emotion and the separation
of behavior into submissive and dominant. This circuit appeared
first in vertebrate animals. In humans, it is activated when the child
learns to walk. This circuit introduces a second dimension, up-down,
linked with territorial politics and tribal power games (as in swelling
body in size to represent dominance, and down, as in the cowering,
tail—between-the-legs submission. The anal stage from Freudian
Psychology.
3. The Symbolic Circuit; concerned with logic and symbolic thought.
This circuit first appeared when hominids started differentiating from
the rest of the primates. This circuit introduces the third dimension,
left and right, related to the development of dexterous movement and
handling “artifacts”, speech, writing, making maps in the mind.
4. The Socio-Sexual Domestic Circuit. This circuit is concerned
with operating within social networks and the transmission of
culture across time. This circuit is said to have first appeared with the
development of tribes. This fourth circuit deals with moral—social/
sexual tribal rules passed through generations and introduced the
fourth dimension of time.
13

5. The Neurosomatic Circuit is the first of the right-brain, “higher”
circuits usually inactive in most humans. It allows one to see things
in multidimensional space instead of the 4 dimensions of Euclidean
space-time. It is said to have first appeared with the development
of leisure-class civilizations around 2000 BC. It is associated with
hedonism and eroticism.
6. The Neuroelectric Circuit is concerned with the mind becoming
aware of itself independent of the patterns imprinted by the previous
five circuits; also called metaprogramming”. This circuit enables
telepathic communication that is impossible to explain to those who
have only left-brain activity. It is said to have appeared in 500 BC, in
connection with the Silk Road.
7. The Neurogenetic Circuit allows access to the genetic memory
contained in DNA. It is connected to memories of past lives, the
Akashic Records, and the collective unconscious. This circuit first
appeared among Hindu groups in the early first millennium and later
reappeared in Sufi sects at the end of the first millennium (ca. 9th
century).
8. The Neuroatomic Circuit allows access to the intergalactic
consciousness that predates life in the universe (characterized as the
Godhead, the Overmind). It lets humans operate outside of space-
time and the constraints of relativity, and tunes the brain into the
non-local quantum communication system suggested by physicists
such as Bohm, Walker, Sarfatti, Bell, etc. Israel Regardie compared
this to the Buddhist concept of Indra’s Net.
Note: Leary claimed that this model explained the social conflict in
the 1960’s where the mainstream of circuit 4 tribal moralists clashed
with the courztercaltarists, the circuit 5 indivia’ualz3t5 and hedorzists.
14

Part 2: ROBERT ANTON WILSON
“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit injbrmation
efliciently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry,
ideologies etc. blocle the ability to receive; robotic reality—tunnels
block the ability to decode or integrate new signals, censorship blocks
transmission.” — Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary were good friends whose
written correspondences of letters will hopefullybe published someday
soon. Though Wilson remained true to Leary’s original circuit
definitions as presented in EXO—PSYCHOLOGY, his contribution
also included finding correlations between the circuits and Armenian
philosopher and dance master Georges I. Gurdjieff’s work with the
Law of Octaves and “vibration numbers” (later transposed into music
by composer/ pianist Thomas de Hartmann). The following parallels
between these two systems are excerpted from Wilson’s second most
popular book, COSMIC TRIGGER:
Gurdjieff and the 8-Circuit Brain
Vibration Numbers and Levels of Consciousness:
384 Movement Center -— Circuit 1 Invertebrate reality
192 False Emotional Center -- Circuit 2 Mammalian reality
96 False Intellectual Center —— Circuit 3 Paleolithic reality
48 False Personality —— Circuit 4 Civilized reality
24 Magnetic Center -- Circuit 5 Hedonic reality
12 True Emotional Center -— Circuit 6 Psionic reality
6 True Intellectual Center -- Circuit 7 Immortal reality
3 The Essence -— Circuit 8 -- Cosmic reality
Bob Wilson's encyclopedic brain continued to discover a myriad of
additional contexts through which to grasp the 8-circuit model. With
great wit, humor and fearless audacity, Wilson wove the threads
of Quantum Mechanics, Behaviorism, Semantics, Superluminal
Physics, Zen, Freud, Sociology, and Political Science into a mind-
boggling tapestry of how the circuits work. This complexity was
distilled down to a series of “Winner” and “Loser” scripts assigned
to each circuit based on the degree each circuit was integrated or not;
winners integrate, losers disintegrate.
15

Wilson also includes some of Leary’s earlier drug references as
“circuit catalysts. In the end, Wilson advanced Leary’s theories by
linking them with previously established philosophical, mathematical,
psychological and social methodologies. What Leary initiated
in abstract thought, Wilson remained loyal to while significantly
expanding it to multiple systems theory.
1) The Bio-survival Circuit (Consciousness)
Imprinted in infancy, concerned with suckling, nourishment,
cuddling, bio-security etc. The imprinting of this circuit sets up the
basic attitude of trust or suspicion that will last for life. First activated
when a human being is born, and programs perception onto an
either-or grid, divided into nurturing-helpful and noxious-dangerous
(approach/ accept vs. flight/flee). Leary thinks that this circuit is
stimulated by opioid drugs. This circuit is said to have appeared in
the earliest evolution of invertebrate brain.
Winner Script: I will live fi)reve1; or die trying
Loser Script: I don’t know how to defend myself
2) The Emotional-Territorial Circuit (Ego)
Imprinted in the toddling stage, concerned with territorial demands,
emotional power tactics, political domination and submission
strategies etc. The first imprint on this circuit identifies the stimuli
that will automatically trigger dominant, aggressive behavior or
submissive, cooperative behavior. This circuit is activated with
abundant quantities of alcohol. This circuit probably appeared first
in vertebrate animals.
Winner Script: I am flee,‘ you are flee,‘ we can have our separate trips or we
can have the same trip.
Loser Script: They all z'ntz'mz'date me.
3) Time-Binding Semantic (Dexterity-Symbolism) Circuit (Mind)
Imprinted by human artifacts and symbol systems. Concerned with
handling the environment, invention, calculation, prediction, building
a “map” of the universe etc. If the environment is stimulating to the
third circuit, the child takes a “bright” imprint and becomes dexterous
and articulate. If the environment is made of stupid people, the child
l6

takes a “dumb” imprint i.e. remains more or less at a 5-year old stage
of artifact clumsiness and symbol blindness. Caffeine, speed, cocaine
and high—protein diet activate this circuit. This circuit supposedly
appeared first when hominids started differentiating from the rest of
the primates.
Winner Script: 1 am learning more about everything, including how to
learn more.
Loser Script: I can’t solve my problems.
4) The Socio-Sexual Circuit (Adult Personality)
Imprinted by the first orgasm—mating experiences and tribal “morals”.
Concerned with sexual pleasure, local definitions of “moral” and
“immoral”, reproduction, nurture of the young etc. This circuit is
basically concerned with operating within social networks and the
transmission of culture across time. While Leary did not associate
a drug with this circuit, some have hypothesized that oxytocin or
MDMA might activate this circuit. This circuit is said to have first
appeared with the development of tribes.
Winner Script: Love, and do what thou wilt.
Loser Script: Everything I like is illegal, immoral or fattening. (I wanna get
laid but I feel guilty).
5) The Neurosomatic Circuit
Concerned with neurological—somatic feedback, feeling high, somatic
reprogramming etc. There is a marked shift from linear visual space
to all-encompassing sensory space. A hedonic turn-on occurs, a
rapturous amusement, a detachment from the previously compulsive
mechanism of the first four circuits. This circuit is stimulated by
ecstatic experiences via physiological effects of Chemical yogas,
tantra, hatha yoga and free fall. Leary describes that this circuit first
appeared with the development of leisure—class civilizations around
2000 BC.
Winner Script: How I fizel depends on my neurological know-how.
Loser Script: I can’t help the way I feel.

6) The Neuroelectric (Metaprograrnming) Circuit
Concerned with re—imprinting and reprogramming all earlier circuits,
relativity of “realities” perceived, cybernetic consciousness etc. The
sixth circuit consists of the nervous system becoming aware of
itself. Leary says this circuit enables telepathic communication and
associates it with peyote and psilocybin. This circuit is traced by
Leary back to 500 BC and he associates it with the Silk Road.
Winner Script: I make my own coincidences, synchronicities, luck and
Destiny.
Loser Script: Why do I have such lousy luck?
7) The Neurogenetic (Morphogenetic) Circuit
Concerned with evolutionary consciousness (past and future), DNA-
RNA—brain feedback, Jung's “Collective Unconscious” etc. The
first to achieve this mutation spoke of “memories of past lives”,
“reincarnation”, “immortality” etc. This circuit is stimulated by
LSD, Raja Yoga etc. The circuit first appeared among the Hindus in
the early first millennium and later reappeared among the Sufi sects.
Winner Script: Future evolution depends on my decisions now.
Loser Script: Evolution is blz'nd and impersonal.
8) The Neuroatomic Circuit
Concerned with Quantum Consciousness, non-local awareness
(beyond space—time), so—called PSI/magical powers, illumination,
out—of—body experiences, astral projection, contact with alien entities
(which does not specifically refer to creatures from outer space, but
rather all beings) or with a galactic Overmind, etc. Some of the ways
this circuit can get activated are shock, near-death experience etc.
This circuit has even been compared to the Buddhist concept of
Indra’s Net from the Avatamsuka Sutra (which we discussed a while
ago). Leary associated Ketamine and DMT with this circuit.
Winner Script: In the province of the mind, what is believed true is true, or
becomes true within the limits to be learned by experience and experiment.
Loser Script: 1 am not psychic, and I doubt that anyone else is.
18

VP.S. The correspondences between your circuits and the Cabalietic
sephire is given sort or ex cethedre in the enclosed.
I have justifications for the corresponoences in a Dart of Game of Idfs
that chip hasn't typed yet. ‘
It is worth wondering why the cahaliste give 3 sephiroth to the
8th circuit and 1 sephire to each of the other 7 circuits. Any
link with Gurdjieff's mysterious 3 laws on that lever? or the
tri—une godheed archetype?
I suppose you are moderately scanaalized at times by my relapses
into occult terminology. well, it's the jargon that the readers of
certain magazines already understand somewhat. and it is a poetic
hint of certain pheneomene that I haven't yet translated into
Learyan. Eiragian or Lillyan. my ultimate goal. like yours. is the
most operational Binstcinian language oossible.
The 12 old man in Pinne ans Wake hare some correspondence with the
12 terrestrial slots bu I haven't worked that out yet...
Berna’: criss-crosses only cover circuits II to IV, which he calls
Child. Adult, Parent. You know his diagrams:
o fa is parent-to-parent
0
being answered parent-to-child. etc. In advanced exo-psychology. one
will be showing similar cries-znxluins ¢rosses.on 8 levels...
s.m.I:L.n. ,
SW
Note from Bob Wilson to Tim Leary
Courtesy of Leary Futique Trust
Tim0thyLeary.org
19

Part 3: ANTERO ALLI
I ’m not one of those people with their head in the clouds;
I ’m one of those whose entire body has been consumed by the clouds.
— Antero Alli
With my background in writing and directing for theatre and
paratheatre (see “Paratheatre”in this THEOREM section), my approach
leans heavily towards engaging a more embodied experience of the
states of consciousness the circuits symbolize. Another difference
between my respected predecessors and me can be seen in my overall
ego-positive bias. Leary’s and Wilson’s bias towards the first four
circuits was ambivalent at best and often negatively referenced with
terms like “the robot” and “domesticated apes”, whereas I suggest
that we “make friends with the robot” and initiate a more positive
image of the body, the ego, and our basic survival needs and habits.
In a section of ANGEL TECH called “Mechanical Problems, I
present my analysis of how the first four circuits can break down and
how they can be fixed.
Wilson’s concept of Chapel Perilous, introduced in “Cosmic Trigger”,
is played forward in Angel Tech 3 chapter on sermons for lost souls. The
upper circuits are given full experiential treatment while raising the
entertainment value in charisma training, designing your own tarot,
psychic trance meditations, an astrology primer, and rituals invoking
the aboriginal dreamtime. What Leary initiated as Primary Idea and
Wilson expanded into Interconnected Systems, I have ventured to
bring home to the senses as direct firsthand experience. In the book
you are reading now, you will find new ideas and applications for
specific ways the upper and lower circuits act on each other (referred
to hereafter as “verticality” and “vertical connectivities”) and notes
on the distinct nature of outside shocks as they relate to upper circuit
activations. Also included are new extrapolations of my early theories
on Chapel Perilous featuring new rituals and other devices for escape.
THE SURVIVAL CIRCUITS: FIXATIONS AND AN CHORS
The first four “survival circuits” are driven by variations of the
primary will to survive. F ixations refer to any concentration and
20

investment of consciousness in those experiences that activate a given
circuit. Fixation also demonstrates how consciousness gets fixed, or
“stuck”, in one circuit over others by overemphasis. Anchors refer to
how a circuit has been integrated by the degree it acts as a stabilizing
influence for absorbing and integrating shocks from the upper circuits
(more on “Shocks and Anchors” in Week One of PRAXIS).
C-1 Physio—Biological Intelligence; the will to survive
fixations: flood, shelter, self-preservation, material goods, safety and security
anchor: degree of physical confidence earned and maintained to assure
biological survival
C-2 Emotional-Territorial Intelligence; the will to power
fixations: territoriality, status, control, ego-strength, emotional honesty
anchor: degree of emotional confidence earned and maintained to assure
personal worth
C-3 Symbolic—Conceptual Intelligence; the will to reason
fixations: thinking, problem solving, analysis, semantics, talking
anchor: degree of mental confidence earned and maintained to solve daily
problems
C-4 Social-Moral Intelligence; the will to socialize
fixations: friends, domestication, courtship, tribal identity, ethics, religion
anchor: degree of social confidence earned and maintained to form bonds
with others
POST-SURVIVAL CIRCUITS: CATALYSTS AND SHOCKS
Catalysts refer to whatever triggers, stimulates and activates each of
the upper four circuits. Shocks refer to specific impacts any activated
upper circuit has on the lower circuits. Upper circuit shocks stimulate
growth and evolution in their corresponding survival circuits —— 5 & 1,
6&2, 7&3,and8&4.
C-5 Somatic Intelligence of Body Wisdom
Catalysts: whatever triggers the experience of rapture, communion with
nature, tantra (yoga, meditation, ritual), charisma, second wind, falling in
love (endorphins) and the expanding presence of simply being here now. The
Shocks of Ecstasy, Bliss, and Happiness (absence of sufllering)

C-6 Intuitive-Psychic Intelligence of the Brain, Spine, & CNS
Catalysts: whatever triggers the experience of awakening the energetic body
or aura, the second attention, intuition, clairvoyance and other psychic
abilities, ritual magic/e, reality selection, direct perception of the relative
nature of reality. The Shocks of Uncertainty and Freedom (absence of
self-investment and dogmatic certitudes)
C-7 Mytho—Poetic Genetic Intelligence of DNA and Gaia
Catalysts: whatever triggers the experience of synchronicity, ancestral and
past lifia memories, archetypes, planetary (Gaia) mind, cosmic consciousness.
The Shocks of Indivisibility and Cosmic Unity (absence of dualzstic
mind and experience)
C-8 Quantum-Nonlocal Intelligence of Subatomic Interactions
Catalysts: whatever triggers near death events, out of body experiences, the
dreambody/dreamtime continuum, experience of Void as true nature, and
the singularity at the heart of subatomic activity. The Shocks of Death
and Impermanence (absence of ego—identzficatz'on and the release from
physical body)
HOW INTELLIGENCE CAN BE INCREASED
All eight functions of Intelligence can be accessed through any
experience allowing for the absorption, integration and transmission
of each level. Developing alternative terms for this tertiary process
is encouraged, i.e. receive, digest, eliminate; experience, process,
communicate; study, interpret, articulate. All three stages are
necessary for the advancement of intelligence. If you only absorb,
nothing is integrated; if nothing can be integrated, we regurgitate and
parrot whatever we're absorbing. Each of the eight levels expresses
its own innate way in which this 3-stage process occurs, i.e., C-2
emotional truths do not follow the same “laws” as C-3 reasoning and
visa versa.
TI-[E VERTICALITY FACTOR
All of the eight circuits exist within each individual at various degrees
of expression and latency. They can be viewed and approached in a
linear sequential “evolutionary” way and/ or in a nonlinear “radial”
way; both vantages carry value. Any assumptions that presume
22

one circuit as “better” or “worse”, or “higher” or “lower” than any
other, usually indicate unconscious intellectual or moral biases that
can limit greater Self-access. The circuits in this system symbolize
simultaneously existing states of consciousness interacting and
working together as a dynamic changing whole. To view any circuit
in a hierarchical way can also perpetuate the insidious emotional
plague, a term coined by Dr. Wilhelm Reich for the psychological
syndrome marked by irrational insistence on beliefs and ideas that
depend on dissociation of mind from body (also see Circuit Two
Feature Article, “The Emotional Plague”; PRAXIS).
Though there are countless ways in which all eight functions interact
with and act on each other, we will focus on specific two-way vertical
connections between the first four “survival” circuits and the second
four “post-survival” circuits. We will discover how the upper circuit
experiences act on the lower circuit experiences as “shocks” and how
the lower circuits act on the upper circuits as stabilizing “anchors”
that allow for greater absorption and integration of those shocks. This
process obviously cannot be fully ggasped in one sitting or reading and
requires much firsthand experience of how their dynamics play out
according to your own CNS. For now, it will be enough to memorize
the following combination of pairs:
l&5,2&6,3&7,4&8
Without a supple and resilient foundation of lower circuit integration,
any significant force of expanded consciousness from circuits 5-8
can destabilize our physical, emotional, conceptual, and/or social
survival. Once the bottom four survival circuits can be more fully
experienced, integrated, and embodied, they are better poised to
act as “shock absorbers”. Shocks arriving through the upper four
post-survival circuits act to stimulate growth and development in the
survival circuits, just as the survival circuits (once integrated) can
help substantiate and “ground” the more ephemeral and subtle states
symbolized by circuits five through eight. By tending to these specific
verticalities of upper circuit shocks and lower circuit anchors (1/5,
2/6, 3/7, 4/8), the 8-Circuit Brain model can offer safer and more
creative ways to expand consciousness and increase intelligence.
23

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF “SHOCK”
How we respond to real life shocks often determines the degree our
experience turns negative or positive, painful or joyous, destructive or
creative, good or bad. Is it possible that shocks themselves are neither
bad nor good but neutral by nature? To assume that shocks are not
neutral but always negative or positive suggests a bi—polar universe
that is either out to get us and burn us -- the negatively inflated paranoid
bias —- or out to bless us and make us prosper -- the positively inflated
messianic bias. Though both of these biases have their place in human
life, I think they also express self-delusion. If we value a choice-
centered life of increasing autonomy and self-responsibility, how we
respond to shock may be more important and have more lasting value
than any initial shock itself. Hereafter the term “responsibility” will
be revised as response-ability or, our ability to respond.
In context to the 8-Circuit model, shocks are only “shocking” to
the degree of naiveté we show around the presence of the objective
truths of ECSTASY, UNCERTAINTY, INDIVISIBILITY, and
IMPERMANENCE (corresponding to circuit five through eight,
respectively). Ecstasy expresses our most natural state of being
when unburdened by the anxiety, over—thinking, and guilt complexes
resulting from unsolved survival circuit problems. Uncertainty refers
to the truly unpredictable nature of life, of not knowing what will
happen next, as a liberating and highly creative state. Indivisibility
expresses the experience following a dissolution of arbitrary divisions,
revealing the basic unity shared between all life forms. Impermanence
means all things pass; everything alive eventually dies.
Real life shocks are innate to Life and can happen anywhere, anytime
and to anybody; nobody is exempt. Examples include sudden
housing eviction, falling in love, getting fired from work, marriage,
divorce, childbirth, parenting, loss of loved ones, natural disasters,
sudden kundalini activations, sudden death of parents and children,
unexpected financial windfalls, terrorist attacks, any move of
residence, police arrest, incarceration, big employment promotions,
social betrayals, family reunions and disintegrations, automobile
accidents, hospitalization, surgery, spiritual epiphanies, heart attacks,
strokes, epistemological crisis, heroic doses of magic mushroom; the
list goes on & on...
24

Shocks can act as turning points for Self-initiation. When the separatist
ego engages in any direct confrontation with the archetype of the
Self, it tends to respond in one of two ways. The ego either realizes
its honest place as a substratum of a larger reality, humbles down
and becomes receptive (not the same as passive or submissive), or it
denies and defies the existence of a greater reality and succumbs to
hubris, arrogance, and ignorance. The receptive ego tends to become
more flexible in the face of greater realities and shocks, while the
inflated ego tends to become more resistant and brittle in the face of
greater realities and shocks. Regardless of which path we take, real
life continues delivering shocks; nobody is exempt. The differences
between these two paths -- of greater receptivity or greater resistance --
may be measured by the quality of life and the quantity of stress each
direction produces at the end of the day.
As more outside shocks are absorbed, integrated and put to work
(applied and transformed), we become as initiates —- men and women
of power -- capable of transmitting initiatic shock to others, if we so
desire. Some of us undergo this Self-initiation process instinctively
without any conscious plan or knowledge, while others approach it on
purpose. Either way, when outside shocks are absorbed, integrated,
and put to work, we are transformed by the transmission of their
presence through us.
CHAOS AS AN EVOLUTIONARY TRIGGER
Shocks come in basically two forms: inside and outside. Inside shocks
are shocks we can administer ourselves. For example, by choosing to
intentionally inconvenience ourselves amidst daily activities, we can
give ourselves small shocks to our habitual routines and go against
the grain of habit by altering the expected. Any way that we are
able to shock ourselves constitutes an “inside shock”. Implementing
inside shocks can encourage more ego flexibility to help us navigate
the influx of greater forces catalyzed by outside shocks. Any inner or
outer-oriented shock results in some degree of chaos, which excites an
internal emergency state triggering our senses to open up and gather
more information to assure survival —- physical, emotional, conceptual
and / or social survival.
25

Any state that triggers an experience of chaos tends to get our
full attention. Chaos acts as an evolutionary trigger that dilates
perception to the naturally incomprehensible complexity — the chaos
— of the brain itself. Chaos accelerates perception of uncertainty
by temporarily breaking down mental fixations and certitudes. A
sudden escalation of chaos can also occur in smaller ways, such as
when we are emotionally upset, or momentarily lose physical balance,
or are socially thrown into embarrassment, or become mentally
bewildered. All of these states offer fluid opportunities for shifting to
higher levels of functioning, if that’s what we want. It’s not the shock
that’s important but how we respond to the shock that dictates what
happens next.
However, there is only so much we can do by our own efforts
alone. With the right attitude, outside shocks can provide deeper
opportunities for more long lasting change if we are willing and able
to respond according to our most creative intentions. For example,
the shock of impermanence can arrive with the sudden death of a
loved one, which can either immobilize us for the rest of our lives or,
given our full commitment to respond, can catalyze deeper gratitude
for the existing bonds shared with the living. As our awareness of
uncertainty increases, the shape of the ego, or self—image, wobbles. We
may experience ourselves as more fluid, volatile, and unstable than
before. In a state of chaos the organism naturally wants to open up
to new sources of information, directives, and values.
For any new direction to take hold, it must be maintained with
applied effort and a supportive environment. “Set and setting” as Dr.
Leary would say. Any newly emergent values or directions also need
to be strengthened by challenges to test their mettle and integrity. In
these ways, chaos and shock initiate highly creative states that provide
opportunities for conscious evolution, given our full commitment to
respond. With enough commitment, imagination and will, these
creative conditions can also guide us into a sixth circuit process that
John C. Lilly called “metaprogramming”.
26

METAPRO GRAMMING
When the Self-Aware Brain Programs Itself
“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true
is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be jbund
experientially and experimentally. These lz'mits are further
beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits.”
— John C. Lilly
“All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world
today, are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our
own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our
programs, nothing more, nothing less. Despite the great varieties of
programs available, most of us have a limited set of programs. Some
of these are built in. In the simpler forms of life the programs were
mostly built in from genetic codes to fully formed adult reproducing
organisms.
The patterns of function, of action reaction were determined by
necessities of survival, of adaptation to slow environmental changes
and of passing on the code to descendants. Eventually the cerebral
cortex appeared as an expanding new high-level computer controlling
the structurally lower levels of the nervous system, the lower built-in
programs. For the first time learning and its faster adaptation to a
rapidly changing environment began to appear. Further, as this new
cortex expanded over several millions of years, a critical size cortex
was reached. At this level of structure, a new capability emerged:
learning to learn. ”
— John C. Lilly,
“Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer”
In his 1966 book, “Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human
Biocomputer, John C. Lilly outlines a scientific approach to
reprogramming the human nervous system with the use of LSD and
isolation float tank therapy, research that would later branch out to
27

his interspecies communication projects with dolphins. Lilly coined
the term “metaprogramming” to reference a process wherein the
self-aware central nervous system learns to redefine, instruct, and
reimprint itself. Lil1y’s (sixth circuit) insight saw beyond the mere
capacity to learn, memorize and repeat data input and/ or routines of
activity. He perceived the underlying psychic infrastructure of how
learning actually happens, how we learn to learn, and how we learn new
ways to keep learning. This one insight seriously expanded the playing
field of consciousness research -- a major turning point that was not
lost on Timothy Leary and his 8-Circuit Brain model.
Leary uses the term “imprint vulnerability” throughout his writings
on the 8-Circuit Brain to refer to a profoundly malleable and
dangerously open state of the psyche capable of being imprinted
with new patterns and habits of behavior, thinking and belief. Leary
discovered that imprint vulnerability occurred during the peak of any
strong dose of LSD, a brief time when new patterns and programs
could be introduced with highly therapeutic, life-changing results. His
book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Boole of
the Dead” (co-authored with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner) was
written as a detailed guide for those using LSD in this way to imprint
positive life changes. Here’s an excerpt from “First Bardo: The Period
Of Ego—Loss 0r Non-Game Ecstasy”:
Liberation is the nervous system devoid of mental-conceptual activity.
Realization of the Voidness, the Unbecome, the Unborn, the Unmade,
the Unflormed, implies Buddhahood, Perfect Enlightenment - the
state of the divine mind of the Buddha. If the subject is prepared to
diagnose the symptoms of ego loss, he needs no outside help at this
point. Not only Should the person about to give up his ego be able to
diagnose the symptoms as they come, one by one, but he should also be
able to recognize the Clear Light without being set fizce to flzce with it
by another person. If the person fails to recognize and accept the onset
of ego loss, he may complain of strange bodily symptoms. This shows
that he has not reached a liberated state. Then the guide or friend
should explain the symptoms as indicating the onset of ego loss.
28

Here is a list of commonly reported physical sensations.‘
1. Bodily pressure, which Tibetans call earth—sinking—into-water
2.Clammy coldness followed by feverish heat, what Tibetans call
water-sinking-into-fire
3.Body disintegrating or blown to atoms, what Tibetans called fire-
sinking-into—air
4.Pressure on head and ears, which Americans call rocket-launching-
into- space
5.Tingling in extremities
6.Feelings of body melting or flowing as if wax
7.Nausea
8.Trembling or shaking, beginning in pelvic regions and spreading
up torso
These above physical reactions should be recognized as signs heralding
transcendence. Avoid treating them as symptoms of illness, accept
them, merge with them, enjoy them.
Il/[PRINTING VS. CONDITIONING
The terms “imprinting” and “conditioning” refer to very different yet
related events. During imprint vulnerability existing ego structures
become more fluid, malleable and open to the new impressions and
imprints. Imprint shock can happen whenever we are exposed to
any direct experience of very high levels of Ecstasy, Uncertainty,
Indivisibility and Impermanence, ‘outside shocks’ that also activate
circuits 5-8, respectively. Any of these exposures can destabilize us
physically, emotionally, conceptually, and socially (circuits 1-4) until
we respond —- become responsible —— and make the necessary adjustments
to restore balance and begin functioning at higher levels than before
the destabilization of our reality structures.
Imprinting and conditioning express different stages of
metaprogramming, a process used to redefine oneself in accordance
with the direct experience of our most innate truths, rather than the
“truths” defined by inherited programs hammered into us since birth.
By programs, I mean family and religious moral codes, sociological
and educational conditioning, and whatever values, ideas, and beliefs
29

were passively absorbed from teachers, books, media and society at
large. By innate truths, I mean our most honest and truthful responses
according to the natural sensitivity and responses of our CNS to any
stimuli, input or experience. Define yourself or be defined.
Imprinting differs from conditioning -- the latter perpetuates whatever
repetitive actions, affirmations, routines, and programs become
necessary to maintain and preserve a given imprint over time or that
attempts to combat, defuse, and break down a given imprint as with
“brain-washing and other de-programming techinques. Examples
of outside shocks that trigger imprint vulnerability: pregnancy,
childbirth (for all infants and first-time parents), the first sexual
mating experience, the first loss of a loved one to sudden death, the
first achievement of objective or wordly success.
Metaprogramming is an attribute of the integrated sixth circuit.
The degree to which any awakened CNS is absorbing, integrating,
and transmitting neuroelectric signals originating in itself, may be
the degree the “se1f—aware brain perceives, manages, and regulates
its own reality. As more sixth circuit processes and attributes are
experienced and integrated — second attention, premonition, precognzfion,
intuition — sixth circuit transmission can give rise to many so—called
psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis,
clairaudience, remote viewing, and other psychic linking capacities
for connecting C-6 adepts with each other.
Set, Setting and Leary’s Upper Circuit Bias
Timothy Leary applied the 8—Circuit model as a metaprogramming
tool with the psychotherapeutic use of LSD, where his famous theory
of “set and setting” was put to test. “Set” meant the mindset each
user brought to the experience and includes their thoughts, beliefs,
feelings, attitudes, moods, and whatever psychological complexes
they may be attempting to gain insight into or free themselves of. The
“setting” refers to the actual physical and social environment where
the LSD trip occurs. The setting can include music and art supplies
but more importantly, a trusted guide who is not on LSD and who
remains present for the duration of the trip as an optional source of
spiritual and social support. The LSD experience itself is profoundly
influenced by the specific elements of the set and setting.
30

In this LSD-based context, Leary clearly exalted the upper four
circuits over the lower four circuits, reflecting his later negative bias
towards lower circuit realities. This bias imposes a hierarchy of values
between upper and lower circuits that I find troublesome in its hidden
assumption of a split between body and spirit, between our daily
surival priorities and the promise of post-survival adventures. This is
where my own bias departs from Leary’s and Wilson’s. My ongoing
experimentation with the 8-CB model continues to demonstrate how
lower circuit integration proves essential for safer and more creative
upper circuit experience through specific vertical connections between
circuits 1 and 5, 2 and 6, 3 and 7, 4 and 8. I have come to call this
position an embodiment bias.
The Embodiment Bias
I have found the 8-CB model especially useful in its capacity for
tracking and pinpointing where experience and intelligence may be
lacking or absent. Used in this way, the grid can expose the limits
of our existing knowledge and our ignorance -- prerequisites for any
serious inquiry into the nature of intelligence. As effective as the 8-
Circuit model can be as a diagnostic, it falls way short as a treatment
procedure. If we lack direct experience of the states of consciousness
the eight circuits represent, nothing can be truly integrated. The grid
becomes an armchair philosophy at best while we run the risk of
becoming inflated legends in our own minds.
My ongoing experimentations with metaprogramming have been
mostly applied in the non—drug context of paratheatre, a unique
ritual technology for Self-initiation. Here, I occasionally reference
the circuits as a diagnostic grid to measure the degree of my access
to the eight functions of intelligence, their various dimensions of
experience and the internal landscape in general. The crux of this
ritual technology, what I call No—Form, refers to a Zazen practice
that can act as a catalyst for approaching imprint vulnerability (see
the following chapter, “Paratheatre” and also the Circuit Five Feature
Article, The No—F0rm Techrzz'que”).
Beyond my early use of LSD, peyote and psyllocibin (1967-1977),
my primary catalysts for approaching imprint vulnerability have
been twofold: organic and synthesized. My synthetic knowledge
31

of metaprogramming has been shaped by the self-work achieved in
group paratheatre experiments since 1977. My organic knowledge
of metaprogramming comes through responding to the shocks and
traumas that Life itself unexpectedly delivers, events that result
in heightened states of uncertainty and expanded awareness of
impermanence. Imprint vulnerability can also follow any significant
destabilizaton of the ego structure and its disconnect from the habitual
routines that maintain its illusion of reality. Imprint vulnerability
expresses a malleable and naked openness in the central nervous
system, temporarily freed from social conditioning, that becomes
capable of being deeply impressed with new patterns and programs.
32

PARATHEATRE
Towards a Ritual Technology fi)r Self-initiation
“Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art? Not in order to
teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism,
our personal and unrepeatable experience have to give us; to learn to
break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from
the breaks which hold us back, flom the lies about ourselves which
we manufacture daily for ourselves and fior others; to destroy the
limitations caused by our ignorance and lack of courage; in short, to
fill the emptiness z'n us: to fulfill ourselves.
— Jerzy Grotowski
from Statement of Principles
The term “paratheatre” was coined by the late Polish theatre director,
Jerzy Grotowski (Aug. 11, 1933 — Jan. 14, 1999), to address a phase
of his group work executed indoors and in the forests of Poland
between 1970 and 1978. If you saw Louis Malle’s unique film, My
Dinner with Andre”, this work is often mentioned by Andre Gregory
whose firsthand experience of Grotowski’s paratheatre transformed
his life. Generally speaking, paratheatre refers to a private, non-
performance oriented physical process of group dynamics often
involving rigorous kinetic and vocal exercises and techniques.
Without any audience, the external pressures to perform are released
and replaced by the self—created pressures of performing actions with
total commitment towards the transformation and refinement of the
human instrument.
The N o-F orm Technique
Since Grotowski himself claimed no legacy of paratheatre, the term
“paratheatre (like the term “theatre”), continues being redefined
and updated to serve the various contexts of its many practitioners.
The paratheatre medium I have been developing with others since
1977 introduces an asocial approach to group ritual dynamics that
implements techniques of physical theatre, dance, song, and standing
Zazen meditation. Though inspired by Grotowski, I do not fashion
33

my work after him nor do I aspire to replicate his process. Probably
the most significant departure of my paratheatre is the consistent use
of a standing meditation posture I call “No-Form”, a technique that
begins and ends each and every ritual experiment in this process-
driven approach to accessing and embodying the internal landscape.
No-Form is the crux of this ritual technology for Self-initiation (see
Circuit Five Feature Article The No-Form Technique”; PRAXIS).
Without No-Form, this paratheatre medium can degenerate into
pretension, play-acting, theatrical improvisation, and empty rituals.
No-Form authenticates self—expression by the receptivity it brings to
engaging vital sources of energy in the body itself. With ongoing
practice, No-Form can enable enough internal receptivity to access
the living forces and realities symbolized by the eight circuits and
enable their expression through somatic ritual processes. The quality
and depth of these rituals, however, depends largely on the degree of
personal commitment to No-Form AND to the four—phase physical
warm—up process that precedes these rituals. Between feeling the
body deeply (in the physical warm-up) and being nothing (via No-
Form), a full spectrum of experience is initiated. For the purpose of
this Eight-Circuit Brain course (starting with Week Two, Circuit Five;
PRAXIS), this ritual technology has been adjusted to accommodate
solo work. No previous experience in theatre, dance, ritual or
meditation is required for the solo paratheatre work presented in this
course.
“Gzfied actors find by instinct how to tap and radiate certain powers,‘
but they would be astonished if it were revealed that these powers,
which have their material trajectory by and in the organs, actually
exist, for they never realized that these sources of energy actually exist
in their own bodz'es, in their organs. ”— Antonin Artaud
The Contact Point
From the state of No-Form any quality or force can be accessed
through an existing contact point. The Contact point is wherever
direct, intuitive absorption of a particular energetic state is already
happening; one has only to locate it. It already exists z'n the body as a
source of energy. This is an important point to grasp, as the qualities and
energies explored in this medium are not always of the imagination
34

or a product of the mind. Our biology emanates a complexity of
energy dynamics most of which, like the organs themselves, cannot
be seen yet remain vital to the organism as a whole. These energy
sources express faster frequencies and emanations of their denser
manifestations in the physical glands and organs themselves. The
contact point can also be discovered outside of the physical body in
the auric field enveloping the physical body.
Take the element of Fire, for example. The energy of Fire already
exists within us as electrical impulses; we do not need to pretend or
make it up. By cultivating enough internal receptivity through the
No—Form technique, we can detect its current within and let it expand
from its initial contact point throughout the rest of the body. If you
can allow this current to infuse your receptive state with its quality,
color and intensity, you can discover how the energy itself guides the
direction, rather than the personal will or ego.
This subtle process requires that we relax the desire to control and
direct the energy. By creating space for its expression within us (via
No-Form), we can be impressed and moved by whatever energetic
state or condition we choose to access and express. In this way
we gain firsthand knowledge of the forces we are working with,
which reflects the primary aim of this Eight-Circuit Brain course in
PRAXIS: Self-access. This orientation takes practice and is nurtured
by the authenticity of one’s No—Form state; the deeper the No—Form,
the deeper we can be impressed and moved by a given force or state
through the contact point.
NOTE: This paratheatre medium is not derived fiom or related to Wicca,
Gardnerian Magic/e, Crowley, 0. TO, Golden Dawn, Voodun, or Santeria.
Since the archetype of The Self plays a pivotal role in this medium, it might
parallel the workings of Austin Spare ( who some consider the grandfather of
Chaos Magic/e ”) and the writings of Carl Gustav Jung. This ritual technology
is documented in my book, “Towards an Archeology of the Soul” and in
several DVD ’s at www.verticalpool.com/paratheatre.html.
For more information and paratheatrical research updates:
www.paratheatrical.com
35

36

Section 2
PRAXIS
The Eight-Circuit Brain Course
Of Advanced Studies and Application
CAVEAT EMPTOR
This section was designed with the intention of real-time
application of the Eight—Circuit Brain through experiments
of direct experience. If this is not your intention, you may
wish to skip this section. 01; if you wish, enter anyway
and proceed as a tourist. Either way,
consider yourself warned.
Fnord.

The Eight Week Course
Week One: System Overview
“Reality is that which, when you stop belz'evz'ng in it,
doesn’t go away. ”— Philip K. Dick
This course offers a reality—based curriculum for direct experience
of the energies, states of being and real—life conditions that the eight
circuits symbolize. The “real” course material emerges from the
existing conditions of your inner and outer lives. The meditations,
rituals and tasks in this course were designed as tools to assist these
processes. If you experience frustration or boredom with these
techniques, you are encouraged to view frustration and boredom as
breakthroughs ready to happen, given your readiness to apply more
commitment to the task at hand. The quality of your results can be
measured by the depth and degree of your commitment -- what you
get out of this course depends on what you put into it.
As of this writing (September 2009), this course has been taken
by approximately 200 self—motivated individuals over a three—year
period via an interactive online format sponsored by Maybe Logic
Academy (maybelogic.org). Since then, this course has undergone
considerable development and refinement before arriving at its
current print version. Angel Tech (Original Falcon Press, 1986) was
the source book for the online course. Though this current course
can be taken without Angel Tech, some may wish to have it on hand
as a reference; the troubleshooting chapter, “Mechanical Problems”
(pp. 63-124; Angel Tech) may be especially useful when confronting
problems that may arise for those who actually do this course.
You can choose to do this course in whatever time frame you wish,
however, I suggest setting an eight—week schedule. I have found
that an eight—week period creates just enough pressure to minimize
procrastination and maintain vital momentum. The first six weeks of
this course include specific reading assignments and the all-important
tasks and rituals for accessing the states of consciousness that the
38

eight circuits symbolize. If you actually do the assigned tasks, you
may notice a saturation point of information and experience around
week Three or Four. If this happens, I suggest completing only
those weekly tasks and rituals that resonate and/ or mean the most to
you at that time. The final two weeks are intentionally void of new
assignments, providing extra time to backtrack and catch up to speed
with missed and uncompleted work.
Though you are essentially doing this course for yourself, interaction
with others on the same journey can be very useful. This kind of
feedback and dialogue can be accomplished in several ways: 1) locate
and organize a group of two or more like—minded, self-motivated
individuals with a copy of Angel Tech and this book, 2) set up an online
internet forum template structured for an eight—week timeline, OR
3) hold weekly in-person group meetings to discuss your processes,
problems, and weekly progress.
In the future I may train individuals as qualified instructors of this
course. As of this writing I have not trained anyone to teach this
course. Depending upon my availability, I can offer instructive course
feedback at varying rates of payment. For details about my potential
participation contact me at:
www.verticalpool.com or www.paratheatrical.com
39

Eu
The transition to a higher neural circuit—is often accompanied by
considerable anxiety or a turbulence in personal lifiz which seems as
if the organism were flzlling apart or breaking up. This phenomenon
of instability is really the way that every living organism —societies,
human primates, chemical solutions, etc.—sha/ees itself, as it were,
by myoclonisms or similar convulsions into new combinations and
permutations for higher and new levels of development. -- Dr. Israel
Regardie, from the introduction to PROME THE US RISING by
Robert Anton Wilson
ON DEFINING OUR TERMS
Welcome to Week One, the ideational stage of this course. The
workload of this week is fairly light with a primary focus on reading,
conceptualizing and writing down your preliminary interpretations
of the circuits. The pace picks up in Week Two through Week Five
when you are engaging the circuits in real time through tasks, rituals,
meditations, and exercises. These task—heavy weeks can require up
to eight hours per week of your commitment. If you do the actual
work, you will get actual results. If you conceptualize the work,
you will get conceptual results. Discerning the difference reflects an
ongoing theme in this course and indicates how effective your B.S.
detector can be (B.S. also stands for Belief Systems).
40

COURSE TEXT READINGS
Reread “The Circuits: Leary, Wilson, & Alli” in the THEOREM
section. If you have “Angel Tech”, read pages 1-9 and pages 15-22. If
you do not have a copy of Angel Tech, fret not. You can get by with
the reading material in this book (you can purchase “Angel Tech”
at: www.verticalpool.com or through Original Falcon Press at: www.
orgina1falcon.com)
THE LAB BOOK
You will need a Lab Book to record your experiments and research
results. Delineate sections in your book to each circuit for easy
reference and future access. Though you can use a computer to
record your results, I strongly suggest the tactile immediacy of an
actual (physical) blank book and pen to record your research results;
to each their own.
WRITING ASSIGNMENT 1: Define Intelligence
Define intelligence in your own words. Now, according to your
definition, how would you go about increasing intelligence?
WRITING ASSIGNMENT 2: Defining the Circuits
After studying this week’s reading material on circuit definitions, find
your own words to define what each circuit means to you at this time,
not in the general sense, but in a way that is personal to you. Keep it
simple and direct. If you don't know what to write, leave it blank or
signify it with a question mark (?). Define these circuits as you know
them now with the idea that your definitions will probably change.
Example: 3rd circuit (figuring things out, speaking my mind, etc.),
4th circuit (how I behave around others, my personality, etc.), 5th
circuit (getting high, being here now, bliss) and so on...
WRITING ASSIGNMENT 3: Circuit Evaluations
On a scale of 1-10 (with 1 representing the least experience and
integration and 10 representing the most), evaluate the degree of
access you have to each of the eight circuits. These numbers start the
mapping process to track your development over these eight weeks,
i.e., C-1/3, C-2/2, C-3/8, C-4/6, C-5/7, C-6/3, C-7/1, C-8/O.
41

THE THREE SUB-PHASES
The term “circuit” refers to any conduit or medium capable of
absorbing, integrating and transmitting information and/ or energy. I
am not attached to the word “circuit”; if you like, choose another word
that suits your semantic sensibilities. For our references here, I will
sometimes abbreviate the circuits as C-1, C-2, C-3, etc. In this 8-CB
model, intelligence can be increased by the absorption, integration,
and transmission of whatever experience is innate to each circuit.
Any neglect or denial of the second stage of INTEGRATION can
frustrate consciousness from advancing through that circuit. The
second integration stage determines whether or not intelligence can
actually be increased through our Physical, Emotional, Conceptual,
Social, Somatic, Psychic, Mythogenetic, and Quantum Nonlocal
experiences.
For example, without C-3 integration (thinking for yourself) we can
fall into the trap of parroting the thinking, writing, and talking styles
of friends, teachers, authors and whatever mass media is selling us.
If the word “integration” means nothing to you, choose another
word that means the same thing. Though you will be assigned
reading material in this course and from Angel Tech, your chief source
material will not come from a book or anything you read. It will
arrive fresh from your own direct experience of how you personally
absorb, integrate and express the energies and states of consciousness
innate to each circuit. As you continue testing and trusting your own
firsthand experience, it can eventually become a more reliable source
of personal integrity, authority and autonomy —— the overall purpose
of this course.
Treadmilling: Getting Stuck in a Circuit
Consciousness gets snagged or stuck in a circuit in several ways.
Treadmilling can occur by: 1) any failure to sufficiently integrate
your experience, 2) any lack of communication from not linking
experiences with others, 3) any excessive inertia from absorbing more
data than there is time or energy to assimilate and communicate.
Generally speaking, consciousness remains fixated in a circuit until
that circuit’s distinct priorities and conditions can be fully absorbed,
integrated, and expressed. Integration cannot be overemphasized;
whatever cannot be digested becomes constipated. As each circuit
42

integrates, it is not left behind as “something we have overcome and
are done with”. There are no final arrivals or graduations. Each
integrated circuit serves the greater changing whole of who we are
becoming.
HIERARCHY ALERT!
All eight circuits will be presented in this course as equal in value. If
and when you encounter any fixed idea of hierarchy within yourself
-— assuming any one circuit as better or more superior than another
-- examine this hierarchy bias more closely. For example, look for
any intellectual, social, and/ or religious morals and dogmas that
have defined “the body” as inferior to “the spirit” or “the mind”.
This split can lead to the faulty assumption that the first four circuits
are “inferior to the upper four circuits, a fatal error in judgment
responsible for the two—thousand-year emotional plague (more on
this in Circuit Two). As this course progresses you will discover how
the bottom four survival circuits, and the realities they represent, are
crucial to laying down the foundation for a safer and more creative
exploration of the four post—survival circuits. To fly higher, plant
both feet firmly on the ground.
SHOCKS AND AN CHORS
Once you discover which circuits carry a negative bias — either
inherited (other people's ideas) or learned (by overreacting to your
own personal traumas) — you can begin defiising their negative charge
yourself. We will examine how each of the upper four circuits acts
as a specific kind of shock to stimulate development and evolution in
the lower circuits by the exposure of specific needs. When real needs
are exposed, they usually find ways to be met; unseen, repressed or
buried needs create frustration.
When the specific needs of each lower circuit are met, these circuits can
then act as stabilizing anchors for realizing upper circuit experiences
in the body. If the lower circuits are not integrated enough, they
may fail to effectively absorb the upper circuit shocks of (5) Ecstasy,
(6) Uncertainty, (7) Indivisibility, and (8) Impermanence. Without
lower circuit integration, these shocks can cause various degrees of
over—stimulation, scattered and fragmented attention, dispersion of
energy, anxiety and fear, depression, obsessive behavior, unconscious
43

aggression and hostility, etc. This is why integration of the first
four circuits is crucial to a safer and more creative approach to the
expanded consciousness symbolized by circuits five through eight
and why, in this course, we will be working with all the circuits in
these specific couplings: 1 & 5, 2 & 6, 3 & 7, 4 & 8.
The Lower Four Circuits as anchors and specific needs
1st Circuit anchor of Security;
the need fl)?’ physical shelter; safety, fiaod, comfiort
2nd circuit anchor of Power;
the need fi)r control, status, emotional honesty, personal territory
3rd circuit anchor of Sanity;
the need for learning, thinking, solving problems, communicating
4th circuit anchor of Belonging;
the need fiar friendship, love, sexual identity, community, ethics
The Upper Four Circuits as shocks and catalysts
5th circuit shock of Ecstasy and Bliss (pain-flee somatic rapture)
6th circuit shock of Uncertainty and Freedom (innate autonomy)
7th circuit shock of Indivisibility and Synchronicity (unity)
8th circuit shock of Impermanence and Death (nonlocality)
SYMPTOMS OF VERTICAL DISCONNECT
When any of the first four survival circuits lose contact with their
higher “shocking” circuit, we begin to suffer loss of context, or sense
of purpose, in our lives. First circuit pursued for its own sake — living
for comfort, safety, and food - can result in a fear-based, low energy
life enslaved by exaggerated security needs; “nothing is ever enough”.
This can also lead to obesity and/ or bulimia, shopping addictions,
and a packrat fetish for collecting too many useless things. Second
circuit vertical disconnect can manifest in many forms of power loss,
emotional soap opera antics, a compulsion to control everything, a
loss of humor, and an exaggerated sense of self—importance.
Symptoms of a third circuit vertical disconnect include over-thinking,
claustrophobia, anxiety, hyper-literalist outlook, imagination death,
and an overwhelming sense of alienation. When the fourth circuit
44

social life is pursued as an end in itself we can manifest endlessly
circuitous social activity, personal trivialization, gossip mongering,
loss of individuality to herd trends, over—identif1cation with impersonal
social and religious moralities and the persistent compulsion to “be
right all the time. For more information on these vertical disconnect
symptoms, please refer to your own firsthand experiences when
making any one of the first four circuits an end unto itself.
45

Week Two: Circuits 1 and 5
Mutual rece tiou of biological safety
an somatic rapture
’’The Body is the only part of ourselves always in present time.”
— Angel Tech
46

Circuit One Feature Article
Nine Tips for a Healthier Diet
Compiled and tested by Antero Alli
1. Hydration
Water is essential for physical survival and optimal brain function.
The brain is made up of 60% water and requires sufficient hydration
to maintain memory and swift processing of information. Don’t
leave hydration to the sense of thirst alone; the ability to notice
thirst typically diminishes with age. The amount of water required
depends on each person's physiology and daily activity. Experiment
with water.
2. Eat high-fiber foods
Fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains (organic when possible).
These are the “good” carbohydrates — nutritious, filling, and relatively
low in calories. They act to slow the absorption of carbohydrates, so
there's less influence on insulin and blood sugar.
3. Adopt a diet rich in antioxidants
Helps to relieve fatigue and boost exercise endurance in healthy
individuals. Antioxidants can be found in green, red, orange, yellow
and blue fruits and vegetables — blueberries, broccoli, spinach, carrots,
cantaloupe, tomatoes, red grapes, and citrus fruits.
4. Limit intake of sugary foods
Refmed—grain products such as white bread and snack foods. Many
sugary foods are also high in fat and are calorie—dense.
5. Reduce animal fat
Avoid all trans fats and margarine. Choose lean meats, skinless
poultry, and nonfat or low-fat dairy products (though whole milk
products provide an excellent calcium source for women).
47

6. Eat more fish and nuts
Contains high levels of protein and healthy unsaturated fats & omega
3 oils. Black cod (butterfish) and wild salmon may be two of the
healthiest foods for the human body.
7. Eat less
In recent years serving sizes have ballooned in restaurants. Many of
us have ballooned in weight and size by naively eating more than we
actually need.
8. Maintain an adequate calcium intake
Calcium is essential for strong bones and teeth. If you can’t get the
optimal amount from foods, take supplements.
9. Exercise and weight control
Balance energy (calories) intake with energy output. Exercise and
other physical activity are essential to burn calories. Take in more
calories than you need for energy, and the extra calories are stored for
fat. Most people require no more than 2000 calories a day. Note: A
daily intake of 12-ounces of soda (160-200 calories) can add up to 16
pounds over the course of a year.
48

The Eight-Circuit Brain Course
Week Two: Circuits 1 and 5
Mutual reception of biological safety and somatic rapture
Course Text Readings:
If you have ‘I/lngel Tech”, read pages 34-40 and 141-147 this week
but replace the word “gear” with your own term for “circuit”, i.e.,
consciousness, trance, state, etc. If you prefer to continue using the
word “circuit”, that’s OK, too. If you don’t own a copy of Angel Tech,
you can get by with the reading material supplied here.
Writing Assignment #1: First Circuit Fear & Safety
:1) Write about any real time experiences you have had with actual
threat and fear, as opposed to “perceived threat and fear”. Explain
your perceptions of their differences, if any
h) Write about what you have done, either by reflex and/ or intention,
to restore a sense of safety in the face of any real or perceived threat
Writing Assignment #2: Circuit 5 Rapture and Aesthetics
:1) Write about any real time experiences that brought you to a state
of genuine rapture.
b) Write about any person, location, work of art or music, scene in a
film, or special moment that demonstrated exquisite beauty according
to your aesthetic tastes.
Notes on Quality and Commitment
The sheer number of assignments, tasks, and rituals offered in the
following five weeks can seem daunting at first, especially if you add
them all up together. Taken one at a time, however, you have only
to do the ones that you are actually willing and able to do, given
the limitations of your existing schedules, commitment and energy.
The quality of your results won‘t be measured as much by how
many assignments, tasks, and rituals you do but by your degree of
commitment and attention invested in the ones you actually engage
in and complete. The quality of results matters more than the
quantity. The final two weeks of this course are set aside to catch up
on assignments we missed and/ or wish to return to and complete.
49

The C-1/C-5 Vertical Connection: An Overview
C-1 survival pursued for its own sake can lead to a dead end life
of ceaseless security fixations and futile attempts to impose control
over an ever—changing universe. This compulsive habit pattern
demonstrates excessive security addiction and a loss of C-l/C-5
verticality. When C—l/C-5 verticality is restored, the fulfillment of
our physical survival needs can act as a foundation for pursuing the
C-5 post—survival incentives of more leisure time, personal happiness
and whatever gets us high. When we get too high, we can anchor (or
ground) ourselves through any number of C-1 activities and routines
— wash the dishes, do the laundry, fix dinner, etc.
C-1: THE SELF-COMMITMENT CONTRACT
Our most basic and urgent survival needs for food (& water),
protection and shelter stem from our earliest infant vulnerability
that knows that if we are not fed, protected, and sheltered, we will
die. Though in later life the details of these core needs will differ
for each adult, C-1 will remain unintegrated as long as we refuse to
meet these needs ourselves. If you fail to meet these needs, they will
be met by the Mommy Women and Daddy Men or Governments
or Prisons or Re—Habs or any Institutions more committed to your
physical survival than you are.
50

Look at commitment as a force, as in the force of your commitment.
C-l work begins with whatever increases the heat and force of your
self-commitment. The worldly manifestation of your dreams, goals,
ambitions, and aspirations requires tremendous commitment; the
greater the dream, the greater the self-commitment required to realize
it. Self-commitment means not bailing on, or abandoning, yourself
in the face of difficulty, ridicule or disappointment. It means that
you dare to stand firm by your side, no matter what Life throws your
way.
Establishing a bond of self-commitment amounts to a contract of
trust between the Adult and the Child within you. The healthy Child
expresses the most vulnerable, creative, and honest part of us that
naturally responds with timidity, fear, and terror in the face of any real
threat, embarrassment, ridicule, or heartbreaking disappointment.
The healthy Adult expresses the tougher, most responsible and caring
part of us that naturally responds with protective love when the Child
feels threatened. This self-commitment contract must be initiated by
the Adult. It begins by facing the Child, as the Adult, and firmly and
without wavering communicating the following vow (use your own
words, if you wish):
No matter how aflaid, embarrassed, or threatened you feel,
I will not abandon you. I will protect you. I have your bacle.
I am here fiar you.
When spoken simply and directly as a process of self-communication,
these words —- and more essentially the intent behind them -- are no mere
‘new age’ affirmation. These are words of power when spoken
and followed through with commitment and action. They can also
become words of self-betrayal if the Adult bails and abandons the
Child. If this happens, you have only to make it up to the Child to
earn your trust back, again. Consistency matters to the Child. If you
betray this trust and don't do anything about it, the Child remains
afraid and your creativity diminishes. This is not a game; this is a
measure of your self-commitment.
51

Commitment takes commitment. Any fear or dread of fully committing
yourself can be traced back to C-1 integrity loss and the wavering intent
to fully commit to your own survival on this planet. Stop; take a look
around. How much do you really want to be here? Your most honest
response is called for. For our purposes here, the term “integrity”
will be interchangeable with 100% commitment. Wherever we are
committed less than 100%, we suffer integrity loss.
I understand this definition may seem extreme to any cyber—relativist
commitment phobes who still live in their heads. I am not anti-
intellectual. C-3 is not the problem; like all the other circuits, it
awaits conscious evolutionary advancement through its absorption,
integration and transmission. However, as long as C-3 remains naive
to our most basic C-l needs and realities, our daily lives can easily
become trivialized by the circuitous looping action of an overly
complicating and often over-educated Monkey Mind (more on this in
Circuit Three). Hereafter, the term “commitment” refers to a living
force that, once discovered, can be increased and applied to almost
any area in our lives requiring more follow-through and integrity.
C-1: FEELING THE BODY DEEPLY
Beyond securing food and shelter, the physical body’s most central
need is to be felt deeply. When this central need can be met with
satisfaction, C-l integration and transmission demonstrates itself as
increased physical confidence. Lack of physical self-confidence can
indicate a frustration of this central need. Examples of methods for
FEELING THE BODY DEEPLY include: plenty of sex, Pilates,
Yoga, fitness (weight) training, dancing, jogging, stretching the
muscles, any cardiovascular exercise, walking, bike riding, kayaking,
Martial Arts, boxing (pugilism), skiing, swimming, tennis, basketball,
and overeating. All of these examples raise your cardiovascular
rate and make you sweat. Overeating will eventually force you to
feel your body deeply after you gain so much weight that you sweat
and palpitate just to drag around the extra pounds wherever you go.
Obesity is probably the least healthy way to feel the body deeply. As
healthier options are pursued, C-1 becomes more receptive to the
influx of pleasure shocks from C-5 endorphins and ecstasy. To meet
the body’s central need, however, we must learn how to increase the
heat and force of our self-commitment.
52

C-1 TASKS
Note: The following C-I Tasks can be applied in any sequence and on any
day. The quality of your results will be determz'ned by the degree of your self-
honesty and the fiJllow through of your commitment. Perjbrm any of these
tasks as many times as you need and record your results in your Lab Boole.
If you do not have time fi)r all these tasks, choose the ones you can actually
commit to and return to the others when you have time.
OBJECTIVES
The aim of doing these C-l tasks is to increase the force of commitment
and restore self-trust. A negative example: if you promise yourself
you will do something that you personally approve of or want to
do and then fail to follow through, you lose some self-trust. The
more self-trust we lose, the more we fall back on a state of distrust,
not only of ourselves but of others and the world. Self-trust can be
restored by proving to yourself that you can follow through with
the commitments you make. Follow-through does not mean doing
something perfectly. Making honest mistakes and correcting ourselves
can feed our integrity. Follow-through means doing something to the
best of our ability. The overall objective of the following tasks is to
rebuild C-1 integrity.
C-1 Task #1: Locating an I.P. (The Integrity Point)
Determine where, in the course of your daily life, you can say with
total honesty “I can stand behind this 100%”. Call this area your I.P.,
your 100% integrity point. NOTE: an I.P. can be almost anything
— your love for your dog, your favorite theory of everything, your car,
your genitalia, your internet addiction, your God or Goddess, your
morning cup of coffee. Your I.P. can even be your lack of commitment
to anything (if you can stand behind your lack of commitment 100%).
The I.P. acts as the high watermark of your self-commitment.
Throughout this course you will discover how your I.P. can also serve
53

as a hidden source of power that can be redirected to other areas
lacking commitment. Before that experiment, however, you must
first locate an I.P. What or who can you can stand behind 100% without
wavering?
C-1 Task #2: The Salt Bath Ritual (approx. 20 - 40 min.)
Draw a hot bath and add one to two cups epsom salts (use approx.
one cup salt per 100 lb. body weight). Stir thoroughly, get naked and
soak for fifteen to twenty minutes. During this soak allow yourself
to become as physically passive as you can; slowly surrender to the
experience. Remain conscious —- don ’t fall asleep —— during this process.
Don't stay in the bath longer than 30 minutes. Afterwards, drain the
tub and take a fresh water shower. Dry off and immediately enter
a safe, dark place to lie down (secure this space beforehand so that
nothing can interrupt you). Minimize external interference. Turn off
the TV, radio, CD player, cell/ telephone, etc.
While lying down in this safe space, simply feel and listen to the
biological processes of your own breathing, heartbeat, pulse, blood
circulation, etc. If your thoughts beg for attention, return your
awareness to your breathing. Watch your breath. If and when
thoughts persist, simply say, “thinking” whenever you see a thought,
or use any other mantra for relaxing C-3 chatter. Continue watching
your breath. This rest period can be as long as you feel necessary and
can even lead to sleep. The chief aim of the salt bath is to amplify a
direct experience of pulsating biological intelligence after C-l passive
absorption.
ALTERNATIVES T0 SALTBA TH RITUAL
(for those with no access to a bathtub):
1) Ask a friend if you can use their tub for half an hour (plus 30
minutes to lie down afterwards).
2) Rent an hour in an isolation float tank:
www. floatation . com/wheretofloat.html
54

C-1 Task #3: Rigor Mortis Junior (approx. 5-10 min.)
1) Lie flat on your back on the floor, mat or bed.
2) Gradually tense both feet at once until you cannot tense anymore,
hold for a count of five and then release the tension in your feet.
3) Gradually tense your feet and legs together until you cannot tense
anymore, hold for a count of five and then, release the tension.
4) Let the tension creep up from your feet into your legs and continue
this process, section by section, up to and including your head until
the tension reaches through your entire body, hold for five and
release.
NOTE: Do steps 1-4 gently; do not force it. Do not hold your breath.
After having undergone the full body tensing and release, continue
lying on your back while slowly deepening your breathing. Find your
own closure and write down the results. Remember to move through
the tension slowly and gently so you do not create violent reactions
in your body.
Rigor Mortis Jr.: The Short Version (approx. 1-3 min.)
Start the tension in the feet and let it creep up your ankles and legs
slowly through your pelvis and up your torso and then, out each arm
and into each hand and then, the neck, face and head. The entire
process should last no longer than a minute or so. Hold the full body
tension for a count of ten and then release. Be gentle; there’s no need
here for violent physical reactions.
C-1 Task #4: Stretch, Sweat & Cool Off (approx. 20 min.)
1) Wear clothes you can move freely in. For five uninterrupted
minutes, stretch your muscles. Do this in your own way; proceed
gently and slowly (if you already know yoga or other stretches from
Pilates, Dance or Martial Arts, apply these). As you stretch, breathe
into the muscles. Seek out areas in your body that you are either not
feeling very much or feel numbness in and focus the stretching and
breathing into these areas. Your objective in these five minutes is to
feel the body deeply by stretching and breathing into the muscles.
55

2) After your 5-minute stretch, use the next five minutes to perform
any physical activity that doesn't cause you injury and achieves the
result of raising enough heat in your body to break a sweat. Pace
yourself. Five minutes can feel much longer to the body than it can
to the mind.
3) After your 10-minute stretch and sweat session, take a 10-minute
walk to cool down.
C-1 Task #5: Applying the I.P. (approx. 10-15 min.)
Choose any activity that you have habitually demonstrated low
commitment to. Apply yourself to this activity and at some point,
begin applying the force inherent to your I.P. to the task at hand.
Begin tapping into this force towards increasing your commitment
to this new task. Take a few moments to experiment with this.
Note any differences between your previous efforts yourself to do
this task and after applying the I.P. and its deeper, steadier force of
commitment. Record your results in the Lab book. NOTE: Applying
the I.P. can also work with those tasks in which high commitment is
already demonstrated and where you may wish to further excel.
C-1 Task #6: The Three-course meal (approx. 45-90 min.)
The aim of this task is to increase self—commitment by the care shown
for feeding yourself. With or without a recipe or menu, decide on
a three-course meal based on food that your body finds the most
satisfying AND healthy; that's right, satisfying AND healthy. For
more information, ask your body. Visit the market and purchase all
the necessary ingredients. Come home and prepare the dishes with as
much love, attention and commitment as you can. Find the gratitude
for what you have prepared and take your time eating your three-
course meal.
WARNING:
Perfi)rmz'ng C-1 tasks with full commitment
can result in spontaneous C-5 rapture and bliss.
56

Circuit Five Feature Article _
“The No-Form Techn1que”
Gateway to the Internal Landscape
True initiation does not require ritual to occur; it is a spiritual event.
At best a ritual can act as a device or a tool to assist the expression
and integration of genuine initiation -— that which has never occurred
to one before and for which one can never truly be prepared.
The first initiation is Self-initiation -- the exposure of oneself to oneself
This means to leave the self-conscious watcher behind and enter the
circle of participation. Words...images. ..explanations all belong to
the watcher: To the participant -- experience is everything.
The void is, as a rule, pointless to talk, think, or write about. Its very
nature is not subject to categorization by ideas, images or anything
conceptual mind is capable of creating. There are no security,
status, symbolic, or social rewards given out for being nothing.
Nobody wants to be a nobody. However, as all self-governing bodies
eventually realize, real power (not control), real freedom (not ego-
independence), and real creativity (not entertainment) stem from
ongoing personal rapport with the formless, invisible sources behind
all palpable, visible, and manifest effects. To continue interacting with
void, we must find ways to refer to it and invite its presence. This state
of potential energy will be referred to hereafter as No-Form.
Think of No-Form as a concept-free zone and the degree of comfort
you can feel for being nothing; for being nobody... for being nobody
but yourself...for just being. In this medium No-Form is approached
in a standing position, rather than the traditional Zazen sitting
posture. The No-Form stance is a position for cultivating profound
receptivity to vertical sources. Through this internal receptivity, we
first become aware of this potential state and then with practice we
eventually realize that we are not separate from it, but an expression
of it. There is nothing to avoid; we are the void. Though No-Form can
never truly be willed or summoned directly, the following conditions
may prove conducive to its occurrence:
57

Internal and External Adjustments
This technique can be first learned in any standing posture that
supports vertical rest, as in standing with minimal effort. Certain
physical adjustments can be made to increase support and balance
while standing: 1) unlocking the knees, 2) widening the stance, 3)
dropping the pelvis, 4) letting the spine drop relaxed and suspended,
and 5) focusing on the exhale, allowing the inhale to come as a reflex.
Eyes are either shut or open as a slit to minimize external stimuli.
Once the physical mechanics of the No—Form stance are established,
certain internal adjustments can support No-Form: I) withdraw the
attention from any identification with the external environment and
reconnect it within, 2) relax the desire to control the outcome of the
experience, 3) relax the desire to control, 4) relax the desire, 5) relax
into the process of becoming or being nothing, and 6) be nothing.
The Dual Function of No-Form
Though this technique is borrowed from traditional sitting ZaZen
meditation practice, it is not done for its own sake or for any type
of spiritual attainment; no samadhi or enlightenment is sought
here. It’s used as a tool or a bridge to a more direct experience of
forces embedded in the physical and energetic bodies. Within this
receptivity we can begin to detect, access, be impressed, and moved
by their innate forces, resistances, and impulses. This technique will
be introduced in this PRAXIS course as a means to access the states
of consciousness symbolized by the eight circuits.
The first function of No—Form is to “charge” the ritual. By
approaching a state of profound internal receptivity, we can begin
attuning to autonomous forces within us. At this point, we can
approach a deepening immersion in their presence and an eventual
surrender to their effects. This can occur by relaxing the desire to
control the outcomes of these forces and allowing them instead to
express through us in movement, sound, gesture, and action. This
immersion and surrender process marks the initiatic stage of this
ritual work.
58

The second function of No-Form allows us to discharge the ritual by
releasing attachment and identification with whatever forces, energies,
or states of being were merged with during the immersion phase.
By disidentifying with these energies, our consciousness returns to
our true nature of being nothing, of being nobody but ourselves, free
of the delusional tendencies common to ego identification with the
psyche’s unconscious contents. Once we can extract our identification
from these sources and energies, we can return to being nobody but
ourselves; we are left with our integrity intact. In this second function,
No-Form serves as a trance-dispersion device.
These two functions of No-Form —- to charge and to discharge the ritual --
occur when we set apart time before and after each ritual immersion
to stand in No-Form. As a consistent guideline, this technique
supports a scrupulous approach to the ritual of Self-initiation, of
accessing any state of being or force in the physical and energetic
bodies towards their authentic expression in movement, sound,
gesture, and action. Without the consistent application of the No-
Form technique -— befiare and afier every ritual immersion —- our work can
easily corrupt and disperse into rote forms of play—acting, spectacle,
and forced improvisation. As with the learning and mastering of any
technique, only ongoing diligence and practice can bring success.

Circuit Five Rituals
NOTE: Please do not ingest any external dru gs, alcohol or psychoactive
agents when doing these rituals, as they can distort the required natural
sensitivity of the CNS and the brain’s own neuropharmacy of drugs
fior getting high.
C-5 RITUAL #1: The Polarization Ritual
(approx. 30-50 minutes)
- Wear clothes you can move fleely in
- Have a bottle of drinking water with you
- Eat a light protein meal one to two hours before doing the ritual
- Do not attempt this under the influence of any drugs
INTENT:
1) To access the forces of a ‘charged polarity’ in the Body
2) To balance these energies in the Body
Step 1. The Charged Polarity List
A charged polarity consists of any pair of opposite states that carry
a strong positive charge (excitement) and a strong negative charge
(resistance). Make a list of five to ten personally charged polarities.
Feel free to borrow from or add to this list:
masculine/ feminine; strong/weak; order/chaos; nourishing/
toxic; dominant/ submissive; safety/ danger; mercy/ severity;
triumph/ defeat; victim/ savior; precise/sloppy; dry/ moist;
reward/ punishment; repulsion/ attraction; satiated/ hungry;
mechanical/ spontaneous; joy/ sorrow; creation/ destruction;
fai1ure/ success; intoxication/ sobriety; love/ fear; parent/ child; fool/
magus; freedom/ oppression; dead/ alive; uncertainty/certainty;
resistance/nonresistance; deception/ honesty; earth/ air; water/ fire;
lack/ abundance; young/old; beauty/ ugliness; reason/ intuition;
head/ gut; right/ wrong; angelic/ demonic; perfect/ flawed; control/
abandonment; exposure/ shelter; sensitive/ numb; acceptance/ denial
60

Step 2. Secure the ritual setting
You will need floor space free of clutter of at least 10 feet by 10 feet.
If there are large objects and furniture in the space, move them to
the periphery. Do whatever you can to secure this space for at least
an hour of uninterrupted time by yourself. Your first ritual task is to
energetically own that space. Do this in your own way. Commit to
any movements, sounds and/ or activities that infuse the space with
a greater presence of safety and solitude for you. You should feel
totally safe and alone in this space before doing the ritual.
Step 3. The Physical Warm-Up Cycle
The quality and the results of your ritual depend on the presence of
safety and dominion you create for yourself and then, the commitment
you show in meeting the following four objectives in your own way.
Take five minutes to realize each of these four physical objectives for
a 20-minute warm-up cycle dedicated to feeling your body deeply.
A) STILLNESS Any posture allowing physical stillness and meditation
B) F LEXING THE SPINE Find ways to render the spine more flexible
C) STRETCH THE MUSCLES Breathe into muscles while stretching
D) GENERATING HEAT Any movements, within your personal area,
that generate enough heat to break a sweat. Stay within your warm-up area
to contain rather than disperse the heat generated. Towards the end of the
five minutes of HEAT mark the boundaries and the center of your area with
your movements. Own this space.
Step 4. No-Form
After you break a sweat, stand in the center of the space. Adjust your
stance to support a position of vertical rest. Unlock the knees, let the
pelvis drop, and focus on the exhale. Begin your process of emptying,
of approaching intimacy with the Void of potential energy. Enter a
state of internal receptivity, of being nothing; empty. Don’t fret if
this stage proves frustrating. No-Form takes (feel free to refer to the
Circuit Five Feature Article, “The No-Form Technique” for tips and
clues).
6l

Step 5 . Choose a Polarity, Immersion
While standing in No—Form, select a charged polarity from your list that
feels relevant to you at this time in your life, not as a concept but as a
living reality. Project one half of your polarity in front of you and the
other behind you. Let their respective energies, qualities, colors and
charges exist before you and behind you as you stand in the center of
your space. From No-Form, step back into that side of your polarity
placed behind you. Let its power and presence fill you. Don’t try to
control or direct this energy. Absorb its influence and let it expand
inside you. This can be subtle or dramatic; there is no predicting
the outcome. Let this energy move and bend you as it wills. Yield
to its direction and serve its expression through you. Commit to the
expression of this force through you. Don’t try to control it. Let the
energy be the boss; let its force guide the direction and expression.
NOTE: If nothing happens, wait a few long moments; if nothing still
happens, return to the No—Form stance and try again.
When you feel done, step forward into the other side of your polarity
and subject yourself to its energies, qualities, colors and force, just as
you did with the opposite side. Remain there until you feel compelled
to return to the other side of your polarity and then, cross over and
immerse yourself. Continue physically moving back and forth
between each side of your polarity with the intention of giving more
of yourself to each side as you go. Take your time. If you feel like
you've lost power -- lost connection with the energy -- return to the No-
Form position until you’re receptive enough to go again. If you have
lost too much heat, return to your process of generating heat and
sweat until you are ready to re-enter No-Form.
Step 6. Return to No-Form, Discharge the Ritual, Closure
You will know when the ritual is over when the energy runs out,
or simply when you feel done. When this happens, return to No-
Form. Let your emptying process discharge any residual force you
evoked. Stay in your No—Form stance as long as it takes to release
your attachment to these energies or states of being. Record your
experiences, impressions, images, etc. in your Lab Book. As your
schedule permits, return to this ritual as many times as you wish
during this week to discover what develops.
62

If you don’t know where you ’re going, any road will get you there.”
—Anonymous
C-5 Ritual #2: Ain1less Wandering
Note: For those whose lives and schedules forbid the completion of the S010
Polarization Rz'tual, here is another C-5 ritual task with similar objectives for
connecting C-1 and C-5 but with a very different approach. For those willing
and able to complete both ritual tasks, you may be rewarded doubly towards
stabilizing the C-1—C-5 vertical connection).
This ritual requires that you take a morning or afternoon off and
drive, walk, ride or be driven to any area of the city or rural region
that is genuinely unfamiliar to you. This ritual can be done anywhere
you are most likely to temporarily get lost. Bring with you a cell
phone, water, a little food and some emergency money.
RITUAL INTENT:
1) To wander aimlessly until you actually become lost
2) To restore your sense of safety and orientation when lost
3) To remain open to the influx of fresh somatic experience (C-5)
This AIMLESS WANDERING ritual acts as a test to your C-l
self—commitment and willingness to restore a sense of safety and
orientation in the face of honest disorientation. Any experience of
wandering aimlessly through unknown territory can naturally open
the senses and excite states of elation and bliss. With the influx of
new information and experience, certain habits and fixed beliefs that
have been maintaining the illusion of certitude can also begin to
wobble and buck. This wobbling and bucking can increase the force
of anxiety in our bodies.
Anxiety as an Energy, a Force
Anxiety is a natural response to reaching our Uncertainty Threshold;
of how much uncertainty we can permit before becoming nervous
monkeys. Anxiety is a fiorce, an energy, that can be managed and
directed as soon as we agree to become responsible —— increase our
ability to respond -- to the anxiety by doing something to restore our
sense of safety and orientation. As long as we refuse to be responsible
63

for our own safety, we remain in a fear-based survival mode and
either wait and hope for someone else to make us safe (the child’s
choice), or become a nervous wreck (the neurotic’s choice). Once we
agree to respond to any threat or disorientation by making ourselves
safe, the neural pathways to C-5 open up. C-5 bliss expresses our
natural state whenever we are free of survival anxiety, fear, over-
thinking, and guilt. Learn to manage the force of your anxiety and
you exponentially expand your chances of C-5 rapture.
AIMLESS WANDERING can take anywhere from an hour to four
or five hours, or more. The point here is not to endanger yourself in
any actual way but to place yourself in unfamiliar terrain, wander
without any goals and see what happens. You have the cell phone,
water, food and money in case your physical survival is actually
threatened. NOTE: If you plan to trek out into the wilderness or into
truly dangerous urban hoods, you may wish to tell someone where
you’re going to minimize the anxiety of your friends and family, and
in case you actually do get into trouble.
64

Week Three: Circuits 2 & 6
Emotional anchoring of accelerating perception
“The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed,
but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought
each other to a standstil . — Robert Anton Wilson
65

Circuit Two Feature Article
“The Emotional Plague’
1
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’/3; ... /Z/(a77sw=. *‘~.&».». .4 :<';u_3'V 1/
°
J
“The emotional plague” is a term initially proposed by Wilhelm
Reich for the irrational insistence on beliefs and ideas that depend
on dissociation of mind from body. Reich also referred to it as “the
neurotic character in destructive action on the social scene”. Though
this body/ mind dissociation has plagued humanity for centuries, it
wasn’t until the “The Age of Reason that intellect was exalted to
god—like status thanks to the immense success of Newton's theories
and Descartes’ “Meditations”. Since then, the snowballing effect
has gripped the collective psyche with overly-literalist thinking made
more dismal by the diminishing presence of Imagination in the
culture at large. Imagination acts like a canary in the coal mine of
the collective unconscious. Whether it’s on the personal or collective
levels, imagination death precedes the death of the soul.
66

In the current Hypermedia Era, the body/ mind fissure has been
dramatized via massive collective projection of vital physical,
emotional, and sexual energy into mentally absorbent mediums such
as the Internet, VR technology, video games, mass media advertising,
and too much TV. If the emotional plague is maintained by constant
disassociation of mind and body, we can expose the virus wherever
we are mistaking the virtual for the real, or taking any image or any
idea of a reality for the reality itself.
The emotional plague in the Hypermedia Era has surfaced in these
two ways: 1) an increasing trend towards depersonalization, and
2) a steadily decreasing capacity for direct experience. As we lose
trust and faith in the legitimacy of firsthand experience, we can
naturally become more vulnerable and compliant to the dictates of
external sources of authority and its endless cycles of obedience,
reward, and punishment. Without enough trust in our own innate
sensibilities, intuitions, and instincts we suffer from an absence of
vital information leading to a growing incapacity to distinguish the
real from the illusory, the true from the false, and what’s right from
what’s wrong. Without self-trust — trust in our own direct experience
— we remain as timid children dependent on parental approval and
guidance for the way we live, work, create, procreate, and die.
This fictitious body/ mind split that was inherited from religious beliefs
and cultural norms acts on our daily lives in unconscious ways that
feed the emotional plague. When any fixed ideas, certitudes, and
beliefs are imposed over the fluid vitality of the organism, the body
absorbs and contains these invisible negations as muscular tension
and armoring. The body never lies. It’s as if the body knows better and
naturally resists these mental and moral impositions of a body/ mind
split by reacting with tension. As muscular armoring accumulates,
the capacity for direct experience diminishes. Numbness gradually
replaces what was once naturally heightened sensitivity. Body-
based therapies influenced by Wilhelm Reich, such as the work of
Jack Willis, Christopher S. Hyatt, and Stanislav Grof’s holotropic
breathwork, all aim to break down this muscular armoring to liberate
the body’s vital forces and restore the capacity for direct experience.
Though their various methods may differ, their purpose is the same:
to bring the people back to li e.
67

The Eight-Circuit Brain Course
Week Three: Circuits 2 & 6
Emotional anchoring of accelerating perception
INTRODUCTION
The real work of this course arrives through applying yourself to the
tasks at hand and recording your results in your Lab book (and the
online Forum posts for those who have set this up). This week we
explore the C-2/C-6 vertical connectivity in the emotional anchoring
of accelerated perception and how emotional honesty can lead to
new ways of seeing.
COURSE TEXT READINGS:
If you have “Angel Tech”, read pages 42-45, pages 85-95, and pages
166-169 (end by reading the “warning” section). If you do not have
Angel Tech you can get by reading the material here and doing the
work assignments.
WRITING ASSIGNMENT #1
Confessions of Negative & Positive C-2 Bias
Here is an opportunity to air your learned and inherited C-3 ideas and
C-4 social moral judgments that carry the bias of distrust, negation,
dismissal and/ or condemnation of the emotions AND also, those
C-3 ideas and C-4 social experiences that convey a bias of trust,
affirmation, inspiration, enchantment and praise of the emotions.
WRITING ASSIGNMENT #2
C-6 Accelerated Perception or Paranoia .7.’
What do you know about the distinctions between accelerating
perception (perceiving more reality) and paranoia (you define it)?
Include examples of how you personally stimulate perception and
how you personally notice and curb unwanted paranoia.
68

WRITING ASSIGNNIENT #3
Updating your terms for the three sub-phases
It’s time to adjust and update your own terms for these three phases
to better serve the processes of your personal style of intelligence
increase. Examples: 1) engage, interpret, and convey, 2) immersion,
organization, and articulation. How does this process work for
you?
C2 - C6: BRAIN PLEASURE & EMOTIONAL HONESTY
Whereas C-5 rapture expresses the physical body’s innate capacity
for pleasure, the highs of C-6 open the “third eye, the sixth chakra,
to the chemically rich neuropharmacy of brain pleasure. Just as
C-5 rapture draws on C-1 physical energy to anchor and fuel its
experiences (and why extended episodes of C-5 bliss require C-
1 physical rest and renewal), C-6 brain pleasures draw on our
existing supply of C-2 emotional power for support and fuel. The
accelerated perception of psychic opening — telepathy, clairsentience,
clairaudience, clairvoyance — and its relativistic outlook depend on a
strong, flexible ego to help anchor our psychic awareness.
69

A strong ego is not the same as a big ego. Ego strength does not refer
to a forceful ego but an ego flexible enough to flow with your most
honest emotional responses, both negative and positive, with minimal
C-3 justifications and C-4 moral judgments. C-2 intelligence can be
measured by the degree of spontaneity we express and can allow
others. Big egos suffer loss of spontaneity by their brittle fixations
in one-sided, exalted self-images; strong egos flow like rivers into the
sea of life, like flowers reaching for the Sun Absolute.
Emotions vs. Feelings
Emotions and feelings are commonly confused as the same thing.
Though related, emotion refers to any preverbal visceral reactions to
stimuli -— a neurological impulse connected to immediate physiological
reaction. Feeling refers to a navigational modality, as in, moving by
“feeling things out” as opposed to “figuring things out” (C-3). Feeling
also allows for cognitive engagement with emotion. For example,
the initial visceral impulse of anger or affection or fear conveys an
immediate reaction. Afterwards we can have a feeling about that.
Initial gut reactions express emotion; cognitive engagement lets us
have a feeling about it.
C-2 motivation differs from C-3 reasons and C-4 duties for doing
something. Moving from C-2 we do things not because we plan them
(C-3) or out of social obligation or for the good of the group (C-4).
From C-2 we do things for emotional reasons, irrational reasons that
don’t necessarily make sense yet still feel right. Satisfying our desires,
knowing what we want, expressing emotions, acting on our feelings...
all these processes can fill the emotional tank.
Emotional problems arise when our tank tips too full or too close to
empty. An empty tank can lead to apathy, depression, and dismal
attitudes that always accentuate the negative. A flooded tank, on
the other hand, can express an inflated sense of self—importance,
delusional behavior and/or immature posturing that others find
emotionally toxic or “obnoxious”. If you are getting your way too
much, your tank may be flooding. If you are not getting your way
enough, your tank may need attention and filling. C-2 integration
involves monitoring and managing the supply of your own emotional
tank to minimize power loss.
70

Power Loss and the Need For Control
C-2 symbolizes the central brain’s territorial instincts and its primary
survival functions of marking and controlling turf. Though the need
to control turf expresses an authentic emotion and impulse it can
become invested in what we have very little control over, such as other
people's opinions and their behavior, the weather, the government,
and almost everything else under the Sun. With every investment of
this territorial need for control into people or places or circumstances
beyond our control, we suffer power loss and oppression to our
autonomy.
Power is not the same as control, although meeting the need for
control can increase power. When this need for control is frustrated,
it can result in an out—of—control “control trip” where we try to control
everything and everybody in sight — a vicious cycle going nowhere
fast. This second circuit treadmill also can produce a maelstrom of
negative emotions — helplessness, futility, envy, insecurity, rage, etc.
— until the primary need for control is satisfied. What can we actually
control? What is it that we can actually call and claim as our own?
What turf can we rightly mark as ours? Important questions to be
addressed and answered before C-2 emotional intelligence can be
integrated.
Emotions can be sticky. Wherever we’re emotionally invested, we’re
also attached and “owned”; we are possessed by whatever we possess.
Whether our investments result in assets or liabilities may depend on
how wise we are to what can and cannot be controlled. Emotionally
invest in anything you cannot control and watch your life spin out
of control. This is not always a problem. Some make an art out of
spinning out for the sheer adrenaline rush or to create drama and
crisis when they’re bored. Boredom expresses a C-2 frustration of
the need for self-challenge. The emotional stagnation of boredom
stems from a lack of risk-taking and self-testing which, if continued,
can lead to immobilizing indecision and other self—victimizing habits.
C-2 emotional confidence, or courage, can be developed by exposure
to new experiences and daring to do things we initially believe, think,
or feel we cannot do. By proving ourselves wrong here, we can win.

Since most things cannot be controlled, “control” represents an
illusion. Yet until we satisfy our territorial needs and instincts, we
remain frustrated by a very real and nagging need for asserting
control. What to do? Find an area in your life that you can actually
and rightfully control, and take charge there. Call the shots and make
it your own. Remain oblivious to your need for control and you’ll
spin your wheels in second circuit overdrive, trying to control what
you have no business trying to control, a futile loser game of power
loss.
Two Culturally Approved Drains to the Energetic Body
An integrated C-2 maintains the health, strength, and power of the
energetic body, the neuro-electrical double or “light body”. Two
popular drains to the energetic body are: l) The Poor Baby or Victim
Syndrome and 2) The Courtship Compulsion. The Victim Syndrome
corrodes and destroys the will of the individual by draining our power
with self—pity and the infantile refusal to accept personal shortcomings,
inadequacies, and flaws, while complaining and whining about
feeling “not enough”. Poor Baby! This popular mechanism of power
loss is not entirely our fault. Multimedia advertising geniuses have
taken full advantage of the Poor Baby epidemic sweeping the land
by appealing to consumer frustrations and unconscious inadequacies
to push their product lines. If we are not defining and meeting our
personal needs for C-1 Security and C-2 Status, corporate advertising
strategies will cheerfully sell them to us (more on this in Circuit Three
Feature Article, How To See Through Advertising).
When afflicted with the Victim Syndrome, we soon become as
emotional vampyres feeding off the sympathy of others while
continuing the Pity Party in private. The Victim Syndrome acts as
a disempowering cycle of debilitating self-indulgence that atrophies
the decision-making muscle with the inertia of indecision. To restore
your power, stop complaining and start accepting the full spectrum
of your humanity —- your strengths and weaknesses, flaws and
talents, ineptitudes and skills, competence and inadequacies. Learn
to become strong enough to be weak, independent enough to afford
dependencies, smart enough to confess ignorance, and courageous
enough to be afraid without becoming a coward. In short, learn to
become more human.
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The Courtship Compulsion weakens the will and wastes the
imagination. This complicated power drain occurs with: 1) the
emotional investment in an idealized image of the “dream lover”,
2) obsessive preoccupation with finding “The One” or the “Soul-
mate, 3) automatic (unconscious) projection of charged emotion
onto any person who looks and feels like said “dream lover” image.
Though this compulsion may seem like a C-4 social issue, the massive
projection and investment of emotional energy defines it as a C-2
power drain.
Courtship Compulsions can be dismantled in several ways. One
approach requires a certain readiness to open ourselves to the numerz
of the archetypal realm by initiating a personal courtship with the
immaterial, invisible, and autonomous transpersonal forces of, what
Jung calls, the Anima (for men) and the Animus (for women). These
archetypal forces make up the very projections that run willy nilly in
the Courtship Compulsion. When faced on their own terms these
projections can be traced back to their true spiritual origins in the
archetypes, rather than imposed onto our lovers, granting us the
critical perspective to begin perceiving others beyond our fantasies
about them (also see “The Am'ma/Animus Shrine”, WEEK FOUR).
As these C-2 projections are withdrawn C-6 perception can be
allowed to expand. Courtship Compulsion expresses a symptom
of C-2 vertical disconnect. When we can discover and establish
more meaningful connections between C-2 emotional needs and C-6
psychic awareness, Courtship Compulsions can be seen for the soap
opera melodramas they are.
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On Defusing the Contaminated Id
by CHRISTOPHER S. H YAT71 Ph.D.
I have been asked numerous times “how do I get more power for
myself? The answer is simple. The process is difficult. The difficulties
lie in repetition & tolerating the restructuring anxiety, along with real
world threats from other monkeys. So here is the secret: “Power”
as metaphor is divided unequally between what Freud called the id,
ego and superego. Keep in mind that Freud’s labels are simply labels
and do not exist in reality but only point to complex structures and
processes.
In most people, the contaminated id (masochism, self-damaging
desires) is controlled primarily by the superego (inculcated authority/
cop). Hence, power is expended in impulse and the counter impulse
battle. How much power? I would guess the average person expends
more than 75% of their total energies in the struggle between
impulsive desire (id), and the self-flagellating response to the desire
(superego). Ego functions, i.e. rational and social functions, represent
about 25%.
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This hypothetical model requires reversal. What does this mean?
The superego (whose very existence depends on social and native
processes) must be defused and its energy given to the ego. This
contradicts Freud’s dictate, that in the healthy person the id impulses
will be replaced by the ego. Instead the superego will be replaced by
the ego and the contaminated id transformed back to the primal id.
The contaminated id must also be defused and the energy given to
the ego. This is the purpose and meaning of Undoing (see “Undoing
Yourself”, Original Falcon Press). In practice, defusing the superego
alone is not sufficient, as the contaminated id will begin to run wild
and get the person into practical trouble with the external superego
(the “authorities”).
Thus, the contaminated id must be defused at the same time. One
problem is that most monkeys cannot separate practical self- control
from superego self-control, due to conditioning at an early age to
(external) authority. This process is existential, in that the helpless
infant deifies the adult caretaker regardless of the caretaker’s qualities.
Thus, the infantile processes of deifying the caretaker/ authority suffer
from an absence of objective evaluation and discrimination. Finally,
the original superego is further built upon by other adults, media, and
social pressure, continuing the innate deifying process to the grave.
Courtesy of The Original Falcon Press, Nic/e Tharcher, and Linda Miller
av
Alan R. Miller (aka Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D.) 1943-2008
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C-2 TASKS
INTRODUCTION
C-2 Absorption, Integration, & Transmission
Last week we learned about the central C-1 need for feeling the body
deeply. If only C-2 needs were that simple. C-2 complexity embraces
multiple criteria to assure our emotional survival. The web of our
emotions makes up a dynamic interplay of contrary forces that
follow their own “laws”, laws that rarely conform to C-3 analysis
and reason or C-4 socio-moral considerations, unless C-3 learns to
read C-2 signals accurately and C-4 can relax value judgments. For
our purposes here, the following C-2 tasks will focus on the reptilian
territorial instincts and the more mammalian needs for experiencing
firsthand status, power, and the personal embodiment of authority.
THE AHVIS OF THESE C-2 TASKS:
l) educating C-3 how to read C-2 szgnals accurately; to relax C-4 momlities
2) to engage, assz'mz'late, and express C-2 emotional power and intelligence
THE OVERALL OBJECTIVE:
To sanction the life of emotions and desires as a foundation for
anchoring C-6 accelerated perception and brain pleasure. The idea:
C-2 hungers for the emotional security of certitudes, set values, and a
sense of status or personal significance. C-6 opens us to uncertainty
as a creative state and a relativistic outlook that perceives multiple
levels of reality, or multiple realities, as equal in value. C-2 pursued
for its own sake makes dogmatic little bigots of us all. C-6 pursued
for its own sake makes skitzy paranoid space cadets of us all. The
main idea here is to find their links and how they work to serve and
balance each other.
C-2 TASK #1: THE DVVESTMENT LIST
Look at your personal supply of emotional energy as a kind of
currency that gathers interest in your emotional bank (the “emotional
tank” referred to earlier). Make a list of people, projects, objects,
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and abstracts (ideas, beliefs, values) that you feel most emotionally
invested in. From this list, determine which ones act as assets and
which ones act as liabilities to your emotional bank by the degree
each replenishes &/ or diminishes your emotional life. Be as honest
as possible. Assets enhance the bank; liabilities drain the bank.
Wherever we are the most emotionally invested, we are also the
most attached. Rate each item in your emotional bank on a scale of
1-10 with “l” signifying total detachment and “10” where you are
“totally attached, addicted, and refuse to live without this.” CLUE:
you are probably the most territorial and possessive wherever you are
most emotionally invested; whatever we own also owns us. Identify
your emotional investments and attachments. Determine what or
who might be draining or replenishing your power, where you are
accumlating interest or debt. Record the results in your Lab Book.
C-2 TASK #2: STATUS REPORT
We experience status by the emotional flux that affirms and/or
negates our sense of self-worth. Emotions tend to shrink or expand
according to our experience of status. We feel “smaller” when we
lose status and we feel “larger” when we gain status.
1) Redefine status in the most personal and honest terms you can.
What constitutes status for you? The university degree? Your father’s
approval? Realizing your dreams? Knowing a famous person? To
what extent does your experience of status depend on internal and/
or external sources for its confirmation? If you automatically avoid
or resist authority and/ or success, your C-2 work starts by redefining
the type of authority and/ or success you can live with. By continuing
to avoid defining our status criteria, we tend to avoid and/ or fight
against those people, organizations, governments that personify the
kind of authority, status and success that we resist.
2) Where in your life experience and/ or training can you say that
you know enough — have enough knowledge — to claim expertise and
establish your authority?
3) How are you defining SUCCESS these days?

Status as a Symbol for Cultural Values
Status symbols also indicate the cultural values of a society. For
example, in a commercial society, having money or wealth and
things that can be bought by wealth, such as cars, houses, or fine
clothing, are considered status symbols. In a society that values
honor or bravery, a battle scar would be more of a status symbol. The
condition of one’s body can be a status symbol. In times past, when
workers did physical labor outdoors under the sun and often had little
food, being pale and fat was a status symbol, indicating wealth and
prosperity (through having enough food and not having to do manual
labor). Now that workers usually do less—physical work indoors and
find little time for exercise, being tanned and thin is often a status
symbol in Western culture. —— Wikipedia
C-2 TASK #3: THE CODE OF HONOR
1) The Approval/Disapproval Mechanism
We are empowered by doing things we personally approve of and
disempowered by doing things we personally disapprove of. Note that
doing also includes behavior, attitudes, beliefs, ideas, relationships,
jobs, and alliances.
2) Exposing the Power/Disempowerment Mechanism
Though your code of honor may not be known to you yet, it may still
exist. You can expose it by clarifying what you actually approve of and
disapprove of. If this seems too abstract, pay attention to situations
that arise where you find yourself seeking external confirmation for
what you already know to be true. What you approve of defines
your code of honor. When you break your code, you experience
self—betrayal. When you stick to your code, you experience self-
enhancement. Don't just take my word for it; experiment and see for
yourself and then, record the results in your Lab book.
3) The Task:
a) Make a choice to stop doing things you personally disapprove of.
b) Make a choice to hold yourself to actions you personally approve
of. Note: This task may be of special value for those of you
suffering overly critical attitudes towards others by projecting your
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own standards onto them without the integrity of holding yourself
accountable to those very standards. Defining and enacting your Code
of Honor increases emotional integrity and overall C-2 intelligence.
C-2 TASK #4: THE DOM]NION RITUAL
Each of us expresses our own distinct, instinctive way of claiming an
area as our own or making our presence known there. This territorial
instinct stems from our central reptilian brain and its behaviors often
occur unconsciously. When this vital instinct can be made conscious,
the action becomes a personal dominion ritual.
The Ritual itself
Choose a room in your current habitat and rearrange the objects to
shape the space in ways to further establish your dominion there.
If you live with roommates, negotiate this temporary change. Also
find ways of moving and making sounds in this space to assert your
presence and energy. If you feel self-conscious doing this —- C-4 social
moral embarrassment or the C-3 inner critic wanting to do everything
correctly -- remember, there are no right or wrong ways to own your
space. There is only your way of owning the space. Write down your
results in the Lab book.
C-2 TASK #5: EMOTIONAL POLARITY RITUAL
Don’t do this ritual on an empty stomach. Eat a light yet protein-rich
meal and allow at least an hour for digestion before doing the ritual.
This ritual follows the same structure as the C-5 Solo Polarization
ritual with the addition of two things: 1) use the STRETCH and
HEAT phases of the physical warm—up to strengthen the sense of
boundaries of your personal area for greater dominion and 2) choose
one polarity from the following list to work with:
WINNING/ LOSING; TRIUMPH/ DEFEAT;
SUCCESS / FAILURE; STRONG/ WEAK;
IMPORTANCE/INSIGNIFICANCE;
DOMINANCE/ SUBMISSION;
INDEPENDENCE/ DEPENDENCE;
WORTHLESS/VALUABLE
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Overall aim
To increase emotional flexibility, or ego strength, by accepting
and engaging contrary sides of your nature. For example, are you
STRONG enough to be WEAK? Do you have enough status to
endure insignificance? Can you win by losing sometimes? Does your
definition of success include failure?
Specific ritual objective
To gain equal access to both sides of your chosen polarity. To enter each
side of the polarity as a source of energy, rather than your concepts
and judgments about that energy. If you cannot escape C-3 chatter
or C-4 judgments, I suggest giving them the attention they crave by
exploring one of these polarities first: CRITIC/PARTICIPANT or
ORDER/ CHAOS.
AUXILIARY RITUAL: For the overactive C-3 or C-4
Resistance = energy. If you cannot bypass negative moral reactions
or over-thinking during the Emotional Polarity ritual, return to No-
Form and project these resistances into the ritual space and subject
yourself to them directly and give them expression. Once you get this
negative static temporarily out of your system, return to No-Form
and re-approach the original ritual of charged emotional polarities.
ALTERNATIVES TO C-2 TASK #5:
For those who cannot find space to perform the previous TASK 5
ritual, here are five small yet effective tasks that can be done almost
anywhere. If they are performed with high commitment, each one
can act towards cultivating greater emotional flexibility, ego strength,
and C-2 intelligence. Choose the ones you know you will actually
do.
1) During your next argument, admit to being wrong” even you are not.
2) Find ways throughout each day to inconvenience yourself on purpose.
3) When you feel the dread of “being stuck in a rut”, relax and be z'n the rut.
4) If you are used to winning and getting your way, help someone else win.
5) If you are accustomed to losing and not getting your way, create three small
victories.
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Circuit Six Feature Article
The First and Second Attentions
“It is essential that you have Knowledge.
It is also essential that you escape the Known.”
-- J. Krishnamurti
HOW THE TWO ATTENTIONS WORK
What we pay attention to informs the content of our minds; how
we pay attention informs the quality of that content. Two types of
attention will be addressed here to demonstrate these ideas. The
first attention is that awareness linked to language, thinking, and the
automatic assignment of labels and meaning. The second attention is
not linked to language, thinking, or meaning, but to presence, energy,
and phenomena. The first attention looks but cannot see; the second
attention only sees. Most people know the feeling of being looked at,
as if on display; far fewer know the feeling of being truly seen. Or of
seeing. Both first and second attentions are important and necessary
for differing reasons.
The underlying purpose of the first attention is survival —— to figure
out how to stay alive. The underlying purpose of the second attention
is creativity, of directly engaging the autonomous forces of creation.
These two attentions can function separately and/or together at
various degrees and consequences. Left alone, the first attention
fixates awareness on survival issues -— such as security, status, analysis
and problem solving, social needs -- with minimal access to the “post-
survival” luminosities of rapture, clairvoyance, telepathy, and the
powers of dreaming.
The first attention expresses a function of physical sight and intellect;
the second attention conveys a function of the energetic body and
intuition with biological correlation to the Central Nervous System.
The sense of sight (first attention) is linked to insight (second
attention) by way of stimulation of the light—sensitive, serotonin-rich
pineal gland via the optic nerve. This stimulation occurs naturally
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during the onset of sleep, resulting in the hypnogogic state of shifting
imagery that bridges waking and dreaming states. Though both
attentions are already linked, their mutual interaction is rarely made
conscious during daytime waking hours. Putting conscious effort into
developing meaningful interaction between both attentions can also
bring about fresh experience and information in our night dreams, as
well as in waking states.
The first attention is stable and stabilizes awareness; the second
attention is unstable and destabilizes awareness. First attention
stability is maintained by the pursuit of certitudes such as fixed
beliefs, ideas, preconceptions, assumptions and dogmas. The unstable
second attention is maintained by permitting more uncertainty,
residing in silence and the experience of being unknown to yourself.
Both attentions can be strengthened through different types of
concentration. First attention concentrates by fixating on an idea,
image, or concept; second attention concentrates by merging with
the energy. First attention creates a picture and assigns a story,
message or meaning to it. The second attention attunes to the signal,
frequency or vibration of the energy. A message is the ordering of a
signal. Second attention gets the signal, first attention organizes it
into a message.
This process already happens by itself, unconsciously without our
control, and it happens at the speed of light. The second attention
absorbs luminosity and is light sensitive; the first attention translates
energy (light) with pattern recognition and is form-sensitive. The
second attention acts like a radar dish receiving raw signals from
outer space and the first attention is like the computer program that
outputs incoming signals as readable data.
The first attention can act as an anchor to the second attention, as the
second attention can act as a catalyst or shock to the first attention.
The first attention anchors the second attention when we can learn
to find words, images and ideas that best serve the authenticity and
truth of the signal. The second attention shocks the first attention
to permit enough uncertainty to experience the unknown directly
and without assigning it any label. If the second attention fails to
anchor itself in the first attention, its absorption of luminosity can
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over stimulate the nervous systems -- all lit up with nowhere to go.
Not unlike an overheated electrical wire without a ground, the forces
of creation are engaged but sputter, disperse and fail to manifest in
lime and space. If the first attention consistently avoids the shock of
uncertainty and unknowns, the thinking processes can rigidify, grow
brittle and overly literal, even paranoid. Both types of attention need
each other; both are necessary to increase the power of dreaming.
liducational systems of western civilization have granted the
lirst attention powerful a priori status that has inflated its sense
of importance in our minds. This inflation has resulted in a kind
of mental tyranny over the body/psyche by the mechanism of
over-thinking in general, and over-literalist thinking in particular.
This compulsion further complicates itself in nonstop, dualistic
comparisons and associations until the psyche is turned into a tool
for an inflated, arrogant intellect. When we learn to use the intellect
as a tool, rather than being owned by it, we can begin to link the first
and second attentions together in more meaningful ways.
The first attention can be called “the knowing mind”, as the second
attention can be called “the not knowing, or unknowing, mind”.
Public education systems sanction the first attention by assigning the
highest grades and status to what can be proven, justified and known.
Who is assigned high grades for not knowing? Without activating
the second attention’s unknowing mind, our focus remains severely
limited by the overly literalist bias of the survival—oriented first
attention. Claustrophobia sets in when the first attention dominates
the psyche with its compulsive data and proof gathering habits. Our
minds fill up with the cluttering detritus of random, impersonal
information and eventually, with enough practice, become dead data
rlcpositories.
II‘ basic survival problems remain unsolved -- and if security, status
and/ or territory become threatened -- survival anxiety can naturally
ensue. In an attempt to alleviate this anxiety, the first attention can
begin fixating on absolutes as an, albeit unconscious, attempt to
restore certainty where no certainty exists. At its extreme, an insatiable
appetite for proofs and certitudes can persist and can mask the deeper
agendas of frustrated survival needs. This dilemma can also manifest
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as a fixation on trying to make sense of everything or as a nonstop
ranting of rationalizations. First attention cannot solve the problems
created by the first attention. By attempting to solve problems with
the very mechanistic mindset that created them in the first place, a
kind of Mobius strip of mental looping occurs courtesy of Monkey
Mind. The mad reign of King Monkey Mind can be overthrown by
shifting the focus towards the second attention.
The second attention can be cultivated by relaxing the search for
meaning. This can be experienced by relaxing the tendency to project
and/ or assume meaning onto whatever is perceived, in lieu of direct
perception of the phenomena. This can also occur by dropping
labels through an agreement to experience the world without naming
what you are experiencing. Infants and very young children see this
way most of the time. This begins a process of flexing a perceptual
muscle that was at one time active and vital before it weakened and/
or atrophied. As these two attentions recognize each other and find
new ways to interact and work together, wisdom builds a bridge
between their worlds.

C-6 Psychic Intelligence
Freedom is just a hallucination created
by a pathological lack of paranoia. ”
— Anonymous
The Second Attention, Conscious Trance, Neuro-Tarot
Brain pleasure, subjective experience of self as light. Opening of
the “third eye”, clairvoyance, telepathy and other supersensual,
or psychic, abilities. Incoming signals registered at light speed and
relayed by an engaged intuition. The Self-Aware Brain/ CNS.
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REALITY SELECTION
The absorption phase of C-6 awareness -- the second attention --
allows us to perceive the existing conditions of the first five circuits
as they are, without fantasy or fear or delusion; no big deal, existence
is seen for what it is. What we can see within ourselves, we are also
able to perceive in others. C-6 also shifts identification away from
the physical body and towards the energetic body, which the CNS/
Brain acts as the neurological sheath and conduit for. This first C-6
absorption stage heralds an emergence of the self—aware Brain and
CNS. C-6 becomes integrated as we find our own way to manage
and navigate our lives as the energetic body. C-6 transmission occurs
with various stages of telepathy, from nonverbal communication
with others to interspecies communication, and onto the C-7 matrix
of interacting with the living planetary entity (more on this in Circuit
Seven).
The activated C-6 enables a new capacity for perceiving parallel
existences of multiple realities as equal in value, something Bob
Wilson called Reality Selection. When perception floats free from
identification with C-l fear/ safety survival issues, C-2 status and
territorial agendas, C-3 theories and rationalizations, C-4 social
considerations and moral judgments, and C-5 hedonic pursuits, we
may be more free to observe the existing conditions of our lives as
they are. This C-6 perception of simultanez'ty initiates the process of
metaprogramming, the conscious redefining and implementation of
new personal realities throughout the first five circuits, if that is what
we want.
C-6 is not bias-free but expresses a relativistic bias for perceiving
simultaneous realities as equal in value. Einsteinian relativity becomes
a new way of seeing. The danger here is that C-6 can seem as if it has
no bias. This can easily lead to a false assumption of pure objectivity
and a disastrous loss of C-2 anchoring and its incumbent threat to
emotional and mental health. If we become overly convinced of
how relative everything is — without also realizing how some things
are actually more important to us than others — we clearly delude
ourselves. If this self-delusion continues, we become Card—Carrying,
Fence—Sitting Relativists suffering from Bias Ignorance.
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The escalating states of uncertainty common to some C-6 psychic
experiences can shock C-2 into craving more certainty. The certitude
of our innermost convictions becomes necessary for emotional
strength and ego resiliency. Yet how much certitude we actually need
to anchor C-6 experiences differs for each person and each CNS.
Human beings are clinging creatures. To stay emotionally anchored,
we need at least one sure thing we can count on. What or who can
you call your “one sure thing”?
The sooner we identify the source of our convictions, the sooner
we can relax the tendency to unconsciously invest C-2 emotions
into C-6 psychic events. Sensationalizing psychic stuff is a popular
buffer to authentic psychic experience. Spook films produced by the
Hollywood dream machine effectively confuse psychic phenomena
with horror with tremendous great commercial success. This has had
the regretful effect of hyping the idea of psychic stuff with terror in
the mainstream mind. Whether the hype around clairvoyance is pro
or con, it's still hype and has nothing to do with the actual experience.
In this spirit, I suggest approaching all C-6 processes with a certain
nonchalance: don’t make it a big deal. The less self—involved you are,
the greater your chances for C-6 to open up and do its work for you.
Lack of self—investment accelerates perception.
ON SAFER NAVIGATION OF PSYCHIC EXPERIENCE
C-6 activation accelerates perception. As consciousness expands, we
perceive more reality. We begin picking up signals from previously
unknown sources. Our sense of novelty and depth perception
increases. As perception continues accelerating, continuity of
consciousness advances and our attention span seriously expands.
At some point, we can even engage a subjective experience of the
Infinite. When perception expands to the point of merging with
the Infinite, 6th circuit enters its transmission phase and links with
Circuit Seven Mythogenetic intelligence. We awaken to the illusion
of the three-dimensional corporeal world. We discover that we are
not our bodies, nor are we our emotions, or thoughts, or beliefs, or
morals, or pleasures. We discover that we are not only more than we
think -— we are more than we CAN think.
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On Encountering Danger Signs
The initiatic conversion of accelerated perception into the infinite
nature of Universe can either manifest as a gnosis of benevolent
unity — the basic goodness of existence — or spin out into the paranoid
netherworlds of Chapel Perilous. How to stop accelerated perception
from twisting into paranoia? How to minimize the descent into
madness after reaching such breathtaking expanding awareness?
The answers to these important questions can be found in C-2 and
how emotionally integrated we are. The emotional anchoring of C-2
integration helps stabilize C-6 shocks. Schizophrenics also experience
accelerated perception but suffer severe disconnect from their
emotions and their bodies. Without C-2 anchoring, schizophrenics
wander the depths and heights of the Personal and Collective
Unconscious. Like a kite cut loose in an electrical thunderstorm, the
divided psyche eventually rips and shreds until it’s finally absorbed
into the tempest itself.
The flat affectations of certain types of schizophrenia reflect this
emotional disconnect and lack of emotional anchoring in the body.
Without C-2 anchoring, C-6 consciousness can destabilize, fragment
and finally disintegrate into the various hybrids of psychosis.
Without meaningful emotional connections and investments (C-2
anchoring), excessive psychic experiences can overwhelm the ego and
cut us off from the emotional truths of what makes our lives worth
living. C-6 can be easily turned on with any number of psychoactive
drugs or techniques but without strong C-2 anchoring, no real
metaprogramming can occur beyond the faux masterpiece you'd
be painting on the inner dome of your very own Chapel Perilous.
Mental illness is no joke; your vigilance is required. Get to know
the symptoms of your own distinct paranoia, emotional disconnects
and delusions of grandeur and how you are becoming a legend in
your own mind. The brief descriptions below (©2009 Steve Connor,
Science editor of The Independent; UK), are offered as warnings for
your ediflcation:
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a severe, chronic brain disorder that usually strikes in
late adolescence or early adulthood and is marked by hallucinations
and delusions. Sufferers may hear voices or believe that other people
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are controlling them or reading their minds. Such experiences can
be terrifying and can cause fearfulness, withdrawal or extreme
agitation. People with schizophrenia have reduced brain receptors
for the dopamine messenger. They may not make sense when they
talk, or they can appear to be perfectly fine and normal until they are
asked what they are really thinking. Treatments can be effective, but
most people have some residual symptoms that can stay with them
for life.
Bipolar Disorder
Bipolar disorder, or manic depression, is marked by unusual shifts in
mood, energy, activity levels, and the ability to carry out day—to-day
tasks. Like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder often manifests itself in
late adolescence or early adulthood, although it may not be diagnosed
for many years. The ups and downs are different from the normal
ones that everyone experiences and they can result in damaged
relationships, poor performances in school and jobs and even suicide.
Sometimes a person with severe episodes of mania or depression has
psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations or delusions, such as
believing that he or she is famous or has lots of money.
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C-6 TASKS
C-6 TASK #1: ENGAGING THE SECOND ATTENTION
Review Circuit Six Feature Article, The First and Second Attem‘z'ons”.
NOTE: Do not attempt engaging the second attention while driving
a car or operating machinery.
STEP 1) Relaxing the projection of meaning and labeling
See if you can go a few minutes without assigning meaning to
anything. Simply experience and pay attention to each passing
moment without labeling anything. Look at a ‘chair.’ Relax the
label of “chair” and see the phenomena itself. Apply this exercise of
relaxing meaning and labels to everything you perceive, moment-to-
moment, until you are unable to do it anymore. Record your results
in the Lab book.
STEP 2) Space-forming
Throughout the day make choices to only pay attention to the spaces
between things and people. Do not allow your attention to fixate on
any one thing or person. Let your attention drift through the space
between and around people and things. Navigate the pathways
defined by the space between things and people. See if you can do
this for five minutes and then, ten minutes, and for longer stretches of
time. Experiment and record your results in the Lab book.
C-6 TASK #2: CONSCIOUS TRANCE MEDITATION
Please refrain from using any psychoactive drugs during this
meditation technique. What is required here is the natural sensitivity
of your CNS to pick up emanations from the energetic body. If done
according to my specific directions, this meditation can support safe
C-6 activation. However, this meditation does not guarantee that your
“third eye” will automatically open to see auras, though it might.
Use this technique to fan whatever psychic spark already exists in you
into a greater flame.
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Conscious Trance induces a physically passive AND psychically
active state. As with learning or mastering any technique, diligence
of practice brings success. C-6 psychic intelligence requires a state of
relaxed self—investment (unlike its anchor, C-2, which becomes active
with emotional investment); if you get too excited, the C-6 channels
can shut down. Until this meditation is learned, limit it to no more
than 20 minutes; when it’s mastered, no longer than forty minutes.
As always, look to your firsthand experience as your final authority.
THE SETTING
Any quiet room with no external interruptions. Candlelight or
low illumination suggested. Room temperature moderate and/or
unnoticeable. A stable and comfortable chair with a firm back. A
glass of water and a piece of candy, fruit, or chocolate (save treats
for after the exercise). Preferred time of day: anytime after sunset.
Wear comfortable clothes. Practice this technique for the first time in
silence; feel free to add ambient music after you learn the technique
if you like.
STEP 1: GROUNDING: The Earth Energy Cycle
1) Sit in chair, both hands resting on your lap cupped upward, feet
flat on floor.
2) Close your eyes and let your consciousness drift down to the base
of your spine.
3) Relax the base of the spine and feel the soles of both feet on the
floor
4) Watch your breath without changing it. Choose any inhale to begin
sucking up the energy of the earth below through the chakras in your
arches (soles of the feet) and draw this energy up through your ankles,
legs, and pelvis. On the exhale blow this earth energy down into the
earth through your first chakra at the base of your spine.
5) Establish this cycle of inhaling the earth energy up and exhaling it
down, so it becomes an unbroken flow connecting the bottom half of
your body with the earth below. Practice this “earth energy cycle” for
five to ten minutes in a gentle and unforced manner by following the
natural rhythm of your inhales and exhales.
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STEP 2: ACTIVATION: Cosn1ic/ Earth Energy Verticality
1) When your energy has stabilized from STEP ONE, rest your
attention in the center of your brain while continuing the earth
energy cycle of breathing.
2) Feel the top of your head. On the inhale, simultaneously suck
cosmic energy down from above through your crown while pulling
up the earth energy from below. Bring both energies into the first
chakra, base of the spine, letting them mix and mingle there. To focus
this energy, purse your lips so your mouth is open just enough to
allow unrestricted breathing.
3) On the exhale, “wiggle” the mix of earth and cosmic energies up
the spine and out the crown AND out the arms and hands at the
same time. This may take some practice to coordinate the influx of
both energies on your inhale while moving them out the hands and
crown on the exhale. Remember to “wiggle” the mix up the spine.
If you can, keep at least some of the earth energy cycling from your
body to the Earth below to stay grounded.
4) As the mix of cosmic and earth energy wiggles up your spine, let
it pass through the attention point in your central brain. Let your
attention remain in the center of your brain as the energy moves up
through you and out the crown. Continue this cycle of earth/cosmic
energy breathing for a few minutes.
STEP 3: SCANNING: Detecting the Chakras
NOTE: This third step may not be accessible to everyone in the same
degree of engagement. If you find it working for you, continue with
it. If nothing happens, practice Steps 1, 2 and 4 as a cycle unto itself.
Step 3 requires a lack of self—investment or “trying”.
1) While resting your attention point inside the sixth chakra (center
of the brain) as you continue the trance process, begin scanning the
bottom five energy centers - (1) base of the spine, (2) a few inches
below the navel, (3) the solar plexus, (4) the heart, (5) base of the
throat.
2) Use your open hands to very slowly move up and down in front
of you like radar discs scanning each chakra. Let your hands pick up
any images, patterns and colors. Let your hands act as radar dishes
for C-6, your third eye.
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3) You can accelerate your trance anytime by narrowing your breath
by closing your mouth into a smaller hole. This can have the effect of
increasing the intensity of cosmic and earth energy as you wiggle it up
and out the crown and your hands. Let your body respond naturally
to this acceleration. C-l may wish to gently convulse, jerk, or spasm;
don’t force it, though. Let your body respond by itself. Be gentle; too
much physical activity diminishes the psychic trance.
STEP 4: CLOSURE: Break Trance
1) When you feel done with the meditation and while still seated,
bend over between your legs and let your arms and head hang while
growling like an animal. I'm serious. The growling restores the
body’s natural aggression and breaks the physically passive trance
state. Bending over helps drain the excess cosmic energy. BREAK
TRANCE.
2) You are now ready for your chocolate, candy or fruit treat.
3) Record the results in your Lab book.
4) The glass of water is there to re-hydrate after amplifying your
electromagnetic field.
5) If you require further discharging of psychic energy (if you
cannot sleep that night), a salt bath can serve to neutralize excessive
electromagnetic charge.

Designing Your Own Circuit Cards
2,4 ,4 t
C-6 TASK #3: THE NEURO TAROT
After reading the instructions, create nine cards -— symbolizing your
current vision of the eight circuits and one for Chapel Perilous.
Mechanical details and visual cues are offered in the following article.
Though the goal of this task is to create nine NEURO—TAROT cards,
you may wish to expand it later to 25 cards by including the three
sub-phases (absorb, integrate, transmit) for each of the eight circuits.
On Redefining the Terms of Your Life
Once we are ready to defuse the archaic, obsolete cultural ideations
wrapped around the living facts of our lives, we can begin to experience
those truths more directly and come to our own conclusions about
what they mean. It’s in this iconoclastic spirit that the following
ideas, principles, and techniques for designing your own oracle are
presented. Many people would never dream of designing a tarot deck
or an oracle, yet how cool it would be to play with cards you designed
according to your own personal vision and magical symbology. You
do not need Tarot experience to design a deck of neuro-tarot cards. If
you know Tarot, you may wish to rethink those archetypes according
to how you are now experiencing and defining the eight circuits and
the precarious bardo zone of Chapel Perilous.
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The Workbench and the Research
I’ve discovered three basic methods for constructing a Neuro-Tarot:
l) cut—and-paste collage 2) artistic illustration, and 3) combined
collage—illustration. Each approach works well enough depending on
the degree of your available energy, artistic talent, and time. To keep
it simple we will stick with the cut—and-paste collage method. Perhaps
the illustrators and fine artists can deviate according to their given
talents and creative processes. An effective Neuro-Tarot depends
on self-knowledge and willingness to completely expose yourself to
yourself. Self-honesty ranks a lot higher than artistic talent when
you’re creating a divination device.
The neuro-tarot can be designed olde skool style or new school via
various computer design programs. Either way, you will first need
a rich and diverse image bank. Olde skoolers must gather copies of
magazines with the greatest variety of gorgeous illustrations, images
and photos. In the service of Art, you will mutilate and destroy these
magazines by cutting out choice images to create your cards. (Note:
collage art bypasses copyright law when the combination of separate
images creates an entirely new work of visual art: yours.) To complete
your oracle kit, you’ll need a couple dozen blank index cards, glue
sticks, scissors, felt—tip pen, and scratch paper. New schoolers with
computers, PhotoShop/ Design programs, and printers who want to
actually handle their cards (highly recommended) will also need the
blank index cards, glue sticks, and scissors.
When the Personal Becomes the Universal
You are creating eight cards that represent each circuit as eight
separate windows into your world. Let Chapel Perilous represent
the wild card in this deck. This process of designing your own oracle
mimics a primitive film-editing project where you become Director,
Producer, Writer, Editor, Star, and Cast. Now, get those scissors
and magazines, or that image-rich file if you've amassed and saved
on your computer. Start cutting out pictures that jump out at you.
The key here is keeping your work personal. If you try to focus on
too grand a scale, you run the risk of losing power or going bland.
Designing these cards requires total integrity. If you commit fully to
what is most personal to you and your life right now, you may have a
far better chance at breaking through to more universal ground.
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Don’t hesitate to make cards that express the darker, frightening
elements within your psyche if it's honest to do so. This goes equally
for the brighter, more cheerful aspects of your psyche. By combining
strong positives and negatives, your deck will tend to ring with more
authenticity. The more personal you get with yourself when you’re
designing your deck, the more personal your deck will get with you
when you use it later. You don’t have to know why these images
touch and move you, as long as they do. Trust your intuition. Create
a deck full of surprises and your cards will continue to alter the
expected for you.
Another visual technique is setting up a “background/ foreground”
by finding images that make perfect backdrops for visual ideas you
wish to highlight up front. This method brings a drama and depth into
play. Try experimenting with the collage technique of juxtaposing
dissonant images in your cards to form new visions, new ways of
seeing things. The faculty of imagination cannot be underestimated
here. Create windows and worlds your soul would inhabit. Expect
certain cards to remain more subjective and esoteric, while others
become more immediately accessible to the minds of others.
More Tools in the Neuro-Tarot Toolbox
When a card looks like it’s done, trim the picture so it fits onto an
index card and then glue it down. After cutting and pasting it onto the
card, you may wish to frame each card with a dark felt-tip pen. Glue
or write a word onto the card, wherever appropriate, to communicate
your insight. If a card speaks for itself without a word, leave it off.
Number the cards to identify the circuit they represent.
As you continue combining words and pictures, watch for
configurations that surprise you by offering a new insight into an old
memory or a bird’s—eye view on a previously banal issue. Look for
visual feasts for the inner and outer eye, snapshots of eternity, close-
ups of your inner life. To fortify the resilience of each card, you may
want to paste two index cards together; a colored card makes a nice
reverse side. To extend the life span of your completed deck, Contact
a printer that offers lamination services (the plastic cover enveloping
restaurant menus) and laminate your cards for easier handling.
96

Week Four: Circuits 3 and 7
How Symbols Contextualize
the M ytho- Genetic Matrix
“Throughout human history, as our species has flzced the frightening,
terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are
going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political,
the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfi)rt
us by giving us order; rules, regulations, informing and fiarming our
minds to their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question
authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-
mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to infiarm yourself”
—- Timothy Leary
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Circuit Three Feature Article
INFORMATION WARS
“How To See Through Advertz'sz'ng”
he Watfi W
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“Believe what you ’re told.
There’d be chaos zf everybody thought fi)r themselves.”
— TOP DOG hotdog venders, Berkeley, CA
CRISISLER
FIASCO SYSTEMS
‘p../
Information wars are not fought over physical turf but over the internal
landscapes of the psyche itself. Those who are not busy learning
new ways to keep learning and thinking for themselves are becoming
Info-War casualties without knowing it. World Entertainment Wars
exist at the level of mind. Information warfare implements massive
infiltration of gorgeous images and catchy buzzwords upstaging
personal and collective imaginations with externally produced images
and fantasies. War is hell. The horror of the information wars begins
when imaginations are over-stimulated, numbed, and replaced by
corporate designer replicas.
98

Imaginations corroded by TV Overdose, Video Game Debauch,
Internet Addiction, and Advertising Bulimia suffer withering slow
deaths. To what extent have our minds become over saturated with
slick simulations of realities that no longer represent anything we
can actually experience or create in real time? Are we losing our
capacity to care about whether or not our dreams and fantasies
are actually our own or the tentacles of a larger octopus of mass-
produced dreams designed by Corporate Imagination Killers?!
Dampen a person’s power for imagining their own futures and you
wash away the internal psychic environment and home to a living
soul. Imagination loss precedes the death of soul.
The Way of How
The public education systems are, in part, to blame for teaching and
rewarding students to memorize and absorb massive amounts of data,
while ignoring the fundamental principles of how learning actually
happens; not just learning more facts but how to learn new ways to
keep learning. In most elementary and grade school, students are
taught to value knowns over unknowns, content over process, as a
measure of intelligence and self-worth. The highest grades and the
greatest approval go to those young impressionable minds willing
and able to retain the densest volume of known facts. Remember
receiving your first “F” on a report card? When minds are taught to
avoid, dismiss, and devalue unknowns, these minds start functioning
as dead data depositories. Over-saturated with inert content, the
once open and hungry mind eventually shuts down and is put out to
pasture to graze with all the other fat cow and fluffy sheep minds.
Any mind can fill itself with dead data and remain fundamentally
ignorant; too many do. Real intelligence thrives on process, not
content. The processes producing the contents that fill a mind
actually govern and regulate that content. WHAT something is
labels it; HOW something happens, shows us its essence. Did you
ever notice how the way someone says something can mean more
than the actual words themselves? The Way of How. The way of how
is utilized to great effect by the Corporate Advertising Imagination
Killers to change the contents of the consumer mind without asking
their permission. Imagination lobotomy. Shame. Shame. Shame.
99

Corporate advertising promotional tactics act on the naive consumers
who have not begun thinking for themselves or governing their own
lives. The most sophisticated front—line advertising strategies trick
consumers into believing their lives are incomplete and deficient
without the promoted product; only through purchasing the
commodity will the consumer’s life become “whole” or “better”.
Successful advertisers expose a real need and then, make a promise
to meet it for the price of whatever they’re selling.
By superimposing the grid of the first four circuits over this general
“deficiency” principle, very specific information jumps out at us.
Our most basic four needs -- physical, emotional, conceptual, and
social -- are driven by specific rewards assuring the satisfaction of
those needs for more and more:
1) SECURITY 2) STATUS 3) KNOWLEDGE 4) SEX
Everybody defines and meets their needs for security, status,
knowledge, and sex in different ways. The content of these needs
is universal; how they’re met is personal. When needs aren’t met,
frustration sets in. This knowledge forms the backbone of all
successful advertising: promise them anything but sell the product.
By associating any product with the promise of more security, or
more status, or more knowledge, or more sex, the consumer’s own
unmet needs are touched and hooked.
Corporate advertising will promise to deliver you whatever you’re
not giving yourself. Imagination Boot Camp demands that we learn
to identify and expose our own needs and then find our most honest
ways of meeting them. Advertising is the business of promises,
fantasies, and dreams: truth doesn’t sell products, images do. The 8-
circuit grid offers a good starting point for seeing through these lies.
By redefining “security” and “status” and “intelligence” and
“sexuality” according to one’s true responses and needs, something
extraordinary occurs: an identity is born. Not a “self-image” (too
often confused for identity), but an honest expression of one’s innate
being. By defining one’s terms, one stands a better chance of living
by them. Info-Warriors know it is too late to avoid self-definition;
100

“define yourself or be defined.” Info—Warriors fight on the front
lines under camouflage of poetry, trance-inducing music, and pirate
cinema; they evoke where their opponents explain and get away with
murderous humor. Info-Warriors hit the roads, rearranging highway
billboard messages to expose dangerous truths while circulating
posters of political candidates referenced by “Dial—A-Prayer” phone
numbers. Info-Warriors use their imaginations as holy mojo healing
totems for inspiring people to death. If religion is the opiate of the
masses, then the death of religion may be the rebirth of poetry.
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The Eight—Circuit Brain Course
Week Four: Circuits 3 and 7
How Symbols Contextaalize
the MythoGenetic Matrix
V I
“He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God.
He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.”
—William Blake
Course Text Readings:
If you have “Angel Tech”, read pages 48-53 and pages 101-106.
C-3 INTRODUCTION
C-3 symbolic intelligence depends on duality—based intellectual
processes of comparison, association, and deduction. In the initial
stages of C-3 we passively absorb the ideas of others from books,
media, schools, and wherever else we gather data. C-3 integration
occurs by thinking for ourselves and by the interpretations we assign
to whatever data we absorb. If we skip this second interpretive
102

phase, we automatically absorb data but fail to truly think about it
or communicate anything beyond parroting, or quoting sources of
said data, rather than saying anything original. Without this second
integration stage -- thinking for yourself and assigning meaning and
context to data — whatever content we absorb busies the mind with
the inner chatter of unprocessed data; the mind gets lost in the mind
as an endless circuitous C-3 loop. Being logical is not the same thing
as thinking. As C-3 continues absorbing and gathering data for its
own sake -- without bothering to integrate or interpret any of it -- the
mental regurgitation of all the unassimilated content turns into food
for Monkey Mind, the name I assign any loopy C-3 intellect that has
lost its vertical C-7 connection.
TI-IE AUDACITY OF BIAS
Monkey Mind can be trained by learning how to think for yourself
and by learning to identify your bias. Thinking for yourself demands
a certain audacity. I mean, who are we to determine or decide what
anything means? The nerve! Why, we are the consciousness seeking
to reclaim our conceptual minds from autopilot Monkey Mind,
that’s who! How do we determine and decide what constitutes the
meaningful? This is an important question to answer for anyone
wishing to advance C-3 integration and for those who wish to truly
use, instead of being used by, their minds.
Who’s your daddy? Are you C—3’s bitch? Does C-3 own you? Are you
ready to own more of your mind or will you continue your daily life
as a C-3 slave? Shall we turn the tables and invest more consciousness
into the way we think, speak, and write? Are you willing to do the
work to liberate the C-3 death grip on your body and the tyrannical
correctness C-3 imposes over emotions? Your immediate rebellion is
required. But how do we revolt in a way that doesn’t further entangle
us in the complicating web of our own C-3 designs? How can we use
C-3 to solve the problems created by C-3? We cannot. We cannot
solve the problems with the same mind that created the problems in
the first place. We must learn how to step outside the monkey cage
and look the ape squarely in the eyes.
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The Mind is a Liar and a Whore!
The mind is a liar and a whore that denies its bias and continues its
tyranny of falsely assumed objectivity while casting its dreary spell of
bogus authority. Such a mind will lie to save face rather than confess
ignorance, and whore itself to whatever and whomever agrees with
its delusions. Bias expresses an outlook of how we know truth; not
THE truth but YOUR truth.
Our bias is informed by the filters of our beliefs, prejudices,
assumptions, ideas, values, personal history, etc. Our bias shapes
everything we say, think, feel, do and how we relate. Everyone has a
bias. Pure objectivity is a lie. Our bias conveys something of where
we’re coming from, our angle or slant. Everybody has an angle.
Our angle informs the context of meaning in our lives, what makes
something worth knowing and what we dismiss as meaningless
drivel.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle eloquently demonstrates how the
observer influences and determines (defines) any reality by the nature
of the observational techniques, maps and models used for interpreting
that data. Pure objectivity is the wet dream of the pre—Quantum
Newtonian C-3 intellect. To increase our powers of observation, we
have only to expose and identify the bias that limits and defines our
perception. Bias is not the problem but not knowing our bias — or
denying that we have one — can be a big problem. Knowing your bias
is a little like knowing the smell of your own shit; it helps you pick up
the stench of other peoples’ B.S. (Belief Systems).
For example, I interpret horoscopes. To me astrology is not a science,
or a pseudo-science, or philosophy, or spirituality, or religion, or
whatever newspaper columns say it is. Though these biases express
the truths of others, I don’t buy into any of them. Since I choose
to view astrology as a language, my astrological bias would be
a linguistic one. Why? Real communication remains one of the
most meaningful experiences in my life and studying astrology as a
language helps me communicate. My linguistic bias renders astrology
meaningful to me.
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C-3 l'Iind Links
Conceptual intelligence expresses a natural curiosity and an impulse
to share ideas with others. We love explaining ourselves in the hopes
that our ideas and theories might find external confirmation and
agreement. If we both thinle it, it might be true ”. Intellectual agreements
swiftly form the basis of mutually meaningful conversations that can
lead to C-2 political and C-4 social alliances. We can also experience
the validity of our ideas in our own hermetically—sealed mental worlds.
However, if our mental states never find translation in symbols and
language that communicate our inner reality with others, we become
legends in our own minds.
Some legends cocoon into their own worlds and wither a slow death.
Others, with greater powers of persuasion, find those who buy into
their ego fantasy and form the C-3 mind links that maintain that
illusion of reality, that is, as long as people still buy it. Whether we
are buying into our own super-hero se1f—images or convincing others
to, there is something of the con artist to any C-3 that has yet to link
with C-7. Like a carny magician diverting audience attention before
pulling a white rabbit from his trick—top hat, there is also something
in the audience that wants to be fooled. The difference between the
magic of C-3 and C-7 is that the former presents magic as an illusion
of reality, whereas the latter reveals the magical nature of reality
itself.
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*C!€{§3
When Money Turned Funny
Note how the collective power of C-3 mental consensus maintains
the illusion of reality known as material currency and wealth. With
so much consciousness invested in money, whatever happens to
the economy also happens to the collective consciousness invested
in it. The global economic crisis masks a deeper global crisis in
consciousness. Back in 1971 that clever president Richard Nixon
took the USA economy off the gold standard. He knew the national
character of Believers well enough to know they would blindly
maintain the value of money by sheer belief, faith and confidence
alone. Money didn’t have to be backed up by silver and gold anymore
-— it could simply be printed up whenever the government needed
more. This shift off the gold standard was diabolically symbolized
by the “In God We Trust” logo the Federal Reserve printed on all
paper money after 1971; before 1971 it was only minted on coins.
Is money the greatest con or the greatest magical act in recorded
history? Only the billionaires know for sure...
We Are Not What We Know
Monkey Mind fastens its grip on C-3 whenever we confuse our
knowledge for who we are. When we confuse what we know (our
information and experience) with who we are (the mystery of being),
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we can easily spin out in a C-3 tilt-a-whirl of self—delusion and
defensive behavior. For example, if someone questions the authority
of what you know (your data sources) and you react defensively,
it may stem from feeling that your very being was judged. What
we know includes all the data, concepts, and information we have
gathered, identified with and/ or held onto as bits and pieces of truth
and fact. Who we are expresses our true nature. Who are we? We
are more than we think and know; we may even be more than we
CAN think or CAN know. As we become more comfortable with
unknowns, within and around us, we naturally open up to greater
sources of inspiration and creativity can avail themselves through us.
This is one way that C-3 warms up to C-7.
Theory, from the Greek, theo, fior god —
are all theories actually ideas about the gods?
Until C-3 discovers C-7, it continues operating mechanically in
dualistic modes of comparison and deduction to secure its ongoing
justifications and rationalizations. We move from proof to proof
in a nonstop C-3 treadmill correcting whatever we deem ‘wrong’ or
‘incorrect’, a mental habit often misdirected at others, society and
the impersonal world at large. This woolgathering can continue
ad nauseum until we get lucky and stumble into an experience that
genuinely blows our mind. Culture shock can do this, as can the
sudden death of a loved one, or a financial windfall, or falling in
love, or engaging any heightened and sustained state of creativity.
In fact, any experience that momentarily stuns our mind into silence
can open C-3 attention to C-7 signals.
Inner Silence, Creativity, and C-3/C-7 Verticality
The intellect’s heavy reliance on the sense of sight automatically
absorbs most of our attention. Our sight-dominant lives can seriously
diminish the sense of hearing so critical for tuning into not just the
nuances of sound but, more essentially, the silent intervals between
sounds, and onward to tuning into the reality of silence itself.
Developing an ongoing intimacy with the reality of inner silence
— through meditation or by other means — conditions C-3 into a more
receptive state so that we may see beyond the products of mind and
allow the experience of silence to act on the mind itself. As this inner
lO7

silence becomes palpable we come to know that it is not, and never
was, a product of the mind. This silence expresses the very ground of
our ineffable being, well beyond any words or theories.
C-3/C-7 verticality can also be cultivated by deep listening. The
power of listening is why and how certain music transports us well
beyond our rational minds. We hear exquisite examples of C-3/ C-
7 verticality in action anytime we’re exposed to the works of great
composers and songwriters who use the language (C-3) of musical
notes to communicate their inspired states (C-7). Poets, writers, and
artists also embody C-3/C-7 verticality through the various literary,
visual, and material mediums of their crafts. Though it sometimes
takes great self-discipline and commitment to transmit C-7 experiences
through various C-3 language forms, we don’t have to be great artists
to do it. These states of consciousness are universal and available to
anyone with the humility to realize that they belong to no one and
like true creativity, flow through us as vessels. In truth, we are not
creators as much as interpreters of creation. When we confuse our
egos for creation and take credit for what we never created, the C-3
self-image inflates — “I am the Artist!” — and the creative channels
shrink and sometimes, shut down altogether.
The Genius of C-7
The word ‘genius’ stems from the C-7 genetic term “genus”, or what
is common or universal to a species. So—cal1ed works of genius are
often marked by uncommon universal appeal. The early Greek idea
of “genius” referred to an autonomous entity, sometimes called
“daemon”, that inspired the most disciplined artists to create great
works. Discipline here must also imply a wisdom for knowing how to
live with the daemon and how to remain open to its wild and creative
archetypal forces. This inspired relationship with genius required full
acknowledgement of the daemon as separate from the artist’s ego.
The artist provided the skills, the techniques, the time and the
commitment; the daemon showed up and played the artist like
a musical instrument. In this creative process, the artist becomes
temporarily possessed by the daemon until the daemon is done with
the artist and then, the daemon leaves; the daemon comes and goes
as it wills. The artist eventually recovers and prepares for his/ her
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next encounter. The dynamic mirrors two lovers, with one obviously
more powerful than the other, who do not live together but part ways
after consummation.
It was only in later Western European culture that this idea of
genius suffered corruption when it was romanticized into a cult of
personality and its angst—driven life of the Tormented Artist. Here
the C-3 self-image, or mental ego, mistakenly merges and identifies
with the C-7 daemon only to be twisted, distorted, and broken by its
powerful archetypal forces. The trick to maintaining healthy C—3/ C-
7 verticality lies with developing a strong, sane, and sober C-3 mind
capable of interacting with the C-7 archetypal realms without going
insane.
A certain humility and nonchalance may be necessary to foster an
openness to the daemon within, which includes not trying to control
it or own it or rationalize its existence. A new definition for sanity
may be needed to allow and embrace the possibility of interacting
with an autonomous, immaterial spirit. As we know, most textbook
definitions for ‘sanity’ obviously fall short here and why the term
must be revisioned before C-3/C-7 vertical stability can be achieved.
Unsane; Beyond Sanity but Not Insane
We commonly think of the human mind as either insane or sane
but there is a third point. When our minds are blown, through any
number of upper circuit shocks, we do not always have to go insane.
We can also go UnSane, beyond sanity but also not insane. If you are
unsane you are not legally insane, to the point of being committed
to a mental institute, but you are not sane either, as most people
define that term. When going unsane, you are probably in a state
of mind where you are perceiving the world very differently than
most people. In the face of C-7 shocks of Indivisibility, we don’t
need to betray our left—brain powers of analysis and critical thought if
we can also embrace more right-brain faculties such as intuition and
imagination to help solve our problems. If C-3 can be trained to take
each situation at hand — case by case — on its own terms, instead of
dominating each event with preconceptions, untested theories, and
blind assumptions, C-3 opens up to new ways of seeing.
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Being logical is not the same thing as thinking. If compulsive C-3
logical analysis can be relaxed or bypassed, intellect can learn to
follow intuition and a new faculty blossoms — what Carl Jung calls
active imagination — leaving us poised to articulate the majestic
tapestry of C-7 through the weave of our own C-3 ideas, images,
words and symbols. If sanity sees the universe as made up of atoms
and insanity sees the cosmos as a paranoid conspiracy, UnSanity
vmight see the universe as made up of stories, myths, songs and other
poetic articulations of the ineffable beauty and unity of existence.
This marginal “unsane” state of mind links directly to the mystery of
genius, a phenomenon often said to border and overlap madness while
also embracing something else altogether: UnSanity. UnSanity has
informed and inspired countless innovations, artistic creations, ideas,
poetry, music, visions, and memes through the work of all the great
scientists, writers, artists, philosophers, spiritual teachers, composers,
and leaders throughout history.
I am choosing ‘unsane’ as a C-3 device (word or symbol) to represent
a state of mind capable of absorbing C-7 experience and then
integrating and transmitting it through whatever mediums of artistic,
literary, scientific, and/ or philosophical means possible. The aim here
is not to explain away the ineffable — impossible! — but to proffer the
experience of the ineffable for others. In this way, we participate in
the transmission of archetypal numen through symbols and images in
a revolutionary act of Art as Magick. Whosoever controls the metaphor
also controls the mind.
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C-3 TASKS
Two Primers for C-3 Receptivity to C-7
The process of cultivating enough C-3 receptivity to C-7 experience
is not easy, yet with diligent application of the following two C-3
primers, it can be started. These primers are not tasks in the common
definition as they don’t involve “doing” as much as “undoing”. These
two tasks can act as primers to render C-3 more flexible and receptive
to C-7 signals, while serving to expose outdated C-3 mechanical
thinking.
1) Cover Your Mirrors
Mirrors can be useful but they can also reinforce the C-3 habit of
referring to oneself as an image ora “look”, diminishing the experience
of self as an evolving or developing process. The use of mirrors can
enchant and induce a subtle trance by reinforcing our identification
with a reflection. For this week only, cover the mirrors in your place
of dwelling and avoid them in the work place and wherever possible.
By living without mirrors for one week, you can learn to find other
ways to reference and validate yourself, while relaxing the sometimes
insipid monkey grip of C-3 vanity.
2) The Talkfast
Don't talk for a day. Pick any day this week that you can hold yourself
to not verbalizing. If and when you interact with others socially or
at work, bring a pad and pen to explain yourself. The intent of this
Talkfast is to expose l) the nature of your internal dialogue and 2) the
effect of silence on C-3.
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INTRODUCTION TO E-PR]1V[E
E-Prime (short for English-Prime) is a modified form of the English
language which eliminates all forms of the verb to be: “be”, “is”,
“am”, “are”, “was”, “were”, “been” and “being”. Sentences
composed in E-Prime seldom contain the passive voice, which in turn
may force writers or speakers to envisage things differently than they
might otherwise. To understand E-Prime, consider the human brain
as a computer. (Note that I did not say the brain “is” a computer.)
The wrong software guarantees wrong answers. Conversely, finding
the right software can “miraculously” solve problems that previously
appeared intractable.
For our purposes here, we will only concern ourselves only with the
word, “is”, as a cause of formulaic and dogmatic thinking, writing,
and speaking. Consider how the word “is” reflects the mathematical
sign for “equals” (=), the central symbol in all mathematical equations
and formulas and you may get the idea. Formulaic thinking and
writing exalts our most literal interpretations while taking the wind
out of Imagination’s sails and slowly sinking C-3 chances of C-7
linkage.

C-3 TASK #1
E-PRHVHNG YOUR LAB BOOK
To encourage more imagination, creativity and insight through
your thinking and writing processes, conduct the following 3-step
experiment: I) examine your written lab reports up to this point and
circle the word “is” wherever you find it, 2) from this point onward,
hold yourself to writing your Lab reports without the word “is” or
keep its use at a minimum, 3) at the end of this week’s Lab reports,
write down any changes in your processes of thinking, writing, and
speaking as a result of eliminating or minimizing the word “is”.
C-3 TASK #2
ON DEFINING SANITY/INSANITY
In your own words and contexts, define SANITY and then define
INSANITY. Do not parrot dictionaries or medical journals or your
psychologist friends. Use your own words as if your peace of mind
depended on it. As with other examples of self-definition, these
parameters can change over time with the influx of new information
and experience. Define yourself or be defined. Record your results in
your Lab book.
C-3 TASK #3
THE DISAPPEARJN G MONKEY ACT (Meditation)
Step 1. When C-3 runs on automatic motor-mouth mode, the internal
chatter casts an illusion that these thoughts might be continuous, as in
an unbroken stream. If you pay close attention you may begin to see
this illusion for yourself. Pay attention to the tiny sparks of silence
between these mental constructs. Watch these tiny gaps of silence
until you can witness the so-called stream of thoughts as fragments,
bits and pieces — quanta — with gaps of silence emanating between
them. This fragmentation of thought expresses a distinct pattern and
symptom of Monkey Mind. The silence between the gaps expresses
our deep self, beyond the comprehension and analysis of Monkey
Mind. Rest your attention in these silences and watch Monkey Mind
disappear.
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Further Notes: When a thought distracts your attention, just say
“thinking” and return to witnessing the gaps of silence. Keep paying
attention to these gaps until they start expanding in your awareness.
Let them expand until you experience more space than thoughts.
Find out how long you can sit with this expansive silence. Write
down your results.
C-3 TASK #4
NON-DIRECTIONAL AND DIRECTIONAL JOGGIN G
Intent: to relax and regulate the C-3 monkey grip over the body. This
task happens while jogging and takes 10-20 minutes. If you cannot
find an open indoor space of approx. 1000 square feet, do this ritual
outdoors. Wear clothes you can run comfortably in and rubber-
soled shoes. This ritual can appear somewhat odd to outsiders. If
you do not care about what other people think of you, this won’t
be a problem. If you do care, do this ritual whenever and wherever
nobody is watching.
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1) Stretch your muscles for five minutes and then start jogging at a
comfortable pace.
2) Begin relaxing the grip you have on your body while jogging. Let
your head bob along with the rest of your body; jog loosely, as a rag
doll or puppet, with minimal grip on your body. Discover your point
of optimum abandonment of this grip without falling or injuring
yourself.
3) After a minute or so of this non—directional jogging, start getting a
grip on your body again. Determine the precise form, speed, tension
and style of your jog. This is your “directional” jog. Take as much
control (grip) over your physical instrument as you can. Gradually
take this directional state to the hilt to find your own extreme
expression of grip and control.
4) Pick a moment to release this grip and return to the nondirectional
state of letting your body jog freely on its own impulses and rhythms
without the grip of control.
5) At your own pace, shift between nondirectional and directional
jogging, giving yourself enough time in each to know and express
their distinct qualities equally.
6) Now, find a jog that effectively combines both nondirectional and
directional styles towards a dynamic balance of these contrary forces
in your body.
7) Hone this jog down to a pedestrian walk that maintains both
nondirectional and directional qualities, without drawing any
attention to yourself. Make it normal.
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Circuit Seven Feature Article
Hakim Bey’s
Moorish Weather Report
Then said the weather god to the queen goddess:
‘we must act at once! I/Ve shall perish of hunger!”
“The Hittite Myth of Telpinu”
(“The Disappearing God Type”)
T.H. Gaster’s THESPIS
...Apollonius replies like a pure sophister: ‘/lnd must I thinle then’ --
saith he that the world is a living thing .7’ Saz'th Jarcas:
“Yea, verily, if you reason rightly; for it giveth life to all things. ”’
Thomas Vaughan
THE FRATERNITY OF THE ROSY CROSS (1652)
If the Earth is a living being, what constitutes her skin? The Hermetic
“natural philosophers” elaborated the Hesiodic cosmogony whereby
Chaos, Eros, Earth, and Old Night, make up the original pantheon
of becoming. The Hermeticists understood that we live and walk on
the pelt of an animate body — just as Chinese mythographers called
humans the fleas or lice on the body of the cosmogonic chaos-figure,
Pan Ku. We are Earth’s symbiotes — or parasites — or (Allah forbid)
her germs.
The old Hermeticists also seemed to believe that atmosphere pervaded
the entire universe; if they envisioned flights to the Moon or stars, for
example, they never imagined the need for “spacesuits” to protect
them against a vacuum. Air was everywhere. Cyrano de Bergerac
dreamed of a way to reach the Moon by attaching to his body many
sealed crystal vials of dew, which was believed to fall from and return
to the Moon. Unable to escape from the vessels, the dew would lift
Cyrano on rays of lunar attraction. Thus weather itself was — at the
very least — sublunar in scope.
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Meteorological phenomena or sky—events, from rain to clouds to
comets, were not seen as parts of Earth’s body, but rather as evidence
that the universe is also alive. Thus every culture perceives a mating
of Earth and Sky —— an erotic reciprocity with the universe -- which
fecundates the planet. Weather spirits or deities belong to that sphere
which is precisely not the Earth. Sky or “heaven”, which includes
what we call “space” -- the aether which fills the universe and is also
alive -- expresses its sexual relation with Earth in the form of weather.
For the early agriculturalists weather is the sperm of the spirits. One
of the signs of this meteorological eros is the mushroom which (as
John Allegro pointed out) has no seed but is planted direct from
heaven by lightning bolts —— an almost universal belief.
Charles Fourier described the Aurora Borealis as the flickering
remnant of a once-great “aromal ray” whereby Earth in former times
held sexual congress with other planets and stars. Unfortunately,
due to the malign influence of Civilization, which has degraded
even meteorological phenomena, the “Northern Crown” no longer
serves its proper function. If we could overcome Civilization and
establish social Harmony, we’d see the Boreal Crown shoot forth
a coherent laser-like 1000—hued ray of pure aroma, or stellar jizm,
and simultaneously we would receive similar rays projected at us
from other planets like sunbeams but even more concentrated and
fruitful.
No matter what “science” tells us, this viewpoint will remain valid
to the extent that weather, as a sensuous event, really does come to
us from “outside.” Looked at this way, the skin of the Earth is her
dirt—surface, her water—surface, and her stable biota such as plants
(her “hair”, etc.). The motile biota constitute an in-between zone or
ambiguous third term between Earth and Sky. Humans, the upright
pivots of this intermediate realm, are precisely the mediators between
Earth and the weather, controlling rain by sacrifice or dance, and
interpreting the falling stars.
The Etruscans catalogued eleven varieties of lightning as auguries;
weather has meaning, but the meaning is vaporous and evanescentas
weather itself. The Taoists saw pictographic characters written in the
clouds -- but for the most part only spirits could read them. Even
ll7

in modern meteorology the weather retains an uncanny ability to
express itself in mysterious glyphs which seem to hover on the edge
of meaning, like the Lorentz “Butterfly Attractor” which describes
the ultimate unpredictability of weather in the form of a mathematic
“writing” in the shape of a butterfly. In some way, weather always
appears to us as an “Other.”
However, science no longer believes that dew rises to the Moon
and falls again with moonbeams. Earth is surrounded by “hard
vacuum” (a nice paradox) which may be virtually universal. We’ve
seen photographs of the Earth which seems to recreate the visions of
shamans in flight, and we have noticed that weather is a very local
phenomena. At first it might seem that the weather (clouds, blue sky,
etc.) makes up Earth’s cloak, a kind of close-fitting hallucinatory
opalescent kinetic garment of atmosphere and moisture. But on
further contemplation a more accurate metaphor occurs: weather is
not the cape but the skin —- the peau sensible -- of the living Earth.
None of us can escape this new world view. Even though as individuals
we continue to experience weather coming to us from Outside, we
must now superimpose upon this symbolism another and perhaps
complementary symbolic structure. In this second view, we humans
are no longer precisely the ambiguous between Earth and Sky. Our
relation with Earth has become much more intimate. We are inside
her skin. We are part of the weather itself, her kinetic flesh, her
kaleidoscopic nudity. How we ourselves seem somehow much more
permeable, such that clouds and blue sky, rain and lightning, might
well move in us and through us, as much parts of our skin and organs
bones as we in turn are parts of the skin organs bones of Earth. We
are ourselves meteorological events, not unlike rain or falling stars.
Courtesy of Talking Raven Quarterly Winter 1993, Seattle WA
and The Mad Farmer’s Almanac
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C-7 Mythogenetic Intelligence
Earth Surrender; Namen of Archetypes,
the Anima and the Animus
When we deeply imagine we no longer imagine at all,
but dive, at last, naked and alive, into the flesh of oranges,
into the steaming jungle, into words that hang like orange rain,
like love just before it happens... — James Tipton
C-7 ACTIVATION AND
C-3 AN CHORING ADJUSTMENTS
C-7 opening can happen in a number of ways. Those who have been
at the birth of their children have experienced mythogenetic C-7.
Those who have survived the hot rise of kundalini hissing blissfully
up their spines and out the crown chakra have activated C-7. Those
who have imbibed heroic doses of LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and
DMT may have blasted open C-7 portals. Those who have undergone
full—blown religious conversion experiences also know C-7. Then we
have the equally mysterious, spontaneous eruptions from the DNA
matrix that no explanations can satisfy, eruptions that can occur
anytime to anybody -- without warning.
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For C-3 to anchor C-7 shocks we need to relax overly-literalist
thinking and learn to cultivate the faculties of Imagination and
Intuition to solve our problems. When overly-literalist left—brain
thinking dominates C-3 mental processes, we lose touch with the
creative options of the more nonlinear right brain. Imagination
thinks cinematically, in pictures and images; intuition links swiftly
and directly with the energy and phenomena of any situation. With
enough imagination and intuition, C-3 intellect can be educated to
serve, rather than dominate, our experiences. But first we must learn
to get over the bogus pride of intellectual vanity that causes us to save
face whenever the limitations of our existing knowledge are exposed.
On the turbulent seas of higher consciousness, all seaworthy vessels
require sufficient anchorage before setting sail.
The first six circuits represent the extent and the limitations of what
our personal ego can do to shape and influence our own reality
by individual efforts alone. Circuit 7 marks a dramatic shift away
from identifying with all self-generated signals and codes -- from
basic survival needs to our beliefs, values, ideas, moralities, rapture
criteria, perceptions — towards a unifying linkage with autonomous
sources originating beyond the CNS/ Body feedback loop. These self-
generating signals — which include unconscious complexes inherited
from unmet childhood needs and early traumas — develop the ego
as a separate entity with its own fears, desires, likes, dislikes, ideas,
beliefs, morals, aesthetics, visions, and the rest of it.
The C-7 shock of indivisibility dissolves and annihilates this separatist
ego through nondualistic immersive experience with the geomantic
mysteries of the Earth itself. The C-7 absorption phase links us with
the living Earth as a vastly intelligent, unfathomably powerful entity
incarnating and embodied as this planet. The Earth is alive and
well. Spread the word. The Earth is calling the shots, has always
been calling the shots.
BEYOND 2012: SOURCING THE EARTH
At the time of this writing (Summer 2009), numerous crosscurrents
of prophecies abound around the year 2012 and what it might mean
to humanity, the end of the world, and the future life of this planet.
All seventh circuit issues. One current follows Terence McKenna’s
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Time Wave Zero theory — also known as Novelty Theory — which
suggests that the end of 2012 will see a rapid acceleration of novelty,
or what McKenna also called singularity. McKenna’s main source for
this theory was metaphysical philosopher Alfred North Whitehead,
who defined this concept as an increase in the universe’s intuitively
perceived interconnectedness. Whitehead’s revelation also finds
correlations in Carl Jung’s initially controversial and now popular
theories on Synchronicity.
With the help of DMT, the I Ching, and mathematics, McKenna
calculated a date in mid-November 2012 as the apex of singularity.
He then changed the date to December 21st after reading about the
end of the current 13-baktun cycle of the Mayan calendar on 21
December 2012, as popularized by visionary author Jose Arguelles
in his books and in the more recent books of ethnogen researcher,
Daniel Pinchbeck. What all this means to me is still up for grabs. I
am reminded of what mythologist and circuit seven adept Joseph
Campbell once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create
it.”
If the recent cresting and collapsing of widespread global materialism
and its reigning economic structures are any indication, I'd say the
immaterial and objective force of the Earth has been amping up its
frequencies. The world is burning and the planet is picking up speed.
If we really want the scoop, the front—line information about what
is actually going on right now, we have only to point our antennas
— our C-6 intuition — outwards to the Earth below and around us.
Attuning to planetary energies brings us to the absorption phase of
C-7 where the individual body/ CNS links directly with the Earth as a
primary source. I do not refer to any Gaia concept of the living earth
but to an enactment of an earth surrender rite for accelerating the
absorption and circulation of the immaterial, objective force of the
Earth throughout the instrument of your own body and CNS.
Here we go!
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C-7 RITUALS
The longer one z's alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.
—Robert Anton Wilson
C-7 RITUAL #1: BUMP CONSCIOUSNESS
This earth surrender rite is best conducted outdoors and on open
ground (no pavement or floors). The intent of this ritual is to stabilize
individual and collective energy fields and can be done alone or in
groups. In groups of three, sit in a triangle; four, a square; five, a
pentagram; six, a hexagon (6-pointed star); any more than six, form
a circle. If you are just two, sit across from one another. If you are
alone, sit anywhere on the planet. When you are ready to begin,
close your eyes and let your awareness settle in the base of the spine
and feel the gravity gather there anchoring you.
Begin the No-Form practice introduced in Circuit Five. Once you
have cultivated enough internal receptivity, find your contact point
with the base of your spine. Watch your breathing and let it be
natural; don’t force or hold your breath. On the inhale, breathe earth
energy up through the base of the spine and on the exhale, circulate
this earth energy throughout your entire body. Continue this cycle
of connected breathing — inhaling the earth energy into your body;
exhaling while circulating it throughout your entire body.
The more earth energy you take in and circulate, the more “dense” it
will tend to feel. How much density can you permit? To increase the
flow, breathe deeper while you are drawing the energy up from the
earth. To decrease the flow, breathe less deeply. You are looking to
find your point of maximum density without losing consciousness.
Become aware of yourself as a bump on the planet. Get a sense of
yourself as a protuberance of the planet where no difference exists
between you and the planet. Be receptive to the vast support and
strength of the Earth as it expresses itself through you.
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Begin resonating sounds that match the frequency of this earth
energy. Do not try to control the sound or create a melody. Let the
frequency of the earth energy determine the tone, pitch, and sonic
direction. Simply resonate a sound to match the energy itself. While
maintaining this cycle of connected breathing, exhale earth energy
through your arms and out your palms and fingertips. Keep cycling
earth energy through your body and out your hands. Continue until
you feel done. Send any excess earth energy back to the planet.
Return to No-Form. NOTE: The quality and intensity of this ritual
can differ according to the particular bioregion it is performed in and
the innate energies there. After you have mastered this ritual, apply
it to walking, other physical movements, and dancing.
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“The Numen of Archetypes”
‘Active imagination is a process of consciously dialoguing
with our unconscious fi)r the production of those contents
which lie, as it were, immediately below the threshold of
consciousness and, when intensified, are the most likely
to erupt spontaneously z'nto the conscious mind. ”
— C.J. Jung, The Transcendent Function
numen (s), numina (pl)
1. A presiding divinity or spirit of a place
2. A spirit believed by animists to inhabit natural phenomena or objects
3. A spirit believed to inhabit an object or preside over a place
4. Creative energy; genius
numinosity
The condition or state of being numinous
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numinosum
I. Revealing or indicating the presence of a divinity; spiritual: ‘Many
religious practices and perfiarrnances are carried out fior the sole purpose of
calling forth the power of the numinosum at will by invocation, incantation,
sacrifice, etc.”
2. Relating to the experience of the divine as awesome and/ or terrifizing;
designating that which governs the subject outside of his or her own will.
During the first half of the 20th century the term “archetype” was
introduced to the collective consciousness by psychologist Carl G.
Jung as an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived
from the past collective experience and present in the individual
unconscious. Decades later during the pop psychology revolution
of the 1960’s, the word ‘archetype’ became very popular and was
applied to numerous contexts, perhaps too many contexts. Certain
words can lose meaning with redundancy and misinterpretation and
I think “archetype” may be one of those words.
I use the word “archetype” to address the numen of an undeniably
autonomous presence of Otherness. At its originating point,
numinosity emanates a presence that sometimes appears in our
night dreams by taking the form of recognizable personal images,
behaviors, situations, and characters, depending on the complexes
defining the individual psyche (more on this later). Archetypes also
reside in the hidden heart of stereotypes and cliches — predictable and
mechanical roles, movements, behaviors, self—images, personalities
— as oversimplifications and cultural parodies as demonstrated
by the commercial icons and stories in Hollywood films. Clichés
may be archetypes distorted through the corruption of excessive
redundancy. Stereotypes convey a banal sense of familiarity, rather
than any numen of Otherness, yet conceal a grain of the deeper
archetypal truth. Every cliché can be traced back to and linked with
its archetypal origins.
According to Jung, the impersonal archetypes interface with the
individual personality in a particular psychological complex, or
fixation. Archetypes take on human imagery — Anima/ Animus,
Hero, Senex, Puer, Crone, The Shadow, The Self, etc. — depending
on the psychological complexes sustained by unmet childhood needs,
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traumas, fetishes and fixations and whatever obsessions are shaping
the individual psyche. For example, the mother complex expresses
an active component of everyone’s psyche shaped by experiences of
the personal mother, then by significant contacts with other women,
and on out to collective assumptions and biases around women in
general. For men, the mother complex links to the archetype of the
Anima, the erotic feminine ideal within the man's psyche.
For women, the father complex runs a similar course towards linking
with the originating archetype of the Animus, the masculine ideal
as heroic protector, which can dramatize externally as a longing for
older father—figure types as potential mates.
Archetypal forces are not subject to any propriety; they do not and
cannot belong to anyone. They are also not subject to our control.
Archetypes come and go autonomously, much like our night dreams
do, and operate at a much higher level of intelligence than intellectual
comprehension. Though we may not be able to control or understand
them, the archetypes can be experienced firsthand.
C-7 Ritual #2: THE ANHVIA/ANINIUS SHRINE
This ritual requires a high level of commitment. The intent here is to
engage C-7 activation through direct experience of the autonomous
archetype of THE ANIMA (for men) and THE ANIMUS (for
women). These archetypes are not the same as the Masculine/
Feminine polarity existing within each human being. The Anima and
the Animus express completely autonomous forces not subject to our
propriety; we do not own them.
To minimize self-delusion, I suggest that we not refer to them as “my
Anima” or “my Animus” but rather, THE Anima and THE Animus.
This simple and important semantic adjustment alerts C-3 intellect
to the novelty of facing a numinous reality beyond our mental
comprehension and control. The following article introduces a
personal context of this ritual and the ritual instructions themselves.
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The Anima/ Animus Shrine
A Soul Retrieval Ritual
Because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to
doesn’t mean they don ’t love you with all they have. — anonymous
This ritual emerged from a need to restore perspective around an
intimate sexual relationship soured by my own rampant psychological
projections. These projections were unleashed beyond my control and
with the force and fury of the gods mistaking me for an abandoned
plaything. I had fallen deeply and swiftly in love with an enchanting
woman of extraordinary beauty. She embodied my every feminine
ideal: Dream Lover, Goddess, Divine Whore, and Muse. With each
passing moment by her side, my body and soul fell under the fainting
spells of Eros and Hypnos, leaving me entranced, bewitched beyond
reason, in a delirious state of insatiable longing towards what would
eventually combust into a nonstop, catastrophic romance.

We fought whenever this woman failed to maintain the behavior,
words, and deeds commonly reserved for goddesses. In other words,
every time she acted like a human being I felt let down and unleashed
more complaints and criticisms onto her person. Naturally, she took
offense to my ranting and dumped me. In the sullen solitude of
her rejection, I suffered horrible angst and felt profoundly drained.
I entered a depressed state of utter blackness, hopelessness, and
suicidal despair while contemplating my demise as a solace to my
naive self-imposed agony. Picture a body walking aimlessly in circles,
its soul spinning out in deep space.
During this period I was reading Carl Jung's seminal work on
Alchemy, “The Psychology of the Transference” where he addressed
the phenomena of the Anima, Animus and the complex processes of
psychological transference. I learned how men project the imaginal,
erotic dynamics of their souls onto living flesh-and-blood women
who personify the man’s inner feminine ideal and how women
project their inner will to power onto living flesh-and-blood men who
personify the woman’s inner masculine ideal. Here was something
that spoke to the nightmare my life had become, something I could
finally connect with and relate to. I had read enough, put the book
down, and began structuring a ritual to access this Anima archetype
on purpose. I felt compelled to face her at the source, instead of
through the woman I had fallen in love with. I also needed to ask
Her a few questions.
THE ANIMA / ANIM U S
RITUAL PREPARATION
The Setting
This ritual can occur in any indoor or outdoor area of at least 10
ft x 10 ft or more of open space free of any external interruption
by others, phone calls, etc. Have a bottle of drinking water nearby
to hydrate yourself. Wear clothes you can move freely in. Remove
all mirrors from the space. If you want music, select the tracks that
support the psychic or emotional climate of your ritual.
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Building the Shrine
Assemble a shrine to the Anima or Animus. Place whatever elements
— photographs, flowers, incense, candles, love letters, musz’c— on this shrine
that somehow resonate with the energies you have unconsciously
projected onto any external man or woman that has personified the
archetype. Sanctify and otherwise devotionally bless the ritual space
as an open invitation to the Archetype.
Dominion
Put the force of your territorial instincts to work by owning this ritual
space, including the space above you. Discover how you personally
go about physically, emotionally and psychically taking charge of the
ritual space in order to feel completely SAFE AND ALONE there.
THE ANIMA /ANIM US
RITUAL STRUCTURE
THE PHYSICAL WARM-UP
Before attempting to access the archetype, it is imperative to stabilize
your energies. You can do this by whatever supports your process
of FEELING YOUR BODY DEEPLY. Include stretching, flexing
the spinal column, yoga or Pilates, and any movement that breaks a
sweat. This physical warm-up should last fifteen to twenty minutes.
When you’ve raised your physical energy enough to break a sweat,
you are ready for the next phase (the Warm-Up cycle in the Circuit
Five Solo Polarization ritual can work well here).
NO-FORM
The integrity of this ritual depends on the integrity of “No-Form”
(see Circuit Five Feature Article, The No-Form Technique”). This
point cannot be overstated, as the ego can easily trick us with its own
self—made images and preconceptions of the Archetype. No-Form
dissolves preconceptions and cultivates receptivity to the archetype.
No-Form charges the ritual.
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POLARIZATION
Divide the ritual space into two areas, designating each side to one
part of an emotional polarity that holds strong charge, or personal
excitement or resistance. Examples: chaos/ order; good/ evil;
severity/ mercy; love/ fear; acceptance/ rejection (the more personal
the polarity, the better). Note: the rest of this stage is identical
with the C-5 Solo Polarization Ritual. When you're done with the
polarization, step outside the circle and return to No-Form.
INVITATION
Begin the ritual by standing in No-Form outside the parameters of
the shrine, with your back to the shrine. Do not face the shrine. While
dropping down to deeper gradations of No-Form, invite the archetype
to visit the shrine behind you. Continue dropping into deeper degrees
of No-Form.
Note: Assume this archetype already exists within you as an
autonomous presence or spirit; you don’t have to make it up. The
archetype cannot be summoned by ourbeck and call. The autonomous
archetypes of the Anima and the Animus are more likely to respond
to invitation, than to a command.
IIVIMERSION
From No-Form, back into the shrine. Allow yourself to become an
empty vessel for the Anima or the Animus. Stand there and absorb
the presence of the archetype. If and when you feel the force of the
archetype moving through you, yield to its direction (if nothing
happens, wait a few moments. If no response, return to No-Form and
re-enter the space). Surrender to Him or Her with your entire body
and soul. Follow its directions, its impulses and its rhythms. Give
your body over to Him or Her as a vessel. Let yourself momentarily
merge with the Anima or the Animus. Let this immersive merging
carry you, transport you, around this space and in relationship with
the shrine itself. Let the archetype move you in whatever ways it
wills; “not my will but thine”...
EXTRACTION
After you feel satiated with the previous immersion, extract yourself.
It is time to stop being the archetype and time to start relating with
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Him or Her. Find someway of releasing the Anima or the Animus
from your body. Extract yourself from Him or Her and let its
autonomous spirit float freely about the shrine. Begin establishing
a relationship with Him or Her. Physically move and dance with
the Anima or the Animus. Find gestures, movements, and sounds
that communicate this relationship. Ask the Anima or the Animus
questions. What purpose does it serve in your life? What is your
name? How shall I call you? Keep these questions simple, direct and
personal to your own needs. Neither Anima nor Animus is simple-
minded; you are the one who may need more directness in relating
with this archetype.
CLOSURE
When you feel complete, say goodbye to the Anima or the Animus.
Give thanks to the shrine before returning to No-Form. This particular
return to No-Form is very important as a time to disidentify with any
residual archetypal identification that can only leave you confused
and inflated. No-Form allows you to become nothing, again,
releasing any attachment to the Anima or the Animus. No-Form
discharges the ritual by defusing any lingering identification with the
archetype and thus allowing closure.
A NOTE TO THE PANSEXUAL COMMUNITY:
Though thi's ritual refers to specific gender dynamics, the basic structure
can be applied to any sexual orientation.
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The Animus Shrine Lab Report
By Lise K1/am
The fiallowing Lab Report was written by a 31 year-old Norwegian
woman durz'ng the Spring 2009 8—Circuit Brain online course at
Maybe Logic Academy. Besides being impressed by its sheer honesty
and candor; I really wanted to include it here as an example of how
this ritual has been worked and reported by a female. I present her
report here without any additional comments. — A.A.
This ritual feels as both success and failure...but I experienced a
lot and got something out of it so I put it here. I wanted to call it
failure because the energies in it are so raw, brutal and “a bit too
much drama” I think. I felt embarrassed of the experienced and yet
so powerful and in rapture when performing it. It felt too risky for me
to put it on the forum, so I will tell you instead.
I began the normal warmup, stretching and meditation. I had
forgot to set up the shrine beforehand, so I went and got thing that
I associate with the animus: a microphone, a painting made by me
of my boyfriend, a designbook, a book about sexual quickies and a
bracelet with nails symbolizing aggression and boundaries held. I felt
that I owned my own space and I felt afraid as well. ..
I entered No—Form and got an immediate sense of balance. I had
chosen (the polarity of) freedom/ duty and asked where I was needed
the most and got dragged to duty. I made a violent noise, slapped
my hands and hammered on the floor and felt my arm go up like
holding a gun and pointing it, saying “there, I want to go there” and I
felt the duty transformed to will combined with that I must. I was so
happy and felt immediately so free that I got confused thinking that
I wasn’t supposed to feel free over here in the duty department, so I
just continued anyhow and the aggression came up again and I spat
on the floor and hammered and tramped with my feet.

When I felt done I went to the other side I felt like a little girl and
jumped a bit and then just stood there and saw a picture of me at last
narchspiel, feeling wonderfully free and lustful. Smiling. I went back
and forth two more times and then I felt the need to unite the two so
I swirled and swirled and changed the space from black and white to
a scale that I could move upon. I then went into the No-Form and
emptied myself real fast!
Animus: I waited in front of the shrine and said that I was here and
that I was afraid. Then I felt a pull to come nearer in my body and my
heart, so I went closer and then even closer. I started touching myself
and asked him to make physical Contact with me and I was really
turned on and got chills all over my body. I stood there touching
myself and I saw pictures of Lestat and the band Deathstars; this
Is my animus. I pinched myself and hit my boyfriend’s face on
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the painting. I sensed violence, brutality, mercilessness and pure
egotistical satisfaction. I was a bit scared with the almost torturing
like pleasure I felt and wondered if this was not a part of my shadow;
the brutality and need to inflict pain. Animus embraced me and we
wavered together, he was holding me from behind. . .it was wonderful
and exciting I felt like I had an amazingly fascinating man there with
me which was so close to me and my mentor, lover all at once.
We danced like for real and then we lay down on the floor and I
asked him some questions:
* I asked what I needed to do with my boyfriend: “end it, end it!”
* What about the band we have started together? “it is a dead end...
you are afraid of having nothing without him, just end it.”
* What should I do to feel fuller, to not feel alone? “make choices
based on what you just sense is what you want, like when you just
took the call of making poster for Artifact. You knew you wanted
it immediately. Take more choices based on what you know and
sense without thinking, just do it! Also when you need me you can
masturbate imagining that it is me or in the form of the Deathstars
band or Lestat.” I smiled and thought it was reeeally funny
* What can I do to have better sex? “Have sex with more men.” I
got the insight that the reason why I’m so turned on with Carlo is
because he has this ravaging sexuality of sweeping over women and
the same with my boyfriend. . . .that is a projection.
* When I felt done I went to the shrine and said goodbye kissing my
books and spitting on my boyfriend. I said thank you and went back
to the No—Form space and thanked the space and pulled my finger
to it, smiling a cunning smile. We both got the humor and he said
goodbye, I bowed to the shrine in my minds eye and closed my eyes
and entered No—Form. I felt a relief coming over me when I made full
contact with myself again and tingling in my whole body, like joy all
over. My body was happy I was back.
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Week Five: Circuits Four and Eight
The Social Personality, Ethics, and Transcendence
“Don’t let yourself be victimized by the Age you live in. When you
put the blame on society, you end up turning to society for the solution.
There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility
and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that and
you pay with your soul. It’s not men who limit women, its not
straights who limit gays, it’s not whites who limz't blac/es. What limits
people is lacle of character What limi'ts people is that they don ’t have
the flicking nerve or imagination to star in their own movies, let alone
direct them. —Tom Robbins (from Still Life With Woodpecker)
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Circuit Four Feature Article
Sex and the Eight-Circuit Brain
Polymorplzous Sexuality in Clrcuitland
The eight—circuit grid can be used to track, read, and otherwise discover
the great variety of human sexual response. As long as we remember
that sex, like Life itself, is messy at best — and will never confiwm to any
mental construct we impose upon it — we are free to speculate. As we
examine the first four survival—oriented circuits, we’ll see how our
sexuality has been, and can be, experienced physically, emotionally,
conceptually, and socially — in isolation and in conjunction with each
other. When we envision the second four post-survival circuits, we
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can imagine and maybe experience how sexuality might act as a
vehicle for higher consciousness and unfathomable realities beyond
our wildest fantasies in and out of our bodies!
C-1 Visceral Sex
Picking up the invisible, subtle scent of sex pheromones in others, we
can elicit instantaneous reactions of visceral sexual attraction. This
can happen so swiftly, literally under our noses, that we have no time
to moralize (C-4), think (C-3), or have feelings (C-2) about it. Acting
on the scent of pheromones alone, without considering circuits two,
three, or four, can drive us into the heat of impulsive, spontaneous
visceral sex. As these impulses gain momentum in action they can
accelerate and combust into explosive, volatile, and even violent sex.
Some male homosexuals may know more about sexual violence than
heterosexual men. In researching his book, You Are Going To Prison
(Loompanics Press, 1994), Jim Hogshire discovered that twice as
many men are raped inside American prisons each year than women
are raped on the outside. C-l sex is hard-wired to our most basic life
and death survival instincts -- self-preservation, aggression, “going
into heat” and procreation.
The growth hormone testosterone exists in both men and women, yet
testosterone levels are twice as high in most men than in women.
Researcher June Reinisch of Rutgers University discovered that
increased testosterone levels in the body produce immediate
aggression. Physiologist Julian Davidson performed a study on
males with low sex drives. When given more testosterone, all
showed an increase in sexual fantasy and desire leading Davidson
to conclude that testosterone is “the biological substrate of desire, at least
in men.” Consistent overemphasis in C-1 sexuality alone, without
incorporating the other circuits, can be dangerous and even fatal.
C-2 Emotional Sex
In those sexual encounters where we are left feeling attached to the
lover, C-2 has been engaged. Emotions express a powerful animistic
force not always subject to the comprehension of C-3 intellect or the
approval of C-4 morality. When emotions are stirred, they mobilize
and travel into the lover's astral body, just like spirits. If this sounds
like voodoo love that's because emo—sex can be like that. It puts you on
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pins and needles. Emo—sex always comes with emotional investment
whether we want it or not. Emotional sex can satisfy unmet needs
for status, security, power, and loyalty. Emotions dwell in our body
until they’re aroused by another body showing profound receptivity
to ours. If you’re physically absent from somebody that you are
emotionally attached to you may find yourself pining -- z'rratz'onally
longing for them —- when, in fact, it may be the spirits of your own
displaced emotions you’re missing. Emotions have a life of their own
and don’t usually bend to the dictates of C-3 reasoning or C-4 ethical
considerations.
Emotional sex can also serve the purpose of establishing an attachment
to someone, regardless of romantic ideals or images regarding the
“perfect partner” or “dream lover”, if only to feel needed. Emo-
sex can hide a desperate attempt to establish meaningful connection
with someone as a coping mechanism for enduring an otherwise
meaningless life — you may not want the attachment but you may
need it. C-2 sex can also fuel a mutual dynamic of sadomasochism
and bondage resulting in creative or destructive outcomes, depending
on how consciously the master/ slave roles are played out, and how
much care and attention is paid to each other’s limitations and needs.
Being tied up and physically immobilized can produce a profound
sense of internal security to those whose early infantile needs were
never met, given that these power rituals are performed in a climate
of total mutual trust. In this way, conscious C-2 Power Sex can also
enable greater emotional honesty and intimacy.
Heavy emotional involvement can produce an assumed familiarity
with the lover, as if we’ve known him/ her for a long time, though
we may have only recently met. For some, this assumed familiarity
can feel invasive or annoying, leading to boundary problems. Emo—sex
can also excite the taboo-laden incestual lust of sibling love, a kind
of familial romance with someone who feels like our big brother, or
little sister, or the nurturing mother, or the good father. lncestual love,
not to be confused with literal incest, can also trigger the negative
emotions of animosity, sibling rivalry, and other C-2 territorial power
struggles. These kinds of infantile passions can make lunatics of us
all if personal boundaries are overlooked and traded down for the
loss of oneself in the other. Losing self-respect can corrode even
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the most strident confessions of love. Significant emotional bonds
also develop without warning between lovers shouldering traumas
together -- miscarriage or abortion, extramarital aflfizirs, domestic violence,
divorce, death of parents, etc. -- and between soldiers at war or with
police officers bonding amidst criminal adversity and danger.
C-3 Mental Sex
Sexual experiences that leave you chatty, by either talking to yourself
or chewing the ears off lovers who’ll listen, have activated C-3
conceptual intelligence. Watch for a lot of phone. A propensity
towards mental sex suggests that you may need more communication
before you are sexually turned on. C-3 dualistic intellect can be
attracted to sexual ambiguities, a quality some may interpret as
bisexuality. Ambiguity, however, is not a bisexual condition but a
human condition regardless of sexual orientation. If you’re aroused
by ambiguity or androgyny, the promise of confounding complexity
may arouse you. Those who find ambiguity erotic may naturally shy
away from commitment in lieu of staying open to the options of their
fickle fancy.
C-3 mental sex can also mean that thinking, talking, and fantasizing
about sex can be more scintillating than the actual experience. The
tease and the chase may prove a greater turn-on than actually getting
caught and nailed. Sometimes talking about sex can also act as a
protective measure to inhibit the lovers from engaging in “dead sex”
when their relations have gone underground and become temporarily
stagnant. Without sexual heat, it may be wiser to read in bed together
or take in a movie. Talking about sexual fantasies, writing erotic
stories, and engaging in phone sex are all obvious examples of C-3
mental sex.
C-3 sex represents the sexual polarity of exhibitionism and voyeurism:
the thrill of physical distance, strong visual stimulus, and being seen
or seeing another engaged in a sexual act. If you are turned on by
the reality or the fantasy of watching someone else enjoying sex
with him/herself or with another, you are aroused by voyeuristic
passions. If you are turned on by the reality or the fantasy of others
watching you having sex with yourself or with another, you are
feeling exhibitionistic passions. Both sides of this C-3 mental sex
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polarity — being seen and seeing — act on the body in erotic ways. When
the sense of sight plays such a clearly dominant role, the C-3 mind
drives the sexual drama.
C-4 Sexual Tribes and Customs
The most commonly used terms for sexuality — heterosexual, bisexual,
homosexual, pansexual, asexual, transsexual — act as sociopolitical labels
to categorize and organize personal and tribal needs for security,
status, sociopolitical identity, and a sense of belonging. Each of
these sociopolitical labels represents a different sexual tribe claiming
its own distinct customs, rituals, fetishes, icons, codes, and overall
force of culture, subculture, and micro culture. As most people are
openly heterosexual, they form the dominator sexual culture around
which all other sexual tribes compete and struggle for autonomy
and equality for legal rights taken for granted by heterosexuals, i.e.
marriage, welfare, child rearing, etc.
Sexual orientation holds no prerequisite for tribal identity. We can
know ourselves as sexual creatures without joining a tribe of others
who share the same sexual orientation. The C-4 need for belonging
can be satisfied in ways that defy assimilation into, and by, any sexual
tribal mind or identity. Those who do not make an issue of their
sexual orientation, or the orientations of others, can more easily link
up with those of differing sexual realities.
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Sexuality expresses a highly personal reality rooted in specific
internal and external conditions and cues, fetishes, and settings that
arouse us and keep us aroused. Our lovers know who we truly are
by the way we make love. The conditions for personal arousal are
as diversified and complex as the greater variety of human sexual
response. C-4 sexual coupling, regardless of sexual orientation,
revolves around the neurochemical dance leading to orgasm and its
release of neuromuscular tension through intense physical pleasure.
Sex also serves as a vehicle for emotional and social bonding, and
procreation for hetero breeders and for artificially inseminated,
domesticating lesbians.
Sex with friends. C-4 social sex also includes friends with flavors. These
interactions have far less emotional investment and more autonomy
granted between partners, who come and go without the constant
“checking in” that more emotional investment seems to demand.
Sex with friends can also serve as an important interval between our
more emotionally invested sexual relations where the social value of
intimacy can be restored and maintained. All too often the bonds of
sexual intimacy break down from a lack of true friendship between
lovers. Without the social context of shared friendship, the primordial
sexual instinct can easily become unfriendly, even hostile.
Sex with enemies. When we become sexually involved with lovers
whose values and morals — or lack thereof — are eventually revealed
to be at war with our own principles, the relations become a testing
ground for our own ethics. This can happen whenever our own ethical
code has become obsolete and requires updating or, when we need to
define our ethics more specifically. Sometimes we discover the true
nature of our ethics by confronting what they’re not. Without this
step of self-examination of our own ethical code, sex with enemies
can easily degenerate into the unsavory blame games of mutual
scapegoating, sadism and self-torment.
C-5 Tantric Sex
Beyond C-4 sexual realities the playing field opens up considerably.
C-5 sexual tantra bypasses C-4 orgasm-as-a-goal orientation in lieu
of exploring sexuality as a vehicle for extended durations of rapture
and bliss, and the charismatic balancing of masculine and feminine
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energies within the body. As C-5 dakinis and yogis become more
liberated from C-2 possessiveness and C-4 consensus moral restraints,
polyamorous “open relationships” can develop between agreeing
parties. New models of intimacy are born and sustained by shared
post-survival values such as pleasure, leisure and ecstatic play. As
with the other upper circuits, advancement through the somatic fifth
circuit can also bring its own unique set of problems to be faced and
dealt with.
When the levels of ecstasy exceed the threshold of what either lover
can tolerate, the ego can automatically slow things down by acting
out old habit patterns such as C-4 moralizing, C-3 over-thinking, C-2
possessiveness and C-1 distrust and fear. In this way, the ego acts as
an emergency brake to minimize pleasure and happiness too intense
to contain. How much rapture and joy can a person take?
When our capacity for ecstasy is overwhelmed, we may find it
necessary to fixate on something as familiar, banal and mundane as
our personal problems or even project them onto our lover. This
buzz-kill may seem wrong but it’s sobering effects cannot be ignored.
Sometimes resistance to intense pleasure and joy can be a relevant
warning signal for rechecking our limits, recalibrating our capacities,
and restabilizing (grounding) our energies.
C-6 Sex Magick
When lovers are initiated into C-6 electric sex, they can benefit from
the many esoteric traditions of sex magick or, create their own.
C-6 sex engages the more subtle medium of our Central Nervous
System (CNS), igniting the energetic body of the aura and chakras.
Occult lodges such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the
O.T. 0., Thelema and their numerous offshoots practice various ritual
technologies of sex magick incorporating symbols towards achieving
premeditated ends (C-3/C-6). With some sex magickians the long-
term effect of these rituals can be so remarkable that when compared
with the energetic bodies of most humans, theirs stand out like alien
space beings. There’s probably good reason why these rituals remain
esoteric and I suspect it’s because sex magick isn’t for everybody.
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C-6 sex magick can often start with C-5 somatic sex but it can also
occur without actual physical contact. When the energetic bodies of
lovers are turned on, sensuality can transmute into the supersensual
neuro-orgasms of brain pleasure. Imagine the warm, glowing
rushes of electromagnetic energy circulating within, around, and
between them. Electricity travels at the speed of light —- in or out of
the body —- and sex magick practitioners learn to act as conduits for
its absorption, integration and transmission. Actual physical orgasm
may be completely unnecessary or, in the case of nervous system over-
amping, orgasm can become important for releasing and grounding
the excess charge (the C-1 Salt Bath ritual can also help to neutralize
excess electromagnetic energy in the physical body and can be useful
in cases of insomnia). Of course, it helps tremendously if sex magick
lovers are also emotionally mature enough to support each other’s
autonomy and freedom of self-expression -- the anchoring action of
C-2 to C-6.
C-7 Planetary, or Archetypal, Sex
Certain sexual experiences of an archetypal nature can be so powerful
and overwhelming that none of the previous six circuit orientations
can contain or define their transformative energies. These sexual
encounters defy the romance of hot sex, emo—sex, falling in love,
getting married, having babies, plus any other known categories of
casual sex, tantra, polyamory, or sex magick. The lovers involved in
these mysteries may feel an encompassing pull of fate towards each
other, as if they were meeting again from some previous incarnation
or past life (not as a concept but as a fully—embodied experience).
There can be a kind of meltdown of their present-life personas that
leave the lovers in a terribly vulnerable, essence-to-essence fusion
experience, helpless to stop it, or to do anything about it. As the
heat and light of bio-psychic energies accelerates between them, a
stream of images flood their consciousness as their minds grapple
with labels and behaviors in an attempt to manage the confounding
reality. No image fits; many explode into thin air. Nobody knows just
how to act and no previous categories are found.
On realizing all of this, the lovers either run far away from each
other or hold their ground and surrender to the experience together.
If they surrender, new information emerges about how to serve
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these transformative energies, seeing how they obviously cannot be
controlled. In a state of continual surrender, the lovers may dawn
on the solemn revelation that the Earth itself may be arranging their
meeting and that these energies are not personal but planetary forces
using them as conduits for feeding the planetary entity. The lovers
may still engage in rapturous somatic and electric sex, but now they
become aware of a larger cosmic ceremony involving a third partner
in the planet Earth itself; a planetary menage—a-trois. How this ritual
unfolds may differ with each dyad depending on their personalities,
culturally conditioned programs and intuitive sensibilities. This
event, and its ritual, formed the basis of my book, “The A/eashic Record
Player” (Falcon Press, 1988) wherein a couple engages the Earth as
a third conduit of a trinary circuit for circulating their combined
currents to feed the planet (also see ‘$4 Neurolological Autobiography”
in HOW I GOT THIS WAY).
Impossible Love: The Anima and the Animus
Love affairs that begin and attempt to maintain themselves in the
subterranean romance of psychic projection, or what Carl Jung calls
“anima/ animus transference”, can lead to very brief and very intense
episodes of archetypal, catastrophic sex (also see Circuit Seven,
”Numen of Archetypes” and ‘Zlnima-Anz'mus”). The spirit is willing but
the flesh is weak. In these episodes, the ego is easily overwhelmed in
the face of these unconscious projections of “the dream lover” and
all its inflated expectations of living up to impossible ideals.
Enter the melodrama of unattainable, impossible love. As the lovers’
egos fail to deliver on the inflated promise of big archetypal love,
the romance backfires and devolves into humiliation, resentment,
and animosity between lovers. The once exalted presence of “ideal
love” and “the dream lover” suddenly downshifts into a nonstop
catastrophic romance of C-2 emo-sex, territorial pissing, and control
trips. If it cannot be stopped or if neither lover has enough sense
to leave, the animosity can degenerate into psychic, emotional and
physical violence and damage. Self—healing can come through
enforced solitude (isolation deflates the ego) and any sou1—retrieval
rituals that support disidentification and differentiation from the
archetypes themselves (see Circuit Seven The Anima/Am'mus
Shrine”).
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C-8 Dreambody Sex
C-8 dreambody (or disembodied) sex occurs in our dreams and in the
more extreme waking out—of body experiences where two or more
energy fields, independent of their physical bodies, unite for reasons
of their own. In the midst of out-of-body experiences and other types
of astral projections, the playing field opens up to infinite possibilities.
Whether we experience dreambody sex in the erotic escapades of our
night dreams or in our more disembodied daytime sexual fantasies,
C-8 sex always occurs out of body, or in a disembodied state.
The dreambody can also use the physical sex act as a kind of launching
pad for astral projection, as with those post-orgasm experiences where
consciousness drifts out of body, passes through hypnogogic corridors
and takes flight over limitless, nonlocal terrains. We wake up feeling
as if we have traveled somewhere and, we have! Dreambody sex may
also be linked to the mysteries of near-death experiences, anesthetic
out of body events in surgery rooms, and onto the more extremely
disembodied extraterrestrial, interdimensional sex reported after
alien abductions.
L .
. -.-”
M‘:
I . V
/
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The Eight-Circuit Brain Course
Week Five: Circuits Four and Eight
The Social Personality, Ethics, and Trcmscendence
Inside a magician’s black bag, two mirrors were facing
each other in a game of infinity when the magician asked,
“What did one mirror say to the other?”
A. It's all done with people.
OVERVIEW
This week marks the final task—heavy week of this course. For those
who feel left behind, this 8-week course was designed to allot its
final two to three weeks for catching up to speed. Feel free to move
between all the circuit tasks according to your available time, energy
and commitment levels. This week we start examining how C-4 Social
Intelligence incorporates the previous three circuits into a complex
web of personal behaviors, habits, and tendencies in an attempt to fit
into tribal and collective realities. We’ll also look at how the first four
circuits represent stages of ego—development. We will also examine
the vertical connections between C-4 and C-8, including the shocks
of impermanence, void, and non—1ocality.
Course Book Readings:
If you have “/lngel Tech”, pages 56-62 and pages 113-124.
WRITING ASSIGNMENT #1:
C-4 Attraction Criteria Check List
List five conditions, attributes, or qualities that must be present in
another person for you to be attracted to them as sexual partners.
WRITING ASSIGNMENT #2:
C-8 Out of Body Experiences
Write down any events that you would qualify as an out-of—body
experience that can include those dreams that seemed to you more
like an out—of-body experience than a dream.
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INTRODUCTION: C-4/C-8 VERTICALITY
C-4 Social Intelligence incorporates the previous three circuits into
a highly complex web of interrelated needs, responses, and agendas
for developing the personality for social and cultural survival. When
C-4 is pursued as an end in itself, we become socialized by a chain
of rituals — from courtship, to mating, to marriage, to domestication,
to raising a family, to joining different clubs and groups or religions
while working five days a week into retirement and death. It’s not a
bad life and most people settle for it.
When C-4 finds its verticality with C-8 nonlocality, the social purpose
of our lives undergoes radical transformation. We can no longer
proceed merely as domesticated cogs in a death-ignorant society.
Any persistent awareness of our mortality and the objective truth of
Impermanence changes all of that.
Like a snake shedding old skin, when C-4 links to C-8 our life outgrows
its previous survival-oriented purposes. In one way, nothing changes.
Through this C-4/C-8 verticality we can still maintain a satisfying
personal life complete with all the physical, emotional, conceptual,
and social pleasures and trappings. The only thing missing would be
ego-z'dentzficatz'on. By absorbing the C-8 shocks of Impermanence and
formless void, we discover that we are not our C-1 body, not our C-2
status symbols, not our C-3 concepts, self-images and/ or beliefs and
not our C-4 personality. Nor are we our bliss (C-5), our CNS (C-6), or
DNA (C-7). Well then, who are we then? Who are we, really?
At the level of C-8 consciousness any remnant of separate ego totally
vanishes into deep intimacy and merging with the Void within and
around us -- Void as true nature. We are nothing and it's not a problem.
We return to our true nature as an expression of the Great Enveloping
Abyss of Existence and Non-Existence. Given enough C-4 social
integration, this metaphysical C-8 event can be anchored in our daily
lives like an open window to the Infinite. We can know ourselves as
the formless, timeless nature of Reality itself. We stand in awe and
then, continue with our lives.
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Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a
cosmic religion fior the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids
dogmas and theology,’ it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is
based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things,
natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.” — Albert Einstein
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Though I am not a Buddhist myself, I view Buddhism as a classic
example of how a strong C-4 socially—based religion can act as a
support system for absorbing and integrating the C-8 shocks of
impermanence and for maintaining an active intimacy with the
indivisible and fertile void, basic tenets of Buddhism. A sophisticated
socio—moral structure — as outlined z'n The Noble Eight-Fold Path (no
connection with the 8-Circuit Brain) — resides at the heart of Buddhist
doctrine. The many branches of Buddhist practice — Theravada,
Mahayana, Tibetan Bon, Zazen, Vipassana -- all approach intimacy with
Void and meditations on formlessness as a path to enlightenment.
Unlike the more anarchist nature spirituality of Taoism, the social
and the spiritual practice of Buddhism is married to the mundane
rituals of everyday life for good reason. Before enlightenment, chop
wood, carry water; afier enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Social Intelligence, Guilt, and Conscience
“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by
tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one
in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his
solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.
A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to
exist, it is a hemming—in, a mutual consent that robs one party or
both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the
realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite
distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them,
if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them
the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an
immense sky.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
I and Thou — “Relationship” vs. “Honest Relating”
Social intelligence does not depend so much on our capacity to do,
feel or think, though all of these attributes certainly come into play
when we socialize. Our social intelligence expresses how well we
relate with other people. What does this really mean to relate? If we
do things for another, are we relating to them? No, they don’t have
to be present for us to do things for them. When we have feelings
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for another, are we relating to them yet? No, not unless they are also
feeling what we’re feeling. When we think of someone, are we relating
to them? Only in our minds. If we assume that any of these modes
of doing, feeling or thin/ez'ng (C-1, C-2, C-3 respectively) means we are
actually relating with another person, we can unwittingly delude
ourselves into fabricating something we label as a “relationship” even
if no actual relating happens! What if there was no such thing as a
“relationship”. We are either relating with each other or we are not.
The word “relationship” is a noun that, when imposed over the fluid
organic process of relating, can slowly encase intimacy like some
cooked pheasant under glass. What we assume to be a relationship
may actually represent an attachment or a need structure -- a simulation
of relating -- expressing more self—involvement than any process of
honest relating with another person. Honest relating comes easier
for some than for others.
Consider the doomed romance of lovers who profess powerful feelings
for the other, can’t stop thinking of the other, and do all kinds of
things for each other, while treating each other badly. When one lover
or friend leaves the room, the relating ends. Though one may start
missing the other or start fantasizing about them, the actual relating
with the person has ended, despite all of our thoughts and feelings
and memories to the contrary. Honest relating refers to real time,
in-person interaction where physical, emotional, verbal, and social
signals can be experienced firsthand, unlike internet “relationships”
that depend solely on text, virtual images &/ or audio bytes. Honest
relating recognizes the presence of another person and responds to
that presence in present time.
Philosopher Martin Buber’s vision of relating, “I and Thou”, reflects
this well. According to Buber, human beings may adopt two attitudes
toward the world: I and Thou or I and It. 1- Thou is a relation of subject-
to-subject, while I—It is a relation of subject-to-object. In 1- Thou
relations we are aware of each other as having a unity of being; we
do not perceive each other as consisting of specific, isolated qualities,
but engage in a dialogue involving each other’s whole being. In I-It
relations, we perceive each other as consisting of specific isolated
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qualities that we desire or like, and come to know the other by what
we want and can get from them. I-Thou expresses a dynamic of
mutuality and reciprocity, while I-It conveys an expanding measure
of separateness and detachment.
We relate through our behavior and how we treat each other. When
enough actual relating has occurred between people, social bonds
naturally develop allowing us to safely assume that the relating
will probably continue; maybe not in the same way but that it will
probably continue. True relating can be a creative and even spiritual
event when it sustains a spirit of improvisation and play. Can any
true relating ever be planned? As individuals continue seeing each
other in real time and stay committed to honest interactions, their
shared experiences gain emotional and intellectual depth. Perhaps
what crushes spontaneous social interaction and honest relating
more than anything are the oppressive forces of a guilty conscience,
excessive self-consciousness, and bogus modesty.
Morality, Ethics and the Spring-Action Reflex of Guilt
Unchecked, repressed, and overwhelming guilt may be the greatest
impediment to genuine relating. Guilt inhibits the flow of spontaneity
that real relating demands. Guilt binds consciousness to the past
while corrupting our capacity to be fully present with another person.
Unjustified guilt -— guilt for no apparent present time reasons —- distorts our
personality with excessive self-consciousness and leaves us feeling
socially inept and embarrassed. Left unattended, guilt doesn't just
disappear but turns into resentment and toxic emotional sludge.
Guilt sucks. Guilt sucks the air right out of the room.
Passive-aggressive, adaptive behavior. As long as we suffer from
a guilty conscience, we cannot truly relate openly and directly
with others. Unchecked guilt can unconsciously force us into
indirect, manipulative, and passive-aggressive modes of interaction.
Unconscious guilt can also motivate the kind of false adaptive
behavior for contriving our reactions to become more attractive or
lovable to another. This adaptive behavior creates a kind of lock-
up account of the heart, where we can never feel loved for who we
truly are but for a false face we have created and are expected to
maintain.
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Before social intelligence can be increased, guilt must be exposed and
dealt with. If we think we don’t feel or have any guilt, we may have
effectively repressed it. If so, an unconscious guilt complex may be
pulling our strings.
The psychopath. For those who have given up on humanity and resigned
themselves to the misanthropic mindset of the sociopath, guilt is a
non-issue. The issue for psychopaths is more about whether or not
the absence of social conscience results from accident or intention.
Some accidental, or naive, psychopaths were raised without any real
moral structure and enforcement. Many fatherless children become
naive sociopaths. Then there are those naive psychopaths that are,
by their very nature, amoral personality types. Neither moral nor
immoral, the amoral person simply does not care about “right and
wrong” distinctions. The intentional psychopaths are those socially
corrosive personalities who, in one way or another, purposefully act
out their hatred of humanity on the lives and reputations of others
whom they do not necessarily know personally. Enter the natural
born killers, the mercenary predators, the homicidal maniacs, the
power-starved rapists, the religious terrorists, the greed—monger
CEOs, the pedophile priests, and all the other sociopathic threats to
individual life in society.
Guilt expresses a negative emotional reaction to betraying someone’s
moral or ethical code that we have been conditioned to care about,
whether it’s our own or our mom’s. Morality and ethics — two terms
commonly confused for the same thing. I understand morality as any
code of conduct inherited from society, family, and church/ religion
that defines, often times in black and white terms, what exactly
constitutes bad behavior and good behavior, a good person and
an evil person. We were raised and conditioned by the morality of
whoever acted as our parents. Whether they were genetically related
or authority figures in foster homes, nuns in the orphanage, wardens
in prison, drill sergeants in military school, etc., all moralities function
by a reward and punishment system. Violate the code and you are
punished, i.e., you eat moral guilt. Conform to the code and you are
rewarded, i.e., you eat moral pride.
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Ethics, as I use this term, express a personally defined code of
conduct developed by making a series of tough decisions based on our
judgment calls that determine the right course of action. When I say
“right course of action, I mean according to the individual making
the assessments and the decisions. As these tough decisions continue
being made, a personal ethos eventually forms and consolidates to
form the bedrock of our conscience. When we learn to abide by this
code, our conscience acts as a guiding principle in our lives. The
degree to which we do not define and live by our own ethical codes
is the degree the guilt complexes inherited from external moralities
continue their grip on our psyches. To your own conscience be true or
else, continue regurgitating the external moralities of society, family,
school, and church. Developing a real conscience is obviously not
for everybody. Not everyone is ready to take a stand and speak
their truth, regardless of whether or not it finds agreement with
the consensus. True conscience demands from us, and gives to us,
increasing measures of courage, integrity and commitment.
Spontaneous vs. Mechanical Guilt
Two styles of guilt: spontaneous and mechanical. Spontaneous guilt
stems from violating your own ethical code; mechanical guilt stems
from violating an externally imposed morality. Both types of guilt
can feel very similar with the exception of one significant difference.
The spontaneous guilt of violating your own code rarely happens
after the act of violation occurs. The mechanical guilt of violating
external moralities can happen before, during, and after the act. See
for yourself. The next time you feel the onset of guilt, ask yourself if
it's happening before the intended act or behavior, or during and/ or
after it. When the feeling of guilt arrives before taking action, you
may be about to do something you personally disapprove of. The
warning signal of spontaneous guilt also means you have not been
punished yet. When guilt arises during and/ or after the act, it is too
late; there was no warning. You have been punished.
If you proceed to violate your own code of ethics, you may naturally
feel remorse and regret for betraying yourself. If you violate an
externally imposed moral code, you will probably feel the automatic
oppression of a punishing guilt; the emotion of becoming a no-
good shit. Mechanical guilt comes from violating a code that you
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did not create yourself and that was manufactured by external
sources. Mechanical guilt can be traced back to family, societal,
and religious morals we passively and unconsciously absorbed
without questioning whether they were actually true for us or not.
We all undergo similar kinds of conditioning as children until we
succumb to its machinations, or rebel. Yet it may not be enough
to simply rebel if we do not also replace the old robotic morality
with a freshly minted code we can live by. Defining your own ethical
code constitutes a creative act. This is why betraying your own code
produces spontaneous guilt and not the mechanical guilt resulting
from violating a pre—fab morality assimilated long ago that you may
no longer believe in, or never believed in the first place.
Family guilt keeps the kids in line and close to the hub with the ties
that bind. Some of us suffer more family guilt than others. These
are the late—blo0mers in life whose burden of heavy family guilt
complexes requires more time to sort things out to differentiate from
clan identity. For others, the ancestral moral traditions serve them
well enough and there is no need to change anything. For those
seeking liberation from these ties that bind, the way out is through
the gauntlet of defining your own code of ethics and demonstrating
the audacity to live by it. As we define and live by our own ethical
code, we also step outside the boundaries of consensus morality
and risk social banishment. If we violate consensus morality, those
who are consensus—identified may call us names with labels such
as ‘freak’, ‘weirdo’, ‘failure’, ‘idiot’, and maybe even ‘evil’ if we’re
perceived as a threat to herd mentality by persisting to exist beyond
the comprehension of sheep.
Those who continue fighting and rebelling against the established
dominator moral culture risk persecution and scapegoating by the
enforcers of herd morality. Fighting against “the man”, or “the
machine”, or “the state” proves as futile as a common housefly
caught in the web of a giant spider; whatever we fight against absorbs
us. Those who wise up to a more progressive revolt have discovered
what is actually worth fighting for. Whatever is worth fighting for
defines the good fight. When we know what is worth fighting for, there
is no point in wasting our time and energy fighting against anything
or anybody.
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As for me, the good fight amounts to fighting for consciousness itself
and its unfettered expansion. As consciousness expands, we perceive
more reality. As we see more, we are better informed about what
we actually care about and what we honestly don’t care for (trying
to care about everything ends up caring about nothing). Unfettered
expansion of consciousness evolves into conscience, a code that
guides us according to our vision, rather than the unconscious
dictates of inherited moral considerations.

C-4 TASKS
INTRODUCTION
If you let the first four circuits symbolize interdependent levels of
ego development, then you can see how the personality develops
and matures through the absorption, integration, and transmission
of our various physical, emotional, conceptual and social realities.
The more developed and integrated our personality, the more socially
complex we become. As we embrace our own complexity, our 50-
called “contradictions”, we can allow more complexity in others and
more chaos in the social spheres.
A strong, supple personality is flexible enough to bear the
manifestations of others, their successes and failures, whether we are
in agreement with them or not. As we individuate, we find greater
tolerance for differences we perceive in others. As our own autonomy
and authority increase, we can allow more autonomy and authority
in others. We are only as liberated as the freedom we can permit in
others.
Each of the fiallowirzg C-4 social tas/es tests the degree to which C-4 has
been integrated. In review, here are some reliable signposts to detect
integration throughout the flrstfiour circuits (allowing for your own
semantic adjustments):
1) ‘‘I am a survivor and can restore my sense of personal safety
when threatened.”
2) “I feel where I am emotionally invested and I know what’s
important to me.”
3) “I think for myself and use my own words to communicate
my experiences.”
4) “I can relate with almost anyone until my ethics are
challenged.”
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If and when you start to fizlter in any one of the following C-4 tasks, see if
you can trace the social insecurity back to the circuit(s) causing the problem
and then make whatever adjustments necessary.
C-4 TASK #1 THE TRUE FRIENDSHIP CRITERIA
What constitutes friendship differs for each of us. One person’s best
friend can be another person’s worst enemy. In terms that are personal
and true to your experience, what makes friendships meaningful and
important to you?
1) List the specific qualities, conditions and virtues that you expect
to be present in another person, or in the circumstances you share,
before you can form a meaningful friendship.
2) Once you have completed your list, review it and cross out or
erase those qualities and virtues that you personally are unwilling
or unable to embody and abide by. Whatever is left amounts to your
true friendship criteria.
NOTE: The first list expresses your expectations. If you can meet these
expectations within yourselfi you are ready to share them with others who
also meet your standards. If you cannot meet these standards yourself while
expecting others to meet them, you may be enacting social hypocrisy.
Task #1 Ritual:
Make an attempt to start one new friendship this week. If you fail,
fret not; what matters is that you make an attempt.
C-4 TASK #2 THE SOCIAL TRUST RITUAL
For People Who Don’t Trust People
The experience of trust is important to social bonding. Without
enough direct experience of trust, it can become easier to fall prey
to social isolation, bitterness, and misanthropy. The word “trust” is
often misunderstood as a synonym for “expect”. When we say “I trust
you” or “I can’t trust you” see if it hides an unspoken expectation.
When you catch yourself using the word “trust”, either verbally or in
your head, replace it with the word “expect” and see if any missing
information surfaces.
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Trust in another person develops over time as their behavior
demonstrates certain patterns of consistency. For example, every
time you see Joe in the market he stops and talks to you about his
recent sexual conquests. Over time you may learn that you can trust
Joe to talk about that. This demonstrates what I call trust. Every time
you see Joe, it’s highly probable that he will brag about his conquests;
he can be trusted to do that. Though you may feel uncomfortable
with Joe being alone with your lover, it doesn’t have to destroy your
experience of trust. You can trust that Joe will probably flirt with
him/ her. The point here is to rebuild your direct experience of trust
itself without confusing it with hidden expectations.
The experience of trust does not have to be damaged if you can be
completely honest about what you can trust in a person, based on
time—proven consistencies of their behavior, action, and word. Trust
is also not the same as faith. Faith signals a hunch, a gamble, a
leap of faith requiring no previous information to proceed. But trust
demands a time-intensive process to produce enough consistency to
earn the sense that it will continue. Due to the naturally unpredictable
nature of human behavior, social trust needs to be earned.
The Ritual Task
In the course of your daily life take note of any patterns of consistency
in those closest to you. It’s not important to tell them about it, as that
could just render them self-conscious. Tell yourself what each person
can be trusted for, or depended on for, based on their time—proven
pattern of consistency. The results may be more humorous than you
expected. Apply this observation to people you have “trust issues”
with, that you have deemed “untrustworthy.
Observe and be informed how they can be trusted beyond your
expectations for them to act or behave in a certain way. After
increasing your experience of trust in their presence, note any change
in how they relate with you. Also, notice any changes in the way you
relate with them. Record your results in the Lab book.
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C-4 TASK #3 TALKING WITH STRANGERS
This simple ritual requires only that you initiate at least one
conversation in the course of the week with a complete stranger. Your
aim is to discover what, if any, interests or values or ideals or feelings
or thoughts or beliefs you may, or may not, have in common. Pay
attention to the levels of tension in various areas of your body during
moments of confusion, disagreement, or judgment. The aim of this
ritual is to challenge C-4 intelligence by responding to the novelty of
this social situation. This is not about making friends, unless that
happens naturally, but rather about testing your social intelligence.
Record your results in the Lab book.
C-4 TASK #4 THE EGO CORROSIVE RITUAL
This is a C-4 intelligence test. Schedule an evening or afternoon to
attend any gathering or event that you would normally avoid due
to your own political, aesthetic, intellectual, social and/ or cultural
biases, tastes, and preferences. The aim of this ritual is to enter an
unfamiliar social setting to discover something of value beyond
your own prejudices, as well as to expose any excessive rigidity in
your own thinking, beliefs, ethics, and/ or aesthetics. Consider this
an ego—corrosive ritual for rounding out the sharper corners of your
personality that can sometimes poke people when you’re not looking.
Record your results in the Lab book.
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The Eight-Circuit Brain Course
Circuit 8 _
Quantum Nonlocal Intelhgence
Cortsciousrzess Projection, Dreamtime, Formless Identity
We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should
make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened
by trz'vz'alz'tz'es, we are eaten up by nothing.” - Charles Bukowski
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Circuit Eight Feature Article
The End of the World As I Want It
An Inccmtation (to be read out loud)
O GOD OF THE END OF THE WORLD, I am afraid to take you
seriously; tell me you’re only kidding, show me how to be a greater
fool than I already am by making me laugh at death without forgetting
my mortality.
0 GODDESS OF BEAUTY IS BETTER THAN TRUTH, I am
embarrassed by my need to be right all the time. Send me your most
gorgeous drop-dead image, the Mother of All Visions, the vision that
outgrows and destroys all other visions including itself, so I can see
through myself when I am lying.
O WRAT HF UL DEI TIES OF DOOMSAYING E VANGELICALS
& DOGMATIC LITTLE BIGOTS, I am bored to tears with my
intolerances. Grant me the enchantment to be entertained by the
hidden pixie agendas behind all dreary, dismal grey-faced warnings
so I can stop taking myself more seriously than the life I am actually
living.
0 DEMIGOD OF POE TIC TERRORISM I am utterly and royally
confused. Make me go crazy in the name of Creation, not
Destruction, so I may freely sabotage the literalist virus immobilizing
my imagination and learn to incite riots in the minds asleep to your
splendor and glory.
O GODS & GODDESSES OF E VERYBODY’S HOLY GUARDIAN
ANGEL, I am fucked up beyond all recognition. Trick me into not
knowing whether I am really a good person or really a bad person.
Give me the wisdom to never believe my own PR and what other
people think of me, no matter how much money they pay me.
Deepen my gratitude for being a nobody in a world of wannabe
somebodies and other hungry ghosts, so I can be touched in the head
by your benevolence and tell your truths without wanting the credit.
— AHMEN and AH!WOMAN!
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C-8 Tasks
INTRODUCTION
Anyone seriously dedicated to expanding their consciousness using the 8-
Circuit Brain model can, over time, achieve palpable results. Two afier-effects
I have noticed over two and a half decades of experimentation are:
1) Acceleration of perception results in perceiving more reality and
becoming more sensitized to the subtle energies within and around
us. These upper circuit openings require lower circuit support.
2) Once certain doors of perception are opened, there can be no
reversing the process or turning back. Not everyone we meet can,
should, or will understand you or join us in this journey. As a
result, we can count on social alienation as part of the territory of
consciousness research. In this light, your circle of friends (C-4)
remains a critical support system for anchoring C-8 experience.
The masses that maintain the narcotic hallucination of consensus
reality will not follow us. Those exploring and manifesting higher
consciousness must bear a moral responsibility to themselves and to
those they care about. Moral responsibility means becoming fully
accountable for yourself. As Gurdjieff suggests, become a man or a
woman without quotation marks”. As we expand our consciousness,
we can perceive more reality and discover what we actually do and
do not care about. Consciousness expansion leads to conscience.
We sharpen our conscience, our compass, by asking ourselves big
questions and mustering up the courage to address and/ or answer
them.
What is worth fighting for? What makes my life worth living? What
am I living for? Who am I? Without conscience we remain chained
to family and societal moralities, and carry the cross of inherited
guilt complexes that are based upon rules and regulations we never
approved of or created in the first place.
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Knowing Who Your Friends Are
C-4 integration takes on many forms but usually starts with knowing
who your friends are. Where are your peers and your peeps, your
people? With whom do you share a common—unity? A C-8 safety
net can be established by forming bonds with like—minded others.
Without true friendships and the sense of tribal belonging that comes
along with them, any strident pursuit of C-8 out-of-body experience
runs the risk of turning into a one-way disembodied death trip. Know
who your friends are.
Living Without a Self-image
C-8 introduces the fertile void as an experience. One way to cultivate
intimacy with void is to expose and relax the C-4 social persona,
that self-image generally preserved for impressing others. The social
persona can be exposed and relaxed during any state of genuine
embarrassment if the vanity buffer of ‘saving face’ can be bypassed
— we blow our cover, make a fool of ourselves, and stand naked in the
light. With practice, this process can support the C-8 experiment of
living without a self-image. No longer identified with a self-image,
you are free to be nobody. Experiment with this for an afternoon.
NOTE: The fi)llowz'ng C-8 tasks do not promise C-8 actz'vatz’on. Their
ef‘ectz‘veness depends on your state of readiness for the experience and the
exzsting conditions of C-4 social support in your life.
C-8 TASK #1: CONSCIOUS PROJECTION RITUAL
The Setting: Any room where you can be alone and uninterrupted
for at least twenty minutes. Room temperature should be moderate.
Wear clothes that are loose enough to allow your body to breathe.
Eat a light but protein-rich meal one to two hours before doing this.
Optimum time would be between 10pm and midnight, though any
time can work as long as it is relatively quiet, with no sudden noises.
Place a chair near the center of the room.
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1) Preliminary Meditation. Use the C-6 Conscious Trance technique
but skip the “Scan the Chakras” part. Just run the mix of earth and
cosmic energies for approx. 10 to 15 minutes.
2) As the energy is running through your body, get a sense of or “see”
one of the upper corners of the room (eyes closed). Project your
consciousness there and let it perch in that upper corner for a slow
count of ten, continue running the energies in your body. Then bring
your consciousness back into your body. With eyes still closed, get
a sense of or “see” a different upper corner of the room and project
your consciousness there, while continuing to run the energies.
3) After a slow count of ten, come back into your body. This time,
project your astral body behind your physical body so that you are
standing behind your seated physical body for a slow count of ten.
Enter your body from behind and then clap your hands loudly while
whispering, speaking or shouting your name, whatever tone best
serves the situation.
4) Break Trance. Bend over and growl like an animal. Stand up,
stretch your muscles, and jump around a bit.
C-8 TASK #2: THE DREAMIN G RITUAL
This ritual can take up to a week to prepare for, as it requires the dream
recall of three separate movements from your dreams (the following
article will clarify this). Once you have these three movements you
will be ready to execute the rest of the ritual which takes anywhere
from one to two hours. The physical warm—up cycle introduced in the
C-5 solo polarization ritual works very well as a preparation for this
ritual. This ritual can be done indoors or outdoors with at least 10 ft.
x 10 ft. of open floor or ground space and, no external interruptions
(no cell phones, music, or social visits).
NOTE: This Dreaming ritual could be the most demanding and complex of
all the rituals presented in this course. If you do not have the time, energy, or
commitment to follow it all the way through, I suggest Skipping it and moving
on to other C-8 Tasks and maybe return to this ritual at a later date.
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Non-Interpretive Dreamwor/efiar the Energetic Body
I
The Para Theatrical ReSearch group at Pinnacles I/Vilderness Park
This dreaming ritual was inspired by an auspicious meeting with
Aborigine, or Koori, elder Guboo Ted Thomas in Boulder circa
1985. Though I developed the ritual structure and intention, Guboo
initiated an awareness in me that brought this dreaming ritual to life
(read my interview with Guboo in my book, Towards an Archeology
of the Soul”; Vertical Pool, 2003). This ritual involves piecing together
kinetic elements from our night dreams into a precise choreography
that, when performed fully conscious, can trigger the forces, images,
and emotions innate to the dreams these movements originated from.
When done with full commitment, this ritual can catalyze at least
four levels of the energetic body:
1. Social: to dissolve the alienation caused by imposed arbitrary boundaries
2. Mental: to exercise the specific dream recall of movement in dreams
3. Emotional: to bypass psychological interpretation in lz'eu of catharsis
4. Physical: to experience the dream in action through the senses
This ritual is kinetic; to do it, you have to move your body. This
approach is non-interpretive; it does not require that you know (or
try to figure out) what your dream means. By relaxing the search for
meaning, an innate meaning can eventually emerge on its own. The
dream has its own story to tell us. There is also nothing you need to
believe or disbelieve for this to work. Do the ritual and find out for
yourself.
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The Movements
The first step is to recall a movement from your dream. It can be any
movement —— the turn of your head, bouncing up and down, walking.
This movement does not have to have been executed by you; it just
has to originate in your dream. However, the movement you select
must be one you can physically repeat upon waking the next morning.
These movements can come from more than one dream. When you
have a movement, practice it throughout the day. This can help
create a somatic memory for future recall when it is time to execute
the actual ritual. The best time to do your movement is anytime.
As you do your movement, stay as close as possible to the way it
actually appeared to you in the dream. Do not embellish it in any
way; keep it pure. This can help contain the power of the dreaming
within the movement. As you perform your movement, it may
trigger memories and/ or emotions associated with the dream. If this
happens, let them come and go. Do not try and analyze what they
mean. The “meaning” will arrive when the dream itself delivers it.
Before going to sleep, ask yourself to remember a new dream
movement. When you find your next movement, execute it
immediately upon awaking. If and when dream memory falters, lie
still in bed a few minutes; listen and pay attention to whatever comes
up. Do this new movement throughout the day, just like the other
one. When it’s time to go to sleep again, stalk one more movement
and practice it the next day.
When you have three separate movements drawn from dreams, you are
ready to begin the choreography. Three movements is the minimum
for this ritual to work, though I have personally used four and five
movements to good effect. Keep it simple. Don’t use movements
that can potentially injure you or overcomplicate the choreography.
Feel free to also replace any existing movement that fails to work for
you with a new dream movement.
Building the Movement Cycle
When you have practiced these dream movements separately, you
are ready to connect them all into a movement cycle that forms the
mechanical stage of this Dreaming Ritual. When you are ready to
166

do this, return to the ritual space of the controlled indoor or outdoor
setting referred to earlier. Perform whatever actions are necessary
to own the space of this setting and then practice each movement
separately to refresh your kinetic memory.
Your choreography begins by “stitching” the end of the first movement
to the beginning of the second movement to form a longer movement
combining the two (it doesn’t matter which of the three movements
you start with). Practice this for about two minutes. Then, stitch the
end of the second movement to the beginning of the third to create a
new movement combining all three together. Practice this until your
body has memorized it.
Finally, make a total movement cycle by connecting the end of
the third motion to the start of the first one. This will form your
movement cycle, the physical choreography of your dreaming ritual.
Practice this choreography until it becomes a dance with its own
rhythms. Let these rhythms subtly influence the form and design
of the dance, without corrupting the integrity of each movement.
Continue performing this movement cycle over and over, again
allowing whatever dream memories, images and feelings to surface
while staying committed to the integrity of the choreography.
Beginning the Dreaming Ritual
Begin with the 4-phase physical warm-up of the S010 Polarization
Ritual (stillness, spinal flex, stretch, and heat). After the heat phase,
mark the boundaries of your space and with any movements and
sounds to take dominion over it. After you have finished the warm-
up, proceed to No-Form.
N o-Form: On Charging and Discharging the Ritual
Imagine a large egg-shaped oval on the floor before you, spacious
enough to move freely in. Stand outside the oval while facing it.
Apply the No-Form technique here. From No-Form, project into the
oval area the power of the dreaming”. Continue approaching No-Form
while sensing the space that you have empowered. Relax your desire
to control any outcomes and allow the power of dreaming its own life
in the space before you. Step into the charged “dreaming” space and
stand there absorbing its presence. Do not try to control or direct this
167

energy; allow it fill you. When you feel ready, begin your movement
cycle. Note: the pace, form or rhythm of your movement cycle may
shift due to the influx of “dream charge”. Allow this dreaming force
to move through you as you work to maintain the structural integrity
of the movements. It may take some practice to maintain the structure
and the internal influence of the power of dreaming. Keep following
through with the movement cycle. Allow any images and emotions
to surface. Stay with it until you are done.
You are done when you lose structural integrity —- the ritual falls apart —
- or when you lose power -- the dreaming energy dissipates. You can also
be done when you feel like you’re done. This ritual can last anywhere
from ten minutes to an hour or more, depending on the elements of
force and form, the dreaming power and the structural integrity of
the movement cycle.
When you are done, exit the dreaming circle and enter No-Form.
Take some time to empty out and release the dreaming power back
to its source. No-Form now serves as a trance-dispersion device to
discharge the dreaming ritual. When you feel more neutral again --
not merged or identified with the dreaming —— the ritual is over. Jog around
the periphery of the dreaming area for about a minute as a way of
returning to present time.
Closure
Write down your experiences and/ or talk about them with others.
This can help integrate the intuitive “depth experience” and your
interpretive, conceptual mind. It can also provide a transition from
the dreamtime back into the daytime. No-Form expresses an essential
transition and bridge between the dreamtime and daytime, without
which you may just wander around under the influence of the dream
state.
NOTE: Do not drive a car or operate machinery under the influence of the
power of dreami'ng.
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C-8 TASK #3: THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
The Setting: any indoor or outdoor space that allows for uninterrupted
time of approx. 15 to 30 minutes. Instigate the standing No—Form
technique and add the following physical adjustments:
1) adjust your stance to relax and drop the spine into the pelvic basin
2) unlock your knees, let arms drop to sides, palms facing in
3) find your position of vertical rest, so that each part of your body
from head down to feet rests upon the part below it, with the soles of
the feet resting on the floor or ground below
Continue standing in No—Form while maintaining these physical
adjustments for approx. two minutes. Project a cloud slightly larger
than your body size at a 45-degree angle, about five feet above and
behind your head. Designate this as The Cloud of Un/enowing. When
you feel receptive enough in No—Form, invite the cloud to drift down
and envelop your entire body. Do not drag or direct or bring the cloud
down with your will. Simply put the invitation out there and let
The Cloud drift down in its own way, on its own time. Stay the
course with No—Form. When the cloud completely envelops your
169

body, merge with the cloud. Become the cloud, so no division exists
between you and the cloud. Stay the course of this merging. There
is nowhere to go, nothing to do and nobody to be. When you feel
done, you are done. When it's over, do something to break trance.
The meditation is over.
C-8 Task #4: THE VERTICALITY RITUAL
Verticality refers to the vertical column of energy coming down from above
and rising up from below, through you as a continuous flow. This verticality
idea was introduced in the C-6 CONSCIOUS TRANCE meditation as earth
energy and cosmic energy”. For the purpose of this verticality ritual, do
not label these energies. Simply refer to them as expressions of your vertical
source.
Step 1. Begin with the 4-phase physical warm-up of the S010
Polarization Ritual (stillness, spinal flex, stretch, heat). After the heat
phase, find movements to mark the boundaries of your space; make
any movements and sounds to take dominion over this space.
Step 2. After marking your boundaries and owning your space, step
outside of this rare area (your warm-up area), stand facing your
space. Start the NO-FORM technique while facing your area. While
in No-Form, project your vertical source into this space. Sense this
verticality before you with your open palms.
Step 3. When you feel ready, step into this area and absorb the
currents of this vertical source. Merge with it; surrender to your
vertical source. The degree of your surrender determines the depth
of your immersion. Let this verticality move you in whatever way
it does. Do not try to control or direct this energy but let it direct
you, your movement, your sounds, your outcomes. Stay with this
immersion process. Surrender to your vertical source.
Step 4. When this vertical source energy eventually disperses or loses
power, step out of the area and return to NO-FORM. Release any
attachment to these forces. After defusing these energies, write down
the results in your Lab book.
170

Strengthening vertical stability requires the cultivation of a habit
not taught in schools; it must be learned on your own or in groups
of individuals learning it on their own. To cultivate resonance with
vertical sources is not easy; it’s a little like praying with no immediate
results. Praying to what or to whom? Real self-work continues as
an uphill struggle with decades of socially conditioned, externally
directed habit patterns. For those who persevere, this struggle has
its own rewards; there is no fire without friction and no life without
heat. Not everyone wants or needs liberation from the creations of
conceptual mind to experience life more directly. Imagine the least
mediated perception and experience you are personally capable of.
This is the experiment, the process, and the goal.
The shock of authentic vertical contact, no matter how fleeting,
can shatter unchecked assumptions about the world around us and
about who we think we are. Any real intimacy with void can stir deep
questioning about identity and the nature of reality. Some vertically
oriented experiences can act as wake-up calls to sociopolitical
oppression in our personal lives. In extreme cases, we can be bolted
into upright renunciation or rebellion against all social dogmas,
religions, and any externally imposed belief systems. However, any
revolt, no matter how sincere, turns futile when our very resistance
binds us further to the source of our oppression. While breaking
out of oppressive self-imposed and socially conditioned habits and
reflexes, we must also be willing and able to replace them with a
greater force of commitment to our own truths. It’s not what you fight
against that matters as much as knowing what is worth fighting fox

Week Six: Chapel Perilous
The Bardo Limbo Place Between Places
“The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.
If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that
of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t,
you ’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you. ”
— Joseph Campbell
173

CHAPEL PERILOUS CINEMA
Films T hat Loole, Feel & Sound Like Chapel Perilous
Think back to the last time you exclaimed, I can? believe this is hap-
peningl“, in response to the very thing that was happening to you.
Sometimes the most difficult thing to believe can be the very thing
that is happening to us. When we’re in the center of an experience
we are often unaware it, or in the case of new experiences, have yet to
label it or form a belief about it. So it is with Chapel Perilous. How
can one tell when they’re inside? Though the journey in and out
of Chapel Perilous differs for each person and circumstance, threads
of commonality have been shared by artists, writers, musicians, and
poets with the wherewithal to intuit their placement and the talent to
communicate it. Sometimes being in Chapel Perilous can feel as if
you’re in a movie. The multi-leveled textures of cinema can lucidly
mirror the multidimensional experiences common to those visiting
or residing in Chapel Perilous and why I believe so many film genres
exist -- noii; horror; zombie, psychological thrillers, darle fantasy, and even
documentaries —— to channel these visions.
174

NOWPLAYING
ERASERHEAD by David Lynch
ANGEL HEART by Alan Parker
STALKER by Andrei Tarkovsky
BARTON FINK by the Coen brothers
THE SACRIFICE by Andrei Tarkovsky
LESSONS OF DARKNESS by Werner Herzog
HOUR OF THE WOLF by Ingmar Bergman
THE ELEMENT OF CRIME by Lars Von Trier
INLAND EMPIRE by David Lynch
J ULIEN DONKEY—BOY by Harmony Korine
TIDELAND by Terry Gilliam
SYNECDOCHE NY by Kaufman
ORPHEUS by Jean Cocteau
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS by Frederico Fellini
THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR by Ruiz
THE HOUR-GLASS SANATORIUM by Wojciech Has
NORTHFORK by The Polish brothers
JACOB’S LADDER by Adriane Lyne
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE by Krzysztof Kieslowski
THE PASSENGER by Michelangelo Antonioni
CATCH—22 by Mike Nichols
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS by Frederico Fellini
SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT by Wojciech Has
BLADE RUNNER (director’s cut) by Ridley Scott
BLUE VELVET by David Lynch
EL TOPO by Alejandro Jodorowsky
APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX by Francis Ford Coppola
HEART OF GLASS by Werner Herzog
175

Week Six: Chapel Perilous
The Bardo Limbo Place Between Places
“Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I”, cannot
be located in the time-space continuum: it is weightless, odorless,
tasteless, and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed like the
Ego, once you ’re inside it there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get
out, again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into
existence by thought and does not exist outside of thought.”
— Robert Anton Wilson
To those residing in or visiting Chapel Perilous: we know who we are.
We are the dispossessed, the outcasts, and the outsiders, rebels with
a cause who have upturned the mulch of our dead lives and seeded
those fertile fields with incendiary visions of our future selves. Having
already subverted the norm, we renunciate dominator culture’s status
quo of everything and drift happy disconnected —— babes in the abyss -
— wavering in the ambiguity fog of dislocation. Free-floating between
old worlds and the new, guided only by the shining paths of mother
evolution. We have passed over, we have passed the point of no-
return and since there is no turning back, we celebrate the momentum
lifting us on the wings of perception, grace, and whatever skills we
have earned from surviving the inevitable catastrophe of self. Only
when we are over, does our real life begin.
176

Overview: Entrances and Exits
The three final weeks are dedicated to catching up on missed reading
assignments, tasks and rituals. To boost the novelty quotient Week
Six explores the mysterious Chapel Perilous, where we will discover
three ominous doors, the pathways leading through each, and a few
exit strategies for those wishing escape.
Course Book Reading:
If you have “Angel Tech”, read pages 126 — 138.
When I first wrote Angel Tech, I placed “Chapel Perilous” between
C-4 and C-5 to convey a discontinuity gap for keeping the 8-CB sys-
tem open-ended. Since the book’s first 1986 edition I have come to
see things differently; twenty-three years can change a man’s mind,
ha—ha! I now view Chapel Perilous as a kind of nonlocal bardo
realm hovering over all eight circuits like a magnetic fog or aetheric
web absorbing whatever consciousness has yet to be integrated. I see
Chapel Perilous as a metaphor for a place between places, where lost
or abandoned souls remain in suspense until they're ready to return to
earth and embody the human condition. If the word “soul” bothers
you, consider Chapel Perilous as a kind of Nonlocal Lost & Found
Dept. for the unclaimed, neglected, and denied portions of ourselves.
Throughout my adult life, almost everyone I've met or have gotten to
know has frequented, or currently resides in Chapel Perilous. So far,
all of them fall into any one or all of the following four categories (in
order from the greatest percentage to the smallest):
LIFERS (THE FLOCK), those who remain in Chapel Perilous unaware
of their displacement
CLERGY, those who are aware of being there but choose to remain and
serve the flock
HERETICS, those who have awakened and managed to escape as either
agnostic or paranoid
TOURISTS, those who have awakened, escaped with soul intact (neither
agnostic nor paranoid), and who return for reasons of their own

I count myself as a Tourist. I periodically return there whenever the
Muses decide I need a good shaking up. I can never predict when that
will be but it usually happens when the Muses are ready to use me (I
make films and create theatre). I am a love slave to the Muses and
consider myself lucky to be a Chapel Tourist. I have known Lifers,
Clergy, and Heretics who have not been so fortunate. Some of what
I've seen and heard would make the hairs on the back of your neck
stand up and shout. There’s a reason why it’s called Chapel Perilous
and not Chapel Happy. If there were one word that might save you
some grief as a Lifer, Priest, Heretic, or Tourist, that word would be:
nonchalance. Learn to treat the archetypes and their realms with the
same indifference with which they treat you. Don't take it personal;
Chapel Perilous is anything but. Keep it cool, chill.
. .
.:-,};s>;5
just another babe in the abyss
178

HOW SHOCKS TRIGGER OBSESSIONS
Obsession acts as a portal through which a great influx of energy
pours forth and finds focus and/ or a target. Any honest obsession
can help organize and restore our sense of selfhood, especially after
a shock or trauma and during times of personal crisis. However, an
obsession can also consume all of our time and energy, and cause
burnout. Many of us end up in Chapel Perilous via an obsession, or
a series of obsessions.
Obsessions often follow traumatic events. The aftermath of any out-
side shock can lead us to fixate on something or someone as an at-
tempt to regain lost ground and a sense of control over our lives.
The obsession we experience after a trauma or shock can be a neces-
sary stage of restoring a sense of normalcy and peace of mind, even
though it may appear “crazy” to others. Post-traumatic obsessions
can take on numerous forms: other people, sex, money, drugs, al-
cohol, religion, ideas, romantic affairs, work, health, big causes, our
egos, our appearance, status and public opinion; the list goes on and
on... (See The Nature and Function of Shock” in the CIRCUITS chap-
ter of the THEOREM section).
Three things to know about obsession:
l) Obsessions express compulsive reactions to initial originat-
ing shocks or traumas and are not the shock itself; obsessions
express forceful reactions to shock.
2) Our obsessions point to where we tend to be in the most di-
rect, intuitive immersion of life energies; our obsessions show
us where all the energy is.
3) Obsessions express symptoms of the ego working through
the affects of past shocks and traumas as an, albeit not always
successful, attempt to heal ourselves.
179

The Revolving Doors of Chapel Perilous
”f.,‘~i' /7
S‘ “
The Front Door, the Back Door, and the Trap Door
Obsession can sometimes launch us into the Chapel. Some obses-
sions accumulate such a heavy force of inertia that our force of will
can become overwhelmed with immobilizing indecision. These in-
ertia—generating obsessions entrench us in the day—in-day—out redun-
dancies of familiar routines that lead directly to the back door of
180

Chapel Perilous. This back door path of inertia maintains itself by
the sinking comfort of Familiarity Trance and can last for months,
years, and decades. A very different type of obsession comes with
the acceleration of novelty — of too many new experiences and in-
formation to assimilate — that spins us out into manic episodes of
rapid burnout. Like moths to a flame, these fiery obsessions are often
short-lived, unbearably exhilarating and typically end in disintegra-
tion. These are the neophiliac obsessions that lead straight through
the Chapel’s front doorway.
There’s another way of entering Chapel Perilous that’s a bit more
mysterious. It’s neither obsession with novelty or habit but a kind of
serendipitous luck of the draw that I call “freefall”. Freefall usually
involves some out—of—the-blue, brick—in—the—back—of—the—head, sucker
punch that suddenly drops us down through the Chapel Perilous trap
door. The bottom falls out in freefall as we drift disconnected through
the abyss.
In my travels and travails these are the three basic ways I have seen
myself and others find Chapel Perilous and often when we weren’t
looking for it. I have entered through the Front Door of Novelty fly-
ing by the seat of my pants on fire. I have crawled through the Back
Door of Inertia up to my ears in the sludge of stagnation. When
the Trap Door of Freefall dropped out from beneath me, I was just
another babe in the abyss sucking my thumb on the way to nowhere.
No matter how we get in, or which door we pass through, all who
enter Chapel Perilous achieve Initiation.
A chapel is a place of worship; perilous means fraught with danger.
Chapel Perilous is a place where a certain kind of danger has become
a point of worship. Whether or not that danger is accidental or in-
tentional depends on your relationship, or lack thereof, with Chapel
Perilous. Are you waking up inside the Chapel or did you fall asleep
during the sermon? Do you recognize anyone here or do these haunt-
ed faces belong to complete strangers? Do you know where you are?
Does your mother know where you are?
181

Patron Saints of Chapel Perilous
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
Honorary Front Door Patron Saint of Chapel Perilous
Status: Agnostic Heretic
Prolific, z'c0noclastz'c author and nearo-arzthropologist “Bob” Wilson
escaped the Chapel and defeated paranoia with daily Sufi Heart
Cha/era meditations and pranayama (yogic breathing).
FRONT DOOR: NOVELTY
Neophilia. A tipping point of new information and experience col-
lapses in on itself like a super nova turned black hole. This can mani-
fest as overwhelming short—circuiting via C-2 emotional upheavals,
C-3 data O.D., C-4 sociosexual addictions, C-5 bliss-out dispersions,
and C-6 & C-7 psychic blowouts from excessive psychoactive drug
use. Too much novelty too soon with not enough assimilation time
can force consciousness into a perpetual tilt-a-whirl merry-go-round
of accelerating chaos. Too hzgh — going nowhere fast!
182

Patron Saints of Chapel Perilous
WAYNE NEWTON
Honorary Back Door Patron Saint of Chapel Perilous
Status: Clergy
Consummate entertainer Wayne Newton perfiwnea’ over 30, 000 solo
shows in Las Vegas over a period of 40 plus years, earning him the
nickname, ‘Mr Las Vegas”.
BACK DOOR: INERTIA
Inertia. Symptoms include staggering redundancy, psychic and cre-
ative stagnation, and immobilizing indecision. The force of will is
overcome by the overwhelming force of habit and familiarity over-
dose. The back door can several ways: in apathetic immobility OR
a steely cheer OR an overly structured life OR an extremely cluttered
life. Here rests in useless repose, the tomb of the perpetual comfort
zone. There’s a fine line between a rut & a groove and the rut wins!
Treadmilling — going nowhere slowly.’
183

Patron Saints of Chapel Perilous
MIKE TYSON
Honorary Trap Door Patron Saint of Chapel Perilous
Status: Paranoid Heretic
Iron Mike”, the most dangerous boxer in history at his prime, also
fi)ught many heroic battles with the inner demons of alcohol, drug
and sex abuse, parasitical sycophants, and wrongful lawsuits, which
scarred his psyche with paranoia.
TRAP DOOR: FREE FALL
Catastrophic change. At the mercy of forces greater than we can con-
trol or comprehend, we free fall into the abyss without a clue, an an-
chor, or a compass. Common causes include unexpected windfalls of
fame or wealth, sudden loss of loved ones to death, massive Anima
and Animus attacks, the culture shock of not coping well in foreign
lands, mass media overexposure, and government interventions in
your personal life. Willy Nilly — out of control!
184

EXIT STRATEGIES
If you’ve entered through the Back Door of Overwhelming Famil-
iarity, you’re likely to remain in Chapel Perilous if you try to exit
through the back door. Try the Front Door, instead. Break up your
routines, take more risks and venture outside your comfort zones.
The same goes for those who came in through the Front Door of
novelty. Try the Back Door. Start building new habits of consistency
and predictability, such as going to the same restaurant every day at
the same time and ordering the same meal. Since front and back
doors represent the polar orientations of change and stasis, they can
be pitted against each other as counterpoints to neutralize each oth-
er’s influence. Unfortunately, those who fall through the wil1y—nilly
Trap Door of Freefall may not find such simple solutions.
Hi, I ’m not really here but I ’m here.
Couch-surfing in Chapel Perilous
My very first visit to the Chapel was through the trap door. Many
of my initial exit attempts failed. If I indulged in anxiety, or in any
way drew attention to myself, I would end up sitting in the Chapel
pews listening to the daily sermons. At the time I was trying to be a
magickian but the way of the Magus was not working for me here.
Any effort on my part to push my will onto the situation resulted in
despair. I don’t recall the moment when I relaxed my desire to con-
trol everything but that’s when things started loosening up for me.
185

As I continued letting go of my attachment to controlling outcomes,
an inner stillness eventually replaced my anxiety. This new calm was
my first step towards escape.
Since my trap door entrance coincided with falling in love for all the
wrong reasons, I also knew I had to chill out on obsessing on my
girlfriend, the femme fatale. But she also held the key to my soul in
a heart—shaped box buried 23 feet below the Chapel altar. I wanted
my soul back. That’s when I created and executed the Anima Shrine
ritual (the same Circuit Seven task). This ceremony defused the psy-
chic charge between us and lessened the messy animosity I felt in my
body. After this healing ritual, I somehow found myself standing
outside of the walls of Chapel Perilous with soul intact. What a
great feeling to be free of my girlfriend obsession and to be walking
away from the dark night I had once made my home.
On my second trip to the Chapel I ran right through the front door
with eyes wide shut. The staging of my play, “Chapel Perilous”, and
my hot new romance with the gorgeous blonde actress who portrayed
the “Anima” overwhelmed my ego with novelty. I could tell I was in
Chapel Perilous this time because my timing was off. It didn’t mat-
ter what I was doing or who I was with, my timing was terrible. I
felt like I was either in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong
place at the right time. I was also going through the motions of my
daily life like some broken marionette, without a shred of presence
or conviction. Even I couldn’t believe myself anymore. Hi there. Par-
don me. Do you have a moment? I’m not really here but I’m here.
I was phoning in my life, not living it. In retrospect, I now see how
timing coincides with believability. My timing was off because I did
not believe in myself. Timing = believability.
During a bardo netherworld of many sleepless nights, I held court
with my good friend Dr. Laphroaig (single malt scotch whiskey)
and the nocturnal sounds of Joy Division, Portishead, and Sisters of
Mercy. I was not exactly depressed as much as psychically displaced.
I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. After awhile, this off—kilter
condition took on a perverse attraction for me. I began twisting it into
my own version of Rimbaud’s deliberate disorientation of the senses,
a technique the Symbolist poet used to spin his psyche into a creative
186

state. This worked for a while but it didn’t shake that haunted, haunt-
ing feeling that some part of me had already crossed over to wherever
people cross over when they die and leave this place. I felt like I was
already there.
As before, I looked to Art for redemption. This time it was poetry that
saved me -— the stark poetics of Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers’ sculpted ar-
rangements of words conjured the same caustic spirits that had made
a home in me. Reading his works out loud (all great poetry must be
read aloud) brought some relief from this hungry ghost realm. How-
ever it was not enough to just read his poems. In typical theatricality
I ended up staging a dozen of his works as abstract Mime Theatre
(not the cutesy French stuff) in Carmel, California — Jeffers’ spiritual
home — featuring Jacob Shefa, Johanna Modisette, and me as the ab-
stracted mimes with Barbara Shuler reciting the poems, accompanied
by Peter Metcalf improvising on cello.
WHERE I?
This woman cannot live more than one year.
Her growing death is hidden in a hopeless place,
Her death is like a child growing in her,
And she knows it, you see it shine in her face.
She looks at her own hands and thinks “In a year
These will be burnt like rags in the Crematory.
I shall not feel it. Where I? Where I? Not anywhere.
It is strange, it gives to her face a kind of glory.
Her mind used to be lazy and heavy her face,
Now she talks all in haste, looks young and lean
And eager, her eyes glitter with eagerness,
As if she were newly born and had never seen
The beauty of things, the terror, pain, joy, the song.
Or is it better to live at ease, dully and long?
—Robinson Jeffers
187

Once again I managed to escape Chapel Perilous by performing a
ritual disguised as theatre (more on my first escape in ‘IA Neurological
Autobiography”; HOW I GOT THIS WAY). I'm aware that not every-
body can exit Chapel Perilous in this way. Sometimes, I am unable
to exit this way. I think that exit strategies can be developed once we
are aware that we’re in Chapel Perilous and maybe discover how we
got there in the first place. When I’m in doubt and in need of a good
reminder of my options, I return to the story of how my favorite Her-
etic Robert Anton Wilson escaped:
“Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I”, cannot be lo-
cated in the time—space continuum: it is weightless, odorless, taste-
less, and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed like the Ego,
once you’re inside it there doesn't seem to be any way to ever get
out, again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into
existence by thought and does not exist outside of thought.” —- Robert
Anton Wilson
There is a key that unlocks the Chapel gates in Bob’s final phrase.
Chapel Perilous was brought into existence by thought and does not
exist outside of thought. Those who discover how to use the mind
to see through the mind, to see beyond the products of the mind,
can also be free of this mind. I believe this type of “seeing through”
— the mind seeing through and beyond itself — expresses a function of
C-6 second attention (see Circuit Six Feature Article, “The First and
Second Attentions” and C-6 tasks). For those contemplating escape
and seeking clues for the means to make that possible, I offer the fol-
lowing Chapel Perilous Tasks. Good luck and godspeed.
188

Chapel Perilous Tasks
“Exit Strategies of the Three Powers ”
1) THE POWER OF CONFESSION
This is a ritual of confession. If you have Angel Tech pick a sermon
from the seven sermons in the CHAPEL PERILOUS section (pages
128-138) that most closely relates to your own visit or residence. Or,
if you wish, write a more personal confession about what you have
done or are still doing that keeps you inside the Chapel. Read it out
loud as a confession to that part of you that is still caught or residing
in the Chapel. Show yourself that you care. Make it count.
2) THE POWER OF PRAYER
This is a ritual of prayer. Find a quiet place where you can feel com-
pletely safe and alone. In this place, set up an altar with a candle plus
relics and/ or images that somehow symbolize the parts of yourself
that you feel may be lost or absorbed into Chapel Perilous. You will
use this altar as a psychic focal point to send a message to those parts
of yourself. When you pray to these aspects of yourself, you are
praying for the return of the bits and pieces of your totality, your
soul. NOTE: This ritual does not require that you believe in the soul
or in God or any Deity, unless you already do. It simply requires
that you pray for your safe return from Chapel Perilous and as such,
requires sincerity of intent.
3) THE POWER OF BREAKING TRANCE
This is a trance-breaking ritual. Look at each of the three doors, or
entrances, into Chapel Perilous as a different trance: The Back Door
and the TRANCE OF HABIT, the Front Door and the TRANCE
OF NOVELTY, the Trap Door and the TRANCE OF FALLING
(feel free to adjust these terms to serve your own semantics). After
determining how you entered Chapel Perilous, experiment with find-
ing or inventing ways to break the trance of that entrance. Identify
the trance that keeps you in CHAPEL PERILOUS and find ways
to break that trance. BREAK TRANCE. Trances can be broken by
instigating activities that counteract the trance, i.e., what is the polar
opposite of the trance you wish to break? BREAK TRANCE.
189

Weeks Seven and Eight
Progress Evaluation
Consolidatmg a Personal Assessment of Course Work
Review
Catchmg Up to Speed Towards Course Completion

PROGRESS EVALUATION QUESTIONNAIRE
1) Review the First Week's SYSTEM OVERVIEW and reflect
on how your understanding of this material has changed and/
or remained the same since starting the course.
2) Check your Lab book for the first week's assignment of how
you measured your experience and integration of each of the
eight circuits, on a scale of 1-10. Update these measurements
to coincide with the research results of your experiments over
the first six weeks of this course; write down the new measure-
ment.
3) Of the experiments, rituals, and meditations you actually
completed, which ones resulted in the greatest success and/
or surprises, and which ones resulted in little or no noticeable
change or, felt to you like a failure or incomplete?
4) List the circuit(s) you feel need more integration and the
one(s) that you feel integrated enough for the time being. Are
there any circuits that you have not been able to access in any
way whatsoever? What are they? Also report your frustrations,
lack of motivation and/ or need for more experience.
192

5) Has your definition of Intelligence changed since first ad-
dressing these questions in the first week? Update any changes
to synchronize closer with your present time experiences.
6) Throughout this journey through the 8-CB, was there any
one circuit that remains with you as a favorite place to either
hang out in and/ or to explore further? If so, please describe
what, why, and how.
7) Was there any one circuit that you found yourself unusually
and/ or unexpectedly stuck in? If so, please explain what, why,
and how. Also, offer possible actions or adjustments that might
serve to mobilize or circulate the energies there. Would you
consider this an area that you could use some outside guidance
in?
8) To what extent has this course lived up to your expectations
and/ or delivered what you wanted or needed from it? Also,
how did this course's content and presentation work, or not
work, for you? Give examples.

Review
Catching Up to Speed Towards Course Completion
The Course ends, the Work continues...
No final arrivals, graduations, diplomas, or exams exist for this
course. All the tasks, readings, rituals, and meditations were spe-
cifically designed to stimulate your own processes with the 8-Circuit
Brain and whatever else they have inspired in you. Though associa-
tions and parallels can be found between the 8-CB and other meta-
forms -- Cabbala, Hindu Chakra System, Tarot, NLP, Enneagram,
Astrology, Buddhist Eight-Fold Path, etc -- I heartily encourage its
study and use on its own distinct terms. Though I can understand
the C-3 compulsion for cross—referencing the 8-CB with other sys-
tems, especially towards the cosmic quest of a grand unified theory
explaining everything about everything, I personally think it’s a waste
of time. But then again, I’m not a meta-systems theoretician either.
The focus throughout this course has been on the study and applica-
tion of the Eight-Circuit Brain model with special emphasis on spe-
cific vertical connectivities bonding lower and upper circuits. Those
who have completed most of the course readings and tasks will have
enough firsthand experience to begin developing their own circuit
theories. This final week is about catching up to speed on missed
reading assignments and to complete whatever work was left unfin-
ished. Good luck and godspeed!
194

COURSE INDEX
Week One - System Overview
Task l: assign numbers to each of the eight circuits
Task 2: your distillations of what each circuit means to you in your
words
Week Two - Circuit-1 and Circuit-5
Task 1 - Cl: Locating your I.P.
Task 2 - C1: The Salt Bath Ritual
Task 3 — Cl: Rigor Mortis Junior
Task 4 — Cl: Stretch, Sweat & Cool Off
Task 5 — Cl: Applying the I.P.
Task 6 - C5: Solo Polarization Ritual
Task 7 — C5: Aimless Wandering
Week Three - Circuit-2 and Circuit-6
Task 1 - C2: The Investment List: Assets or Liabilities?
Task 2a - C2: Status Report Part 1: Shrinking & Expanding
Task 2b — C2: Status Report Part 2: Code of Honor
Task 3 — C2: The Dominion Ritual
Task 4 — C2: The Emotional Polarity Ritual
Task 5 - C2: Five small alternative rituals to Task 4
Task 6 — C6: Two ways to engage the second attention
Task 7 - C6: Conscious Trance Meditation Technique
Task 8 — C6: The Neuro-Tarot
Week Four - Circuit-3 and Circuit-7
Task 1 - C3: Report: On Defining Sanity/ Insanity
Task 2 - C3: Meditation: The Disappearing Monkey Act
Task 3 — C3: Ritual: Nondirectional/ Directional Jogging
Task 4 — C7: The Animus/Anima Shrine Ritual
Task 5 — C7: The Verticality Ritual
195

Week Five - Circuit-4 and Circuit-8
Task 1 — C4: Report/ Ritual: The True Friendship Criteria
Task 2 - C4: Task: The Social Trust Ritual
Task 3 - C4: Task: Talking with Strangers
Task 4 — C4: Task: The Ego Corrosive Ritual
Task 5 - C8: Task: Consciousness Projection
Task 6 — C8: Task: Dreaming Ritual
Task 7 - C8: Task: The Cloud of Unknowing
Week Six - Chapel Perilous
Task 1: The Power of Confession
Task 2: The Power of Prayer
Task 3: The Power of Breaking Trance
Week Seven - Progress Evaluation
: System overview
Eight circuits measurements
Evaluation of completed tasks
Evaluation of circuits
Intelligence definition
Favorite circuit
Circuit You’re Stuck In
Course Expectations
99>'.°.‘F’.‘:‘.>P.’.'.”“
196

Section 3
FORUM
Q&A
Featuring z'hquz'rz'es from those
who completed the Praxis Course
197

THE PRAXIS FORUM
The following forum material was excerpted from a private eight-
week online version of The Eight—Circuit Brain course as featured
in the PRAXIS section. I include their anonymous contributions
here for their honesty, candor and courage. I also believe that their
processes and inquiries, and my own responses to them, might be
illuminating to those already committed to the PRAXIS course in
this book. I have also included a few offerings and responses from
various online communities where I have found resonant inquiries.
Each of the z'talz'cz'zedsectz'ons of text, between the non-italicized sections
of text, represents the views, processes, and questions of a different
person. My responses are preceded by my initials, AA.
198

On the 8-Circuit course material in general
I think I grasp all the circuits, and am moving towards integrating them, but
I don’t know that I ’m doing it right. My life has always been this desire for
balance, and when I came across this model in Angel Tech, I was astounded
at how well it resonated with my own research and experiments. Yet, are
we to try to equally and incrementally grow in each circuit? I don’t feel like
we should focus on one over others, but then what if one needs more work?
How does one know which circuit needs more work? If we focus too much
on the first four; will its corresponding hzgher” circuit give us a shock? If
a higher circuit is overemphasized, is there a counter shock from its lower”
correspondence szgnzfizing that anchoring needs to occur? If all your circuits
are jucked, are you in Chapel Perilous, or the Robot Junkyard?
AA: Your questions and concerns as legitimate. Since each CNS
(Central Neural System) differs, each person engages the processes in
this course at their own pace and according to what they are willing
and/ or unwilling to do. Individual integrity and autonomy count for
a lot here. We are using the 8-CB as a diagnostic to discover the existing
conditions of our internal and external lives, rather than idealize this
system as any kind of Nietzschean super hero yoga, though for some
this remains their preferred self—delusion. In working through each
circuit we invariably discover strengths and weaknesses and where
work is most needed. These exposures of “what needs work” and
also “what can rest” become obvious over time. What is required
more than anything else is self-honesty and a willingness to commit
to actually doing the work, as opposed to thinking about doing the
work.
A big part of self-work is learning how to increase the force of our
commitment. Commitment as a force can be increased at will when
you know how and is addressed in the I.P. (Integrity Point) technique
of WEEK TWO. WEEK ONE is about exposing our preconceptions,
expectations, and existing knowledge of the 8—Circuit model. This
preliminary ideational phase provides an important base to be tested
against the truths of more direct experience and adjusting our map
to better serve the real life territories we’ve encountered. In regards to
the Robot Junkyard, I say be kind to the robot; 5/ he is your friend.
199

On Chakras vs. Circuits
Do you find correlations between the Cha/eras and the Circuits, especially the
third chakra and circuit three?
AA: Whereas the chakras refer to actual emanations from living
organs in the human glandular system, the circuits do not. The circuits
refer to a symbolic system — as opposed to the more “real” chakra
system — that if used correctly (remembering that it’s a symbolic
system), can refer to attributes of consciousness and intelligence of
the chakras. The 3rd chakra (solar plexus region) and third circuit do
have relevant parallels but there are also important differences. They
are not a clean match. Certain esoteric systems view the solar plexus
as a kind of dreaming portal through which the dreambody exits and
re-enters the physical body at night during sleep. I think what ties
the 3rd chakra and third circuit together is the state of being ego-
identified. Check out that queazy feeling you get in your solar plexus
the next time you surpass your uncertainty threshold.
On the I.P. (the Integrity Point)
I had been contemplating my IP as: connection with Gaia (Earth
Intelligence)” to very strongly feeling: connecting to / creating sacred
space internally (eso) or externally (exo)” and now seeing as its a fiarce of
commitment I've rewarded it like so: “commitment to the sacred”. I ’ve been
applying it as a force and well I fizel like whenever I do it gives me energy to
do things I have trouble committing to or enhances my focus with those things
that I am good at.
AA: It looks to me like your reflections have paid off. We know
when we have discovered an actual I.P. by the positive results of
applying its force to other areas requiring more commitment or its
ability to enhance areas that we already demonstrate commitment
in. You say you have discovered the sacredness of life. You will
know if this is your I.P. by a total commitment to this experience.
You see, it is possible to know the sacredness of life and still not be
ready to fully commit to this experience. The I.P. is not an ideal or a
belief or an aspiration. The I.P. refers to an unbending force of total
commitment.
200

I am totally committed to: sleepz'ng well, the idea of a higher purpose to
life, the music I love, finding new artists/ musicians to love, the idea of
family / community, my cat, getting better at being myself and makz'ng more
contributions to the world (learning how to do this), keeping in touch with
certain people who have moved away, eating healthy tasty food, running,
yoga, traveling more...my list is long because i believe my most basic trait is
my enthusiasm. It is diflicult for me to do things which do not enthuse me.
To accomplish certain tasks I am not into sometimes I have to pretend I am
excited-- is this the trick? To not be flzke about it and draw from one’s internal
source?
AA: The I.P. does refer to an internal source of energy and your
enthusiasm could be it if you are 100% behind it when it happens.
The I.P., however, is not about pretending unless you call your
commitment to being on this planet pretending. The energy of the
I.P. expresses a force of self-commitment that stems from the first
survival chakra, at the base of the spine, which contains the truth
about the degree you are willing to commit to being on this planet.
Tapping into this energy, and then directing it to areas that need for
of this commitment energy, is what the I.P. technique is all about.
I ’m pretty insecure. In examining the possible IP’s I always had a doubt in
my mind like but do I really support that? So now I fieel like the uncertainty
of things puts me in a situation were I just don ‘t feel like I could back up
anything. I always have this doubt in my mind. So I realized that my IP
might possibly be this, my doubt about everything. Do you suppose I ’m on the
right direction or should I look further to find something more solid than my
solid doubt? I feel this is meta—complicated or simply meta-boring.
AA: Your doubt may indeed be an IP or, perhaps your uncertainty.
Maybe what you call your meta-boredom is an I.P. Let’s consider
other options. Consider that this I.P. is not a concept but a reality,
and that I am asking you to search for what is real. For some this can
seem an almost impossible task while for others, the answer is right
under their noses. What I am saying here is that if you approach this
task from a purely conceptual (C-3) orientation, you will only find
a conceptual result. The I.P. links to C-1 and its innate biological
“language” of instinct, sensation, action. The Body Knows what the
mind can only guess at. Take a walk outdoors.
201

I fiaund my 1.1’. as honesty and applied that ‘energy’ to the chemistry class I
was in. I immediately noticed many changes in my experience— I was much
more aware and concerned with the quality of my work (nothing too difficult,
taking notes), but it also took less effiart than usual to maintain this level of
commitment. My mind was more clear and fi)cused, and I understood the
material easily. I needed to renew the effect several times, as I slipped back into
my usual habits. I also felt a strange reluctance to the experience— it was if a
lazy part of me didn’t want to put forward this strange, new eflbrt. However;
I plan on repeating the experiment as ofien as possible.
AA: You did the work and got results; well done.
Perhaps my II’. is my commitment to evolving, getting myself together and
realizing my potential. When I ’m at my most self—destructive, or when I ’m
failing to follow through on things, the DESIRE to ‘do better’ or to initiate an
upward curve in my evolution seems always there. Even in the midst of the
dumbest shitI end up doing. Does that sound viable?
AA: Viable? Perhaps not. Though strong desire can be a powerful
motivator, desire alone can never fully achieve the high ideals you
have set for yourself. Sometimes desire can become so strong it
leaves us wanting for more and having less. Reflect on the distinction
between Necessity and Desire. For example, the need for food vs. the
desire for food. Maybe it can be a good polarity for your C-5 Solo
Ritual. The cultural trance of materialism/ consumerism has many
of us so fixated on what we want that we lose touch with what we
actually need.
The only people that I can stand behind 100% are my husband and my
mother. There is a mutual and abiding love back and from each of them
and me that is incomparable to anything else in this world fl)r me personally.
They are my bedrock of support through thick and thin. This next part is
harder to describe, but there’s certain experiences I feel I stand behind 100%:
certain inspired moments making art or mixing live video, certain times
playing strategy games, or making love, or playing guitar; or other kinds
of performance or dynamic interactive activity. However; its less about the
activity and more about the specific dynamic energy & intensity - its like
they are vehicles fior that experience. Its the experience I fiael 100% about, the
moment of active bliss when everything is balanced just so by my own hand.
202

AA: Your use of the word “bedrock” says it all. This force of
commitment (IP) may be as consistent as gravity itself and may
indeed be an expression of gravity through the energetic body.
Your husband and mother seem to me good examples of the I.P.
in your life, as there is no belief required to maintain that force. If
the other examples you listed require inspiration, they may be more
like convictions and/ or aspirations, both of which are important yet
differ from the force of commitment in specific ways. Refer to your
unwavering stance behind your husband and mother and you can
sense, feel and register the steady force of your commitment. This
force requires no inspiration or belief from you to exist. The force
of commitment conveys remarkable consistency; it doesn’t just come
and go depending on mood, circumstance, or inspiration.
On Apathy
It is my view that z'n cornrnitting to selfworle one will inevitabbz be confronted
with their own (and others Qpatheticness. Other than general inadequacy and
powerlessness, what is the true nature of something pathetic? What causes
patheticness?
AA: I think part of any real self—work will expose us to the limitations
of what we actually can and cannot do, that is, if we are totally honest
with ourselves. For example, I think it's natural to feel helpless in the
face of any apparently insurmountable odds. The trick is not falling
prey to Poor Baby self—victimization by confusing our feelings of
helplessness for actually being helpless. This confusion easily brings
us to the bended knees of patheticness squared.
Apathy expresses a symptom of the immobilization of the will
and can result after any outside shock that delivers a serious blow
to our self—confidence. Apathy signals a “why bother?” loss of self-
confidence and energy so necessary to facing life’s challenges and the
solving of our own problems. Apathy can also be instructive by the
perception and receptivity it can bring unless, of course, this apathy
is also tainted by negative emotions such as cynicism, bitterness,
avarice, envy, resentment, guilt, etc. Some kinds of apathy can simply
result from an increasing awareness of powers far greater than our
ego, whether that be big government or big religion or big spiritual
203

experiences, coloring our personalities with pathos. The exception
to this pathetic disposition may be the degree we have accepted the
absurdity of life and can laugh at our so-called ‘spirituality’.
On C-1 Fear and Safety Issues
Am I onto something when I think that what we call fear is more an energetic
response to our environment, but when exaggerated or misidenti_'/iea', this
energy powers destructive thought patterns? More reflections on perceived
versus real fear; and the simplicity of real fear- In cases of real fiaaig is it less
stressfitl because it is a simpler situation? It seems that in situations of real
fiat; it may be easier to identify the threat and respond to z't. With perceived
fear; since its not real in the first place, the mind is able to confixse itself more
easily.
AA: Yes, I think you are onto something. Direct experience of the
energy of pure fear is a raw signal free of C-2 dramatization and C-3
mapping about what it all means. When we respond instinctively (C-
l), emotions (C-2) and thoughts (C-3) may have very little to do with
it such as in the common response people show in real emergencies
(not just perceived emergencies): they get real calm and act without
hesitation.
When I was a child I was always aflaid of losing my mom. Some nights
I would wake up feeling intense fiaar and then I would just crawl into my
mom ‘s bed and stick to her tightly to malee sure that she was still there. Real
fear happened when she died. It felt like part of me died. It is strange that I
stillfieel that void in me. I still have the fear of being lefi‘ alone. Is it because I
need to do something to restore my safety?
AA: It is biologically and emotionally healthy for any child to need
the mother’s love, sense of safety and emotional sanctuary. The child
depends on the mother for these experiences and when the mother
dies, it can be a real shock to the child within you no matter how
old you are. The fear and void you feel inside may express the inner
child’s cry inside the mature woman’s body, calling out to the mother
in you. It may now be up to you to give yourself whatever love, sense
of safety and emotional shelter you once depended on your mother
for. Tending to these needs can help you reclaim C-1 and begin a new
204

relationship with your Body, one that replaces fear with love. I suggest
the polarity of Mother/ Child in the C-5 Solo Polarization Ritual to
engage these processes more directly, openly and consciously.
On the C-1 Rigor Mortis Jr. ritual
I really tensed my muscles doing this task, I really fizlt them contracting hard
and fiiund it very diflicult to build the tension flom the chest up. Chest, neck
and fizce tension felt like a threat to me, like hurting myself or blocking life.
From the torso onward this task became very unpleasant. I know I could do
this task better than this and would like some guidance to go past this point
and to understand the feeling of unpleasantness and fear related to whole
body tension.
AA: Look at your experience of pain (or very unpleasant sensations)
as an important C-1 signal from that you are trying too hard or
pushing too much. Don't hold your breath when you are reaching
‘peak tension’; if you experience discomfort, relax a little. Slow down.
The fear related to the ‘whole body tension’ can mean a number of
things. The body knows it’s going to die; the mind thinks it will live
forever. And so, this whole body tension can feel a little like death
to the body and why this ritual is called Rigor Mortis Jr. It is a small
preview of the inevitable for us all. The fear can also stem from an
ego fear of “losing control”; maybe you are afraid to surrender to
this experience. Maybe you are afraid you will die, too. Maybe you
are re in a rush. My suggestion is to slow down. Do not rush. Go
gently. Talk to yourself; tell yourself, “we ’re not going to dz'e now. We are
conducting an experiment in tension and release.”
I did the rigor mortis ritual again and then afler performing the warmup/
stretch / cool down this evening (a few hours ago) i am feeling better and better
as the day has gone on. I feel lighter and more energetic and there is a sense
of generalized positive anticipation. Maybe a little touch of some C5 bliss
creeping through?
AA: You are doing the work and getting results, well done.
205

I don’t understand how I can be totally tense and at the same time breathe.
If I encourage tensions z'n the belly and the chest the breath naturally stops.
Should I tense the muscles only halfway?
AA: Though it may not ‘make sense’ to your mind, follow the
directions and see for yourself what it is that you can and cannot
do. What the body naturally does may differ from what you think
it can naturally do. Remember to slow it down and go gentle on
yourself. Find the level of tension that does not cross over into pain
or unpleasant feelings. Pain and suffering are unnecessary to perform
this task or any other task in this course.
On the C-1 Salt Bath ritual
This ritual was pretty intense and show-stopping for me. I had profound
feelings of allowing my body to do things, to relax the way it wanted. It made
me realize how much of my stretching and relaxation exercises are usually
expressing some regime I read about where the movements are prescribed
beforehand. This time I felt like I was actually listening to my body fivr the
first time in ages. I had womb—like sensations that were very profound fiir me;
a sphere outside me keeping me safiz, a sphere that somehow was the whole
Earth, and some sort of umbilical cord connecting me to z't. Around halfivay
through I was having oscillations between total vulnerability and need for
protection, and also being the ‘mother’ figure who was offering protection to
my body. I seemed to occupy both roles at once. I had an awe—inspirz'ng sense
of my body as a really incredible intelligence of a different order than what
I ’m used to valuing (intellect, largely).
AA: Your words beautifully address the experience you had with the
Salt Bath ritual. I totally understand how preverbal and pre-linguistic
this primordial C-1 experience of Body Wisdom can be. I especially
appreciated your notes on the oscillation between Infant/ Mother
with the defenseless state of real vulnerability genuinely in need of
protection and nurturance.
206

In the bath, I breathed out, waited fiir the next in breath, and it didn’t come.
There was no discomfort ATALL. It felt like I could have just not breathed
for days, but I got scared (what if I die here?!) and eventually told myself to
take a breath. I was scared. Not a panicky fear; more of an assessment from
a space of total relaxation, ‘I wonder what’s going on’, to ‘what if I ’m going
into some state that I don’t know how to get out of? ’ I don’t wish I hadn’t
taken the breath, but would like to know more about this state. Thinking
about it, the breathing-halt was partly my body telling me how much I gasp
fiar air in life. But it was really so unusual. Next time, if z't happens, I want to
keep waiting fior the next breath. ..there’s nothing to fear is there? Is there???
AA: To the best of my knowledge, I do not know of any instance
where soaking in a salt bath caused an actual physical death. I do
know that if you soak too long in salt water, it can exhaust the C-
2 emotional body and pucker up your skin like a prune. You were
evidently shocked by the awareness of your body’s innate capacity to
stop breathing momentarily AND not die. This probably confused C-
3 intellect, which could not make sense of the event. Consequently,
C-2 was probably alerted into panic and flight mode to push you
into making a choice to start breathing again. I believe you may have
discovered something new about C-1 here and that is how biological
intelligence has a life of its own and can operate autonomously and
do things you were previously unaware of.
Do the bath, again. When breathing, focus on the exhale and allow
the inhale to occur as a reflex. To do this you must exhale all the
way. You can exhale a little further beyond the point where you
feel there is no more air. It may feel as if you have exhaled all the
way but the body retains more oxygen than you realize. And if you
cannot find the reflex to inhale, by all means intervene and choose
life: INHALE. This kind of ‘connected breathing’ happens when the
inhale is allowed to become a reflex. Connected breathing is familiar
to most musicians who play brass and wind instruments and, the
didgeridoo.
207

On the C-2 Code of Honor
I have to admit, the more I grow closer to fixlfilling the code of honor I have
established myselfi the better I fieel all the way around. What if someone has
the capability to flollow their code of honor perfectly : couldn't this too lead
to a overly—critical spirit and an elitist attitude, or becoming anal-retentive?
I ’m wondering if I won’t develop an attitude of self righteousness or lack of
tolerance fl)r others’ shortcomings? Do you think are there times when being
rebellious against your own code of honor and consciously doing something(s)
“wrong” can actually be a healthy thing on some level?
AA: As we know, some rules are meant to be broken and sometimes,
those rules are the ones we create ourselves. The urge to break rules
can sometimes indicate rules that have outgrown their usefulness
or no longer serve present time needs and values. As for criticizing
or disrespecting the shortcomings of others, this sounds like a good
rule to break and replace with another rule that accepts your own
shortcomings, if only to better endure the flaws of others.
On C-2 Status issues
I discovered that approval from respected persons invoke positive emotional
responses in me. If I take responsibility for choosing those I respect (or the
traits in people that] respect), it still feels as if I am remaining true to myself
and not seeking it out. However; there is still something fishy about this to
me. It may be that I am over—c0nceptualizing the situation and assigning
outdated thoughts of “don’t need approval flom anybody to those that I
have consciously chosen to respect. I am confi4sed by the conflictingfizelings
between my self-approval and external respected-person approval. Overall, I
thz'nk that this is a C-3 issue, making a problem out of nothing.
AA: Your awareness of C-3 complicating things may be the result of
intellect not yet learning how to accurately read and understand C-2
emotions on their own terms. C-2 does not have to make sense to
function. Emotions follow their own fuzzy logic as contrary forces
and contradictions. To a naive C-3, this can seem wrong or like a
problem to be solved because “it doesn’t make sense.” When we can
allow contrary forces and contradictions to be what they are, without
confusing them for a problem to be solved, what was once perceived
as complicated may soon be revealed as authentic complexity.
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My sense of status is so tied in with how others respond to me, to the point
where it feels that to restore status means putting them down, to be dominating
and aggressive, because they are the only measure of my status. And good
people’ don ’t do that to other people so I just slide into guilt and anxiety,
giving up all my power. Its a fucking nightmare.
AA: Your concern for how others respond to you and/ or what they
think of you can also mask a genuine care and love for people that
you have not yet found a more open expression for. You may not
be as misanthropic or antisocial as you think; perhaps you're just
struggling with a socially primitive shyness.
On Paranoia
Personally, fi)r almost a year now, I have become aware that in social
situations, I catch people staring at me more ofien than not. I ’m talking about
strangers here. It usually happens like this — I will scan the room of people,
and almost immediately make eye contact with another person staring at me.
Then I will move on, and make eye contact again. Also, I often look up at
a particular random person as they simultaneously look up into my eyes,
with no apparent reason fi)r doing so. This happens across distances and in
crowded rooms. It’s not the case that I ’m always being watched, but more
ofien that not, if I look around, there is someone staring at me. Its no longer
a big deal to me, but I ’ve come to feel that I am, in a way, being watched. I
don ’t mean this in a malicious way, and I don’t think it’s a paranoid notion.
I have felt the paranoia beckoning.
AA: As you may know, we have entered an era of unprecedented
change made obvious by the fluctuating and collapsing global
economic structures. Due to the massive investment of collective
consciousness in C-3 symbolic reality of money, all that consciousness
cannot help but destabilize as these structures wobble and break apart.
Collective consciousness is now in a state of shock and wavering and
adrift in its own kind of collective limbo bardo or, “Chapel Perilous”,
if you will, until it restabilizes at a higher level of awareness than
before.
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As a result of this “crisis in consciousness” people from all walks
of life are currently undergoing various stages of inner awakening.
We see flickers of awareness and precognition but without full
cognition yet about what is happening and/ or how to best manage
those energies. I remember walking the streets the morning after a
big earthquake and looking into the eyes of people. Everybody was
still in shock yet we were all strangely alert and open to each other,
looking fresh into each other’s eyes without the usual baggage of
biases and judgments so often clouding our jaded alligator eyes. It
had this miraculous utopian feeling about it, like, why can't we stay
open to each other like this all the time?
I had some paranoia about manifiestation and external/ internal influences.
I worried that, because I was getting good at manifestation that there was no
way fiar me to know if I was creating the inflnrmation I was perceiving, or if
it was being presented to me by the external world. A friend of mine, when I
asked her about it, asked me back, “Does it matter?” And I said, “Oh. No,
I guess not.” I figure that no situation is created by a single person and that
helps keep me from being paranoid.
AA: “Does it matter?” Yes and no. You raise an interesting point about
the origin point of creation. I have been creating theatre and films for
most of my life and even though the closing credits at the end of each
film reads “Directed by Antero Alli”, a part of me knows it's a lie.
Filmmaking is not only a teamwork process but an internal creative
process involving genuinely mysterious forces that do not belong to
me. I call them muses. Though I must earn everybody’s trust on the
set as “the director”, I quietly proceed as an impostor who knows
the truth: it’s not me that creates. At best, I can make myself into a
worthy vessel for the expression of creation through me. At the end
of the day what matters to me is how well I served creation.
On Shock
About the ’shocks and anchors’ idea. I ’m comfortable enough with the lower
circuits acting as ‘anchors ’ flar the upper, but does ‘shocks’ generally refer to a
checkin g / cautionary experience sent from the upper circuit to the lower (so to
speak) to let you know one of your lower circuits is lacking integration? This
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was the sense I originally gleaned flom the readings, but you refer to the 5th
circuit shock as rapture ‘, which is presumably a more ‘positive’ or desirable
experience. I suppose I ’m just asking flnr clarification on the idea of ‘shocks’.
AA: The term “shock” gets a lot of bad press. I use the word for
specific events that catalyze growth, mobility and transformation of
some sort or another. I do not view shocks as innately negative or
positive but neutral. I see that how we respond to a given shock can
determine the degree we enhance (positive) or diminish (negative)
ourselves. Using the 8—circuit model, I can track four types of shock:
Ecstasy, Uncertainty, Indivisibility, and Impermanence. For example,
5th circuit shock of ecstasy can be positive for some and negative for
others, depending on how we respond to more pleasure, happiness
or joy than we’re accustomed or “allowed” to. I see C-5 bliss as our
natural somatic state when we’re free of the burdens of unresolved
survival anxiety, power issues, over-thinking, moral judgments and
familial guilt complexes -- innate to the first four circuits, respectively --
that can crimp our bliss capacity accordingly.
C-5 Solo Polarization Ritual Lab Reports
Polarity: anger/ peace. The first 3 or 4 times going fwd/ back were self-z'mage
and performance-based in that I felt I had to ‘keep going’ ‘do something’. I
was very selfconscious. When I imagined I was done, I tried to “stay in no-
fiirm as long as it takes to stop identzfizing with the energies... ’I thought, I ’ll
step back and see if I can not identifii, and then I ’ll lenow the difference’. I
then stepped back to see what would happen. What fiillowed felt like trance.
One pole contained power with light, almost delicate, intensely focused
movement, on the other was a ball of heat moving around my body, which
crumbled and made feeble noises. There was a sense that it wouldn’t let me go
til IT was done. The movement didn’t seem to relate to any concept I had of
these polarities. It was simpler; a more simple connection. My body did what
it wanted in relation to the polarities, nothing conscious. When Ifizlt ready
to stop I noticed that the only real way out of it was to resume some other
everyday trance.
AA: Your report suggests the layers you underwent in this ritual from
C-3 mental impositions down to the simpler C-1 biological impulses
and reflexes. The self-consciousness you mention is natural to the
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beginning stages of this ritual approach that expresses a kind of
embarrassment of the social persona. With a little more practice,
you can get over this embarrassment and dive into a more engaged
participation with the forces themselves. Your words convey a
breakthrough to me, where the forces innate to the polarity were
allowed to carry and move you, direct you, rather than you trying to
control or direct them.
I see the choice you made afterwards to break trance as an intelligent
one. Returning to a deeper No-Form state can also break trance
but what you did —— “resume some other, everyday trance” -— served
you well enough it seems. A key to unlocking the Solo Polarization
Ritual involves selecting a meaningful polarity, one that is “hot” or
highly personal to you, and somehow refers to the existing conditions
of what is already up for you in your life. The point here is to get
personal with yourself, to challenge and even confront yourself with
a polarity that might even scare you a little. Or maybe a lot...
Polarity: urban/ rural. The no-form state was challenging, but I found it
useful to keep my eyes shut and fl)C‘L£S on breathing, as my body was starting
to recover flom jumping around the space. When I projected the two polarities
they came across my mind '5 eye as a flood of images. I used my hands and
arms as a way of flinging each polarity into its side of the room. First I
entered the urban ” side. I dz'dn’t notice much. Maybe a little tingling in
my lefi hand? I just stood there, catching my breath and wondering if I was
going to get any results. The preparation period seemed so successful, I think
I was hoping for more. I walked over to the “rural” side, and still not much
noteworthy. Maybe my right hand was tingling now? That was a notable
change from the other side. I walked back and forth again, without noting
much.
The third time that I stood on the “rural” side things started to change. My
feet started moving on their own. I was kind of dancing around, shuffling
my feet and twirling around a lz'ttle bit. Afler a little bit of time, I naturally
drified back over to the “urban ”side. My fleet almost instantly lost their range
of motion. They stepped up and down in the same place while my upper
body swung around in a sort of unpleasant way. My shoulders, head and
neck were wanting to move a lot while my lower half stayed pretty still. This
proved to by dizzying and somewhat uncomfortable.
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After a short while, I returned to the “rural” side where my movements were
once again more fluid and easy. I moved back and forth three or four more
times, experiencing the same type of movements on each side, and probably
spending a few minutes on each side befiare moving back to the other. My last
trip to the “urban ” side of the room really sapped me. I started to fieel almost
sick and definitely dizzy. I stumbled back to the otherside, as it dz'dn ’t feel right
to end the ritual without returning to the rural side. I felt better after doing
that, but was definitely drained. When I returned to no form, my hands and
upper body felt cold. I stayed there with eyes closed for several breaths until I
felt pretty normal. I ’m curious about how I should interpret this experience,
or if I should try to interpret it at all. Is the purpose of the exercise to diffuse
some of the tension between these seeming opposites by giving expression to
the underlying energies? On a basic level, I wasn’t surprised to find that I was
more comfortable on the “rural” side, but I ‘m wondering if there is anything
else I should be taking away flom this.
AA: I am glad you stayed with the ritual after the first pass into
each side of the polarity, instead of stopping out of discouragement.
Your commitment to stay the course produced some very interesting
results. This particular ritual form is very simple and evocative.
What emerges from it, once we get beyond the mental chatter, are
nothing less than patterns of motion animated by forces rising up
from the existing conditions of our lives, as they have been absorbed
by and embedded in the Body such as your body’s innate responses
to urban and rural life. Note the fluidity and grace in the rural zone
and the marching in place in the urban zone. The body never lies.
No interpretation required here. Your C-1 / C-5 body wisdom showed
you the whole story, practically spelled it out in black and white.
Polarity: dreamtime / waking time. Upon beginning to enter the no fiorm
state I was not sure if I was really in it or not, though I felt like I was given a
nod that I could step back into the waking time. As soon as I had crossed the
threshold I was immediately possessed by some gnarly mechanical primitive
finrce. Rigid with veins of iron steel bridges creeping throughout the space,
wanting movement but instead faced with constraint. Sadness, frustration,
and anger; and rage all took hold. I began crying, moaning and gnarling.
Then I stepped forward into the dreamtime and I was liberated by the shackles
placed on me and it transfiyrmed me into a wolf of sorts and this energy began
howling through me .
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Then many different creatures, beings, and entities entered into the vessel, all
having a ball celebrating ecstatic movement and dance. The most distz'nctive
movements was that of a monkey and then a crane. Then it began to spin me
and we were spinning one way and then another Then it fizlt sexual, touching
all over; moaning with pleasure. I didn’t want to return to the other polarity
but knew that I needed to. So I backed into the waking time and this time it
behaved more like a clown. It felt like it knew what it was and aware of its
limitations. It began to be a bit curious of the other side but feared it too.
Then I stepped back over to the other side and found myself merging with a
particular creature. It explored me as I began to explore it. I can fizel it taking
shape within me. From what I gather z't was a flzun and it felt a bit distruszful
of its proximity to the waking time that was nearby. It was content just being
where it was. I just stayed with it feeling its presence within me. Eventually it
lay? and I returned to the other side and felt some infancy take hold. There was
tenseness in the arms and legs, movement was constrained and the infant was
unsure how to move. So it began drooling and spitting saliva onto myself and
feeling amused about it and then annoyed that it had saliva on itself
I returned to the No-Form state, this time it felt like the entire space was
in No-Form as this presence was everywhere. There was a general feeling
of connection with everything. Standing there still until the energy of the
experience began to dissipate. Upon further reflection regarding the experience
it felt as though the vessel was being possessed and the I became the witness
which had veto power over the ritual if necessary.
AA: Your words speak of a very powerful ritual, especially the ending
where the presence of N0-Form expanded like that. It seemed that
you found your way into this ritual and were able to access these
sources fairly directly and so, I recommend you practice this some
more at your own discretion; well done.
On Kundalini Yoga and Yoga in General
I ’ve been meaning to start a practice of Kundalini yoga and I am finally
ready to commit to doing this practice every day. What advice would you
have before starting this journey .7
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AA: I see the choice to consistently work at kundalini activation
— until it actually happens — as a life-defining decision. I doubt you
can reverse this experience after it happens. Certain doors, once
opened, don't just stay open; the doors themselves and their hinges
disintegrate. What I know about this kundalini journey is this: once
the serpent rises, there’s no stopping it. Hence, my question why:
knowledge of motivation being key here. In kundalini activation,
there’s no guarantee the white, hot fluid will make it all the way up
to the crown chakra, as many esoteric Hindu texts suggest. It can hit
a ‘road block’ along the way depending on which chakra is blocked
by lack of personal integration in the experiences that chakra governs
or repressed complexes or hurt or whatever. When this happens, the
serpent can detour out through the chakra below that one with all
its intended fury of transformation. The many years of practice
often recommended to those undertaking Kundalini yoga involve
incremental exposures and releases of blocked chakras.
For example, if the heart chakra is blocked the kundalini can bounce
down through the solar plexus chakra and seriously amplify your
existing power dynamics. This outcome can be advantageous for any
ego—driven motives (I have no issue with ego) involving dominance
in competition and/ or increasing the power for performing ritual
magick through ego—state cathexis, the conscious projection of one’s
power into objects (talismans), situations and other people towards
one’s own ends. Whatever window the snake leaps out of brings
an amplification of the existing dynamics of that chakra and its
correlating areas of life experience.
What are your general thoughts on yoga? Do you think yoga can benefit
anyone?
AA: Amongst the many respected traditions of yoga, all seem to have
one thing in common and that is this mind-over matter approach
to the body where a set of pre-made forms are superimposed over
the organic fluidity of the organism. The practice of yoga requires
that we conform precisely to specific physical poses developed
centuries ago by yogini’s and yoga adepts towards releasing currents
of energy in the body. I think this is why yoga works so well for
those already demonstrating a strong mental grip on their bodies --
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the mind-over-matter types -- that becomes a standard way of knowing
and experiencing themselves. However, the same yoga poses can be
anything but natural to others -- the mind-under-matter types -- who try
to perform them in failure or even injury. Contrary to what most yoga
teachers advertise, yoga is not for everybody. Eastern yoga practices
work well for some people, while not working so well for others and
I count myself in the latter category.
To take an opposite “mind under matter” approach would involve
conforming and surrendering to the innate forces and energy centers
within our own bodies. This state of self-surrender would give way
to authentically convulsive expressions of our own bio-idiosyncratic
forms, exotic gestures and spontaneous mudras. This would result
in a yoga born from surrender to one’s own internal landscape of
sources. I think such a yoga would only be possible for those who
have discovered ways to relax their desire to control and also, to be
able to release the mental grip over their bodies. Practicioners would
also have to be willing and able to develop their bodies as a physical
instrument to be played by these forces, not unlike the way a flautist
plays a flute. This “backwards yoga” has been the overall aim of
my paratheatre work, my yoga, since 1977. And just like traditional
yoga, it is not for everybody.
On No-Form
In the practice of the standing No-Form, would you recommend eyes open or
elosedflor this?
AA: At first eyes closed or open just a slit. This is to minimize
external stimulus and allow the attention to be redirected within.
Later as one becomes more proficient with one’s No-Form practice,
eyes open or closed doesn’t matter as much (but this is usually after
much practice).
Would you see any downside to practicing it in spare moments in your day
so you get better at entering z't for when you ’re doing rituals? It feels like
something I could do to some extent even walking around, but more so sitting
on the bus and things like that.
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AA: I do this all the time. This is actually a very good way to build
a casual relationship with No-Form. Casual is key so that No-Form
does not become a big deal. No point in making nothingness a big
deal
Within the rituals, esp. when doing no form before a polarity, would it make
sense to resist the first urges to go on to the polarity in favor of making sure
you get to the bottom of no fiarm flrst (pun intended).7 I fliund in the Anima
Shrine task that I wasn’t sure if I ’d really achieved no form yet but felt pulled
towards my polarity so just went with it. But maybe I should have stuck it
out more.
AA: From No-Form, sense the presence of the energies projected into
the space until you feel its ‘pull’, rather than the inner urge or push
to enter. This gives credence to a presence beyond ego urge. There is
also no achieving total No-Form which represents a process of an
infinite experience. One can only deepen the No-Form receptivity by
degrees until one reaches a certain limit where one can go no further
(until maybe the next attempt). A key here is “no effort”. Any trying
to deepen No-Form results in only trying. Let No-Form act on you
as a solvent, a gentling force of dissolution. I have been at it 30 years
and am still at Beginner’s Mind.
This is the vaguest question: its about the technique and / or intention
applied when doing no fiirm. I ’m seeing it so far as a deep listening down
into myself to create internal space. I ’m not sure how to apply words to this,
but would you say the approach is largely ‘intentional’: ie. you ’re wordlessly
saying to yourself ‘I am nothing’ and waiting for that to manifest in your
experience? An easier way to put it might be just to ask if you ’re able to flesh
out how to ‘do’ no form?
AA: The process starts out intentional and voluntary; we make a
choice to empty, to be nothing, etc. At some point, the experience
takes over. This usually happens when that part of us that actually IS
nothing steps forth and replaces the previous intentionality. It steps
forth after the conscious mind sanctions and thus, invites, its presence
by choosing to “be nothing”.

On Accidental Upper Circuit Openings
I believe that the C 7is being activated regularly when I do sofiware development,
which at the moment is daily. While I am working on problems of this kind
there tends to be a lot ofi not necessarily interesting, mental stimulation (C3).
What I ’ve been noticing is that my perception is altered in some way that I ’ve
been seeing auras and wisps of light within the environment. This experience
hasn’t stabilized yet though I feel like it may at some point. Is this C-7 or
C6?
AA: The sense-deprivation that sometimes accompanies long stretches
of computer coding can sometimes abstract the consciousness into
intermittent C-6 action. C-7 experience tends to engage the whole
being as an all—encompassing interconnectedness of everything;
synchronicity is an example of the absorption phase of C-7.
On the First and Second Attentions
In regards to the “First Attention ” and “Second Attention ”,' are there more
Attentions known at this time? I ’ve always felt like I would manage to
understand them better once I knew about the others. I ’m still unsure if there
are more that I just haven ’t heard of yet?
AA: Heh, there’s always more, isn’t there? However, until these first
two attentions can be engaged and even mastered, what point is there
to list any others beyond the intellectual itch to know they are there.
The thing about first attention is that most people who are raised in
western societies, schools, and jobs are primarily fixated in it. We
can seek proof, evidence, and answers to satiate intellectual curiosity
without actually experiencing anything beyond the ideas in our
heads. Not saying you are doing this; just saying how our sometimes
voracious intellectual appetites can dominate other, perhaps equally
valid, hungers and needs for other types of “food”.
I don’t know if this is exactly the ‘second attention’ you refer to but I have a
general sense of zooming out that I first achieved when I discovered meditation,
a sense of being outside the robot and calmly watching. This is the most in
control and centered I generally feel, but I ’m not sure that’s the same as the
second attention.
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AA: You may have cultivated an unintentional talent for psychic
disassociation through your meditation practice. Second Attention,
as I define it, is a C-6 attribute that refers to that awareness linked
to presence, phenomena and energy and, without assigning it any
meaning. Second attention is not a dissociative event but a linking
event. Intuition links us directly with our inner voice and innermost
impressions; it is not a dividing or dissociative event.
On Synchronicity
How do you dfizrentiate synchronicity from precognition? Generally
speaking, does precognition concern thoughts correlatz'ng with reality as we
experience it, while synchronicity is more about outside events correlating
with each other?
AA: I use the word ‘synchronicity’ to refer to the perfect timing of
what is already happening all the time within and around us, whether
we are aware of it or not. From the vantage of C-7, synchronicity
is the standard time zone of the cosmos at large. As we get closer to
our true centers and aligned or synchronized with our true selves, I
think we become more aware of the phenomena of synchronicity; it
becomes more obvious. Precognition is a word for the inner knowing
that sometimes enables us to be cognizant of something about to
happen before it actually happens, like thinking of someone and then
they telephone you. I don’t see precognition as a function of thought
but of intuition and second attention.
On Metaprogramming
Do you have any thoughts on Robert Anton I/Vilson’s perspective on
Metaprogramming and why he thought it was a Circuit 7 activity? In my
experience it is clearly a Circuit 6 phenomena. Why do you think he saw it
as C7? Perhaps using the Autonomous Will of C6 to arrange C1—5 issues but
with the energy and current of C7 .7
AA: Good question. My speculation here is that Bob had an abrupt
and powerful C-7 awakening, maybe with a very strong dose of LSD,
and was exposed to that chain of biological command where DNA
manufactures (and thus controls) the Brain & CNS which, in turn,
control the Body. If during such a powerful C-7 activation his ego
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identified with the DNA matrix, I could see how he might come out
of this experience pegging C-7 as the metaprogramming circuit. He
also saw C-7 linked with genetic engineering which can be seen as
a type of metaprogramming. I think if Hitler had studied the 8—CB
model, he also would have pegged C-7 as the metaprogramming
circuit but with obviously very different motives. Beyond genetic
engineering, I don’t think we can “program” C-7 or C-8, which to
me signify states of consciousness so far beyond ego volition they
border on the absurd. I think ego volition stops with C-6. I also think
C-1 through C-6 can be self-modifed and even transformed through
the Autonomous Will and Vision of C6 but only after it’s sufficiently
anchored in C-2 (and aligned with the imperatives and bias of the
emotional body to keep things “real”).
On the Conscious Trance Technique
Is there a way to gauge the degree to which these might be relevant to my
cha/eras and not just chatter in my monkey mind? I felt pretty fi)cused during
the exercise, but was definitely still experiencing errant thoughts.
AA: With more practice, we can begin to discern between C-3
projections and C-6 perceptions. Projections tend to be more pushy
and aggressive whereas perceptions tend to be more like the calm
of a mirrored lake. Take note of the qualitative differences between
them as they emerge. Errant thoughts can emerge if C-3 has
nothing to do and becomes bored, curious and starts talking to itself
(internal chatter). Trancing out and channeling energies may also be
genuinely exotic or strange to usual C-3 functioning. To minimize
errant thoughts, I suggest giving C-3 something to do while you are
busy engaging in these meditations. Give it the task of witnessing, of
simply paying attention, for the purpose of learning something new.
C-3 naturally likes to learn and if the meditation can be introduced
as a learning event, C-3 may stop to take a look see.
On the Dangers of Psychic Trancework
When you say this CONSCIOUS TRANCE technique can get you high as
it activates similar brain chemistry as psylocihin, what do you mean by this?
And are there dangers to this .7
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AA: This trance technique can trigger a mild release of seratonin, a
neurotransmitter chemical released naturally every night during the
onset of sleep. In that hypnogogic state, between awake and dream,
we begin to see images forming by themselves in our own minds or
against the dark interior screen of our closed eyelids. The molecular
structure of psylocibin mimics seratonin at the synapse level and
tricks the brain into thinking it’s seratonin. When I started learning
this technique, I stopped taking mushrooms and LSD because I felt
that I could achieve similar results and with far less negative side-
effects.
This is also why this Conscious Trance meditation should be
performed with prudence (no more than thirty minutes at a time)
and then balanced by post-trance pleasure—inducing activities like C-1
eating or exercise, C-2 strength testing, C-3 writing and talking, C-4
socializing and C-5 raptures. This process of balancing our energies
expresses a very important responsibility for anyone pursuing C-6
psychic awareness and abilities. The danger of psychic work comes
with flooding the brain with too much neurotransmitter seratonin
from too much trancework and not enough physical activity and
pleasure. Neglecting to find pleasure—inducing activities for triggering
dopamine and endorphins --to counteract and balance the seratonin -
- is not only stupid, but will eventually shut down the clairvoyant
channels maybe turn you into a flaming asshole.
Around 15 minutes into this meditation, things started to take ofl’ all by
themselves. I began rocking and shaking around in my seat, and my
breathing changed radically. I seemed to keep inhaling endlessly, and hardly
ever breathed out; seemingly impossible but there you go. I started generating
a huge amount of heat and actually broke into a sweat on my fbrehead. A
jerking, nodding motion of my head began that continued for the rest of the
process (in the end it was actually hurting my neck but I didn’tfiael the desire
to stop it). I was shaking around like a rag doll. At times there were bursts of
bright light behind my eyelids. During the scanning phase, I didn’t get many
clear images or intuitions (perhaps a tree / mushroom cloud around the heart
and solar plexus areas). I didn’t experience any fiustration, just a lack of clear
additions to what I was already going through. About 25 minutes in I very
suddenly knew it was over The energy just flew out of me and I flopped down
and broke trance as per the instructions.

AA: The spark of clairvoyance will not strike in everyone. Success
depends on the readiness of each CNS to engage consciously at C-
6. This readiness may involve the degree of C-2 integration in the
individual. When done correctly, this technique enacts a physically
passive, psychically active state. Rocking and shaking around in
your seat and shaking around like a rag doll are not examples of a
physically passive state. The body kicks and bucks like that when
the ego identifies with the earth/cosmic energies, rather than simply
allowing them to run their course freely throughout the body (while
your attention continues resting in the center of the brain) and
without identifying with them.
This requires a lack of self—investment. Lack of self-investment
means don’t merge with the energies; the ego must relax. By the way,
your reaction here is common to many who attempt this meditation;
it happened to me at the start, too. I was a juice junkie and couldn’t
get enough of the psychic thrill factor, that is, until the thrill chilled
the factor. Get too invested and the channels close down.
If you have the time and inclination, please do this meditation again.
Exercise patience and relax the tendency to merge with the cycling of
earth/ cosmic energies. Let your body become as a hollow vessel for
these forces. Remember, we are looking to establish a simultaneous
state of physical passivity and psychic activity. This involves a small
ego death. Your first attempt will have been successful if you can
discover what not to do next time.
Is there a danger of overdoing thzs psychic medz'tatz'orz techrzique?
AA: There can be danger in overdoing almost anything. Don't do it for
more than 30 minutes at a time until you feel comfortable with it and
then, experiment with longer durations. Do not drive a car or operate
machinery under its influence for at least an hour after you break
trance. When this technique is done correctly the effect is potent but
in a gentle and subtle way, not in a violent or earthshaking way. It’s
not like the S010 Polarization ritual which engages a physically active
AND psychically active state together. Remember, this requires a
physically passive/psychically active to work effectively and safely.
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On the Anima/ Animus Shrine Ritual
I have always had this idea of a peifiect dream lover Not to sound arrogant
but men of all ages get easily attracted to me yet I hardly get attracted to
anyone. Out of curiosity I did this ritual to see what happens. I fiillowed your
instructions. I chose love/fizar as my polarities. T he first ritual did not take
long. I oscillated between love and fear a couple of times and let the energies
move me until they dissipated by themselves. Then the Animus came. To my
surprise it was nothing close to whatI had in mind. I felt a bulky figure with
a sloppy miss match suit on, who had no idea about anything. I let it merge
with me and move me around. At some point I started singing my fizvorite
love song. Afler a while I separated from him and started dancing with him
and then I let it go. The movements were very similar to ragdoll jogging and
have helped my body get stronger and more flexible.
AA: The Anima and Animus archetypes rarely appear as we might
think or preconceive, as they dwell and emerge from the collective
wellspring of autonomous forces with lives and agendas of their own.
Sometimes this is why their appearance can act like a shock to the
ego and yet, their presence is undeniable when they arrive before us.
I am grateful that these energies are helping your body get stronger
and more flexible.
I approached the ritual with some fizar & trepidation, afraid that either a) I
wouldn’t be able to shut up my monkey-mind cynic enough to commit fully,
or b) Something pretty disturbing that I wasn ’t prepared fi)7’ would happen. I
managed to use this negative energy to increase my commitment, which I was
pleased about. I threw myself into the polarity ( CHAOS / ORDER) deeper
than before. Returning to No-Form, I fialt the shrine pulsing behind me. I
swayed, feet, calling the Anima to visit me. A yearning welled up within me
and I swayed upwards, felt almost lzfied off my feet. The Anima seemed like
ghostly wisps circling the space around me I danced and stumbled around a
lot while letting this spirit fill me. I said ‘I want my soul back‘ a couple of
times, and sang high tones, then low.
I eventually extracted myself from the Anz'ma and started to dance with her.
This was very flowing and gracefid compared with the previous stage. At one
point] moved to embrace her but was compelled to leeep my arms open and let
her dance around me at will. I asked her ‘What is your purpose for me? ’. Her
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answers were fiaeling-based, but she seemed to say something like: “You don’t
own me, I ‘m a part of you. Don’t look fiar me in other people, there is more
than enough inside you. Use me to take back your power and autonomy. I
asked, “What should I do about impulses.7”, and she said: “Live them. Don ‘t
be owned by them. They're part of your power; not your weakness. Again
this is more the feeling I got rather than actual words. I said goodbye, bowed
to the shrine and returned to No-Form. Found it quite diflicult to break trance
but actually the act of clearing up the shrine and rearranging the fi4rniture in
the living room gradually restored normal, non-ritual consciousness.
AA: I commend your high level of commitment here and the
courage to enter enough of a state of real vulnerability to be moved
by the force of the Anima. I also note the respect you showed for
not analyzing what in essence was a force and condition of deep
feeling, an experience that brought you more truth than any amount
of C-3 knowledge could have offered. I see that you discovered how
breaking down the temple can act as a good trance dispersion device.
Well done.
On C-4 Mechanical and Spontaneous Guilt
I ’m strugglz'ng a little with the spontaneous versus mechanical notion regarding
guilt. I can clearly see its usefizlness if you have a certain clarity about your
own codes and so on, but I think I ’m in danger of using a pretense of fighting
external moral codes to indulge in things that are actually self-betrayal. A
tangled web... I ’ll engage in things that are unhealthy fior my own integrity,
but simply stopping z't is pretty hard. I guess I ‘m fairly well entrenched in a
reevaluation of all values with regard to the society around me.
AA: This conflict between one’s own emerging ethos and the external
moralities of family and society can generate a certain internal
pressure. However this conflict is not entirely destructive as it creates
the friction and heat necessary for transformation. Without that
heat, no struggle and without struggle, very little chance of rebirth.
The trouble with fighting against any external codes is that we end up
fighting and draining ourselves since we are actually a part of society
and family.
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The key here, I believe, involves enacting a more conscious rebellion
which requires more clarity on what is worth fighting for, so you can
fight for that and stop fighting a losing battle against society, family
or whatever. The good fight amounts to fighting for what you believe
in.
I find it diflicult to distinguish between low self—esteem, powerlessness, shame
and guilt; they all blend together Antero, how do you define shame?
AA: Shame seems related to the experience of humiliation and the
impulse to cover oneself or hide as a reaction to being dishonored,
disgraced or maybe even condemned. Whereas guilt is like just feeling
bad for doing something perceived as bad, whether by oneself, others
or society. Power loss can result in feelings of helplessness, which is
not the same as being helpless (though it can FEEL that way). Low
self-esteem relates to negative ego-inflation, of making yourself too
important in a dissing, cutting down sort of way.
On the Cloud of Unknowing
My experience was that my body got lost, nothing there but sofi‘ edges...a
real feeling of there being no floor and the world way below. Then I was
just the sound again, without a body, nowhere in particular. For a moment
I imagined I was high above a landscape... it was a spontaneous imaginary
thing, probably the suggestion of ‘cloud’, with a real feeling of there being
no floor and the world way below. Breaking trance involved wriggling and
swaying and then bouncing up and down vigorously for a while. Does that
sound like I ’m pursuing the intent of the task, or am I in cuckoo-land,
bullshitting myself?
AA: You ask “what sense could I imagine it with if it is behind me?” The
same sense that lets us know someone is standing or walking behind
us. We all have “eyes in the back of our heads”, however, this sense
of our backside is often ignored in lieu of the more socially accepted
behavior of always “being upfront”. Backside awareness can also
evoke more awareness of subconscious states (and why I suggest
backing into a side of the polarity in the C-5 Solo Polarization
ritual.)
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Sometimes the imagination is not just “imagination” but a link to the
imaginal world; not a make-believe pretend world but the internal
landscape of dreamstuff. As to whether or not you were in cuckoo-
land, bullshitting yourself or not, that’s a question for you to sit
with. Though I must say something spoke to me in your words: “My
experience was that my body got lost, nothing there but soft edges...a real
feeling of there being no floor and the world way below. Then I was just
the sound again, without a body, nowhere in particular. ” Sounds like the
Cloud of Unknowing to me.
On the Dreaming Ritual
OK...that was fantastic! How can such simple movements create such
flzntastic sensations? Is it because the dream comes back to life and you, in a
sense, become the dream .7 From those two simple movements the dream is as,
or more vivid than when originally dreamed. This is really amazing to me.
AA: Movements recalled and extracted from dreams carry the power
of the dreaming in them. When these movements are performed as
remembered (without embellishment), they can act as triggers for
the images, emotions and forces innate to the dream they originated
in. The dreaming movements act as living dream talismans in this
way. When you have at least three of them and can piece them
together as one fluid movement cycle (as described in the actual ritual
instructions), another level of the dreaming is activated.
I find this Dreaming Ritual works great with retro-dreams. I ‘m experiencing
a dark depression though, not an overwhelming one, but a sad, contemplative
one. Could this have something to do with entering back into dream modes that
have a basis in depressing times? Any suggestions for handling the depression
in connection to the Ritual work? I ’m not sure it is connected to the Dreaming
Ritual, as present circumstances are also causing a type of depression.
AA: Are you sure it’s depression? As I know depression, it’s not an
emotion. It's an emotional flatline. Sadness, grief and sorrow are
lively compared to real depression. Depression can occur from any
disconnect with C-2, especially after constantly repressing feelings
you have not been ready to face.
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Depression can also occur by any event of significant power loss,
where your emotional tank was drained by self—victimizing choices
you've made and/ or agreements to carry the heavy emotional burden
of another.
I have not seen the Dreaming Ritual cause depression in the 20 years
I have been working with it. However, it does engage the conscious
ego with the subconscious through our dreams and so, performing the
ritual can trigger repressed emotions and expose whatever defenses
you're invested in to keep them at bay. Ongoing repression consumes
a lot of energy and can drain the emotional tank.
On C-8 Consciousness Projection
I really was up there out of my body! I felt relieved and free and enjoyed being
so far up; I fizlt thrilled and lighter It was easier to breathe and my vision
was sharp. When I came back to my body I noticed that I felt my body more
clearly that before; sensations and tensions. I notice that I was IN it instead
of BEING it. I am frightened of this ability because I have lost contact with
grounding befiore when I did these kind of rituals. . . floating ofl’ into cosmic
foofoo land. I also have a very active imagination when being fueled with fizar
Antero, do you have any advice as to fizding out this fear response? Could it
be a key to balancing it with C-4 activities like sharing C-8 experiences with
others? I really want to integrate C8 consciousness in my life now.
AA: This meditation worked for you and then I think C-3 got spooked.
This C-8 event goes against C-3 logic: “how can I be z'n two places at once?
does not compute, does not compute”. If it could not analyze the event,
it may have frozen up with panic, like a computer freezing up and
crashing. It’s up to you to put your mind at peace and communicate
with yourself about what’s going on with this experiment. Talk to
yourself in a reassuring way. Explain how this experience is not the
same as going insane. Perhaps it’s time to update your definitions
of in sanity and sanity. One way to include C-3 in this meditation
(and fade the fear away) is to instruct your mind to pay attention and
witness the experience, say, “hey, take a look at this. Check this out.
Look what we can do. Witness this.” It can also help to have friends
to share this experience with.
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On Chapel Perilous
Do you find similarities between chapel perilous and Gura'jiefls explanation
of the moon or Castenada '5 relationship with the eagle’s emanations?
AA: The experience of Chapel Perilous can differ for each person
as much as the ideas and thoughts that separate us from each other.
Castaneda’s ‘eagle’s emanations’ reflect the cultural imagery of
the shamanic tradition he was absorbing and/or inventing, just
as Gurdjieff’s explanation of being ‘food for the moon’ reflected
his Armenian cultural bias around the Feminine which, in some
cultures, is deemed inferior to the ‘Sun Absolute’. I think Chapel
Perilous represents the crosscurrents where our cultural reality
tunnels intersect with our own conceptual maps and where our
individual egos are entangled in the cross hairs. I think escaping the
Chapel Perilous involves extracting our identification (our egos) from
the cultural matrix we live in and strengthening the warp and the
weave of our own tapestry. And with our hard-earned autonomy,
we can learn to weave in and out of the cultural cloth with minimal
entanglement.
About the Confession, Prayer and Breaking Trance: How does one know
portions of themselves are “stuck ”in CB .7 Also, is it always a negative thing to
have parts of ourselves lost” or missing? Can we ever really become whole ”
in this space/ time continuum and, better yet, do we want to, meaning; are
there or could there be benefits to having aspects of ourselves in other places
(CB), provided we are fimctioning flzirly well without calling these portions
of ourselves back home”? I ’m amazed at the thinking processes this course
has awakened in me, and will continue to work with the material you have
presented here.
AA: Typically, you can notice parts of yourself in CP by a certain
vacancy within yourself. In ANGEL TECH, there’s a section called
“Mechanical Problems” (pp. 64-124) with a sub-section called “Pretty
Vacant” that details how you can identify those pieces. Sometimes
we have to get lost before we can be found. By the way, you may
want to eliminate the word “always” from your vocabulary unless
you really believe this word applies to anything real.
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On Soul Loss and Retrieval
I understand that the fiaeling of being lost in Chapel Perilous is similar to the
concept of soul loss -- What do you think about the need or process of Soul
Retrieval?
AA: To some of us soul loss is a reality and not just a concept. It’s
a way of knowing something essential is missing in our lives but not
knowing what to do about it or how to get it back, whatever “it” is.
From my view, soul loss expresses a dominant condition of modern
society. The causes of this malady are too complex to explain here
but it also involves death of the imagination, a preliminary condition
for soul loss. For those awakening to this crisis in consciousness, a
naked need is exposed for what you call Soul Retrieval and this need,
if listened to closely, can dictate exactly what is necessary to call or
sing your soul back. Exposing this need can be a personally difficult
and painful process. It requires the undoing of many family and
socially in— grained programs towards uncovering a highly vulnerable
state, a nakedness of being requiring its own safe settings and support
systems to emerge and blossom.
I think the current economic crisis (a symptom of a deeper crisis in
consciousness) reflects how we have grown accustomed to getting
our way too much. We know more about what we want than
what we actually need. After such heavy immersion in material
abundance, we have lost touch with our immaterial spiritual needs
and have forgotten that we even have such needs in the first place.
Soul Retrieval rituals are common to many indigenous tribes.
Some of these ancient rituals have been appropriated by
entrepreneuring ‘plastic shamans’ who charge exorbitant fees for
the vision quest promise of getting your soul back. Soul retrieval
is big business in any souldead materialist society. THE ANIMA/
ANIMUS Shrine ritual in this course doubles as a kind of soul
retrieval ritual that emerged out of a naked need of my own after
suffering a massive Anima attack/ projection where I was wandering
willy-nilly soulless in Chapel Perilous.
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On Evaluating the Eight-Circuit Brain Course
My understanding of the 8-CB model has changed in that I now understand
more clearly the primacy of experience. Thinking about any given circuit can
provide some degree of insight or understanding but cannot take the place
of attempting to activate that circuit through one of the exercises or rituals.
Most of my work during the last 8 weeks has focused on activating and
understanding the lower 4 circuits, and I have a much clearer understanding
now of how they can support the experiences available in C5-8. Realizing
the relevance and role of my body, my emotions, my thoughts, and my
community in relation to any higher circuit activity has radically changed
my way of perceiving the world. This has also been a great foundation for
changing the way I exist in the world. Befbre the course, I was fixated on
having experiences of C6-8. Now I am more content to be patient, realizing
that these realms will unfold as I nurture my lower circuits.
AA: It seems you have earned some wisdom here. Many fall in love
with the prospect of upper circuit adventures yet without lower circuit
integration, they invariably end up as psychic casualties of one form
or another while parasiting others for the lower circuit energy they
are lacking.
The flamework provided here has also allowed me to understand my ignorance
more easily. The distinction between C2 and C4 has been especially useful and
has made working on these areas independently more manageable. Before the
course, my emotional and social lives were sort of a chaotic soup, of which
I struggled to get a clear understanding. Making some distinctions between
C2 and C4 experiences and patterns has allowed me to more easily recognize
progress when it happens, rather than feeling bogged down by the enormity of
my emotional, interpersonal lie.
AA: Often times, C-2 is not as interactive with others as we may
FEEL it to be but rather more self-invested in issues, fears, emotions
tied to our own bodies and the memories and the histories they act
as vessels for. Emotions remain a highly personal, often nonverbal
and immediate expression of our responses to the environment and
whatever “climate” that entails.
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Of the experiments I completed, the conscious trance, directional / non-
directional jogging, and C5 polarity ritual were the most effiective. I plan to
continue practicing each of these, and am also committed to creating a physical
space where I can more easily practice the rituals, as this was difficult for me
to secure on a regular basis. Another important lesson, which this course
helped me to realize, is that I am very sensitive to my physical environment.
Establishing dominion of the spaces I inhabit (at home and work) has been
an ongoing project throughout these 8 weeks. I have made some important
progress and am also exploring how I can not only assert my presence in a
space but make the space beautiful, functional, and productive. This is a rich
area for me to explore, I think.
AA: I agree 100% with you here and the only think I might add
is to experiment with making statements. When you feel strongly
about something or feel confident enough to stand behind something
100%, make a statement. No need to justify it or tag it with “I think”
or other diminishing comments. C-2 loves making statements and
feeling sure about stuff, just as C-6 loves uncertainty. Certainty and
uncertainty make a good C-2/C-6 polarity.
Important exercises were the emotional asset/ liability list, recognizing
C3 biases, and the C6 2nd attention exercise (I’ve taken to practicing this
whenever I ’m walking alone outside) This has helped me to see the innate
similarities between my dreams and my waking world.
AA: C-6 second attention tends to avail itself more as C-2 becomes
more integrated. It’s almost as if emotionally we need to fee what
or who we can depend on, as well as where we can feel the bond
of attachment and be invested as a way of establishing ourselves in
the body and in real time. As we grow more comfortable with the
knowledge of our emotional attachments and investments, we tend to
resist it less and are less threatened by emotional commitment. This
is especially true when we know how securing our emotional reality
lays the foundation for C-6 experience. It may seem like a “paradox”
to C-3 (which can be easily puzzled by apparent contradictions) but
the more sure we are about certain things in life, the more uncertainty
we may be willing to permit; the more uncertainty we can permit,
the C-6 opens up.
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C4 needs a lot of work. I have made some progress getting over self-
consciousness (which has been deep-seated since childhood), and feel an
improvement in the honesty and spontaneity I am bringing to my interactions
with people. I need to work on engaging people. The “talk to a stranger“
exercise was a hurdle I have yet to overcome. C5 is accessible, but not reliably
so. I am committed to my yoga practice and see this as an important access
point for C5. C6 is also developing, as I strengthen my emotional boundaries
and become less attached to my desire flar experiencing subtle energies. C7
and C8 didn ’t get a lot of attention during this course. I plan to focus on them
some more in the coming months.
AA: Getting over the self—consciousness you refer may require effort.
If you do not apply yourself, it may nag at you like a needy dog.
The application I refer to is the exercise of getting your attention off
yourself. This can be accomplished by approaching any action with
the intention of placing your full attention on what you are doing,
rather than watching yourself doing it. If you’re feeling daring, apply
this to the C-4 action of talking to a stranger. Place your attention on
the other person, not on yourself talking with the other person. Keep
eye contact and pay attention only to what you are doing. This task
of getting your attention off yourself and onto the action at hand can
be applied to almost any action but you may notice a bigger change
if you succeed in doing this around other people. If you succeed it
may shock you a little; surprise you. Your self—consciousness is like
training wheels ready to be removed when you are ready to ride the
bike.
C6 was a nice taste of the world of subtle energies. My conception of subtle
energies has been demystified considerably during this course. I feel like I am
less invested in my preconceived notions and more open to experiencing these
energies on their own terms.
AA: This suggests to me that you have accessed the second attention
and have opened the gates to f11I'thCI' discovery, if that is what you
wish for. The key here, of course, is relaxing self-investment and
preconceptions to, as you say, experiencing these energies on their
own terms.
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C4 is thearea I fizel moststuc/e in. I have realized that many of my relationships
are vestiges of former aspects of myself. Thus, I fieel like I need some new
friends to accompany me on my next stage of development. This made me
realize that I ’m a little bit out of practice when it comes to making friends.
My biggest struggle is taking the first step -- initiating conversation, saying
hello, trying to find a common ground. Once that has been established, its
easier flar me to move flarward. I feel confident in my values and my capacity
for living in accordance with them, and I don ’t have serious issues with trust.
Community and belonging (on a deep level) are what I miss. Any advice you
might have in this area would be most appreciated.
AA: As we develop as awakening individuals, we often outgrow old
social ties with those who either can’t keep up with us or have been
revealed to be less than friends or were never friends to start with or
insist that we remain the way they used to know us. The truth is,
these kind of social mutations come with the turf of personal growth.
Until we meet up with those who are also committed to their own
awakening, we walk the solitary path until we find each other.
The self-consciousness you refer to earlier may be your greatest C-
4 obstacle. My guess is that at some point you will become bored
with it when the need for friends and community upstages your self-
consciousness. The social aspect of our existence is important for
several reasons. All C-4 social experiences test, exercise, express and
incorporate all previous circuits in a complex web of interactions.
Sometimes, we find out more about ourselves by interacting with
others than by staying in the house. As you risk more social exposure
and interaction, especially with people that don’t always agree with
you, the brain’s synapses fire up in the moment to moment discovery
of not just who you are or who you thought you were but, who you
are becoming. If C-4 experience is anything, it’s about a shifting
field made up of some of the most highly unpredictable energies and
entities on the planet: other people.
233

Section 4
HOW I GOT THIS WAY
‘$4 Neurological Autobiography ”
“The Eight- Circuit Brain Interview ”
“The Magus and the Mystic”
“The Cosmic T rigger Ejfect”
235

A Neurological Autobiography
A Personal Chronology of Outside Shocks
and Hedonic Upgrades
Like many others, I have survived a series of real life shocks, all of which have
coincided with specific turning points on my path. I have chosen to flame
these turning points as a personal chronology of hedonic upgrades, shocks
and imprints, from birth to present time. As you read through these episodes,
see if you can z'denti/‘y the specific circuits activated along the way and the
shocks that triggered them. You may notice that I have reflainedfiom using
the word ”circuits in my personal story. Oddly enough, I don ’t naturally use
this word in the ways I privately think, speak, or write about myself I tend
to fiacus more on actual experiences first and then, see if and how they might
be symbolized later — A.A.
Helsinki, Finland, shortly after sunrise, November 11, 1952. I was born
drunk. My mother told me she drank brandy to relax her muscles
and ease the pain during her labor with me. I asked her if she thought
I was born drunk and she said, “Probably”. If this is true, and I have
no reason to believe otherwise, I count intoxication as my first infant
imprint (which may help explain a few things). Though I really
didn’t start drinking alcohol until I was forty, I've always felt a deep-
rooted emotional need to get high. When I don’t meet that basic
hedonic need, my emotional tank drains and when it’s running on
vapors, depression sets in. Depression is not the problem, whereas
not meeting my needs can become very problematic.
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Fulfilling my basic emotional need to get high has meant doing
whatever it takes to alter my consciousness towards an exalted state.
This need is not unique to me but historically reflects one of the
oldest human rituals we know of. For tens of thousands of years we
humans have been extremely resourceful in finding and creating all
kinds of ways for getting high. Whether it has been to escape the
dismal drudgery of mundane existence or the dreariness of cultural
ennui or simply to expand the outer limits of our consciousness, we
humans are hard-wired to get high.
A FATI-IERLESS CI-IELDHOOD, AN OPEN HORIZON
Toronto, Canada, 1955-1961. My mother abandoned my father when
I was three. She, her mother, my younger brother, and I migrated
southwestward to Toronto where I enjoyed an uncommonly happy
childhood. I satisfied my hedonic needs by playing ice hockey and
soccer. I was never an indoor kid. Though I loved the speed and
coordination necessary to excel in these sports, I was eventually bored
by the increasing climate of competition. I found my next big thrill
in the improvised war games my brother Timo and I, along with our
new Canadian friends, played by fake-killing and fake—dying around
each other. “Hit the Dirt” was a highly theatrical game that gave us
many chances to die many times over and in as many different ways
as we wished. Whoever died the ‘best death’ (and I don’t recall any
argument about this) earned the role of Executioner who would then
ask each of the next round’s condemned exactly how they wanted to
die. This was no morbid kid sport. This was kid heaven on the empty
suburban lots of south side Toronto. It also doubled as an accidental
death/ rebirth initiation ritual which, when looking at my life today,
tells me how some things never change.
Los Angeles, CA, 1961-1970. When I was ten years old, my family
migrated further southwest to southern California where my highs
also found new horizons. My brother and our new friends discovered
the bum rush of hopping trains in Highland Park while getting dizzy
puffing Lucky Strikes in the boxcars. We quit the hobo fantasy after
a neighborhood kid got smacked by a train which sliced him into
so many pieces the police had to carry him away in pillowcases.
I didn’t see it happen but the image of the pillowcases scared the
living daylights back into me. We soon discovered the underground
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expedition pleasures of the pitch-black sewer systems below greater
Los Angeles; no flashlights allowed and no turning back once we
got in. Seeing nothing, all our other senses dilated to embrace the
blackness before us. We were urban tunnel rats foraging in the abyss
for the light to guide us out again. And it always did.
Our expeditions were cut short with the 6 o'clock News report of
flash floods filling the sewers, our sewers. It was time to leave the
tunnels to the real rats and whatever else scrambled and slithered
down there. From here, we graduated from the underworld to the
rooftops of neighborhood apartment buildings, playing international
spy games, gathering classified information from whatever and
whomever we saw through open windows. The phrase “peeping
tom” never entered our naive, inquisitive minds. In looking back, all
these youthful follies were also positive social experiments. None of
them could have ever happened without my younger brother Timo
and our ever-shifting circle of friends. When psychedelic drugs came
to town, however, it was time to put childish games aside.
MY WORLD ON DRUGS
As a rebellious teen growing up in the suburbs of the San Fernando
Valley during the late sixties, drugs were not just a recreational habit
— they were my world. Drugs were available everywhere. My drugs
of choice were pot, shrooms, and acid, plus a few regretful detours
into the rubber room zones of PCP and the chattering jitters of
bennies. Back then, pot and acid were first rate and very inexpensive.
Throughout high school, I did just enough dealing to keep a steady
supply for myself and my friends. At fifteen, a shattering epiphany
accompanied the peak of my first LSD trip. In a flash I realized that
nothing I was learning in High School, except maybe typing class
and Drama 101, could ever help me survive in the real world. Up
until then I was a shy straight—A student trying my best to do the
right thing. I decided that the New and Improved Right Thing was
achieving the minimal grade point average necessary to graduate.
This revelation marked my first renunciation of culturally imposed
values, an imprint and a shift that would gather steady momentum in
the coming decades.
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MY CATASTROPHIC FIRST SEXUAL IIVIPRINT
Hollywood and Burbank, CA, 1968. I was fifteen and cruising the
bustling Sunset strip for girls with my best friend Keith in the high
hopes of ruining my virginity. We struck estrogen gold at His Place,
a local make-out pad run by Christian hippies, where my teenage
romantic ideal — long straight dark hair, big eyes, hips, and lips, and a
body to die for — appeared out of the blue and started hitting on me.
I couldn’t believe my good luck and told Keith that I’d catch up with
him later. Soon after locking lips she asked me to go outside with her
where her car was parked. We piled into the back seat and went at it.
Deep into the heat of lust, the front door of her car suddenly opens
and this guy gets in, starts the engine and drives off with us in the
back. I look at her and she whispers, “Don’t worry. That’s Bill. He’s
just my brother. He’s driving us to my place.” She and I went back
to business as her brother drove us off into the night.
We were dropped off at her Burbank apartment where I had
intercourse for the first time. She was four years older than me, just
my type, and we were both suddenly in love. The next morning Bill
appears at the door and makes himself at home. I soon discover that
he’s not her brother at all but her husband and they’re in an open
marriage. Seeing how Bill had no problem with me being in love
with his wife, I felt no threat in the situation yet. This was the sixties’
sexual revolution in action and the whole experience not only felt
right but very right. Very hip. Or so I thought.
They invited me to quit school, leave my family, and come live with
them. After a few days I phoned my mother and told her my life had
changed, that I met the love of my life and wouldn’t be coming home.
In a panic, she asked me if I was kidnapped. I said, “Kidnapped?
No, this is my choice.” At that very moment Bill took the phone away
and told my mother that I was alright, not to worry, and then hung
up. In my reality I was having the time of my young life. In the shared
realities of my mother and brother, Timo, I was kidnapped. Truth
was, I was having the time of my life while I was being kidnapped.
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I learned that Bill was twenty—f1ve, an avid runner, and an amateur
boxer. He was also an ex-con who cut a plea bargain with the
Burbank Police Department to snitch out drug dealers in exchange
for time off for writing bad checks. I also discovered that he used his
wife as bait to net me as his fuckboy. After successfully avoiding his
advances, and with the help of his sympathetic wife, Bill dropped the
issue and recruited me instead as an accomplice to his life in crime. I
was taught how to break into houses and steal stuff for him without
getting caught. This was all done under Bill’s verbal threat that if
I ever got caught and snitched him out, he would find me and kill
me. Between my escalating sex hormones and the bloom of hot teen
romance, all this seemed like a big adventure to me.
As soon as I returned to school I was called out of class into the
principal’s office. Waiting there for me were two uniformed police
officers who gave me an ultimatum: either I testify against Bill in
court or go to jail (juvenile hall). I didn’t know the details of how
they found Bill but to make a long story short, I testified against him
in court and he was incarcerated. At this point I woke up to how
masterfully manipulated I had been. The shattering of my young
romantic ideals and the distortion of my sexual reality left me hurt,
angry, and seeking escape from my nightmare world.
RELIGION & SURVIVAL: TWO LSD STORIES
Lutheranism is the default religion of most Finns and several months
after my first LSD trip I decided to drop on my Confirmation day.
Why? I insisted on a genuine religious experience, not just another
Bible story about what God does or looks like. I was peaking as the
Pastor read the catechism and saw God as an inner light emanating
from all living things. I saw how religion got in the way of religious
experience. I saw the bad joke of God as the Bearded Old Man
Watching Over Everybody and Punishing Those Who Got Out of
Line. I laughed anyway. I left my Confirmation ceremony having
snuck a peek behind the stage curtain of organized religion where
I saw the master puppeteer pulling strings to maintain the illusion
of reality for a hypnotized audience. I felt shaken and elated by the
thought of having discovered one of Life’s Big Secrets. Religion was
a sham but spiritual experience rawked.
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Thanks to my good instincts for setting and context, I never had a
“bad trip”. For the most part I only agreed to trip in nature with
optimistic friends aligned with a spirit of adventure. The angst-ridden
wannabe junkies typically avoided us acidheads. Besides, their drugs
of choice were usually hash oils, quaaludes, booze, or whatever else
could trigger their infighting rituals and nod fests. My LSD trips
often occurred with friends venturing out beyond city limits, either
to Vasquez Rocks in the Mojave Desert (where many of the first
Star Trek TV episodes were shot) or the remote beaches of Ventura
County.
One night my best friend Keith and I decided to drive well beyond
Vasqeuz Rocks for our next LSD trip. We head out around 10pm.
About an hour before our planned arrival, we decide to drop. Big
mistake. We unexpectedly run out of gas about ten miles from our
destination while coming on to 200 micrograms of orange sunshine.
We get out of the car and push it to the side of the road. We wander
the surrounding desert of cactus, chapparal shrubs, and the occasional
industrial warehouse. In this aimless wandering we suddenly hear a
loud and long tone like an air raid siren. About a hundred yards
away, we see two figures running towards us, laughing! We look at
each other stunned, stoned, and a little paranoid.
The laughing figures appear before us — two young and very drunk
local guys bragging about breaking into a warehouse and getting away
with their booty (probably petty cash). They tell us to run away, since
the police would arrive soon, and then, they ran off into the night
laughing their asses off. Meanwhile Keith and I look at each other a
little more stunned, stoned, and a lot more paranoid. Those guys were
right. Within maybe five minutes, nine or ten police cars approach
the area and park in a large semi—circle, maybe 200 or 300 yards away,
their headlights casting long shadows across the Chaparral. I suddenly
shift into survival mode and tell Keith we need to gather some tumble
weeds, dig a ditch, get into the ditch and cover ourselves with the
desert brush. We hear dogs barking and see policemen walking in the
distance towards us, their flashlights bobbing in time with their swift
gaits. The dogs! I tell Keith we need to rub dirt all over our bodies
and clothes to cover our scent or the dogs would find us. Meanwhile,
we are peaking on orange sunshine.
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While hallucinating our brains out, we bury ourselves in the ditch
and wait for the police to either go away or find us. Our eyesight is
at ground level and within minutes, we see the legs and feet of police
searching for the perpetrators who tripped the warehouse alarm. We
hear the dogs sniffing about for clues. After what seemed like an
eternity of this, the police and their dogs go away. We remain in the
ditch, covered with dust, our eyes aglow with gratitude. We are very
free and very stoned.
We fall asleep for a few hours. At sunrise I get out of the ditch and
realize that my wallet was lost in the shuffle. We don't have enough
money to buy enough gas to get back to Los Angeles. We wander
off the desert and into a suburban neighborhood where we go from
door to door asking for help, i.e., begging. A family finally takes us
in and the father leads us into their backyard. Here, he instructs us to
scrub a huge pile of mud-covered red bricks until they are all clean in
exchange for gas money back to L.A. We scrub the bricks clean and
then, we were served breakfast of pancakes.
We finally make it back to Los Angeles. The experience for us was
nothing short of a full blown initiation survival rite that, as a result
of the LSD, imprinted us with a newfound survival confidence that
continues in me today. Though the experience was harrowing to say
the least, it left us both with a strong visceral sense that no matter
what happens in life, we could get through it. We were survivors.
THE THEATRE OF LIFE
Big Sur; Berkeley, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Berkeley, CA, 1970- 74.
Graduating from high school felt like being shot out of a Spanish
Armada cannon. Ka—boom!! At seventeen I hitched up the coast to
Big Sur where I spent the entire summer alone roaming the Ventana
wilderness of meadowlands, forests, and shorelines, dropping
acid, communing with nature, and dreaming about my future. At
summer's end it was time to return to civilization and start my new
life in the real world. I caught a ride to Berkeley in a smoke—filled bus
of other hippies who invited me to come live with them in their big,
old Berkeley craftsman communal house.
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Between 1967 and 1973 a mass exodus of teenagers flooded the San
Francisco Bay area and the police were ordered to check out any happy
or lost looking teenager on the streets as a possible runaway. After an
idyllic two months of rent-free, nonstop partying, the Berkeley Police
arrested me for hitchhiking. I was booked as a runaway and spent
the next seventy—two hours in a cell before I was flown back to Los
Angeles. Two months shy of my eighteenth birthday and the real
world was seriously harshing my buzz. Back in L.A., I dealt grass to
raise enough money to return to Berkeley on my eighteenth birthday.
In two short months I earned more than I expected, which got me
to thinking about my future. Instead of heading up to Marijuana
Heaven, I decided to become an actor.
I auditioned and was accepted at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute
in Hollywood. It was there that I met the incomparable William
Traylor and Peggy Feury, two keenly perceptive acting teachers.
Though they saw enough talent to encourage me to stick around,
I chose to keep acting because it got me high. One day I found a
note on the Theatre Institute community board offering a live—work
situation for a gardener. I needed a place to call my own and set
out to meet Mr. and Mrs. Potter, the owners of a small mansion in
the Hollywood hills, who introduced themselves to me as the former
producers of the old fifties’ “Queen For a Day” TV game show.
Though I had no real gardening experience beyond mowing the front
lawn for my adolescent allowance, I saw this as a chance to test out
my new acting chops. I got the job, moved into the tiny gardener’s
studio, and continued my classes at the acting school while dealing
grass on the side. Life was as good as it had ever gotten.
While pulling weeds late one afternoon, I noticed Raymond Burr
(the actor from the old TV series “Perry Mason”) perched high on
a balcony of the mansion next door. He was looking off into the
sunset with sheer misery plastered across his face like a cracked mask.
Two great danes flanked both sides of his tormented thousand—mile
stare. Mrs. Potter appeared and walked over towards me, asking how
I liked living there. I said, “It’s great, but why does Mr. Burr look
so unhappy?” She sighed and told me he just received news that an
island he recently purchased sank into the sea. Sank into the sea?
Whoa. I looked up at him again and this time I saw a Grand Guignol
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gargoyle flanked by hell hounds sounding a message just for me: Get
out of Hollywood while you still can! These weren’t exactly words I
heard but my translation of a transmission from a source greater than
Perry Mason that was using Raymond Burr to reach me. At least,
that’s the way I chose to see it. I gave the Potters notice, packed my
bags and headed up the coast to Berkeley.
THE LIFE OF THEATRE
Oakland, CA, autumn 1972. A maze of synchronistic events led me
to the front porch of the Dudesheep Theatre Company. The DTC
was a group of eight twenty-something actors and performers living
communally in a three story, 23-room Victorian mansion deep in the
hairy heart of downtown Oakland. This was a truly magical house
with its own auditorium (with 25-foot ceilingsl), two ballrooms, a
winding staircase, secret passageways, and a tiny attic bedroom that I
lusted after. I presented my case as an aspiring actor, they took a vote,
and I was accepted as their ninth company member. The DTC was
also a heady group of University of Irvine dropouts heavily inspired
by Julian Beck’s Living Theatre and their own surreal collective
dream they were living out every day. Within two weeks, I was cast
as a Hungry Ghost in their upcoming theatrical treatment of a bardo
ritual from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I had no idea what that
was, what I was doing, or what it all meant. All I knew was that these
performances resulted in the most transformative experiences of my
life so far.
One month later I was performing with DTC on weekends at the
Renaissance Faire and soon after that, accompanying them as pianist
for their performances of John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera” at the San
Francisco Dickens Faire. Here, I met and fell in love with whimsical
Bella, a Greek singer of Italian arias; she was eighteen and I was
twenty. Bella’s sex-positive outlook encouraged me to begin healing
the damage surrounding my first sexual imprint. My sexual healing
happened one sunny afternoon at a remote Stinson beach cabin
while we were both peaking on a large dose of blotter LSD. During
our lovemaking, my body erupted in a series of physical contractions
of powerful emotion. I went with it as Bella’s openhearted embrace
guided me through all my old fears of being deceived and all the rage
I felt at being betrayed. I shook, I screamed, I wept. There was no
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orgasm. We stopped making love when Bella cradled me in her arms
and started singing. Through her soft pure voice, an unspeakably
beautiful melody flowed and took flight, transporting me to a place I
had never been before, a place beyond fear. And in this place we made
love and our orgasms blossomed from a heart of pure rapture. The
fears of deception were gone. Some rage remained but felt necessary,
as if to say, you will never be betrayed again without knowing it.
Back to my life in the theatre. Between constant performing and being
in love with Bella, I was high almost all the time. Besides scripting,
rehearsing, and performing together, the DT C also bonded around
the occasional acid party. My social utopian imprints were humming
with eternal delight. This idyllic life continued for three more
months until the escalating bliss and brain pleasure began dispersing
everybody’s focus. The theatre company soon unraveled, fragmented,
and finally collapsed in on itself. Everyone, including myself, was
too busy becoming legends in our own minds to notice that we were
imploding. Our super—hero egos went super nova. Today’s star is
tomorrow's black hole. After I saw the vulgar decadence we had
become, I left the company. For the next two years, Bella and I lived
together and made an art out of poverty by turning our performance
skills into the Hampshire Roundtree Story Theatre Troupe, a clown
duet that performed at faires, conventions, and birthday parties.
OUT OF BODY, OUT OF MIND
Berkeley, CA, 1975. Once an acidhead, always an acidhead. There
was no way to forecast the long-term effects of all that acid until it
caught up with me shortly after my 23rd birthday when I succumbed
to a spontaneous, full—bl0wn out-of—body experience. I was not on
drugs; this was not a lucid dream, or some acid flashback. If only
it were, I might have recovered. While fully conscious, an unbroken
chain of internal psychic events rapidly unfolded resulting in my
cognition of existing independently of my physical body. I still have
no words for this astonishing event except to say it radically altered
my outlook, destroyed my sense of body-based identity and shook the
very foundations of my being. “I have a body but I am not my body”
was no longer a metaphysical concept; it became my metaphysical
reality.
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After the initial fears subsided, I did everything I could to replicate
the experience a few days later but to no avail. I wanted to fly out
of my body again and fly out further than before. I wanted to know
what happened to me. However, this was not a shock I could conjure
up with my will or perform by my efforts alone. Whatever happened
to me was clearly dictated by a source far greater than my ego.
A peculiar consequence developed from this out of body event — I
began to see auras. I was now subject to an intermittent ability to see
energy fields emanating from almost everyone I encountered. On
the streets or inside my home, I saw friends and strangers alike as
indistinct flashes of light, random bits and streams of weird personal
information. Too much information, way too much information.
My “third eye was blasted open, out of control and overwhelming
my daily existence. I did not feel this was a problem, as I was also
feeling very high during this time. In fact, I was not feeling much of
anything and had no idea I was courting schizophrenia.
Around this time I developed this obnoxious behavior for mirroring
the emotions of others. I also tried anchoring or grounding myself
in the young women I was attracted to by feeling or feeding off
their emotions. I didn’t know it was happening at the time. What
was happening was I had lost touch with my true feelings and had
become another amiable, twenty—something, emotionally parasitic
acidhead on his merry way to his first psychotic break. Who knew?
After reading Castaneda’s first four books, I thought I was an urban
shaman surfing the Nagual on my way to becoming an urban shaman.
To me, this state of overall weirdness was simply part of the shamanic
path, which in retrospect it may have been. Or maybe not.
I was very lucky that someone cared enough to tell me point blank
how unstable I was and how I really should learn to “manage my
energy”. That caught my attention. Nobody ever called me unstable
before. My friend suggested that I go see a professional clairvoyant
by the name of Michael Symonds who was interviewing candidates
for his next psychic training program. So, I went to see Michael and
he told me that my sixth chakra was spinning out of control and that
it was something he could help me with. I asked him if the others
in his program were also out of control like me and he said, “No,
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you’re the only psycho in the group”. Then he laughed and said most
of the others were psychos, too. We both laughed though I was left
wondering what he really meant by that. Michael had a glint of the
leprechaun in his eye.
THE NEUROPHARMACY OF MY BRAIN
Berkeley, CA, 1976- 77. Around the same time I began Michael’s training
program, I was invited by musician/ painter David Rosenbloom to
join a small group of individuals he was directing in paratheatrical
processes inspired, in part, by the early work of Polish theatre director
Jerzy Grotowski. Certain non-Grotowski principles, such as the
“No—Form” of Zazen, and the exploration of energy polarities, were
also introduced to help us access subtle energy currents in the body
as movement resources. We learned how to detect and access sources
of energy in the body towards giving them expression in physically
active trance states. This new ritualistic work revived my relationship
with my body. I began to experience and see my body in a whole new
way as a kind of vessel that mixed and transformed its own alchemy
of elements, conditions, and forces.
This awareness inspired a new respect for body wisdom. Doing
this physical ritual work also left me in an extended rapturous
state but, unlike smoking pot, I didn’t feel spaced out, ungrounded
or disconnected from my body afterwards. This work was clearly,
deeply grounded in the body itself. These early experiments with
David also marked the genesis of the paratheatre medium that would
become my life’s work. (wwvv.paratheatrical.com)
Mr. Symonds taught our group a meditation technique resulting in a
physically passive but psychically active trance state. This trance work
stimulated the pineal gland, releasing just enough serotonin to increase
the sensitivity to light which, in turn, enabled more perception of the
subtle currents of energy emanating from the energetic body of the
chakras and the aura. With practice, we were trained to see our own
auras and then, to see and read each other’s auras. More importantly
for me, we also learned how to close the third eye; what a relief not
to see auras, 24/7. Besides helping manage my psychic energy, this
technique also got me very high in a very different way than the ritual
work. I happily practiced this psychic trance meditation every day
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and as my psychic abilities improved, I turned my new talents into a
career as a professional clairvoyant (from 1978 until 1986; more on
this later).
Just as Rosenbloom‘s ritual experiments opened me up to new
somatic pleasures, Symonds’ psychic trance meditations turned me
onto even more novel brain pleasures. Both mentors discouraged
any psychoactive drug use during their respective trainings and for
very similar reasons. In their different ways, they explained how pot
and psychedelics over stimulated and the natural sensitivity of the
CNS, a sensitivity critical for detecting the more subtle energy centers
and currents. It was a no-brainer; I stopped cold turkey. Why? The
effects of these ritual and psychic technologies closely mimicked my
psilocybin experiences but without all the pesky side effects like post-
trip loss of concentration, apathy, and paranoia. The new dealer in
town was my own brain and its complex neuropharmacy of natural
and supernatural highs. It was time to change my life. I committed
myself fully to restoring the natural sensitivity of my CNS and
rebuilding my commitment to the body wisdom.
PUNK’D IN CHAPEL PERJLOUS
Berkeley, Helsin/ez' Finland, Carmel and Petaluma, Calzfi)rm'a,' 1977 -1983.
I was busy making an art out of poverty by teaching piano lessons to
children, clowning at birthday parties, teaching theatre, doing aura
readings and going on welfare for food stamps and medicale. My
chief sources for getting high were ritual, psychic work, romance,
sex, and performing.
The heady mix of these hedonic sources aroused new levels of
imagination and inspiration. Over the next four years I would write,
direct and produce four full-length experimental theatre works, all
exploring mystical themes. The thrill of seeing my plays staged and
touring up the northern California coast was a big thrill. I would
have continued doing it had these intoxicants not been upstaged by
the gorgeous chaos of Punk Rock. Berkeley, 1980 was a great year to
start a band. I formed The Frozen Beauties with my dancer/ singer
girlfriend, Sima the firecracker, and three other frozen beauties — Dick
Doty on drums, Dean Webb (from Dudesheep days) on vocals, and
a foxy lady bass player whose name I sadly cannot remember. Sima
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played synth, helped create the music and belted out the songs with
Dean. I wrote the lyrics and played my blonde Rickenbacker until
my fingers bled. We rode the punk/ new wave with other local acts
The Dead Kennedys’, The Mutants, Crime, The Nuns, The Dils, The
New Critics, and my favorite band, J. Poet and the Young Adults.
After six months of gigging, The Frozen Beauties crashed and burned
in a rubble of ego clash.
In 1981 this prolific and creative era culminated in a return to Finland
for a highly anticipated homecoming visit. On arriving at the Helsinki
International Airport, I stood before the passport control clerks who
asked me my name, age, and citizenship...three times. I found this
odd but answered them three times: Antero Alli, 29 years, Finland.
They then explained the law — all male Finnish citizens under the age
of thirty must serve in the army. WTF? I was suddenly ushered down
a corridor two floors below where I entered a holding cell, given a
blanket, a pillow, and locked inside. WTF? Shock. Shock. Shock.
The morning after my sleepless night I was driven by first class military
escort to Helsinki Militia Headquarters where I was interrogated by
two army officers and a medic. After speaking Finnish amongst
themselves (which I understood but pretended not to) and after
several hearty chuckles, the medic asked me to stand up. I stood up.
He looked me up and down, told me to sit down and announced that
I had passed the physical exam. WTF?! The two officers proceeded
to explain to me, in no uncertain terms, that my life in California
was over and that it was time to serve my country. Shock. Shock.
Shock. Saturn takes about 29 years to orbit once around the Sun
and I was officially in the dead heat of what astrologers call Saturn
Return. I pleaded with the officers. “I haven’t been to Finland since
I was three years old. Surely there must be some mistake!” They
laughed and said it was my mistake to return to Finland before the
age of thirty if I did not wish to serve in the army. They told me that
my option to marching the icy tundra of the Finnish-Russian borders
was prison time. Shock. I reluctantly signed up for active duty. They
told me I had one week to get my affairs in order before leaving
civilian life. The next sound I heard was the howling ghost winds of
Chapel Perilous. I looked around. Where was I? There, above the
altar, crucified, hung out to dry. Punk’d in Chapel Perilous.
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As I drifted amongst the gravestones of the medieval Finnish
cemetery in Mynamakki, it felt as if my entire consciousness had
been jolted up and out of my body into a vortex several feet above
my head. Here, this entity called “I” furiously radiated white heat,
white light as the rest of me continued drifting throughout the
tombstones. The feeling down below, inside my physical body, was a
confusion of indescribable elation and panic. After finally finding my
grandmother's house, I told her all about my military catastrophe.
She listened very carefully and then called her friend, an unnamed
Finnish professor of political science, for advice. He soon arrived,
and after some serious thought, introduced (under solemn vow of
anonymity and secrecy), my escape plan. I made it back to Berkeley,
but not in one piece. My personality felt like a thousand shards of
broken glass. I remember thinking — this is probably what used to be
called a “nervous breakdown”.
Unable to cope with urban life, I accepted the kind invitation from
my psychic friend Geri (who introduced me to Robert Anton Wilson;
see “The Cosmic Trigger Effect”), to convalesce and recover at her home
in the serene seaside town of Monterey, California. Though the
outside shock of my exile awakened me spiritually, socially I was
a broken person. Over the previous two years, I had written down
scores of notes on Leary’s 8-Circuit Brain model and now I realized
it was time to put them to task. Seeing as I was already out of body
in circuit eight hell, I felt compelled to start developing and testing
a series of meditations, rituals and exercises to find my way back
in. My aim was to engage the other seven functions of intelligence,
roughly corresponding to the seven chakras, as a means to re—enter
The Body.
I had no thought to publish these notes or the results of my research
into any book. I just wanted to use the circuit system as a map to
reclaim and rebuild myself. I began taking dance classes and doing
more ritual work to restore my physical self-confidence. All my efforts
at self-reclamation, however, were in vain since I was also hopelessly
in love with an enchanting younger Piscean woman whose native
charms aroused a nonstop catastrophic romance and a downward
dog spiral into Chapel Perilous. Kendall, my love, my nemesis...
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Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called I, cannot be located in the
time-space continuum: it is weightless, odorless, tasteless, and undetectable by
ordinary instruments. Indeed like the Ego, once you ‘re inside it there doesn’t
seem to be any way to ever get out, again, until you suddenly discover that
it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside of
thought. — Robert Anton Wilson, “Cosmic Trigger”
One thing I learned from Bob was how a certain kind of writing could,
with enough imagination and will, act just like magick. With this in
mind I decided to write myself out of Chapel Perilous by scripting
a tvvo-act stage play about a nonstop catastrophic romance between
a Man, a Woman, the Anima of the Man, and the Animus of the
Woman. After writing the play in Carmel, I traveled north to the
quiet farming town of Petaluma where a cluster of theatre friends let
me couch surf for a few months. I ended up casting three of them in
the play and cast myself as “Anton” the Animus (in homage to Bob).
In January of 1983, “Chapel Perilous: Dreaming Phases for Lovers”
premiered at Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theatre and Studio Eremos in San
Francisco. Chapel Perilous” was ritual magick disguised as theatre.
Judging by audience response, it was also good theatre. The invisible
soul-retrieval ritual worked well enough and I walked scot-free out of
the dark wood, at least for the time being...
MARRIAGE, FURNITURE & THE FACE ON MARS
Boulder, CO, 1984-88. Breaking up with Kendall also meant breaking
up with Berkeley. I needed a change of scenery, somewhere beautiful
where nobody knew my name. The rocky mountain region of
Boulder, Colorado took my breath away; literally. The rarified air
of the mile-high altitude made me naturally high. It even altered my
digestive tract so I could no longer stomach red meat or junk food.
I began teaching my ritual and psychic work as a way of fitting into
the New Age mecca of Boulder. I never really fit in but I tried. After
attending a lecture on Buddhism at Naropa Institute I was struck
by a radiantly beautiful young woman gracing her way through the
crowd. Transfixed, a voice in my head — a voice I had never heard
before — said: “That woman could be your wife.” What?! Up until
then, I was dead set against marriage, babies, furniture, and death by
domestication. I dismissed this voice while my body involuntarily
followed her. Who was this woman and why was I following her?
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Three months later Christi and I were married, and eighteen months
after that, Kallista was born. That strange yet familiar voice in
my head was none other than the genetic entity of DNA whose
biological authority trumped all previously held senses, beliefs, ideas,
assumptions, pleasures, and reality tunnels that defined who I was.
The awesome genetic rush of looking into the eyes of my firstborn
completely upstaged all my previous highs. My head was not only in
the clouds; my entire body was consumed by a cumulus of fate. As
if in a dream, I was now married with a baby and buying furniture
for our new home. All the beloved habits of the Single Male Artist
bucked and swayed as I struggled to reinvent myself as Husband,
Father, Family Man. I was in shock. According to the context of my
previous life and self-image, Antero Alli was now either deceased,
clinically insane, or both.
In response to my shocking new life I began writing obsessively, day
and night. Into the wee hours I organized, typed, and edited all my
Eight-Circuit Brain notes towards my decision to self-publish my first
book. I was on a mission from God. Around this time I discovered that
visionary author, Jose Arguelles, also lived in Boulder. As a big fan
of his earlier books, MANDALA and TRANSFORMATIVE VISION,
I ventured out to meet him and he was kind enough to receive me in
his home. This was 1986, the year before his Harmonic Convergence
fame and sudden death of his teenage son. I mention this as those
massive shocks catapulted Jose into very different trajectories than
the unassuming man I met that day. What started out as casual small
talk subtly and unexpectedly spun into Arguelles’ transmission of his
Gaia vision and the infamous NASA Viking 1 photo of the “Face on
Mars”.
Listening to Jose share his story, my bewildered intellect could not tell
if he had gone mad or gone genius until a light went on in my head
and I saw him going both ways — going human. The nonchalant,
matter of fact way he conveyed his vision of the Earth as this vastly
intelligent entity that reincarnated as a planet held me spellbound in
wonder and awe. Was I simply naive or just hungry for new truth?
The more he spoke, the more I experienced his words as triggers
for the very presence and power of the Earth moving through me,
through him, through everything else around us. The more I listened,
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the more I realized how this presence of the planetary entity pervaded
and unified everything I knew as my life. All sense of separate ego
dissolved. I sat there frozen with astonishment and the unsettling, yet
totally reassuring sense of being an expression — no, a protuberance, a
bump — of the Earth itself.
And then, Jose pulls out the NASA photo and asks me to meditate on
the face. As my attention rested on this grainy image, Jose’s words
narrated a story of how the red planet was once blue like our own
and, also like our own, whose civilization had reached full nuclear
capacity. OMF G. Mars earned its mythic status as the God of War
through widespread nuclear catastrophe that rendered the once blue
planet, red and barren. Before all life was annihilated, a renegade
colony of engineers and artists constructed a colossal face to warn
future civilizations that had reached the technological advancement
to see it in their telescopes. And then, Jose delivered the coup de
grace. This colony migrated off Mars, landed on nearby Earth and
started breeding. A cosmic deja vu. We are the Martians looking
back at ourselves as we approach a similar era of crisis in our
planetary history.
As expected, this Face on Mars story was met with all manner of
government dismissals yet I could not deny the goose bumps racing
across my body. As I left Jose’s place, I could no longer view or
feel myself separate from the Earth. Over the next several months
a widening chasm between my beautiful young wife and I brought
new strife into our home. The recent birth of our child flooded her
nursing body with lactose hormones, compelling new obsessions
for more security, more territory; more was never enough. She was
rapidly molting into a different woman than the one I fell in love with
and married, and it was not her fault; it was DNA. If I knew then
what I know now, I would have handled the whole domestication
scene with more wisdom and treated her better. But wisdom was
not in the cards. I was a hotheaded, hotshot wannabe author with
his first book in the works and in demand as the hot new psychic in
town. As the only breadwinner in our little household, my workload
doubled along with my stress and I found myself doing far too many
psychic readings for my own good.
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I slacked off with my ritual work, resulting in a chemical imbalance
set off by too much passive trance work; too much serotonin on the
brain. Without my pleasure—inducing dopamine and endorphin
rituals, I sputtered out of control like a live wire without a ground.
Growing increasingly irate and agitated, I lashed out where no lashing
out was called for — a monstrous version of myself was born. Since
I knew that I was chemically imbalanced, I also knew what I had
to do: pump up my dopamine and endorphin levels by immersing
myself in as much ecstatic experience as possible.
Since this marriage unexpectedly killed my sex life, I knew what I
had to do. I told Christi that I did not like the person I was becoming
and to avoid further damage to us all, I would leave her and Kallista
after two more years. I thought this would give her enough time to
get her life and body back together. Though I was clear and resolute
with her, she did not believe me and failed to instigate a plan for her
future. It was the start of what would become an extremely difficult
separation for her and eventually, the most difficult decision of my
life to date: leaving my firstborn behind.
A PLANETARY MENAGE A TROIS
I quit my lucrative psychic practice cold turkey (1986) and over the
next two years, fell into an unbroken chain of sexual liaisons and one-
night stands with over twenty women until I met Camille. The most
sensual, leonine woman I ever met was also a wildly talented Julliard
dance graduate, thirteen years younger than me and mezmerized by
my ritual work. We first made eye contact on the night of February
12, 1988 after she saw a paratheatrical performance I directed. And
that was it. The energy passing between us was impossible to contain
or describe. It wasn’t just sexual magnetism or falling in love or
another DNA baby—maker vibe. Neither of us knew what to make
of it but neither of us could deny it. Camille was also engaged to
someone at the time. The drama starts here.
We met again to do the ritual work, which escalated these energies
as I hoped it would. As the larger forces danced between us, I
began feeling anxious about not knowing how to define this new
relationship. I did not feel in control. Whenever I tried to impose an
image or idea over the experience, it would disintegrate and explode.
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Stranger still, it felt like our meeting was somehow arranged, as if
by some majestic presence using us for its own agendas. That’s the
closest I came to describing it. I just couldn’t tell whether this was a
good thing or a bad thing yet. This was much bigger than both of us
and bigger than anything my mind could wrap around.
The only other time I remembered feeling this majestic presence was
at Jose's place, hearing him talk about the planetary entity. Was the
planet orchestrating our romance? If the planetary entity brought
us together, what did it want from us? The experience itself was
not frightening in any ordinary sense. It was more like the terror of
reaching a threshold for how much beauty, joy, and divine intervention
one could stand before annihilation by Angels.
”Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart,
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror;
which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awestruck
because it serenely disdaz'ns to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrzfi/ing. ”
Rainer Maria Rilke
As we continued our ritual experiments, we spontaneously began to
source the Earth until the planet became our entire energetic focus.
This led to a distinct physical pattern, a ritual action, erupting between
us, revealing a kind of reciprocal feeding process going on between
the Earth and us. Instead of gorging on these big energies, like the
punch-drunk lovers we had also become, we simply redirecting them
back into the Earth. As I recall, Camille absorbed the energy through
her feet and lower body and directed these forces into my heart chakra.
I then directed this energy back down to the earth's core, which in
turn circled back up to Camille in a continual cycling of earth energy.
We were oddly at home in this eternal moment, as if we had done
this ritual before. In the months following this experience, I wrote it
into the story of my next book, THE AKASHIC RECORD PLAYER:
A N0nStop Geomantic Conspiracy and, in the following year, this same
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ritual formed the basis of ANIMAMUNDI, an orphic performance
duet Camille and I created after we left Boulder and settled in Seattle
(from August 1988 to April 2004; more on Seattle later).
THE ACCIDENTAL PSYCHOPATH
Boulder, CO and Sedona, AZ, I986-88. Rewind and backtrack two
years. Two of the three highest moments of my life without drugs
are the birth of my first daughter and the publication of my first
book. These experiences seriously expanded my consciousness far
beyond the bounds of ego and body, bridging me to deeper ancestral
currents and the collective culture of the world at large (my highest
experience so far was the earth surrender rite detailed in the previous
paragraph).
After the first “black cover” limited edition of ANGEL TECH sold
out, I mailed a copy to Timothy Leary who unexpectedly mailed
back a written endorsement for my book, which was now also graced
with a Preface by Robert Anton Wilson. I was beyond ecstatic. After
the second white cover edition ANGEL TECH sold out, Alan Miller’s
(aka Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D.) Falcon Press took notice and picked
it up in 1986 where it has remained in print for the last twenty-three
years. I signed a three—book deal with Falcon that would include my
next book (on ritual), ALL R1 TES REVERSED and THE AKASHIC
RECORD PLAYER, a strange little novel featuring Dr. Hyatt and
myself as principle characters.
The synchronistic convergence of so many uplifting and meaningful
directions over such a brief period of time overwhelmed what little
conscience I had to start with. I was on top of the world and like
Icarus, flying dangerously close to the Sun. How else could I have
seduced so many women while married and then, turn around to
abandon my wife and child by cutting out of town with a feral dancer
without a shred of remorse? Like a moth fluttering into a flame,
my trajectory met its fate in Dr. Christopher S. Hyatt (aka Alan R.
Miller) when the Accidental Psychopath came face to face with the
Psychopath with a Mission.
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Dr. Hyatt and I re—typeset ANGEL TECH every day for two weeks
in his Sedona, Arizona home, which doubled as Falcon Press
headquarters. Since typesetting is very tedious work, every day
presented new opportunities for “Doc” to provoke and enlighten his
new author. I had not read his book, UNDOING YOURSELF and had
no preconceptions of his approach or his ideas; to me, he was just my
publisher. After a few days, his formidable presence changed all that.
On a day-to—day basis, he took it upon himself to annihilate all my
cherished pretenses and self—images. If he was just my publisher, why
all the psychoanalysis? What was he trying to prove? He was seeing
through me and telling me what he saw. I was appalled, delighted,
outraged, and in shock.
Doc told me I was still a boy, not a man; a mamma’s boy. I protested.
He said my marriage was a sham, a need structure, not a relationship
and that my many affairs proved it. I got defensive. He said I valued
my life too much since it had become utterly meaningless. I denied it.
He said that everything I assumed to be ‘me’ was a lie and that I was
living a lie. This difficult encounter initiated an even more important
encounter with myself. Once I had been “seen through and undone”,
there was nothing more he could say or do. It was now up to me
to start recalibrating my values and living more honestly. Though I
hated his tactics, their humiliations humbled me into an era of real
self-work.
As we got to know each other more, he suggested that we adopt
a surrogate father/ son dynamic to work through specific ‘family
complexes’. He was without a son (he abandoned his only biological
son twenty years earlier) and I had not been raised by a father. This
private pact confirmed the start of a mutual trust and respect between
us. We also agreed that this would be a temporary social experiment.
Doc’s fondness for conducting experiments was a carry-over from his
earlier days as a clinical research psychologist working with monkey
brains, a field he left to pursue his occult studies. To say he “loved
and dreaded me as a son” and that I “loved and feared him as a
father” would not be incorrect. I often felt mixed emotions in his
presence. Our psychological transference finally came to a head, at
least for me it did, when I began seeing myself in him and seeing him
in myself.
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The naive, accidental psychopath I had unwittingly become
resulted from a complete lack of early paternal moral structure and
enforcement. Since the two loving, lenient women who raised me
gave me free reign to do whatever, I never adhered to any morality
since I had none and had no reason for one yet. This maternally
sanctioned permissiveness also encouraged certain delusions of
entitlement as one of Dr. Spock’s “cherished children”, raised in the
fifties and rebelling in the sixties. Hyatt exposed these entitlement
delusions as one link in a chain of lies that had become my life as I
knew it. I was getting used to the idea of seeing through myself.
Doc was always experimenting on himself and on others. As a
promising new and youngish author in his stable, I also felt that he
was priming me for his psychopathic cause. I came to know Doc’s
inner self by the fantasies he confided in me of his ideal future life as
a despot of a small army of followers sustaining their own culture on
a tropical island. It was very easy for me to see him inhabiting this
role, though it would take him another ten years to come out of the
closet as a self—aware psychopath; his opus, The Psychopath '5 Bible, was
first published in 1999. After three years our relationship had reached
an impasse of great pressure. A life—def1ning decision presented itself
to me — either yield to Doc’s powerful shaping influence towards
becoming a more conscious psychopath or, start defining my own
code of ethics towards developing a real conscience. A genuine neo-
Faustian dilemma, my proverbial panties were in a bunch.
Hyatt’s influence could guide me on a path of power as a magickian
whose destiny could be shaped according to his own will. Following
my own conscience would place me on a path of the heart as someone
whose world was subject to serving what I loved the most. The love
of power vs. the power of love. I was eventually redeemed by the
invisible artistic muses, who always by my side and, who recoiled
at the very idea of being shaped by anyone else,. I decided to leave
Falcon. After completing my three-book quota, I told Dr. Hyatt in
1990 that I was moving on. This pissed him off and we had a falling
out that continued to his untimely death in early 2008 (also see “The
Magus & the Mystic”).
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POETRY, DEATH, & REBIRTH
Seattle, Port Townsend, Seattle, WA, 1988 to 1995. 1988 was a good time
to be in Seattle. An electric current of emerging subcultures filled the
air. Nirvana was afoot. The art muses told me it was time to publish
a newspaper as an outlet for the voices of this vibrant underground
community of poets, musicians, performers and media makers,
many of whom convened at the Weathered Wall, a large cavernous
salon bar and performance venue. I told David Meinert, its young
adventurous manager, about our literary project and he opened up
the space to us.
Talking Raven Quarterly was born in 1991 with a print run of 5,000-
10,000 every solstice and equinox, and distributed absolutely free on
the streets. Each quarterly issue revolved around a different theme
serving the meta-theme of Insurrection of Poetic Imagination. For
the next four years we ran quarterly benefit performance nights
featuring local talent that miraculously covered our printing costs.
A relatively ad—free TRQ featured the radical collage art of James
Koehnline (who would later create the covers for four of my books),
articles by Robert Anton Wilson, Rob Brezsny, Michael Ventura, and
excerpts from Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone before its
book publication. We celebrated the coup by hosting Hakim Bey
himself at one of our Weathered Wall benefits.
One day, while walking in Seattle’s University District, I suddenly lost
muscle control over the entire right side of my body and fell swiftly
to the pavement. Face down on the ground; I could not understand
what was happening to me except I was in shock. Slowly I regained
enough control over my body to stand up and walk to my car, where
it dawned on me that I might have survived a stroke. I had enough
cognitive coherency to drive home and did not notice any further
changes until I began talking or rather, trying to talk between stops
and stutters. My thinking was all jumbled up. I had to invest more
effort than usual just to find the words to say what I meant. My
communication processes refused to be flippant, casual, or clever. I
had only enough will to say what I meant.
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This mysterious condition forced me into a new relationship with
thinking and language. The soles of my feet also felt like they were
on fire, as if walking barefoot on hot coals. I met with a neurologist
who prescribed an M.R.I. test that, given my absence of insurance,
would have completely broken my bank. I decided, instead, to
visit a chiropractic who x—rayed my neck and found the source of
my problem. The occipital lobe and atlas were cemented together,
seriously crimping the flow of signals between my brain and the rest
of my body. I didn't have a stroke. I had a fortunate rearrangement
of my thinking, talking, and writing processes that was also treatable
with chiropractic adjustments.
This traumatic event led me to Rainer Maria Rilke whose poetry I
pursued as a linguistic mentor to impress my newly destabilized mind.
I apprenticed myself to his epic lament, “Requiem For a Friend” (the
Stephen Mitchell translation), with a feeling of hope that something
of his tone, rhythms, and arrangement of words might impress me
somehow. I decided to direct my friends Jadina Lilian, Cyndia
Pickering, and the now pregnant Camille, in a performance ritual
using Rilke’s “Requiem” as a disembodied floating narrative that I
would speak, sight unseen, behind the audience.
Two months after our sold—out Rilke performances, Zoe was born
into an entirely different domestic environment than my firstborn.
No marriage, no furniture purchases, no death by domestication.
Ours was not a cloistered family but an open house to performance
rehearsals, art salons, and gatherings of kindred souls. The group ritual
work was also in full swing. Our first paratheatre video document,
Archaic Community was produced and a video document was made
of the performance of “Requiem For a Friend”. Twenty months
after Zoe’s birth she accidentally asphyxiated on a single peanut,
went comatose, and one week later died.
The worst thing that could ever happen to us just happened to us.
We were in the hospital when Zoe passed. Camille carried Zoe’s tiny
body up to the rooftop where, with the help of her Buddhist friend
Terry, we quietly performed a Tibetan ceremony for safe passage
through the bardos. Impermanence is one of the great Buddhist
teachings and one that remains with me to this day. One week prior
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to Zoe’s death we began working on MASS OF THE ICONOCLASTS,
a death/ rebirth ritual involving fifteen ritualists and a seven-person
chorus that we planned to perform over two winter solstice nights at
the Masonic Temple and the Weathered Wall. The unfathomable
devastation Camille and I underwent seriously undermined our
confidence to continue this project. We soon realized that we
needed this ritual to contain the lament, for ourselves and for Zoe.
In the face of death and loss, our decision to perform MASS OF THE
ICONOCLASTS also reminded us what brought us together in the
first place, a ritual for containing forces greater than ourselves.
VIDEO; FROM VIDERE, LATIN FOR “TO SEE”
Seattle, WA, 1993. Great losses sometimes come with gifts. The
annihilating loss of Zoe gifted me with big picture vision. The eyes of
my eyes opened. I saw “death” as an illusion, an intellectual symbol
for fear, social control and oppression. I saw through the lies of a
death-ignorant society that hides its dying in hospitals, prisons and
retirement homes. I glimpsed the eternal cycles of Life, how people
come and go but Life continues. I saw that children don't always
outlive their parents. I saw how we are all expressions of Love. I saw
Love trump Death.
This accelerating perception differed from my earlier psychic
experiences; no spontaneous aura sightings to report. But these
visions lacked context. Beyond the initial phenomena of seeing
through everything, I didn’t know what to do with this new experience
of loss, the big picture vision and all the images now flooding my
conscious mind.
This was the year consumer video technology became financially
accessible to almost anybody. With the help of a small A/ V mixer,
I compulsively started creating a series of short videos venting my
lament. I felt that if I stopped creating videos, the constant influx of
visions would have smothered me; it was time to create or die. This
artistic resurgence turned into my next hedonic upgrade the moment
I first saw my video work projected onto the big silver screen, a
breathtaking sight that took my attention away from my worries, my
sorrows, and myself. It felt like maybe things were on the upswing,
again. I was inspired to continue creating more videos, which led to
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the curation of works from others in what would become the Nomad
VideoFilm Festival (1992-2002), a popular west coast touring venue
of experimental shorts.
CHASING THE DRAGON BACK INTO THE ABYSS
On July 27, 1993 Arizona was born and nine months later, we left
Seattle for the small seaside village of Port Townsend on the tip of
the Olympic peninsula. After moving into our quaint little house, I
discovered Papaver somniferum growing wild in our new backyard.
Thanks to the local P.T. high school dopers and Jim Hogshire’s book,
“Opium for the Masses”, I learned the ancient art of milking the
poppy (vertical, not horizontal, cuts bleed the pod) and chasing the
dragon (quickly inhaling the invisible vapors released by the bubbling
poppy sap). My new life in Port Townsend began in a haze of opium
addiction and the education of “kicking”.
The opiate molecule tricks the brain into thinking it doesn’t need to
produce endorphins as long as the opium is there to replace them.
When the opium disappears, the endorphins can take anywhere from
48 to 96 hours -- depending on depth of addiction and the individual
-- to kick in and restore normalcy and peace of mind. During this
kicking period, I was jonsing in a quasi-flu-like state of delirium
with a sick lion’s roar in my ears. Without the brain’s natural output
of endorphins, life was hell. I was caught off guard by how subtly
opium snuck up on me and pulled me down to the ground. Respect.
The experience of kicking left me with new respect for the poppy, for
the power of plants in general and for the brain’s awesome capacities
to supply its users with natural euphorics for enduring the howling
winds of the abysmal abyss (not to be confused with No-Form).
Kicking my opium addiction inspired the writing and production
of “THE DRIVETIME” (1995; 88 min.), a cyber—f'1 feature film
collaboration with my famous friend Rob Brezsny, the Free Will
Astrology columnist. The “drivetime” was a code word we used to
address a nonlocal corridor of moving images interfacing daytime
and dreamtime realities, with auxiliary links to virtual reality and
cyberspace. Hakim Bey’s treatise of poetic terrorism seeded the
subtext of the movie. Rob and I wrote THE DRIVE TIME to incite
a series of tiny riots in the poetic imagination mixed into a sonically-
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charged, visual cocktail. After a successful Seattle premiere in the
Fall of 1995, “THE DRIVE TIME ” went onto screen in Portland, San
Francisco and Los Angeles while garnering critical praises in WIRED
magazine, FRINGE WARE REVIEW and other publications.
After seven drama-rich years, Camille and I parted ways. The
losses and the horror of losing Zoe had proved too much for both
of us to bear. She had found a more suitable mate for herself and
a stepfather for Arizona. I was devastated. I did not feel ready to
break up with Camille. I had actively made plans to commit more
fully to our relationship and to raise our family. Though I could not
blame her entirely for dumping me, I felt dishonored. Not wanting
to shoulder the daily humiliation of being replaced as father and as
mate, I immediately returned to my familiar Seattle haunts. In a
rented basement apartment my identity as Father-Parent-Family Man
performed its last rites of heartbreak, grief, dishonor, rage, panic,
anxiety, guilt, resentment, remorse, indignation, and finally relief.
After hitting absolute rock bottom, I slowly found the resolve to start
reinventing myself and for me this meant reinvem‘z'ng the Romam‘z'c.
MY NEW LOVER, THE MUSE
Rewind and backtrack. Six years earlier, a year after Camille and
I arrived in Seattle, we met Cyndia, a talented composer whose
music enlivened our performance rituals and my later videos. On
first sight, I was fascinated with Cyndia’s intense yet quiet beauty
but since we were both with mates (both exactly thirteen years
younger than us!), I kept my relationship with Cyndia limited to our
shared artistic projects. That is, until the summer of 1995, when I
returned to Seattle and pursued her. Cyndia was my age, had no
interest in bearing children and was fully committed to her Art. She
represented to me a future life with someone fully aligned with my
innermost values. Regretfully, I was not her “type” and it was very
difficult to convince her otherwise. Through persistence, sensitivity
and cunning, I eventually earned my place in her heart as Friend,
Lover, Artistic Collaborator, as she did in mine. She also earned a
bonus niche as my Muse, an exalted status that turned out to be an
impossible expectation for any woman to consistently satisfy. Anima,
Anima, where art thou, Anirna?
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Berkeley, CA, 1996-2009. We migrated south to Berkeley and established
ourselves as a business entity, an intermedia arts company called
Vertical Pool. I also got the paratheatre group work going again.
However, the woman as Muse thing was not working out for us. After
several years of cat and dog fights, I slowly came to my senses and
withdrew all the Anima projections. Our mutual animosity subsided
as I vowed to continue relating with the powerful autonomous
archetype of the Anima — not “my” Anima (she belongs to no one!)
but the Anima. This important psychological event initiated a prolific
nine-year era of filmmaking (1999-2008) that produced eight feature-
length works, all of them graced by Sylvi’s enchanting music (she
had since changed her name). As long as I continued relating with
the Anima, I didn’t have to become that nemesis of beautiful, erotic,
and intelligent women everywhere: the anima—possessed, bitchy man
of ten—thousand moods.
On the eve of the publication of “The Vertical Oracle”, our neo-
tarot deck and card set, Sylvi and I celebrated with a big sushi dinner
that, unbeknownst to us, carried tiny malignant parasites that made
a home in my intestines. I thought I was dying. After four lethargic
months of trying everything to rid myself of the bad sushi bugs, my
Maui friends Aleister and Sufi called out of the blue and invited me
to their rain forest permaculture farm for an Ayahuasca ceremony. I
told them I was too sick with parasites to attend and Aleister gleefully
replied, “Huasca is a powerful anti-parasitic brew. It’s been used in
the Amazon River basin for ages as an anti-parasitic. Come on over.
You won’t regret it.” Since I quit using psychedelics I asked about
its vision—inducing properties. “I thought you wanted to rid yourself
of parasites!” Aleister laughed. Good point. The following week I
arrived at their paradise farm and started my fast on the papayas and
bananas growing next to my tent. The medicine quest had begun.
THE REDEEMING ENTITY OF AYAHUASCA
A few days later a small group gathered and headed out to cut a
truckload of the DMT-rich yage vine that grew wild in the jungle
and, the leafy bush, Psychotria viridis that catalyzed the release of
the DMT from the vine into the human system. We were instructed
in the complex preparation rites of the huasca brew by someone
taught by a Peruvian shaman. Besides blowing tobacco smoke over
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every machete cut of vine, we pounded the vines afterwards into
a pulp, boiled them in water for hours while adding hundreds of
Psychotria viridis leaves into the bubbling cauldron. I naively bent
over to smell the brew and the vapors instantly knocked me down on
my ass. Respect.
As night fell, the group gathered under a branch and leaf shelter
constructed especially for this ritual. There was only one rule issued
for the night's ceremony: do not snore. We were told the huasca
brew would first act on us as a tonic that would put us to sleep and
then, its visions would wake us up, dreaming. The brew could also
greatly amplify our sense of hearing. We were told that the sounds
of snoring might be misconstrued by any one of us as a jaguar and
cause great upset. This vigilance to snoring also forced me to stay
conscious until the very last moment before nodding out, infusing a
kind of self—remembering into play as the visions emerged and woke
me up dreaming, eyes wide open.
Vine-like intertwining patterns formed a backdrop to everything.
Through the cracks in the vines, numerous sets of luminous alien
eyes peered in at me, as if to say, “what do we have here?” Behind
this entwining quilted backdrop, I heard the muffled sounds of distant
voices when a vision appeared — an 18th century schooner slowly
sinking into a tempestuous sea. Near starboard, a life raft bobbed up
and down in the waves as two tiny figures gesticulated and argued
with each other. My huasca night vision zoomed in.
There on the raft two ghostly figures appeared as the artist William
Blake and the scientist Sir Isaac Newton. There they were, shipwrecked
and enflamed in an eternal debate, the genius of Imagination and
the genius Reason (this vision haunted me for several years until it
finally found a home in the performance of my 1999 two-act play,
“The Hungry Ghosts of Albion ”). While I was busy having visions, the
redeeming entity of Ayahuasca destroyed, assimilated and eliminated
my parasites. I was sent back into the realm of the living with a new
way of seeing.
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THE WELLSPRJNG OF VERTICAL POOL
My second life in Berkeley (1996-present) has become the most stable,
productive, and artistically prolific era to date. The paratheatre work
has produced two to three ritual labs (lasting two to three months
each) every year for ten years straight and counting. These facts
confirm the theory that once the four survival-oriented circuits can
be integrated, they can act as stabilizing anchors to manifest the
heightened creativity and expanded consciousness of the four post-
survival circuits. This was no longer a metaphysical idea but my
metaphysical reality.
As I approach the ripening age of sixty I feel at peace with myself,
and hopeful by the consequences of my choices and my continuing
commitment to respond to whatever life inevitably brings. In
retrospect, I see how this very ability to respond has defined my true
responsibility. I am also aware that some grey-faced moralists may
perceive my so—called “true responsibilities” and my life of “hedonic
upgrades, shocks and imprints” as totally irresponsible, self-indulgent,
solipsistic debauchery. And I say to them — by thine fruits shall ye be
known, not by the fecund and wormy earth that sprouteth them. In
the end Iblame my shameless audacity on what my dear grandmother
used to call “sisu”.
Sisu: a Finnish term translated into English as strength of will,
determination, perseverance, and acting rationally in the face of
adversity. It has been described as being integral to understanding
Finnish culture. The meaning is equivalent in English to “having
guts”, and the word derives from sisus, which means something inner
or interz'or. Sisu has a long-term element in it; it is not momentary
courage, but the ability to sustain it.
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Anrero and Time Alli, circa 197, L05 Arzgeles, CA
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THE EIGHT- CIRCUIT BRAIN
INTERVIEW
by M z’/ee Gathers
Ten years ago I discovered Robert Anton Wilson and the 8-Circuit
Brain model, and began devouring whatever I could find online and
in used book stores. Early in that journey, a copy of Angel Tech
found its way into my possession. I never got very far into the book;
I was not ready for what it offered, or rather what it demanded.
Several years later I came to know Antero through his posts on the
8-Circuit Brain discussion group at tribe.net, where his authoritarian
posting style often rubbed me the wrong way. Years of reading
Wilson and participating in Wilson-inspired Internet discussions had
reinforced my natural anti—authoritarian tendencies. Just who did
this Alli guy think he was?
Yet behind his delivery I found wisdom, forthrightness, and a spirit
of inquiry that demanded my attention. Eventually I understood that
Antero’s tone did not emerge from an overdeveloped sense of false
security, but rather from someone who has courageously explored the
mystery and lived to tell about it. Antero writes from the authority
of direct experience and the sanity of someone who has integrated
frontier explorations with a solid grounding in self.
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This interview originally took place in two parts. During the in-
between period, I spent 48 hours with Antero when he invited a few
of his virtual acquaintances to stay with him in Berkeley for the cast
and crew screening of his latest film, The Invzszhle Forest. Despite
having never met before, I immediately felt at ease in his warm, open
presence. He had an unexpectedly nerdy, playful quality about him,
which I found delightful and endearing. I felt intimidated only once
when he asked if we had any interest in a game of chess. Having
played a handful of times since childhood, I declined the offer.
In between paratheatre labs and with his film all but wrapped up, we
enjoyed a largely quiet time spent with good coffee, good conversation,
and casual walks about the Berkeley underground. After my brief
time there, I left with a lasting impression of a man who lives life one
hundred percent on his own terms. Although the opportunity never
presented itself, he had a gleam in his eye and a cackle in his laugh
that told me we could get into a lot of mischief together. And next
time, I will take him up on that game of chess. — Mike Gathers
MG: The process of making the unconscious conscious seems like
a common theme among various traa’itz'ons of self work. How does
minafirl awareness tie into the 8-Circuit Brain model.7?
AA: The complex conditioning received from infant imprints, our
culture at large, early childhood and parental influences, peer pressure,
teachers in our public education systems, and the mass media all serve
to shape the definitions of the individual experience of Physical,
Emotional, Conceptual and Social survival and intelligence. From
my view, these bottom four circuits represent patterns of behavior,
habit and response that remain for the greater part in most of us,
unconscious.
Though it is commonly assumed that we operate consciously and
awake in all these four “survival” levels, contradictions to that
assumption arise and persist in the face of any serious, ongoing self-
observation. The 8-Circuit Brain model can be used in the process
of “making the unconscious conscious” once the assumption that
we are “awake and conscious” is relaxed and replaced with a spirit
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of inquiry into the very nature of consciousness itself and more
specifically, the distinction between what is mechanical and what is
alive; what is preconceived and what is spontaneous, what is habitual
and what is truly natural.
MG: Does a mindfitlness practice such as sitting mea’z'tatz'on create
spacefior z'nsz'gI1ts into the upper cz'rcuz'ts.7
AA: Mindfulness, presence of mind, accelerated perception...all
these phrases relate to my experience with the 8-Circuit Brain model
as fifth and sixth circuit consciousness events. Fifth circuit somatic
intelligence ignites when mind and body start yoking, coming into
union, as in yoga; bringing mind to body. The body expresses that
aspect of ourselves always in present time, whereas the mind often
wanders into imaginary and projected realms of past and future.
When they come together as a conscious act, the mind begins a
transformation and the body develops more confidence to keep
living. The body also expresses that aspect of ourselves that always
knows it’s going to die.
When the conceptual mind (circuit three) is humbled into service to
life itself, that is to say, to attune its attention to the body as teacher,
as guru, as source of life and guidance, then we have the start of
a kind of somatic enlightenment process. Body wisdom becomes
exalted over intellectual cleverness. How circuit three intellect is
humbled differs for each of us but usually it involves some kind of
direct experience of unity, of the shocking objective reality of unity,
the interconnectedness of all life.
Before such a shock, the intellect typically functions exclusively (and
often dogmatically) in dualistic modes of comparison and deduction.
The direct experience of unity, the shock of unity, blows the mind.
And the mind is forced to reassess its purpose and place in relation to
all things. Or, flip out on some ego-tripping bender of insanity.
Eventually this yoking, or body/ mind yoga, naturally blossoms
into sixth circuit “second attention”. When body and mind work
together, perception of reality is released. This perception expresses
an awareness not linked to thinking or the assignment of meaning,
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as with circuit three “first” attention, but with presence, energy and
phenomena. It is a kind of seeing, rather than merely looking or
judging, and also a kind of “seeing through” whatever illusions of
separation the ego works to maintain and buffer itself against the
objective reality of unity.
MG: Lately, I have conceptualized the 8-CircuitBrain model as a system
of four intellzgences (physical, emotional, conceptual, and social) that
each has two distz'nct modes of operation — ordinary consciousness
(CI -4) and transpersonal consciousness (C5—8). For example, I
conceptualize CI and C5 as polarities of the same intelligence where
we normally operate on C1 and sometimes shift into C5. Does this
align with your findings in working with the model?
AA: I agree with you here regarding the upper four circuits acting
like outgrowths of the bottom four. It’s like with clairvoyance being
merely an amplification and acceleration of regular perception;
clairaudience and the sense of hearing, clairsentience and the sense
of touch, etc. However I have found that the upper four don’t sprout
very well until the ground of the lower four circuits have been well
tilled, fertilized and tended with care. This amounts to a complete
overhaul of their definitions so as to replace the culture’s images
with images developed from one’s own direct experience. And before
that can happen, there has to be some way or method or self- work
or spontaneous enlightenment to dismantle the old paradigms and
the wherewithal to endure the transformation into one’s truer, more
innate self.
MG.‘ I suspect that early linguistics and the assignment of meaning
0‘irst attention) belong more to C2 emotional intelligence than C3
conceptual intelligence. The toddler goes through a phase of asking
first, What is this?” and second, [5 it mine?” that seems to tie into
C2 development of the me/ not me territorial boundaries. Higher level
conceptualizing still remains with C3 while the lower level labeling
falls under C2 territorial processes. This also puts the first attention
on C2, which ties in nicely with the second attention on C6. Your
thoughts?
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AA: Having seen three of my own daughters grow into circuits
one and two, I have to stand by the notion that C-3 is where the
linguistic labeling really starts, the naming and the nicknaming, the
comprehensible words (to C-3 savvy adults) assigned to events and
objects. However, I have noticed a kind of C-1 pre-verbal gurgle-talk
that some mothers can miraculously understand and translate into
C-3 for the dumfounded, astonished fathers.
I disagree with first attention assigned to C-2, no matter how neatly
it fits into the whole sixth circuit association with second attention. I
use the term “first attention” for its specific attributes of automatically
assigning meaning to thoughts and words and also as a kind of
attention that is really inseparable from thinking. C-2 engagement
is usually busy emoting or testing personal strength, boundaries and
status (pecking order) in primarily nonverbal ways.
An important side note. I know the borders between these circuits
and what they represent to as blurry and with many messy overlays.
They are not so clear cut. I think if we can keep this Mess Factor in
mind, it may help minimize that hopelessly nerdy tendency for trying
to squeeze the putty of real life too tightly into the cookie cutter ideas
of our hungry minds.
MG: Both Leary and Wilson wrote that the bottom circuits imprinted
at acute, random moments in early childhood and adolescence, but I
do not see the biological baszsfior such small windows of imprinting.
Certainly birth is the primary CI imprinting event and the universal
human trauma, but I suspect it only accounts for roughly 30 to 80%
of the CI imprint depending on the z'ndivz'dual and the circumstances
of birth. It seems that C] imprinting starts in the womb and continues
well into the first several months of lifiz. I suspect that C4 imprinting
occurs over several years, and I struggle with Wilson’s assertion that
the entire C4 imprint is taleen on at the moment of first orgasm. What
are your thoughts on imprinting?
AA: What birth is not traumatic ? If all birth is labeled traumatic,
perhaps it is more like standard to the experience and not the
exception. My experiences parallel Wilson’s and Leary’s here
regarding the early childhood imprints of the first four circuits.
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Once imprinted, however, there are years and decades of affirmative
conditioning that fortify and maintain those imprints, habits that can
run throughout the rest of our lives and can run or rule the rest of our
lives. Though C-1 imprinting does start with the infant dependency
event with the mother, or surrogate mother, I think circuits two
through four (especially C-4) can remain “un-imprinted” for years to
come differing, of course, with each person and their circumstances.
As for the entire circuit four imprint occurring with the first orgasm,
this sounds ridiculous to me. If only it were that simple and easy yet
circuit four has proven to be anything but easy and simple. It's not
just me; look at the world, look at our human history of warfare,
genocide and social tragedy. Other equally complex imprints such
as religious upbringing, courtship rituals, woman and manhood rites
of passage, pregnancy, and parenting also inhabit the web of fourth
circuit realities.
MG: Could the development of morality fall under the C3 imprint
as we build our conceptual maps of right and wrong, whereas C4
imprinting involves the development of our individual identity within
our tribe?
AA: Look to real life examples for these answers. Look at friends
of yours with the highest C-3 IQ or the ones with overemphasized
intellects and ask yourself if they have developed any real sense
of right and wrong. Maybe they can tell the difference between a
“correct” answer and an “incorrect” answer or whether it’s morally
wrong to cheat on a test but the whole area of ethics demands
something greater than intellect; it demands conscience. As for tribal
identity, that won’t happen unless you know the code of the tribe and
can prove yourself worthy of it. That code would probably express
how that tribe defines right and wrong.
MG: Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan said, “For me there is only
the traveling on the paths that have a heart, on any path that may
have a heart. There I travel, and the onbz worthwhile challenge flar
me is to traverse its full length. And there I trave --looking, looking,
hreathlessb/.” How can we work with the 8CB model as a path with
heart?
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AA: The term “heart” has been tossed about so much in pop
psychology and other areas as to almost lose meaning. I define
“heart in terms of courage. Fighters have heart; great fighters have
great hearts. Heart is not just about peace and love and flowers. It’s
also about the courage to become vulnerable and to show compassion
for your naked self. Heart is about facing life as open as the empty sky
with the seriousness of a child at play.
Heart plays a pivotal role in the integration process of the 8—Circuit
Brain model. It’s one thing to understand the model, its basic
definitions of intelligence and internal correlations and, it's an
altogether different thing to realize, to embody, your participation
in the experience that the circuits act as symbols for. It takes a lot of
heart to live nakedly enough to discover one’s most direct experiences
and responses to the realities represented by each circuit. It takes a lot
of heart to discover direct experience, period.
MG: Could you define ego in terms of the 8-cz'rcuz't brain? Do you see
a distinction between ego and self?
AA: In context to the 8-Circuit Brain model, the first four circuits
symbolize specific developmental stages of the ego personality as our
physical, emotional, conceptual and social survival strategies and
defenses. However, until these levels or circuits can be experienced
firsthand and redefined for oneself, our survival strategies and defenses
tend to run, more or less, on automatic. Running on automatic means
a life defined and driven chiefly by the unconscious parental and
societal conditioning we were raised with, rather than a life dictated
by our own innate sensibilities, values and ethics as an awakening
human being. This shift from automatic living to awakening parallels
Carl Jung’s Individuation, Dada Bhagwan’s Self-realization, Dr.
Abraham Mazlow’s Self-Actualization, G.I. Gurdjieff’s Self-Work
and other related approaches to differentiating the innate being from
the unconscious complexes we have mistaken for identity.
The 8—Circuit Brain can offer useful guidelines for revisioning these
four survival modes, according to one’s own discovery of what
each one means and how they interact with each other, towards the
maturing of a strong, supple and flexible ego. How the term “ego”
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differs from “self” should remain an ongoing inquiry. In shorthand,
ego refers to any self—image or idea we have become emotionally
invested in protecting, defending and preserving; for whatever
reasons. The term “self”, for me, represents a process not a goal; self
as a verb, ego as a noun.
Our experiences are mediated by our bias, beliefs, ideas, ideals,
etc. When these mediations can be minimized we can open up to a
more direct experience of whatever is happening. As we experience
life more directly, or with minimal mediation, a new kind of self
develops...one that must stay open and flexible to persist, rather than
the ego tendency for fixating on a set image or idea of who we are or
what is happening. Again, self as verb, ego as noun.
Since the ego is made up of ephemeral image-stuff, it is naturally
insecure and understandably covets the idea of being in control or the
boss of it all. Even though deep down we may know it’s an illusion
to feed the ego’s fantasy, we do it anyway. That’s sleepy human. We
also forget that ego is a fantasy and end up taking it way too seriously.
Dreaming humans. The process of selfhood, on the other hand, seems
more guided by experience itself where the situation becomes the
boss. When we become fully engaged, the ego completely disappears
into the experience itself. Ah! The awakening human!
MG: Where do the “upper” process-oriented circuits 5-8 fit in?
AA: Whereas the first four circuits symbolize a hierarchy of survival
needs, circuits five through eight represent states of consciousness and
functions of intelligence operating with, what I call, transpersonal
post-survival agendas. These agendas push and stretch human
consciousness to their outermost limits and can be thought of as
evolutionary triggers. Upper circuit experiences are often triggered
by specific types of shocks, such as fifth circuit shock of ecstasy, sixth
circuit shock of uncertainty (or relativity), seventh circuit shock of
unity and eighth circuit shock of impermanence.
When I use the word ‘shock’ here I mean these experiences are
only shocking to the ego-personality that remains naive to, or in
denial of, the objective realities of ecstasy, uncertainty, unity and
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impermanence. Cultural conditioning, or cultural trance, keeps us
asleep to these innate realities until we are ready to become aware
of and live with more reality. As we know, real life delivers these
types of shocks all the time. We do not need to study psychology or
the 8-circuit brain or meditation to experience them. However, these
examples also represent methods and systems through which the
outside shocks of our lives can be integrated and even transformed
towards productive ends, rather than leaving us devastated victims of
circumstance.
How the “upper” process-oriented circuits 5-8 fit in is as a kind of
language or grid to help us organize our perceptions around those
unsettling, yet consciousness expanding, experiences that don’t always
come with their own explanations, instructions or descriptions. The
8—circuit brain model provides a context through which to view and
apply the transpersonal experiences of our lives in more personal
ways.
MG: Does the shzfiflom goals to processes necessitate the activation of
these upper cz'rcuz'ts.7
AA: Though this shift you mention can increase the probability of
activating these upper circuits, I don’t think it’s guaranteed. Circuit
five opens naturally enough through any somatic experience and
practice such as tantric sex, yoga, Tai Chi, or creative dance, as well
as, more spontaneous events such as the chemistry of falling in love
or the joyous culture shock of traveling in a favorite foreign country.
However, activation of circuits six, seven and eight rarely avails itself
to the assertion of our personal efforts. An exception to this might
be the ingestion of certain psychoactive substances, which I, for the
most part, do not recommend due to their tendency to force the
circuit open. I am more biased towards the disciplined alchemy of
simmering low heat or gradual opening, than white light/white heat
blowtorch tactics.
It seems that the further consciousness extends into the transpersonal,
the less personal effort or ego is required to sustain the experience.
This is where the notion of Gurdjieff’s “outside shocks” comes in;
they are outside of the ego’s control and comprehension. And as I
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mentioned earlier, outside shocks happen all the time. What protects
us from the awareness their objective realities is what Gurdjieff called
kundabuffers, the buffers of our conditioned beliefs, ideas, ideals and
assumptions that over-mediate our experiences. As these buffers relax
or fall away, the upper circuits become more activated. These buffers
are often there for good reason and why their forced elimination or
disintegration using high—octane drugs can become traumatic in and
of itself.
M G.‘ Can the loweig g0al—0rz'erzted circuits be experienced as processes?
AA: 1 think the lower, goal-oriented circuits can be experienced as
processes after we discover the post-survival context their survival
agendas can or could serve. For example, attaining security for the
sake of security alone is results in a kind of cul de sac, dead end life.
We are animals who need to nest, breed and sustain our shelter but
we are also more than animals and will become bored, frustrated
and even violent if denied our higher human need for fifth circuit
ecstasy, for instance. A life lived solely for security, as it turns out, is
not enough for some of us. This is why'the 8-circuit brain model and
the exploration of higher consciousness are not for everybody.
This is not a populist system nor is pursuing post-survival agendas
a viable mainstream objective. I do see specific ways the lower and
higher circuits can be linked to serve both survival and post-survival
agendas in harmony, given there is enough commitment and self-
motivation to realize such a Promethean enterprise. The bottom four
survival circuits, once integrated as fulfilled needs, act as anchors to
stabilize the shocking experiences transmitted through the upper four
circuits in these specific combinations: 1/ 5 , 2/6, 3/7 and 4/8.
When basic 1st Circuit security needs such as food, shelter and safety
are actually met, we become free from survival anxiety and move
naturally towards 5th circuit bliss. When 2nd circuit emotional needs
for status, territory and power are genuinely fulfilled, we naturally grow
more empowered and able to permit more uncertainty, supporting
a 6th circuit relativistic position allowing greater simultaneity of
multiple views. When 3rd circuit intellectual needs for problem
solving, communication with language and creative thinking are met,
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we are better equipped to find or invent the symbols and images to
represent and anchor 7th circuit impressions of ineffable unity and
boundless indivisibility with all of existence.
When 4th circuit social needs for getting along with people, making
friends and forming clans are met, we find a sense of belonging that
allows us to live with the awareness of 8th circuit experiences of our
mortality, impermanence and intimacy with the all-encompassing
abyss of existence. Thus ends a brief summary of how the lower,
goal-oriented circuits can be experienced as dynamic processes when
linked with the upper circuits in more purposeful ways.
MG: Earlier you mentioned that physical, emotional, conceptual,
and social survival strategies compose our ego, but that ego also
refers emotional investment in protecting, defending and preserving
self image. Does it then stand that ego is not necessarily our various
survival strategies themselves, but more so our C2 emotional investment
in these strategies?
AA: The way I use the term “ego” is more like a metaphor to help
me understand the human needs for security, boundaries, sanity, love
and morality. All these reflect distinct survival criteria of the first four
circuits, respectively. There are other needs but these can help explain
how the first four circuits symbolize a kind of hierarchy of needs
that, when met and fulfilled, nurture the development of a unique
personality and distinct ego.
And then, there is that level of ego that expresses an emotional
investment and attachment to a particular self—image, an image often
justified by our proven, and unproven, talents, skills and/ or means
of employment, i.e., since I read astrology charts for a living, I must
be an “astrologer”. As this attachment to self-image persists, we
demonstrate defensive behaviors when confronted by anybody who
decides that we are not who we think we are or posing as a fraud
or impostor. “How dare you!” Emotional investment under this
duress reveals itself as “hurt feelings” until we lighten up, laugh it off
and realize we were simply taking ourselves —- our self-image -- too
seriously. The real crisis of ego lies with forgetting that it’s just an
image.
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It is my experience that ego becomes more and more refined as the
personality develops and matures. As we learn to fulfill our personal
security, status, intellectual and social needs we become more well-
rounded as personalities and, we can easily take pride in that. We
pride ourselves as being a “good person” (C-4 ego), or a “smart
person” (C-3 ego), or an “important person” (C-2 ego) or a “stable
person” (C-1 ego) and become invested in these self—images; that’s a
lot of ego. As the ego becomes more well—rounded and refined, new
problems arise. You see, the refined ego is more difficult to track,
identify and expose than let’s say, a louder, more obnoxious and
obvious ego. A sufficiently refined ego can easily masquerade as “no
ego”, as demonstrated by the countless spiritual gurus whose ultra-
slick egos went by unnoticed until scandals of one sort or another
eventually caught up with them.
These are not necessarily bad people, just as “ego” is not necessarily
bad, but people who mistakenly bought into the illusion of their own
more esoteric, slippery self—image. They confused a part of themselves
for the whole self. Our actual survival strategies can act separately
from ego. We are all animals and like our four-legged friends, much
of our planetary survival tactics function as pure instinct. However,
as humans we suffer from self—consciousness and that ego causes
suffering. We suffer differently from all the other animals. Most of
the suffering I see in the world is self-imposed suffering and often,
unconsciously so. It is a kind of cheap suffering with no payoff
beyond bitching and moaning about trivial drivel.
I think there can exist, at the most primordial levels of each circuit,
a very pure expression of intelligence relatively free of fixation on
image, pride and/ or false propriety. However, to access this purity
and to maintain it in this society is almost impossible. I mean, we
can hold it as an ideal but practically speaking, I think it’s the lesser
of two evils to just accept the ego, remain vigilant of one’s own
egotistical tendencies and try not to have too many ideas about who
you are. My own ego-image is about minimizing ideas about myself
-- or not to take any of them too seriously -— as they just get in the way
of direct experience. Besides, there are far more interesting uses for
ideas than to cake them onto myself.
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MG: Setting the tangled thing called ‘ego ’ aside, the emotional
investment and attachment to self—image strikes me as a function of
identification, which contrasts against the C6 shock of relation. Does
the C2/ C6 verticality lz'e in a shififlom identification to relation? Does
the process of relating suggest more awareness, more choice, and thus
the capability for “reality selection?”
AA: It’s true, when we have become completely identified with
something or someone, it becomes nearly impossible to relate with
that thing or person due to a lack of spatial awareness. Relating
requires space. Like the synapse gap between interacting neurons,
I don’t think there can be any authentic relating or communicating
without an increase of spatial awareness. This literally means
assigning value to one’s own personal space and the personal space
of others. The parameters of one’s personal space differs for each of
us but usually it’s the three to five feet of actual space around one’s
physical body that I refer to. Once this space can be honored and
respected, then we all have more choices about who to let in and
how to navigate within the sphere of our own exclusive energy field.
Honoring personal space also allows for more trust that this space
won’t be as easily violated or invaded.
In terms of C2/ C6 verticality, I see the fixed idea you are attempting
to impose —- that identification belongs to C-2 and relating to C-6 -
— over what is essentially a fluid and unpredictable state. But people
can and do get fixated or overly-identified in C-6 in ways that are not
C-2 involved, that do not involve the emotions. This happens often
enough with those training to become psychic or clairvoyant who
forget to anchor (or ground) their newly opening third eye and its
relativistic outlook in the body itself, in emotional honesty. In the
extreme, they become emotionally disconnected and their previous
clairvoyance, or clear seeing, turns into a clear cruelty to others and
ultimately, themselves.
‘Reality selection’ is a C-6 term I use for an attribute of perception
that allows for the simultaneous existence of multiple realities sharing
equal value. This C-6 attribute carries a strong relativistic bias where
no status or prioritization of realities has been assigned yet. Pure
awareness. Reality selection is made possible by the relaxation of the
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first attention and the activation of the second attention. This can
happen by accident, as with certain outside shocks to our attention,
and/ or it can occur with conscious training.
The first attention is that awareness linked to thinking, language and
the automatic assignment of meaning to what is being observed. The
second attention is that awareness linked to presence, energy and
phenomena without any projection of meaning involved. The second
attention is what Carlos Castaneda wrote about in his “don Juan”
books when we referred to “seeing”. Many of us look but do not
see, in other words. Reality selection is a metaphor for the process of
dialing into the different bands of the spectrum of realities opened
up by the second attention. What you do, or can do, with that vision
depends on how well anchored C-6 is with C-2 emotional reality, or
how engaged you actually are with your feelings, passions and the
motivation to make things happen.
MG: In my own experience, I can “see” the differing perspectives
(realities) of various individuals, but I have trouble integrating all
those perspectives; I struggle to “dial into” them as you suggest. Tim
Leary used to say, “you can be anyone, this time around, ” but that has
not been my experience.
AA: When you talk about integrating all those perspectives you're
really reaching towards C-7 experiences of cosmic unity but that
magnum of indivisibility cannot be forced, contrived or “integrated”
as any conscious act. To do so expresses the C-3 ego arrogance of
attempting some unified field theory by imposing conceptualizations
over something that remains essentially unfathomable to intellectual
scrutiny: the underlying interconnectedness of all existence.
C-7 intelligence lives with and knows the existing unity weaving all
those perspectives together. They are already integrated. The trick
is anchoring this experience of unity -- which is at essence beyond
words and beyond duality -- with C-3 intellect using symbols,
language and images that can communicate that somehow. Those
of us opening up to C-7 also become responsible for maintaining
our sanity which involves maintaining our communication lines with
other minds. Without this C-3 anchoring, our consciousness drifts
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far and away beyond the body and mind and, from the bodies and
minds of others. Many assigned to our mental asylums are actually
C-7 casualties who never found or created C-3 anchors. Their ghost
ships sail the high seas of eternity, forever and alone.
As for Timothy Leary, he was perhaps the most misunderstood
famous person of the 20th century. I think what Leary meant when
he said, “you can be anyone, this time around,” was that through
conscientious use of LSD one could re—imprint their nervous system
and, if you were willing to die to your old self and be reborn anew,
transform your life accordingly.
MG: Earlier you mentioned experz'encz'ngfirsthand and redefining the
eircuitsfiar one’s self Could you say more about the process of defining
ones own terms?
AA: It feels like maybe you have hit a frustration point here, of
not finding what you were either looking for or hoping to find. I
have found your line of inquiry up to this point to be incisive and
thoughtful. Your question about the process of defining one’s own
terms is a big question, and may be too general for me to address but I
will try. This process of defining one’s own terms reminds me of a C-
1/ C-5 process we explore in the paratheatre work around expanding
what we call our “movement vocabulary”. As animals, we all express
a distinct movement style, an instinctive way we move through space
or how we enter a room for the first time without thinking about it.
This personal style forms the basis of an entire movement vocabulary
made up of a set of specific patterns of motion in the way we walk,
crawl, run, and otherwise move across the floor through space. ‘
In paratheatre work, we strive to expand and stretch our movement
vocabulary beyond the comfortable and habitual so as to discover
entirely new ways of expressing the physical instrument. On a C-
1/ C-5 level this amounts to defining the terms of our physical self-
expression. But to do this, we first must expose the existing conditions
of our limitations, where we are in a rut and mechanically repeating
the same old movements over and over, again. And so that marks the
first stage of this process. After we become familiar enough with our
particular rut, we explore what we call ‘movement taboos’...moving
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in ways we normally wouldn’t due to shame, or fear or embarrassing
exposure of some kind. Breaking our movement taboos opens up the
playing field for redefining our movement vocabulary and liberating a
wider, more dynamic range of motion. I think we can apply this same
principle of defining and redefining our terms to the other circuits, as
well, given that we remain true to the distinct integrity of each one,
i.e., their emotional, conceptual and social realities.
MG: So defining and redefining our terms isn’t so much a simple C3
exercise of labeling each of the cz'rcuits and what they mean to you, but
rather a much more rigorous practice of determining one’s “comfi)rt
zone” in the context of the reality or medium of that particular
circuit, and then moving past that comfort zone into a new areas of
experience?
AA: Exactly. There’s a reason why self-work is called self-work;
it’s actually difficult and requires effort, rigor and diligence. When
we’re defining C-3 terms it can be as simple as renaming, labeling
and making any symbolic adjustments necessary to change the lines
on a map. But when addressing the other seven circuits, we really
have to yield to their innate values, properties and attributes or we’re
fooling ourselves. Each circuit has its own code, or language, that
can be detected and learned by any illuminated C-3 intellect that has
outgrown its tyranny for imposing its conceptual code onto everything
else. An illuminated mind gives off more light of perception, allowing
greater receptivity to the signals, patterns and codes originating in the
other centers, or circuits.
The process of identifying our various comfort zones in the various
circuits is key to understanding the nature of formidable forces of
habit, inertia and redundancy there. When our various physical,
emotional, conceptual and social habitual comfort zones can be
exposed, I think we stand a greater chance of stepping outside those
parameters and going against the grain, you know, rattling our cages
a bit more. Sure it can be uncomfortable; genuine growth usually
is. Sleep is comfortable. Invest a priori status on comfort or living a
comfortable life, and you will go to sleep. If that suits you, then you
can be content with that. But you will not grow or evolve beyond
whatever habits maintain your comfort zones.
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“The Magus and the Mystic”
Journal Entrzes of an Empzfical Mystic
The 611/!l‘h01; circa 1985
When I was about sixteen, I made a private vow never to become
anything or anybody when I grew up. This private pledge was a
heartfelt response to what I saw as a vapid persona problem plaguing
most of the teenagers I knew who seemed hypnotized by the spell
(promise?) of premature adulthood. It seemed most kids my age
were in a big rush to become Somebody. Whether that somebody
was the “self—image” of their own creation or the public image of
what others expected from them, the very idea put me off, There
was a vulgarity in trying to encapsulate the mystery of their being
into some understandable C0nCept that seemed absurd to me. In high
school they Called it an “identity crisis.” To me, it was a ridiculously
white Jude0—ChriStian mental Construct to shroud the embarrassing
fact that they did not know how to live their lives yet. Who could
blame them? Nothing in high school taught us how to survive in the
real world. When I realized this, I also realized that I was on my
own.
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This vow to “be nothing” inadvertently initiated a specific self-
defining perspective through which the rest of my life would gather
momentum and focus. By not becoming anything, I was naively yet
sincerely confessing my fervent adolescent devotion to what ancient
Kabbalists call “ayn sof”, what Buddhists call the “Illuminated gate
of the Void”, and what the Book of Tarot names “The Fool.” In
other words, the mystical impulse had made a home in me. A primary
long-term effect of this impulse has convinced me that the very core
of my being may be made of this nothingness. The fertile void as
true nature? Yes. I know my center as pure potential energy -— void
of form, shape, or color. Another side effect has been this sense of
ordinariness about this revelation: I am nothing and it is not a problem.
Magick vs. Mysticism
For the sake of semantics and to clarify my own bias, I draw important
distinctions between mysticism and magick. I see the mystical path
as primarily devotional, a path of the heart. Mystical tendencies
encourage us to yield, acquiesce, and eventually surrender to forces
we experience as greater and more intelligent than ourselves. The
mystical bias remains unconcerned with the outcomes of destiny. It
follows a wisdom of nonchalance for letting things happen, letting
others be and flowing with the forces at play. Mysticism can be
defined simply as any sensibility encouraging direct openness to the
universe through a reverence of its innate mystery.
Magickal work amounts to self-determined wish fulfillment
anchored in the will to power. Magick is rooted in the development
of whatever volitional skills enable us to effect change in the outer
and inner worlds according to our will, that is to say, on purpose.
The magickian works to utilize the forces of nature to fulfill his/ her
intentions. This can also occur with the use of magickal tools, i.e.,
ritual implements, herbs, incantations, sigils, etc. Tendencies of both
the mystic and the magus exist within each of us at various degrees of
latency and realization. When the terms “mystic” and “magus” are
used hereafter, they refer to (pre)dispositions and tendencies within
us rather than any pure type.
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Aleister Crowley’s magickal axiom, Do what thou wilt shall be the
whole of the Law... love is the law, love under Will, speaks precisely of
the magickian’s alignment with Will as a superior principle under
which Love, or devotion, serves. Crowley's life and profuse literary
heritage remain a chief prototype for many a magus today. The
poet, William Butler Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn, as was Alesiter Crowley. Crowley discounted
Yeats as an ineffective magickian and how right he was! Yeats was
more mystic than magus. One has only to read his lavish poetry and
his experimental no-plays to ascertain this much. No doubt Yeats
probably considered Crowley's prose and poetry lame by comparison
— it was!
Mystical or magickal practices express two diametrically opposed
approaches and responses to engaging the living forces of the universe.
The magus, not unlike the scientist, approaches the universe’s mystery
as a relative phenomenon to be understood in gradation through a
series of repeatable experiments with predictable results. The mystic,
not unlike the priest, relates to the mystery of the cosmos as an
experiential process to participate in and eventually be sacrificed to
through an act of conscious surrender.
“Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
— WB. Yeats
What is the meaning of Im'tiati0n.7 It is the Path to the realization
of your Self as the sole, the supreme, the absolute of all Truth,
Beauty, Purity, Peifiaction./” — Aleister Crowley
The Shaper and the Shaped
The mystic approaches ritual-making in a completely different
manner than the magus. Mystical rituals, from the liturgy of the
Catholic High Mass to Native American Sundance ceremonies,
engage the celebrants in the physical, emotional, and mental
preparations necessary to cultivate direct experience, or gnosis,
of sources greater than ego. Receptivity is achieved for merging
with higher sources as mystical union. The mystic is “shaped” by
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this process. Ritual magick, from the Gnostic Mass of the O.T.O.
to Golden Dawn ceremonial magick, trains the aspirant to banish
and command whatever forces are necessary to evoke and invoke the
desired effect(s) of the individual and/ or group involved. Energy is
summoned, focused and then directed at a target with a goal clearly
in mind. The magus “shapes” this process. Within the polarity of
the Shaper and the Shaped, we find a spectrum of degrees between
magick and mysticism.
Whether we lean towards magick or mysticism, we are shaped to
some extent by any prolonged influence in either approach, just as
we also shape each approach. To discover the inner workings of each
path we have only to examine the different ways we might respond
to the phenomena of acceleration, or intensification, of life force in
the body. When this happens, I see three basic ways to respond to
acceleration:
I) resist it: contracting away from the experience, we tighten and
otherwise withdraw our will and consciousness flom having the
experience; you deny or avoid the experience (self-denz'al is the boss)
2) control it: directing the experience of the energy according to our
will, we grow more aware of gaining influence over the energy itself;
you control the experience (you are the boss)
3) serve it: yielding to the experience, we allow the will and
consciousness to blend with the experience of the energy; you serve
the experience and its innate direction and fiorce (the experience, or
situation, is the boss)
All three responses express distinct self-defining trajectories and
outcomes. In the resistance response, we gain self-knowledge of
our limitations — how far we are willing to go with a given force
before stopping; here, we are the bosses of ourselves. In the control
response, we discover how our will manages the forces by shaping
their direction towards self-determined ends; here, we are the bosses
of the energy. In the service response, our direct intuitive connection
with the energy itself leads to unpredictable outcomes where we are
moved and shaped by the energy; here, the energy or the situation is
the boss.
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All three responses exist at various degrees of expression and latency
in each of us. Using these three responses as a model, we can read
the extent of our own magical vs. mystical bias by the degree we
favor control / power over the forces and/ or the degree we favor servz'ce/
devotion to the forces. Resistance seems innate to the challenges of
both magickal and mystical orientations.
The Sorrow of Too Much Understanding
The first “resisting” option is usually the more instructive of the three,
insofar as its capacity to expose self-work yet to be attended to before
any genuine control or service can actually happen. Like ice to water,
resistance expresses energy in its frozen state; it is not different than
life. Working to face and express resistances augments the flow of its
latent forces. Even though I feel more innately mystical, I have spent
far more time operating in the magickal realms. In retrospect, I can
now see how this created a conflicted friction between my essence
and personality. In mundane terms, I was a controlling, manipulative
person most of my life while harboring secret mystical yearnings
within my hidden heart. As it turned out, I was a false magus and a
closet mystic, a control freak with a heart.
Maintaining control over my external life depended on constantly
testing and strengthening my faculty of comprehension.
Understanding myself and my place in the world brought me a
sense of being in control and solidified my social status as person of
“understanding”. People often came to me for advice and perspective
on their problems. I did not know it at the time but exaggerating
the importance of the faculty of understanding eventually resulted
in a self-isolating paranoia. The more I comprehended, the more it
became clear how much I could not know and since I was addicted
to understanding everything, I started feeling more and more irate
and easily annoyed. When comprehension is assigned a priori
status, emotional repercussions arise as that status shrinks. Over-
emphasizing the value of my understanding resulted in an enflamed
sense of self-importance. I was slowly becoming psychopathic, a
control freak without a heart.
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Corrosion of the False Magus
An older magus from a well-known magickal order and temple
initiated me to my own process of dismantling the false magus
within. After accepting his offer, my life as I knew it began to
unravel. Whatever metaphysical understanding I had accumulated
was lambasted by the magus as inconsequential and frivolous; I was
shaken to the very core of my being. Whatever was not innate to this
being was subject to more shocks of undoing. I felt terrified. This
magus was not terrorizing me. I was terrorizing myself by exalting
my bloated assumptions about being a magickian. My lifelong
metaphysical understandings and occult pretenses were all revealed
as a tyranny of self-oppression. I was living a lie and not coping well
with facing that fact.
In response to these shocks of self—exposure, my more authentic
nature began to emerge. In my heart of hearts I realized the truth -- I
did not live for power but for love. I was no magus but a mystic. The
power of love triumphed over the love of power when emanations of
this love emerged and the magus retracted in displeasure and disgust.
He called me pathetic and weak. I called him cruel and heartless.
Truth all around. I saw the magus as a brilliant yet sociopathic
psychotherapist whose final aim was not to serve the other but to
serve himself. The magus helped reveal my true nature by showing
me who and what I wasn’t. I left him wounded but assured of my
integrity as an individual. This initiatic ritual was over — we had no
more reasons to meet or converse.
In my eyes, the undoing of the false magus within turned out to be a
process of mutual transference between the real magus and myself.
His elusive persona cast the illusion of being a mystic himself. The
false mystic within him seemed as subverted by my genuine mysticism
as my false magus was undone by his magick. His dismantling of my
pretenses continues inside my own efforts to live more honestly and
for that, I salute the magus. As the persona of the false magus finally
fell away, I was left feeling how the need to be seen was equally valuable
as my need to see, and that the need to be known was as equally valid
as the need to /enow.
289

H
“The Cosmic Trigger Effect
How I Met Robert Anton I/Vilson
In the No Coincidences Dept.
Spring 1979; Berkeley, CA. I’m playing my electric guitar when the
phone rings. The nervous voice on the other end introduces himself
as Larry, a former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with a kundalini
problem. We don’t know each other but he heard through some
grapevine that I knew about kundalini problems. I ask him to explain
the circumstances around the spontaneous eruption of the hot spinal
fluid and he goes on about his discovery of an encampment of
extraterrestrials near Edwards Air Force Base deep in the Mojave
Desert. “Extraterrestrials? You mean, like UFO people?” I ask.
“Yes”, he says, “and that there were a lot of them using the earth’s
energy out there as some kind of fueling station.” OMFG.
I asked him if he had been able to talk to anyone else besides me
about his experience and he said, no. I told him that I thought he
might be undergoing some kind of kundalini krack—up. I explained
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how his neck was linked to his throat chakra, where the kundalini
met up with resistance. Seeing how he was avoiding communicating
his experience to anyone, the energy had nowhere to go but implode
in his neck. He was silent for a moment and then told me that I was
probably right and that he would call back after he thought about
what I said some more. We hung up and I went back to playing my
1975 blonde, semi-hollow body six-string Rickenbacker.
A week later Larry calls back, except now I am calling him Scary
Larry in my mind. He wants me to join him and a group of psychics
on a trip out to you-know-where, deep in the Mojave Desert. His
plan, as he spelled it out, was to get all these clairvoyants out there to
validate his life—shattering experience so that he could get on with his
life. He invited me to a pre-trip meeting with him and the psychics.
I told him I’d attend the meeting but didn’t know whether or not I’d
join them in the desert.
Five days later I'm standing in Scary Larry’s living room with about a
dozen or so bug—eyed psychics eyeballing each other and wisecracking
about the upcoming extraterrestrial trip to the desert. In this group I
met Geri DeStefano, a large and ebullient Italian—American woman
radiating enough shatkti for ten men. She asked me if I was going
and I told her, probably not. Then she asked me if I would participate
in a remote viewing experiment when they were out there and I said,
sure. We got to talking and she asks me “What else do you do besides
read auras?” I told her I was scripting my next play, a psychic soap
opera called ‘$45 the Worm Turns”, but that I was suffering writer’s
block. She laughs loud and long after hearing the play’s title and then
tells me, “There’s someone I want you to meet. His name is Bob. He’s
a writer. He writes books.” I ask, “What kind of books?” She laughs
and waves her hand as if I were asking her an impossible question.
Scary Larry took Geri and all the psychics out to the Mojave
Desert while I stayed home concentrating on that remote viewing
experiment. I had played a little with R.V. during my training with
Michael Symonds so I figured I could get the process going. After
entering trance I couldn’t see any extraterrestrials but I did see a
raucous group dancing and partying under the desert moon. It didn’t
make any sense to me so I broke trance and went to sleep. A few days
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later Geri calls me up and tells me about their desert adventure. Since
they didn’t see any UFO people out there, she decided to get Larry
good and drunk on lots of tequila. She even convinced him to eat the
worm. A grand old time was apparently had by all.
I told Geri about my remote viewing experiment and she laughed that
big laugh of hers and said, “You’re good. You’re for real.” She asked
me how my stage play was coming along and I told her it wasn’t; damn
writer’s block. She said she had just the thing for me and invited me
to a private “salon” up in the Berkeley hills hosted by Bob and his
wife Arlen. It wasn’t until after hanging up the phone that I realized
the book I had been reading for the past month, COSMIC TRIGGER,
was also authored by someone named Bob — Robert Anton Wilson.
Probably just a coincidence.
Two weeks later and I am sitting on the couch in Robert Anton
Wilson's living room, dumbfounded by the rapid—fire laughter and
brainpower of the intelligencia bouncing off the walls around me.
At 26, I was clearly the youngest person in the room, the baby of
these illuminati of scientists, authors, mathematicians, magicians,
and discordians. Geri and her husband David were also there. The
person who stood out beyond all the other lights in the room was
Arlen Wilson. Bob’s wife Arlen struck me as almost mythic, wizened
yet totally human, a full—bodied woman with a bawdy sense of humor
and an astonishing literary intellect. There was also something about
Arlen that was peculiar and complex, simultaneously severe and
merciful and very kind. Arlen was also clearly Bob’s muse.
A serene, elegant looking fellow with a well-clipped beard walked
over to me and introduced himself as a Discordian. He shook my
hand, saying, “Greg Hill”. I remembered his name from COSMIC
TRIGGER as the author of the infamous Discordian manifesto,
PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA. He asked me why I was there. I told him
I didn’t know yet, but that Geri had invited me after telling her about
my writer’s block. He asked me what I was writing. I shared a few
plot details from As the Worm Tums and he cracked up and walked
over to where Bob was sitting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying
over the buzz of words ricocheting off the walls like so much flying
lasagna, but Bob was laughing.
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I felt lightheaded. My gaze drifted over to the window and the night
sky beyond. That’s when I saw it. A slowly moving point of light,
paralleling the horizon, took a sudden ninety—degree vertical turn
straight up and kept climbing. I sat there transfixed when I heard
my name called.... “Antero. Antero.” It was Bob. “Greg says you’re
writing a psychic soap opera. Any chance we can give it a virgin
reading at the next salon?” My jaw must have dropped because my
words came out sounding funny. “Yes, I can definitely can have the
first draft ready in a month.” My gaze drifted back over to the window
and there was that light again, only this time it was blinking. Or rather,
winking... at me. Now I knew why they called UFO’s unidentifiable
flying objects. I didn’t know what it was and that somehow made me
feel very, very happy.
THE BEARER OF THIS CARD
IS A GENUINE AND AUTHORIZED
$5 1% ('9 13 E M
So please Treat Him Right
GOOD FOREVER
Genuine and authorized by The HOUSE of APOSTLES of ERIS
Every man, woman and child on this Earth is A genuine and authorized Pope.
Reproduce and distribute these ea1dsFvoe|y°P.O.E.E. Head Temple, San Francisco
A month later ‘$45 the Worm Turns ” was finished, just in time for Bob’s
next Discordian salon. I was stoked. My new play was scheduled
for a virgin reading with Pope Bob himself. I also became a certified
Pope that night, at least according to the little yellow card Greg Hill
gave me when I arrived with seven copies of my play stuffed under my
arm. There I was again, sitting on a couch in Robert Anton Wilson’s
living room wondering whether I would see another UFO but mostly
just plain wondering. The place was hopping. Jack Sarfatti and
Saul Paul Sirag, two cutting edge quantum theorists, were riffing on
something traveling faster than a speeding photon. They were jazzed
about a superluminal theory that claimed information traveled faster
than the speed of light. A wiry heavily bearded, bespectacled Saul
reminded me of Allen Ginsburg’s younger brother. Jack struck me as
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some kind of medieval science fiction wizard —— brilliant, mercurial,
totally present, and not completely there. I sat there dumbfounded in
the crossfire of the superluminal highway.
Later that night Bob was in fine form reading excerpts from his
upcoming book, The Trick Top Hat, from his “Shré'dz'nger’s Cat Trilogy.
I sat there astonished by the highly compact, information—rich writing
style he had developed. It was as if every other word triggered a
different chemical in my brain. Bob had this unique way with words
that acted on my ear-brain loop just like drugs. I remember thinking
to myself, “This is what writing is all about! Writing is all about
magick.” After the initial round of quantum banter and raucous
limericks died down (Bob loved them naughty Irish limericks), Arlen
asked me to assign roles in my play to those who wanted to read. I
assigned her the role of Sylvia, the trance medium who channeled
the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. I gave Bob the part of Frank, her droll
husband in charge of putting Sylvia into a trance and after the spook
left her, bringing his wife back into her body. They both got a big kick
out of that idea, maybe bigger than I’ll ever know The reading went
far beyond my heightened expectations and after a short break, the
subatomic socializing fired up again.
. E
... ....... W-/* . I T
rw 1’: ~ _
flom “The Holy Chao”Neuro-Tarot (1979, unpublished)
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At this point, I should mention that Bob and Arlen’s previous salon
inspired me to create, with my limited cartoon-panel talent, an entire
deck of neo-tarot cards based on the premises of Greg Hill’s book,
Principia Dzscordia, specifically on the wildly decentralizing central
principle of the “Holy Chao” (pronounced “cow”); a ‘chao’ represents
a single unit of Chaos. 1 called the Zero card “No-Form” and named
the number 1 card “Holy Chao” and the 1.5 card “The Chaoboy”.
I showed my cards to Greg. Nodding his head while slowly flipping
through the deck he mumbles, “You’re one of us”. He then showed
me a tarot spread he called 5-card Catma, a kind of discordian five-
card stud or, evolutionary poker, where the winner was decided by
the best creation story told using your final five cards. I asked Greg
how he could tell which one was the best story. His pause created a
big moment for me. He said, “You’ll know; it’ll be obvious. Sometimes
the best story is the funniest, sometimes z't’s the saddest one, other times it’s
the most bizarre but usually people know right away which story is best.” I
asked him, “But what if there are two best stories?” He laughed out
loud and said, Isuppose then we enter sudden death.”
Certain books can change your life and Cosmic Trigger changed mine.
Though it was not the first book to blur the lines between “reality”
and “fantasy”, it was the first one to suggest that no such lines existed
beyond my beliefs in those lines. It was the first book to challenge my
beliefs about beliefs, period. Bob's way with words acted like drugs
on my brain and reading this book set off a chain reaction of time-
release psychic explosions lasting many years to come. Cosmic Trigger
was also where I first discovered Timothy Leary’s Eight Circuit Brain
model.
The Bob Wilson I came to know (circa 1979-86) was at the peak of
his game. As far as I could tell, this game was initiating his readers
— in books and in person during his many worldwide lectures — to the most
operational Einsteinian language possible and to do this in the most
entertaining ways his imagination could conjure. I was, and still am,
bewildered by how he was able to recontextualize quantum physics
through the interactions of his fictitious characters and labyrinthian
plot designs in The Shro'dinger’s Cat Trilogy” and ‘Masks of the
Illuminati”.
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Though Bob was clearly a master of this game, I never saw him treat
actual living people as characters, or their interactions as games. He
knew the difference and took the time to show others that he knew.
Bob was very soulful that way. He seemed to simultaneously belong
to two generations; the Caregivers of the World War Two era and the
Hedonic Seekers of the Sixties. I suddenly saw Bob as a psychedelic
mensch with a genius IQ, which for me was as hilarious as it rang
true.
As I continued attending Bob and Arlen’s Discordian salons, now at
their new home in a San Francisco condo, I began to notice a change
in my attitude. Though my presence remained one of a gleeful fly
on the wall that occasionally buzzed agreement, I also began to see
important differences distinguishing Bob’s views from my own. I
did not voice these at first for dread of appearing arrogant or stupid
but I did not disregard them either. One of the down sides of being
in the personal presence of people with more brains and heart than
yourself is a kind of gorgeous oppression that took the form, for
me, of wanting to be just like Bob or wanting to write just like Bob.
At the next salon Bob announced, Disciples are assholes looking for a
human being to attach themselves to”. That was the moment I knew
there would be no guru worship at Bob’s house and that Bob would
never wish that kind of oppression on anyone.
Though I never felt any oppression from Bob personally, I do recall
struggling in his presence with my own unmet and often unconscious
childhood needs for a father figure (I never knew my real father).
As with many other young fans, my own star struck projections
oppressed me more than anything else. That he never encouraged or
accepted these projections enabled me to eventually release them and
observe him closer, as he was, with little or no emotional investment.
What I saw was a man fully inhabiting a world of his own creation
— a sophisticated, entertaining and byzantine network of reality
tunnels where his consciousness traversed and cross—referenced with
astonishing artistry and humor.
Whether he was high or sober I noticed that whenever anyone
questioned Bob, a consistent delay of silence followed. It was as
if he was so abstracted into his internal labyrinth that it took him a
296

few moments to gather his response and surface with it into present
time. I began to wonder whether Bob had lost the capacity for direct
experience and spontaneous response by living so profoundly in the
multiple reality tunnels of his epic mind.
Funny thing about Bob and emotions. I never heard him say a good
word about emotions, which he humorously dismissed as “territorial
signals” and “barnyard politics and soap opera antics”. If Bob
professed a certain freedom from territorial signals, they acted out
anyway whenever he felt his publishers were withholding royalties
or that his books were not getting the recognition they deserved.
Bob seemed very emotionally invested in his legacy as a writer. He
also showed strong emotion whenever he protested any form of
government oppression of the people. All of these personal protests
revealed his humanity to me. Something else. Despite all of his so-
called extraterrestrial communiqués with the Sirius star system and
his own Pookaville of invisible rabbits, Bob consistently struck me as
one of the most genuinely sane people I had ever met.
Spring 1981, Berkeley, CA. My presence at the Discordian salons began
to wane, as I grew more aware of certain key differences between
my views and Bob’s. The main difference had to do with The Body. I
decided that Tim and Bob overlooked The Body when writing their
tomes on the 8-Circuit Brain. Though they certainly wrote “about”
The Body, their language was still steeped in the language of the mind,
of spelling things out in rational and scientific terms that stimulated
the intellect but failed (in my opinion) in its appeal to the senses. This
awareness marked a critical weaning stage for me.
Summer 1984, Boulder; CO. My bohemian California lifestyle ground
to a halt. I had unwittingly become a parody of myself and was
desperate for a big change. For me, this meant getting serious about
my 30-year old life. I migrated to Boulder, Colorado. Within a year,
I was married and soon afterwards, a father. In the summer of 1985,
I co-produced Bob Wilson’s first visit to Boulder to talk about one
of his favorite topics, “Anomalies, Coincidence & Synchronicity”. I
remember Bob reveling in the exquisite irony and high humor staged
by the venue we booked him in: a church, complete with stained glass
windows, a multitiered altar and rows and rows of stained wood
297

pews. I opened with a brief solo mime shtick and then Bob the Pope
of Chapel Perilous preached to the choir; a rollicking good time was
had by all.
November 1985, Boulder, CO. Five years after starting my book ‘I/lngel
Tec ”, I hit a massive writer’s block and decided to throw in the towel.
That I was overcome with doubts and insecurities was the least of
my problems; my marriage was also falling apart. As beautiful and
gracious a person as my wife was, a significant conflict between our
separate values surfaced exposing the folly of having wed too soon.
I was at a total loss for direction and wandered the streets aimlessly
as I’m apt to do when I don’t know where I am going. Wu Wei;
aimless wandering. That's when I noticed a poster on a telephone
pole announcing a lecture by Timothy Leary on November 11th, my
33rd birthday, at the University of Colorado just five blocks from our
basement apartment. The topic was The Eight Circuit Brain.
Up until then I had only seen Dr. Leary once in person at Berkeley's
Keystone, a former rock club where he was the opening act for several
bands. He performed his live wire, standup comic philosopher act
as a ruse for delivering rapid-fire jolts of high octane data on the
human brain, species evolution and fascism in America; I believe
this was 1980 or 1981. I wondered if the stoned out rockers knew
298

what to make of Tim. I was astonished by the clarity of pure signal
transmitting from this man. I could have sworn I saw a bolt of blue
light shoot right out of his third eye, hitting mine. And now he was
scheduled to talk on my 33rd birthday about the 8-Circuit Brain.
Aimless wandering led me straight into The No Coincidences Dept.
November 11th, 1985, Um'versz'ty of Colorado. No longer playing the
fool, Tim now embodied the cool academic charisma of a seasoned
philosophy professor. His lecture on the Eight-Circuit Brain was
electrifying. I thought of approaching him afterwards but couldn’t
bring myself to saying, “Hello Dr. Leary, I am writing a book on your
8-Circuit Brain theory. Would you care to look at it?” Right. Who
was I kidding? Stumbling out of the lecture hall I drifted across the
snow—covered Boulder streets that night, my brain on fire. I could
not sleep. I was too busy destroying my writer’s block with fresh hot
inspiration for completing my book.
Spring of 1986 ‘Angel Tech ” celebrated its first “black cover” edition
of 300 copies self-published under Vigilantero Press. This first edition
was not typeset on a computer. Each page was typed on an IBM
Selectric II typewriter and these pages became the original masters
for the printer. This first edition came out to a hefty 367 pages (later
reduced to 242 pages for the 1986 Falcon first edition after the
publisher told me we had to minimize print costs; oh well). I decided
to mail Timothy Leary a copy of this first edition in the hopes he
might, as a long shot, approve. Several months later I received a
letter from Los Angeles containing a computer print out signed by
Dr. Leary that said:
299

‘I4ngel Tech is a witty, rollicking, wise rendition of the stages of
evolution we have been experiencing. Antero Alli is that special brand
of human —— a frontier scout fior the species —— out there on the rim where
the past and future intersect.”
I couldn’t believe it. Timothy—Fucking—Leary just endorsed my book.
OMFG. Beyond the swelling in my head, something changed in me
that day. I felt initiated as the next link in an unbroken chain of vessels
continuing the transmission and circulation of the consciousness
evolution meme. As much as I wanted to feel this moment as some
personal triumph, it was not personal at all. It was, and remains to
this day, a privilege, one to be passed on to others after my purpose is
fulfilled. Hail Eris! Hail Tim and Bob, too!
*“’®“*°”l
from The Discordian Tarot
(Antero Alli, 1979; unpublished)
300

Artist Credits
Suggested Readings

ARTIST CREDITS
© 2009 BEAU CAUGHLAN
Pages46,101,114,135,140,145,173,18O
contact: beaucaugh1an.com
© 2009 JAMES KOEHNLINE
Pages 45, 123, 148, 155, 160 (and book cover art)
contact: www.koehn1ine.com
© 2009 ORRYELLE DEFENESTRATE—BASCULE
The Book of Kaos Tarot: Pages 65, 105, 124
Other art: Pages 127, 136
contact: www.crossroads.wi1d.net.au/tarot.htm
© 2009 MISCHA
Pages 73, 133
contact: Lore-Contact—Miche1e.lore@gmai1.com
© 2009 BOBBY CAMPBELL
Pages 174, 182, 183, 184
contact: wwvv.bobbycampbe11.net
© 2009 ZACHARIAH H. WEST
Pages 74, 85, 89, 97
contact: http: / /swingbabyswing.com/zach_art.htm1
© 2009 LINDA JOYCE FRANKS
Page 176
contact: www.nimbvs.com
© 2009 NINA FIKE
Pages 50, 112, 178
contact: www.amorecolore.wordpress.com
© 2009 LEARY FUTIQUE TRUST
Pages 12, 298 photos, 19 Bob's letter to Tim
Denis Berry, Trustee
contact: TimothyLeary. org
302

© 2009 LANCE BAUCHER
Pages 12, 290 photos
contact: maybelogic.org
© 2009 LINDA MILLER
Page 299 Falcon logo
contact: www.origina1falcon.com
© 2009 ANTERO ALLI
Pages 94, 268, 294, 300
contact: wwvv.vertica1poo1.com
© 2009 V’SAR 23
Page 66
© 2009 ORIGINAL FALCON PRESS
Page 75 photo
contact: www.origina1fa1con.com
© 2009 SYLVI ALLI
Page 12 photo
contact: www.vertica1pool.com
© 2009 KAIJA H. ALLI
Pages 236, 267 photos
© 2009 JESSICA BOCKLER
Page 165 photo
contact: www.jessicabock1er.co.uk
© 2009 ELIZABETH CHRISTI ALLI
Page 284 photo
303

Suggested Reading
Books that have influenced my research
EXO—PSYCHOLOGY by Timothy Leary
THE GAME OF LIFE by Timothy Leary
NEUROPOLITICS by Timothy Leary
THE INTELLIGENCE AGENTS by Timothy Leary
PROMETHEUS RISING by Robert Anton Wilson
COSMIC TRIGGER by Robert Anton Wilson
SCHRODINGER’S CAT TRILOGY by Robert Anton Wilson
MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI by Robert Anton Wilson
TOWARDS AN ARCHEOLOGY OF THE SOUL by Antero Alli
ANGEL TECH by Antero Alli
PREGNANT UNIVERSE by Antero Alli and Christopher S. Hyatt
UNDOING YOURSELF by Christopher S. Hyatt
FOOD OF THE GODS by Terence McKenna
ARCHAIC REVIVAL by Terence McKenna
TRUE HALLUCINATIONS by Terence McKenna
ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND by Shunryu Suzuki
TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE by Jerzy Grotowski
SELECTED POETRY OF RAINER MARIA RILKE
(Rjlke translations by Stephen Mitchell)
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE TRANSFERENCE by Carl Jung
THE BOOK OF SECRETS by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
TEACHINGS OF GURDJIEFF by C.S. Nott
BOYHOOD WITH GURDJ IEF F by Fritz Peters
STRANGE LIFE OF IVAN OSIKIN by P.D. Ouspensky
IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS by P.D. Ouspensky
TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE by Hakim Bey
MANDALA by Jose Arguelles
EARTH ASCENDING by Jose Arguelles
THE TRANSFOR1/IATIVE VISION by Jose Arguelles
THE INVISIBLE PARTNERS by John A. Sanford
HE, SHE, and WE (three books) by Robert A. Johnson
A BLUE FIRE by James Hillman
304

Reality hm Metaaliysns, Mnqlikl Mysticism u.s. Flite sir is
THE ElGHT—(|R(U|T BRAIN
Navigational Siraiegies for the Energetit Body
by Aniero Alli
Antera Alli is iliai speriul brand al human - a ftoniiei smui lav ilie speries — aui
tliere an tlie rim wlieie ilie past and laiure inieisen. — TIMOTHV LEARV
We knew wlia we are. We are tlie dispossessed, the auttasis, and ilie outsiders,
rebels witli a tause wlm nave Diiliirned tlie llI|ll(li oi our dead lives and seeded
those lenile lields wiib inrendiary visians al our future selves. Having already
siibveiled ilte nnim, we reniimiaie daminalni mllure's status qua al everything
and drift liappy disrannetted v babes in the abyss -- wavering in ilie ambiguity
lag al dislataiian. Fieellaaiing between ald warlds and ilie new, guided anly by
ilie sliining pallis al mniiiei evalutian. We have passed aver, we liave passed iiie
point of nrrieiarn and sinie ibeve is no turning bark, we celebrate the manieniam
lifting as an llie wings al penepiiun, glare, and wiinievei skills we have earned
lroin surviving tlie inevitable (fl'|1Sli|)DlI¢ nl sell. Only when we are over, does our
real lile begin.
-lram Section 2: PRAXIS, Week Six: tliapel Perilnas
Antem Alli is the autiiur oi Angel Tern, inwards an Arzhevlngy 9/ the Saul, Astmlagilr,
A Madern Shaman’; Eiliide m H Pregnunl l/niverselwitli rs llyattl and The vmimiam/i
(wiili Sylvie Pitkeringl Anleia is also an underground llltlitlllllien a world renawneil nsiiologei
in in launder/diiatlai al Parailieaimal veseimii (since W77), wliicli is dedkaled ta
asarial gmup iliilul dyiinmlrs in nan perlarmanre modalities
lllllllll llllllllllllllll
. '-‘win.
(ave! Art by Janie: Kaelinline
VEiii|[AL PDDI PUlil|Sii|N|3
www.verlirnlpaal.(ani