Introduction to Circuits
A Model of Consciousness
Consciousness is the most important problem in philosophy; it may be the only problem. To consider any topic philosophically, one must understand the thing which considers. We have to know its nature and its abilities, because it is the only thing we ever truly experience. It colors everything. We must learn how far we may trust it as our informant: our inside source for every outside thing. This is my seven circuit model of consciousness. The slippery nature of consciousness means this epistemological model becomes a theory of psychology, sociology, history and even metaphysics. I believe this model works and I’ve used it many times to understand my own behavior and the behavior of other people.
Part I: The Basic Material of Consciousness
First I have to explain where consciousness is and how it forms. Consciousness is that which experiences itself and it occurs in the spirit. The human spirit is an emergent phenomenon born of the interaction of the human soul and the human body. The body and soul are individual monads which interact in a special fashion that creates a “third mind”: a spirit. In a way, the spirit is like a conversation between these two individuals. It is built by the two, but it is not a part of either. Yet it cannot exist without both parts contributing to it and cannot truly live without both parts invigorating it. You may be familiar with the term monad – Leibniz’s simple substance which enters into compounds. My philosophy was heavily influenced by Leibniz and my conception of metaphysics was inspired by his Monadology, but I am not using the term in the same way.1 I define monads primarily by their wholeness, or indivisibility, and hence their lack of extension. They are entities which cannot be divided whilst retaining their qualities.2 These qualities are not contained in their parts, or parents, if they have parts. This isn’t to say that they divide their qualities, as some live in one part and others in another, rather these relational monads have emergent qualities not contained in any part. They have a unique identity, one which interacts with other monads the same way their simpler counterparts do: not as a collection of individual parts but as a whole. Some things are perceptually monadic – which is to say they have a form they lose when taken apart. These are “forms” not monads proper. Forms only exist in the mind of an observer, and were there no observer, nothing would be lost in the deconstruction. Take, for instance, a chair: there is a point at which a chair is deconstructed to such an extent it is no longer recognizable as a chair. This doesn’t require that it lose any given quality; the change only occurs in an observer’s recognition.
This is a form taken by matter; a monad with parts is more similar to a compound. The form does not alter the part’s qualities, it is only an organization that the parts conform to. Nor is a mixture a monad, mixtures are an accident of things sharing space and again do not lead to emergent properties but only the given individual part’s properties sharing space and acting concurrently in that space. These are roommates not lovers. A compound, on the other hand, can have unique chemical properties that none of the components which make it up have. For instance, the properties of NaCl are not contained in either sodium or chlorine but are a result of the interactions between them. Sodium is a volatile metal and chlorine is a gas, but in their interaction they form table salt. These properties are within the interaction – they are properties which emerge from their bonds and that relationship has its own qualities. In this relationship there is sodium, chlorine and sodium chloride. This is a non-living relational monad. The difference between a living and non-living monad is that a non-living monad cannot change its qualities and is not reproductive. So were the relationship to end between the sodium and chlorine - they would both leave with the same qualities they met with and the sodium chloride would cease to exist. They would be unchanged and their relationship would leave nothing behind. There is no circumstance which would change either’s qualities. Of course, an element can be changed, this is because it is made up of smaller monads who are themselves acting out a relationship. That’s what the element is. These smaller monad’s relationship can change thus creating a different monad with different qualities - but never a transformation in qualities of the same non-living monad.
My monads unlike Leibniz’s can be created and destroyed - they do so quite often. If this makes you uncomfortable, you can think of them as monad-like relations or relations that act as monads. In a relation like this, to an extent the the members cease to exist: the sodium temporarily ceases to exist as sodium and the chlorine temporarily ceases to exist as chlorine. That is to say that they stop expressing their given properties, but as the material is non-living their qualities remain the same. This marriage kills its members so long as it persists. The extent to which this is true depends on how dominating the relationship between the members is: some chemical marriages leave more independence to the members than others. A spirit is a living monad which exists in relation to the body and the soul but does not subsume either. This is why I characterize the relationship as parental. The parent continues to live after the birth of the child as an individual, but in taking on the parental role, they are changed. Further, the child does not cease to exist after the parents die, but once again is changed. There are three separate things present; these three forming one individual.
While not simple in the same way that Leibniz’s monads are simple, my monads are still simple after a fashion. Which is to say that they, in themselves, are whole and thus without parts. A monad’s unique identity is indivisible: it either ceases to exist when divided or with reproductive monads it forms an independent continuous self. These monads are not extended either – the extension they exhibit is separate from their monadic self - it is sometimes the behavior of that self and other times it’s the remainder of the parents. It is the environment they play out on, the vessel they exist within or the players creating the monad. Their unique identity can interact with other monads in the same way a simpler monad would. Obviously, from the term interact one can see that these monads do not abide by pre-established harmony. I believe interaction can occur with mutual or unilateral effect either directly, when monads behave according to their given properties in the same physical space3, or indirectly as a result of information and consent.4 Information being defined as a thing which communicates something it does not contain: a symbol or set of symbols. Consent referring to an agreement of the qualities of an entity with a piece of information; its ability to internalize and use the given information. Information, in order to be used, must always be constructed in the user. It must change the user and this cannot occur without the user’s qualities agreeing with the information; the user must have the potential to be informed. The communicated information is just the way in which the communicator excites the recipient into performing this construction. Take for example someone telling another, “Watch where you’re going, you could get hit by a car.” In order for the hearer to use this information, they must contain the forms included in it: understanding the command construction, the concept of being hit by a car, and the relevance of the statement to their situation. Using these forms, they must choose to construct its information – they must internalize the idea of being hit by a car as a consequence to their actions. We all know that some will refuse to perform this construction, leaving its meaning lie, rendering the communication failed. With more emotionally rife or difficult pieces of information, this refusal will occur almost necessarily. The consent is not always the consent of an agent though: information/consent dynamics occur in unconscious agents. It only requires the correct qualities exist to allow the information to change the receiver. In the last note cited, I illustrate an example of unconscious information use.
All material and immaterial things are built of indivisible monads and insofar as they are wholes are monadic themselves. I am not going to explain this Monadic physics much more here, but I do feel it is important to explain how monads without extension perform material behaviors. To put it differently, and perhaps more glibly, how immaterial things become material. This will help you to understand how the “immaterial” soul interacts with the “material” body. Monads interact and these interactions can be material phenomenon. These phenomenon are behaviors, they are born of qualities but they are not qualities themselves. They are properties. So, for instance, something is not solid as a quality, rather it performs solidness if it has the correct qualities in the correct situation. A wall is solid because it prevents your hand from moving through it. It is not the matter of the wall that arrests your hand: it is the interaction between the matter which does so. The nuclei and electrons are not stopping you rather the agreement between them is. There is nothing, no matter how small, that is solid in itself, rather it performs solidness. It is this agreement that makes the mostly empty and decidedly non-solid space that makes up the vast majority of the wall perform solidness. This is true of all other material properties (with different interactions of course). The material property belongs to the interaction. Dark monads, or monads that do not interact, are without properties regardless of their given qualities. A monad only exists in a material sense if it deigns to interact with others. The body performs its particular material qualities through these interactions but materialness does not belong to it anymore than it belongs to the soul. The soul performs its own type of materialness as it interacts with the body.
The body is the vessel that the soul and spirit use to interact with other bodies and material objects. The body is a vital piece of this operation and this is why it is resurrected at creation’s end to be reunited with the spirit and soul. The spirit has an independent existence, but it is only invigorated by its continued interaction with the body. It is only capable of using outside information in this configuration and thus can only pursue most forms of change while it’s in this relationship. When the body dies, and the spirit and soul are let loose, the conversation is cut off. The spirit becomes blind, deaf and left with only the soul and God. Like any other conversation it may be recorded. From there the conversation can reflect on itself, possibly degenerate, but it can’t continue. It can’t add any more content. Like a book, once the author has died the book is finished, no new editions can be written. The endless interpretations of scribes and critics, or the spirit reflecting on itself, may change its meaning or even its content, accidentally or through interpretation, but no additional material can be added.5
The body acts something like a radio, it picks up information from the spirit and reads it – an activity that happens primarily in the brain. This reading is not the same as consciousness – rather it’s the mechanics by which consciousness has physical effects. The interpreting structure of the radio is not the source of the music, that’s contained in the waves it’s picking up. Rather by interpreting those waves the radio allows you to hear the music – it makes it audible. The brain makes our thoughts material. It makes us “feel” and “act out” our thoughts; it gives them substance. The body then feeds back to the spirit its physical sensations, which are also interpreted through the two-way brain radio. In this way the spirit receives outside material sensations that it can use. The spirit is always in relationship with the body (and the soul). The most obvious sign of this relationship is the body’s taking after the pattern of the spirit. Some people refer to this condition as “physiognomy”. The orientation of your spirit influences your physical behaviors which in turn influences the condition of your body. Your body then influences the way your spirit functions: influencing what sensations are delivered to the spirit and the spirit’s material capabilities. This is a powerful feedback loop.6 Most of the information that your spirit uses enters it through the body, although in its interpretation the spirit adds a significant amount structurally.7
The spirit in this configuration between body and soul engages in its characteristic behavior: consciousness. Consciousness is vitally not the same as the spirit; consciousness is rather how the spirit experiences itself at a given moment. Consciousness at any given time only expresses part of the spirit and not the spiritual whole; at any given time only certain aspects are in use. To relate this difference, I’ll use the example of a computer. A computer has both Storage Memory and Random Access Memory. The storage of the computer contains all the information that is stored on the machine while the Random Access Memory only contains those parts of the memory that are being used at any given time. The RAM does not contain everything stored on the computer; it is like consciousness and the storage memory is like the spirit. A trait that is not being used at a given time is not conscious, but it persists in the spirit. I do not like to use the words subconscious and unconscious - those terms have been put to terrible purposes.9 Regardless, the unconscious elements of your mind are contained in the spirit outside of the part you are currently conscious of. These parts affect you, as they have served to construct your world and exist in relation to the conscious objects, but they do not have a governing effect.
The spirit has 6 aspects or circuits which are organized in two dimensions. One dimension is closer to the body and extends through the bodily. The other is more closely related to the soul, not because it is closer to the soul: the soul has no location. Rather it is further from the body, so the body recedes here making the soul more visible. The first dimension contains the first, second and third circuits. The first circuit is our representation of the body and its desires. The second is the social or bodily self and the third is the material world or our bodily perspective. The second dimension contains the fourth, fifth and sixth circuit. The fourth circuit is our interpretation of the transcendental good and beautiful, or our imagination: these are the desires of the soul. The fifth circuit is the soul’s identity and the sixth is our interpretation of the monadic world or the soul’s perspective. The spiritual whole immediately interacts with God creating an independent seventh circuit that interacts with the spiritual whole. The circuits of the second dimension correspond to the first: Fourth to first, fifth to second and sixth to third. The fourth and first circuits are motivational: they invigorate the spirit and give it desires. Other circuits may have desires, but they reduce to these desires: they are apparatuses we use to get these things.9 The fifth and second circuit are organizational: they help the spirit organize the world and place itself within that world. They are our “identities” and they tell us who we are. The sixth and third circuits are systematic: they create systems out of the world which can be understood and in so doing they build our conceptions of that world.
This creates a bit of redundancy in the system: people can live functionally with only three circuits open. In fact, the redundancy is such that any circuit can translate information originally processed in another circuit. Thus a person who has opened and used three circuits may develop so that they can only use one and function to some extent. A person can, and many do, function only experiencing one circuit almost all the time. At any given time you are experiencing one circuit – you are experiencing the world through its perspective. The other open circuits pick up information that the experienced circuit translates. In this way, one lives with their shadows cast over the experienced circuit’s reflections. The circuit which you experience the most often is your dominant circuit, but you may switch between different ones in different circumstances.
My model has many parents: all the thinkers I’ve engaged with in my studies. Some of the parents whose influence I recognize range from Plato to Leibniz, Uexküll to Shannon and O’Conner to Dostoevsky.10 Possibly, the most easily recognized influence would be Leary’s eight circuit model of consciousness. This is mildly unfortunate because I never read Leary. I did read Robert Anton Wilson’s treatment of the model in Prometheus Rising when I was younger. The book was very useful to me as I had never considered “taking the mind apart” before and my model would not have been possible without his. I found different parts than he did, but without his structure I would have never looked for parts in the first place. The main similarity between our two models is the shared term “circuit”. Aside from this term, my model has few other similarities to his anymore, to the point that familiarity with that system would likely hinder understanding of mine (as shared terms like “fifth circuit” are used in radically different ways). For those who are familiar with this model, I have written a note at the end of this essay detailing the differences more completely.11
I saved the term circuit as a humble reminder of my model’s, perhaps silly, origins. I also kept the term because my circuits operate like circuits. This “circuit” is not intended to be electrical, rather I’m referring to a closed, or completed, circle.12 They must be completed – the circle must run through the circuit above and the circuit below to acquire full functionality. A circuit that is not completed, one that’s only opening is through its intersection with another, is only a shadow of itself. Its shape and movement can perhaps be observed but it cannot be truly apprehended. The enclosed area within the circle is the circuit. The lower circuit “grounds” it and the higher circuit “drives” it. Each circuit is grounded below itself, grounding being the place where that circuit stops asking “why” and takes structures for granted: its foundation. The first circuit is grounded in the body and driven towards the second. The second is grounded in the first and driven towards the third. The sixth is grounded in the fifth and driven outside itself towards that special seventh circuit: a circuit which is one with God and thus drives itself. All circuits in some special cases can be driven by the seventh circuit, this is very important for people’s religious development but it is most often temporary. A circuit’s primary driver is its upstairs neighbor. A driver provides the material that a circuit needs to perform its information interpretation - it provides the tools.
A circuit is a way of interpreting information – it has particular structures with which it interprets sensory stimuli. The stimuli of the world, undisclosed, is meaningless and not particularly useful. It needs to be tamed with structures overlaid atop it and placed within it. At any given time you’re seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling millions of things. Your mind needs to choose what its going to focus on, what’s important, and what those important things “mean”. Let’s return to our computer. A computer program by itself is useless to the computer that operates using only binary. Similarly our mind can’t understand bare information. So just like the interpreter breaks the code down until its essential components are found (the particular necessary ons and offs), we interpret sensory stimuli into something we can understand. These interpretive or meaning making constructs are what the circuit is doing while you’re inside of it. Each circuit performs this in different ways. A circuit is not superior to another because it’s higher; its being higher only reflects the fact that it opens later in a mind’s development. All circuits are necessary in a healthy mind. The only superior circuit is the seventh, which is divine.
In contemporary society, only the first four circuits are relevant. Most people do not have an open fifth circuit and very few have an open sixth, so while these are important to explore psychologically, they have less sociological influence. When a circuit is open, it can acquire information that it communicates to any experienced circuit. Despite this, its particular type of meaning making can only be used within the circuit. Put another way, the fruits of its structures are available to anyone with that circuit open, but to add, build or alter a structure, to use it on a meta level, one must think within it. For example, a person who has an open third circuit will be able to understand rational explanations even if they’re experiencing the second circuit. They would not be able to create a novel rational explanation though, and would only be able to repeat one they had already developed or heard. That’s because they aren’t thinking about rationality rationally, they are translating it into their present frame. That translation is necessarily “read only”.
Part II: Developmental Circuitry
The easiest way to quickly illustrate what the circuits do and how they interact is by describing a healthy person’s spiritual development. Consciousness, which is the spirit experiencing itself, is born with the spirit from the interaction of body and soul. When a spirit forms, it immediately has six aspects or “circuits”. This spiritual whole interacts with God and forms an independent seventh circuit. The consciousness can only exist within one part, or circuit, of the spirit at the time. The child is born thrust into the first circuit – his experience is of his body. He has access to the first, second and seventh. The first circuit has to be open in order for any behavior to occur – the body cannot be used without it. The second circuit allows the first circuit to carry its experiential charge and drives it. The child is able to feel and use his body and to experience physical desires and physical terrors. He is also able to understand social stimuli as bodily sensations. He is comforted when his mother coos and frightened when she yells.
His second circuit is open and he is naturally oriented towards it. Not only because circuits naturally orient upward, but because his body is incapable of fulfilling his physical needs and he must rely on other agents. The first circuit is motivational – it communicates needs to the mind. These needs and desires are physical – the need for food, safety, comfort and eventually the basic sexual libido.13 This motivation is what moves the person forward, but it is not organizational – it’s not good at learning how to fulfill its needs or determining where the person belongs in society. The helpless baby is forced towards the second circuit to survive – he relies on his mother. The healthy parental relationship makes this safe and easy for the child and encourages exploration. He spends his first months exploring his body – finding out what it’s capable of. In between his reflexive behaviors he tries out his hands and his mouth. This is how he plays. Further, he understands those basic communications his mother makes to him, they are translated into directly apprehensible sensation. He is perceptually in the present and unable to conceptualize other people and objects.
He can, however, understand some social information – as he converts it into physical sensations and is imprinted by it. He cannot yet participate in social creation, he cannot understand the social in itself. He’s very motivated to learn though, to take some control over his condition. As he becomes more comfortable with his body and its capacities, his curiosity turns more towards these other agents. As he begins to grasp towards that social world, smiling and crying, he notices some of his actions have an effect. Some of the things he does seems to make his mother happy or, more importantly, upset. He begins to understand there are certain rules that he can participate in. From this understanding of cause and effect his behavior begins to change. He’s no longer just moving to practice using his body, he begins to do things to see what the effect on his mother and father will be. His babbling starts to favor words. He has opened his third circuit and he’s entering into the second. At this point he begins to learn things about the material world – he learns object permanence and that he can manipulate objects. He’s particularly interested in doing so when it pleases his mother or father. Punishment through fear is no longer necessary because now he desires to please those around him. This transition occurs in all but the most pathological cases: were the third circuit to fail to open the person will miss most milestones and remain pre-verbal.
The second circuit acts within dominance hierarchy and operates through social signalling using rules and algorithms. It uses these algorithms to encode social information. In his first circuit state, the most important rules are imprinted and early on he is heavily conditioned into other important culture defining rules. When he’s grown up these rules will stay with him and he’ll instinctively avoid breaking them. He finds these rules make things more predictable: they ensure his comfort. His personal activities are no longer focused around bodily exploration, instead he practices social scenarios. He plays conversations with himself, when he grows older he begins to play more complex games to practice. He is not yet able to model systems and can only understand material phenomenon through rules and algorithms. His primary desire is to be socially accepted and socially dominant and in his games he practices those behaviors he thinks will ensure these things. He is pleased to imagine the positive regard others will hold him in. As the child grows up though, he comes to find out there’s more to life than physical needs and more to existence than pleasing his parents. He knows the rules now and no longer needs to be absorbed in learning them. When he’s alone, he no longer desires to practice them, because he’s already practiced enough to reliably succeed to his standards. The world has become predictable and he’s getting bored.
If his life is very unpredictable and he finds that his social world isn’t influenced by rule following behavior he may choose to stay behind in the first circuit more often to protect himself. A similar effect could occur if his parents insulate him from any effect his incorrect social behaviors may have. Both of these lead to first circuit dominance. In healthy development though, he will have entered the second circuit comfortably and developed it to such an extent he becomes bored with it. In order to fill his time, he has to make more than the physical world to interact with – he begins to imagine and play imaginary games. Of course, his previous social games had an imaginary aspect, but they were invigorated by the imagined social reward that was tied up within them. They are very different from his new games, they were simple and repetitive and further, they were drawn directly from things the child learned (interpreted of course through his unique perspective). The new games involve creation, sometimes of entire worlds.14 He invents his own rules and systems in these games and does not use those that he’s been taught. This rule-making rather than rule learning behavior causes the child to open the fourth circuit – the home of the good and the beautiful. Without these passions the child has no reason to develop anything: he is not motivated by anything beyond physical sensation. The fourth circuit, the imagination, is the motivational circuit of the second dimension – it motivates people with transcendental things beyond physical needs. In a way, these are the soul’s, rather than the body’s, desires. Now, obviously, someone can be motivated by social rules, but before the opening of the fourth circuit these reduce to physical needs (the need to stay safe and comfortable primarily). The child with an open fourth circuit is ready to enter the third circuit and start modelling and creating. The third circuit, a systematizing circuit, allows him to make his game “real” and allows the game to imitate the experienced world in exciting ways he hasn’t been taught. At first this imaginative play is hollow, it’s not as fun as the games the world provides. He has to practice until he develops the imaginative capacity to make a stimulating internal perspective.
Unfortunately, our contemporary culture allows children to outsource this imaginative drive with technological stimulants. They never have to make their own games, because they find there are enough games out there made for them. They’re never bored enough to make something up. A child’s early imaginative efforts are pale in comparison to exciting stimulating electronic games. This milestone is missed. Circuits do not open because it is time, nor do they open because the child wants to open them. The child is always more comfortable with the circuits they have open. They must be forced to fulfill a need in order to face the frightening task of thinking in a different way. Life has to become unlivable before people choose to live in a different way.
When this milestone is missed, later circuits cannot be opened. The child instead learns to use other circuits to compensate for the missing fourth. The mind can replace transcendental beauty with physical pleasure and natural preference for the familiar. People can use their innate desires, for the cute and the attractive, along with the familiar stimuli they grew up with, to create an ersatz aesthetics. This can be extended with second circuit social signalling – beautiful will mean things which accord with an identity the person would like to project. To put it more simply, the person will like the things they grew up with, things that make them feel good and things that are “cool” and will think this is what people are talking about when they say “beautiful”. The second circuit is primarily used to replace transcendent moral feelings. Right and wrong become largely a matter of protecting the person’s identity and social position – it becomes wrapped up in cultural etiquette. A person can do most things like this; they can even create art. Art itself is a physical process and doesn’t require any transcendent mental activity. Their art would be a repository for social signals based upon other art they had consumed and their own experiential accident. A good second circuiteer (as I call these unfortunate creatures) would read that sentence, roll their eyes and say knowingly, “Isn’t that what all art is?”
In healthy development though, the child opens the fourth circuit. He develops the imaginary capacity to extend his world, something personal he cannot share with others. This underlines his personhood and his individuality. Sometimes with his own individuality in mind, he wants to take the game farther, this is how precocious children end up opening their fifth circuit. The fourth circuit’s important work is the creation of the personal world. It weaves incredible, intricate and absorbing fantasies – but these fantasies serve an important purpose. They tell the person who they really are. They allow the person to approach their own meaning. Many people, perfectly healthy people, don’t open the fifth circuit until adulthood. These people are content with the directed life they lead and find themselves, while protected by it, unconcerned with their own personal meaning. Eventually though, we all should be confronted with the question of our meaning. The purpose of a person’s life is found within their soul; this is the fifth circuit. Like the second circuit, its first dimensional sibling, this circuit is organizational. It defines a person’s role in relation to others and their place in the world. This is a different kind of place though, not one that works in the cultural realm the person is born into but rather one that operates on a larger scale. This is one’s position in humanity or in God’s plan. For most people this meaning is intimately tied in with making a family – many souls are in the soul creation business. This means that souls are gendered – male, female and neuter.15 If a person has developed in a healthy way, opening their fourth circuit, the birth of a child or a defining romantic relationship will often open their fifth circuit. Purpose and greater meaning will become central to their lives and they will no longer be as attached to their body - they have other bodies to care for after all. Unfortunately, for many people the fifth circuit is unreachable as they haven’t opened the fourth. It also doesn’t necessarily open in everyone with an open fourth circuit. Many people’s lives are guided to such an extent, that even when they leave their parent’s home they are not seriously confronted with the question of meaning – they’re honestly too busy most of the time. The guidance, and even more importantly the endless work, of the public school system, the university system and the capitalist work structure prevent the fifth circuit from opening. People have to have a certain degree of control over their lives and actions to determine their meaning and culture’s heavily defined pathways interfere with this. Consequently, the circuit’s prominence declined significantly during and after the Industrial Revolution.16
Before I can explain the opening of the sixth circuit I have to explain the special seventh circuit. Without the use of this particular circuit, the sixth circuit cannot be opened. When the spirit is formed it immediately interacts with God and forms the seventh circuit which is the person’s most obvious spiritual connection to God. God is obviously present in all the circuits, as he is in all things, but here he stakes his territorial claim. This is our representation of the Holy Spirit. Just as the first circuit is not the same as the body and the fifth circuit is not the same as the soul; this circuit is not the same as the Holy Spirit. However, due to God’s unique qualities – this circuit is one with Him. The Holy Spirit interacts with the other circuits – directing and guiding them. At any given time, this circuit can take over and drive you in whatever circuit you are residing in. Unlike the other circuits, this one is not dependent on others: He doesn’t have prerequisites. He interacts with the spirit as a whole in any form it may take. His only condition is that the spirit open itself to Him. He will find you where you are and direct you if you allow Him to. This means that anyone with any circuit orientation has the same ability to experience the Holy Spirit. We are intended to have all six circuits open, and this allows us to live with the seventh circuit more fully, but He can find us wherever we are. He meets you with the spirit that you have, not only with the spirit that you should have. The major behaviors of the seventh circuit are: the development of universal conscience, delivering intuitions from closed circuits and epiphanies. This circuit writes the moral law on your heart and makes you feel guilt when you wander astray despite yourself. He whispers to you what closed circuits are trying to yell. Sometimes He finds you on the road to Damascus and He shakes you until you wake up reborn.
With this circuit above a person and five circuits beneath them, the mind is ready to face its own mortality in a real, and not merely theoretical, way. This forces the mind to deal with things which are eternal: what the world is like underneath our perception of it. If the fourth circuit is the soul’s desires and the fifth circuit the soul’s identity, then this circuit is the soul’s eyes. It gives you access to the soul’s perspective. The sixth circuit correlates with the third, but while the third circuit reasons empirically about material as we experience it, the sixth circuit reasons about the material itself: its monadic nature. The third circuit deals with properties while the sixth circuit deals with qualities. This is a way of thinking that isn’t spatially or temporally limited: just as the soul, taking up no space, has no place or time. In this circuit, one finds their personal religion: not as a series of doctrine’s they’ve analyzed and accepted, but as a direct apprehension of the mystical. This is how true psychic phenomenon occurs and where supernatural experiences occur. That doesn’t mean that everyone whose has had a supernatural experience has it open – these are often intuitions and one can get intuitions from closed circuits. Still, these experiences are very meaningful to the person experiencing them – as the sixth circuit is the pathway by which we internalize outside spiritual material. Closed circuits still radiate down even in their passive state, and a spiritual experience or a spiritual contact makes the circuit active and hence more capable of this radiation.17 An open sixth circuit is very rare. Yes, this includes people who prod at it several times using psychedelic drugs.18
Everyone has a circuitry makeup. This involves a dominant circuit, and various orientations in the other circuits. Your dominant circuit is the one you experience the most often. People with healthy circuit balances will experience different circuits at different times but will still have a favorite one that they rely on most frequently. For many people now, this is the second circuit, but for most of my readers it will likely be the third. Due to common circuit limitations – failure to meet milestones – it is often the second highest achieved circuit. Strongly dominant circuits shape what a person can understand. People are not resisting their “better nature” or “ignoring evidence”. They simply don’t see the evidence or have the given nature. For instance, first circuit dominant people often act in reckless and anti-social ways. This isn’t because they are ignoring the consequences of their actions or the feelings of others – these things don’t occur to them at all. They are only capable of considering these things with effort or assistance, and when neither of these things are available, the thoughts don’t occur to them. People are doing the best they can think to do and according to the evidence available to them they are behaving rationally and purposefully. They aren’t trying to be difficult and forcing themselves to do things differently from the way you do them: they are thinking in an entirely different way. People do not behave the way they do out of sheer badness anymore than you behave the way you do out of sheer goodness.
Depending on a person’s dominant circuit they have a different religious orientation and define pleasure differently. Pleasure, most often release, is found in a circuit’s grounding force. For the first circuit dominant, pleasure is bodily, for the second circuit dominant it’s found in first circuit comfort, and so on. Religious orientation is most often aligned to the driving circuit, the one directly above the dominant circuit most of the time. A lot of times this is the highest circuit. When the highest circuit is different from the driving circuit, a person may have a mixed religious orientation if they have a flexible orientation; if they do not have a flexible orientation, the driving circuit will win out. Of course, the Seventh Circuit is also a “driver” and plays a major role in the religion of people who are open to it. First circuit dominant people are religiously excited by social domination, second circuit people by rationality, third circuit people by the good and the beautiful and so on. This is the mind’s attempt to overcome itself.
Let’s take a second circuit dominant person with three open circuits, a second circuiteer, for example. This person will find pleasure in the comfortable stimuli imprinted on their first circuit – they will enjoy familiar media franchises, cute animals, familiar food and similar things. This person will be religiously oriented towards the rational. Those rational thoughts that escape the social, like the size of the universe, will be what gives them a religious and transcendental rush. Something just outside their capacity to consider – something not governed by social rules, but nonetheless real in their given mental field. Oftentimes people with heavy dominances will have their most especially positive and especially negative associations with their given circuit. For instance, a heavily second circuit dominant person will both deny they care about social status/social whilst also defining themselves, and their highest value, as being nice (following social rules). Third circuit dominant people do a similar thing with hating “the cult of rationality” whilst wondering why people can’t be more rational. They know the difference very well: their entire world is made up of these things so it includes all the things they love and hate the most. We’ll examine various circuit dominances in the coming articles and how these affect people’s worldviews and the cultures they build.
The dominant circuit isn’t the only one affecting a person’s behavior – other circuits are open and operating in a person’s mind. People with healthy orientations will inhabit other circuits at certain times. Substance use in particular often results in forced switching, but so does going to a party or using a computer. A person processes information from all the circuits they have open and working. A circuit can have positive or negative orientations which affects how comfortable a person is using it and what kind of information they can acquire from it. The second circuit, for example, can have a positive, negative or neutral orientation – this is how people see themselves in relation to others. People with strongly negative orientations in this circuit will be less willing to use information from it and more likely to avoid it. This will often result in atrophy.
Atrophy is the inability to use a formerly open circuit completely: it’s a loss of formerly present functionality. Circuits that are open can atrophy from traumatic situations or from perpetual disuse: it’s a common but unhealthy condition. Many people come to abandon higher circuits with age. Their desires in these realms are frustrated and they find their lives more comfortable without these desires. This is what causes the stagnation often observed in adults in the past.19 When a higher dimensional circuit atrophies, the lower dimensional sibling can take over for it – so if you close your fifth, you can integrate all the information you’ve acquired from it into the second and use the second for the things you once used the fifth for. This does make behavior notably different however; it’s not total redundancy.
First circuit atrophy is relatively common and becomes more common with digital stimulation. A person with an open fourth circuit can compensate for this, but those without an open fourth circuit face serious consequences from this condition – most often this is called “Depression”. When a circuit completely atrophies, it ossifies. This means while you keep information you learned from it previously and integrate that information into other circuits, you cannot acquire any new information from it. Its growth stops. So a person with an ossified circuit is different from one who has never opened it – they have access to different memories that shape their beliefs. However, over time, they come to resemble a person without the circuit as their behavior becomes more stereotyped. This may eventually lead them to change their beliefs entirely as they consider their younger self “naive” and “foolish”.
A serious condition called circuit locking can occur when a circuit is heavily stimulated. This can be acute – when too much information is passed all at once - something most often caused by drug use. It can also happen from chronic overuse of the circuit. Some degree of second circuit locking is becoming relatively common due to technological overstimulation. Our society supports this condition, by which I don’t mean it encourages it but rather, like a browser supports an extension, the society compensates for it and has created different apparatuses to make the condition livable. Circuit locking is very serious, and in many cases, it is difficult to overcome. I will discuss the locking behavior of each circuit in its given article and will discuss it at length in the final article on the practical uses of the model.
This should give you some idea what the pieces of this model are and how they interact. In the next part I am going to tell you what the future articles will be about. I’m very sorry if this seems rushed or slip-shod. I have written a tremendous amount about this model and had to be brief, and occasionally rushed, so as to not write an (even more) egregiously long introduction. I also find the editing process impossible, so forgive any typos. Each time I tried to proofread I ended up rewording or adding more, which required me to proofread again. I eventually had to simply cut off this process. Further, this philosophy is a work in progress. I’m still working on certain parts of it and addressing certain issues the model has yet to treat satisfactorily (in my opinion). I hope any questions you may have here will be addressed in future articles. These articles will also be introductory, but I hope the introduction is so complete that I will be able to discuss various specific phenomenon using the model in the future.
Part III: What to Expect Coming Up
This article is going to be followed by seven more. These essays will attempt to explain all the vital parts of the circuitry model. It won’t include everything I’ve written, but it will tell you how the individual circuits work in detail: the particular structures they overlay over sensory information, the pathologies which can develop from their over and under use and how they function in healthy minds. These pieces will also cover personality types that develop from circuit dominances and circuit atrophies and the types of civilizations different mental orientations build. If you’d prefer to be surprised by the future articles then you needn’t read on, this is just an outline of what’s coming next.
The second part of the series will discuss the first circuit. The first circuit is the spiritual representation of the body or the way the mind models and uses the body. This is the circuit which feels bodily sensation and everyone has at least partial use of it. This circuit cannot ossify in a living person although it can atrophy. The circuit feels simple desires like hunger and root sexual libido but it also extends itself to more subtle bodily sensations like terror and comfort. I will discuss at length how the first circuit develops, how its nature follows that of the body and how it works in a normal person. We’ll meet the first circuit dominant person – someone you’ve almost certainly experienced before if you’ve ever been to a slum or a prison. Their behavior is characterized by the “possible” and the “pleasure calculation”. These people have limited imaginations – so they develop their concept of the possible from those things which they have personally and recently experienced. They have this set of “possible” operations and from it they calculate what will be the most pleasurable course of action given present circumstances and then do it. They have little ability to reflect on this process and are not typically able to explain their decision making process afterwards (as circumstances have likely changed making the calculation different). First circuit dominant cultures are not possible on a large scale as the circuit has no organizing principle, but is rather motivational. However, some cultures have so many first circuit dominant members they develop in the image of the first circuit. I will discuss how these sorts of cultures operate – by physical punishments and managing the possible primarily. We’ll learn how some other societies have a first circuit leadership thrust upon them through artificial means (this most often happens when the first circuit leader gains access to an artificial source of resources like a corporation’s sponsorship or an NGO). I’ll tell you why drugs can be so devastating to these people once they become “possible” and then hijack the pleasure calculator. We’ll also learn about the effects of first circuit atrophy – which causes depression in people who only have the first three circuits open and how fourth circuit fantasy compensates in those with a fourth circuit. Lastly, I’ll talk about first circuit locking – which leads to some bizarre behaviors that many people might find familiar due to a particularly famous first circuit locked internet personality.
The third article will be the most sociologically relevant. It’s about the second circuit, how it develops in normal people and what it does in their mind. The second circuit has recently become culturally dominant and can be used to explain several contemporary cultural phenomenon. We’ll look at how rules govern the information in this circuit and how it uses rules to integrate information from other circuits. Our main character in this excursion will be the “second circuiteer”, a peculiar type of person who has only opened their first three circuits and is dominated by their second. We’ll learn how these people are coming to run our culture and how they differ from second circuit dominant people with more flexible circuit capacities. This circuit has historically been more dominant in women, who due to their social role have always prioritized agents over material factors. We’ll learn that its rise in prominence is responsible for a lot of things which are characterized as cultural “feminization”. The second circuit locking phenomenon – which goes by many names like borderline personality disorder, ADHD and narcissism depending on the person’s second circuit orientation – will be explored. We’ll find out why and how the second circuit governs digital spaces. Finally, the essay will cover second circuit atrophy and ossification and its role in some of the cases of what we call “autism”.
The fourth article is about the third circuit. This will be very relevant to my readers – most of whom I assume are third circuit dominant. This article will demonstrate how language acquisition is the same as third circuit acquisition as words belong to this third circuit. The third circuit dominant “industrial man” will be our protagonist in this article. We’ll learn how he prioritizes moral and aesthetic judgments and how he rationally solves problems and organizes the world in order to reach towards these transcendental goals. This circuit has historically been more dominant in men and it became culturally dominant after industrialization and maintained this dominance until very recently. The effects of third circuit locking – something that’s often called schizophrenia – will be discussed. Finally, we’ll cover the behavior of third circuit dominant people in a second circuit dominant world – something we sometimes call “high functioning autism”.
The fifth article will be all about the fourth circuit. This circuit can most briefly be called “the imagination”. We’ll explore how one first starts using this imaginative capacity in the third circuit and will examine the role of unguided play in its development. We’ll learn how fantasy changes when it’s used inside the third circuit versus inside the fourth. This circuit is a fundamental part of artistic creation and the “artist” or “fantasist” will play the leading role in this article. This will be a sad essay because we, as a culture, experienced a disintegration of the fourth circuit in the 20th century and are now experiencing its die off as many reach adulthood without ever having opened it. We’ll see how other circuits attempt to compensate for a missing fourth circuit: how second circuit rules come to mock moral instinct and how first circuit comforts comes to mock aesthetics. We’ll learn why I expect our culture will soon relieve itself of some fourth circuit instincts – like the love of nature and poetry. I’ll tell you why the fourth circuit, given its flights of fancy and highly individual nature, cannot dominate a civilization. Finally, its relationship to the first circuit, its first dimensional sibling, will be explored so that its role in depression and pleasure can be understood.
The sixth article will discuss the fifth, sixth and seventh circuits. This one might balloon into three articles depending on whether the information can be concentrated easily or not. In our culture, these are less prominent circuits and play a smaller role in the social world. Thus, the sociological aspects of the first articles will fall into the background. The fifth circuit as the soul proper will be examined as we look at what the soul does in human development. Here we will explore the soul as purpose-making machine and how it creates the “meaningful”. In the quest to understand that we will learn the role of female, male and neuter souls and how family making is central to many people’s purposes. This will explain why so many people first open their fifth circuit when they have children or fall in love. We’ll learn why people after years of frustration often shed this sometimes painful circuit. I’ll introduce “The Specter of the Adult” and how the failure to open this circuit makes so many people fail to ever feel like “real adults”. Next we’ll see what the “fifth circuit perspective” is or what people are doing when they “take a look at their lives”. We’ll look at it as an organizational circuit, and the sibling of the second, and try to understand how this helps people “find themselves” in the world.
The sixth circuit and the world of monads will follow. Here we will discuss monadic physics a bit to understand the relationship of the sixth and third circuits – the difference between understanding material as appearance and material in itself. The third circuit works by explaining our empirical reality – material as it appears. The sixth circuit looks at things differently, interacting with the monadic wholes themselves, or, really, its representation of these. Thus, its information is not sensory but is intuited through the soul and its relation with fellow monads. We will discuss how people create mock six circuits with psychedelic drugs and what’s psychologically happening when people have supernatural experiences. We’ll learn how contemplating, and coming to terms with, death opens this vital spiritual pathway. We’ll end the article on an elucidation of the seventh circuit. This circuit is different from all the others as it lays outside the spiritual whole and is formed in interaction with God. The most moving way the circuit “shows” itself is through epiphany – this circuit governs our “road to Damascus” moments. We’ll look at its less spectacular role as part of the “conscience” or the moral law written on our heart. We’ll learn how it whispers guidance from circuits we can’t hear and how it acts as our special guide and mentor. Finally, we’ll thank this special circuit for meeting us always where we are and not where we should be. We’ll learn that it’s always available to us so long as we make ourselves available to it.
The seventh article will present a history of circuits and their cultural domination in various historical eras: how circuits rose and how they fell. This will start with their creation – as discussed in the Bible. We’ll learn when the circuits were created and for what purpose – we’ll learn why we were made with the first, second, fifth, sixth and seventh circuits. We’ll learn how we got the fourth and why God gave us the third in response. We’ll learn how the fifth circuit relates to our creation in the “image” of God. We’ll also learn how we lost circuits and regained them through God’s justice and through his grace. Then we’ll run through history and define what “mental anarchism” is and how it defined the decentralized middle ages. We’ll find out why and how the fifth circuit came to dominate the Renaissance and why its dominance led the sixth circuit to die off in the Enlightenment. We’ll learn why the fourth circuit was never dominant and how industrialization caused widespread third circuit dominance and the fading away of the fifth. We’ll discuss the painful fourth circuit disintegration of the 20th century until finally we find ourselves back in the second circuit dominant contemporary Western world we call home. In the course of this history we’ll learn a little bit about animals and how their circuitry differs from their human counterparts.
Finally, in the eighth article I’m going to discuss my model’s practical applications. If you only read one other article I would recommend it be either the third or the eighth. The third has the most cultural relevance while the eighth has the greatest potential to help people practically. I’ll discuss various mental illnesses as modelled with circuits – and importantly how this model opens up novel treatment options. I’ll tell you about the “Hall of Mercy”: a treatment plan for second circuit locking which is currently epidemic. I’ll tell you about stimulation therapy for depression. I’ll tell you why schizophrenia is such a difficult disorder to treat and I’ll tell you why so many pharmacological treatments don’t treat people’s root problems but merely manage some of their symptoms. This is why I want so badly to share circuitry with other people. It’s not just a fun concept: I believe it’s a powerful tool with the power to help people live better lives.
Thank you for bearing with me so long. I am sorry this has taken so long to get together and I apologize if in my excitement I fail to be clear. I am very familiar with this model, but realize I am the only person who is. I believe this model works and I think it can empower people to understand others and even help themselves. So let me take you on a journey through these powerful concepts and give you some of the tools I’ve found to be so useful and enlightening.
PS. I don’t know when the next article will be done. It should be relatively easy because I have most of the first circuit done, but I found many times while writing this that while I have hundreds of pieces written, I often didn’t have the pieces I needed. Thankfully, with the help of the Lord and my friends I managed to get this together. I am going to set up a patreon soon to have a place to post updates for this project (and others). These updates will all be public. While I’d love (and will try to reward) financial support, I’m going to mostly use patreon to keep tedious housekeeping posts off my twitter and organize them together somewhere. There will be essays and other articles on substack in the interim. I will also return to posting on Twitter regularly. I want to end this by thanking three very special people without whom this would not have been possible; they know who they are.
Notes:
1. This is not the place, nor am I the person, to thoroughly discuss Leibniz’s philosophy. I highly recommend reading his Monadology. His monads essentially, as I understand them, are immaterial, indestructible, and changing entities defined by qualities. They are the smallest, indivisible, element that makes up all other compound things. My monads are also immaterial and changing entities which are defined by qualities. They are not indestructible though: relational monads come in and out of existence as the monads interact with one another. If this makes you uncomfortable you can refer to these non-living relational monads as “relations which act as monads”. Also, a primary, or perhaps the primary, quality of Leibniz’s monads are their partlessness: his monads have no parts, mine have parts in a way. My monads are wholes and thus are not contained in parts, but can be born of parts. Further, his monads follow a doctrine called “preestablished harmony”. This means that they do not interact but rather follow their own self initiated paths which due to God’s planning agree with all other monads without their needing to interact. I always found this to the be the weakest element of his metaphysics and my monads do not abide by it. My monads can interact with mutual or unilateral effect. The effect these interactions have is defined by the interacting monads’ qualities and resulting properties. I see the path of a monad as defined by a set of possible actions, an interacting monad can influence another monad to choose one of the set of possible actions but not lead to an action not within the set: an action contrary to the monad’s qualities and consequent nature. The monad’s qualities can change over time influencing the makeup of the set, but at any given point in time only those potential actions in the present set can be chosen.
2. I use quality to mean an internal attribute. This is something the monad contains in itself, either innately or through the development of those innate qualities by interaction. I define properties as a behavior that something engages in - a habit. Properties are defined by qualities, but unlike qualities they do not exist unless the entity is interacting. They are born of the interaction in the presence of qualities and outside of interaction, there are no properties. A dark monad, or one that is not interacting with any other monads, has no properties. Language can make this distinction murky as some qualities are referred to using the same words as their corresponding properties. To make it clearer, imagine someone who plays the flute. They retain the quality (or the set of qualities), the capacity to play the instrument, even when the instrument is not present. This quality can impact their actions in the absence of a flute (their choosing to join an orchestra for instance). However, the property, the act of playing the flute, only exists and arises in a situation where the flute is present and ceases to exist when the flute is removed. In a way, qualities are those things which define potential properties and properties are those things which express qualities.
3. I am personally agnostic as to whether any action occurs through a direct interaction as opposed to an information/consent dynamic. I actually lean towards everything being mediated by these information and consent dynamics, but I didn’t want to wait until I was comfortable rigorously defending that belief before I released this piece. So for now, in this version, I’m allowing for direct interaction, but I may remove that later. This philosophy is still “in progress” but I know it will be incomplete forever, so I’m unfortunately releasing it to you imperfect. I will update it when I’m more learned.
4. Information communicates things which it does not contain. My formulation of Information and consent arose from my consideration of Meno. In this dialogue, Plato demonstrates that knowledge exists within the learner to be excited by the teacher. The teacher does not impart the knowledge, rather he simply gives the mind the tools with which it may form the knowledge itself. If a mind doesn’t contain the given set of pieces needed to perform this construction, it cannot use it. If it chooses not to assemble those pieces despite having them, it still can’t use the information. This is the consent I’m talking about: the agreement of internal qualities. This consent is not the same as “agreeing” with the information, one can use information negatively. This doesn’t need to be conscious. For instance, DNA performs this informational communication unconsciously. A significant amount of DNA is used to produce proteins. Through the use of the RNA, relevant pieces of this information are taken to actors which can then interpret it and use it. The actors are changed by the information, they change in order to perform its instructions. This change in shape is required for them to fetch the needed amino acids. This can only occur because these actors have the correct qualities that render this process meaningful to them and the correct qualities to be able to react correctly to that meaningful information. If they did not have the correct qualities then the protein would not be formed and the gene would not be expressed.
5. This is similar to the pre-resurrection afterlife Leibniz briefly details in Monadology. To be blessed or Sainted refers to an afterlife where one retains living qualities. One in which the spirit is content and relies on God, whose relation to the spirit remains. This person will be resurrected in this state of beauty. Other spirits are not so lucky. They are cut off from their earthly pleasures and those sinful attachment eat at the spirit. They do not have hope or faith. Consequently the spirit refuses to rely on God and degenerates. This is a form of hell and the person is resurrected changed.
6. Some people may find this difficult to accept because of cultural conditioning that heavily punishes making judgments of a person based on their physical condition. However, it’s obvious and undeniable. When someone develops a negative outlook, temporarily or more habitually, they will take notice of and prioritize negative information. In this world creation, the world becomes more dangerous and less pleasant and hence they react to it with a sense of desperation and fear. This means that they will not be capable of the same discipline as someone with a more positive outlook: they will be hungry and desperate for immediate pleasures to “fix” the problems they perceive. In the long term, such a person’s bodily health would suffer and degenerate– they will become sick, unfit and likely less attractive. These things will contribute to their negative outlook – they will be in pain, things will be more difficult for them to physically accomplish and people will be less kind to them. You create your world, but it is out of your control in a way because you create it. You get stuck, and all the things you see and experience are in your image (because you are always choosing what you see and what you experience). Different circuit dominances lead to different sorts of habits, which in turn create corresponding physical types. These will be discussed in their relevant articles.
7. A spirit adds information to the sensory input after its own nature. If there is an open fifth and sixth circuit, it gets information through the soul and the soul’s monadic interactions. A spirit also gets information from God through the seventh circuit.
8. The subconscious is an awful cope. It is a way that people allow themselves not to acknowledge their, most often conscious, desires. There is not a frenzy going on under the surface: the reason you did a certain action is almost always the reason you thought you did it at the time. It’s possible that you refused to acknowledge it at the time, but you almost certainly were at least very capable of knowing why you did it. Some people have very poor introspective capacities and as such can’t understand their past actions when their present circumstances have changed. These people can’t relate to their past selves anymore. Fortunately, these aren’t the people using “subconscious” to mask the parts of themselves they don’t like, or don’t think other people will like. You don’t have a shadow self out of your control; you were tired and in the first circuit and did the thing you did because it was pleasant to do (or you at least thought it would be). You aren’t at the mercy of unconscious actions playing our from your childhood: you established a habit and your first or second circuit followed the routine it was used to following. The closest thing that we may have to a “subconscious” behavior is the fact we use different circuits at different times and sometimes the behavior of one circuit is difficult to understand when you are inside another one. This can make it hard to stick to resolutions, as can the fact desires change with circumstances. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t in control of yourself though. Returning to our computer, the CPU only has direct access to those things in the accessed memory. Storage memory has to be accessed to be used, it is not affecting the operation of the CPU in its inert state. The stored information may have had an effect at some point on one of the pieces of memory in use and have some indirect effect, but it’s not governing silently.
9. Obviously this doesn’t refer to the seventh circuit which runs itself. It invigorates you with God’s motivations.
10. I have tended to avoid going out of my way to cite philosophers. This is not because I want to pretend I came up with all of this myself. Rather, I don’t feel the need to justify my thinking with the thinking of others when they were not a direct influence. More importantly, I’ve done this to avoid the inevitable “well actuallying” that comes when you cite a thinker. Most of the time I’m using ideas differently than their creators did and I would, as far as possible, like to avoid being corrected for my “misinterpretation” when I’m not attempting an interpretation in the first place. I am not an expert in any philosopher and these articles will not serve as an introduction or analysis of any philosopher.
11. Wilson’s model is very much a product of its time. This applies both to its silly, and most often inappropriate, use of scientific jargon as well as its structural failings. He was also a relatively lazy thinker that didn’t engage with things in depth preferring to extend out rather than delve in. At the time he was writing, the culture was very third circuit, or rationally, dominated. It was also undergoing a process of fourth circuit disintegration, or of rabid criticism of aesthetic and moral ways of knowing. Thus, his model is only really analogous to mine in his third circuit. In his model this is also the rational or time-binding circuit and plays a role in semantic and rational thought. He models the first circuit as a baby with an “oral fixation”. This isn’t accurate, you can tell because you rarely meet baby people; certainly not often enough for that to be a key aspect of the human spirit. And why would you? People’s bodies change drastically as they grow up – they develop different needs and different capabilities. Why would a mind hold onto a circuit that remains essentially vestigial? The adult body when focusing on its needs and desires does so realistically with all needs and capacities kept in mind. Even when it enters that solipsistic and present-oriented first circuit it doesn’t behave like a baby – crying out for needs it can easily fulfill itself and ignoring other later developing desires. The first circuit is not a baby, but a gang banger. It is the direct apprehension of physical needs and desires and the attempt to fulfill those needs without the harnessing of social or rational thought. Wilson thought of this gang banger as the “second circuit” which is highly inaccurate. The second circuit isn’t a soldier, but a church lady. We don’t behave socially in a violent manner, that was just an allusion to his anti-war sentiments that chose to ignore the way most groups actually police themselves in practice outside of violent (and consequently first circuit inducing) conflict. We create dominance hierarchies through social communication in the form of shared rules and social signals. Only the first circuit attempts to manage social pressures with violence, because it’s not processing them correctly. That is not a generally successful strategy outside of more first circuit dominant cultures.
After the third circuit, his model falls apart. His fourth circuit is a childish attempt at understanding ethics by reducing them all down to sex. This was a popular narrative during the fourth circuit disintegration – the reduction of all ethics down the physical needs and social concerns. Fittingly, he devotes very little time and thought to this played out exercise. The rest of the book is dedicated to trip reports essentially – different ways acid can “blow your mind”. I could say that the fifth and eighth circuits are contained in my fifth to some extent and the sixth and seventh contained in my sixth. The eighth is also tangentially related to the seventh. I don’t feel the need to do this though, because I never used this part of the book to develop my own model. I only read that part once and had to review it to write this. Wilson, as per his usual, never spent any time actually psychologically or physically/metaphysically modelling the circuit’s operation – choosing instead a “maybe logic” or vibes based approach. Thus it never becomes a functioning whole. He never really discusses how the circuits work together in practice, they always remain essentially separate minds whose interaction is cloudy at best. I am grateful that he introduced me to the idea of breaking the mind down into constituent parts, but the book is mostly surface level and stops being useful when you’re no longer interested in the surface.
12. I very often think of the circuits as electrical and will likely use metaphors to that effect sometimes. Nonetheless, I don’t want these metaphors to obscure their operation and communicate electrical properties I don’t intend the circuits to have. To help you visualize what I mean by a circuit, the thread presenting this article on twitter includes a quickly drawn model of the system. This model is not intended to show you “what the spirit looks like” but to be a representation of some of the ways the pieces relate to one another.
13. The first circuit libido is not the basis for all of a person’s sexual behavior. It is only the sex drive and doesn’t extend to social or romantic elements. It further doesn’t contain all sexual desire. While the physiological libido is first circuit, a significant amount of sexual desire is second circuit. This is particularly true of fetishistic desire. Some fetishistic desire can be first circuit oriented – when it is introduced early and thus works to form the blossoming libido. Most fetishistic sexual desire is second circuit – because its object is the social self and not the body. Most fetishism is either the humiliation of another, which provides a person with a positive pleasure relating to their relative identity, or controlled self-humiliation. The latter finds its pleasure in a person “relieving themselves” of aspects of their social self.
14. By this I mean the child’s play can have very extensive imaginary elements. True imaginary “worlds” are a fourth circuit development. This circuit sometimes opens up in early adolescence in precocious children, but most childhood play is third circuit, which isn’t capable of building the complete imaginary world that characterizes the fourth circuit. These worlds require the third circuit structures to be used foundationally so that new imaginary artifacts can be built upon them.
15. This does not correlate with trans phenomenon. It is impossible for a person to be born with a soul gender in opposition to their body – they would be born with a purpose that can’t be fulfilled. Most people who pursue transition likely have a soul which follows their body’s gender. The spirit is incapable of having an orientation in opposition to the body because the body, along with the soul, is what has created it. Androgynous souls do not lead to cross-sex presentation – gender presentation is largely a second circuit phenomenon. They are things which people are attempting to communicate about their social identity: things they want others to recognize. They are not related to the person’s purpose. Most people don’t have open fifth circuits anymore anyway. Neuter souls are characterized by their not being driven to have children and the presence of an alternate purpose. These people are often celibate.
16. I believe “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is about this phenomenon. Bartleby representing the dying aimless fifth circuit and the narrator being the consummately caring fourth circuit that is unable to care for him in the way he needs to be cared for.
17. Demons are entities which have an opposing circuit orientations to human beings. This is to say that while our circuitry runs from 1 to 6, their circuitry runs from 6 to 1. A demon in its most basic form is an unbound monad – or a monad that is dark and not interacting with anything. The demon then reaches down through the circuits, often with the help of human agents. A demon cannot have a body of its own – anything with a material body was either given this body by a person (a phenomenon I call “ceded matter”) or is one of God’s own make. This phenomenon can occur through a closed sixth circuit, and is actually more common in such a state because the person’s defenses are low. Demonic possession causes these sixth circuit attachments to radiate down. This is an unconscious phenomenon, but it doesn’t mean the behaviors it causes are unconscious – behaviors cannot manifest from the condition until it has radiated down to open circuits. This means, while you may not know the origin of a desire, you are acting on a known desire. It’s just that the desire originates outside your spirit rather than inside of it; it doesn’t work silently. There is no Freudian unconscious in my model.
18. Psychedelic drugs do not make you experience the sixth circuit. They alter your perception in various ways and one of these ways makes you more aware of sixth circuit intuitions, but these are intuitions not experience – thus they are processed through whichever circuits you have open. You acquire information from the sixth circuit but you process it rationally or socially or in whatever other circuit you are experiencing at the time. Repeated use of psychedelics doesn’t make a “sixth circuit”, it simply makes a model using those pieces of information in the lower circuit’s image. These artificial circuits actually prevent you from opening your higher circuits and can even cause higher passive circuit atrophy. You falsely believe that you’ve seen past them and what you’ve found is integratable into your open circuits. This is what happened to many people in the psychedelics movement including Robert Anton Wilson. I probably don’t need to tell people that this makes you vulnerable to demonic radiation, as possessing spirits radiate down through the intuitions you’re acquiring.
19. This is going to become less common as people are failing to open higher circuits in the first place. It will be replaced with a degree of “Peter Pan” syndrome, people who never truly feel like they’re adults and are shocked when they consider their own age: forty year old teenagers with teenage philosophies.