Brian George
A few weeks back, I
responded to a question posed by Antero Alli, which read, “Are men really
mutant women?” I wrote, “I'll stick with Plato's analysis: men and women are
the mutant halves of what was once an eight-limbed sphere.” Antero replied, “An
eight-limbed sphere...an early model for Leary's 8-Circuit Brain?” (Antero has
written two excellent books on this model of the eight-circuit brain—The
Eight-Circuit Brian: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body and The
Shamanic Path to Quantum Consciousness: The Eight Circuits of Creative Power.)
I wrote that I was also preoccupied with the number eight, and posted an
excerpt from a recently revised essay about the West African tricksters Eshu and
Ananse that explores the central significance of this number. Here is one
paragraph of the excerpt:
“The number eight (8)
struck me as significant. In the Yoruba tradition, eight gives birth to all
other numbers. Even one is born from eight. There are eight elements of
primordial consciousness in the Hindu cosmos. There are 108 prayer beads on the
mala of a sanyasin, or monk. The god of destruction, Shiva, is sometimes portrayed
with eight arms, and his roadside shrines, where he takes the form of a small
cement head with three shells for the eyes and mouth, look exactly like those
for Eshu, the Yoruba trickster god who is the guardian of the crossroads. Shiva
is said to have either eight or 108 dance forms. In the Hebrew tradition, boys
are circumcised eight days after birth. Ananse is notoriously phallic. It
seemed possible that there was some type of connection. Perhaps the trickster
invented circumcision a way to show his phallus off. In the Symposium, Plato
has Aristophanes argue that human beings were originally spherical creatures
with eight limbs, whose halves were arranged back to back. They wheeled around
like clowns doing cartwheels. They were enormously powerful, and Zeus feared
that they would assault Olympus, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them
in two. In Taoism, it is said that the four gives birth to the eight; the eight
then gives birth to 10,000 things. There is a Gnostic text about the boundary of
the created world called Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. Ananse mediates
between Nyame, the obscure god of the sky, and Asase Yaa, the mother of the
Earth. At the boundary of the nonexistent, he weaves an open house. He drops on
a self-created thread from the circumference.”
Antero responded, “Going by your post here it seems you may be a little
more than ‘preoccupied’ with the number 8. Though I have written two books on
the 8-Circuit model (and teach a course on it once a year), I rarely refer to
it in my daily thinking processes. It's the experience that symbol systems
refer to that has my attention.”
I wrote, “My concern is
not so much with the number eight as with the nature of the primordial body. In
the late 1980s, I had several experiences during meditation in which my various
bodies fell away like the stages of a rocket. At the end, I experienced myself
as a kind of crackling electrical sphere. These experiences did not last long,
but, ever since, the memory of what it felt like to exist in this type of body
has stayed with me as an almost constant presence. My normal four-limbed
version and this spherical version somehow coexist. A bit later, in 1990, after
a yogic initiation, a small luminous sphere appeared in my field of vision. It
was sometimes very bright and at other times almost invisible. Unlike the
experiences in the 1980s, which were spontaneous, my interaction with this
sphere had more of the aspect of a dialogue. These experiences were subtle
rather than violent, and mercurial rather than dualistic, with a sense of the
vantage point being everywhere and nowhere. In my poetry and prose, I have attempted
to explore these experiences from a number of different angles.”
Image: Victor Brauner, Mythotony, 1942
