Saturday, January 26, 2008

Eight System Cards

One of the most interesting models that came up in my studies of grids and systems of thought remains the eight system model (eight circuit model) that came from Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

Antero Alli has contributed greatly to my understanding of the model, too - his online course encouraged us away from words and our computers, to explore these other realms - and part of the escape from words and concepts (System Three) involved making a set of 'tarot' cards of our own. I have posted these elsewhere on the blog (follow the System link) but came across them again while cleaning my hard drive, and quite like them...

Not having much 'artistic' talent I made 8 collages of images grabbed from the web, and my apologies for not crediting all the 'real' artists who drew and photographed these images.





I don't intend to wrap words around this right now, to try to explain it all - you can find versions all over the place out here, (check out some of the relevant posts on Only Maybe) but I will offer these collages I made on Antero's course, which captured at least some of my understanding of these mindbody (or bodymind) matters.





One of the joys of making up a set of cards remains the fact that you can shuffle them around, and play with layouts (like Tarot) and perhaps find new connections (like Mendeleyev and the Periodic Table)
Mendeleev loved chess and card games. He would write down the names and atomic weights and properties of all the known elements (about 63 at that time) on blank cards. He would shuffle the cards and lay them out in a thousand different patterns. He was trying to find a pattern in nature.

When he arranged the 63 known elements in rows of seven across, he noticed that the columns down always had elements that had much in common with one another. But occasionally there was a gap. He took a bold guess. "There is an element as yet undiscovered," he predicted.

In fact there were three gaps. He predicted three undiscovered elements. And he predicted boldly what they would be like once they were discovered!

All three were found, just as he predicted.

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