What is the TO8?

The TO8 is an entirely original way of at the world, at the process of change, and at our personalities. It is a completely fresh look at people and the personalities they express, and provides successful analyses of all relationship problems.

It was created in 1981 by a writer and poet, Andrew Kennedy. He collected his thoughts into a text in 1995 and created this web site in 1999. He has produced a new text Decyphering Souls: How to recognise friends, lovers, rivals and allies which will be published in the summer of 2007.

Kennedy says, 'Evolution has programmed us to be similar to one another in ways that arise and change within one's lifetime according to patterns revealed in the solar year. Modern life, and especially urban life, has disturbed our ability to read personality - including our own - and we get confused about our actions and the forming of relationships.

The TO8 system analyses the creation of personality, its changes and its interactions with others in order to throw new light on how we think and behave.'

So What is Different?

The TO8 shows how our personalities are formed in a process of continuous movement towards a resolution

It is based on a notion of how we evolved.

Its starting point is what we share as humans.

In particular, the TO8 uses its unique formulation of the Landscape, the cognitive and cultural space that is fundamental to human life, to re-cast the individual identity.

How is a person defined in the TO8?

A person is born with Major and Minor personality influences. The Major describes the core being - our consistency as individuals, while the Minor describes our everyday 'face'. We write the two together separated by a colon with the Major, or dominant, sign first, like this, 4:5 or 6:1.

Each of these two signs also has a Resolution (drives), an Affinity (friendships) and an Antagony (blocks).

Adding to these basic dispositions an individual has an on-going personal development cycle starting from birth called the Essential Year

Through the TO8 we can understand how we gradually develop and come to understand who we are, our achievements and feelings of well-being. It can describe, with increasing levels of complexity, how a person will interact with the world, and the influences that a person is most sensitive to.

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Children of the Sun

Thanks to the stability offered by the presence of the moon early on in the life of the Earth, the seasons have provided a set of constraints to the evolution of life.

In particular, human evolution, coming up against the seasonal extremes in climate found a way to jump the limitation of the slowness of changes and adaptions in the genes.

We are all children of the Sun, and our behaviours are a consequence of it.

Read a review of Decyphering Souls here