Julian Jaynes Quotes

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These esoteric poses of philosophy and even the paper theories of behaviorists are mere subterfuges to avoid the material we are talking about.

Julian Jaynes
Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Julian Jaynes
I therefore believe that these and many other movements of our time are in the great long picture of our civilizations related to the loss of an earlier organization of human natures. They are attempts to return to what is no longer there, like poets to their inexistent Muses, and as such they are characteristic of these transitional millennia in which we are imbedded.

Julian Jaynes
I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

Julian Jaynes
The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

Julian Jaynes
Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Julian Jaynes
No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.

Julian Jaynes
Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.

Julian Jaynes
Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

Julian Jaynes
One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.

Julian Jaynes
We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.

Julian Jaynes
Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.

Julian Jaynes
This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles.

Julian Jaynes
Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and desire are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is "within" not in extenso.

Julian Jaynes
"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

Julian Jaynes
The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.

Julian Jaynes
We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space.

Julian Jaynes
I am emphasizing individuals set apartfrom others as ill, because, according to our theory, we could say that before the second millennium B. C., everyone was schizophrenic.

Julian Jaynes
Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

Julian Jaynes
Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.

Julian Jaynes
The central assertion of this view, I repeat, is that each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes which are reflected in the archaeological record.

Julian Jaynes
If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Julian Jaynes
The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.

Julian Jaynes
It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete metaphiers become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb 'to be' was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, to grow, or make grow, while the English forms 'am' and 'is' have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, to breathe. It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for 'existence' and could only say that something 'grows' or that it breathes.

Julian Jaynes
Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

Julian Jaynes