Julian Jaynes Quotes - Page 2

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.

It is by metaphor that language grows.

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.

The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species.

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.

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time.

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

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

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

The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.

The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.

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

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.

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

We know to much to command ourselves very far.

Include the knower in the known.