The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Quotes

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the Iliad. Good and evil do not exist.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself,” he said. “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.” From a Life Magazine interview in 1988.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating new circumstances thereby.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning. My point is that, for such natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Thinking, then, is not conscious. Rather, it is an automatic process following a struction and the materials on which the struction is to operate.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a "dying god," not "life caught in the spell of death," or "a dead god," as modern interpreters have said. He was the hallucinated voice of a dead king whose admonitions could still carry weight. And since he could still be heard, there is no paradox in the fact that the body from which the voice once came should be mummified, with all the equipment of the tomb providing life's necessities: food, drink, slaves, women, the lot. There was no mysterious power that emanated from him; simply his remembered voice which appeared in hallucination to those who had known him and which could admonish or suggest even as it has before he stopped moving and breathing. And that various natural phenomena such as the whispering of waves could act as the cue for such hallucinations accounts for the belief that Osiris, or the king whose body has ceased to move and is in his mummy cloths, continues to control the flooding of the Nile. Further, the relationship between Horus and Osiris, 'embodied' in each new king and his dead father forever, can only be understood as the assimilation of an hallucinated advising voice into the king's own voice, which then would be repeated with the next generation.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“[the Trojan War] was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions. But this effort at special identity is loudly false. It is not religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other over the same ground. Both proclaimed to be the only way to divine revelation.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“CIVILIZATION is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example [of learning without consciousness]. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person's eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed. Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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 Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Even today, our ideas of nobility are largely residues of bicameral authority: it is not noble to whine, it is not noble to plead, it is not noble to beg, even though these postures are really the most moral of ways to settle differences.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“if one belonged to a bicameral culture, where the voices were recognized as at the utmost top of the hierarchy, taught you as gods, kings, majesties that owned you, head, heart, and foot, the omniscient, omnipotent voices that could not be categorized as beneath you, how obedient to them the bicameral man!”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Why are we forever judging, forever criticizing, forever putting people in categories of faint praise or reproof? We constantly rate others and pigeonhole them in often ridiculous status hierarchies simply to regulate their control over us and our thoughts. Our personal judgments of others are filters of influence. If you wish to allow another’s language power over you, simply hold him higher in your own private scale of esteem.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Had Achilles or Hector been modern executives, living in a culture that repressed their stress-relieving gods, they too might have collected their share of our psychosomatic diseases.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“The divine voice ends the decision-stress before it has reached any considerable level.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“we may regard the Iliad as standing at the great turning of the times, and a window back into those unsubjective times when every kingdom was in essence a theocracy and every man the slave of voices heard whenever novel situations occurred.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind