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

Julian Jaynes

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Julian Jaynes
Age: 77 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 27
Died: 1997
Died: November 21
Psychologist
University Teacher
Newton
Massachusetts
Everyone
Living
Art
Else
Doe
Towns
Size
Civilization

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The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.
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Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.
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Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.
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Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.
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It is by metaphor that language grows.
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There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
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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.
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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.
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Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.
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The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.
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Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.
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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.
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No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.
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We know to much to command ourselves very far.
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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.
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Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
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For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.
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I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.
Julian Jaynes
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Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.
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History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
Julian Jaynes