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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

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Julian Jaynes
Age: 77 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 27
Died: 1997
Died: November 21
Psychologist
University Teacher
Newton
Massachusetts
Rather
Emphasis
Moving
Immediate
History
Aspects
Past
Leap
Doe
Aspect
Unrelated
Move
Leaps
Learning
Selective
Knowledge
Novelty

More quotes by Julian Jaynes

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Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
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Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.
Julian Jaynes
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Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.
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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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I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.
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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.
Julian Jaynes
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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.
Julian Jaynes
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Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.
Julian Jaynes
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It is by metaphor that language grows.
Julian Jaynes
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There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
Julian Jaynes
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Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.
Julian Jaynes
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The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.
Julian Jaynes
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Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.
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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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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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Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.
Julian Jaynes
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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.
Julian Jaynes
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The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.
Julian Jaynes
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We know to much to command ourselves very far.
Julian Jaynes
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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