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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

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Julian Jaynes
Age: 77 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 27
Died: 1997
Died: November 21
Psychologist
University Teacher
Newton
Massachusetts
Stones
Bicameral
Silent
Carved
Importance
Visually
Taken
Tremendously
Upon
Breakdown
Voice
Spoken
Important
Voices
Writing
Stone

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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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Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.
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Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.
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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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I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with 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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Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
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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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Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.
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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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There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
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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.
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We know to much to command ourselves very far.
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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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History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
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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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Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.
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Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.
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The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.
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