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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
Upon
Breakdown
Voice
Spoken
Important
Voices
Writing
Stone
Stones
Bicameral
Silent
Carved
Importance
Visually
Taken
Tremendously

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Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.
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It is by metaphor that language grows.
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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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Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.
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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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Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.
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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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We know to much to command ourselves very far.
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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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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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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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There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
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The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.
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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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Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.
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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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Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.
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Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
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Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.
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