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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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Julian Jaynes
Age: 77 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 27
Died: 1997
Died: November 21
Psychologist
University Teacher
Newton
Massachusetts
Mind
Began
Poet
Poetry
Shall
Bicameral
State
Thesis
States
Plain
Firsts
Poets
First
Gods

More quotes by Julian Jaynes

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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.
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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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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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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Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.
Julian Jaynes
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Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.
Julian Jaynes
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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.
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
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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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Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.
Julian Jaynes
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We know to much to command ourselves very far.
Julian Jaynes
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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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There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
Julian Jaynes
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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.
Julian Jaynes
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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.
Julian Jaynes
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Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Julian Jaynes
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Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.
Julian Jaynes
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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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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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Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.
Julian Jaynes