the timboucher experience

Just want to give myself a link to a little thing about Julian Jaynes’ book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. May come in handy when I’m writing my next article tonight.

“Presents a theory of the bicameral mind which holds that ancient peoples could not ‘think’ as we do today and were therefore ‘unconscious,’ a result of the domination of the right hemisphere; only catastrophe forced mankind to ‘learn’ consciousness, a product of human history and culture and one that issues from the brain’s left hemisphere. Three forms of human awareness, the bicameral or god-run man; the modern or problem-solving man; and contemporary forms of throwbacks to bicamerality (e.g., religious frenzy, hypnotism, and schizophrenia) are examined in terms of the physiology of the brain and how it applies to human psychology, culture, and history. “

Some of Jaynes’ work is kind of stupid I think, and a lot of people dismiss him as a quack. I think most important is that he suggests that what we call consciousness has not always been experienced by all peoples everywhere. Another decent quote about that is: “One implication of Jaynes’ hypothesis is that what we today call ‘ego’ consciousness in the past may not have been, nor be in future, the dominant mode of human awareness.”

Oh shit, here is this one too, this one is good, from that same site:

This is certainly the conclusion of Erich Neumann in his exhaustive analytic psychology study of the evolution of consciousness - The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954). For Neumann, the ancient myths and religions show progressive development of the ‘hero’ as the carrier of individuality, i.e., of ego consciousness. Ego consciousness was an evolutionary struggle of one mythogemic complex among many for dominance. A mythogem is an analytic psychology term describing the common core of dreams, fairytales and myths of different peoples, in different places, in different times. They can, under different circumstances, also be called ‘archetypes’ or ‘complexes’, of which the ego complex is but one.

Here’s a good quote from James Hillman too, who I need to read more of. He was a student of Jung who basically said that the idea of a centralized unified self should not be the goal of psychological development, because it did not ultimately represent the multiplicity of the mind. More on that tonight though.

• Centers of gravity in the dis-unified mind
• BOSS Everyware
• Neurotheology
• Out of body experiences
• Schizophrenia & Ego Loss