Julian Jaynes quotes

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else. (Julian Jaynes)
Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets. View quote
Julian Jaynes
The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all. View quote
Julian Jaynes
The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still. View quote
Julian Jaynes
Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved. View quote
Julian Jaynes
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. View quote
Julian Jaynes
I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. View quote
Julian Jaynes
"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. 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. View quote
Julian Jaynes
We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. View quote
Julian Jaynes
There is no such thing as a complete consciousness. View quote
Julian Jaynes
Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression. (Julian Jaynes)
The king dead is a living god. View quote
Julian Jaynes
Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first. View quote
Julian Jaynes
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. View quote
Julian Jaynes
If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. View quote
Julian Jaynes
The legend of the parting of the Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption. View quote
Julian Jaynes
It is by metaphor that language grows. View quote
Julian Jaynes
Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind. View quote
Julian Jaynes
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. View quote
Julian Jaynes
The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods. View quote
Julian Jaynes
The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space. (Julian Jaynes)
We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog ‘I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space. View quote
Julian Jaynes
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. View quote
Julian Jaynes
We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man. View quote
Julian Jaynes
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. View quote
Julian Jaynes