Julian Jaynes Quotes

We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.

There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Include the knower in the known.

Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.

Thinking, then, is not conscious. Rather, it is an automatic process following a struction and the materials on which the struction is to operate.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

The legend of the parting of the Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption.

The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.

Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

We know to much to command ourselves very far.

The unlocatable location of things thought about

Cases they arrived suddenly, without any effort on my part . . . they liked especially to make their appearance while

We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.

The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.

The king dead is a living god.

One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.

Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

It is by metaphor that language grows.

Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.