Julian Jaynes Quotes & Sayings

Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself," he said. "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." From a Life Magazine interview in 1988. — Julian Jaynes

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

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

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

Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows unconvincing and paradoxical. — Julian Jaynes

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

We know to much to command ourselves very far. — Julian Jaynes

We invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others ... we assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what it is to be conscious. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioural world that do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. — 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. — Julian Jaynes

The unlocatable location of things thought about — Julian Jaynes

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been. — 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. — Julian Jaynes

It is by metaphor that language grows. — Julian Jaynes

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

He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture. — 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. — Julian Jaynes

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

As a boy when his mother told him to listen to the voice inside him to help him tell the difference between right and wrong, nothing happened. He concluded that "either I was too wicked to have a conscience or too good to need one". — Julian Jaynes

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

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

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

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

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

All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication. — Julian Jaynes

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

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

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why? — 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. — Julian Jaynes

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. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in what-ever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all men-tality when actually it does not. — Julian Jaynes

Include the knower in the known. — Julian Jaynes

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

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

And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech. — Julian Jaynes

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

What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts. — Julian Jaynes

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world ... concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. — Julian Jaynes

The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating new circumstances thereby. — 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. — Julian Jaynes

As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods? - Psalm 42 — Julian Jaynes

The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization. — Julian Jaynes

There is no such thing as a complete consciousness. — Julian Jaynes

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

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

Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example [of leaning without consciousness]. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person's eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed. Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring. — 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. — Julian Jaynes

And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods. — Julian Jaynes

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

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

The king dead is a living god. — Julian Jaynes