I intended my last post (The 99th Monkey and Me...or End of the Journey?) to be the denouement of my three year saga, but there is always, always something interesting to mention here as my real life continues.My study of Consciousness has led me down many fascinating paths in the past few years: from quantum physics to shamanism to psychedelics and a number of different religious traditions.
But as a person who has always wanted to know how we got to wherever it is we are, I've often wondered over the years what it must have been like for early Homo Sapiens. How did their minds work? Were they truly conscious?
The real question here is 'what is Consciousness?' When did it arrive in our species? And before it arrived, did our earliest ancestors muse about things or question what happened around them? Or was their consciousness similar to a dog's in which life is mostly a response to external stimuli and internal biological needs?
It seems obvious that before some point in time, this was indeed the case. We are, after all, merely differently-evolved animals.
So...when was the point at which Consciousness was sparked in us? By Consciousness, then, I mean introspection: the ability to look inside oneself from the viewpoint of the "I" inside.
It seems odd that before this remarkable moment - which could have taken hundreds, even thousands of years - men and women didn't possess egos, since ego is, by definition, the "I" inside. Still, even in very early Man, there was genuine mental activity of a "conscious" nature. We know this by archaeological evidence going back as far as 40,000 years ago when primitive artists, shamans and other visionaries painted images on the walls of caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira as well as create other items of manufacture.
But what creative drive were these artists and artisans responding to if not their own sense of self? This, to me, is one of the great mysteries of humanity. It seems that the time is right, therefore, that I should dig deeper into these compelling questions.
As such, I just completed a book, the title of which has intrigued me for years, but only now felt ready to explore.
The book is called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes. It was originally published in 1976 and was very controversial when it first came out. In fact, its ideas are still controversial. Yet, over the years, instead of Jaynes' ideas falling into disrepute, the evolving science of brain imagery has validated a great deal of what Dr. Jaynes hypothesized over three decades ago about Consciousness.
The most startling idea in the book - at least to me - is not how consciousness evolved in man, but how recently Jaynes believed this to have happened.
His theory purports that the consciousness we all know and love - the womb of our egos and therefore the birthplace of most of the mental and emotional anguish that we are heir to - is a mere 3500 years old give or take a few centuries.
Ponder the significance of this if you will. Our genus, Homo, diverged from the early hominids, Austalopethecines, about 2 million years ago. Our own species, Sapiens, diverged from the Neanderthal species about 500,000 years ago. The approximate time of divergence from the common ancestor of all modern human populations was about 200,000 years ago. Although there were many earlier movements of Homo species that left Africa, anatomically modern humans evolved solely in Africa, between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, with members of one branch - our branch - leaving Africa by 60,000 years ago.
Language, arguably the most important cultural tool ever developed by man, probably began from 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. We developed agriculture some 10,000 years ago. To assist in the necessary accounting of excess agricultural yields in trade, the earliest forms of writing were invented 9,000 years ago. The first writing systems developed around 6,000 years ago. Yet, incredibly according to Jaynes, it would be another 2500 years before people could sit down and think about the world around them - and more importantly - the world inside their minds. This idea is indeed mind-boggling!
Currently, I am reading (or rather listening to) an audiobook called The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong. This is from a Washington Post review or the book:
One of her discoveries is that religious faith is a very recent concept having come about in the 18th Century, and that the roots of most religions were not about belief, but rather about behavior.
Click here to watch to a very interesting 21 minute TED Talk, Ms. Armstrong gave in 2008 about these ideas and about her Charter for Compassion, which is about her efforts to return The Golden Rule, which was the basis for all the great religious traditions of the world, to our culture and society - and mostly to our religions.
What I am most interested in learning about in this book is how much correlation there is between Jaynes' idea about the Bicameral Mind and Armstrong's "history of God", because both are concerned with how human psychology and consciousness developed in the past 3500 years.
Much of what Armstrong discusses regarding the origins of the world's great religions corresponds quite well with Jayne's views.
Armstrong notes that in all these Axial religions and philosophies, the lack of introspection in all the early writings followed by the gradual ascent of a moral code fits with Jaynes' idea that until a certain point in mankind's intellectual evolution, introspection simply didn't exist for man.
In his book, Julian Jaynes argues that:
Obviously, this is a very simplistic and abbreviated account of Jaynes arguments laid out in his book, but as brain research has exploded in the past thirty years, the Bicameral Brain concept has become the standard theory of how the brain works.
A recent book I wrote about here called My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. by Jill Bolte Taylor gives even more credence to Jaynes' idea of the Bicacmeral Brain when her left brain - the time-bound logical brain - was severely damaged by a stroke. Her right brain, then in control, created a mystical world where she described herself as
while man's right brain still dominated, words leaked from the right brain to the left. To primitive man, as with modern man, much of what goes on in the right brain is unconscious to us. From thus comes imagination, dreams, art, poetry and other forms of creativity. But for men and women who had no sense of self or "I", the words they heard seemed alien - were alien - and were from somewhere out there. The only explanation their primitive minds could come up with was that these were the words of kings or gods (often being equivalent in early societies) commanding them in some way. In fact, it was their own minds in the earliest mode of thinking.
And as the prerequisites of Consciousness' - writing and memory - spread around the world, this new thing called thinking spread along with them, and as the ego, the "I", developed over the centuries, the gods' voices from the right brain dimmed and then stopped altogether.
But they didn't disappear without a fight. As less and less people heard the voices of their gods, the ones who did were seen as special: as prophets, a word that comes from the Greek and means "an interpreter, spokesman, especially of the gods".
Thus the great prophets of the Old Testament, such as Amos, Isaiah, Daniel and the myriad others were men who heard the voices of their gods just as clearly as we hear another person in our presence speak to us.
And these early prophets had only one reaction to the voices: obey! So when they were commanded to destroy the lives of their enemies, they did it, unquestioningly. When they were commanded to kill their own families, they did this too without question. Questioning of the voices would come later, when the "I" became more prominent and a richer understanding of social consequences could be understood.
Man during the age of the Bicameral mind was violent and reactive species; very much like a pack of wolves who react only with the base instincts they were born with. Before man could introspect, there was only reaction.
Incidentally, I use the term Man here both generically and chromosomal because one constant aspect of the Axial Age was that women were truly not seen as fully human; especially by the Greek Axial Age sages like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle where a definite misogynism exhibited in their ideas. While not as strong in other early Axial cultures like Judaic, Indian and Chinese, there was still a very real sense that women had nothing to offer society beyond their roles as wives and mothers.
Armstrong's book, then, talks about the origins of these religious and philosophical ideas that for the most part are still with us. But one common element that all these ideas brought to humanity was compassion: the ability to feel or suffer with another person.
The "I", then, created a mind-space where "what if" logic could be entertained. What if "I" was the person they were throwing stones at? What if "I" was blind and couldn't find food to eat? The new ideas that came about in the Axial times were the first to utilize the "I" - and the ideas of compassion, justice and love revolutionized the entire world by introducing a new way of thinking and acting.
The question both these books address at their core is, what about the idea of god? Where does He or She or It or Them fit into all this? Was God or the gods simply the hallucinated voices of people who weren't aware that it was simply their own voices - their own disparate pieces of their own personalities - they were hearing? This seems incredible to consider now.
But is it? There are today still many people whose worlds are filled with the voices of God, gods, devils and others from whom commands are to be obeyed. In the sense used by Jaynes, they are indeed Bicameral men and women.
These are people suffering from schizophrenia; the mental illness that exists in every society on the planet; leading one to surmise that this mental state has come down from the earliest sentient days of mankind. One of the conclusions of Jaynes' book is that before about 3000 years ago, all men and women were schizophrenic in a sense; except that auditory hallucinations were the norm and those developing a left brain dominance would have been the ones considerred to have a mental illness.
This is certainly an intriguing idea and would also explain many of the events of the scriptures - including the Old Testament - that were reported as miraculous and prophetic once the left brain was firmly established as the dominant mind of mankind.
Science and History can be a double-edged sword when dealing with our most basic belief systems. My own questioning about my belief in Christianity and its progenitor, Judaism, came about as a freshman in (of all places) a Catholic Jesuit University. The course was about the history of religion and one of the most pivotal ideas to me was the belief by many that The Bible is the absolute word of God.
Yet the historical fact of these writings is that for centuries, the Old Testament had been passed down as stories and myths and were edited and enhanced as they went along to make it appropriate and relevant to the current teller's culture and mores. When it was finally written down, the same thing happened. Passages and ideas were added, modified and deleted as needed in their current context.
The most evident example of this are the four Gospels of the New Testament. All four purport to tell the same story: that of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet each approaches the story with its own agenda, adding things here and leaving out things there. Some holes between the Gospels are large enough to drive a truck through.
Then one learns that none of the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Instead, they were written later, sometimes many decades after these apostles died by others who were inculcated in their own societies and its current crises and challenges.
Then, there is the fact that these four Gospels were set to be the only true Gospels in 325 A.D., when for any number of reasons, including political, social and sexual, many other gospels and letters were thrown out because they didn't conform to the political policies of the Church Fathers of the 4th century.
The book The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels is an excellent overview of how the early church, long after Jesus and the Apostles were gone, set about to create a Church that would establish its own power structure with those who had won the political struggle for the past three centuries. This book, like the ones mentioned here, is an eye-opening account of how little the vast majority of us know about something so integral to all our lives as our own religious history.
And so...where is God?
Billions on earth believe in some form of divinity or divinities. Have we all been given these ideas from the Bicameral brains of men three millennia ago?
Beyond even the question of God, what about spirit? Is this concept, too, just a product of the breakdown of the Bicameral mind?
My own search for knowledge has led me full circle to a point where doubt is my prevailing belief. Doubt is the only certainly I have. And for me as well as the billions of others who share this planet and this kind of mind, it will be all we ever can know for sure.
When all is said and done, however, it's apparent that there is something in us that wants - that needs - to believe that there is more to this life than just the little time that is allotted to us - and more to us than just the atoms, molecules and tissues that we are composed of.
Certainly some of the greatest evil has been and still is being done in the name of "God". Yet we must also recognize that much of the greatest art, literature and ideas have come from the idea that there is a greater good and a greater "mind" at work in the universe than we can know or understand.
Humanism is an idea that precludes any necessary belief in a god or a supreme being and it seems that in the face of the fact that in the entire 13.5 billion year history of our universe, there has never been any absolute proof in the existence of God or supreme being, we should be able to create a world of human relations that has a moral code that doesn't need to incorporate a belief in God. Yet it seems that this is not how the mind of Man works.
Geneticists have recently discovered a God gene that apparently predisposes our species to a belief in a power greater than ourselves. Why has this gene survived since it first came into being?
If we believe in the ideas of natural selection, there is a survival reason for this gene still being with us. Nature doesn't keep things around it doesn't need. Even so, perhaps vestiges of our evolution like the appendix, the eye's nictitating membrane, muscles in the ear and the coccyx (tailbone) show us that at some point, this gene will stop working and become just another piece of "junk" DNA.
Until then, I find it hard to believe that even the most hardened atheists have never uttered the phrase, Please God, help me! when faced with one or more of life's many difficult and eventual crises.
But as a person who has always wanted to know how we got to wherever it is we are, I've often wondered over the years what it must have been like for early Homo Sapiens. How did their minds work? Were they truly conscious?
The real question here is 'what is Consciousness?' When did it arrive in our species? And before it arrived, did our earliest ancestors muse about things or question what happened around them? Or was their consciousness similar to a dog's in which life is mostly a response to external stimuli and internal biological needs?
It seems obvious that before some point in time, this was indeed the case. We are, after all, merely differently-evolved animals.
So...when was the point at which Consciousness was sparked in us? By Consciousness, then, I mean introspection: the ability to look inside oneself from the viewpoint of the "I" inside.
It seems odd that before this remarkable moment - which could have taken hundreds, even thousands of years - men and women didn't possess egos, since ego is, by definition, the "I" inside. Still, even in very early Man, there was genuine mental activity of a "conscious" nature. We know this by archaeological evidence going back as far as 40,000 years ago when primitive artists, shamans and other visionaries painted images on the walls of caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira as well as create other items of manufacture.
But what creative drive were these artists and artisans responding to if not their own sense of self? This, to me, is one of the great mysteries of humanity. It seems that the time is right, therefore, that I should dig deeper into these compelling questions.
As such, I just completed a book, the title of which has intrigued me for years, but only now felt ready to explore.
The book is called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes. It was originally published in 1976 and was very controversial when it first came out. In fact, its ideas are still controversial. Yet, over the years, instead of Jaynes' ideas falling into disrepute, the evolving science of brain imagery has validated a great deal of what Dr. Jaynes hypothesized over three decades ago about Consciousness.
The most startling idea in the book - at least to me - is not how consciousness evolved in man, but how recently Jaynes believed this to have happened.
His theory purports that the consciousness we all know and love - the womb of our egos and therefore the birthplace of most of the mental and emotional anguish that we are heir to - is a mere 3500 years old give or take a few centuries.
Ponder the significance of this if you will. Our genus, Homo, diverged from the early hominids, Austalopethecines, about 2 million years ago. Our own species, Sapiens, diverged from the Neanderthal species about 500,000 years ago. The approximate time of divergence from the common ancestor of all modern human populations was about 200,000 years ago. Although there were many earlier movements of Homo species that left Africa, anatomically modern humans evolved solely in Africa, between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, with members of one branch - our branch - leaving Africa by 60,000 years ago.
Language, arguably the most important cultural tool ever developed by man, probably began from 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. We developed agriculture some 10,000 years ago. To assist in the necessary accounting of excess agricultural yields in trade, the earliest forms of writing were invented 9,000 years ago. The first writing systems developed around 6,000 years ago. Yet, incredibly according to Jaynes, it would be another 2500 years before people could sit down and think about the world around them - and more importantly - the world inside their minds. This idea is indeed mind-boggling!
Currently, I am reading (or rather listening to) an audiobook called The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong. This is from a Washington Post review or the book:
In 1948, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term "Axial Age" to denote an astonishing era, from roughly 900 B.C. to 200 B.C., in which the foundations of the world's great religions were laid. This was the time of Socrates, Elijah, Siddhartha, Confucius. In her magisterial new exploration of the era, Karen Armstrong argues that all Axial Age traditions emphasized justice and were committed to the practice of "disciplined sympathy" and compassion. The Great Transformation is Armstrong at her best -- translating and distilling complex history into lucid prose that will delight scholars and armchair historians alike, drawing connections between the distant past and our own religious practices, suggesting that the antidotes to some of contemporary religion's excesses lie in the roots of the religious traditions themselves.In researching more about Karen Armstrong, I found out that she is a former Catholic nun who eschewed religion - and even God -when she left the convent, but who then found herself wanting to know more about what religion, in fact, was and how it developed in us. Over a long and remarkable career as an author and television producer, she has become one of the great authorities on comparative religions and has become a forceful speaker for a more realistic viewing of Islam in a Post-911 world.
One of her discoveries is that religious faith is a very recent concept having come about in the 18th Century, and that the roots of most religions were not about belief, but rather about behavior.
Click here to watch to a very interesting 21 minute TED Talk, Ms. Armstrong gave in 2008 about these ideas and about her Charter for Compassion, which is about her efforts to return The Golden Rule, which was the basis for all the great religious traditions of the world, to our culture and society - and mostly to our religions.
What I am most interested in learning about in this book is how much correlation there is between Jaynes' idea about the Bicameral Mind and Armstrong's "history of God", because both are concerned with how human psychology and consciousness developed in the past 3500 years.
Much of what Armstrong discusses regarding the origins of the world's great religions corresponds quite well with Jayne's views.
Armstrong notes that in all these Axial religions and philosophies, the lack of introspection in all the early writings followed by the gradual ascent of a moral code fits with Jaynes' idea that until a certain point in mankind's intellectual evolution, introspection simply didn't exist for man.
In his book, Julian Jaynes argues that:
ancient peoples did not access consciousness (did not possess an introspective mind-space), but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the gods. Jaynes argued that the change from this mode of thinking (which he called the bicameral mind) to consciousness (construed as self-identification of interior mental states) occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of metaphorical language and the emergence of writing.These twin pillars of human intellect - language and writing - together allowed man to not only describe things and events in his or her life, but by writing them down in symbolic form allowed time and the passage of time to be marked in a way never before known. These two things also contributed to the employment of memory to a greater degree than ever before because by viewing again and again the metaphorical ideas that writing symbolized, memories were formed and reinforced. The "pondering" upon memories created billions of new connections in the brain that created more abilities within the brain. As a result of all this, the inside "I" came into being.
Obviously, this is a very simplistic and abbreviated account of Jaynes arguments laid out in his book, but as brain research has exploded in the past thirty years, the Bicameral Brain concept has become the standard theory of how the brain works.
A recent book I wrote about here called My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. by Jill Bolte Taylor gives even more credence to Jaynes' idea of the Bicacmeral Brain when her left brain - the time-bound logical brain - was severely damaged by a stroke. Her right brain, then in control, created a mystical world where she described herself as
the life force power of the Universe. I am the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form...at one with all that is.Jaynes puts forth that as mankind has two distinct language centers - one in each hemisphere - called Wernicke's area evolved and language developed, both areas processed language. But
while man's right brain still dominated, words leaked from the right brain to the left. To primitive man, as with modern man, much of what goes on in the right brain is unconscious to us. From thus comes imagination, dreams, art, poetry and other forms of creativity. But for men and women who had no sense of self or "I", the words they heard seemed alien - were alien - and were from somewhere out there. The only explanation their primitive minds could come up with was that these were the words of kings or gods (often being equivalent in early societies) commanding them in some way. In fact, it was their own minds in the earliest mode of thinking.And as the prerequisites of Consciousness' - writing and memory - spread around the world, this new thing called thinking spread along with them, and as the ego, the "I", developed over the centuries, the gods' voices from the right brain dimmed and then stopped altogether.
But they didn't disappear without a fight. As less and less people heard the voices of their gods, the ones who did were seen as special: as prophets, a word that comes from the Greek and means "an interpreter, spokesman, especially of the gods".
Thus the great prophets of the Old Testament, such as Amos, Isaiah, Daniel and the myriad others were men who heard the voices of their gods just as clearly as we hear another person in our presence speak to us.
And these early prophets had only one reaction to the voices: obey! So when they were commanded to destroy the lives of their enemies, they did it, unquestioningly. When they were commanded to kill their own families, they did this too without question. Questioning of the voices would come later, when the "I" became more prominent and a richer understanding of social consequences could be understood.
Man during the age of the Bicameral mind was violent and reactive species; very much like a pack of wolves who react only with the base instincts they were born with. Before man could introspect, there was only reaction.
Incidentally, I use the term Man here both generically and chromosomal because one constant aspect of the Axial Age was that women were truly not seen as fully human; especially by the Greek Axial Age sages like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle where a definite misogynism exhibited in their ideas. While not as strong in other early Axial cultures like Judaic, Indian and Chinese, there was still a very real sense that women had nothing to offer society beyond their roles as wives and mothers.
Armstrong's book, then, talks about the origins of these religious and philosophical ideas that for the most part are still with us. But one common element that all these ideas brought to humanity was compassion: the ability to feel or suffer with another person.
The "I", then, created a mind-space where "what if" logic could be entertained. What if "I" was the person they were throwing stones at? What if "I" was blind and couldn't find food to eat? The new ideas that came about in the Axial times were the first to utilize the "I" - and the ideas of compassion, justice and love revolutionized the entire world by introducing a new way of thinking and acting.
The question both these books address at their core is, what about the idea of god? Where does He or She or It or Them fit into all this? Was God or the gods simply the hallucinated voices of people who weren't aware that it was simply their own voices - their own disparate pieces of their own personalities - they were hearing? This seems incredible to consider now.
But is it? There are today still many people whose worlds are filled with the voices of God, gods, devils and others from whom commands are to be obeyed. In the sense used by Jaynes, they are indeed Bicameral men and women.
These are people suffering from schizophrenia; the mental illness that exists in every society on the planet; leading one to surmise that this mental state has come down from the earliest sentient days of mankind. One of the conclusions of Jaynes' book is that before about 3000 years ago, all men and women were schizophrenic in a sense; except that auditory hallucinations were the norm and those developing a left brain dominance would have been the ones considerred to have a mental illness.
This is certainly an intriguing idea and would also explain many of the events of the scriptures - including the Old Testament - that were reported as miraculous and prophetic once the left brain was firmly established as the dominant mind of mankind.
Science and History can be a double-edged sword when dealing with our most basic belief systems. My own questioning about my belief in Christianity and its progenitor, Judaism, came about as a freshman in (of all places) a Catholic Jesuit University. The course was about the history of religion and one of the most pivotal ideas to me was the belief by many that The Bible is the absolute word of God.
Yet the historical fact of these writings is that for centuries, the Old Testament had been passed down as stories and myths and were edited and enhanced as they went along to make it appropriate and relevant to the current teller's culture and mores. When it was finally written down, the same thing happened. Passages and ideas were added, modified and deleted as needed in their current context.
The most evident example of this are the four Gospels of the New Testament. All four purport to tell the same story: that of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet each approaches the story with its own agenda, adding things here and leaving out things there. Some holes between the Gospels are large enough to drive a truck through.
Then one learns that none of the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Instead, they were written later, sometimes many decades after these apostles died by others who were inculcated in their own societies and its current crises and challenges.
Then, there is the fact that these four Gospels were set to be the only true Gospels in 325 A.D., when for any number of reasons, including political, social and sexual, many other gospels and letters were thrown out because they didn't conform to the political policies of the Church Fathers of the 4th century.
The book The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels is an excellent overview of how the early church, long after Jesus and the Apostles were gone, set about to create a Church that would establish its own power structure with those who had won the political struggle for the past three centuries. This book, like the ones mentioned here, is an eye-opening account of how little the vast majority of us know about something so integral to all our lives as our own religious history.
And so...where is God?
Billions on earth believe in some form of divinity or divinities. Have we all been given these ideas from the Bicameral brains of men three millennia ago?
Beyond even the question of God, what about spirit? Is this concept, too, just a product of the breakdown of the Bicameral mind?
My own search for knowledge has led me full circle to a point where doubt is my prevailing belief. Doubt is the only certainly I have. And for me as well as the billions of others who share this planet and this kind of mind, it will be all we ever can know for sure.
When all is said and done, however, it's apparent that there is something in us that wants - that needs - to believe that there is more to this life than just the little time that is allotted to us - and more to us than just the atoms, molecules and tissues that we are composed of.
Certainly some of the greatest evil has been and still is being done in the name of "God". Yet we must also recognize that much of the greatest art, literature and ideas have come from the idea that there is a greater good and a greater "mind" at work in the universe than we can know or understand.
Humanism is an idea that precludes any necessary belief in a god or a supreme being and it seems that in the face of the fact that in the entire 13.5 billion year history of our universe, there has never been any absolute proof in the existence of God or supreme being, we should be able to create a world of human relations that has a moral code that doesn't need to incorporate a belief in God. Yet it seems that this is not how the mind of Man works.
Geneticists have recently discovered a God gene that apparently predisposes our species to a belief in a power greater than ourselves. Why has this gene survived since it first came into being?
If we believe in the ideas of natural selection, there is a survival reason for this gene still being with us. Nature doesn't keep things around it doesn't need. Even so, perhaps vestiges of our evolution like the appendix, the eye's nictitating membrane, muscles in the ear and the coccyx (tailbone) show us that at some point, this gene will stop working and become just another piece of "junk" DNA.
Until then, I find it hard to believe that even the most hardened atheists have never uttered the phrase, Please God, help me! when faced with one or more of life's many difficult and eventual crises.