Bicameralism, Stoicism, Zen

I recently finished (re) reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I suspect this will not be the first of such posts where I react to it. Nothing to do with development here, sorry.

After my recent re-read, I’m finding it hard to ignore the various visible consequences in our world of this rather wild hypothesis. (And I should say that I still think of it as a hypothesis, albeit a fascinating one to consider, if true.)

Every time I read or hear a metaphor, I’m more reminded of their power than ever before.

This morning, I was reading one of the Daily Stoic quotes:

“Drama, combat, terror, numbness, and subservience—every day these things wipe out your sacred principles, whenever your mind entertains them uncritically or lets them slip in.”
—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 10.9

This quotation takes on a completely new dimension after reading Jaynes. Before, its meaning is fairly straightforward: be careful what you let into your mind.

After, in a timeline where humanity has only recently gained the ability to introspect and do anything aside from live in the moment and obey the gods, it feels more like the emperor is a normal human wrestling with the new metaphoric phenomenon of consciousness!

It turns out that the very idea of a mind that is a space where the “analog I” has any amount of control is a metaphor, not a physical reality. (One of the fascinating topics in the book.) To hear an individual like Marcus Aurelius describing abstract concepts like drama or terror as physical entities that can be “blocked” at all is, if you buy into bicameralism, a relatively new phenomenon. Humanity is realizing that there are things that can be “let in” or not, and that those things have consequences to the future. Indeed the spatialization of time is itself a very new thing to humanity around 1,000 BC.

These are entirely new concepts, and I think explains the power and relevance of Meditations and other works like it.

It also is a terrific reminder that there is a certain relativity to all of this. Had we not developed the language of metaphor, we may never have become conscious in the way we know it today. Or it would have developed differently. And that means we potentially would have very different ideas about good and evil, right and wrong.

There are a lot of other things like this in daily life.

I’m a frequently listener of Alan Watts. Have been for years. The meditative goal (so to speak!) of living utterly in the present moment bears a striking resemblance to the experience of bicameral human beings. The history of the Hindu culture reaching back into ancient times is certainly a lineage worth exploring - seeing as the breakdown of the bicameral mind is set at roughly the time period between the Vedas and the Upanishads.