May 4, 2008
“Hush, somebody’s callin’ my name.” “Strong mother God,” “Warm, father God.” “Dear weaver of our lives’ design whose patterns all obey.” Or, as we’ll sing later, “You’ve got to do when the spirit says do.” You will have noticed, I trust, the overtly theistic content in this morning’s music—the language of God, Spirit and Creator. Although most traditionally religious people, I suspect, would regard him as an atheist—and a dangerous one at that—I can think of no better music to help us reflect on the late psychologist, Julian Jaynes’ controversial and largely forgotten book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Published in 1976, it is a history of divine speech. More precisely, it is about the “slow withdrawing tide of divine voices and presences” over the past 3000 years, and humanity’s ongoing attempts through “prophets, poets, oracles, diviners, statue cults, mediums, astrologers, inspired saints, demon possession, tarot cards, Ouija boards, popes and peyote,” to re-establish the “lost ocean of [divine] authority.” Not only does this book offer a provocative theory of the origins of consciousness—a theory that has been widely dismissed; it also offers a theory of the origins of religion which, if true, explains virtually everything about the religious life—any religious life. I found his theory of religion so compelling I actually read all 469 pages, even though when Fred Sawyer first handed me the book last year I thought, “There’s no way I’m finishing this thing.”
It should be painfully obvious to those of you who’ve been here in recent years that there is only one reason I would preach about a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and that is because Fred Sawyer bought a sermon at last year’s Goods and Services auction and asked me to preach on it. Fred has a unique theological signature. I am always thankful for his suggestions. He recommends material I would not typically seek out on my own; it is always challenging; it adds a nice counterpoint to my regular services; and, most importantly, these ideas make us think. Which reminds me: This year there are two sermons up for auction, and this is my final plug for you to attend our Goods and Services Auction next Saturday, May 10th. Doors open at 6:00, silent bidding at 6:30, regular auction at 7:30. There are over 200 items, many great bargains. I hope you come!
Back to the “tide of divine voices and presences.” Jaynes reminded me of a story from when I was six which some of you have heard. A family friend had invited my mother and my two brothers and me for a day at their country club. While splashing around in the shallow end of the pool, I somehow treaded my way out to deeper water. As I realized I was in over my head I panicked and started drowning. I vividly remember flailing the way drowning people often do. I remember my fear. I remember not knowing what to do. And just as vividly I remember hearing a voice in my head, a calm female voice speaking one, gentle word: “Relax.” I obeyed. I stopped flailing. I dropped down to the pool floor, pushed up to the surface, took in air, and treaded to safety. I asked my mother if she had seen me drowning. She hadn’t. No one saw. I have never tried to name definitively the source of this voice. Could it have been divine speech? Maybe. Could it have been my unconscious mind telling me something I knew but couldn’t recall in the midst of fear and panic? Maybe. Either way, I am convinced it saved my life.
To introduce Jaynes’ theory of divine speech I want to read a quote from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins says: “Jaynes notes that many people perceive their own thought processes as a kind of dialogue between their ‘self’ and another internal protagonist inside the head.” “Nowadays…we understand both ‘voices’ as our own…. Jaynes’ suggestion is that some time before 1000 BC people in general were unaware that the second voice…came from themselves. They thought [the second] voice was a god: Apollo, say, or Astarte or Yahweh or, more probably, a minor household god, offering them advice or orders. Jaynes even located the voices of the gods in the opposite hemisphere of the brain from the one that controls audible speech. The ‘breakdown of the bicameral’ mind was…. the moment in history when it dawned on people that the external voices that they seemed to be hearing were really internal. Jaynes even goes so far as to define this historical transition as the dawning of human consciousness.”
Based largely on his studies of schizophrenia in the 1960s, Jaynes argued that the left hemisphere of the human brain controls speech. The right hemisphere lies dormant in relation to speech. However, the hallucinated voices one hears in the midst of schizophrenia originate in the right hemisphere. Prior to approximately 1000 BC, Jaynes theorizes, everyone hallucinated voices in their right hemispheres and assumed these voices to be the speech of gods or dead kings. Left hemisphere—human speech. Right hemisphere—divine speech. Two distinct voices, hence the bicameral mind. More importantly, according to Jaynes, everyone in the same community hallucinated essentially the same voices. He doesn’t look too closely at how this is physically possible. Rather, he offers hundreds of pages of evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Israel, and the Americas for which there is no other explanation than that everyone in a particular community at a particular time heard the same voices.
These voices often emanated from a physical body, whether the statue of a deity or the preserved body of a former king. Ancient villages and cities were often built around a central structure that housed a God-statue. Cuneiform literature often refers to god-statues speaking. Old Testament literature makes reference to speaking idols. The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel describes the king of Babylon listening to idols. The Aztecs told the Spanish invaders that their history began when a statue from a ruined temple spoke to their leaders. In hundreds of Mesopotamian texts it is the speech of the Gods who decide what must be done. Jaynes’ survey of the ancient evidence is exhaustive and exhausting! He has a special fondness for the Iliad which depicts a society in which the “beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods. It is “a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points…who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual fields. It is the gods who start quarrels among men, that really cause the war, and then plan its strategy.” In these ancient societies there was no consciousness as we know it today. Where we recongize consciousness today, the ancients recognized divine speech. “The gods take the place of consciousness.” All human action begins in these hallucinated voices.
For Jaynes, consciousness refers to our private, inner life made possible by our ability to think metaphorically. For example, physically speaking, time doesn’t take up space, but we contemplate the passage of time by ordering the events of our lives into linear succession. We spatialize time in order to think about it. We put events next to each other in our mind’s eye—which is itself a metaphor. The very idea of a space in which consciousness takes place is a metaphor. No such physical space exists, yet without such a metaphor we have no private, internal life in which to hold ideas next to each other and evaluate them. Jaynes argues there was no such capacity for metaphorical thinking in bicameral societies. In the oldest societies he surveys, the statues weren’t metaphors for the gods—symbols or likenesses of the gods as the standard crucifix is today. In bicameral societies statues of the gods were the gods. Very immediate. Very concrete. In the bicameral era, Jaynes writes, “there were no private ambitions, no private grudges, no private frustrations, no private anything, since bicameral [people] had no internal ‘space’ in which to be private…. All initiative was in the voices of the gods.” Bicameral people lived amidst an ocean of divine authority.
And then, something happened. The ocean began to dry up. Recall the story of the carving on an altar commissioned about 1230 BC by the Assyrian tyrant, Tukulti-Ninurta I. “The throne before which this first of the cruel Assyrian conquerors grovels is empty. No king before in history is ever shown kneeling. No scene before in history ever indicates an absent god. The bicameral mind had broken down.”
Jaynes then traces, exhaustively, the decline of evidence for hallucinated voices. The decline was not immediate, though it does appear to begin quite rapidly as societies grow, develop complex writing, come into contact with one another, engage in war, and encounter large-scale crises humans had never encountered before. The voices had no answers for such crises and thus went into decline. But the concept of divinity had been firmly established in human culture, and though the voices declined in larger populations, initially there were always individuals who could still hear them: the Hebrew prophets; the Greek oracles. Jaynes compares the words of the 8th century BC prophet, Amos to that of Ecclesiastes five centuries later. “Amos is almost pure bicameral speech, heard by an illiterate desert herdsman, and dictated to a scribe…. Amos never ponders anything in his heart….In the few times he refers to himself, he is abrupt and informative without qualification…he does not consciously think before he speaks; in fact, he does not think as we do at all: his thought is done for him. He feels his bicameral voice about to speak and shushes those about him with a “Thus speaks the Lord!” and follows with an angry forceful speech which he probably does not understand himself.”
By contrast, “Ecclesiastes thinks, considers, is constantly comparing one thing to another, making brilliant metaphors as he does so.” To Ecclesiastes God is mysterious, opaque, inaudible. And “the famous third chapter, ‘To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven….’ is precisely the spatialization of time, its spreading out in mind-space, characteristic of consciousness.” When the gods stop speaking, the people start thinking.
Consciousness, then, for Jaynes, is a response to the absence of audible gods, a response of longing for voices that no longer speak, guide, comfort or console. Religion becomes the search for those voices. Religion becomes the effort to re-discover that ocean of divine authority. Religion becomes, like the Psalms, like Sufi poetry, like Christian mysticism, a longing for God, a calling to God, rather than God calling us. Religion becomes the expression of an almost innate “nostalgic anguish” we feel in a divinely silent universe.
Jaynes’ passion for his theory appeals to me. I get caught up in his passion. I forget he is marshalling mounds of evidence to disprove the existence of God in any traditional sense; to show there is no such thing as an external God beyond the right hemisphere of each human brain; to demonstrate all theism is hallucination. As a theistic person this is a very challenging theory. And yet it is also hard to label Jaynes an atheist. He passionately believes these voices were real. He believes the longing for these voices has shaped and continues to shape human identity and religion. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a believer, even if it’s not what most typical believers believe.
More importantly, while it’s widely accepted he got the science wrong; my instinct is that he got religion right. No matter what one believes about divnity, religion today is marked by a profound longing. As our opening words proclaimed, “worship is a loneliness seeking communion; it is a thirsty land crying out for rain.” In Unitarian Universalism we don’t long for that ocean of divine authority, but we do speak of longings: a longing for the experience of oneness, of unboundedness, of being connected with all life; a longing for that experience of transcending mystery and wonder; a longing for peace and justice; a longing for truth; a longing for insight and wisdom; a longing for a safe, secure and sustainable world for our children; a longing for intimacy; a longing to know and be known; and certainly some of us long for some experience of God. We speak of an inherent human impulse to worship, to seek, to honor, to love; and we gather in religious communities to nurture those impulses. We are reaching for something and we have some sense we are not only reaching into the future, but back into the past, to a time when, whether or not people heard divine voices in their heads, the the gods were close at hand, intimate and knowable. The hymns we sing today are not statements of belief; they are expressions of longing in a divinely quiet universe.
When I was a child, I heard a voice. In that moment I was unconscious in the Jaynesian sense. I did not think. I did not reason. I did not make metaphors. Somehow I knew instinctively the proper response was to obey. And my obedience kept me alive. I don’t know the source of that voice. But my memory of it resides at the core of my spiritual life. Religion for me is marked by longings—longings for justice and truth, longings for connection and wholeness. I try to live and minister such that I may fulfill these longings. And always I am mindful of how wonderful it would be to hear that calm, gentle voice again. Amen and Blessed Be.
