Merkabah

[muir]

It's just a singular little quote drawn from a sea of information out there, not meant to be of terrible import. People with darker features were targeted during the Holocaust. It's sort of a Nazi thing.

I think the nazis used birth certificates

They had trouble deciding who was a jew from biology so they looked at birth certificates and also culturally who was speaking yiddish

They were trying to identify ashkenazis because they believed that the ashkenazis were trying to subvert and destroy the aryan bloodlines through the marxist ideas pushed by ashkenazi thinkers like marx and engels

The germans had their own sense of homeland and traditions they called 'heimat' and they wanted to protect that from what they saw as subversive forces

They believed that the ashkenazis also controlled the central banks in the west and were using global finance as a way to subvert western countries so that they could destroy them and institute a marxist world government in their place controlled by the ashkenazi bankers

many ashkenazi marxists fled germany for example the frankfurt school and freud and marx and these people settled in the UK and US and carried on their work there

Interestingly the economies of those countries are now teetering on the brink of implosion

 

[Skarekrow]

Spiritual Snobbery: the Dark Side of Lightworkers.
Via Syma Kharal

Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates:

At the first gate, ask yourself “Is is true?”
At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?”
At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?”
~ Rumi


​

I recently found myself removed from a Facebook group I had joined that describes itself as “a loving community of spiritual lightworkers intended for sharing spiritual growth, support, information, resources and other helpful tips and tools.”

I believed I participated accordingly by “Liking” others’ posts and sharing helpful resources to support fellow members, such as articles I published with elephant journal and free worldwide distant healing events I offer monthly.

I thus figured the removal was an error and requested to join again, but the request was surprisingly denied.
Unsure of what led to this, I contacted the administrators asking if they could share what happened.

A few days later I received a reply from one of the two explaining that while she herself didn’t remove me, only admins are allowed to post events.
This confused and disappointed me on several levels.

First, as there were no community guidelines beyond the group description, I wondered how loving it was to abruptly remove an unsuspecting member who unintentionally broke an unwritten rule.

Second, as a community aiming to foster support and the sharing of resources, I wondered how reserving the exclusive the right to post free healing events served the over 10,000 members.

And finally, I wondered how kind it was to essentially ban the sensitive healer types the group is meant to serve.

While this isn’t a particularly drastic example, it did get me thinking of other experiences of snubbing in the “spiritual community.”
There was the raw-vegan yoga student who asked me if I was vegetarian and stopped attending my classes—which he had claimed were really helping his back issues—after I replied I wasn’t.

There was the popular yoga studio owner who stated that if I was interested in practicing “real yoga” (instead of attending classes at a local gym with some of the most grounded, loving and inspiring teachers I have had), that I should join his studio instead.

There was the cosmetician at my first and only visit to a Sephora shop whom I had simply asked about a tinted moisturizer for my yoga teacher training in Thailand.
Instead of suggesting a product, she took it upon herself to lecture me what yoga is and isn’t about: It’s not about having clear skin, you shouldn’t care how you look, you shouldn’t try to impress others, you need to let go of your ego and just let your skin detox and breathe for once. It wasn’t even so much what she said, but the highly condescending tone she used that took me aback.

My clients, students and friends have expressed similar observations and disappointments in the spiritual community.
A friend who started taking yoga classes sadly expressed that after months of trying to befriend fellow students she felt a camaraderie with given their mutual love of yoga, that her efforts were never reciprocated because she perhaps just wasn’t “hippie” enough for them to fit in.

Interestingly, my own inner spiritual snob came out when I met such “hippies” during yoga teacher training.
The training was set on a secluded Thai beach with several yoga, meditation and detox retreat centers, as well as the only bars on the island that sold drugs and held night-long raves.

At the time, immersed in reading sacred teachings, in awe of the natural beauty all around me and high on the love within my group, I couldn’t understand how or why these “bohemians” could meditate, do beach yoga and sing kirtans (call-and-response devotional chanting), while simultaneously smoking marijuana, doing hard drugs, raving all night, drinking and screaming in the ocean at sunrise and comparing who had sex with more strangers at the party.

Thankfully, I was able to realize what my real problem was: I somehow thought it was my place to look down on them for their “unspiritual” behavior, which in the very moment I did, disconnected me from my own spirit.

While getting on the “spiritual path” can be completely transformational and open us to profound healing, wisdom and miracles, the tools and teachings we practice—no matter what tradition or trend they follow—usually share the same ultimate aim: inner peace and the perfection of love.

But when we get so caught up in what we are practicing rather than why, we can slip into the temptation to judge rather than discern, condemn rather than love and exclude rather than accept.

Even with the best of intentions, it’s all too easy to identify with being a “lightworker” and succumb to darkness.
We may guise a condescending remark by ending it with “Namaste” or “love and light.”

We may gossip about someone and say we are simply “honoring our truth.”
We may say things like, “I am not religious, I am spiritual” in an attempt to disassociate ourselves from what we might perceive as the dogmatic and judgmental nature of organized religion, and yet turn around and exhibit the same exclusivity and rigidity that we think have risen above of.

We may share our love for animals while inwardly calling a meat-eater a murderer.
We may gracefully flow into the most physically advanced yoga pose and yet find those bending their knees in forward fold just not good at or committed enough to yoga.

We may think of ourselves as old souls with many incarnations and then deem someone we think isn’t as evolved as us a “new soul” who clearly has not lived many lives.
We may begin our mornings with a loving-kindness meditation and then resent our “totally unconscious” corporate employer the rest of the day.

These are just some examples of how we may be more attached to the idea of being spiritual rather than practicing the universal spiritual values of love, acceptance, compassion, peace and oneness.

The thing to remind ourselves of in these dark moments is that everyone is spiritual because everyone has a spirit.
We are all seekers whether we know it or not.

We are all lightworkers because the spark of the Divine shines within each of us.
To keep myself in check and monitor any spiritual pretentiousness that creeps up in me, I have developed a three-step process that helps me stay centered in my spirit rather than caught up in my spirituality:

1. Observe Consciously

One of the greatest gifts of spiritual teachings and practices is to help us become aware of our natural human reactions and emotions.
We may not be able to control our inner reactions, but if we can catch ourselves as soon as thoughts like, “They are so (fill in the blank)!” come up, we become a witness to our reactions rather than bound by them or identified with them.

2. Accept Compassionately

Once we realize we have slipped into judgement and made ourselves better than or superior to another, instead of condemning ourselves for condemning, we can practice compassion for our own humanness.
We can take a deep breath, process our feelings and welcome what we might learn about ourselves.

3. Respond Lovingly

Now that are aware of whatever has come up for us, we can go beyond accepting our human reactions and transcending them by asking one simple question: “What would love do?”

The moment we ask this, we bypass our ideas and ideologies and get right to the heart and soul—where all spiritual paths are trying to lead us anyways and yet getting there does not require any specific path at all.

Sometimes the heart will tell us to accept, connect, invite, open and include, and sometimes it may tell us to walk away, speak up, draw a boundary, discern and be firm.
But no matter what the heart says, it will always do it from, for and with love.

Whatever spiritual path we follow, how we treat others along the way says nothing about them but only defines us.
So the next time we are about to say “Namaste” to someone, let us be mindful of whether we are truly intending to honor and connect with their inner light, or simply trying to outshine them with ours.

We can then take a step back, reconnect with our hearts and speak and act from our spirit rather than our spirituality.
Because the world doesn’t need our lightworker lifestyles.

It needs, more than anything, our kindness and love.

 

[invisible]

awesome article!

i always remember a time when i was in hospital for mood disorder and anxiety. the first therapy session of the day is mindfulness meditation after breakfast. this particular admission i was treated by a therapist who kept telling us stories from a meditation group he lead outside the hospital in another suburb - but that it was a closed group that none of us could attend! those were his exact words.

in his personal presentation, he styled himself in a way that i think is self consciously "new-age". not that i have anything against it - we all have our ways of presenting ourselves as we hope to be, or as we hope to be seen.

the therapy room was lit by fluoros, which were fine for the group talk therapy sessions, but usually the therapist would turn them off for the morning meditation. without them the room was not dark as there were windows letting natural light in, but when trying to meditate with them on, the brightness was very noticeable! one day this particular therapist left the fluoros on as we began. after a little while i asked, "can we please have the lights off?" to which he replied "we can, but we will not." i think he thought it would be helpful to give us poor wracked souls just a little extra dimension of challenge, but i found his response a bit passive aggressive! :lol:

 

[Tin Man]

[MENTION=5045]Skarekrow[/MENTION] I've come across that sort of thing before. Some people who practice spirituality and alternative medicine can become arrogant. They begin to believe themselves better than others. It becomes less about the spirit of the thing and more as a way to make them seem more important.. It seems especially true with yoga mentors. So many mock new comers or anyone looking to practice yoga as a way of relaxing. It's pathetic that something which is meant to help others is used as a way to inflate the ego.

I've also noticed that some of the most caring and supportive people can become the most vicious and brutal. It's probably because these people are more empathetic and so know exactly what comments will hurt the most.

 

[Kgal]

Their egos hijacked them.

That's one of the misconceptions about all this spiritual stuff. Some think one turns in to an angel or a saint or something and is infallable. One only needs to look at the Buddha's teachings to see we are still only a human being who had to put their pants on one leg a time. I love the story where Buddha was asked who was he. Was he king. Was he a god. What? ....and Buddha said I am none of those....I am a man who is awake. :love:

Late last year I began hearing messages advocating to the new age community to stop being so divisive and combative. Hahahahahaha....I laughed and laughed at that. It became clear to me we all have our traumas to clear and just because they had opened up their perspectives to embrace the ascension path didn't mean they had cleared themselves.

Besides. I wonder at all of them sometimes. I mean come on....we all knew that as of Dec 21st 2012 the world as we know it was scheduled to begin ending....and that included all of the old teachings and methods and ceremonies and ways. Anything based upon the old ways of power and control are ending. I guess I am fortunate because I'm a newbie and don't have any preconceived notions of how it's supposed to be. The teachers I'm following are literally living in the Now and creating their teachings as they go.

 

[Skarekrow]

awesome article!

i always remember a time when i was in hospital for mood disorder and anxiety. the first therapy session of the day is mindfulness meditation after breakfast. this particular admission i was treated by a therapist who kept telling us stories from a meditation group he lead outside the hospital in another suburb - but that it was a closed group that none of us could attend! those were his exact words.

in his personal presentation, he styled himself in a way that i think is self consciously "new-age". not that i have anything against it - we all have our ways of presenting ourselves as we hope to be, or as we hope to be seen.

the therapy room was lit by fluoros, which were fine for the group talk therapy sessions, but usually the therapist would turn them off for the morning meditation. without them the room was not dark as there were windows letting natural light in, but when trying to meditate with them on, the brightness was very noticeable! one day this particular therapist left the fluoros on as we began. after a little while i asked, "can we please have the lights off?" to which he replied "we can, but we will not." i think he thought it would be helpful to give us poor wracked souls just a little extra dimension of challenge, but i found his response a bit passive aggressive! :lol:

Sorry that you had to go through with that…
I’d rather be depressed my whole life than have bad anxiety for one hour.

@Skarekrow I've come across that sort of thing before. Some people who practice spirituality and alternative medicine can become arrogant. They begin to believe themselves better than others. It becomes less about the spirit of the thing and more as a way to make them seem more important.. It seems especially true with yoga mentors. So many mock new comers or anyone looking to practice yoga as a way of relaxing. It's pathetic that something which is meant to help others is used as a way to inflate the ego.

I've also noticed that some of the most caring and supportive people can become the most vicious and brutal. It's probably because these people are more empathetic and so know exactly what comments will hurt the most.

Their egos hijacked them.

That's one of the misconceptions about all this spiritual stuff. Some think one turns in to an angel or a saint or something and is infallable. One only needs to look at the Buddha's teachings to see we are still only a human being who had to put their pants on one leg a time. I love the story where Buddha was asked who was he. Was he king. Was he a god. What? ....and Buddha said I am none of those....I am a man who is awake. :love:

Late last year I began hearing messages advocating to the new age community to stop being so divisive and combative. Hahahahahaha....I laughed and laughed at that. It became clear to me we all have our traumas to clear and just because they had opened up their perspectives to embrace the ascension path didn't mean they had cleared themselves.

Besides. I wonder at all of them sometimes. I mean come on....we all knew that as of Dec 21st 2012 the world as we know it was scheduled to begin ending....and that included all of the old teachings and methods and ceremonies and ways. Anything based upon the old ways of power and control are ending. I guess I am fortunate because I'm a newbie and don't have any preconceived notions of how it's supposed to be. The teachers I'm following are literally living in the Now and creating their teachings as they go.

You are all correct of course!
Just because someone is “X”, or this way or that way…still never excuses someone from acting like a dick….hehe.
And we all act or think in negative ways on a daily basis…because we are human…because this experience of consciousness in this body is so all-encompassing it is hard to step back and find the edges of the movie screen and remain in that place consistently.
It takes time and practice…even then, shit happens in people’s lives and can challenge the efforts and progress that one has made.
It’s like trying with all one’s might to reach the next stage of “awakening” or “enlightenment” (the words themselves can seem arrogant), when it is the opposite of grand efforts…it is very subtle…to sink back into the all-mind itself.
We are all already enlightened…that knowledge never leaves, it only gets filtered and blocked.

 

[Skarekrow]

[video=vimeo;9953368]https://vimeo.com/9953368[/video]​

 

[Skarekrow]

Study Finds Genetic Link Between
Creativity And Psychosis

It’s a common observation: Those who are the most creative are often fighting their own mental demons.
Even as far back as Ancient Greece, it was noted that creative genius is often associated with mental illness.

Now, a new study published in Nature Neuroscience claims that creative talent and psychiatric disorders may share genetic roots.
The research, carried out at King’s College London, suggests genes that increase an individual's risk of developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can also be used to predict how creative they are.

Critics, however, have been quick to call the study out.
While there could be a link, they say, it’s so tiny it's hardly worth worrying about, and that means its predictive ability is very limited.

The scientists of the study examined the genetic data for 86,000 Icelanders.
They found that when certain genetic variations were looked at together, the combination could be used to predict psychosis.

These combinations were found to double the average risk for schizophrenia and increase the risk for bipolar disorder by a third.
The researchers then looked at how common these gene variants were within “creative individuals.”

These people were defined as those who belonged to national art societies, such as dance, writing and acting.

After examining the occurrence of these genetic variants in the individuals sampled, the researchers report that they found a 17% increase in people who were members of artistic societies compared to non-members.

The team then expanded the study to look at over 35,000 people from the Netherlands and Sweden, and discovered that those deemed to be “creative”—this time assessed through a questionnaire—were 25% more likely to carry the variations.

“By knowing which healthy behaviours, such as creativity, share their biology with psychiatric illnesses we gain a better understanding of the thought processes that lead a person to become ill and how the brain might be going wrong,” said Robert Power, one of the paper's authors. “Our findings suggest that creative people may have a genetic predisposition towards thinking differently.”

But the data is weak.
The genetic variants analyzed only explained about 6% of schizophrenia cases and just 1% of bipolar disorders.

The same variants also only explained about 0.25% of the variation seen in people’s creative ability.
As David Cutler, a geneticist from Emory University who was not involved in the study put it: If artistic ability is a mile-long road where someone with high creativity stands at one end and someone with low creativity stands at the other, these genetic variations will only collectively explain about four meters (13 feet) of the distance.

So not much at all, but not nothing either.

Others point out that the scientific definition of creativity, that of whether or not you belong to an art society or not, is also terribly poor.
Going to a society or doing a “creative” occupation does not necessarily mean that you are creative, or that those who don’t go to one are necessarily uncreative.

It also ignores the fact that many mental hospitals use art as a therapy for patients, so the fact that those with mental disorders might then be drawn to “creative” jobs could also skew the data.

 

[Skarekrow]

THE TIBETAN TRUTH ABOUT SUBSTANCE ABUSE

STEVEN BANCARZ



“All the substances of abuse, whether they’re opiates or cocaine or anything else, they’re actually pain killers.”

Whether it’s a sex addiction, or internet or a relationship or shopping or work addiction, these are ALL attempts to get away from distress.

Keith Richards, who had a severe heroin addiction, said that ‘all the contortions we go through are just not to be ourselves for a few hours.

I don’t care what they tell you about genetics or choices or any of that nonsense, it’s always about pain.

But the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, it’s got a wonderful line in it:

‘Whatever you do, don’t try and escape your pain, but be with it.’

Because the attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain.

And that’s the reality with addiction.

Addicted people need a compassionate present which will permit them to experience their pain without having to run away from it.

And all the attempts to run away, it’s like what another teacher says:

The surest way to go to hell is to try and run away from hell.

We live in a society that, one way or another, is always about instant relief, quick satisfaction, distraction… it’s always the quick getaway.

It is a matter of, at some point, finding a way of being with your pain so that you can actually get to know what it’s really all about.


[video=youtube;T5sOh4gKPIg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=T5sOh4gKPIg[/video]​

 

[Nixie]

I think in many ways having to deal with chronic pain has fundamentally changed my ability to run from pain, no pun intended.....wellllll maybe

I believe in what I call the 4 Aspects of Being, everything in our life is encompassed within the physical, emotional, intellectual and spirtual, interconnected.

In order to deal effectively with the constant physical pain I had to learn coping skills and because all of our aspects are interconnected, I have had to develop different emotional, intellectual, and spiritual skills too.

When you cannot ignore something or avoid it, you either deal or cash out (hide)

 

[Free]

Keith Richards, who had a severe heroin addiction, said that ‘all the contortions we go through are just not to be ourselves for a few hours.
I don’t care what they tell you about genetics or choices or any of that nonsense, it’s always about pain.'

But the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, it’s got a wonderful line in it:

‘Whatever you do, don’t try and escape your pain, but be with it.’

Because the attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain.

Exactly. [MENTION=5045]Skarekrow[/MENTION] always has the best articles. <3

 

[Skarekrow]

I think in many ways having to deal with chronic pain has fundamentally changed my ability to run from pain, no pun intended.....wellllll maybe

I believe in what I call the 4 Aspects of Being, everything in our life is encompassed within the physical, emotional, intellectual and spirtual, interconnected.

In order to deal effectively with the constant physical pain I had to learn coping skills and because all of our aspects are interconnected, I have had to develop different emotional, intellectual, and spiritual skills too.

When you cannot ignore something or avoid it, you either deal or cash out (hide)

I think those of us who have had some form of chronic pain are forced to learn to deal.
Even then…it’s an ongoing ever-changing challenge…as if life wasn’t enough to keep you busy…hehe.
It can drag you down if you let it…and I think we all probably have our moments of weakness…but it has also been a force for good in my life as well.
It has certainly made me more empathetic toward those in pain…in all the areas you listed…emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, physically.
It can help you define what is truly important in our lives and what is not.

Exactly. @Skarekrow always has the best articles. <3

Thank you!
I try!
:wave:

 

[Skarekrow]

Consciousness Began
When the Gods Stopped Speaking

How Julian Jaynes’ famous 1970s theory is faring in the neuroscience age.
​

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s.
He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice.

He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure.
His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University.

But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.
From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience.

Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he’d wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did.
As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself.

It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when it finally came out in 1976, did not look like a best-seller.
But sell it did.

It was reviewed in science magazines and psychology journals, Time, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978.

New editions continued to come out, as Jaynes went on the lecture circuit.
Jaynes died of a stroke in 1997; his book lived on.

In 2000, another new edition hit the shelves.
It continues to sell today.

​

In the beginning of the book, Jaynes asks, “This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it? And where did it come from? And why?”

Jaynes answers by unfurling a version of history in which humans were not fully conscious until about 3,000 years ago, instead relying on a two-part, or bicameral, mind, with one half speaking to the other in the voice of the gods with guidance whenever a difficult situation presented itself.

The bicameral mind eventually collapsed as human societies became more complex, and our forebears awoke with modern self-awareness, complete with an internal narrative, which Jaynes believes has its roots in language.

​

It’s a remarkable thesis that doesn’t fit well with contemporary thought about how consciousness works.
The idea that the ancient Greeks were not self-aware raises quite a few eyebrows.

By giving consciousness a cultural origin, says Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, “Jaynes disavows consciousness as a biological phenomenon.”

But Koch and other neuroscientists and philosophers admit Jaynes’ wild book has a power all its own. “He was an old-fashioned amateur scholar of considerable depth and tremendous ambition, who followed where his curiosity led him,” says philosopher Daniel Dennett.

The kind of search that Jaynes was on—a quest to describe and account for an inner voice, an inner world we seem to inhabit—continues to resonate.
The study of consciousness is on the rise in neuroscience labs around the world, but the science isn’t yet close to capturing subjective experience.

That’s something Jaynes did beautifully, opening a door on what it feels like to be alive, and be aware of it.


Jaynes was the son of a Unitarian minister in West Newton, Massachusetts.
Though his father died when Jaynes was 2 years old, his voice lived on in 48 volumes of his sermons, which Jaynes seems to have spent a great deal of time with as he grew up.

In college, he experimented with philosophy and literature but decided that psychology, with its pursuit of real data about the physical world, was where he should seek answers to his questions.

He headed to graduate school in 1941, but shortly thereafter, the United States joined World War II.
Jaynes, a conscientious objector, was assigned to a civilian war effort camp.

He soon wrote a letter to the U.S. Attorney General announcing that he was leaving, finding the camp’s goal incompatible with his principles: “Can we work within the logic of an evil system for its destruction? Jesus did not think so ... Nor do I.”

He was sent to prison, where he had plenty of time to reflect on the problem of consciousness. “Jaynes was a man of principle, some might say impulsively or recklessly so,” a former student and a neighbor recalled. “He seemed to draw energy from jousting windmills.”

Jaynes emerged after three years, convinced that animal experiments could help him understand how consciousness first evolved, and spent the next three years in graduate school at Yale University.

For a while, he believed that if a creature could learn from experience, it was having an experience, implying consciousness.
He herded single paramecia through a maze carved in wax on Bakelite, shocking them if they turned the wrong way.

“I moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earthworms, fish, and reptiles, which could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution of consciousness,” he recounts in his book.

“Ridiculous! It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all.”
Many creatures could be trained, but what they did was not introspection.

And that was what tormented Jaynes.

​

Meanwhile, he performed more traditional research on the maternal behavior of animals under his advisor, Frank Beach. It was a difficult time to be interested in consciousness.
One of the dominant psychological theories was behaviorism, which explored the external responses of humans and animals to stimuli.

Conditioning with electric shocks was in, pondering the intangible world of thoughts was out, and for understandable reasons—behaviorism was a reaction to earlier, less rigorous trends in psychology.

But for much of Jaynes’ career, inner experience was beyond the pale.
In some parts of this community to say you studied consciousness was to confess an interest in the occult.

In 1949, Jaynes left without receiving his Ph.D., apparently having refused to submit his dissertation.
It’s not clear exactly why—some suggest his committee wanted revisions he would not make, some that he was irked by the hierarchical structure of academia, some that he simply was fed up enough to walk.

One story he told was that he didn’t want to pay the $25 submission fee. (In 1977, as his book was selling, Jaynes completed his Ph.D. at Yale.)
But it does seem clear that he was frustrated by his lack of progress.

He later wrote that a psychology based on rats in mazes rather than the human mind was “bad poetry disguised as science.”

It was the beginning of an odd peregrination.
In the fall of 1949, he moved to England and became a playwright and actor, and for the next 15 years, he ricocheted back and forth across the ocean, alternating between plays and adjunct teaching, eventually landing at Princeton University in 1964.

All the while, he had been reading widely and pondering the question of what consciousness was and how it could have arisen.
By 1969, he was thinking about a work that would describe the origin of consciousness as a fundamentally cultural change, rather than the evolved one he had searched for.

It was to be a grand synthesis of science, archaeology, anthropology, and literature, drawing on material gathered during the past couple decades of his life.
He believed he’d finally heard something snap into place.

ONE-BOOK WONDER: Although Julian Jaynes, who died in 1997, never completed another book,The Origins of Consciousness in Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind will carry his name into eternity. John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that when Jaynes “speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods … we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence he finds in ancient literature, modern behaviorism, and aberrant psychological phenomenon such as hypnotism, possession, glossolalia, prophecy, poetry, and schizophrenia.”Princeton University


​

The book sets its sights high from the very first words. “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!” Jaynes begins. “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.”

To explore the origins of this inner country, Jaynes first presents a masterful precis of what consciousness is not.
It is not an innate property of matter.

It is not merely the process of learning.
It is not, strangely enough, required for a number of rather complex processes.

Conscious focus is required to learn to put together puzzles or execute a tennis serve or even play the piano.
But after a skill is mastered, it recedes below the horizon into the fuzzy world of the unconscious.

Thinking about it makes it harder to do.
As Jaynes saw it, a great deal of what is happening to you right now does not seem to be part of your consciousness until your attention is drawn to it.

Could you feel the chair pressing against your back a moment ago?
Or do you only feel it now, now that you have asked yourself that question?

Consciousness, Jaynes tells readers, in a passage that can be seen as a challenge to future students of philosophy and cognitive science, “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.”

His illustration of his point is quite wonderful. “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 whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”

Perhaps most striking to Jaynes, though, is that knowledge and even creative epiphanies appear to us without our control.
You can tell which water glass is the heavier of a pair without any conscious thought—you just know, once you pick them up.

And in the case of problem-solving, creative or otherwise, we give our minds the information we need to work through, but we are helpless to force an answer.
Instead it comes to us later, in the shower or on a walk.

Jaynes told a neighbor that his theory finally gelled while he was watching ice moving on the St. John River.
Something that we are not aware of does the work.

The picture Jaynes paints is that consciousness is only a very thin rime of ice atop a sea of habit, instinct, or some other process that is capable of taking care of much more than we tend to give it credit for.

“If our reasonings have been correct,” he writes, “it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but were not conscious at all.”

Jaynes believes that language needed to exist before what he has defined as consciousness was possible.
So he decides to read early texts, including The Iliad andThe Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime.

And he believes he sees that in The Iliad.
He writes that the characters inThe Iliad do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative.

They only do what is suggested by the gods.
When something needs to happen, a god appears and speaks.

Without these voices, the heroes would stand frozen on the beaches of Troy, like puppets.
Speech was already known to be localized in the left hemisphere, instead of spread out over both hemispheres.

Jaynes suggests that the right hemisphere’s lack of language capacity is because it used to be used for something else—specifically, it was the source of admonitory messages funneled to the speech centers on the left side of the brain.

These manifested themselves as hallucinations that helped guide humans through situations that required complex responses—decisions of statecraft, for instance, or whether to go on a risky journey.

The combination of instinct and voices—that is, the bicameral mind—would have allowed humans to manage for quite some time, as long as their societies were rigidly hierarchical, Jaynes writes.

But about 3,000 years ago, stress from overpopulation, natural disasters, and wars overwhelmed the voices’ rather limited capabilities.
At that point, in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, bits and pieces of the conscious mind would have come to awareness, as the voices mostly died away.

That led to a more flexible, though more existentially daunting, way of coping with the decisions of everyday life—one better suited to the chaos that ensued when the gods went silent.

By The Odyssey, the characters are capable of something like interior thought, he says.
The modern mind, with its internal narrative and longing for direction from a higher power, appear.


The rest of the book—400 pages—provides what Jaynes sees as evidence of this bicamerality and its breakdown around the world, in the Old Testament, Maya stone carvings, Sumerian writings.

He cites a carving of an Assyrian king kneeling before a god’s empty throne, circa 1230 B.C. Frequent, successive migrations around the same time in what is now Greece, he takes to be a tumult caused by the breakdown.

And Jaynes reflects on how this transition might be reverberating today. “We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past,” he writes, in awe of the reach of this idea, and seized with the pathos of the situation. “Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now-silent deities, taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.”

It’s a sweeping and profoundly odd book.
But The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was enormously appealing.

Part of it might have been that many readers had never thought about just what consciousness was before.
Perhaps this was the first time many people reached out, touched their certainty of self, and found it was not what they expected.

Jaynes’ book did strike in a particular era when such jolts were perhaps uniquely potent.
In the 1970s, many people were growing interested in questions of consciousness.

Baumeister, who admires Jaynes, and read the book in galley form before it was published, says Jaynes tapped into the “spiritual stage” of the ascendant New Age movement.
And the language—what language!

It has a Nabokovian richness.
There is an elegance, power, and believability to his prose.

It sounds prophetic.
It feels true.

And that has incredible weight.
Truth and beauty intertwine in ways humans have trouble picking apart.

Physicist Ben Lillie, who runs the Storycollider storytelling series, remembers when he discovered Jaynes’ book. “I was part of this group that hung out in the newspaper and yearbook offices and talked about intellectual stuff and wore a lot of black,” Lillie says. “Somebody read it. I don’t remember who was first, it wasn’t me. All of a sudden we thought, that sounds great, and we were all reading it. You got to feel like a rebel because it was going against common wisdom.”

It’s easy to find cracks in the logic: Just for starters, there are moments in The Iliad when the characters introspect, though Jaynes decides they are later additions or mistranslations. But those cracks don’t necessarily diminish the book’s power.

To readers like Paul Hains, the co-founder ofAeon, an online science and philosophy magazine, Jaynes’ central thesis is of secondary importance to the book’s appeal. “What captured me was his approach and style and the inspired and nostalgic mood of the text; not so much the specifics of his argument, intriguing though they were,” Hains writes. “Jaynes was prepared to explore the frontier of consciousness on its own terms, without explaining away its mysterious qualities.”

Meanwhile, over the last four decades, the winds have shifted, as often happens in science as researchers pursue the best questions to ask.
Enormous projects, like those of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Brain-Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, seek to understand the structure and function of the brain in order to answer many questions, including what consciousness is in the brain and how it is generated, right down to the neurons.

A whole field, behavioral economics, has sprung up to describe and use the ways in which we are unconscious of what we do—a major theme in Jaynes’ writing—and the insights netted its founders, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith, the Nobel Prize.

Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, has conducted experiments to investigate how aware we are of things we are not focused on, which echo Jaynes’ view that consciousness is essentially awareness.

“It’s not unreasonable to have a view that the only things you’re conscious of are things you are attending to right now,” Schwitzgebel says. “But it’s also reasonable to say that there’s a lot going on in the background and periphery. Behind the focus, you’re having all this experience.”

Schwitzgebel says the questions that drove Jaynes are indeed hot topics in psychology and neuroscience.
But at the same time, Jaynes’ book remains on the scientific fringe. “It would still be pretty far outside of the mainstream to say that ancient Greeks didn’t have consciousness,” he says.

Dennett, who has called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind a “marvelous, wacky book,” likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt. “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk,” he says.

Particularly, he thinks Jaynes’ insistence on a difference between what goes on in the minds of animals and the minds of humans, and the idea that the difference has its origins in language, is deeply compelling.

“[This] is a view I was on the edge of myself, and Julian kind of pushed me over the top,” Dennett says. “There is such a difference between the consciousness of a chimpanzee and human consciousness that it requires a special explanation, an explanation that heavily invokes the human distinction of natural language,” though that’s far from all of it, he notes. “It’s an eccentric position,” he admits wryly. “I have not managed to sway the mainstream over to this.”


It’s a credit to Jaynes’ wild ideas that, every now and then, they are mentioned by neuroscientists who study consciousness.
In his 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, sympathizes with Jaynes’ idea that something happened in the human mind in the relatively recent past.

“As knowledge accumulated about humans and about the universe, continued reflection could well have altered the structure of the autobiographical self and led to a closer stitching together of relatively disparate aspects of mind processing; coordination of brain activity, driven first by value and then by reason, was working to our advantage,” he writes.

But that’s a relatively rare endorsement.
A more common response is the one given by neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland, an emerita professor at the University of California, San Diego. “It is fanciful,” she says of Jaynes’ book. “I don’t think that it added anything of substance to our understanding of the nature of consciousness and how consciousness emerges from brain activity.”

Jaynes himself saw his theory as a scientific contribution, and was disappointed with the research community’s response.
Although he enjoyed the public’s interest in his work, tilting at these particular windmills was frustrating even for an inveterate contrarian.

Jaynes’ drinking grew heavier.
A second book, which was to have taken the ideas further, was never completed.

And so, his legacy, odd as it is, lives on.
Over the years, Dennett has sometimes mentioned in his talks that he thought Jaynes was on to something.

Afterward—after the crowd had cleared out, after the public discussion was over—almost every time there would be someone hanging back.
“I can come out of the closet now,” he or she would say. “I think Jaynes is wonderful too.”

Marcel Kuijsten is an IT professional who runs a group called the Julian Jaynes Society whose membership he estimates at about 500 or 600 enthusiasts from around the world.
The group has an online members’ forum where they discuss Jaynes’ theory, and in 2013 for the first time they hosted a conference, meeting in West Virginia for two days of talks. “It was an incredible experience,” he says.

Kuijsten feels that many people who come down on Jaynes haven’t gone to the trouble to understand the argument, which he admits is hard to get one’s mind around.
“They come into it with a really ingrained, pre-conceived notion of what consciousness means to them,” he says, “And maybe they just read the back of the book.”

But he’s playing the long game.
“I’m not here to change anybody’s mind. It’s a total waste of time. I want to provide the best quality information, and provide good resources for people who’ve read the book and want to have a discussion.”

To that end, Kuijsten and the Society have released books of Jaynes’ writings and of new essays about him and his work.
Whenever discoveries that relate to the issues Jaynes raised are published, Kuijsten notes them on the site.

In 2009 he highlighted brain-imaging studies suggesting that auditory hallucinations begin with activity in the right side of the brain, followed by activation on the left, which sounds similar to Jaynes’ mechanism for the bicameral mind.

He hopes that as time goes on, people will revisit some of Jaynes’ ideas in light of new science.
Ultimately, the broader questions that Jaynes’ book raised are the same ones that continue to vex neuroscientists and lay people.

When and why did we start having this internal narrative?
How much of our day-to-day experience occurs unconsciously?

What is the line between a conscious and unconscious process?
These questions are still open. Perhaps Jaynes’ strange hypotheses will never play a role in answering them.

But many people—readers, scientists, and philosophers alike—are grateful he tried.



Veronique Greenwood is a science writer and essayist.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Aeon, New Scientist, and many more.
Follow her on Twitter here.

 

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ILLUSTRATIONS FROM 18TH CENTURY OCCULT BOOK

I had a friend who liked to collect occult illustrations from the earliest woodcuts of witches sabbats to hand-painted plates of winged demons.
My friend did not see these pictures as telling a history of the occult, but rather a luminous narrative of the imagination’s power to invent monsters.

Similarly fabulous creatures can be found in the illustrations to the Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros, a rare book on the occult dating from 1775 which is held by the Wellcome Library.

The volume is written in a mixture of German and Latin and contains 31 water-color illustrations of the Devil and his demonic servants together with three pages of magic and occult ritualistic symbols.

With the warning “NOLI ME TANGERE” (“Do Not Touch”) on its cover, the compendium can be seen as a last attempt by those of faith to instil fear among the superstitious.

After all, the Compendium Artis Magicae was produced during the decade of revolutions (American and French) and in the Age of Enlightenment–when reason, science and the power of the individual dominated, and the first stirrings of industry were about to change Europe and the world.

The horrendous witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries were long banished and the last execution in England for witchcraft took place in 1716 (1727 in Scotland, 1750 in Austria, 1782 in Switzerland), while the practise of witchcraft ceased to be a criminal offense across Europe during the century (England 1735)–all of which makes this Compendium Artis Magicae all the more bizarre.

The illustrations are a mix of Greco-Roman mythical monsters (chimeras such as Cerberus and Hydra), Phoenician gods (Astarte/Astaroth) biblical devils (Beelzebub, Satan), while some look as though they were inspired by witnessing the slaughter of men and beasts on European battlefields.

The claim that the book originated in 1075 has been dismissed, and the whole volume has been scanned on Hi-Res and can be viewed in detail at the Wellcome Library.

 

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To go with the above quote ^^^^

 

[Free]

I find it fascinating that every time I read one of your brilliant articles, a warmth floods my brain. Specifically the frontal lobe. One could argue that it's my limbic system kicking. I disagree.


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