Bicameral
/ Bicamerality:
The quality of having ‘two rooms , chambers,
or main branches. The term was coined into a cognitive definition
by Julian
Jaynes — who uses it to indicate ‘two kingdoms’
of consciousness co-existing as potentially discrete entities in
a single person. Jaynes’ model proposes that over a timeline
covering the last 6000 years of human history we lost an anciently
conserved aspect of human consciousness, trading it for a new form
of memory and representational awareness. This aspect was one in
which we heard voices, learned in seemingly impossible ways, and
were by all modern standards profoundly different creatures. We
were more akin to our models of advanced aliens in some dimensions,
and at the same time more prone to what would seem by modern standards
to be outlandishly irrational pogroms of various sorts. In effect,
tantrums.
For example, back then, celestially authorized voices
in our head could drive us around like cars...commanding us almost
like puppets, in the name of a human sovereign — such as a
King or Prophet — or in the name of God(s).
We used external toys to conserve memory of identity,
tasks and locations, and our own memory was formative at best. Jaynes
saw these matters as a mechanism of achieving tight social cohesion
in groups, which led to dramatic new opportunities for benefit and
stability.
o:O:o
The bicameral person has common ongoing experience
of ‘being told’ the memories, commands, intelligence
and admonitions of an ‘other who speaks within’. Sometimes
these events are entirely involuntary, and contain admonitions or
instructions which ‘must be carried out at all costs, immediately’.
Often this other is identified with a celestial dimension, or —
in cognitive terms — the dimension representative of ‘authority’
and its hierarchies. A bicameral culture is one in which this status
is ‘normal’, and unicamerality within such a culture
would be experienced as ‘alien’.
A unicameral person (the position we inhabit) has
purportedly either integrated (unlikely) or displaced what is essentially
‘half’ of consciousness — the half we might have
once referred to as divine, and which we now don’t refer to
much at all except to silence. badly emulate or diagnose it. Most
modern theistic religions are mimicking themselves as reconstructors
of a viable assembly-call to unified bicameral experience, yet any
actual bicamerality would be severely punished by these same edifices.
In very recent history we have repeatedly seen the
relative ease with which a mechanized unicameral culture based in
object commerce will decimate and control the terrain
of any extant bicameral culture once empowered to do so. Even without
large-scale terrestrial crisis — unicameral cultures of any
size have always been a virulent enemy of their predecessors in
every case.
o:O:o
This ‘mode of consciousness’ is generally
denigrated such that it appears to be an undesirable consequence
of something we did not yet possess (a hallucinatory denigration
of our modern consciousness by comparison) rather than a
family of abilities that was obscured and co-opted by competing
momentums. The problem is clear: to admit anything other
than hallucination was happening would require we attempt to explain
what that happening was — and this activity would
lead us away from cognitive archeology into theology — a dimension
that Jaynes was happy to take an abstract or academic view toward.
He was an archaeologist more than a theologian, and
part of his agenda as an academic was to debunk the idea that other
forms of intelligence might exist in locally accessible transports
— and that religions might be records of such contact.
From his position there was no way for him to metaphy these dimensions
of consciousness as actually having to do with contact
with anything other than something akin to sustainable group hypnosis.
He paints these collective cognitive activities as a primitive precursors
to our modern consciousness, and shows that these momentums are
still with us in forms we would recognize — such as the ‘imaginary
friend’ of the child, and the admonitory demons of dark psychosis.
The general outline of the book paints ‘the
gods’ as primarily imaginal or metaphoric figurations, a kind
of auto-regenerative group hallucination common to the intimately
knit civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Ur. While I agree that
these societies were ‘something akin to bicameral’,
I do not subscribe to his implication that these qualities of consciousness
were fundamentally ‘hallucinatory’ or ‘self-generated’.
It is certainly true that these experiences and ‘directives’
most often take place in an imaginal ‘dimension’ —
but this does not comprise evidence that they are merely local simulations
— even if they were, they are not simulations of nothing.
We must remember that all of metaphication, including the forms
with which we question and explore such matters — everything
we have ever thought or ‘proven’ is imaginal in basis!
Remove humans from the picture, and all of the ‘proofs’
and names and structures of ‘rational fact’ are entirely
void.
All of our intellectual and knowledge-activity takes
place in precisely the same sort of imaginal dimension. The very
mind with which we decide ‘what is hallucination’ is
just as ‘hallucinatory’ as whatever we may agree to
degrade with this epithet.
o:O:o
Prior to 7000 years ago, human history probably made
a few flops back and forth between various mixtures of these two
modes, until some 4000 years ago when the remaining bicameral kingdoms
were shattered, and the remaining bicameral peoples became the subject
of open persecution. From this time forward they and their kind
have been generally hated and killed by those who were no longer
able to ‘hear the counsels and teachings of the gods with(in)’.
When these features of our consciousness were lost
or environmentally challenged, the resulting ‘unicameral’
peoples became increasingly violent in their active opposition to
or predation upon the remaining bicamerals, and many of the stories
of persecution we are familiar with today emerge nearly intact from
this ancient prejudice. A unicameral society will ideologically
frame its bicameral members as bad, wrong, broken, criminal, undesirable
for congress or diseased — as justification for imprisonment,
rape, slavery, execution, or ‘conversion’ to ‘a
more civilized model’. In many or most cases these cultures
actually pretend to bicameral roots, such as in
the spurious ‘Christian Basis’ of North America — particularly
the United States.
The transition from a bicameral paradigm to formal
representation was fraught with anomalous phases and false starts.
Additionally, the phases played out along unique timelines on different
continents, such that the unicameral culture of Spain could penetrate
and destroy essentially pristine bicameral cultures in South America,
as later those of England would do in the northern continent.
o:O:o
According to Jaynes’ perspective, over a period
of around a thousand years, the gods ‘left earth’
— perhaps as the result of a variety of events which shattered
or severely stressed complexly evolved localized cultures. Human
unity was the lens that assembled ‘contact with the gods’
and when terrestrial events shattered this, that contact disappeared
as surely as if it had never existed. Our modern religions exist
as almost indecipherable memoirs of the times prior to and during
this disappearance.
What this actually meant was that a kind of ‘first
channel’ in our imaginal universe shut down unexpectedly for
whole civilizations. A greater catastrophe could not be imagined,
and in fact the idea that something which had always been present
could disappear had never really occurred to anyone. It was about
the same as if everyone’s eyes suddenly stopped working for
no apparent reason.
The resultant chaos and reorganization of meaning,
consciousness and civilization set up successive ‘mini-apocalypses’
proceeding from our many competing responses to this initial loss.
These events marked the beginnings of our long exile into the dimensions
of semantic abstraction, memory, ‘psychology’, ‘language
math’, and ‘the sciences’. In the wake of this
very sudden change, those left ‘inwardly blind’ had
to try to understand or justify what had happened. The result? Guilt,
by association: If the celestial ones left us, we must have
somehow offended them...
Usually these cultures organized around a central
teacher, prophet or protective sovereign. Large groups often formed
into unique sub-instances or ‘families’ within collectives
— each one uniquely recapitulating their larger superset(s).
We still carry this entire assembly within us — we can see
that the inner self we form and sustain in distant remembrance of
these fundamentally human necessities is amenable to to the same
analogy. The primary difference is that as a result of the loss
of our bicamerality we have largely moved from exploring the experience
and expressions of enacted human unification — to isolated
simulations which when enacted breed catastrophe. Eventually a transport
leading in the general direction of this cognitive heritage was
‘re-discovered’ in the mutually adoring relationship
we call ‘love’.
o:O:o
Bicamerals
and Memory
Jaynes believes that (as a species) we did not possess
an analog of our modern formal representational memory until relatively
recently (starting 5000-2500 years ago). Before this time he shows
evidence that we probably used tokens, particularly dolls and other
‘idols’ as inductive autohypnotic transports —
allowing us to record and recall primarily by associating memory
with a physical toy (an ‘idol’). Essentially he is suggesting
that human memory is based in an earlier analog which required extrinsic
tokens. Over time, we assembled the necessary ‘re-presentative’
skills such that we could effectively resignal ourselves in a new
dimension. He provides a variety of credible evidence for this general
idea throughout his book.
His theories on this matter have met primarily with
scorn, but my own experience and research leads me to credential
his innovative position, if not his specific timelines. I have clear
memories of my own early phases of enlanguaging, and I find his
speculations congruent with my own experience. This might lend support
to the idea that his theories are pointing in a generally correct
if seemingly radical direction, and also that we may each be recapitulating
all of these phases ourselves during our own enlanguaging and enculturation.
The latter position is clearly evidenced in the cognitive maturation
of human children.
What we ‘used to do’ with solid dolls,
we now do with formal lexical symmetries — metaphor. Except
almost none of us are aware of any of these terrains, or their significance
in our lives and planetary history as a species.
o:O:o
There is a subvocalization phase in most children’s
experience of learning to read. This ‘inward gesture’
is eventually transferred out the ‘place’ in conscious
anatomy where it is founded, into a place where vocalization is
simulated only vaguely if at all when reading. Yet in the early
phases of ‘sounding out’ words and phonemes, we are
either sub-vocalizing, or performing a cognitive analog of this.
During this activity the elemental structure of our consciousness
is changing, as previously conserved potentials are sloughed off
in favor of the incoming complexities and requirements of formal
language. Some of those
Acting as an invasive terrain-predator, language establishes
itself as a priority in many simultaneous domains of our cognitive
person. The rewards of enlanguaging to the human person appear profound
— more attention from those around us and increased opportunities
for survival, fulfillment, reproduction and elaboration of self.
Yet perhaps we should know more about what we are trading away for
the gifts of abstraction, comparative valuing, and relation that
come with language and their informal and formal logics. Too often
the appearance of profound reward is hiding something —too
often the something hiding there is a predator.
Bicamerality,
Psychism, Psychosis
Adults in the West are scripted by parents, culture
and peers to dispose of the anomalous cognitive events of children
with a smirk implying they somehow ‘know better’. In
most cases, we do this with each other as well. In general, at least
here in the West, the child’s impossibly adaptive natural
intelligence is openly attacked, shattered, co-opted and sold back
to them at ever-increasing prices, in an absurd and exponentially
expanding assortment of costumes. Why? By which I mean to ask: what
is it that is so profoundly missing in us and our children that
endless millions of plastic doll-like reductions must be manufactured
and consumed ever-more rapidly to account for this inconceivable
impoverishment?
Even this question is dwarfed by our complete denigration
of forms and ways of learning and expression we (as ‘adults’)
consider primitive. A human infant, apparantly ‘intellectually
helpless’, will learn over 150 distinct alien languages within
the first year of its life. How exactly do we each accomplish this?
We are told the answer is ‘still unknown’, which means
essentially that ‘experts are still stumped’. The reason
they are stumped is that they seek a mechanical answer in a dimension
where the answers are so amazing that to glance in the general direction
of the truth would completely eradicate most of what we know as
science.
In the processes of enlanguaging and enculturation,
a human infant will develop and express cognitive skills which far
exceed those of the savant. If merely encouraged, each child will
naturally magnify these into potentials of learning and application
unheard of and unbelieved in by ‘rational adults’. We
see no examples of this because it is nowhere allowed, not because
our children fail to be born incumbent geniuses. The environment
is ‘dead-set-against’ the establishment of the child’s
native intelligence, and prefers a crippling analog which effectively
assassinates prodigy.
I wish to suggest that an element of the ‘learning
engines’ employed by children is direct contact with a transhuman
and atemporally local sentient ‘entity’, and since this
is generally denied or co-opted by adult stories which openly contradict
the truth, the children are ‘punished to silences’ or
congruance with absurd paradigms acting as predatory obstacles to
understanding these matters. As to the potential to retain and elaborate
access to this non-human ‘dimension’ of intelligence
— there is none. With extremely few exceptions, the environment
within which each of us are immersed will attack us nearly every
time we move in that direction. So there is a direct cultural pressure
against anyone who desires to explore these dimensions of ‘anomalous
cognition’.
As a child I was deeply curious about these matters,
and I spoke at length with other children of my age, younger and
older at every opportunity. I was consistently asking them for reports
of anything out of the ordinary, especially things the adults would
not credential or believe, or experiences which they were told ‘were
just their imagination’.
The results were consistently startling. Eventually
I came to believe that the majority of gateway experiences of youth
were neatly snipped off and discarded with precisely this sort of
strategy. My own parents, who were young (in their 20’s) and
somewhat liberal, if atheist (they sometimes entertained metaphysical
ideologies and discussions), were always quick to silence or deny
any sort of cognitive event or behavior that didn’t appear
to ‘fit the norm’ or that would too significantly
single me out for attention. In every case the incredible adventures
of dreaming and matters I will not here pursue were silenced, translated
into meaningless babble, and openly denied to me. Perhaps worse,
my parents and family were consistently denied the fruits such understandings
might have bore had they ever received the least nurturence or terrain
for elaboration.
This is of course not ‘my story’ but the
story of a nation, a continent, and in fact hundreds or thousands
of generations of human beings. Why must we denigrate matters of
connectivity which do not fit our models? Purportedly it is to ‘protect
us from nonsense and charlatains’ — yet somehow it seems
to increase their numbers, rape us of what it is supposed to be
protecting at ever-higher prices, and deliver us naked and helpless
to the servitude of even more bizarre and deadly predators. I have
no experience of humanity or any person ‘being protected’
by these denials at all. In fact, my experience, and the experience
of the children and adults I have known and spoken to is one of
rape. Open, overt rape, repetitively applied to children who are
blamed for the incidents and charged incessently for re-application
of the blade. Why would we be cognitively raping our children?
o:O:o
The Lens Effect
It may well be that common contact with ‘the
Celestial Ones’ or ‘the unityBeing’ requires that
certain dimensions of human unity are well-established and luxuriously
nurtured.
Bicamerals and God [meaning] or Logics [structures]
Bicamerals in ‘Fiction’ and Mythos:
• Fiver in ‘Watership Down’
• Jesus Christ
The story of Christ considered in this light is a
story consistently replayed in human history: we claim to desire
access to and preservation of our bicameral birthrights, but we
enact the polar opposite whenever proffered the direct opportunity
to partake of them. Generally this results in the wrongful execution
of innocent people who would in fact deliver on their promises of
access to impossible abundance if given any reasonable chance to
do so.
This is the story of every human child — born
bicameral in a world that by its logics and agreements must hate,
deny or oppose this in every possible way.
• Guatama Buddha
Bicamerality in Industrial Societies
o:O:o
