For most of my waking consciousness, there is a constant chatter in my head. James called it a stream of consciousness in 1890. Thoughts need not take the shape of audio or visual words. But they often do in our word infested culture. Most everyone has had the experience of actually hearing something, smelling something, or seeing something, that wasn’t really there. Our brain has a way of tricking us. But as I stated earlier, there is a difference between the voice we hear when we have a song stuck in our head, and a ‘real’ hallucination such as Cindy describes in the case of a hypnogogic hallucination. ‘Real’ hallucinations happen to most people at some time in their life. But they aren’t the norm – for most people – most of the time.
Jaynes makes it clear, that the voices bicameral people heard, prior to the advent of writing, were not ‘figments of the imagination’. These bicameral folks listened to a voice actually produced by the right side of their brain and obeyed using the left side of their brain and as a result, there was peace and harmony throughout the land. There were “no private frustrations, no private ambitions” 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. But 4000 years ago we have people who wrote those Mesopotamian letters I posted. Then we get a lot of whining, and threats, and bickering about money and people who are as perfectly self-centered as we are today.
I blame Walt Disney for theories like Jaynes’s. I know it sounds crazy but we Boomers grew up on Walt Disney in the 50s and 60s. By the 70s we were primed to believe in anything - and an actor and playwright like Jaynes was happy to provide us with fantasies that were couched in sophisticated language and tantalizing scholarship, and that are impossible to disprove.
It seems to me Ziang Xianlong is talking about an ‘internal monologue’ that can be likened to James’s stream of consciousness and the constant chatter in my head. And I find it perfectly appropriate to say this ‘internal monologue’ is the voice of God or the Dao. I agree with Campbell when he said that the mystery that is out there, where deities may reside, is the same as the mystery within, where the contents of the collective unconscious reside. This theory, or way of looking at things, is also impossible to prove or disprove. Yet Campbell’s is perfectly sensible, coherent, and rational to me. Jaynes’s is – well – sorry Cindy – a no sale. (As if my opinion matters )
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Wow! I was so focused on wanting to cap on Jaynes I missed the purport of the Bodhi’s line posted in bold. I believe just the opposite, and yet, when I read his explanation it appears as sound and clear as ever. I really had to give this some thought. I’ll try to explain how I see things differently.NoMan notes that there is evidence of mythological thinking at least 100,000 years ago (and Campbell notes the earliest evidence of such 500,000 years ago) ... but evidence of mythological thinking is not evidence of a rational consciousness. In fact, the more developed the rational ego, the more likely it is to discount mythological thinking, which has been our trajectory the last five thousand of years or so - the beginning of which is documented in those pharaohs who stepped outside their mythological role in favor of the survival of the "me."
Similarly, child psychologists describe the childhood years as characterized by "mythological" or "magical" thinking, which eventually yields ground (as Jung has pointed out) to the "directed thinking" of developed rational consciousness (what we generally think of as "conscious" today). Of course, that associational or mythological thinking remains nevertheless just beneath consciousness - emerging most frequently in dreams, daydreams, art, visions, and such
... and sometimes erupting to swamp and overwhelm the conscious, rational ego (as in schizophrenia).
-Bodhi
In my mythblog I started with an example of pre-mythological thinking. An adolescent male chimpanzee named Flint had lost his mother Flo. He couldn’t comprehend the finality of death. He wouldn’t move from the spot where his mother lay cold and motionless, and kept waiting for her to ‘wake-up’ and come back to life. His sister Fifi tried to help him, Jane Goodall said, but she was occupied with a child of her own. Flint refused to eat, his condition worsened, and only two weeks after Flo died, Flint died too.
Some comments on the web suggest that Jane Goodall may have gotten carried away anthropomorphizing the depression of Flint. He may have died they say, as a result of the disease that had killed his mother. But it is still a wonderful story to relate of what pre-mythological thinking must have been like for our species. The feelings must have been there first. But the rational interpretation of those feelings come much later.
When I began to write that mythblog, I was looking for a different story by another primatologist. It was something that was observed in the Tai National Park, a rain forest in Cote d’Ivoire, in West Africa. A female chimpanzee had been killed by a leopard in the middle of the night. Her body was mangled and sort of scattered about in one small area. The next morning when the chimpanzee group approached the scene of the crime, they stopped a distance away. The older chimps held all the younger ones back, except for the baby daughter of the mother who had been killed. She was prompted to go ahead and examine the remains of her mother, alone, while the rest of them waited in a group a short distance away.
We must have gone through a stage similar to the modern chimp sometime in our evolution. We have a reasonable sense, or guess, of the difference between chimp consciousness and human consciousness. But what about a period of time, in human prehistory where hominids of our lineage were between these two modes of consciousness – only partially aware of the passage of time and only partially aware of cause and effect relationships? This could have lasted, and most probably did last, a long, long time.
I have to tell you Bodhi, this is a tough call.
But if there were a time in our prehistory when we were only half aware of our predicament, when we were only half aware of the passage of time, when we were only half aware of cause and effect relationships, and only half aware that in order to live we must kill other living creatures that are consciously aware like ourselves; during this period, I would say, that we were not yet thinking mythologically.
It has to do with what we mean by ‘mythological thinking’. If mythological thinking includes wandering and wondering disconnected thoughts then why not say that the cow or the cat is thinking mythologically. I don’t see it that way even if Joe Campbell does. The only way you can have true mythological thinking is after you become fully conscious of your predicament as a human being, of cause and effect relationships, of the passage of time, and of the temporary condition of living things, including your loved ones and yourself.
The fairy tale world that two-year-olds live in is not the same as mythological thinking in my definition. Instead, fairy tales are a preparation spurred on by adults, for the horror that awaits. Only after the forbidden fruit is eaten, and the child gets a glimpse of this horrific experience we are calling ‘ego consciousness’ – only then, can true mythological thinking begin. Myth is necessarily ameliorative. But there must be something to ameliorate.
This is what I meant by ‘the awakening’. And your guess is as good as mine as to when it actually took place. I look for burials and artwork, and then subtract several tens of thousands of years from the oldest because the earliest particular examples we find are most likely not the first.
According to Wiki the Riss-Wurm interglaciation began about 130,000 years ago. I don’t think we have Neanderthal burials or religious shrines that old. The science of physical anthropology is constantly being revised and Joseph Campbell was writing over 20 years ago. From what I know, the oldest burials are not more than 70,000 years old and the oldest artwork not more than 100,000 years old.P25 It can only have been at some unrecorded moment in the course of the last 3.5 million years of these developments that in the human line the crisis occurred of that awakening to the mystery of death, and therewith of life, which – more than any physical transformation – elevated man above the level of the beasts “that live but know nothing of life, and that die and see death,” as Spengler remarks, “without knowing an thing about it.”
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However, it is not until the period of Neanderthal Man in Europe, toward the close of the great Ice Ages, during the Riss-Wurm interglacial, that the first indubitable signs appear anywhere – namely, in burials of the dead and in reliquary shrines to the animals slain – of that recognition for the mysterium which marks the waking of the mythologically inspired “second mind.”
-Atlas of World Mythology, Vol 1, part 1, Joseph Campbell,
However, we have plenty of tools much older than 100,000 years old. When one looks at these arrowheads, and thinks of the skill required to make them, one can’t help but imagine a sentient being responsible for them. We must have, at some period in our evolution, gone through a zombie stage; a state where we were half-aware of what was happening. But in my definition, in my way of thinking about it, I don’t consider this half-aware state “mythological thinking”. We had to feel the full force of our predicament, and get the big picture, before we could partake in mythological thinking.
In this same sense, I don’t think of the two year old child as thinking mythologically. That is our projection, as ‘rationally ego-conscious’ adults onto the thinking of the little tots. If everyone died at the age of three, we wouldn’t need mythological thinking. This is the way it must have been prior to the awakening of the mythological mind in our evolution.
An analogy can be made with Campbell’s description of Indian meditation:
A – waking consciousness
U – dream consciousness
M – deep dreamless sleep
The yogi, in meditation, goes through these stages of consciousness achieving (2) dream consciousness and (3) deep dreamless sleep while fully aware. Analogously, a mythology achieves the child-like wonder (of a two year old child) or undifferentiating selflessness (of a two month old child) while fully aware. But since the babe and child has not yet acquired the big picture of ‘rational ego consciousness’ I don’t consider it to be mythological thinking in its true form.
In the full blown case of paranoid schizophrenia the person has rejected their ‘rational ego-consciousness’ so I don’t consider that mythological thinking either. It might be thought of as anti-mythological thinking. You see, the opposite of rational thought is irrational thought. But irrational thought need not necessarily be mythical. But the opposite if mythological thought is anti-mythological thought – or we could call it ‘mythoillogical’ thinking. How’s that for a new word?
Mythological thinking, by my definition, harmonizes the ‘rational conscious-ego’ of the psyche with the desires and fears of the psyche. I reject the idea that the psyche operates like a balance scale with 'rational ego-consciousness' wieghing on one side and 'mythological thinking' wieghing in on the other.
tough and interesting question i must say -
maybe i should have stuck with yesterdays mantra.
- NoMan