I read Gunter Grass's "The Flounder" in the late 1970s while still in school. We read Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan as part of our school coursework. So we were introduced to Bergsonian elan vital. I don't know what history I learnt in school, but I had named different stages of my life as "ancient greek", "dark ages", and "renaissance", and ofcourse, renaissance was the then present, when I wanted to read everything, from economics to literature to physics. The Flounder got mixed with all this..... In 1980s , I discovered Jung and Neumann. And I read something of Julian Jaynes, so bizarre was it , but unfortunately I lost the reference to him. In my mind, Neumann and Jaynes were so mixed up, for me the meaning of monotheism was obvious. Sometime back couple of days search on internet led me to Jaynes - a search for bicameral mind would have lead to him immediately, but I was trying monotheism. .. Now I have decided to seriously learn neurobiology (Open courseware is available at MIT). I have read a few semipopular books.. I found the following in a forum discussion, few years old. Otherwise I would have joined in.
I have always meant to write down some of my big dreams, and have written two posts on them. So in my 50th year, I am seriously turning to religion after turning away from it when I was 12.
http://www.julianjaynes.org/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=393
It is stunning to look at Jaynes' and Jung's work through each other's lenses as well. The Right Brain becomes The Feminine, and the emergence of Jaynes' introspective consciousness in the last 3000 or so years becomes the Masculine declaring its independence from the Mother, to form what we could call The Patriarchy--a necessary exploration of individuality, sovereignty, intellectual operation, in revolt against the hive-consciousness of the cultures built around The Great Mother (Sumer being the last great one in the Old World), where a human individual identified ONLY as his/her function/position in Her service; where only specially-initiated individuals--originally initiated only by priestesses of The Goddess--had access to intellectual knowledge (animal and plant husbandry, astronomy, geometry, number, writing, preparation of psychotropic concoctions such as alcohol and other hallucinogens, and especially the connection between intercourse, conception and birth--the "Women's Mysteries").
And now that The Patriarchy is dissolving (and ironically but not surprisingly we are becoming conscious of THAT), it looks to me as if we are about to experience another evolutionary leap (or self-destruct as a species in our failure to do so). In "Jungian" terms, we are about to re-unite the Patriarchy (Left Brain) with the Matriarchy (mostly suppressed and masked Right Brain), to produce something new. Our "globalization" activities--the internet, the emerging awareness of climate change as a global, species-wide problem, the mounting irreconcilabilities of individual vs. collective wellbeing in all their medical, spiritual, cultural, political and ecological forms--even our recent preference for dual processors in computers! all point to this, when human evolution is viewed from a "Jungian" point of view AND a "Jaynesian" one simultaneously. In other words, the Left Brain will need to see itself as good governments are supposed to operate--as knowlegable SERVANTS, not as ignorant, repressive "gods". In yet other words, we are about to redefine what "gods" are and then BECOME GOOD ones...taming the "animal" parts of ourselves through knowledge and compassion, rather than through fear and suppression.
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