http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Julian Jaynes Society The Minds of the Bible The Minds of the Bible The Minds of the Bible: Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness Author: Rabbi James Cohn Publication Date: 2007 Length: 44 pages Abstract: Human culture raises children, and thus creates adults, who understand their mental life who understand what's happening within their minds in a particular way. Before the development of written language, human beings were acculturated to understand their mental life in terms of automatic (some might say "robotic" or "zombie-like") responses to auditory hallucinations which they identified as the external voice of God. The hallucinated voice was in fact a part of their own internal mental processes, but the voice seemed to them to be coming through their ears from the "outside." Every action they took was taken as a response to what they understood to be the authorization and direction of the voice. Thus, they had no words in their vocabularies to correspond to our words such as "mind" or "imagination" or "belief," nor did they have any awareness of choices or of choosing. They understood themselves to be hearing Gods voice, and they obeyed. Today, we are acculturated to experience our mental life far differently: not as an obedient, automatic hearkening to an external "voice," but as a narratized dialogue with our self, in which we experience the seemingly ceaseless commentary of our own mind, and then take actions based on deliberate, self-authorized internal decisions. The task of this project is to explain the rise over a few centuries of the introspective, reflective mind so familiar to us, a mind whose processes were physically possible to our ancestors (the neurological wiring was all there just as it is today), but culturally impossible to them. The tools we will use to explore this enormous cultural transformation are a careful reading of the Hebrew Bible (placing its texts into the sequence and context suggested by critical scholarship), accompanied by an analysis of language and linguistics, and observations about the function of certain areas of the brain. Societal pressures led human society to move from a cultural setting in which it was accepted that everyone individually heard the voice of God. Those pressures produced an interim, transitional human cultural setting in which it was accepted that only certain prophets or monarchs could hear the voice of God (and would then convey the contents to others). In our own human cultural setting, "normal" mental life consists of a rich introspective consciousness full of internal "mind-talk" (or "narratization"). Along the way, it was necessary specifically to deny by decree the authority of anyones externally "heard" voice of God, and instead it was asserted that the voice of God was conveyed only in a divinely authorized and permanent written word universally available to be reflected upon by the individual human mind. Modern mental life is strikingly different from the life of our ancestors. They were not "like us." How did this happen and why? The full text of this article is available for purchase (instant PDF download): Copyright 1998-2009 Julian Jaynes Society Friend Marcel Kuijsten/JJS on Facebook Friend the JJS on Myspace Follow the JJS on YouTube