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THE AUTHORITY OP SOUND

We must not leave this subject of the hallucinatory mechanism
without facing up to the more profound question of why such
voices are believed, why obeyed. For believed as objectively real,
they are, and obeyed as objectively real in the face of all the
evidence of experience and the mountains of common sense.
Indeed, the voices a patient hears are more real than the doctor's
voice. He sometimes says so. "If that is not a real voice, then I
can just as well say that even you are not now really talking to
me," said one schizophrenic to his physicians. And another when
questioned replied:

Yes, Sir. I hear voices distinctly, even loudly; they interrupt us
at this moment. It is more easy for me to listen to them than to
you. I can more easily believe in their significance and actuality,
and they do not ask questions.'4

That he alone hears the voices is not of much concern. Some-
times he feels he has been honored by this gift, singled out by
divine forces, elected and glorified, and this even when the voice
reproaches him bitterly, even when it is leading him to death. He
is somehow face to face with elemental auditory powers, more
real than wind or rain or fire, powers that deride and threaten
and console, powers that he cannot step back from and see
objectively.

One sunny afternoon not long ago, a man was lying back in a
deck chair on the beach at Coney Island. Suddenly, he heard a
voice so loud and clear that he looked about at his companions,
certain that they too must have heard the voice. When they acted
as if nothing had happened, he began to feel strange and moved
his chair away from them. And then

suddenly, clearer, deeper, and even louder than before,
the deep voice came at me again, right in my ear this time, and
getting me tight and shivery inside. "Larry Jayson, I told you
before you weren't any good. Why are you sitting here making
believe you are as good as anyone else when you're not? Whom
are you fooling?"

The deep voice was so loud and so clear, everyone must have
heard it. He got up and walked slowly away, down the stairs of
the boardwalk to the stretch of sand below. He waited to see if
the voice came back. It did, its words pounding in this time, not
the way you hear any words, but deeper,

as though all parts of me had become ears, with my fingers
hearing the words, and my legs, and my head too. "You're no
good," the voice said slowly, in the same deep tones. "You've
never been any good or use on earth. There is the ocean. You
might just as well drown yourself. Just walk in, and keep walk-
ing."

As soon as the voice was through, I knew by its cold com-
mand, I had to obey it.25

The patient walking the pounded sands of Coney Island heard his
pounding voices as clearly as Achilles heard Thetis along the
misted shores of the Aegean. And even as Agamemnon "had to
obey" the "cold command" of Zeus, or Paul the command of Jesus
before Damascus, so Mr. Jayson waded into the Atlantic Ocean to
drown. Against the will of his voices, he was saved by life-
guards and brought to Bellevue Hospital, where he recovered to
write of this bicameral experience.

In some less severe cases, the patients, when accustomed to
the voices, can learn to be objective toward them and to attenuate
their authority. But almost all autobiographies of schizophrenic
patients are consistent in speaking of the unquestioning submis-
sion, at least at first, to the commands of the voices. Why should
this be so? Why should such voices have such authority either in
Argos, on the road to Damascus, or the shores of Coney Island?

Sound is a very special modality. We cannot handle it. We
cannot push it away. We cannot turn our backs to it. We can
close our eyes, hold our noses, withdraw from touch, refuse to
taste. We cannot close our ears though we can partly muffle
them. Sound is the least controllable of all sense modalities, and
it is this that is the medium of that most intricate of all evolution-
ary achievements, language. We are therefore looking at a prob-
lem of considerable depth and complexity.

The Control of Obedience

Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking
to us. In a certain sense we have to become the other person; or
rather, we let him become part of us for a brief second. We
suspend our own identities, after which we come back to our-
selves and accept or reject what he has said. But that brief
second of dawdling identity is the nature of understanding lan-
guage; and if that language is a command, the identification of
understanding becomes the obedience. To hear is actually a kind
of obedience. Indeed, both words come from the same root and
therefore were probably the same word originally. This is true in
Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Russian, as well as in
English, where 'obey' comes from the Latin obedire, which is a
composite of ob & audire, to hear facing someone.

The problem is the control of such obedience. This is done in
two ways.

The first but less important is simply by spatial distance.
Think, if you will, of what you do when hearing someone else
talk to you. You adjust your distance to some culturally estab-
lished standard.17 When the speaker is too close, it seems he is
trying to control your thoughts too closely. When too far, he is
not controlling them enough for you to understand him comfort-
ably. If you are from an Arabian country, a face-to-face distance
of less than twelve inches is comfortable. But in more northern
countries, the conversation distance most comfortable is almost
twice that, a cultural difference, which in social exchanges can
result in a variety of international misunderstandings. To con-
verse with someone at less than the usual distance means at least
an attempted mutuality of obedience and control, as, for ex-
ample, in a love relationship, or in the face-to-face threatening of
two men about to fight. To speak to someone within that distance
is to attempt to truly dominate him or her. To be spoken to
within that distance, and there remain, results in the strong
tendency to accept the authority of the person who is speaking.

The second and more important way that we control other
people's voice-authority over us is by our opinions of them. Why
are we forever judging, forever criticizing, forever putting people
in categories of faint praise or reproof?  We constantly rate
others and pigeonhole them in often ridiculous status hierarchies
simply to regulate their control over us and our thoughts. Our
personal judgments of others are filters of influence. If you wish
to release another's language power over you, simply hold him
higher in your own private scale of esteem.

And now consider what it is like if neither of these methods
avail, because there is no person there, no point of space from
which the voice emanates, a voice that you cannot back off
from, as close to you as everything you call you, when its pres-
ence eludes all boundaries, when no escape is possible - flee and
it flees with you - a voice unhindered by walls or distances,
undiminished by muffling one's ears, nor drowned out with any-
thing, not even one's own screaming - how helpless the hearer!
And if one belonged to a bicameral culture, where the voices
were recognized as at the utmost top of the hierarchy, taught you
as gods, kings, majesties that owned you, head, heart, and foot,
the omniscient, omnipotent voices that could not be categorized
as beneath you, how obedient to them the bicameral man!

The explanation of volition in subjective conscious men is still
a profound problem that has not reached any satisfactory solu
tion. But in bicameral men, this was volition. Another way to
say it is that volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a
neurological command, in which the command and the action
were not separated, in which to hear was to obey.