Chapter One: Bicameral Mind
1. In the beginning was the bicameral brain but it was of one mind. So says Julian Jaynes.
2. And it was in the Iliad of deep hallucination. No introspection. No subjectivity.
3. The gods were their only consciousness, residing in their secret mind, and Achilles and Agamemnon heard and saw visions as the grass is surely green of Athena and Thetis.
4. Like Moses and the burning bush. Like voices truly living in the numinous halls of their right brain.
5. Like schizophrenics, acid heads, or religious mystics of today.
6. In time, forming great theocracies, they avoided killer chaos, with “lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so" on and so on to idol kings and queens and gods and goddesses.
7. But the odyssey of new migrations, natural disasters, and unnatural conquests led to younger societies of much social complexity requiring intensive education,
8. cutting the cord, the corpus callosum, the holy bridge between the left brain and the right brain,
9. as the Babylonian ‘Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’ says, “My god has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me,”
10. and made us all in the image of that wily coyote Odysseus on a different kind of long strange trip,
11. left with just the profane lonely old left brain we have with us today.
12. Unless we can reconstruct that major work of inter-state suspension span between the brain's two separate but equal hemispheres and vacation once again on visionary Mt. Olympus.
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