The Causes of Consciousness AN OLD SUMERIAN PROVERB has been translated as “Act promptly, make your god happy.”1 If we forget for a moment that these rich English words are but a probing approximation of some more unknowable Sumerian thing, we may say that this curious exaction arches over into our subjective mentality as saying, “Don’t think: let there be no time space between hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you.” This was fine in a stable hierarchical organization, where the voices were the always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy, where the divine orders of life were trussed and girdered with unversatile ritual, untouched by major social disturbance. But the second millennium B.C. was not to last that way. Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes. Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world. Hierarchies crumpled. And between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous. Until, finally, the screening off of their tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog space with an analog ‘I’. The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness.

• proverbs
• bicameral mind
• hallucinations
• schizophrenia
• command hallucinations
• gods
• language
• consciousness
• god
• life
• time
• chaos
• unconscious
• shadow
• proverb
• english
• analog
• ritual

Upon meeting, you're judged by your clothes, upon parting, by your wit.

• humanity
• proverb

No one is satisfied with his fortune, and everyone is satisfied with his wit.

• humanity
• proverb
• fortune