The “bicameral mind” 30 years on (2007)
The question I have is: was Jaynes a closet anthroposophist, or is &quot;<i>bicameral mind</i>&quot; an independent corroboration?<p><i>If we look at this evolution from the far-distant past, when the ego was hidden within its sheaths as though in the darkness of a mother&#x27;s womb, we find that although the ego had no knowledge of itself, it was all the closer to those spiritual beings who worked on our bodily vehicles and were related to the human ego, but of incomparably greater perfection. Clairvoyant insight thus looks back to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged. In those times, also, we find in man a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth. The faculty that man in the future will acquire with his ego was present in the primeval past without the ego. Clairvoyant consciousness entails that spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream. Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual. He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character. When he thought of something, he could not have said to himself, “I am thinking”, as a man might do today; his thought stood before his clairvoyant vision. And to experience a feeling he had no need to look into himself; his feeling radiated from him and united him with his whole spiritual environment.</i><p>- Rudolf Steiner, May 1910<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rsarchive.org&#x2F;Medicine&#x2F;GA059&#x2F;English&#x2F;RSP1983&#x2F;19100505p01.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rsarchive.org&#x2F;Medicine&#x2F;GA059&#x2F;English&#x2F;RSP1983&#x2F;1910050...</a>