Life Is A Puzzle That Can Only Be Solved With Intuition
There are limits to “reason” and rational thought.
As the author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, points out, there were events in our prehistory that were good for the organization and proliferation of our species — farming, for instance — that actually weren’t so great for us as individuals. We went from happy go lucky hunter gatherer to drone-like farm worker, trudging along behind a plough share.
The “cognitive revolution” that occurred that made mankind conscious of what Harare calls “things that don’t exist,” like religious and political concepts, was a great way to organize citizens but caused agony for individuals.
But it really wasn’t farming that invented agony. Before we had the agony of agriculture we had to have this “person” who could be agonized.
How does this oppressive thing called the SELF enslave and torment us?
By talking.
Nonstop.
Julian Jaynes in his seminal The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind places the blame clearly on the two-hemisphered structure of our brain. We can’t get the left brain to stop blabbing on to the right, is basically the conclusion of his 300-page analysis. His work is controversial, in that he…
