Life Is A Puzzle That Can Only Be Solved With Intuition

There are limits to “reason” and rational thought.

Photo by Jessica Pamp on Unsplash

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 claims this event of the left talking to the right only happened 3,000 years ago. What is not controversial is that at some point in history we developed an inner monologue, which soon contributed to the notion that we have some sort of “self” inside our head. Not inside our heel. Nobody ever locates the self inside the shin or the right hip bone. It’s normally located in the brain — for the very reason that the brain has these two hemispheres — a built-in audience!

We hear the voice of the inner monologue when we wake up and we hear it say goodnight to us when we go to bed. Michael A. Singer quite aptly referred to this incessant inner monologue that lives in our heads as our “inner roommate.”

It is the internal monologue of our thoughts that is the first and most important mechanism by which the self constructs its imaginary “self-i-verse” — a universe entirely imaginary and yet so real to each one of us that we would say that our…