In the spring of ‘92, Aspen and I were at the Rainbow Family’s spring council. It was in the deep woods, at the end of a very rough and dangerous road. There were maybe a hundred or so of us camping there. Someone had some peyote tea going. Folks were playing music everywhere.

At the council circle, I said something – I forget what – and someone said I sounded like an intellectual. I wanted to be accepted by these folks then. I also didn’t yet know that I was, in fact, an intellectual. So I didn’t tell the guy who said that to me that he sounded like a fool, praising ignorance.

But now that I am finally sure of who I am, this note begins as a response to that clown in the circle. It ends on a lot higher note though. First of all, before I leave the Rainbow Family behind, in this note at least, I want to say that I understand now that the hippie movement, especially the Rainbow Family’s part of it, has always been anti-intellectual in and of itself. Perhaps I should have known better then and talked down to the folks in that circle. Perhaps I should have realized that I was trying to fit into the wrong one.
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I am an intellectual. Reading Julian Jaynes’ book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, helped me to finally accept and realize that I really am one. The ideas in his book were wonderful and nourishing food for my mind. These ideas have given me something to think about, something that I can sink my intellectual teeth into.

In his book, Jaynes makes the point that before 2000 B.C. everyone saw and heard the gods. They were commonplace, everywhere. They were in everyone’s life. They were real. They were great and powerful. They were awesome.

Jayne’s illustrates this point by noting that in The Iliad not one of the great warriors or other players in that story ever made a personal decision. Everyone did what the gods told him or her to do, without questioning or even thinking about it at all. Everything happened because the gods asked for it to happen. Humans just did what they were told.

Around 2000 B.C., however, what Jaynes called the bicameral mind, a mind without the self-awareness or focus that we have today but one that still heard and saw the gods, this mind began to breakdown. The gods that had ruled and formed great civilizations began to disappear from human consciousness.

As a result, great civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia fell completely apart. Jaynes reports that this also happened in Mesoamerica. Great civilizations, ones that had existed for millennia disappeared, all around the same time and for the same reason – the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

The gods had left. They were no longer seen or heard. They no longer existed at all. During this time of great upheaval of consciousness and culture, most of the people in the world became refugees, looking for some god to guide them home.

Soon, some at least began to think for themselves. By the time The Odyssey was written, there already existed the beginnings of our modern consciousness. There was wily Odysseus. He had self-awareness and great cunning too. He didn’t listen to the gods; he had his own mind, his own consciousness. Rather than be an unconscious servant of the gods, he went his own way – and won through.

At this pivotal time in history, around 2000 B.C., the right hemisphere of the human brain, the source of the gods’ voices, became less powerful and less influential in our daily lives. At the same time, the hardware necessary for consciousness in the left hemisphere began to develop. We began to think and feel for ourselves.

Research today has shown that the right hemisphere, when stimulated in certain areas, still causes voices to be heard in the experimental subject. The voices that we once thought were of the gods are still there although we usually don’t hear them anymore, being so preoccupied with our own private thoughts and feelings.

And now, unless someone’s brain is being stimulated in a scientific study, it’s mostly crazy people and what we might charitably call holy people, who still hear the voices. And the voices are no longer the same for everyone. Now everyone who hears has their own inner voices, personalized especially for them.
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If Jaynes is right, the gods were just voices in our heads, not out there or real, just voices…. If Jaynes is right, there never were gods and there certainly aren’t any now. There are only dying religions honoring people from long ago who once heard voices and confused them with reality. If Jaynes is right, then “God is dead,” as Friedrich Nietzsche once said.

It’s as if we were once children who did what we were told, who never thought for ourselves, and who followed without questioning the dictates of our parental gods. Then we grew up. At first, delighted in our newfound powers of consciousness, we ignored the voices that had so long guided us unconsciously through our lives. Now that we are grown somewhat though, we can begin to return to that source of spiritual wisdom, to that inner space called god-consciousness, out of which came the voices that guided us in our past.

I have been in that space in consciousness myself, especially while tripping high dose on acid. And it isn’t just me. I’m reading Stan Grof’s book, LSD Psychotherapy – an awesome book. In his book, he summarizes his work and that of others who have guided many thousands of acid trips. In his book, he reports that people often have an experience of god-consciousness while doing high dose acid.

I am also experiencing it more and more in my daily meditations. I come into god-consciousness now whenever my head is turned off, whenever I am just floating in consciousness, whenever I am just the witness. I find that god-consciousness is always there whenever I turn off my mind.

I am finding that god consciousness isn’t voices telling us what to do. That was then. Today, god-consciousness is the space we can enter and decide for ourselves, at our highest level, what we want to do.

Yes, there are no gods, if there ever were any. But there is a god-consciousness that any of us can access. It is true; we once lost the voices and their guidance. We have had to change our focus in order to grow into who and what we are as human beings. But now that we are more grown up, we can find a middle way, one that utilizes both of the brain’s two hemispheres equally.

Today we are experiencing the functional union of the left and right hemispheres. We are experiencing what could also be called, the union of man and spirit. We are becoming whole beings.