What Is and What Should Never Be
WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE
Once consciousness dawns, can it ever set? And another thing: If we had the answer to one of the great metaphysical questions – god, reality, mind, that slippery stuff – would anyone even notice?
The short answers are: I hope so and probably not.
The story of the origin of consciousness has already been told. Every age tells it – from the Bronze Age to our own. In our age it has been told by Julian Jaynes. Which leaves but one further metaphysical question about consciousness: How does it end? That is the question I will take up after first answering the second:
How could it be that in 1976 Jaynes explained the origin of consciousness in four hundred and fifty pages of clear beautiful prose and no great awakening occurred?
The veil of māyā lies so thickly over our eyes that we cannot see the truth even when it stands before us resplendent. We see only our own contrivances. Laws. Money. Power. And other abortions of the imagination.
The sparkling metaphors of Jaynes’s prose, the mellifluously cadenced sentences, the exuberance that wafts from his forest of exclamation points – these are not irrelevant features of his writing. This is not a story that could be told by any other than a true poet. The “how” and the “what” are never separate.
Jaynes is a philosopher-poet in a class with Plato, Blake, and Nietzsche.