Have you ever tried praying and received no answer? Have you been told that if you really really pray hard, you will see a change in your life or even hear someone or Someone responding? I can believe as intensely as the next guy and I have even been known to fool myself in a spiritual sorta way. Praying for change certainly has helped me align my energy in a particular direction, like the magnet and the iron filings trick we all did in grade school. Perhaps praying helped me reach my needs and goals, but hearing voices? That’s a tricky area…sort of like admitting you’ve seen UFOs. Our contemporaries will be patient and suspend judgement, but probably place us at the beginning of the looney tunes scale of credibility. At the risk of acquiring a strait-jacket for my wardrobe, I must confess I have heard voices; usually when I am half asleep or trying desperately not to hear voices. I cannot recall any significant messages. Invariably they take the form of pleasant conversation just below the threshhold of understanding. Sometimes people yell at me really loud, and not just Pia when I forget to plug my face into the C-Pap machine.
When folks tell me that they hear the voices of prophets, angels, Jesus, or Beelzebub, I too, suspend judgement. To my mind, one of the most extraordinary psychological treatises of the past half century was posited by Professor Julian Jaynes. In his 1976 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he suggests that the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were split between one part of the brain which appears to be “speaking”, and a second part which hears and obeys. When this bicameral state was no longer in play in complex civilizations, the model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought which is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language. In brief, the one side of our brain told the other more receptive side what to do, think, or believe: And it did it through active auditory hallucination i.e. ‘speaking’. This might appear to be the voice of a divine entity delivering the spiritual goods. Prophets in your ear, but it was much more divine than my dear wife telling me I’m snoring, although she does have divine aspects. This hit its peak about 3 000 years ago and as we developed language and story-telling, becoming meta-cognitive or conscious, bicameralism petered out. Vestiges of it remain, according to Dr. Jaynes, in the thought processes of schizophrenics, whose corpus callosums still have wicked throughput.
Which brings me back to the original query; have you ever tried to successfully pray? I like Peter O’Toole’s response in the film The Ruling Class. When queried why he believed he was Jesus Christ, he replied in a deadpan way that whenever he prayed, he found he was talking to himself.
I heartily suggest you acquire and read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. You won’t ever think the same again. . .
