Well…the conference has come and gone. A good time was had by all. I found it greatly stimulating and personal. What a fine bunch of people to be affiliated with! I can feel the momentum of Thunderbolts building.
To my surprise there were no new initiatives by Talbott or Cardona, despite the video runups to the conference. Cochrane didn't attend. The Earth catastrophes and tumultuous sky drama continues to be shoved back up against the period after the end of the era of the goods (3200 BCE). For Cardona, add another 5,000 years into pre-history. Who knows how long the planets acted out after Saturn left? Centuries? Millenia? To me it just doesn't make sense that this is not being addressed. Cook, Velikovsky and de Grazia have certainly embraced the challenge, have done the research and laid out the observations. How come this is not being debated? You tell me….
I enjoyed very much meeting Jno Cook and spending a good amount of time with him. He is indeed a diamond in the rough. He pronounces his name Jon, is 72 years old, originating from Holland, having moved to the U.S. at the age of 7. He speaks in a gravely voice and has a wry sense of humor. He is nobody's fool.
He's fine with tweaking his web book, and avoiding publication. He's not a public speaker, so we will not find him up at a podium mesmerizing the audience and promoting his books. You're going to have to be mesmerized by the subject material itself, and if you're lucky, have a brush with he and his inscrutable Dutch wit at some Thunderbolts conference.
In the meantime, he, I and his 36 year old son, Kees (pronounced Case) have decided to collaborate on a new forum based around his work. It seems we are the fringe of the fringe, but I suppose there's a lot of that out in the world today. Please stop by and share your thoughts as we all try our hand at "Recovering the Lost World".
Julian Jaynes', The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind
In order to make sense of our human heritage we need to understand how our ancestors dealt with Earth catastrophes. Beyond the comparative study of mythology and the science of astrophysics we must delve into the realm of consciousness studies. Cook addresses this subject by bringing in a discussion of Julian Jaynes', The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind. This is a classic work from 1976 and still carries much import. To review Cook's thoughts on the matter:
This thesis, though not incorporating a recognition of planetary incursions, nevertheless is credible in that the development of the human mind was greatly influenced by changing cultural conditions beginning around 1500 BCE (the time of Moses). After that time, more and more people were able to develop a "subjective consciousness", capable of standing apart from their inchoate being and seeing the abstraction of an independent self. This opened up a whole new vista of interior consciousness that freed people from the confines of hearing commanding voices in their heads. This was the breakdown of the bi-cameral mind that had previously kept people in lock step with the voices of authority within a collective consciousness. This was a major shift for humanity. You could call it a type of emancipation.
While an intriguing theory that also assigned operative qualities to the right and left hemispheres of the brain, I feel it leaves out some important considerations, namely the psychological and sociological impacts of planet sized upheavals. Jaynes goes so far as to recognize the destructive force of volcanoes and large tsunamis on the human landscape that precipitated the development of subjective consciousness, but stops short of endorsing Velikovsky style planetary destruction. Jaynes writes about Moses listening to voices in his head while on the mount as a bi-cameral human yet to awaken to this subjective consciousness, but isn't aware of the extreme planetary destruction going on around him causing immense psychological stress. This verges on a schizophrenic event, perhaps only a breakdown of a normal mental state.
For all survivors, such impacts could lead to deep trauma, amnesia, multiple personality splits, a hardening of beliefs, and a host of other destructive stress related illnesses such as our familiar PTSD. For Jaynes, these impacts, as well as other tumultuous social upheavals led to a new consciousness of being which still guides us today. Whether this is progress and a healthier state of being, or an adaption to immense stress, resulting in our fall from a now forgotten collective consciousness is a whole other question. Perhaps we needed to evolve toward a different ego based consciousness in order to better deal with the intensity of the fallout from the catastrophes.
This is an area of study I am most interested in, trying to understand how humans coped and adapted, and how we may unconsciously be sublimating this trauma in an unhealthy way all the way down to today. We have a great deal of amnesia about this subject, are full of denial, fearful of visions of Armageddon and ridden with guilt and shame. We live inside our skin encapsulated egos, and are often in opposition to the natural world. Without recovering some memories of these traumas we will forever be consigned to destructive habits. Our desire to go to war, the despoiling of our environment, an elite that works to enslave its subjects, and our general ignorance about our origins are signs of serious neuroses.
For more, visit the Lost World Forum where we discuss Cook's work:
