Semi-trance, Mental Illness, and Altered States of Consciousness

The book “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” of Julian Jaynes provides, not only a fascinating scenario about the evolution of modern consciousness from the consciousness of bicameral stone age man, but also a holistic view about schizophrenic consciousness. In fact, Jaynes regards schizophrenic as a bicameral man receiving commands of “God” as auditory and visual hallucinations. Jaynes sees “Gods” as the right brain of the bicameral man. In TGD framework “Gods” represent higher levels of the self-hierarchy. To put it in nutshell, TGD view about the relationship of human consciousness to higher levels of self-hierarchy relies on the notion of semi-trance. During semi-trance parts of brain entangle with some higher level, say the self associated with the social group, and are in trance and therefore unconscious. The remaining parts of brain are however conscious and receive communications from the collective consciousness via the entangled region of brain as sensory hallucinations, emotions and thoughts. Semi-trance is absolutely essential for the self-narrative: without it our consciousness would consist of memory fragments lasting only few seconds: higher level selves tell us where we come from and were we are going. Bicameral man received the commands and advices of the collective consciousness as auditory and visual hallucinations via regions of the right brain hemisphere wherefrom they were communicated to the left hemisphere whereas modern man receives these communications as thoughts (“internal speech”) in left brain semi-trance and emotions in right brain semi-trance. According to this view, schizophrenic spends in the bicameral state larger fraction of time than normal person and receives communications of the higher levels selves more often as sensory hallucinations than as thoughts and emotions. Thus schizophrenia can be seen as cognitive and emotional abnormality and becomes illness in modern society relying crucially on cognitive and emotional self-narrative which is much more refined than the self-narrative based on sensory hallucinations. In normal consciousness left brain hemisphere inhibits the messages from right hemisphere, left and right hemispheres are totally entangled a considerable fraction of time and the entanglement with higher level selves can also involve the entanglement of entire brain leading to short periods of total trance. In this view the negative periods of schizophrenia correspond to the phases when right brain hemisphere is not entangled with higher level selves and positive, psychotic periods to the phase when this entanglement occurs often. This vision generalizes also to manic-depressive and anxiety disorders and one can see mental illness as disorder of communication between human brain and higher levels of self