And when it is suggested that ...

And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.
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 Julian Jaynes

Quotes from the same author

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.
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 Julian Jaynes
History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
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 Julian Jaynes
We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space.
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 Julian Jaynes