I think there was a time when men didn't think

I wish Jaynes were still alive, because I would like to ask him "who do you think these gods were, whose voices were heard by mankind?"

He never really dug into that subject in "Bicameral mind"...

Obviously, Abraham and the Israelites believed they were hearing the voice of the Creator, Jehovah. But what about the rest of humanity? Were they hearing the voices of the Sons of God (watchers)? Were they hearing the voices of the Fallen Angels?

The same amount of information has always been out there, what has changed dramatically is our access to it. With the advent of the information age the level of accessible information has expanded exponentially. Our inherent ability to process it, however has not signifigantly changed. This leaves us feeling awash in reams of information we are helpless to process or change. Another point is what I consider to be the American worldview, e.g. that we must be filling our very waking hour with doing something. We have lost the understanding of simply being. like the famiy going fishing in the Rockwell painting. Being with family, rather than doing something. it's kinda a zen thing, but as I grow older I find more value in simply being sometimes.

>We have lost the understanding of simply being. like the famiy going fishing in the Rockwell painting. Being with family, rather than doing something. it’s kinda a zen thing, but as I grow older I find more value in simply being sometimes.

You are right; and the truly twisted thing about it is that there is a deadly-philosophy that many have embraced which invalidates ‘being’ for many: feminism.
Feminism, in practice, counts a man as nothing for his maleness; additionally it counts many women as nothing for being feminine (e.g. a young woman who wants to start a family right after high-school is looked down on and derided).

So then, in a culture that has so strongly embraced feminism there cannot be any of that “simply being” for many people because the being of that person is socially/culturally invalidated.

There are really three stages to making it useful. The first is to “take the lock off” by getting control over the internal chatter, and turning it off for longer and longer times.

The second is to have enough mental energy to change from your normal state of mind to either a focused or unfocused state, which means that it helps to be rested, relaxed, and without a lot of stress.

And the third is to hold your mind in place once it has reached a focused or unfocused state. This is mostly practice, training yourself to do so.

One of the better techniques to get started in this is based on the idea that the part of the brain that controls the chatter also controls attention in general. And it has limited energy to do both. So if you can use up all its energy on attention, it cannot continue with the chatter and gets quiet. And the longer you can stretch out the times of quiet, the more control you get over it.

The technique itself involves ordinary walking, which takes a lot of attention directed at the legs. Next you hold your hands in some unusual manner, with the fingers folded differently. It doesn’t matter how, just as long as your attention is also directed to your arms and hands.

Then the tricky part is to unfocus your eyes. Normally, when we look at things, we look from tiny point to tiny point, which doesn’t require much attention. But when you unfocus your eyes, you take in a 180 degree field of view in which everything is equal to your attention, which uses up a lot more attention.

So there it is, walking, holding your hands funny, and unfocusing your eyes. Most people start seeing results after a couple of weeks, going for walks three or four times a week.

A few side notes: do not wear a Walkman or other music device and don’t carry anything in your hands. This is a form of exercise, though it is not physically or emotionally demanding, so you do get mentally tired after doing it, in a different sort of way.

Turning off the chatter can be a little distracting at first, because you are so used to the chatter, and you will start to get a lot more information about your surroundings that you previously ignored.

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