In the present essay, I have attempted to depotentiate our pathologizing of auditory and visual hallucinations, as Smith has also attempted to do in his book mentioned above. If Jaynes's theory is to be believed, auditory hallucinations that he refers to as voices were relatively commonplace in our bicameral ancestors in pre-literate cultures.
By depotentiating auditory and visual hallucinations, I hope to persuade progressives and liberals to look over Jung's RED BOOK.
I want to say that I do not expect auditory and visual hallucinations to become as common in our contemporary secondary oral culture as Jaynes suggests that they were in pre-literate cultures. But I do hope that they will become more understandable.
I do not know if all vision quests culminated in visual hallucinations. But the basic spirit of the vision quest is a sound idea. I would even go so far as to say that the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES of St. Ignatius Loyola involve the basic spirit of the vision quest.
In THE RED BOOK, Jung refers to his search or quest for his soul. Basically, this is what the spirit of the vision quest is about. No doubt Jung himself found his mission in life through his encounter with the auditory and visual hallucinations he describes in THE RED BOOK.
But this implies that people who have not undertaken a vision quest have not found their souls. This would presumably include most of the educated people in Western culture that Bloom refers to in the passages quoted above.
(Article changed on December 14, 2014 at 15:17)
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