mental consciousness, which depends on the eye as its source or
connector. There is the blood-consciousness, with the sexual
connection, holding the same relation as the eye, in seeing, holds
to the mental consciousness. One lives, knows, and has one’s
being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain
(Lawrence, 2004:xxiii).Here Lawrence is probably using blood as a metaphor for sensory, non-
rational perception of content from the unconscious and of which he was later to
expound in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious.
He later went on to refer to this blood-consciousness belief as his great religion:
My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser
than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our
blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is
only a bit and a bridle ... We know too much. No, we think we
know such a lot .... And we have forgotten ourselves ... We cannot
be. ‘To be or not to be’ – it is the question with us now, by Jove
(in Steele, 2004:xxi).Jung wrote about a conversation he had with Pueblo I ndians who told him
that white men were crazy because they thought in their heads, and when he
queried this he was told that ... the Americans were mad because they believed
their thoughts were in their heads, whereas any sensible man knew that he thinks
with his heart (Jung, CW 8: par. 669). Jung mused that the Pueblo I ndians:
... are just about in the Homeric age, when the diaphragm (phren:
mind, soul) was the seat of psychic activity. That means a psychic
localitization of a different nature. Our concept of consciousness
supposes thought to be in our most dignified head. But the
Pueblo I ndians derive consciousness from the intensity of feelings.
Abstract thought does not exist for them ... consciousness and
thought to them are localized in the heart (Jung, CW 18: par. 16).This would seem to confirm Julian Jaynes theory, not of the time sequence
but of the essence, of the break-up of the bi-cameral mind, or at least of a non-
egoic state that somewhat resembles that of the participation mystique. In order to
amplify this idea of body consciousness, I submit an interesting, if not provocative,
interpretation of Christian tenets from a Gnostic-MLC perspective. I suggest that
one must see gnosis in two forms: there is the gnosis of The Book of Genesis that is
entirely different from the second gnosis, the gnosis of the return to the bicameral
mode via the subjective ‘I ’ which first arose. This reactive mode, or chamber,
within which the subjective ‘I ‘eventually evolved, that extraordinarily versatile mode