Julian Jaynes' 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, continues to arouse an unsettling ambivalence. Richard Dawkins called it "either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between". The present book suggests that the bicameral mind is a phantasm; the dating of the origin of consciousness contradicts archeological and literary evidence; and the theory contributes nothing toward explaining why some physical states are conscious while others are not because the nonconscious bicameral brain is neurophysiologically equivalent to the conscious brain.

However, the author pays tribute to Jaynes's work as a work of "consummate genius" because it compels us to re-evaluate the significance of humankind's earliest traditions and texts that might shine light on the "very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology" that consciousness has evolved continuously and gradually from worms to man.

The present book suggests that the evolution of the relationship between consciousnesses, mass, energy, and spacetime radically changed nearly 6,000 years ago during the epigenetic, evolutionary degeneration of a little-known, threadlike structure originating from the center of the central nervous system called Reissner's fiber. The earliest Egyptian, Hebrew, Indian and Chinese traditions, buried beneath the dust of fallen Babel and thousands of years of distortions and disguisings, describe this process during the origin of religion and mystical traditions.

Lawrence Wile received a B.S. in physics from Union College (1971), an M.D. from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine (1976), a post-doctoral fellowship from Yale University School of Medicine (1979) and an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (1991). He is a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. His awards include an Air Force Commendation Medal and a first-place prize in the John Templeton Foundation competition for his winning essay 'Reissner's Fiber and the Neurobiology of Mysticism’. His ideas about Reissner’s fiber have appeared in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He is currently the President of the Chaikin-Wile Foundation, leading a multidisciplinary team at Boston University dedicated to the exploration of Reissner’s fiber.