Great Books #2: Homer and the Invention of the Human

We've read the first half of the Iliad, and I recently posed three questions about Achilles to explore the text's power.

The first question was to imagine yourself as Achilles. How are you similar? What experience in your life is very similar to that of Achilles? One student said that Achilles is almost a mirror to them; they loved playing soccer, but one day felt so humiliated that they stopped playing, and it tore at their heart. The phrase they used was pride and vulnerability.

This shows that reading the Iliad gives you tremendous insight into yourself and the nature of the human heart, where arrogance and insecurity are two sides of the same coin—they're bundled together.

Another question was to imagine Achilles's childhood. The response was that as a young boy, Achilles was probably very rebellious and imaginative, which is true. He's always testing boundaries and has a very vivid imagination.

The last question was to imagine Achilles today. What would he be doing? The answer here was very interesting: he's probably trying to be an Olympian athlete. The obvious answer would be a soldier because he loves war. But what was recognized is that what Achilles really wants is to stand out and be admired by everyone. He wants to be famous. It makes more sense for him to be an Olympian athlete than a soldier.

However, it was also recognized that being an Olympian athlete has a lot of restrictions. You need coaches, sponsors, and you need to follow a certain regimen. Achilles is a very independent-minded person, so he would rebel against all this authority, structure, and conformity. He would probably fail in today's society.

The entire point of this exercise is to show you that a great book excites your imagination. It helps your imagination peer deeply into your own human heart and see how complicated, complex, and dark it is. It also allows you to imagine Achilles as a whole person. You've never met Achilles, and he is a fictional character who never existed, but he's real to you. You're able to imagine his past, his childhood, and experience what he experienced. What's even more powerful is that you're able to imagine Achilles in our world and see him as a living, breathing human being.

That's what a great book is. A great book is composed of characters that are real to you and make the world more real to you. They excite your imagination, allowing you to think much more deeply into yourself and more imaginatively understand the world around you.

The question then is, how does this happen? What are the mechanisms behind all this?

What Makes a Great Book?

There was a very famous American literary critic named Harold Bloom, who taught at Yale when I studied English literature there. He is considered the most famous American literary critic, and here is his explanation for what a great book is.

A great book is something that helps us become human.

What he means by that is that in a great book, the characters are different because the characters are able to hear themselves speak.

What does it mean to hear yourself speak? It means that as I'm speaking, there's also a part of me that steps back and analyzes what I say. It has to make sense to me, and it has to make sense to you. We call this consciousness. To be human means to be conscious, but to be conscious is ultimately an act of imagination because while you're speaking, you have to step back. We actually call this disassociation.

You have to disassociate, meaning that as you are speaking, as you are in this world, a part of you—almost like a ghost—steps away and observes the entire scene. Not only am I imagining myself speaking, but I'm also imagining what is happening inside your mind and your heart as I'm speaking—my effect on you.

Let's look at how this applies to the Iliad.

Consciousness in Conflict: Agamemnon vs. Achilles

Remember in the first book of the Iliad, Agamemnon and Achilles are having an argument. They're arguing because Agamemnon stole and kidnapped a girl. The girl's father, a priest of Apollo, demanded to ransom her back. Agamemnon broke the rules of war and piracy and said, "No, I like her. Screw you. I'm the king of kings. I'll do whatever I want." Apollo then starts a plague among the Greek soldiers. They're all dying on the shores of Troy.

Achilles says, "We're all dying, so you have to give the girl back." And Agamemnon says, "Sure, I'll give her back, but now I want your girl in return." This starts the main conflict of the Iliad. What's interesting is how conscious they are.

This is a war council where the Greek generals get together and decide on policy. As Agamemnon is speaking, if you observe his speech, he's doing three things at once.

1. He's responding to Achilles. Achilles says he has to give the girl back, and Agamemnon says fine, but in return, he wants Achilles's girl. He feels as though Achilles made him lose face, so now he wants to make Achilles lose face as well.
2. He's considering how others are perceiving the interaction. Why does Agamemnon demand Achilles's girlfriend? Because Agamemnon does not want to lose face amongst the others. He recognizes that if he just says to Achilles, "You know what, Achilles, you're right," he would lose respect. In this world, if no one respects you, you could get killed. These people are gangsters. He recognizes that in order to save face, he must now demand something from Achilles to show that he is his superior.
3. He's conscious of his own words to make sure they are coherent. He steps back and ensures his words make sense to himself. What he says to Achilles is, "Why am I doing this? Because I love my girlfriend. You stole from me who I love, and therefore I must enact vengeance on you."

You see how coherent all this is. He is saying to Achilles, "To ensure that you understand that I'm your superior, I'm going to take what you most prize." He's thinking about the reaction of the others to make sure they understand that he's still the top boss. But he's also in his head ensuring that what he says is coherent in itself—that what he's doing has a rationale. The rationale is, "Because I love her. Because you're stealing from me. I love her more than my own wife, Clytemnestra." You can see how this makes Agamemnon a real character to us.

But Achilles behaves the same way. He is alive in the scene, listening to Agamemnon, and his response is this: "Why are you stealing from me what is rightfully mine? Agamemnon, I came to Troy not because I hate the Trojans. I have nothing against the Trojans. I came to Troy because you ordered me to, and so I'm risking my life for you. You gain most of the treasure, most of the profit from this war. I take a little bit, and now you're stealing that little bit from me as well."

Why is Achilles saying this? He's saying this as a response to Agamemnon, but he's also saying this to win sympathy from the others. And he's also doing this because he's conscious of who he is. It's a battle of world views. What they're really trying to do is control reality through their speeches. They're trying to impose their reality on others, and that's why this is such an emotional, violent scene between the two.

Then, what happens is even more amazing. Agamemnon hears Achilles speak and responds to him using his own memory and experience. He says to Achilles, "You say that you came here to fight for me, but we all know that you are vain. You're a narcissist. You came here to win glory for yourself. You're just using me as an excuse, as a pretext to win glory on the shores of Troy. That's why you really came. So don't give me this crap about you making all these sacrifices for me. You can't make sacrifices for others because you're selfish."

And then Achilles's response is, "Fine. If you do that, then I won't fight for you anymore."

You can see how real this is. What's amazing is that this all comes from the mind of one person: Homer, the poet. Imagine speaking and being able to mentally lift off and observe the entire scene. Not only am I hearing myself speak and measuring the effect of my words, but I'm also able to go into your mind one by one and think about how my words are changing your reality, how they're impacting your emotions and your memory, and think about their impact on you and how they will guide your behavior and actions tomorrow or 10 years from now.

What's even more amazing is that as this is happening, Nestor, one of the older generals, comes into the scene and tries to reconcile Agamemnon and Achilles. So, not only do the two main characters have a life of their own, but the observers have a life of their own as well. In the Iliad, it's amazing that not only are the main characters alive, but every single character—whether it's Odysseus, Hector, Priam, or Nestor—they're all alive as well, with real emotions, feelings, and experiences.

We know this is true because we're able to look back at how this conflict came into being and also make predictions about the future, and all of it is coherent. Based on this, we now know that the major conflict in the Iliad is the one between Agamemnon and Achilles, where they're struggling for control over the narrative. Achilles wants everyone to believe that he is a hero doing everything he can to save the Greeks. Agamemnon is trying to get everyone to believe that Achilles is just selfish. That's what leads them to behave the way they do, including suicidal behavior.

Remember, as you read, Hector and the Trojans are coming to burn down the ships of the Greeks. If they do that, every single Greek will be killed. And even at this point, both Agamemnon and Achilles refuse to give up their narrative. They insist they're right.

So when Odysseus comes to Achilles and begs him, "Please come back and join us. We'll give you all the money in the world. Agamemnon has promised his daughter to you. We'll give you all of Troy after we conquer it," Achilles says, "No. I want Agamemnon to come and apologize. If he's not willing to come and apologize to me, then screw all of you."

You can see how human and how real this is. This is important for us because now we're able to step back and observe ourselves as well as others. We have greater imagination, greater empathy, and greater curiosity. That's the power of a great book. This is how the Iliad created the greatest civilization on earth in history: the Greek civilization.

The Mystery of Homer: How Did He Do It?

How did Homer do this? This is a great mystery that has confused scholars for centuries. We all know the Iliad is one of the greatest books ever composed, but we don't know who Homer is or how he did this. Some have speculated that "Homer" was many people. There's confusion as to who Homer is. The Greeks themselves called Homer "the teacher" and considered him the father of their civilization. So we know that Homer was a real person, but we know almost nothing about him.

What I'm going to do now is speculate as to how he was able to do all this. How was one human mind able to construct an entire universe with real people by himself?

To understand this, let's discuss how identity, personality, and consciousness are created. Basically, what happens is that we have experiences, and these experiences become short-term memory. Then, our brains will filter these memories into emotions. You will index your experiences according to their emotional strength or value—happy, sad, angry, whatever. In other words, something really important for you to understand is that your memories are your emotions. Memories that create emotions in you will come into you and help create your identity. But memories that have no emotions, you will never remember; you'll just throw them out.

Together, these memories will create your identity. Different combinations of these memories will create different identities because different memories are indexed to different locations. Your identity at school will be different from your identity at home or your identity when you go to America because you need different identities to navigate different landscapes. Together, this will create your world view. Your world view is just your identity—who you are, how you perceive the world, how you perceive yourself—and this helps you make decisions, navigate social relationships, and determines how you behave.

This is basically the way that we understand how our personality develops. But there are problems with this understanding.

1. The Sorting Mechanism: Why do we respond to different experiences with different emotions? It doesn't make sense. You can have the same experience but respond with different emotions. You might get a 50 on a test. Some of you will be really sad, but some of you will be really happy, like, "Wow, I thought I was going to get 10%." Some of you are glass half empty; some of you are glass half full. That determines how we perceive the world. But the question then is, where does this personality come from? Why are some people optimistic and some pessimistic? People are born like that. Your response could be that it's just genetic, but if you think about your parents, your personality doesn't come directly from them. You're actually different from your parents. I have three kids, and I know this because all three are different from both my wife and myself. So, where does this personality come from?
2. Storage of Memories: We know how this process works psychologically, but where are the memories stored inside the brain? We know where in the brain breathing happens or where language acquisition happens, but we don't know where in the brain memories are formed, stored, and accessed. We don't know. That's really weird.
3. Empathy (Theory of Mind): This model doesn't really help us explain how empathy works. It doesn't help us understand how we're able to perceive the emotions of others.

So we have these three major problems created by modern psychology: Where does our personality come from? Where does this all happen inside the brain? And how are we able to perceive the emotions of others?

A Theory of Universal Consciousness

I'm going to propose a theory to you. Imagine that we are composed essentially of two selves. There is the body, which comes materially through evolution. But then our consciousness comes from our interactions with the universe. Our brain is not a storage facility; it's an antenna for the vibrations of the universe. We call this consciousness.

The universe is conscious, and there are infinite dimensions to this consciousness. This is where our memories are stored. A simple analogy is the internet. You have a laptop, and some memory is stored on the laptop, but most of it is actually stored in the cloud. How the computer works is by interacting with the internet; your computer becomes more conscious. The same thing applies here. If you just assume that everything comes from the human brain, nothing makes sense. But if you assume that the human brain is merely an antenna for universal consciousness, it makes a lot more sense.

By imagination, by consciousness, we're able to implant ourselves into the universe. Different emotions implant themselves in different wavelengths, different dimensions. The combination of your emotions leads to a unique imprint in the universe. Different personalities will have the same imprint in the universe, and we call these archetypes. This is from Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist. Archetypes are different personalities that are accessing the same parts of the universe, and so they behave the same. That's why certain people look alike. If you're an evil person, you have a certain look to your face. If you're a good person, you have a certain look. If you're clever, you have a certain look.

What Homer is doing is opening his mind to the universe, and therefore he's able to access all archetypes. We all do this for empathy, but Homer is able to do this at a greater level than everyone else. He's able to transplant these archetypes into the world of the Iliad, and that's how he's able to create what he does.

A word we have for these people is prophets. What are prophets? Prophets are those who bring the truth of the universe onto our world and construct it in a language that allows us to access this truth eternally. In this time in history, poets, prophets, and teachers are the same function. You're accessing the truth of the universe and spreading this truth through words that enable the construction of civilization.

We think this is true because think about how amazing it is that the Iliad was written 2,500 years ago by this guy, Homer, living in the Mediterranean. Different culture, different time, but the Iliad is able to speak directly to you as a person living in the 21st century. Not only that, but you're able to imagine Achilles as yourself.

If we assume that the universe is conscious, infinite, and eternal, and that there are archetypes that exist within this universe that Homer is able to draw on, then that makes sense. This consciousness is both spaceless and timeless. If this is not true, then you have to answer the question: how was Homer able to construct characters like Achilles, Odysseus, and Agamemnon that are so real they feel alive to us? So real that we can hear them speak to themselves, and so real that they themselves can hear themselves speak to others.

What Does It Mean to Be a Prophet?

A student asked if, in this theory, a prophet is not technically a prophet because they are not predicting the future, since the universe is timeless and everything is already "written."

The word prophet doesn't actually mean someone who predicts the future. The word prophet means someone who speaks the truth. Throughout most of human history, when you say someone's a prophet and he speaks truth, what you're really saying is that he's speaking the word of God. Because what is truth? Truth is the universe, which is God.

When you speak truth, you're speaking the universe. And what is the universe? The universe is past, present, and future all together. It is beyond space and beyond time. So when you speak the truth, the truth is what has happened, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future. The way that you test a prophet's words is to see if they happen.

A lot of this truth is moral truth. If you do evil unto others, evil will come unto you. Look at the story of Achilles. He's stuck in a situation where he wants Agamemnon to apologize so that he can go fight the Trojans. Agamemnon refuses. So what does Achilles do? He sacrifices Patroclus. It's the death of Patroclus that enables Achilles to go fight the Trojans. He has done evil unto Patroclus, and because he's done that, evil will now come on to Achilles.

So, we think prophets mean speaking the future, but it's really speaking the truth, because truth is eternal. If you do evil unto others, then evil will have to come on to you. It's both a prediction and a moral judgment.

The prophet, the poet, and the teacher are the same idea. Why is the person a poet? Because how do you know it's truth? You know it's truth because it's beautiful, because it speaks to you. Homer lived in an illiterate culture; there was no writing. He was going to different places, telling the story of the Iliad. As he's speaking, it's like music to the listeners. It's beautiful poetry, but it's beautiful because it's also truthful. They feel as though Achilles is a real person with real emotions, and Achilles helps them better understand themselves.

That's the poet. The teacher is about how you understand yourself. You understand yourself by understanding the Iliad. By understanding the psychology, the motivations, and the emotions of these individuals, you can better understand yourself. Once you do that—once you're able to hear yourself speak and have more consciousness—then that gives birth to civilization. You're not only able to imagine, but you're able to imagine with other people as well.

If you look at Greek culture—whether it's Plato, Thucydides, or Aeschylus, the greatest thinkers and intellectuals of Greek civilization—they're all derivative of Homer. They're all operating within Homer's universe and working off that universe, but their applications are different. For example, Thucydides writes in a very Homeric way in that his characters are always giving speeches. The difference, of course, is that Thucydides is writing about real people and real events, whereas Homer is singing about people of his imagination that are part of the Greek cultural landscape.

In literature, prediction and truth are the same thing. If you're going to speak truth, you can predict the future, because that's what truth is. Truth is eternal. Past, present, and future collide and converge on truth.