Noah

[andrew]

Aronofsky has a new pic out. I know that some folks in this community are a fan of his work so up this post goes. I am going to use this post, if nobody objects too strongly, to write all i know about that story. It's something i spent a lot of time investigating and i've never really talked about it. First, let me say for those of you who don't know me that i don't identify myself as a Christian and haven't for over 30 years. I was raised secularly and couldn't really tell you what a church was when i was sixteen, let alone wonder about god. I think though, as far as i can remember, that i've always had this strange feeling that something was very much wrong on this planet, and that , that feeling goes right back to childhood. Now, to be fair, there was a brief period of time in my early 20's when i did identify with evangelical Christianity, but a year or so after sensing the corruption within that institution, i became what i now call an independent. I am still this way today; spiritually and politically.

Please be aware that very little that i post here will be from my imagination directly, most everything will come from the history of human literature on this mythology. Now i'm quite sure i hear Julian's voice in the noosphere saying, ' Andrew, this is just silly," well, perhaps, but this has been a part of my path, Aronofsky choose this subject matter, and without seeing the film, i can reasonable guess that it will not reflect what is said in these books. 

It should be noted, that at the time Jesus lived, The Book of Enoch was  part of the religious canon. Most people within that community believed strongly in those stories as far as my study of history shows, and that Jesus quoted from these stories a number of times, mentioning that his return would be surrounded by events that were just like what happened in those days. I'll certainly return to this later. 

Now, i am not really interested in challenging histories orthodoxy on humanities past .That is not what this is about, but what i do think is somewhat possible though, is the idea that prior to the development of the written word, history gets a little bit murkier. By saying this, i am not suggesting there was a global flood, i am just suggesting that things are a little more unsure the farther back one goes from the written word. Obviously, this premise would be throughly attacked by historic fundamentalists; i don't care!

Okay, i am going to stop here for now, so The Book of Enoch and the story of god and angels! lol The first place to start on these myths………….

[andrew]

Opps, wrong! I should probably start at the primary source: The Liebel; i mean Bible. What little is says on angels, and by the way, its long  mystified me that the good book has so little to say on so many of it's stories and characters. I mean, compared to say the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Sutras of Patanjali, the bible seems very UN-detailed, at least to me. Let me give but one example: The Story of Adam and Eve. I've talked to thousands of christians in my life and i can safely say that NONE of then seemed to be interested or cared about what it must have been like to be Adam and Eve AFTER the fall. The complete and utter devastation that these mythical figures must have felt. But to christians, they couldn't care less about things like that. Fortunately, i searched out secondary writings that go into detail about that story: The Lost Books Of the Bible and The Story Of Adam and Eve , which i will also reference as time goes by here. Anyway, i digress, and back to angels. We know from the stories that Jesus appeared as an angel of light upon his resurrection; that he appeared as a light being, and no where do i hear of him having wings, but it is reasonable to conclude ( as far as the stories go) this his ethereal body appeared as light, just like the angels. We know that the stories say that these beings can take human form, or appear as human; that they have the ability to effect the weather, and that upon the death of Jesus the angels were able to cause an earthquake. That is the extend of the info, for the most part, on these beings from the primary source. We will first, also have to touch on Genesis 6 before we move on, that  which must have been source for Aronofsky and this film.

[andrew]

I'll pepper this post with links to the film. The comments sections always very entertaining.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/movie-review-noah-harrowing-gut...

[Edward theurj Berge]

I saw it today knowing it would be the mythical crap from the Bible. But I thought I'd give it a chance, giving Aronofsky's involvement. Sure, the CGI and cinematography are spectacular but it's still the same mythic and magical crap. I'd had enough when Noah tells his wife that in another of his visions from God Almighty he saw that he and his family were corrupt no-good sinners too and had to die with the rest of impure humanity. I held on a bit longer to see the flood come but shortly thereafter Noah and family are sitting around hearing the human screams of agony outside from those who survived the first wave. With absolute conviction that those people deserved their fate, or rather God's will, he starts telling the story of Genesis. That was the last straw and I walked out.

I was however in time to see Cesar Chavez from the start in another theater. Now there's a real hero who alleviated the suffering of the downtrodden and liberated farm workers from the hideous conditions under which they were subjected. And against seemingly insurmountable odds, since the growers, the police and the politicians were all against them. Except for Senator Kennedy, who paid with his life for supporting Chavez and the workers movement. This is what it takes to fight the real evil in this world, the greed and corruption, to provide living wages and safe working conditions. Not some bullshit story about a God who hates mankind and wants to drown most all of his children to death.

Fuck Noah, hail Cesar Chavez!

[andrew]

Fuck Noah! lol I have no quarrel with your second paragraph Edward. I hope you will tolerate what i feel i need to get off my chest in the next little while on this thread. I know this particular site is not the perfect place for this, so thanks, in advance. 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Say what you want, it's your thread. I just had to get my own thoughts off my chest.

[andrew]

Thanks Man! It will have to wait though. The brat that i date keeps continually creaming me this year in lexulous! I have a theory here, too. I think that the lexulous algorithms are written so that if one keeps losing one keeps getting tons of 1 point vowels and that the person who keeps winning gets a much higher percentage of all the good letters! The rich get richer and the poor get poorer even on the U.S. game sites! lol

[Joseph Camosy]

You could use Jung's interpretation of the Bible's Book of Job to also gain insight into the Noah story.

The following excerpts are from:

Edinger, E. F. (1984). The creation of consciousness : Jung's myth for modern man (illustrated, reprint ed., p. 120). Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books.

In Answer to Job Jung submits the basic myth of the West­ern psyche to an intense conscious scrutiny. He accepts the imagery as psychic reality and follows the implications of the images all the way to their conclusions. This has never been done before.
[…]
If one is a religious believer he will be afraid of acknowl­edging his unconscious doubt. If one has no religious beliefs he will be  afraid to admit his sense of spiritual emptiness. These are the two most common sources of offense to the readers of Answer to Job. Either one is offended that Jung describes Yahweh so outrageously, in contradiction to the dogmatic God-image in which he believes, or one is offended that Jung takes so seriously the primitive, anthropomorphic image of God, that has long since been discredited by the rational intellect.  I venture to assert that every person on first encounter with Answer to Job will be offended to some extent in either one or the other, or perhaps both, of these ways.

[...]

The central theme of Answer to Job, as of the  Hebrew­ Christian myth, is the relationship between man and Yahweh. Jung deals with this issue in terms of psychic reality and we will be able to understand him only if we know what Yahweh is as a psychic reality. The question is: What does Yahweh mean psychologically? In a  1933 seminar Jung made these remarks:

For the collective unconscious we could use the word God .... [But] I  prefer not to use big words, I am quite satisfied with humble scientific language because it has the great advantage of bringing that whole experience into our immediate vicinity. [18]

[...]

If you try to  formu­late it, to think what the unconscious is after all, you wind up by concluding that it is what the prophets were concerned with; it sounds exactly like some things in the Old Testament. There God sends plagues upon people, he burns their bones in the night, he injures their kidneys, he causes all sorts of trou­bles. Then you come  naturally to the dilemma: Is that really God? Is God a neurosis? ...Now that is a shocking dilemma, I admit, but when you think consistently and logically, you come to the conclusion that God is a most shocking problem. And that is the truth, God has shocked people out of their wits. Think what he did to poor old Hosea. He was a respectable man and he had to marry a prostitute. Probably he  suffered from a strange kind of mother complex. 18

18. C. G. Jung,  The  Visions Seminars (Zurich: Spring Publications, 1976), p. 391.

[...]

Twenty-five years later, in 1958, he writes the following in an important letter to Morton Kelsey:

The absence of human morality in Yahweh is a stumbling block which cannot be overlooked, as little as the  fact that Nature, i.e., God's creation, does not give us enough reason to believe it to be purposive or reasonable in the human  sense.  We miss reason and moral values, that is, two main characteristics of a mature human mind. It is therefore obvious that the Yahwistic image or conception of the deity is less than [that of] certain human specimens: the image of a personified brutal force and of an unethical and non-spiritual mind, yet inconsist­ent enough to exhibit traits of kindness and generosity besides a violent power-drive. It is the picture of a sort of nature­ demon and at the same time of a primitive chieftain aggran­dized to a colossal size, just the sort of conception one could expect  of a more or less barbarous society -cum grano salis.
[…]
This most shocking defectuosity of the God-image ought to be explained or understood. The nearest analogy to it is our experience of the unconscious: it is a psyche whose nature can only be described by paradoxes: it is personal as well as imper­sonal, moral and amoral, just and unjust, ethical and unethical, of cunning intelligence and at the same time blind, immensely strong and extremely weak, etc. This is the psychic foundation which produces the raw material for our conceptual structures. The unconscious is a piece of Nature our mind cannot compre­hend. It can only sketch models of a possible and partial understanding. 19

19. Jung Letters, vol. 2, p. 434.

[...]

In Answer to Job Jung writes,

It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We can­ not tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental con­tents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an arche­type of wholeness ....Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with ...[ this] special content of it, namely the archetype of the self.20

20. Jung, Answer to Job, par. 757.

[...]

Shortly before his death in  1961, Jung was asked by an interviewer about his idea of God. He replied, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my  subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse."21

Summarizing all of these quotations, we can say that Yah­weh as a psychic reality is a personification of the collective unconscious especially in its aspect of center and totality, the Self. It expresses itself in dreams and  fantasies of an archety­pal nature; in  affects, instincts and intense  energy-manifesta­tions of all kinds; in psychic and somatic symptoms; and in its specific quality of "otherness" which goes contrary to the desires and expectations of the ego. Since the phenomena of synchronicity imply a fluid boundary between inner and outer reality, the unconscious can come to us  from without as well as from within. Hence Jung can say, "God is reality itself."22

21. Good Housekeeping magazine, December 1961.
22. Jung, Answer to Job, par. 631.

[...]

Answer to Job begins with an examination of Job's encoun­ter with Yahweh. The Book of Job can be considered as the pivot of the Old Testament. Here for the first time Yahweh engages a man as an individual rather than as the representa­tive of Israel, the collective nation. This book thus marks the transition from collective psychology to individual psychology, from the election of a people to the election of an individual who must now encounter the numinosum on his own without the supporting containment of identification with a nation or a creed;

[...]

By reliving Job's experience and by bringing to it a modem consciousness, Jung has discovered an astonishing new mean­ ing of that experience. By standing his ground and remaining true to his own conscious judgment, Job did not succumb to the moral condemnation of his "comforters" and thus "cre­ ated the very obstacle that  forced God to reveal his true nature."25 Since Job did not fall victim to the proposition that all good is from God and all bad from man, he was able to see God and recognize his behavior to be that "of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is a phenomenon and, as Job says, 'not a man.' "26 The result is that the man Job, because of his conscious awareness, is raised above Yahweh. And further:

If Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know  himself. It just could not be that Yahweh's dual nature should become public property and remain hidden from him­ self alone. Whoever knows God has an  effect on  him. The failure of the attempt to corrupt Job has changed Yahweh's nature.  27

25. Jung, Answer to Job, par. 584.
26. Ibid., par. 600.
27. Ibid., par. 617.

[andrew]

Thank-you for the link Joseph! I spent a fair amount of time on Jung and Campbell as an uneducated layperson in the 90's, and have no quarrel with their ideas in general. Please don't take this truncated reply as a dismissal of their concepts.  For the purposes of the thread, though, and only here, i am not going to limit the experience of god to phenomenology, or Wilber's upper left.

Thanks for bringing up the book of Job, as i should touch on that to illustrate what the relationship is between god and destructive phenomenon. For the purposes of this thread, i will call those happenings the left hand path of god. The Book of Job illustrates the relationship between God and the archetype of corruption within the left hand path. Or put another way, the left hand path is Gods will as illustrated in that story. I should also bring up momentarily the issue of Theosophy. This is not what this thread is about and in this thread i'm not so  interested in arguing the veracity of any truth in  those beliefs. 

Okay, i'll get to Genesis 6 when i can.

[andrew]

I should mention that anthropomorphism is unavoidable here and i shall not apologize for it. In a way, this is a similar situation as to when one tries to talk about non duality; silence would be best, but alas, the talking monkey likes words; in fact, one could even argue that we've developed quite the cacophony of madness, so, like any wayward son i shall carry on as best i can given the limitation of my own conditioning, concomitant with the medium available.

Another problem that i've come up against in my endeavours is trying to sort out- or delineate- things that seem relevant, truthful, and even sublime in religious writings. Contained within one book, or within any given tradition is a mass of contradictions; seemingly sublime truths juxtaposed to seemingly retarded codes and instructions. The Book of Manu and the Book of Deuteronomy are two examples. Given this, i concede the subjective nature of some of my interpretations.

[Layman Pascal]

I am a big fan of what I call "mytho-colloquialism".

Common parlance converges with archetypal energies. The way we represent Native religion (Raven, Great Spirit, etc.) and philosophical discourse (Truth, Beauty...) and popular media discussions (The Debt, The Environment...) are powerful fragments of mythic understanding which lose power when they remain isolated in the form of exotic names. The Origin (Genesis) in The Book (biblos) is the quintessential example. We become either gullibly attached or critically detached from a cartoonish story about people named Adam & Eve living in Eden. But were are INSTANTLY resonant with the tale of Man & Creature living in Nature's Garden. The myth vanishes from us in the degree to which we leave terms untranslated.

Of course full translation is more convincing in some stories than in others and we do not always have reliable etymological information with which to reestablish our nourishing life-line into the psychology of the authors of sacred fables.

Consider the legend of Mr. Relaxed (Noah) -- the Restful One:

The was one a Restful One who could would often be still and relaxed with closed eyes. After the Restful One had lived a long time he gave birth to Fame (shem), Warmth (ham) & Expansiveness (japheth).

This all happened a long time ago when the Great Fallen Ones lived upon the Earth. It was an age of Barbarians, Demi-Gods & Heroes. Yet despite their many accomplishments they had an unhealthy culture. It was unhygienic, murderous, insensitive, tense and ugly. Our Divinity was troubled to behold such a world. There were many painful, depressing and overwhelming things about that civilization.

Yet our Divinity was pleased by the Restful One. He acquired the radiance of the Great Spirit and many gifts of insight and foresight. It became obvious to him that this culture was unhealthy and could not continue in this fashion. He began to collect all healthy and living and generative things in the world. In a great vessel he conveyed the Living Things to a new frontier and survived the great storm which seemed to drown the world.

In this new frontier, from his lofty vantage, the Restful One began to establish a new culture. This was the Place of Rainbows. It was cleaner, sweet-smelling, open-hearted and upwardly oriented. Here our Divinity rejoiced. It swore that never again would it allow the world to be drowned in its barbarism. In the Rainbow Place they created Laws to protect life and minimize killing. They planted vines and cultivated the pleasant spiritual intoxication of wine.

Later one more interesting thing occurred:

The Resting One was lying motionless with his eyes closed. He was naked. His son Heat assumed he was drunk on too much wine and did nothing to help me. But Fame & Expansiveness brought him a blanket and were sensitive to his condition. When the Restful One opened his eyes he expressed some prophetic insight:

The descendants of the Restful One will flourish. Their Divinity will shine and reward them with a Great Name and Expanded Spacious Territory. But among them will be those who are too Hot-tempered. They will lose their glory and freedom. They will become Subdued(Canaan) and enslaved by Fame and Expansion. 

[andrew]

There are a couple of basic spiritual premises that i should mention before i move on. Those being:  the personality is easily corrupted by money and hence the cautioning of not being able to serve two masters. The ego/human personality is too prone to delusion although we should be able to learn to be unselfish with money. Secondly, human ethnocentrism applied to spirituality will aways be in error. 

Genesis 6: Two main events  occurred in that story with the first one being a population explosion upon the earth and the second event being that the population became overridden by corruption. I will point out the coincidences of a new population explosion on the planet starting around 1850 and the massive corruption that has taken place since that population explosion. 

This story also talks about angels that took human form and taught the tribes technological advancements; the stories overtly suggest that technology was handed down to humanity by these angels in human form . I'll point out the  coincidence of the rise of technology co-arising with the other two events in the last 150 years. 

The story suggests that the population explosion was caused by angels in human form mating with natural humans. The Book of Enoch is one of the main sources for what happened here. The stories say that this event happened in Lebanon around Mt Hebron. The tale implies that this group of angels gave up their first estate and committed a trespass against the will of god. Apparently, it's this situation that caused god anger and moved god to action. Genesis also implies that this trespass became on ongoing event in human history. It's the only explanation that i've ever come across that explains the genocides and atrocities of God in the Torah. A disagreement between god and angels. 

As i pondered this throughout the years i wondered about what would happen to these legion of hybrids that have said to have lived and died upon this planet. I wouldn't think that there was a 'natural' place for them to reside in the afterlife. Okay, chuckle, chuckle. But anyhow, one explanation i came up with is that these souls ( cough cough) are isolated somewhat in some kind of limbo and that they must be legion (the population explosions). Perhaps the same legion that Jesus was said to have sent into the swine. 

At this point i will backtrack to the Story of Adam and Eve. In that story it says that the Satan appeared to Adam and Eve many many times throughout their life. It tells how Adam and Eve could not tell the difference between the voice of this being and the voice of God. In other words, this being is able to mimic god so closely that even Adam and Eve could not distinguish between the two voices. This being that apparently emanates from God ( see the Book of Job) has one main attribute: falseness! It is able to appear as truth but everything it says is some form of lie. And the story says that it wasn't until the end of their lives that Adam and Eve were able to distinguish truth from lies.

This is how i've come to think of this: the right and left hands of god! Practically speaking, if one were to put the right hand of god beside the left hand of god one wouldn't be able to tell the two apart ! Bloody twins ! lol Anyway, the kicker is, since Jesus left the planet god has given this planet over to the left hand path. Not that we can't find truth, we can, but it's much more difficult than it used to be. This dynamic was high- lighted when Jesus had his vision in the wilderness. The left hand showed him its dominion. 

Now a word on translations: it's astonishing to me that none of the translators of the Torah were able to translate the word Sheol ( the common grave of mankind). They used the term Hades from greek mythology, gehenna from the aramaic ( a place they used to burn garbage ) , and Tatarus, the place that god apparently imprisons out of line angels. The point being, no where is there a word that describes a place god created to punish human beings forever. This reprehensible doctrine that is taught shamelessly throughout at least 2 of the worlds major religions. 

Most of this information i collected prior to the advent of the internet and it's kind of imprinted in my dna because i spent so much time searching out all this crap. But really folks, if anyone is at all interested in confirming what i've passed on here, then, it should be a lot easier for you than it was for me because all this must be on the internet now. And while your at it read the Urantia book, too! lol

Was any of this is Aronofsky's Film?

[andrew]

That's the most awesomest thing i've heard on this fable in aeons Mr. Pascal:)

Layman Pascal said:

I am a big fan of what I call "mytho-colloquialism".

Common parlance converges with archetypal energies. The way we represent Native religion (Raven, Great Spirit, etc.) and philosophical discourse (Truth, Beauty...) and popular media discussions (The Debt, The Environment...) are powerful fragments of mythic understanding which lose power when they remain isolated in the form of exotic names. The Origin (Genesis) in The Book (biblos) is the quintessential example. We become either gullibly attached or critically detached from a cartoonish story about people named Adam & Eve living in Eden. But were are INSTANTLY resonant with the tale of Man & Creature living in Nature's Garden. The myth vanishes from us in the degree to which we leave terms untranslated.

Of course full translation is more convincing in some stories than in others and we do not always have reliable etymological information with which to reestablish our nourishing life-line into the psychology of the authors of sacred fables.

Consider the legend of Mr. Relaxed (Noah) -- the Restful One:

The was one a Restful One who could would often be still and relaxed with closed eyes. After the Restful One had lived a long time he gave birth to Fame (shem), Warmth (ham) & Expansiveness (japheth).

This all happened a long time ago when the Great Fallen Ones lived upon the Earth. It was an age of Barbarians, Demi-Gods & Heroes. Yet despite their many accomplishments they had an unhealthy culture. It was unhygienic, murderous, insensitive, tense and ugly. Our Divinity was troubled to behold such a world. There were many painful, depressing and overwhelming things about that civilization.

Yet our Divinity was pleased by the Restful One. He acquired the radiance of the Great Spirit and many gifts of insight and foresight. It became obvious to him that this culture was unhealthy and could not continue in this fashion. He began to collect all healthy and living and generative things in the world. In a great vessel he conveyed the Living Things to a new frontier and survived the great storm which seemed to drown the world.

In this new frontier, from his lofty vantage, the Restful One began to establish a new culture. This was the Place of Rainbows. It was cleaner, sweet-smelling, open-hearted and upwardly oriented. Here our Divinity rejoiced. It swore that never again would it allow the world to be drowned in its barbarism. In the Rainbow Place they created Laws to protect life and minimize killing. They planted vines and cultivated the pleasant spiritual intoxication of wine.

Later one more interesting thing occurred:

The Resting One was lying motionless with his eyes closed. He was naked. His son Heat assumed he was drunk on too much wine and did nothing to help me. But Fame & Expansiveness brought him a blanket and were sensitive to his condition. When the Restful One opened his eyes he expressed some prophetic insight:

The descendants of the Restful One will flourish. Their Divinity will shine and reward them with a Great Name and Expanded Spacious Territory. But among them will be those who are too Hot-tempered. They will lose their glory and freedom. They will become Subdued(Canaan) and enslaved by Fame and Expansion.