A Journey To Babel

There are two stories that fascinate me.  One is Noah's Ark and the other is the Tower of Babel.  They exist in nearly every single culture, tradition and myth on Earth, across vast spans of time, and on every inhabited continent (Antarctica has yet to yield its secrets).

The Ark story has been pretty much beaten to death, with tales of folks running up and down Mount Arat for a century looking for boats.  Boring.

But Babel...now there's a fun tale.  What exactly is going on here?  And why is it that so many cultures throughout our history record a similar event with similar circumstances at more or less the same time.  In each case, it is a single event, not multiple ones.  And in every case, the gods get worried about how far and how fast humans are progressing and decide to do something about it.

In every case, Man did not sin or do anything wrong, he simply had reached a point where he posed a direct challenge to the gods.  As Joseph Farrell says, it was a political, not ethical decision on the part of the gods to come down and stir things up.

Perhaps it would be instructive at this point to look at a couple of the stories.  Wikipedia starts us off:

The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מגדל בבל‎ Migdal Bavel Arabic: برج بابل‎ Borj Baabel) forms the focus of a story told in the Book of Genesis of the Bible.[1] According to the story, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar (Hebrew: שנער‎), where they resolved to build a city with a tower "whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."
God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withheld from them which they purpose to do." "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, so that they would not be able to return to each other, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth".

The Sumerians have a similar tale involving the construction of a tower, the gods Enki and Enlil, and the confusion of languages.  The Sumerian word babel means "gateway of god(s)" or quite literally "stargate", while in Hebrew, it is similar in sound to the verb "to confound".

There are similar myths in various African cultures.  The Maya have a version that is nearly identical to the Biblical telling, except that it involves those pesky Giants who keep showing up in the old tales and myths:

After Creation and the Great Flood, there were Giants running around the Earth.  However, they weren't receiving enough sunlight, so they built a tower to reach the Sun.  This act angered the sky gods who destroyed the tower and confused the languages, scattering the people across the Earth.

The Aztecs, South Pacific islanders, Mongols, and many other cultures preserve this story in some form.  Most involve the people of Earth 'speaking the same language', which allows them to work together to 'build a tower' that will either allow them to reach the realms of the gods, or conversely, preserve the knowledge already received by having reached the realm of the gods or given by a renegade god (Enki, Prometheus, etc.).

The Hindu version is particularly interesting, as it combines the symbol of the Tree of Knowledge with the Tower/Babel myth:

There grew in the center of the earth the wonderful 'world tree,' or 'knowledge tree.' It was so tall that it reached almost to heaven.  It said in    its heart, 'I shall hold my head in heaven and spread my branches over all the earth, and gather all men together under my shadow and protect them, and prevent them from separating.' But Brahma, to punish the pride of the tree, cut off its branches and cast them down on the earth, when they sprang up as wata trees, and made differences of belief and speech and customs to prevail on the earth, to disperse men upon the surface.

So, let's dissect this story a bit.  First of all, the language thing.  There is no evidence in the historical record of Mankind ever having used a single language, right?  Or is there?  Even today, if you look around, there is one Universal Language that spans countries, cultures and time.  That language is mathematics.  All of our vaunted technology is based on some kind of mathematical discovery.  Radio waves, lasers, computers, even such mundane things as alternating current, convection ovens and headphones, are all mathematics brought into our physical world.

As Galileo Galilei said, “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”  And don't we use mathematics to reach orbit and the other planets?  In other words, isn't mathematics a single language that allows us to reach the realm of the gods?

Well, not really, because mathematics is split into many different types and disciplines.  There's algebra and calculus and physics, and so forth.  In other words, our language of math has been 'confused' or 'confounded'.  And what is the Holy Grail of science but the Grand Unified Theory (GUT), which should unite all forms of mathematics under a single, elegant set of formulae.

Sounds a lot like the story of Babel, the fracturing of languages, and a current effort to restore what was lost to men.  And mathematics does indeed allow us to reach the realm of the gods, of that there is no doubt.  So if we are able to find the Holy Grail of the GUT, isn't it true that 'nothing would be withheld from us that we purpose to do'?

Nikola Tesla summed up the confusion of the Great Language quite nicely, "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."  This implies that if we can get our language straight, we can do 'anything we propose to do,' including engineer reality itself, as Tesla was attempting to do.

Now what about the 'tower'?  Folks have proposed dozens of locations and structures.  Alexander the Great destroyed the giant ziggurat of Babylon called Etemenanki.  But I think that if we accept that the One Language is/was mathematics, then the tower may have a completely different interpretation.

In Western culture, there are basically two main structures associated with towers: one is a place of worship, and the other is a university.  We can dispense with the first, since it preserves myth and superstition and keeps us afraid of obtaining the realm of the gods.  The other, however, is about preserving and advancing knowledge, and particularly the sciences, logic and philosophy, which are founded on the One Language, and indeed seek to obtain the realm of the gods.

Therefore, couldn't the Tower of Babel have been an enormous university or library?  After all, the great structures of the ancient world, such as the Library at Alexandria, were devoted to preserving and advancing knowledge.  The great universities of Europe are all dominated by large towers, and in fact the towers are emblematic of the universities.

Across the planet today, people are building taller and taller towers as signs of wealth and scientific prowess.  Towers have always been symbols of achievement, and they require lots of precise mathematical calculation to erect safely.  Many towers, such as the pyramids all over the Earth, not only required precise math to build, they encode all kinds of mathematical equations, formulae and constants in their structures.

Richard Hoagland's theories concerning Cydonia on Mars posit monumental structures built on profound mathematical knowledge that is embedded in the design and relationships of structures on that planet.

Thus, we can now tell the Tower of Babel story in a slightly different way.  Mankind had amassed a great amount of knowledge that either allowed or was on the verge of allowing him to reach the heavens, and perhaps even begin to engineer the fabric of space/time itself.  God-like powers, in other words.  The gods, a race of extraterrestrial, technologically advanced beings, were alarmed at Mankind's rapid growth that threatened their hegemony over the heavens and their exulted rank as gods.

So they took the decision to pop down and destroy the great university/library where all this knowledge was stored and substitute false or misleading science and mathematics that would prevent Mankind from obtaining god-like power.  This sent people off in a hundred wrong directions unable to work together because their mathematics were confused and fractured.

A perfect example of this, if you believe the official story, is the Mars Climate Orbiter - a multi-million dollar spacecraft lost because one set of scientists was using metric measurements, while another was using Imperial standard.

This ensured the supremacy of the gods and kept Mankind out of the rarefied realms.  As Farrell said, it was a political decision, not one based on evil doings or moral corruption.  Thus, the Yahweh character now appears to be more insecure than all-powerful.

All of this brings up two rather profound questions.

The first is, would destroying towers today have the same effect on human culture: scattering, confusing, causing dissension?  For that, we must thoroughly examine what has happened to our individual and collective psyches since the 9/11 attacks.  It sure seems that the destruction of the Twin Towers has scattered and confused humanity, pitting us against each other rather than focusing on concerted effort to advance the species.  Could the perpetrators of that crime have taken a page from ancient myth?

The other question that arises is, if the gods got nervous the first time humans endeavored to reach the heavens through stargates and took severe action to prevent it, could they do it again?  If/when we start getting too close to god-like abilities, will some external force come down and stir the pot again?  If so, could the rise in UFO sightings in the past 70 years have something to do with that?  And will we humans be able to stop it this time?

And much more to the point, from the perspective of the Big Picture, are humans ready to obtain that kind of power?  After all, we seem incapable of solving some of the most mundane problems with our species.  It hardly seems advisable to let us go mucking around with the very fabric of space/time, much less carrying our errors into the cosmos.

Sure, the Babel incident was done to humanity to keep it unable to enter the heavens, but was that decision made because we threatened the hegemony of the gods, or because we threatened the peace of the Universe?

Looking around, I'd guess the latter.

I Have Slipped The Surly Bonds

The one myth that has most bedeviled me for most of my cognitive life is the story of the Tower of Babel.  I use the biblical name for it, but the same or similar story exists in dozens of different forms in dozens of different cultures.  However, the gist of the story is the same in every case.

There is a group of elites, also known as the gods, and there is the rest of humanity.  The gods are in a position of superior technology and able to control and enslave the rest of humanity, and they like it that way.

Humanity, though, has a different view of things.  Through some medium, whether its architecture, economics, science, or whatever, humans were able to come together and challenge the position of the elites.  The Bible puts it this way: humans will be able to do whatever they imagine through the use of the "tower".  Whatever the tower is, it represents mankind's ability to become gods through unified effort.

So what happens?  The gods embark on a decidedly non-religious campaign to scramble and divide humans to prevent them from achieving elite status.  Depending on the version you are reading, the elite split the science, the system of weights and measures, or the languages, thus dividing mankind into warring and irreconcilable factions.

In other words, this is a classic example of 'divide and conquer'.  It is also the playbook by which the contemporary elite continue to keep humanity from uniting in common cause and challenging their exclusive positions as rulers of all.

This is a fascinating phenomenon, because the very tactics and reasoning of the elite has been literally shoved in front of our faces for thousands of years, yet no one seems to get it.  In its simplest form, the Tower of Babel is a story of powerful elites creating conflict among humans in order to prevent them from challenging the status quo.  It is the prototype for the Middle East medling by the West.  It is the foundation of mutually combative religions.  It is the earliest known example of social engineering and psychological warfare.

We see this same tactic restated in Sun Tsu, or Machiavelli, or any of several dozen other thinkers on the topic of social control and manipulation of mass humans.  What's more, this singular event establishes a moral dichotomy between the elites and the rest of us.

By virtue of superior technology, the elite have pounded into our collective mind that they have a separate and superior moral code.  Since they are more advanced, they must also have a higher view of basic moral behavior.  Therefore, humans must adhere to one set of moral standards, while the elites/gods follow another...and theirs is unquestionable because of their superior technology.

At this point, we seem to hit upon the very heart of the problem in the world today.  For us mere mortals, murder is wrong and punishable by draconian methods.  But if you are a member of the elite, then you can slaughter on the most horrendous scales, and it is justifiable because of your higher moral stance.  If you are a mere human, it is wrong and punishable to steal.  Yet, if you are part of the elite, you are justified in helping yourself to the productivity and possessions of whomever you please without recompense. 

The list goes on, but the dichotomy is apparent in every case.  You can't dodge taxes, but the elite can.  You can't get out of speeding tickets, but the elite can.  You can't get a decent education for your kids, but the elite can.  You can't pass on you life's savings to your family, but the elite can.  In every case, might makes right, and we mere mortals are not allowed to question it because the elites live by a different and superior moral code.

Meanwhile, humanity is constantly manipulated to become more and more factionalized.  Whether its religion, economics, rivalries, or wars, we are endlessly steered towards smaller and smaller groups that are mutually exclusive with greater numbers of other groups.

Some examples?  The Batman shooting has set gun-grabbers against gun-owners.  The Chick-fil-A bullshit has set fundmentalist Christians against gay rights groups.  In the Middle East, it's Sunni against Shi'ite, fundamentalists against secularists, democracy against monarchy, male against female.

Support the troops, no matter how egregious their moral transgressions.  The Olympics is nothing but setting nation against nation, with endless accusations or not following the rules in the name of national glory.

All of this strife and division is tailored to any given region.  It is unimportant what the division is.  It is the division itself which serves the elites' purposes.  Whether it's political parties, or who you sleep with, or what name you call your god, the whole purpose is to keep us masses from finding our commonalities and, in doing so, challenging the privileged position of the elite/gods.

Whatever the real story of the Tower of Babel, it is the first recorded use of division and the superior morality argument to subjugate humanity to some self-appointed elite group.  For our part, we play right into it despite having the motive and technique embedded in our favorite holy books.

We are horrified by some drugged-up patsy shooting up a theater full of people, but put him in a uniform and point him at whatever target is dictated to us by the elite and we celebrate the slaughter.

We are angered and indignant when some strung-out junkie breaks into our house and steals some knick-knacks to buy his next fix.  But give that junkie an ID card, some nifty forms and call him an IRS agent, and we'll fork over our hard-earned wealth to him with nary a whimper.

So we've replaced, in our oh-so-advanced society, the gods with the State, but the same playbook is in use.  The State still possesses higher technology and bigger fire-power, so by virtue of that, it must have a superior moral code that we mere mortals cannot question in our miserable and degraded state of being.  So we prance merrily along at the heels of our new gods, doing whatever they bid us while never raising even the most basic moral questions about the acts and motives of our gods.

Might makes right, so we cower behind the State and take pot shots at whatever target it dictates.  We spout off mindless jingoisms like, "My country, love it or leave it."  We "support our troops" and "our athletes", never once asking what part of all that is "ours".  We hate these groups and support those because we are told we must identify with one or another.

The lesson planted in the books in front of our very eyes is that if we put away these rivalries and hold the elite to the same moral code we all believe in, then we could do anything we imagine for ourselves.  We would, in fact, become the elite...the gods.  We would rise above all this bickering crap and turn our attention to far more noble and lofty goals.  Humanity would rise up out of its enshackled squalor and enter a truly Golden Age.

All we have to do is reverse the Tower of Babel.  To do that, we must first understand its true meaning, and how it is burdening our species even now.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred thing
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

== John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Etemenanki

Ya know, this whole Supreme Corpse thing in the States really has me fired up.  It goes straight to the heart of one of my pet peeves, which I can lay directly at the feet of the Roman Empire (aka Catholic Church), and which has so screwed up Western history and, by extension, the world.

Here's the deal....

Once upon a time, Humans were viewed as the pinnacle of Creation.  We were Masters of our domain (Seinfeld excepted) and the individual was a sacred being capable of achieving god-like characteristics.  Buddhism, which predates both Christianity and Judaism, speaks to the whole idea that humans are perfectable to the point of deification.  Each of us, given enough time and effort, are capable of achieving apotheosis.  As Robert Heinlein put it in 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' "Thou art god."

That whole concept is as foreign to us now as snorting Moon-dust.  We folks today can't imagine such an idea as individual human beings becoming gods in their own right.  That's some quaint idea reserved for Caesars and Japanese Emperors.  Us little people are but worms to be trod upon for the greater glory of someone else.

It shows up in so many subtle ways in our thinking and social discourse.  The concept of our baseness and unworthy-ness is built into our language.  We speak it and don't even think about it.  If we only paused for a moment and pondered what we say on a daily basis, we would (should) be shocked.

The other day, in my Business Conversation class, we took up the topic of 'jargon'.  Jargon is slang that is meant to exclude others from the inner sanctum of any given profession.  Jargon separates us into guilds and professions.  It allows us to exclude the uninitiated, but it also excludes us from other groups.  Slang divides generations, jargon divides disciplines.

Some of the terms we took up were 'core competency', 'corporate values', and 'human resources'.  If you are a corporate drone, then these terms are branded on your soul.  And chances are, you've probably never really thought them through.  So let's do that, because it's part of the Big Picture here on the Far Side.

First of all, 'core competency'.  This is a gem of bullshit.  Here, we've taken a horse turd and shined it up into an object of veneration and desire.  We are using 'core', which means the center, heart or penultimate, as an adjective to describe 'competency', which means average achievement, mediocrity and unenlightened.  So, when your boss talks about your company's 'core competency', he's asking you to buy into the idea that at your organization's heart is nothing more than mediocre ability.  A competent surgeon means he likely won't kill you, but all the effort and money likely won't cure you, either.  There's no art or substance, just following directions, boss.

The next term, 'corporate values', really goads me.  It is the assumption that a collection of humans, working in concert, constitute a 'person' that, in itself, has values, judgement and morals.  In other words, the collective hive becomes an 'individual' with a soul and independent existence.  We are no longer a collection of individuals working in concert, we are cells in a body corporate, where the body is supreme over the cells that make it up.  This should be classified as a psychiatric pathology, but of course psychiatry is part of the problem and definitely NOT part of the solution.

Finally, we come to 'human resources'.  This is particularly egregious.  Earth, wind, fire, and water are resources.  Humans are not.  Paper is a resource.  Ink is a resource.  Electricity is a resource.  Time is a resource.  But humans are humans.  We are not raw materials to be thrown at any given situation, along with whatever lumps of shit we have to hand.  I have skills and talents that are available to my employer for a fee, but I am not cord wood to be thrown on the fire on a cold night.

Now, I think we have sufficiently built a framework to show that the whole core of modern society is sick and dying.  That we humans has surrendered our basic value as individuals who are capable of apotheosis, in order to become cells in artificial golems of mystical construct, in order to receive remuneration and pay taxes is, in a word, sick.

We are a sick society, and perhaps that is why apocolyptism has become so prevalent.  We know we are sick and admit that we have no way to cure this sickness, and so we hope for some deus ex machina to come along and take care of the situation for us.

It doesn't matter what stripe you hail from.  Whether it's neopagan, Christian, Muslim, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even atheism...everyone is looking for some outside force to come in and clean up our dirty thinking.

This is the way mass murderers think.  They know they are 'broken'.  They can't figure out a way to cure themselves.  So they start killing people hoping to be caught so that someone else will take responsibility for their sickness.

This is the origin of the 'war on drugs'.  The elite don't want the individual to figure out how to cure their illness.

We, as a society-culture-civilization, are doing all we can to deny the problem at the core of our existence.  We ARE gods.  We are spiritual beings who are capable of things far beyond what we are achieving on a daily basis right now.  We are in the throes of evil beings trying to harness our power for their personal gain.  We  are the cocoon denying the worm the ability to become a butterfly.

It's time.

It's time to release ourselves.  Only we, as individuals, can open the cocoon and allow ourselves to soar where we belong.  All the legalisms and jingoisms and jargonisms serve only to keep us in the shell, when we should be fighting with all our might to break free of this morass of limits and horizons.

To come full circle, the Supreme Corpse decision on Obamacare serves only the shell, not the 'becoming'.  Those who are doomed to believe that we are nothing without the collective are doomed to spend eternity inside the cocoon.

In Asian thought, an individual is created by hard work.  One must spend a lifetime drawing the elements together to form a unique being.  If you fail, then you must return to the 'soup' from which you came, so that your energy can be recycled into another effort, commonly called reincarnation.  Once you achieve 'self', then you can perfect that thing into an eternal being.

Is the 'self' you are trying to create a part of some 'corporate' being?  Or are you strong enough to create a real 'individual'?  Therein lies our common dilemma in this day and age.

The root of the problem lies in language.  Take control of your language, and you take control of your life...your REAL life.

The lesson of the Tower of Babel was that the gods confused human language to keep them from achieving their true status.  Language is the key.  Learn your own language to the roots.  Then learn as many other languages as you can.  Then, at some point, it will all congeal to show the Big Picture.

Don't let anyone control your language.  If they control your language, they control your thoughts.  That was the whole point of the Great Light called George Carlin.  That is the point that I am trying to make.  Learn all languages.  Use language with great care and control.  It is the most powerful weapon that we, as Individual Human Beings, have at our command.  By controlling our language, we are setting ourselves free to exit the cocoon.

In other words, fuck the Supreme Corpse.