Freedom Essay 38

 

Noah’s Ark explained

 

The following explanation of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark is a condensation of paragraphs 743–751 of Jeremy Griffith’s 2016 book, FREEDOM.

Now that we can understand and resolve the underlying issue in all of human life of the human condition (see THE Interview and Video/​Freedom Essay 3) it finally becomes possible to explain and demystify all mythology, including the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark.

 

 

As was explained in F. Essay 30, Resignation occurs when adolescents become so depressed from trying to understand why they, and everyone else, are so competitive, aggressive and selfish when their moral instinctive self or soul expects humans to behave cooperatively, lovingly and selflessly, that they give up trying to confront and think about the problem. It was pointed out that this process of Resignation to living in denial of this most fundamental and all-important issue of the corrupted or ‘fallen’ state of humans—which is the issue of ‘the human condition’—was such a compromising adjustment it was the most significant psychological event in human life.

Metaphorically, Resignation represented the time when humans began hiding deep underground in Plato’s dark cave away from the condemning glare of their moral soul, the result of which was a horrific life of soul-dead alienation. (Plato’s cave allegory is explained in Video/​F. Essay 11.) But again, such an existence was preferable to trying to live with the suicidal depression that came from trying to live with the condemnation of our moral soul. (See F. Essay 21 for the explanation of the origin of our moral instincts or soul.) It was a case of either stay alive and accept living a psychologically dead life of soul-less alienation, or die from suicidal depression. That humans have chosen to stay alive but accept psychological death is a measure of the immense heroism of the human race—and thank goodness understanding of the human condition has at last been found and humans no longer have to resign to living in a state of soul-dead alienation.

 

 

Of course, when humans resigned they couldn’t admit they had done so—you can’t maintain a denial of something if you admit you’re denying it!—which is why the agony that resigning adolescents went through could not be acknowledged and was instead evasively and dishonestly blamed on their brain’s development and hormonal change; we needed some excuse for the enormous psychological transition that resigning to a life of denial represented. The whole issue of humans’ corrupted condition had to be avoided until the human condition could be truthfully explained, which, mercifully, it now is.

So, the most important psychological event in human life of Resignation has been denied by the cave-dwelling, mechanistic world of resigned adults. However, while this has been the case in the resigned world, the Bible has long been humanity’s outstanding book of denial-free truth, and so we could expect that Resignation would be recognised in it, and it is—it is what the story of Noah’s Ark is all about. Moreover, the story also deals with a very important question that F. Essay 30 about Resignation doesn’t discuss, which is when did Resignation become a normal event in the history of human life?

I say ‘a normal event’ because Resignation was not always the universal phenomena it is today. It is the upset from a lack of nurturing in infancy and early childhood that makes self-confrontation during the thoughtful early adolescent stage overwhelmingly depressing, and this lack of nurturing (in-effect, the human-condition-afflicted, alienated, detached-from-their-all-loving-soulful-self state of parents) was not an outstanding feature of human life until the final stages of humanity’s journey from ignorance to enlightenment—so it follows that Resignation would not have become the key feature in human life until the latter stages of humanity’s journey. It would not have been a feature of the lives of Homo habilis, or Homo erectus, or even the subsequent H. sapiens. We can expect that Resignation would have only appeared during the 200,000 year reign of H. sapiens sapiens, and only become almost universal in the final 11,000 years of that reign after agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals allowed humans to live in close proximity, a development that greatly increased the spread and levels of upset in humans. (See chapter 8:15 of FREEDOM for more on the final 11,000 years of humanity’s journey.)

 

 

The reason Resignation is not completely universal, is that while distressing and even depressing, the upset from a developing mind’s own efforts to self-adjust is not sufficient to cause the mind to have to pay the very high price of blocking out our instinctive self or soul’s happy, all-loving and all-sensitive world because of the condemning expectation it gives rise to that we should still be behaving in that all-loving, cooperative, selfless way. No, upset and its effects have to be very great for humans to pay that very high price of killing off their soul by resigning, and while upset and its effects are very great in modern humans and as a result Resignation is almost universal, the fact that even amongst modern humans there have been adults who didn’t need to resign, such as the denial-free thinking prophets Abraham, Moses, Plato and Christ, is evidence that the extreme upset that leads to Resignation is not yet an intrinsic part of the human make-up. (Christ and the life of denial-free prophets are explained in the next essay, F. Essay 39.)

Further, for adult members of the relatively innocent representative ‘races’ of H. sapiens sapiens living today, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Australian Aborigines, to be as happy and full of the zest and enthusiasm for life and as generous, selfless and free in spirit as numbers of them are, or at least were when they were still living as hunter-foragers, means that many of them must not have resigned.

 

 

So the evidence is that the world of soundness and happiness is not far below the surface in humans today—which, incidentally, means that while there must be a degree of genetic adaption to a resigned, soul-destroyed existence in humans now, a sound, sensitive and happy life is retrievable for all humans. What is presented in F. Essay 15 and in chapter 9 of FREEDOM about the Transformation that this information makes possible, evidences that this is true. Resignation, with the soul-dead insensitive and must-prove-yourself mean and unsatisfying life that went with it, is fundamentally a mental, psychological condition, not an immutable genetic condition (see Video/​F. Essay 14 & F. Essay 40), so you can choose to leave that insecure, embattled, insensitive, mean and unhappy life behind. (see par. 743 of FREEDOM)

This denial-free understanding of when Resignation became almost universal—about 11,000 years ago when, as mentioned, the advent of agriculture and the domestication of animals brought humans together in close proximity, the effect of which was to rapidly spread and compound upset behaviour—at last makes it possible to appreciate that Moses’ Genesis account of Noah’s Ark is actually a metaphorical description of this time when Resignation ‘flooded’ the world and our soul and all its truths ‘went under’. Our all-sensitive and loving—although unbearably condemning of our self-adjusting conscious self—soulful self was, in effect, ‘drowned’ when we resigned; it was repressed, pushed into our subconscious, out of conscious awareness, and our extremely superficial and artificial, living-only-on-the-meniscus-of-existence, highly competitive, ‘I-only-care-about-proving-my-worth’, egocentric way of living became all-dominant. The only creatures to escape the horror of Resignation, to survive this ‘drowning’ of our soul, were the animals and the very few well-nurtured-with-unconditional-love, sound and secure unresigned prophets, as symbolised in this case by Noah and his zoo. As Moses says in Genesis, ‘Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God [he did not have to deny Integrative Meaning]…​God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, “…​make yourself an ark…​I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth…​Everything on earth will perish [the soul and all the denial-free truths will perish when people resign to a life of denial]. But I will establish my covenant with you [but from here on prophets will have to preserve the truth of Integrative Meaning and all the other great truths that relate to it], and you will enter the ark…​Go into the ark [don’t resign], you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation”’ (6:9, 12, 14, 17, 18; 7:1). (See F. Essay 23 for an explanation of ‘God’ or Integrative Meaning.)

In the following depiction of Noah’s Ark we see dead people littered everywhere, and, as was pointed out above, Resignation is a form of death. The ‘dove’ that Noah ‘sent out’ ‘to see if the water had receded’ (8:8), kept coming back because the world was still flooded—Resignation was still universal—because it is only now with the human condition finally understood that the need to resign can end. The time that Moses prophesised would eventually be possible, when the ‘dove’ will never need to ‘return’ (8:12) to the Ark, has finally been realised.

 

 

So Moses knew all about Resignation, including how it became all but universal. And, as with his accounts of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden of our species’ original, cooperative and loving innocence, and of the lives of Cain and Abel that describe how humanity has progressed from a state of innocence to a state of upset, and how, following the advent of agriculture, that progression eventually led to warfare (more about Moses’ Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel stories is explained in par. 906 of FREEDOM), he used a story to pass down that knowledge through generations of humans who were resigned to living in denial of the true nature of the human condition. Moses—who wrote not just Genesis but the first five books of the Bible—was certainly an exceptional unresigned, denial-free-thinking prophet. To think people have actually searched for remnants of an ark, and tested ice cores from glaciers and sea beds in the Black Sea for proof of a great flood in the past, as if the story depicted an actual event rather than the metaphor/​allegory it really is! Understandably, however—in a development that is discussed in F. Essay 35 and elaborated upon in ch. 8:16I of FREEDOM—the more upset and thus insecure humans became, the less they could afford to confront the truths contained in religious scriptures and the more they needed to interpret their contents in literal and fundamentalist ways—like ‘God is actually a person sitting in the clouds somewhere’, ‘Christ was actually physically resurrected from death’, ‘Christ’s mother was actually a virgin’, ‘Abraham actually considered murdering his son’, ‘Judgment day actually heralds an afterlife in which some unlucky souls will be judged as evil and burnt in a fiery pit’, etc, etc. But with the upset state of the human condition now defended, all religious metaphorical descriptions, parables and symbols—in fact, all mythology—can be safely explained and demystified, as is shown throughout FREEDOM and in the compilation of all my work, the book Freedom Expanded. (Please note, F. Essay 35 is such a significant essay it has been produced as the standalone booklet titled Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution, which is freely available on our homepage as one of the WTM’s six key books.)

 

While the above comment is intended as a criticism of the Bible, it actually reveals the
accuracy of the Noah’s Ark metaphor: how the emergence of consciousness resulted in
criticism from our moral instinctive self, which led to Resignation becoming almost universal.

 

Indeed, with understanding of the human condition found, the Bible’s entire contents can be fully demystified now—an exercise that will likely amaze the reader because they will discover that, unlike all the libraries of denial-complying books in the world, the Bible is, as mentioned, a repository of extremely rare denial-free truth. In fact, virtually the whole story of the human condition, bar its scientific explanation, is perfectly described in the Bible, albeit in the abstract, metaphysical and metaphorical terms that denial-free, truthful-thinking prophets were limited to in those early pre-science times when the Bible was written. The reformist theologian Martin Luther recognised the comparative integrity of the Bible when he said, ‘Homer, Virgil, and other noble, fine, and profitable writers, have left us books of great antiquity; but they are nought to the Bible’ (Table Talk, 1566; tr. William Hazlitt, 1857, p.1). No wonder it is the world’s bestselling and most widely distributed book, with 6 billion copies having been printed so far. And I might conclude by mentioning that just as people practise regularly re-reading the Bible because its denial-free, out-of-Plato’s-cave, soul-filled honesty is so aligning for soul-repressed, alienated, lost humans, so people will discover that the more they re-read FREEDOM, the more it will re-connect them to their soul and clear their mind of alienation—but in an infinitely more effective way, because the denial-free truth it contains is both reconciling of our upset state and based on first-principle science, which means it is infinitely more explanatory, clarifying and understandable, and thus infinitely more soul-aligning and mind-clearing.

 

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For further demystification of religion and religious metaphors, we recommend F. Essay 39: Christ explained and F. Essay 40: Judgment Day finally explained. You can also read much more about humanity’s heroic journey in chapter 8 of FREEDOM.

 

Discussion or comment on this essay is welcomed—see below.