007 Maps of Meaning: 7 Contemplating Genesis (TVO)

I think of all the stories that we've investigated so far, all the fundamental myths of creation that we've investigated so far, the two that we're going to talk about in detail today are probably the two stories that have had more impact on the course of world history than any other two. I'm going to talk in some detail today about the story of creation laid out in Genesis and also the story of the Buddha's enlightenment. Both stories are also characterized by a kind of depth that's virtually limitless.

And I think in some ways that the topics we're going to discuss today are the most enlightening of all the many ideas that we've traveled through so far in this series. So, we're gonna be concentrating on an analysis of this schema again. The idea being here of course that the world of experience, which is the world that mythology is attempting to describe has these fundamental constituent elements: one associated with chaos or nature or the unknown, one associated with culture or the great father or the predictable, and another associated with the archetypical son, the individual who's the offspring of the interplay of these two fundamental forces.

But given that part of the purpose of this series is to elucidate the causes of war and motivation for war, attention paid to the dualistic nature of the individual is of paramount importance. So we could say that just as nature has its terrible side and just as culture has its terrible side, so the individual has his or her terrible side. And the depth of that capacity, say for atrocity and vengefulness is just as deep as the depth of terror that the unknown itself holds.

I think this is a difficult, a difficult fact for normal individuals to grasp, given that we're highly motivated to view ourselves as, if not precisely good, at least as relatively harmless. But the evidence that as individuals we are relatively harmless is very, very thin indeed. And I don't think it's possible to understand the depth of motivation for atrocity and social conflict without coming to terms with the capacity for evil that's characteristic of the individual.

Now both the story in Genesis and the story of the Buddha's enlightenment lay bare in many ways the nature of the structure of individual evil. And also not only its structure, but its motivation. Why it is that people would turn more or less voluntarily away from the good and embrace what can only be described as its polar opposite. So in addition to making reference to this structural schema, of course, we're also going to be discussing its typical mode of interaction of these elements of experience.

You may note for example that this diagram with which you're now very familiar, the notion of order, chaos, and reestablishment of order also parallels the structure of the story in Genesis, the creation where human beings are created first and exist in a paradisal state. That paradise is disrupted as a consequence of some event of virtually cosmic significance, that as a consequence of that disruption people are destined to live a profane existence in constant wait for the next state of order.

So just as this is a fundamental archetypical structure so that fundamental archetypical structure constitutes the basic grammar for this story in Genesis. Now what we're gonna do to begin with is to describe precisely how this idea of paradise, descent, and the search for paradise is illustrated symbolically in Genesis and exactly what those symbolic representations mean.

The idea here being that the reason that the authors of Genesis, the multiple authors of Genesis extending over thousands and thousands of years chose those symbols is not because they were laboring to be obscure or not because they were establishing a pre-empirical representation of reality, a kind of quasi-scientific representation, but because these symbols have an elusive or metaphorical richness that enables a story, although short, to be characterized by an almost infinite depth.

That's part of the reason. The other part of the reason is that when you say something profound, you say it using the language, the clearest language that you have access to. And if the story is almost unutterably profound, then the images in which it is enshrouded are almost incomprehensibly complex. It has to be that way because if the target of the investigation is reality itself, something so complex that we cannot conceptualize it fully, then the language that we use to represent that reality has to stretch us to the limits of our ability to understand.

And it is the case that the story in Genesis, say as much as the stories of Buddhist enlightenment, constitutes an artistic endeavor on the part of the human race to portray the nature of human reality and to explain the behavioral and philosophical consequences of that reality. That being a tall order, perhaps we should forgive the multiple authors for only being able to manage it in a way that's essentially imagistic and dramatic, rather than explicit, logical, philosophical, and fully developed.

So the first thing I'd like to point out to you is a statement made by Eliade, which I think is one of the most enlightening things I ever read. Now, the first thing that Eliade does is describe the universality of flood mythology. But then he puts a twist on it.

So the idea behind flood mythology is something like this: if societies deviate from an emergent, a necessarily emergent kind of morality, a kind of morality that takes the viewpoint of all the inhabitants of a given society into account, if a society deviates from that viewpoint sufficiently, it dooms itself to annihilation. That annihilation being represented mythologically as the flooding of the society by the precosmogonic waters, the primordial element or chaos.

So societies that are tyrannical doom themselves to eradication by chaos; a simple equation. But made more complicated by Eliade, his observation that more than one factor plays a role in the establishment of the tyranny. On the one hand, there's straight degeneration of cultural presuppositions in that if you establish a state or a game, which has particular rules, because the environment is constantly transforming itself, the rules by necessity become out of date.

So merely as a consequence of the progression of time, the presuppositions on which any state are founded tend to become less and less relevant to the current environment. Okay. So there’s this aging and senility merely as a consequence of thermodynamic processes. But then Eliade also points out that there's one additional factor which has to be attributed, not to society, but to the individuals that make up that society, which is that the strictures and rules on which society was founded can be constantly and carefully updated when necessary.

If all the individuals that make up that society are perfectly willing to confront exemplars of emerging chaos in their own lives when those exemplars emerge, which is to say that it's perfectly reasonable to be guided in your personality by the structures of your state. But if you face something unknown that those rules cannot handle, it's a moral necessity and obligation on your part to face that emergent anomaly forthrightly to solve it if you can, and then to communicate the consequences of your solution to the rest of the members of your society.

Now what Eliade points out is that the individual who removes him or herself from the responsibility of confronting their own anomaly speeds the process by which the state decays. So the decay of the state and the possibility for the emergence of chaos is an interaction between the tendency of the state to disorder, the tendency of the state to archaism and senility merely as a consequence of change and the voluntary unwillingness of the citizens that comprise that state to face the unknown courageously when it confronts them.

So Eliade says: that the deluge myth, deluge myth is almost universally disseminated. It is documented on all the continents, although very rarely in Africa, probably because of the relative shortage of water. And on various cultural levels. A certain number of variants seem to be the result of dissemination, first from Mesopotamia and then from India.

It is equally possible that one or several diluvial catastrophes gave rise to fabulous narratives, but it would be risky to explain so widespread a myth by phenomena of which no geological traces have been found. The majority of the flood myths seem in some sense to form part of the cosmic rhythm. The old world, people by a fallen humanity is submerged under the water, and sometime later a new world emerges from the aquatic chaos.

In a large number of variants, the flood is the result of the sins or ritual faults of human beings. Sometimes it results simply from the wish of a divine being to put an end to mankind. The chief causes lie at once therefore in the sins of men and the decrepitude of the world. By the mere fact that it exists—that is, that it lives and produces—the cosmos gradually deteriorates and ends by falling into decay.

This is the reason why it has to be recreated. In other words, the flood realizes on a macrocosmic scale what is symbolically affected during the New Year festival: the end of the world and the end of a sinful humanity in order to make a new creation possible.

So then the question might arise logically enough, what is it that would motivate an individual to work to avoid anomaly when it emerges in his or her own life, and to risk an eventual flood? And even more profoundly, what would motivate an individual perhaps to work for the antithesis of order, to work to promote the emergence of chaos? Since we know that people are relatively ambivalent in their moral stance, is it possible that we can create a compelling motivational story for the desire of the individual as such to work against the emergence of the good rather than for it?

So let's take a look at what Genesis says about the creation of experience. So first of all, remember we're taking a phenomenological stance on this story, which is to say that this story is not an objective retelling of materialistic emergence. It’s something more specifically dramatic. It describes the nature of human experience.

Okay? The nature of conscious human experience. And in fact, the creation story of Genesis lays explicit stress on individual consciousness literally as a precondition for being itself. Which is to say that underlying the story of Genesis is the notion that without whatever consciousness is, there would be no segregated entities and therefore no being.

So this is one manner in which Genesis attempts to put human beings at the center of the cosmos, so to speak, which is the idea that the world independently of consciousness, whatever that world is, absolutely needs to be reflected by consciousness in order to exist in any sense that existence could reasonably be defined.

First chapter: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void. And darkness was on the face of the deep." Now, the idea that the earth was without form and void takes us back to the Mesopotamian creation myth and because the word for void, the Hebrew word for void is “Tehom”. And “Tehom” is a word derived from Timat.

And the void, the chaos that constitutes the unformed condition of the cosmos prior to the elaboration of being is assimilated to the same category as Timat, which is this terrible unformed and frightening aprioric condition that has to be courageously confronted in order to manifest itself as being. "And the earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep."

So now you see another interplay of opposites here between matter and water, the primordial elements. So first of all, it's heaven and earth. And then it's earth and water and, and the height and the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. So another opposite: that interaction between spirit and whatever it is that the precosmogonic water or chaos constitutes.

"And God said let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness." And then a prototypical division between light, which is associated with illumination and enlightenment and consciousness because we're conscious during the day. And the sun and life that emerges nested inside this, the initial opening lines of this sentence.

Northrop Frye notes that there's tremendous emphasis on the notion of a repetitive cycling of days and nights in the opening sentences of Genesis, even though from a formal perspective, this emphasis is paradoxical because the notion of the day emerges before the creation of the sun. And Frye's point is not that this is some careless gesture on the part of the people who authored Genesis, but more that it's an attempt to emphasize the idea of a cyclical relationship between consciousness and light and darkness and chaos and to highlight the idea that this cyclical relationship is somehow absolutely vital to being itself.

So Genesis one five says "and God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day." Frye says "... the central metaphor underlying beginning is not really birth at all. It is rather the moment of waking from sleep. When one world disappears, a world of virtuality and potential, and another comes into actual being. This is still contained within a cycle. We know that at the end of the day we shall return to the world of sleep..." and that's a notion that has a metaphorical resonance because there's the sleep that punctuates periods of consciousness.

And then there's the great sleep at the end of life, which is characterized by the complete cessation of consciousness. We know that at the end of the day we shall return to the world of sleep. But in the meantime there's a sense of self-transcendence of a consciousness getting up from an unreal into a real or at least more real world.

This sense of awakening into a greater degree of reality is expressed by Heraclitus as a passing from a world where everyone has his own logos, into a world where there's a common logos—experience that we all share. "Genesis presents the creation as a sudden coming into being of a world through articulate speech, which is another aspect of logos." Logos incorporates the idea of creative exploration, and then the formulation of the consequences of that exploration in verbally communicable categories, right?

Which give our aspects of our being their defined boundaries and parameters and enable us to establish a shared mode of social being—through articulate speech, conscious perception, light, and stability. Something like this metaphor of awakening may be the real reason for the emphasis on days and such recurring phrases. "And the evening and the morning were the first day," even before the day as we know it was established with the creating of the sun.

The most fundamental pair of conflicting and cyclically interacting pairs of opposites that is portrayed in Genesis is essentially the pairing of chaos versus order, chaos versus generative order. And a poem by F.I. Tiutchev expresses this idea extremely well and very powerfully. So I'm going to read it to you.

"When sacred night sweeps heavenward she takes the glad the winsome day. Unfolding it, rolls up its golden carpet that had been spread over an abysmal pit. Gone vision like as the external world. And man a homeless orphan has to face in utter helplessness naked, alone the blackness of immeasurable space. Upon himself he has to lean with mind abolished, thought unfathered in the dim depths of his soul he sinks. For nothing comes from outside to support or limit him. All life and brightness seem an ancient dream while in the substance of the night unraveled, alien, he now perceives a faithful something that is his by right."

Um, absolutely brilliant poetic statement, I think, laying out very nicely, very richly the fundamental nature of the existential paradox that constitutes human life. Pointing to a very profound sense of futility and fear. But then beyond that to the notion that in the depths of the unknown, in the depths of the darkness and in the depths of all that, that's fundamentally unfaceable, there still lurks something that can be discovered given sufficient courage.

Another fundamental division portrayed indirectly in Genesis, the word versus chaos. So what you have in Genesis is an absolutely stellar idea. I think perhaps the most fundamental contribution of archaic Jewish thinking to western and world civilization, which is that although it is easier in some ways to consider the actual matrix of things, their material substrate as the strata from which they emerge, it is equally reasonable and perhaps more pragmatically useful to note that things only exist because of the interaction between the logos, the word that characterizes consciousness and whatever this matrix is.

So in Jewish thought and then Christian thought, and of course in thoughts of that sort echoed throughout the world, there's the idea that consciousness, associated with the transcendent directly associated with the deity, is actually the thing that in interaction with this matrix gives rise to being. Genesis plays a stress, places stress on this notion of the internal logos, the individual consciousness in two very complex ways.

It first says that it's the word of God, the logos of God that gives order to chaos and makes being emerge. But then even more particularly, it’s the self-conscious logos of individual humans, their capacity not just to see the world as an object, but also to see themselves as an object that gives the world the particular value slant that it has for us.

Which is to say that not only are we in a world where the subject and the object are separated and therefore experience and suffer the consequences of that separation—but even more particularly we are the only creatures who are so conscious that we can observe ourselves as objects. And the consequence of that is that because we've extended our consciousness to ourselves, we're capable of conceptualizing things that other creatures cannot conceptualize.

Such as the infinite possibility that lays manifest of the unknown, but also the fact that as individuals we're subject to our finite limitations, right? That we can become diseased, that we can become mentally ill. And that finally we'll die. And so the idea here is that something like the extension of logos to the object, to the subject has made human existence finally problematic.

And Genesis refers to this as essentially the heritable sin of Adam. Because we're aware of our own vulnerability as a genetic consequence merely of being human. There's a transformation in the nature of experience that has essentially cosmic significance. Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching makes a comment on the formless chaos that constitutes the matrix of things, the origin of things in the following manner.

He says, "there was something formless yet complete that existed before heaven and earth without sound, without substance." This is the void or the chaos. "Dependent on nothing, unchanging, all-pervading, unfailing. One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven." The idea here being that whatever experience is in the absence of a delimited human consciousness, is something that’s outside the boundaries of time.

Because time—temporality—is a human attribute. And it's outside the boundaries of spatial limitation because only human beings, with their delimited and fixed size, can attribute spatial aspects to being itself. So whatever it is that exists without us is so comprehensive and so complete and transcends temporal dimensions to such a great degree that it can't be conceptualized as being at all.

It’s something that transcends being to such a degree that it's not even nameable but still exists as "the mother of all things under heaven." Now Genesis formally associates the human being with logos. And this is a determinative move in human history just as the Mesopotamians first hypothesized that their emperor was equivalent to Marduk, the force that confronted Timat and carved her into pieces and made the world.

And just as the Egyptians conceptualized their pharaoh as the intermingling between Osiris, the stability of the state, and Horus, the exploratory hero, and then disseminated that identity down the aristocratic levels, closer and closer to the individual. So the ancient Hebrews said, “and God said let us make man in our image after our likeness.”

Now, it could be said that the logical derivation of that statement is that God looks like human beings. Or conversely that God is an old man with a beard. But it means something I think that's more sophisticated than that. Which is that the central aspect that's associated with this transcendent deity, the logos, which is the thing that gives rise to order as a consequence of its confrontation with chaos, is also the thing that centrally characterizes human consciousness.

And so with that, there's this transcendent notion that inside each human being is a spark of genuine divinity. And it’s the manifestation of that divinity in human temporal and spatial parameters that literally keeps the cosmos generating. "So God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him. Male and female created he them and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

Now fundamentalist Christians read this as an injunction, right? This is what human beings should do, dominate all other living things. But it's more like a description, which is that the consequence of the embeddedness of this spark of divinity in the individual is precisely what gave rise to the human ability to dominate the planet. Which is an ability that at least at the moment seems fundamentally unparalleled, with no limit in sight.

So it's not an injunction so much as a cold-hearted description. There's a very profound idea underlying the necessity of the creation of the individual human being. Here's a line of archaic Jewish speculation that runs something like this: Why is the creation of a limited subject necessary if God's omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent?

Why would he bother creating anything outside of himself? And the line of speculation runs like this. The one thing that a being that is complete in all regards, even all hypothetical regards lacks by necessity is limitation. And as a consequence of that anything that's absolute is not complete and can't be complete without limitation.

And so there's an emergent idea in Genesis, and most notions of the emergence of human consciousness that the absolute needs the reflection point of a delimited being to actually spring into some kind of defined actuality. So that being itself becomes an interplay between the necessary limitations of the finite and the transcendent reality of the absolute.

And so being is something that emerges because of the fact, as another ancient Jewish tradition has it, God and man are in a sense twins, mutually dependent on one another for their defined being. From such a perspective, being has the same nature as a game. When you're playing a game you have to play by rules, which means that there are things that you can do while playing the game.

But there are many, many things you can't do. And that the game could not exist without the limitations, also predicated on the idea that the imposition, the Nietzschian idea that the imposition of limitations on a structure actually gives rise to the possibility of diverse new forms, which is also a very sophisticated way of conceptualizing the world.

So from the perspective of Genesis, the individual is the locale of the experiential drama. And the fact that the individual is limited is a necessary precondition for being.