Let's conclude
the Noah's story
first however when we
ended last time
The ark had come to its resting place and Noah and his family had
debarked
And so this is the stories of
What occurs immediately after afterwards
it's a very short story, but I think it's it's very relevant
for
both of these stories. The Tower of Babel is well, very relevant for our current times and the sons of Noah
that went forth of the ark were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth
and Ham is the father of Canaan.
These are the three sons of Noah and of them was the whole earth overspread and Noah began to be a husbandman
and he planted a vineyard and he drank of the wine and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent
and Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without
And Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backward and
Covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were backward and they saw not their father's nakedness
and Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done unto him
and he said cursed to be Canaan a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren
and he said blessed shall be the Lord God of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant
and God shall enlarge Japheth and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant
and Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years and all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died
and the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. Okay, so
I remember thinking about this story
It's got to be 30 years ago
And I think the meaning of the story stood out for me sometimes
When you read complicated material, sometimes a piece of it will stand out. It's for some reason, it's like it glitters
I suppose that might be one way of thinking about it. It's
It you're in sync with it and you can understand what it means
I've really experienced that reading the Dao de Jing which is document I would really like to do a lecture on at some point
Because some of the verses I don't understand but others stand right out and I can understand them and I think I understood what this
Part of the story of Noah meant and I think it means you know
we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve
and the idea essentially was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability
the physical your physical boundaries in time and space and
Your.. your.. your physiological
your fundamental physiological
Insufficiencies as they might be judged by others. So there's biological
Insufficiency that's sort of built into you because you're a fragile
mortal vulnerable half insane creature and and that's that's just an existential truth and then of course
even
Merely as a human being, even with all those faults there are faults that you have that are particular to you
That might be judged harshly by the group
Well might be, will definitely be judged harshly by the group
and so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious and and to.. and to know your limits and to know your
Vulnerability and that's what is revealed
to Ham when he comes across his father naked and so the question is
What does it mean to see your father naked? and it seems to me and especially in an inappropriate manner like this it it
it's it's it's as if
Ham
He does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth
When when Tiamat and Apsu give rise to the first gods
They're they're the father of the eventual
deity of
Redemption, Marduk, they're very careless and noisy and they kill Apsu
their father and attempt to inhabit his corpse and that makes Tiamat enraged and so she
Bursts forth from the darkness to to do them in it's like a precursor to the flood story or an analogue to the flood story
and I see the same thing happening here with Ham is that he he's insufficiently respectful of his father and
and the question is exactly what does the father represent and you could say well there's there's
There's the farther that you have and that's a human being that's that's a man like other men, a man among men
but then there's the farther as such and that's the spirit of the father and
Insofar as you have a father you have both at the same time. You have the personal father
That's a man among other men, just like anyone else father, but insofar as that man is your father
that means that he's something different than just another person and
what he is is the
incarnation of the spirit of the father
and to see that to take it to what to
disrespect that carelessly maybe even like no one makes a mistake, right he
Produces wine and gets himself drunk and you might say well
you know if he sprawled out there for everyone to see it's hardly Ham's fault if he stumbles across him, but
The the book is laying out a danger and the danger is that well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable
moment and if you're
disrespectful
Then you transgress against the spirit of the Father and if you transgress against the spirit of father and lose
Spirit of the Father and lose respect for the spirit of the Father then that is likely to transform you into a slave
That's a very interesting idea. And I think it's particularly interesting
Maybe not particularly interesting, but it's it's particularly germane I think to our current cultural situation because I think that
Were pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our father so to speak
because of the intense
criticism that's
Directed towards our culture and the patriarchal culture so to speak
we're constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities and let's say nakedness and
There's nothing wrong with criticism, but the thing about criticism is the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff
It's not to burn everything to the ground
Right it's to say well we're going to carefully look at this. We're going to carefully differentiate. We're going to keep what's good
We're gonna move away from what's bad. But the point of the criticism isn't to identify everything is bad, it's to
separate what's good from what's bad so that you can retain what's good and move towards it and and to be careless at that is
Deadly because you're inhabited by the spirit of the father right insofar as you're a cultural construction
Which of course is something that the that the postmodern neo-marxists are absolutely
Emphatic about you're a cultural construction. Insofar as you're a cultural construction then you're inhabited by the spirit of the father and to be
Disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes you not all of what you are certainly
certainly not all of what you are but a good portion of what you are in insofar as you're a socialized cultural entity
and if you pull out the
If you pull the foundation out from underneath that what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own
You know, it's just not possible. You're a cultural creation.
And so Ham makes this desperate
error and is careless about
Exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father something like that. He doesn't without sufficient respect and the judgment is that
not only will he be a slave but so all of his descendants and he's contrasted with the other two sons who
I suppose are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt something like that. And so when they see him in a compromising position
they handle it with respect and and
and don't capitalize on it
And maybe that makes them strong. That's what it seems to me. And so I think that's what that story means
It has something to do with respect
You know and the funny thing about having respect for your culture and I suppose that's partly why I'm doing the biblical stories is because
They're part of our.. they're part of my culture
they're part of our culture perhaps but they're they're certainly part of my culture
and it seems to me that
It's worthwhile to treat that with respect to see what you can glean from it
and
And not kick it when it's down. Let's say
so
And so that's how the story of Noah ends, you know and the thing too is Noah is actually
A pretty decent incarnation of the spirit of the Father that which I suppose is one of the things that makes Ham's
Misstep more egregious is that I mean Noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood man
You know, it's not so bad
and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify humiliating him and
You know, I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation
To note on a daily basis that we're all contained in an ark
Right, and that's the ark that you could think about that as the ark that's been bequeathed to us by our forefathers, that's the
Tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit that we take for granted because it works so well
that protects us from things that we can't even imagine and we don't have to imagine because we're so well protected
and so one of the things that has really struck me hard, I would say about the
Disintegration and corruption of the universities is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that
You know what
Criticism as I said, it's a fine thing if it's done in the spirit... in a proper spirit
And that's the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff
But it needs to be accompanied by gratitude and it does seem to me that anyone who lives
in in the West and in the Western culture at this time
in history and in this place and who isn't
simultaneously grateful for that is
is half blind at least because it's never been better than this and
It could be so much worse and it's highly likely that it will be so much worse because for most of human history
So much worse is the norm
So
You