There are many myths in the book of Genesis, including the myth of the Tower of Babel. To recap, from Genesis 11:1-9:
1: Originally the whole earth was of one language…2: And…as they journeyed from the East…they found a plain…and they dwelt there. 3: And they said…Let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven…lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 4: And the Lord came…to see the city and the tower which the children of men had builded. 5: And…said…This they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do…
6: Let us…confound their language that they may not understand one another…7: So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city and the tower: 8:…because the Lord did… confound the language of all the earth.
To say we lack single-pointed focus is an understatement, given the abundance of contradictory forces inside each of us.
Entire books could be written about this passage—that’s how much it contains. For now, let’s focus on just one aspect: the phrase “of one language.”
Long ago—before our time on Earth—human beings were whole beings. We were fully integrated and living in harmony within ourselves—no conflicts and no contradictions. Our spirits were not fragmented and scattered as they are now.
To say we lack single-pointed focus is an understatement, given the abundance of contradictory forces inside each of us.
These contradictions can be thought of as “different languages.” This is a symbol that represents how we don’t understand ourselves. Because this “Tower of Babel” exists within us, it must also appear in the outer world.
Here is the source of chaos.
The Babel within
The conditions of this world are the sum total of what’s going on inside the people who live here. It is largely a jumble of confusion, blindness, wrong conclusions and contradictory aims.
Then the outer confusions and problems confound us, because we ignore how they are being conditioned by our inner ones. As a result, we fail to connect cause and effect.
We can’t make sense of all this “Babel.”
The way to resolve this is to explore the meaning of our emotions, which up until now we have largely not understood.
If we can’t understand ourselves, how can we possibly understand others? Our confusions contribute to our poor ability to communicate.
We struggle to make ourselves understood.
So difficulty communicating is also the Tower of Babel.
We still have far to go—but we have also made real progress. Some walls have come down.
The outer world is a reflection
As in the Babel story, we are surrounded by symbols that reflect inner problems. This is true for nations, religions, languages—even atmospheric conditions.
They are all symbolic of the inner world of the individuals involved. They all express both harmony and disharmony in the souls.
So the world that determines our reality is our inner world.
That’s the cause of it all.
The world we see with our eyes is the effect.
For the most part, we humans have this backwards.
We think that happenings in the world are what disturb us. In fact, we are the ones who are disturbed. As we continue on our journey of growth and healing, we’ll see that this is true.
We can even see this in our surrounding landscapes. They are an expression of all the souls collectively.
On one hand, there is magnificence.
On the other, pollution, grunge and bleakness.
Conditions throughout the world are not so mysterious when we stop and reflect.
Nature and weather, in fact, paint a purer picture of the state of our souls than do relations among nations. Our natural environment represents our thinking, meditating and contemplating aspects, where we raise our thoughts to higher things.
At this point in time, we are able to be alone and get along with ourselves. The problem happens when other people come into the picture.
Now we have to get along with them—communicate with them—despite all the egocentric immaturity that surfaces.
It often seems easier to be alone in nature.
Similar to looking at the way nature symbolizes certain aspects of our souls, we can look at art and artificiality as out-picturings. Everything in the material world can be seen as a symbol of inner attitudes, if we just look through this lens.
Language itself is not the true barrier between people. These are a symbol of something more profound.
If we dismantle our inner barriers, the outer ones will come down on their own.
We still have far to go—but we have also made real progress.
Some walls have come down.
This reflects the way some of our inner defenses—which are so destructive for us—have been removed. At the same time, outer destruction of walls in the world has supported the destruction of our walls within.
The more we continue to dismantle these inner defense mechanisms—which cause so much damage to a person—the more we contribute to better world conditions in every way possible.
The illusion of perfection
In the passage on the Tower of Babel, there is a reference to people trying to build a tower so high it would reach heaven. This, of course, can never happen.
But isn’t that what we’re doing when we try to be perfect?
Our insides are like battlefields. Nonetheless, we think we should try to appear as though we are perfect. Such superiority does not match our present inner state.
In the myth, the people attempt this misguided venture out of pride. They want to reach great heights, but their methods and motives are wrong.
It’s interesting how much that’s like us and our idealized self-image. Where we attempt to fashion a perfect façade to cover our highly imperfect selves.
This cannot succeed.
Such a structure is bound to crumble—just like our pride when we realize we can’t possibly live up to this ridiculous version of ourselves.
Our unrealistic goals and demands crush us, and we end up feeling defeated.
Trying to get to heaven—to reach perfection—by taking a shortcut through material means is doomed to fail.
It’s not realistic.
It makes no more sense than building a tower to reach heaven.
It can’t be done.
Growth and self-development require a more down-to-earth approach.
The cycle of return
In the story of the Tower of Babel, people wanted to reach heaven directly, through a shortcut.
But the true movement of evolution is one of perpetually closing circles. This applies equally to the evolution of the cosmos and to our individual spiritual paths.
We start out with an outward movement and then move in, in a return to perfection.
For humankind, we start in the East, which symbolizes one point of eternity—although this a rather paradoxical way to say this. The West, then, is the goal.
The East was the perfection we started out with.
The West is the perfection we will one day have regained.
Yet they are really one—it’s a loop.
Only through our human eyes do we see two different directions.
When we strike out on a spiritual journey, we begin with a spiritual emphasis, which we then drift away from. Later, we return to it but with a new understanding gained during our time away.
We are back where we started from, but now it’s different.
We’ve become richer and wiser.
It’s like that with perfection, too. We’re coming back to it. And when we get there, we’ll be more perfect than ever.
We don’t know why we do what we do, or why we react the way we do. We are strangers to ourselves.
Estranged from ourselves
It is the “perfect” version of our fragmented selves—our own personal Tower of Babel— that splits us up inside. The resulting estrangement is a symbol of the inner foreign language we can’t understand.
We don’t know why we do what we do, or why we react the way we do.
This leaves us strangers to ourselves.
We have a conscious desire to go in one direction. Then we act on this, but don’t realize there are deeper currents flowing in the very opposite direction.
They throw things into reverse, creating chaos.
This too shows up in the story of the Tower of Babel.
So much truth is contained in this fantastic myth.
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