I feel the need to finally just talk about this. I mean, it is time really. I thought about 8 years ago that it was too crazy, too way out there. But now, looking around me, talking to people I talk to, I realized times have changed. People just get it. Maybe its 2012, or the age of Aquarius. Maybe it's PBS, maybe it's Youtube. Maybe its both. Who knows. The point is, the human mind has opened up a notch wider. You can say we are in a kind of soft awakening.
So, to clarify, I wrote to the esteemed and published biblical scholar and asked precisely that. I was surprised by what he said.
"I'm afraid that your sources have misled you."
I was taken aback. An entire tradition of understanding a crucial language in history was being assigned to "matters of faith". Myths it seems to this myth expert is nothing but the silly things that people who go to synagogues believe in. He has never perhaps heard of Joseph Campbell or Jung.
It seemed not so long ago, that I had an unfortunate email exchange with a biblical scholar whose expertise I sought to investigate a historical mystery. He is to his credit an expert in his field and very well respected. But he has demonstrated a more fundamental problem that has plagued human knowledge in the modern era.
I had been studying Classical Hebrew on my own in order to understand the Seven Days of Creation more. I was fortunate to have had a strong hunch about the story. Further research showed me that the creation myth has more to offer if we re-examine the translation from classical hebrew to rabbinical hebrew. I was wondering why biblical scholars dismissed the meaning of hebrew literature from the rabbinical hebrew perspective.
I had been studying Classical Hebrew on my own in order to understand the Seven Days of Creation more. I was fortunate to have had a strong hunch about the story. Further research showed me that the creation myth has more to offer if we re-examine the translation from classical hebrew to rabbinical hebrew. I was wondering why biblical scholars dismissed the meaning of hebrew literature from the rabbinical hebrew perspective.
So, to clarify, I wrote to the esteemed and published biblical scholar and asked precisely that. I was surprised by what he said.
"I'm afraid that your sources have misled you."
I was taken aback. An entire tradition of understanding a crucial language in history was being assigned to "matters of faith". Myths it seems to this myth expert is nothing but the silly things that people who go to synagogues believe in. He has never perhaps heard of Joseph Campbell or Jung.
Classical hebrew sticks to the notion that language evolves in the same way as european languages does, by blending with other languages. Some expert in languages said that. Rabbinical hebrew experts, more from the religious sector asserts that Hebrew is different. Each letter is a root symbol that not only conveys a phonetic sound and a numerical value but also a conceptual or even archetypal meaning. It is amazing. I can't imagine one person would actually take on the task of creating a spoken language by laboriously constructing each word. Perhaps, the expert that said this was not possible can't either. But, it was largely a literary language at some point and only became a spoken language later on. The language has largely become structured and coded with meaning during its literary stage. Scholars attribute rabbinical hebrew to the medieval times. But evidence can be found in Christian dogma that seems to come from the interpretation of the Hebrew words and thier root letters.
Another example of how rabbinical hebrew translation can be different from classical hebrew translations can be observed in the very first words of the Creation Story.
The word "Ha-erets" means "the earth." The word Earth itself came from this hebrew source "erets." The problem is, nowadays when we hear the word earth, a vision of a blue planet with swirling white clouds floating in space appears in our visual library. We are children of the space age. We've seen the earth from the moon's vantage point. So when you read "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," we picture the earth as the blue planet. The story right then and there loses its credibility. The sun, the moon and the stars does not get created until the fourth day. We all know that the sun was a much earlier addition to the planet itself.
But, if you examine the word "Ha-erets"in rabbinical hebrew, you will realize that "erets" is not talking about Earth, the planet. Erets is earth, soil, the dirt you step on. Ha-erets is defined by its root letters as "the/strong/first/need". Now here's the thing. I noticed that the word "need" is really symbolizing a more universal kind of need. It is more a kind of force that pulls toward itself. The strong first need, to me, sounds more like a definition of gravity in this context. Only that gravity is not separated from matter itself. To the mysterious guys who first coined the word, matter is gravity. It is anything that pulls to itself and is very strong. Combine that with the meaning of the Hebrew word for skies and you may get an ancient version of today's astrophysics. It's hard to say since the symbols can go from very meaningful to total gibberish depending on how you read them.
The word is "Ha-shamayim" which is translated loosely as the heavens, which we understand as the skies. It turns out that the "skies" to whoever it is that first started Hebrew is defined as "the fiery waters" or "the shining/burning waters." In elementary, I learned that plasma is the fourth state of mass and it was not liquid, gas or solid. It was something else altogether.It turns out that plasma, the stuff that is making the stars shine is actually a liquid, a fiery liquid. Given that, the story can now read this way: "In the beginning, God created plasma and gravity producing matter." (The story gets longer if I get on the case of what the word "God" or "Elohim" means. I will get to that at some point.)
Going back to the biblical scholar. He gave me such wonderful patronizing advice of taking the easy path of spending a fortune on a good university, taking the same classes he did in graduate school to come up with this : "its just matters of faith." I politely told him that "I did not know enough to dismiss anything as matters of faith."
His response to my surprise was long, insulting and angry. He said emphatically that I may not quote him or use his name on any of my research. I politely said thank you and silently wondered what on earth did he say that I could use on my research? That my research is trash?
The exchange was enlightening. I found that people with positions in the academia are a little constrained by reputation. See, the problem does not lie in the fact that the answers cannot be found. The answers can be found. We can make the connection if we bothered and work towards finding proof. The problem is one expert says there is nothing there, that it is superstition just because they didn't bother to understand it and then like mindless sheep, every aspiring expert after him treats that as gospel truth, as dogma. They fall into the very trap that the founders of science have sought to free humanity from when they defied the Inquisition. If our long history in science has taught us anything, everything is worthy of investigation. Every piece of the puzzle is part of the picture. One scientist's junk is another's Nobel prize.
I am truly glad we are now no longer mere mental slaves to the opinion of authorities and folks with PhDs. Information is evolving very fast, switching on many lights inside our heads. The questions are coming faster than experts can answer them. The answers are coming from all over. Bloggers, children, amateur astronomers, cartoonists, hobbyists, teenage rappers. They come in different forms-- stories, songs movies and art. A unified picture is emerging and it is very different from what we've been taught in school. While many say that you can't trust what's written in the internet, it is also true that never has there been an explosion of information accessible to everybody until now. The more we talk about it, the more what we talk about organizes into something cohesive. The common threads become easier to see. It is now possible to peer into the collective mind and feel the pulse of the planet. Information flows through us the way thoughts pass through our individual minds. What we know now will be very different from what we will know tomorrow, next month and in the next couple of years.
The narrative of how civilization came to be has evolved in the last five years. Those who dismiss matters of faith, the cornerstone of where we are now in the global culture as mere matters of faith is the new dinosaur. It's the new old school way of looking at things. Matters of faith are no longer something you dismiss. The question is why do we believe them? Why do we hold on to them even if we have been told they are not true. Things of human importance should be investigated, regardless of what sector of culture they come from. It is no longer about debunking myths but about understanding them with eyes wide open, with no looking over our shoulders out of fear of being chastised.
With this much information out there, it is becoming clearer that the history of human knowledge is far more exciting than we thought it was since we started looking back.
I am truly glad we are now no longer mere mental slaves to the opinion of authorities and folks with PhDs. Information is evolving very fast, switching on many lights inside our heads. The questions are coming faster than experts can answer them. The answers are coming from all over. Bloggers, children, amateur astronomers, cartoonists, hobbyists, teenage rappers. They come in different forms-- stories, songs movies and art. A unified picture is emerging and it is very different from what we've been taught in school. While many say that you can't trust what's written in the internet, it is also true that never has there been an explosion of information accessible to everybody until now. The more we talk about it, the more what we talk about organizes into something cohesive. The common threads become easier to see. It is now possible to peer into the collective mind and feel the pulse of the planet. Information flows through us the way thoughts pass through our individual minds. What we know now will be very different from what we will know tomorrow, next month and in the next couple of years.
The narrative of how civilization came to be has evolved in the last five years. Those who dismiss matters of faith, the cornerstone of where we are now in the global culture as mere matters of faith is the new dinosaur. It's the new old school way of looking at things. Matters of faith are no longer something you dismiss. The question is why do we believe them? Why do we hold on to them even if we have been told they are not true. Things of human importance should be investigated, regardless of what sector of culture they come from. It is no longer about debunking myths but about understanding them with eyes wide open, with no looking over our shoulders out of fear of being chastised.
With this much information out there, it is becoming clearer that the history of human knowledge is far more exciting than we thought it was since we started looking back.
