Parashat Noach 5786 – 10/25/2025
Beginning with Bereishit 5781 (17 October 2020) we embarked on a new format. We will be considering Rambam’s (Maimonides’) great philosophical work Moreh Nevukim (Guide for the Perplexed) in the light of the knowledge of Vedic Science as expounded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The individual essays will therefore not necessarily have anything to do with the weekly Torah portion, although certainly there will be plenty of references to the Torah, the rest of the Bible, and to the Rabbinic literature. For Bereishit we described the project. The next four parshiyyot, Noach through Chayei Sarah, laid out a foundational understanding of Vedic Science, to the degree I am capable of doing so. Beginning with Toledot we started examining Moreh Nevukim.
Bereishit 6:9-11:32
Rambam now turns to another weakness of the senses:
The second count arises from their saying that the senses can be mistaken with regard to the object of their apprehension. Thus a man, when he is far off, sees a big thing as small; a small thing as big, if it is in water; and a crooked thing as straight, if part of it is in water and part of it outside. Similarly someone suffering from jaundice sees things as yellow, and one whose tongue is steeped with yellow bile tastes sweet things as bitter. They enumerate many things of that kind. They say: for this reason the senses should not be trusted to the extent of adopting them as the principles of demonstration.
We are now moving away from the physical aspect of perception, which have accidental limitations (the imperfections in our instruments) and essential limitations (e.g. the Uncertainty Principle), and considering the mental aspect of perception – the way we evaluate what we perceive, or think we perceive.
Recall that last week we discussed various physical limitation of light and the instruments that register this light. In particular, there are limitations of the human eye that restrict the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can see (“visible light”) and that we can’t see (ultraviolet and infrared, microwaves, radio waves, etc.). That is partly because of the structure of the eye that collects the light, and of the reactivity of the cells of the retina with respect to different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.
All this is well and good, but once the light has hit the retina, another process begins, and that is the process of interpretation. When a photon of light hits a cell in the retina, and electrical impulse is emitted which travels along the optic nerve to the visual cortex in the back of the brain. In the visual cortex certain patterns of light and dark and color are encoded into edges and curves and shapes and matched with patterns we have already learned to recognize. This learning process starts at birth and continues as we grow. At some point, in a way that I don’t believe is really understood, the set of electrical impulses in our nervous system gets transduced into a mental image, a non-physical structure in our mind. It is in this transduction, or interpretation, that errors can creep in.
There is an old Indian story about a small village that had a coil of rope lying in the street. It was dusk and someone saw the coil of rope. Thinking it was a snake (India has some large and dangerous snakes) he starts running and yelling, “Snake! Snake!” The rest of the village takes up the cry, and soon everyone is cowering all night in their houses lest the snake come in and harm them. After a night of trembling, the sun rises, and everyone looks out the window and sees that the snake never actually existed – it was a rope all along. The fault, in this case, lay partly on the physical side – the low light conditions at dusk – that prevented the people from distinguishing those features that would allow them to tell the difference between a snake and a coil of rope. But a lot of the problem is mental – the same photons hit the same cells in the retina, but the conclusions reached after all the neurological processing were entirely delusory. Or, in the words of Yogi Berra, “Ninety percent of this game is half mental.”
The point of the story of the snake and the rope is much more profound than simply one of perception. Nonetheless, it does bring out the danger of relying on the senses for complete knowledge. The senses, the mind, the imaginative faculty, the rational faculty, as long as they are dealing with the finite world, the world of the snake, so to speak, are only going to be able to access finite knowledge.
Maharishi identifies two basic means of gaining knowledge – objective and subjective. We have been discussing the objective means of gaining knowledge – study of objects and their relationships. We have seen that there is a subjective component even to objective knowledge, simply because it’s knowledge , and knowledge is inherently subjective. The objective means of gaining knowledge try to minimize the subjective aspect by using repeatable experiments, where all subjects can agree on the objective situation. This is really a paradigm from the “hard” sciences where we are studying “hard” objects that we can (apparently) separate ourselves from. For the “soft” sciences, where the “measurements” involve the interaction between the researcher (a human being) and the object of the research (another human being), this separation is more of a problem – the observer’s (researcher’s) subjectivity can skew the responses of the object, and the object’s responses can be interpreted in very different manner depending on the state of the researcher.
In fact, even in physics, the boundary between subjective and objective is blurred when we are discussing quantum mechanical phenomena. When we make a measurement in quantum mechanics, we don’t always get the same results. If we go to measure the position of a stationary object, we get the same result each time. With quantum mechanics, repeated measurements give a spread of results. The only thing we get is a probability distribution of results. The interesting thing is that the object only gives us a specific answer when we make a measurement. That is, it is only when the consciousness of the researcher interacts with the object that the object actually becomes an object with a fixed measured value. This is called the “collapse of the wave function” or the “quantum measurement problem.” We have discussed this in these pages before, and you can click the link for more information.
What we find is that the gap between subjective and objective means of gaining knowledge is not as absolute as we thought. The real subjective means of gaining knowledge is what we know as intuition – literally “inner knowledge.” It is a precious commodity in many fields – the ability to know the way a system operates without needing to go through a long process of analysis. And the ultimate value of intuition is achieved in Unity Consciousness, where we recognize that our own, inner Pure Consciousness is the same as the ultimate value of every piece of “objective” creation. Then we have perfect intuition about the functioning of the objective world, because it is the functioning of our own consciousness. Our senses become perfected, our ability to interpret what we perceive is perfect, our understanding is perfect.
This of course undermines the issues that the Mutakallimūn have raised. Rambam, in the rest of this section, points out that the Mutakallimūn have an ulterior motive for their sense-bashing. Since there was, at the time Rambam was writing, really no empirical evidence to support many of their claims, they were forced, as it were, to claim that they were right, but the senses are too crude to resolve the relevant objects. Of course, in Rambam’s time and place, Unity Consciousness wasn’t available either. Next week we’ll move on to the proofs offered by the Mutakallimūn for various important propositions.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Noach
“Noach” means “rest” as in “Be Still and Know that I Am Gd” (Psalm 46:10). To Noach whose stillness allowed him to hear Gd’s Words and to follow them, Gd gave the task of keeping life on Earth alive while most of it was destroyed.
In Parashat Noach, our world begins again after Gd destroys its population, all but those in the Ark.
In Bereishit, many say Creation begins; others say, the separation of Heaven and earth begins; I say it is not the beginning; it is not a new creation. It is another joyful cycle in the infinitely rapidly cycling that is the vibration of Torah, the Liveliness of Gd. Torah and Gd are One.
It is not that there is ever a new Creation, Gd is eternally complete: all is already accomplished in Gd. The Whole of Gd is in every point of Gd and at every point, every moment, cycling infinitely rapidly, Gd reveals Unity separating into Heaven and Earth, into Subtle and Gross and returning to Unity. All of Torah is always taking place in an infinitesimal instant and also timelessly and in Infinite Cosmic Time.
In Parashat Noach, we see the story of how the diversity of the Gross is dissolved into the Ocean of Subtlety and yet an Ark with the seeds of diversity remains to reveal that the Wholeness is always there, diverse and also unified.
Parashat Noach inspires us to be aware that we can experience this Wholeness. It begins by describing Noah as righteous, perfect in his generations, walking with Gd. Since all but Noah’s family were destroyed in the Flood, we are all descendants of Noah and have the potential to be perfect although clearly neither today, throughout Torah, nor throughout history do we see more than a few people fulfilling this potential.
We can also be inspired by remembering that not only are we descendants of righteous Noah but also as Bereishit says “… in the image of God He made man.“ Genesis 9:6
Since there is nothing but Gd, to say that Gd made man in Gd’s own Image means that we have the potential to remember we are roles Gd Plays, and we can rise to a level where we are perfectly comfortable playing our roles in God’s Play. We can do this by favoring those thoughts and actions that do the positive mitzvot Torah ordains and avoiding the negative ones.
And yet we can wonder “what is keeping us from realizing this full potential?” My answer is simply that whenever Gd wants to Reveal to us that we are Gd playing the roles of us, Gd will do it. In the meantime, everything we experience is a clue in the puzzle and we need to keep guessing and acting, refining our guesses with each result we experience from our actions.
Nonetheless, even in this state of massive ignorance compared to the Omniscience of Gd, I experience life as joyful, blissful with a lot of teshuvah, return to Oneness, already taking place and it seems to me that many in our congregation and community can say the same.
So, life is fun, even in our state of ignorance, and we enjoy the safety of a bit of an ark of Joy and kind actions that helps us flourish in the floods of ignorance, misinformation and selfishness that are so common in our world.
This parshah tells us one thing we should do to avoid falling more deeply into ignorance. Do not think that any action of ours can reach Gd. Only Gd Knows Gd and only Gd’s Grace can reveal Gd within us. Forgetting this, in their vanity, descendants of Noah sought to build a tower that would reach the heavens. Prior to this attempt, they were a single people, speaking a single language. To prevent them from wasting time with their project, (which could never succeed since a gross building made of gross materials can never reach the subtle realm: heaven is not in the sky, it is in the delicate loving feelings that are primordial vibrations of Gd.) Gd limited their understanding so they were divided into 70 different nations, each speaking a different language. This separation continues in our times but we see a rise of Love, loving Wholeness, loving details. Through kindness, we are experiencing deeper and finer levels of feeling, of Love; we are learning to link the diversity of life with the Unity. We are learning to create the effect that the tower was intended to create but without the vanity: we are learn-ing to experience the subtle and to experience Gd, the Wholeness, in which all levels of subtlety and coarseness are but Joyful Vibrations of Gd Knowing Gd.
The parshah ends with Terah, taking his family, including Abraham and Sara (at this time, Abram and Sarai) toward Canaan, which will be the Promised Land. The family does not enter Canaan, they settle on the way, in Haran. “Haran” means “mountain,” “Canaan” means “synchronicity.” We are getting a taste of the fruit of Torah, the last parshah, V’Zot Haberacha, in which Gd has Moses ascend a mountain from which he can see Canaan. From this mountain, Abraham and Sara have the possibility for experiencing the synchronicity that unites the diversity of the separate nations, languages.
The next parshah, Lech Lechah, is often translated as “Go forth, your self” or, as those with a bit of experience of the self as Self, can read, “Go to your Self.” Go to the Promised Land outside you by revealing to your self, the Promised Land within you, the Self.
Since Gd will later speak with Abraham as he did with Noah, we see in the ending of this parshah a foretaste of this return of perfection to our world, to humanity. We are seeing a foretaste of a world in which we can synchronize diversity and create unity, common language, common experience, while delighting in and creating ever more and more delightful diverse expressions of Unity.
We see signs of this in our community; not that I know either that we have members to whom Gd speaks or that I know that we don’t but I do feel that we are dedicating our lives toward right action, service and a return to Wholeness, Oneness. We are learning to cherish each other and to meet, by Zoom or in person, on the level of fine feeling, of Love.
Baruch HaShem