 So, Noah, huh? That dude was the last of the anti-Diluvian patriarchs in Genesis. He built a huge boat, invented wine... You know, he seemed like he's a pretty busy guy, but he did live to be about 950 apparently, so it's not like he wasn't having any fun in that time. We watched the movie recently, partly because it kind of fit nicely with our recent Sumerian epic series, The Great Flood, go and check it out, and there were a few things that struck us as worth talking about. For one, only after watching it did we realize that there's a sense that the movie could be set at any time. We know that it's the past because we know it's the story of Noah and that whole thing, but otherwise it could be set a thousand years in the future in some dystopian society, or you know, a bajillion years in the past for all we know. The movie never really makes it clear, and I think that's part of what makes it so interesting. At its core, Noah is a movie about our connection, or rather, disconnection, with the Creator. And while the original legend is Hebrew, the movie never actually calls the Divine God, a sentiment that upset more than a few religious critics. At its heart, many classical Christian themes are generally brought up though, stuff like love and forgiveness, overhate and lust, and the concept of personal mercy, the idea that we are the ones who decide if we're worth saving and returning to the Creator, rather than the Divine being the one making those choices. But we want to look a little bit deeper, at a more core spiritual level, and ask, what is it that makes Noah tick? As he embodies everything from being a divine messenger who is championing the idea of everything having a place, and being super vegan, all the way to a crazy, almost fascist who sees nothing wrong with killing his own grandchildren because he believes it's the will of God. And then in the last second, you know, find some compassion. Bear in mind, we're obviously talking about the movie here, for the old-school biblical Noah never wanted to kill his kids, although he did curse Ham out for seeing him naked, but hey, what family doesn't have drama, right? Anyways, from the beginning of the movie we're introduced to Noah, and he seems to be living in complete harmony with nature. He gathers his food from berries and shrubs, makes his clothes out of natural textiles, and even teaches his kids the important concept of only taking what one needs. On top of all of that, he's a badass warrior who fights off like three guys with a tiny knife to save an armadillo fox thing. In a nutshell, he seems to have most of his lower chakras pretty balanced and in tune if you know what I'm saying. He's surviving just fine, living off the land, has three healthy kids, beautiful wife, and a strong determination and willpower, and seems to have some pretty hardcore energy reserves for carrying huge bags and going on hikes. His root, sacral, and solar plexus are all completely in balance, or at least working pretty good. He knows how to live and how to act out his desire calmly and rationally in the physical dimension. An important distinction is made early on too in that Noah doesn't actively look for signs from the divine, he simply goes about his life and allows the signs to come to him, approaching them each with careful thought and from a position of acceptance. When he gets his wet dream, no, not like that, about the coming flood, he decides to visit Grandpa Methuselah, who bears all the hallmarks of your typical shaman. He lives in a cave in the mountains, is old and wise, and reminiscent of Taoist sages, and even gives Noah a drink that not only induces magical visions, but also looks an awful lot like ayahuasca. And if you haven't ever tried ayahuasca, let me tell you, it's no strawberry sundae. After his plant medicine experience, Noah starts receiving instructions to build the ark, along with some help from the now friendly watchers, who totally want to help and not kill everybody for some reason. And so, sorry, I should probably give some backstory here. In the book of Enoch, the watchers are angels dispatched to earth to watch over humans, but they soon begin to lust for human women, and at the prodding of their leader, defect en masse to illicitly instruct humanity and procreate among them? Yikes. The offspring of these unions are called the Nephilim, savage giants who pillage the earth and endanger humanity. And straight up, the deluge itself was a force from God to wipe out these Nephilim specifically. But hey, I guess in Hollywood, you gotta change some things around from time to time. Kinda makes sense too, as the watchers were depicted as rock monsters in the movie, and human watcher offspring might be freaky. It'd be like a bunch of things from Fantastic Four running around eating everything in sight. Anyways, after his ceremony, Noah's higher centers start to come into focus, and he can receive messages from the divine. Coupled with his powerful root chakras from earlier, he can now channel an idea from the source, and put that into informed action and make a change in the world. Naturally, this attracts the attention of Tubalcain and the other humans in the cities. Wait a second, Tubalcain? Is that his name? I just call him the big hairy bad guy. But either way, it makes sense that they'd noticed, because a huge forest growing apparently out of nowhere isn't exactly inconspicuous. Interestingly, Methuselah's idea about how God would end the world in a blaze of fire and brimstone is exactly how the cities in this movie are depicted. They're filled with hedonism, the fires of industry, and enough blood to make even the Aztecs happy. And much like Tolkien and his environmentalism, one of the main sins depicted in the movie is our disconnection with the natural world. Noah and his family live in a place reminiscent of Eden, with lush greenery, foods and animals of every kind living in harmony with nature and the divine. The cities, however, are industrial havens that have sucked the life out of nature around them. When Noah crosses that threshold and sneaks into one of the cities to see how people live, the experience is so traumatic, and he's so disturbed by what he sees that not only does he run away, but also has come to the conclusion that everyone has to die, including his own family because the capacity for sin is also in them. There's a scene here where Noah sees himself looking back at him, but this time, an evil Noah, dark shadow Noah, which really pushes him into a darker state of mind. The thing is, what he doesn't take into account is that being in this evil place, he is being affected by everyone else's bad vibes and perceptions. He takes seeing evil him as a sign from God that he has to die too, not that he is being affected poorly by his environment. Too bad Bruce Lipton wasn't around back then to explain to him the biology of belief and epigenetics, but this scene, while powerful, actually makes a bit more sense when viewed through the lens of the chakras. See, we've talked about Noah's lower centers being active and some of his higher ones being engaged while he receives the messages and signs from the Creator, but we haven't yet touched on the middle one, the heart. Now there's a lot of debate in New Age circles about which box to put the heart chakra in, as some people claim it's a part of the lower centers as it governs love and connection to our physical life and others claim that it's obviously a higher center because love itself is the purest of spiritual emotions that is channeled from the divine. But what if it's both though? Generally speaking, most would agree that the heart chakra helps us with empathy and compassion, things that Noah seemingly lacks until the end of the movie. Oops, spoiler alert. It seems as if Noah's heart chakra goes through a sort of journey, from being partly open to closed and finally back to balance. In the beginning he's depicted as a caring guy who looks after his family, takes Ela in when she has no one, and tries to save an injured animal and then prepares a cute little funeral for it. This Noah is probably the best suited to start building the ark since he receives a message and starts acting on it out of care for the animals and his family. Once he gets emotionally scarred by the city though, his heart closes and he loses that connection to love and compassion that made him so great in the beginning. You could even look at it from the other side of the coin. He's doing so to find Ham and Japheth wives, but maybe also Loki wanting to see if other humans can be redeemed and act of pure love. Going into it, his heart could just as easily be too open, making him unconsciously absorb every emotion and character of the city without any filter. Maybe he becomes too empathetic and absorbs everything, lust, fear, anger, chaos, whatever is going on in the city, and eventually he just snaps, leading to the closing of his heart. This idea of a filter makes a lot of sense. Perhaps we can see the heart as the bridge between our lower chakras and our higher ones, the bridge between the physical and the spiritual bodies, kind of like our own internal avatar Aang. When no one gets a message or sign from the Creator, it's filtered down through each chakra until it meets the heart and the intent is passed onto the lower centers to be carried out in the physical. With every chakra in balance, such an intent is filtered through a loving and compassionate lens, which also means that the act carried out is done lovingly and with compassion. With a blocked or disconnected heart though, our intuition or understanding of messages and signs from the Divine is skewed and we would struggle to interpret things properly. Once Noah gets back from the city, he is almost completely a different person. He becomes exactly like the other humans, being solely driven by his root or sacred chakra. Interestingly, when he asks for signs from here on out, they either don't come or he misinterprets them, perhaps because he's seeing them from a purely physical sense of what they mean on the surface without considering the deeper meaning found in love. This idea of not communicating properly with the Divine is also echoed by Tubalcain when he rallies his armies. He's about to storm the ark and he tries to talk to God, asking him, the problem is he's approaching that communication from a place of anger and resentment. He feels entitled to communication because he believes, I am in your image. I give life and I take it. How are we not the same? He's actually not wrong. Humans do have the ability to create life and take it away, but by acting out in anger or not from a place of love, he simply perpetuates the reality that he's living in. Back with Noah, it finally gets to the point where Illa is revealed as pregnant and has two baby girls, who he immediately decides to kill because they might be able to have more kids in the future. Try not to read into how, since Noah and his family are supposedly the only ones left alive. Killing in general is pretty bad, but killing your grandkids probably tops the list of worst grandpa ever, and it's seemingly like Noah has no sense of love whatsoever. When the rain stops, we see an interesting dualism of perspective from Illa and Noah. The rains have stopped. The Creator smiles on our child. The rains have stopped because of your child, yes. Illa, who is coming from a place of love for her children, believes the flood stopping to show that the children are innocent and worthy of coming into this new post-flood world. Noah, however, thinks God is now angry, more sinners have been brought into the world, and will continue to wash everything away once these kids are killed. Depending on how you look at it, God arguably never actually answers Noah here. If anything, there's a lack of an answer. Which Noah interprets as God giving him the all clear to just, you know, go up and knife his kids. But I think it's obvious at this point that this is Noah's ego deciding for himself rather than inaction on the divine's part. He interprets the lack of a message as a message in itself, and in this moment where he is seemingly ignored by God, Noah becomes that which he is fighting against, angry dirty beardy bad guy, taking action based solely in a loveless mindset. Later on, we find out that God left the whole thing up to his interpretation anyway, and did so to allow Noah, who at this point represents, you know, all of humanity, to choose whether they were worthy of coming into the new age. If Noah teaches us anything, it's that all of our chakras must be in balance, and you can't rely on living on only one side of the spectrum. If even one of your centers is not open enough, or even too open, it can affect all of the others quite negatively. More importantly, his journey from unknown bliss to blockage and finally to balance to love teaches us the importance of the heart chakra in interpreting messages and synchronicities from our higher self. Without a balanced heart to filter the energy through love and compassion, we can't successfully integrate and understand the divine elements of ourselves or put those incredible intuitive emotions into physical action without losing ourselves in the process. In the end, when Noah discovers that God puts him in charge because he knew he would make the right decision, he acknowledges the fact that all he had in his heart was love, a sentiment that we should always consider when making a decision or interpreting the meaning of things. With that, thank you so much for watching. If you liked this video, be sure to like, comment, and subscribe, you know, spread the video around, and we'll see you again next week for something new. As always, strive for balance, compassion, and always live life through a lens of love.