The Tower of Babel - Fragmentation of Language

 In this episode of the Gifted Neurodivergent podcast, delves into the Tower of Babel story from the Old Testament, exploring its deeper meaning through the lens of holistic intelligence and societal fragmentation. Initially puzzled by the story as a child, I now interpret it as a metaphor for the division of human intelligence into cognitive and somatic parts. I argue that modern society overvalues cognitive intelligence, leading to a dismissal of big-picture, holistic thinking and the marginalization of creative individuals.
The discussion covers the historical and modern implications of this fragmentation, the importance of holistic intelligence, and the role of neurodivergence in maintaining a blended cognitive and somatic perspective. It concludes by emphasizing the need to nurture holistic intelligence in the face of societal and technological changes, urging listeners to reconnect with their innate capacity for empathy, creativity, and multidimensional thinking. 

Transcript

Tower Of Babel - Langauge of Fragmentation 

[00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome to the gifted neurodivergent podcast. 

Today, we're going to talk about the Tower of Babel, a story from the Old Testament, found in the Book of Genesis. If you grew up in a Western country and went to Jewish or Christian schooling, you've probably heard of it. 

As a child, I heard it and was very confused. The idea that people just suddenly started speaking different languages made no sense to me. 

I remember they had a poster on the wall in Sunday school with people falling off the tower, shouting in different languages, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Icelandic, Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, Russian, Slavic, and at the bottom, was English explaining the story. very quickly. I just remember thinking "how do you wake up speaking another language? How are you falling off this tower and learning it as you fall? None of it made much sense to me. You need exposure to learn languages. It just all made me very frustrated so I ignored it. I feel like that's why it's one of these little stories that people [00:01:00] really never talk about. 

As an adult, though, it has a very different meaning for me. Because researching intelligence, creativity, holistic intelligence, specifically, now I understand what they're really talking about in this story. The problem with this story is not about language. It's about fragmentation of intelligence. 

Thanks to Dr. Linda Silverman's work, we already know that people see the world differently. They see it in 2D, or 3D. But this also applies beyond that. I see it in language. I see it in writing styles. 

I see it in the way people move through the world. 

People are either somatic, body based thinkers, and they communicate with emotion, and they see big picture, and they have symbolic language. 

Or, they're cognitive thinkers. They stay in the small picture. They stick with details, and facts, and logic. And they will regurgitate at length all of these things they learned without ever getting to any point. They never see the root cause to fix it. This is a problem because our society only values cognitive intelligence. 

Right now. If you're a big picture thinker, you're dismissed as grandiose or [00:02:00] narcissistic half the time. You're told that there's something wrong with you. I see many somatic men, very angry, very frustrated, very detached from their families, because they don't understand that their families aren't the ones that were oppressing them. It was the system. They were aligned with the system against the people that they lived with and loved. Which causes a lot of chaos and heartache. The third group that is out there is the creatives. We're the smallest group. We only make up about 2 percent of the population. n It should be the whole population or 98 percent of the population. But because of their fragmentation, only 2 percent of us manage to make it through maintaining the ability to blend our cognitive and somatic thinking. The creatives, use story and science together because it is the universal, holistic language. 

And it's the one that our systems don't recognize . They don't respond to this. Literally, as someone who's incredibly centered between their somatic and cognitive intelligence, and because my intelligence is unified, I struggle to understand what the, Eckhart [00:03:00] Tolle's of the world are saying . I struggle to understand that because it's only one side of my intelligence, (and it doesn't make sense) unless it's multidimensional. Just as much as I struggle with a lot of academic papers, because they put out all these details and facts, and I could see this 70 different ways, and the way they chose to look at it is not the way I would have chosen to look at it. It would be much more valuable if you looked at it from a different perspective, and it would change everything. So I find it very interesting and also sad that we don't have a middle place. The need for That middle place makes perfect sense when you listen to the story of Babel. 

So let's talk about the story of Babel. Let's talk about how they were supposedly all brought together. Because they wanted to find each other, as the story goes, and their compassionate leader wanted them to build a tower to heaven because people love laboring on towers to heaven. God saw this and intervened, confusing their language so they couldn't understand each other, and as a result, they abandoned the tower, the tower fell, they scattered across the earth, and they became divided. This story is ridiculous because who is actually super [00:04:00] excited about making a tower? 

I don't know anybody that wants to lay the bricks of their house. It's not something you're like, yay, let's all get together and lay the bricks of our house. That's not what happens. also How did they come back together after 250 years? And what was it 250 years from? Apparently, the story says they were scattered by the great flood, that same great flood of Noah's Ark. 

And then suddenly, 250 years later, they're finding each other. The 250 years earlier, it was ancient Egypt. And their empire collapse. They collapsed because of degradation. Resulting in this flood. Now, Noah built that amazing ark. 

We know about Noah. We know some people survived, and these are some of those people. But what we don't know is that, They would be speaking 250 years later the same language. Were they all from Egypt? That's not really clear. But what is clear is that, like children , like every animal in the world, there is a way to communicate without needing a shared language, per se. 

I am [00:05:00] holistic intelligent. I regularly travel, and when I travel, I connect with people beautifully. Almost more so than I do in the States, because in the States, People are highly fragmented, but overseas people are not as fragmented. I can have really deep, sweet, wonderful conversations in broken google trans ator with people and really feel a connection there. 

My children have this too. When I put them into school, they all went into Spanish immersion. They had no Spanish prior , and they have large age gaps between them, so they weren't really bringing it home. And as a result, our, my children had to learn to speak Spanish, but even in the first couple weeks they were connecting with their peers and their teachers would be like, how did they know that about their peer? 

We sort of know things about each other because we can embody it in ourselves. And then we know that if this is how we felt, then this is how this person feeling. that's pretty much mind reading guys. It's just based on embodied cognition. 

The next part is why would they all want to build this massive tower voluntarily? It's this back breaking project, and, it just seems like an illogical thing that we all just want to [00:06:00] live together in this tower. . I don't believe it. They were proberly all forced to come together. They were probably captured. This is probably a warlord situation, something we should all be thinking about because we're about to face this again in our own collapse. 

There are gonna be people who are roving around trying to, build power. There's a reason for all of this. This all ties together. The fall of Egypt and the birth of fragmentation again it's a mini collapse story. Where The example is so clear in this one. 

We can look at all these other collapse stories. Jared Diamond goes on and on and on, but really this one does the most beautiful job I've seen of making it very clear that the fragmentation of intelligence is what causes the collapse,. In slavery systems create division and hierarchy with the fragmentation of our intelligence. 

Fragmentation occurs because They separate people into roles, laborers, managers, rulers. Holistic intelligence is lost, and the people become trapped in one mode of thinking, body or mind based. 

The most holistic people, [00:07:00] they're put aside. In ancient Egypt, they were actually slaves to the pharaoh what they could see, heal, or what they could do that was exceptional, was allotted to the pharaoh. This made the pharaoh seem more godlike, because they had these special abilities of those who the creatives. 

But this group didn't seem to have creatives, or they did and destroyed them, or they ran away and were still living free in the woods. But s omewhere between when this group came all together, speaking holistic, and the tower fell they were lost. 

So What does holistic look like? They were operating under internal framework. Holistic intelligence means you build your own internal frameworks, and you don't need the outside external frameworks, you have more perspective taking. You think more multi dimensional. 

Indigenous still function this way today, using body intelligence, emotions, and mind as a single function. but that's what was lost in Babel, and today. Which is why they weren't able to speak anymore. Our science tells us modern education fragments intelligence by systemically destroying creativity. 

We have Dr. George Land's study funded by NASA. Where he [00:08:00] talks about 98 percent of the children having creative genius at 5, and then 2 percent of the adults retaining creative genius in adulthood. Our systems actively destroy our cognitive flexibility, which is the connection between somatic and cognitive intelligence and seeing the whole picture. 

This is cerebellum work. We do not seem to know much about the cerebellum . We're only barely getting into how the cerebellum blends our intelligence. This is highly recognized, though, in ancient China, in ancient Egypt. They thought this was the cat's meow of intelligence. This is what drives pattern recognition. 

 Our systems like to get rid of it and then at the end say, let's have holistic intelligence or let's have natural intelligence. Hey, pattern recognition, but not do any studies on it. That's exactly what's going down right now. Now, neurodivergence is not the problem, fragmentation is. 

Neurodivergence, who aren't broken, they're the people who maintain some level of holistic intelligence and they're moving through, quite fine, but they're different. . I'm different. I move through the world in a different way than most people because I don't follow the frameworks of our system. 

I [00:09:00] follow my internal frameworks because they're based on my compassionate empathy, they're based on my unconditional love, and they're based on my creative genius. Neurodivergents who are broken, though, we see them at the extremes. Because our interoception is so loud that it pushes you one to extreme or the other. 

 The inside of your body is so loud when it's fragmented that you have no peace and you are emotionally much more volatile. Twice exceptional people are not experiencing asynchronous development. I've talked about this. They're twice gifted. But they're showing us what the system's forcible separation of cognitive and somatic is doing. 

The somatics have all been repressed. They are not being cultivated in their systems intellectually. Your somatic intelligence has profound intellectual knowledge. And this is not showing up. So everybody's grades, are highly skewed. because They're not valuing big picture. 

Basically, if you're big picture, your intelligence is not truly being recognized. I see this profoundly in us, the twice exceptional, because [00:10:00] literally you can see how the somatic intelligence, my math and science, is a lot lower than my humanities . It's a lot lower because I just wasn't cultivated in it. I have turned that around as an adult, but I can tell you that because my cognitive takes care of the humanities and my body is more math and science. It is profoundly intelligent in both, but it's probably more intelligent in the math and science. And I have not received any cultivation in that. I've had to do all of that cultivation myself. 

We talk about sacred geometry, I've put posts up about it. For those of us who are math and science somatic, we really, really need that sacred geometry because we're all about whole picture. And our systems prevent you from really seeing that. I know this, my math savant is insane about how Everything is so detail oriented yet doesn't have any applicable real life examples. 

So, thank God for AI, we pulled that up. But, this is what we do. We pathologize big picture thinking. We say, oh, you're too [00:11:00] grandiose. We, there's something wrong with you, you have too many emotions, you're too intense. You can't win if you're anybody who has somatic intelligence, whether you're twice exceptional or somatic. 

You can't win because the only people who get to be big picture thinking are the ruling class. 

Now. Corporations today mirror the Tower of Babel. The corporate jobs in the Tower of Babel, you have the workers siloed, laborers serve managers, the managers serve executives, and the executives serve the owners. 

The cognitive class sits in air conditioned offices while the laborers are breaking in the field. They're just making sure that the numbers are hit, and push them higher. The actual bodies, the people who are doing the labor, there's no real Concerned for we can see this in Amazon reports like people getting injured and hurt in Amazon and then there was that other report of Holding people back in some chicken plant and then six people dying because they stayed too long and didn't get home and ended Up getting washed away. 

This is going to increase because this is the future we're facing the rise of AI and the end of cognitive supremacy is just gonna add gasoline to that fire. AI will be replacing [00:12:00] cognitive intelligence. So, like machines replace physical labor, we'll have some people who might need some, who'll still have some value or some roles, but, a lot of it's going to be AI replacing it. 

So the cognitive will lose their place, and the system's going to collapse because AI can't replace the holistic or the somatic and we have not culitivated that. 

the death of shared meaning also results as loss from fragmentation. We lose our ability to communicate. We lose, we have political estrangement, we have family estrangement, we have people living in different realities because their intelligence is so deeply fragmented into this. 

This is going to be really scary when we have these communities that are mostly cognitive people who have bought into these communities and they all get together. There's going to be warring in those communities. Because you have a bunch of people who are used to dictating what's going to happen. Now they're all living together and they're all going to, , kumbaya. No, that's not going to happen. 

You also have other communities where people are breaking down and they're fighting because they really truly believe in the hierarchy. This is why we had that warlord come [00:13:00] along and sweep up all these people 250 years later because there's certain people still maintaining that fragmented intelligence and they're going to keep perpetuating the cycle on and on. 

But if we accepted our holistic intelligence, not only will we be able to move and work fluid with nature, we'll be able to figure out how to survive, we're going to be able to avoid war. We're going to be able to get past this. The most valuable intelligence in our future will be holistic. 

Because compassionate empathy, which is mind and body empathy coming together to be more, is pattern recognition. That's greater, holistic pattern recognition. Unconditional love is healing and community building. The better you are at it, the more you're going to be valuable. Creative genius is the ability to create, survive, know and see what's coming, get in front of it. 

These three things are the things our society devalues, and they're the most important for survival and adaptability. Our cognitive flexibility, the thing that twice exceptional people have been pathologized for, is the very thing that's [00:14:00] going to save us because we can see the whole and get in front of it. 

Holistic intelligence is not a theory. It's legit. We're all born with it. Every little kid has this. We know it. We see it in Piaget's work. We see it in Maria Montessori's work. We see it in our science. And yet nobody questions, that this is maybe not the way to be, or it's healthy, or whatever. 

Nobody will go all the way up because they're too fragmented. They will not look at the core, reasons because they can't. They cannot see it. \ 

Today's corporations are replicating this. Every little tiny one of them is a babel . The workers are siloed. They're exhausted. They don't have any way to make their grievances heard. So, what happens is, just like the Tower of Babel, there is a breakdown. There is some catalyst that kind of flips it over. These bricks, these perfect bricks that society had finally figured out, Become weapons. 

 I think this is one interesting fact when I did this research, they kept talking about how [00:15:00] perfect the bricks were the closer they got to collapse. Because the focus was all wrong. The focus was no longer on people, it was on the perfection of the buildings, the perfection of the actual implements they used to make them. But not on the people, not on the health of the people. So yes, we may get more metrics and more specific, but at the same time we've destroyed the entire environment, and we also have destroyed the people. 

So the systems collapse. So this idea that we can divide our intelligence, fragment our intelligence, and then create perfection is really a lie. You can't destroy whole sections, only value a certain group, and then hold us all to the standard of that certain group without causing great pain and great dysfunction. 

AI will replace the cognitive, which means the middle management, the data analysts, the creative professionals, are going to get pushed out. We're not going to have them. AI is eliminating the cognitive class. As a result, they're [00:16:00] not going to be useful anymore. They're going somatic people who were tossed aside when everything moved overseas. 

But the cognitive never had any unions, so they're even more at risk than the somatic people . 

AI is not holistic though. It does not understand the world around it. All of its data is 2D and it can't really update it unless it's got holistic people updating it. 

So the future's looking at, especially now with this deep seek thing, the future's looking at data. Being much more important than AI. We can build all these little tiny A Is it's open source right now. In fact, And all these little tiny AIs and the data that's put into it will make or break it. Holistic data is the way to go. 

This means that AI automates the cognitive class away, but those of us who have been devalued in the past, our value is about to go up. 

Now, how does that go when society's falling and your values going up and other people's going down? It doesn't work well. This is why they burn witches. This is why they do horrible things to [00:17:00] creative people because they've been conditioned to believe that creatives are less than and now all of a sudden they're not. And that makes them hate them because you are supposed to be lower. It's no different than when they take minorities and say they're less than, women are less than, all these things that they have. 

They're all lies. They're just biases because that is how you create hierarchy. So they create the hierarchy of people that are most like them. Women could do this next. We could be the ones that create the hierarchy. The problem is that pretty much hierarchy is based on cattle raising and females are the ones that have babies. So that makes females more of a commodity. This is all disgusting, if you ask me. We shouldn't be having this. It never should be this way, but that's where we're at. 

 We have a breakdown of shared reality. We have political estrangement, media estrangement, family estrangement, social division, and AI is going to accelerate that because people are going to be looking to understand what they already believe. 

What we had before. It wasn't healthy that there was only one reality and everybody had to, agree with that reality. [00:18:00] But we can have holistic intelligence where people learn multidimensionality again, and they see the realities of others, and it's equally as important as their own. 

We have lived like that. The indigenous still live like that. It's the only societies that don't collapse. The problem is that ours is not indigenous. Ours is a giant hierarchy, and the moment people decide they no longer agree on basic reality, all collective action pretty much blows up. 

Governments can't function, economies become chaotic, people turn on each other, and truth and trust is gone. Babel is not about linguistic confusion. It's about the collapse of shared reality itself. The only people who are going to survive this are the meek who inherit the earth, because they are the holistic. 

The intelligence we're all born with, I highly recommend, if you can, to maintain that intelligence, in your children. Help them maintain their creative intelligence. Because they will need it more than ever. 

We [00:19:00] have more neurodivergence coming up. I don't think it's because kids are more sensitive. I think it's because the schools are more fragment oriented. Every ABA class, every tutoring, every thing they do, drugs included, all of that is to fragment your intelligence further. 

We have three pillars of survival they are the compassion, empathy, your pattern recognition, your unconditional love, your healing and community building and your creative genius, your ability to adapt and innovate. 

Those are all holistic. They require your emotions to navigate your somatic and cognitive and bring them together and find flow, find your best self, find super focus and special interest. Yes, those are not pathologies. They're the highest level of intelligence. I can't believe people can't see that. All of these things are what's going to help you. 

 We are living Babble 2. 0. We can either, take this lesson and use it, or we can just keep going on like we are. I'm taking this lesson. I'm using it. Because [00:20:00] I have children I need to create a future for. Because the one in our system is horrific. 

If you see the patterns If you're feeling things and you want to understand them better, reach out. I have savant circles and we are trying to change the world. We're trying to build, a deeper understanding of holistic intelligence. We're trying to use those of us who have natural talent and higher sensitivity to understand it so that we can share it with everyone else because it's the only way I see forward. I don't really see other solutions. Warring is not a solution. . This is about reconnecting. And that's all cerebellum work, and we need to get back in touch with it. 

That's it for my podcast. I hope it was valuable. Take care.