Genesis 6:4 · World English Bible
The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when God’s sons came in to men’s daughters and had children with them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
Legend compresses many people into one enormous figure, and the giants are what that compression looks like from the far side of time. Generations of the formidable, the ancestors who did more than their neighbors, get gathered by collective memory into single larger-than-life shapes.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
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CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Legend compresses many people into one enormous figure, and the giants are what that compression looks like from the far side of time. Generations of the formidable, the ancestors who did more than their neighbors, get gathered by collective memory into single larger-than-life shapes. The ordinary is burned away, and what remains swells into myth. History cannot be told without this. The past is remembered at the level of selection, and selection turns a hundred forgotten strong men into one man of renown.
These figures are not lies. They are the distilled heroism of what a people admired, drawn from countless faded lives and held up where it can still be seen. Understand that the mighty men of old are your ancestors made visible, the best of them concentrated into a form memory could carry. The giant is what greatness becomes once time has done its editing.
Clinical Psychology lens
Whose life am I living on top of, and do I even know their name?
Confucius said he was not an inventor but a transmitter, loving the ancients and passing on what they had already found. The greatness he taught was collected, not created.
The tradition opens by naming a chain of hands passing teaching forward, one generation to the next. What reaches you arrives carried by people, most of whose names are gone.
Krishna points to the line of teachers through whom the knowledge came down, saying it was known by the great ones of old and must be learned from them. The ideal has ancestors.
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Clinical Psychology