By Jericho Walls
At every level, the ego says, “I’ve arrived.”
Then another crack lets the light through.
That is how I’ve come to see the Tower of Babel: an image of consciousness seeking to rediscover itself, while the ego tries to claim every step of the journey.
I read many biblical stories as allegories of our inner experience. Adam and Eve can become a way of exploring separation and the fall of consciousness. Cain and Abel can reveal the conflict between aspects of one whole. Babel, for me, speaks to the structures we build around identity—and what happens when those structures can no longer hold.
In this interpretation, the tower represents the stages of the search for enlightenment. Nimrod represents the ego directing that search. I’m bringing him into the allegory as a symbol of the inner ruler that wants to own the ascent.
But this reading means something to me because I experienced the collapse myself.
The tower fell. I remained.
The Tower We Build Within
We spend our lives collecting answers to the question, “Who am I?”
Our names. Our roles. Our beliefs. What we’ve accomplished. What happened to us. What others told us we were allowed to become.
Some of those answers help us navigate life. Others become walls we stop questioning. Eventually, we can mistake the structure for the self living within it.
Then something opens.
An experience, a realization, a moment of stillness. We see beyond a belief that once defined us. Something we thought was permanent turns out to be an assumption. We discover a freedom we didn’t know was available.
That is a genuine step.
But the ego can make that step into another floor of the tower.
“I understand now.”
“I’ve awakened.”
“I’m enlightened.”
A discovery becomes a description of who we are. Soon, we’re protecting that description with the same intensity we once used to protect the belief we left behind.
Nimrod: The Ego That Claims the Ascent
In my reading, Nimrod is the part of us that wants to direct, organize, and possess the journey.
The ego can take something as intimate as awakening and turn it into an achievement. It wants to know how high we’ve climbed, what that says about us, and where we stand compared with everyone else.
Even spiritual understanding can become material for its construction.
We learn a new language. We discover a practice. We have an experience that changes us. Then we start building an identity around knowing, practicing, or having experienced something others haven’t.
The tower rises.
There is a subtle shift here: instead of remaining open to discovery, we become invested in being someone who has already discovered.
That investment makes the next crack uncomfortable.
Because the next crack doesn’t merely challenge an idea. It challenges the person we’ve built around that idea.
Each Crack Exposes More Light
Awakening, as I’ve experienced it, doesn’t move in a straight line.
We see something. We open. We feel the possibility of a different relationship with ourselves and the world.
Then we settle into it.
What once surprised us becomes familiar. We develop explanations. We repeat them. The ego finds a place inside the new understanding, and gradually we drift back to sleep.
Another crack appears.
Something happens that our current explanation cannot contain. We encounter a contradiction, an attachment, a fear we thought we had moved beyond. The certainty loosens, and more light comes through.
We take another step.
Then the ego says it again: “Now I’ve arrived.”
This is the cycle I recognize: awakening, claiming, settling, cracking, opening. The experience moves through clarity and obscurity, expansion and contraction. Yin and yang offer me an image of that movement—different phases held within one life.
Drifting back to sleep doesn’t erase what we’ve seen. It asks us to examine what we’ve done with it.
Have we allowed the insight to deepen our awareness?
Or have we used it to build a more convincing identity?
When the Old Language Stops Working
The confusion of language has an inner meaning for me, too.
There are moments when the words we’ve relied on stop explaining our experience. We can still say them, but we no longer feel the certainty they once carried.
Our thoughts pull in one direction. Our emotions move in another. We speak about surrender while trying to control everything. We talk about unity while defending an identity that depends on separation.
The builders within us no longer seem to understand one another.
Sometimes we respond by searching for more terminology, a more elaborate explanation, another system that will make the structure feel secure.
But there can also be a moment when we stop demanding that the old language contain what is happening.
We sit with what we cannot yet explain.
For me, that opening matters. The loss of an explanation can expose how tightly we’ve confused understanding something with controlling it.
The Stone Through the Glass House
Then comes a collapse that another explanation cannot repair.
For me, it was like throwing a stone through a glass house. What had appeared solid shattered. The identity I had constructed could no longer hold together.
This is what I mean here by ego death and the dark night of the soul: my experience of losing the familiar structure through which I recognized myself. Even the identity of being awakened could not remain untouched.
I’m speaking from my own experience, rather than prescribing a sequence everyone must undergo. I don’t believe suffering has to be sought out or treated as proof of spiritual achievement.
But when that collapse happened to me, the question changed.
I could no longer rely on the same collection of answers to tell me who I was.
And yet I was still there.
That realization is the heart of this allegory for me. The structure fell, but the consciousness that had experienced it remained.
Picking Up What Fits
Afterward, I could pick up the pieces that fit and leave the rest.
I didn’t have to reject everything I’d learned. I didn’t have to declare my whole life meaningless. There were things worth keeping: understandings, experiences, parts of my story that still belonged.
But I could choose them consciously.
I could keep an insight without making it a claim of superiority. I could value an experience without asking it to prove my importance. I could acknowledge my history without letting it determine every possibility ahead of me.
What remained useful no longer had to support the entire weight of my identity.
There was freedom in leaving pieces on the ground.
Some things had served their purpose. Some had never fit. I didn’t owe every broken piece a place in whatever came next.
Awakening Is a Living Relationship
The cycle still matters.
We awaken and drift back to sleep. We discover and become attached. We release something, then find ourselves holding tightly again.
Recognizing that movement gives me a reason to stay attentive. Even a meaningful insight can become another wall if I stop examining my relationship with it.
The question is no longer simply, “Am I enlightened?”
It becomes, “What am I defending? What have I stopped questioning? Where have I mistaken my understanding for the whole of what can be known?”
In this reading, Babel gives us a way to look at the ascent, the ego’s ownership of it, and the collapse that reveals how much we’ve confused ourselves with our construction.
Each step can bring discovery. Each discovery can become another floor. Each crack can open something we were unable—or unwilling—to see.
And when the tower falls, we may find that we have choices we couldn’t recognize from inside it.
I did.
I picked up what fit. I left the rest.
The tower fell. I remained.
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