Page 447 of
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All but an armful of the books written in human history comply with humans’ strategy of evading the issue of the human condition. The few books that are not party to the ‘noble lie’ are, in the main, the great religious texts. Fortunately for the resigned world, the denial-free, unevasive words and truths in these texts are not overly confronting because the truths are expressed in pre-scientific, abstract, often metaphorical language that leaves them sufficiently obscure not to confront humans directly with their meaning and implications. Even so, in humans’ unreconciled state, the way they have coped with the degree of confrontation these religious texts cause has been to dishonestly assign to them a divine, separate from humans, origin. (The honest ultra-natural—as opposed to the dishonest super-natural—origin of religious texts was explained earlier when prophets were explained.)

Martin Luther accurately compared books written from the blind, denial-complying, evasive position with those written from the unevasive, honest position, saying ‘The Superiority of the Homer, Virgil, and other noble, fine, and profitable writers, have left us books of great antiquity; but they are nought to the Bible’ (Great Thoughts on Great Truths, gathered by Rev. E Davies, book undated but appears to be late 20th century, p.56 of 707).

Apart from the religious texts there are a few other books that have been written from the denial-free position. The WTM has a small but comprehensive library containing a collection of denial-free works. In particular, the collection contains works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Olive Schreiner, Sigmund Freud, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Eugène Marais, Nikolai Berdyaev, Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Kahlil Gibran, D.W. Winnicott, Sir James Darling, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Louis and Richard Leakey, Joseph Campbell, Erich Neumann, Arthur Koestler, Sir Laurens van der Post, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Ilya Prigogine, Charles Birch, Robert A. Johnson, John Morton, R.D. Laing, Dian Fossey, Stuart Kauffman and Paul Davies.

Virtually everything written and said by humans has been dedicated to maintaining the great lie by which humanity has lived. In fact everything about humans is now almost saturated with the lie. Page 448 of
Print Edition We are almost completely fraudulent beings.

It is interesting that, in contrast with the situation today where society does not recognise its prophets and instead evasive intellectualism holds sway everywhere, the ancient Hebrews collected only the words of their prophets. Humanity does not have any records of the great authors or poets or playwrights or composers or artists or singers or astronomers or legal minds from the 5,000 year-history of the Israelites. All we have is the collection of the words of the few prophets that lived amongst the Israelites during those 5,000 years. That collection is the Bible.

The more corrupted and alienated people became as the search for knowledge continued, the more insecure they became and thus the more evasive they became of any condemning idealism. While prophets have been persecuted throughout history for being unevasive and for being so defiant of evasion, in earlier more innocent times, people were sufficiently secure to be able to acknowledge their prophets.

These early more innocent and thus less evasive civilisations even sought out their prophets to lead their societies. The Old Testament of the Bible is the documentation of the search for prophets to lead the Israelite nation. Moses, who was an exceptionally denial-free thinking unresigned prophet, lead the Israelites out of Egypt to the foothills of ‘the promised land’ of Palestine. The ancient Athenian society elected only uncorrupted, innocent shepherds to run their society. To quote Sir Laurens van der Post, ‘He [Pericles] urged the Athenians therefore to go back to their ancient rule of choosing men who lived on and off the land and were reluctant to spend their lives in towns, and prepared to serve them purely out of sense of public duty and not like their present rulers who did so uniquely for personal power and advancement.’ Sir Laurens continued, ‘Significantly in The Bacchae, the harbinger of the great catastrophe to come is “a city slicker with a smooth tongue”’ (in his foreword to Theodor Abt’s book Progress Without Loss of Soul, 1983, p.xii of 389). In the biblical Book of Exodus, Moses took the advice of his father-in-law to ‘select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands’ (Exod. 18:21). (Note the ‘fear’ of God mentioned here refers to respecting God, not the fear of integrative meaning that Isaiah for example was referring to when he said prophets ‘delight in the fear of the Lord’ [Isa. 11:3].)

In another example of how humanity has become increasingly Page 449 of
Print Edition insecure and thus dishonest I have noticed that often the earliest investigators of a scientific discipline revealed the most truth, and that as the discipline became more developed it became more sophisticated, which, if you look up the definition of ‘sophisticated’, means ‘false’. Probably the best example of this phenomenon is Plato. What the Plato essay reveals is that philosophy has retreated from the clarity of the thinking Plato demonstrated over 300 years before Christ. As the 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, the history of philosophy is nothing but ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’. In the study of anthropology, the renowned anthropologist Richard Leakey, who didn’t attend university, was exceptionally honest in some of his early writings about the original innocent, cooperative purity of the human race. In his 1977 book Origins, which he wrote with Roger Lewin, he said: ‘We emphatically reject this conventional wisdom [that war and violence are in our genes]…the clues that do impinge on the basic elements of human nature argue much more persuasively that we are a cooperative rather than an aggressive animal.’ I haven’t been able to find such a clear admission from Leakey since Origins.

With humanity becoming increasingly evasive, superficial and alienated—retreating further and further into Plato’s cave of denial—there is now such an emptiness in the world, such a lack of truth, such a jadedness from all the New Age quackery and other trite, superficial nonsense, that some 3 billion dollars has recently been committed in China to typing up all the Buddhist scriptures from wooden blocks onto computer, even going to the trouble of deciphering some of the ancient characters used in those scriptures whose meaning has been lost in antiquity. To go digging for truth in such ancient, pre-scientific texts is a tragedy, but it is a measure of how bereft of truth the world has become. The arrival now of the denial-free scientific description and explanation of the human condition will truly be like the summer rains that come to water the parched earth.