ASPECT B

In analysing how humanity liberates itself from the human condition it was established that there was a need for someone to be sufficiently free of corruption of soul and its associated denial to be able to confront and think truthfully and effectively about the issue of the human condition. In Plato’s metaphor, it needed to be explained how someone ‘escapes from the cave into the light of day’ (Encarta). In answering that question there were three aspects to look at.

Page 131 of
Print Edition ASPECT A involved explaining that it was the human soul that was being corrupted, then explaining how we acquired our soul, how it became corrupted and the spectrum of alienation that resulted from that corruption.

We now need to look at ASPECT B, which is the particular knowledge that someone sound enough to confront the issue of the human condition would need if they were to assemble the liberating understanding of the human condition. In Plato’s metaphor of the cave, we need to look at how someone, ‘sees for the first time the real world’.

ASPECT B has two sections. B1, ‘Science—the liberator’, explains how mechanistic science had to find all the details and mechanisms of the workings of our world without confronting the truth of integrative meaning. B2, ‘Soul—the synthesiser’, explains how a denial-free thinker or prophet has to take the hard-won insights about the workings of our world that mechanistic science found, and from these insights synthesise the liberating explanation of the human condition.

B1: Science—the liberator

We have established that there always existed a few people who could confront and look into the issue of the human condition, however this ability was obviously not enough to solve the human condition otherwise it would have been achieved long ago.

The other component required to solve the human condition, and ‘see for the first time the real world’, was knowledge.

In The Republic, Plato frequently emphasises that the two ingredients needed for wisdom are nurture and education. For instance he talks about ‘the one great thing,—a thing, however, which I would rather call, not great, but sufficient for our purpose…[is] education and nurture…for good nurture and good education implant good constitutions’. (This quote is from Benjamin Jowett’s 1877 translation of The Republic. Lee, in his translation of these passages, which appear on page 169, uses ‘well brought up’ and ‘sound character’, instead of ‘nurture’.) All humans were once innocent—living outside the cave—and when the dilemma of the human condition emerged with consciousness some 2 million years ago they could have avoided having to live in denial of it—having to hide in the cave—if it were not Page 132 of
Print Edition for the fact that they did not have the knowledge with which to explain the human condition. Nurtured soundness alone was not enough, knowledge was also required. The overall journey that humanity has been traversing has been the journey to find sufficient knowledge to be able to explain the human condition, clarify the issue of whether humans are fundamentally good or evil, find the biological reason for humans’ divisive behaviour. It has been a journey from ignorance to understanding, a journey in search of knowledge.

An innocent individual today is in the same predicament as the entire human race was in when all its members were innocent, in that no one could explain the human condition until there was sufficient knowledge available from which to assemble that explanation. Before an innocent individual could synthesise the liberating explanation of the human condition, humanity first had to find sufficient knowledge to make that synthesis possible. That was the plan, although it could never be acknowledged, for doing so would require admission of the existence of humans’ non-ideal state and confrontation with the problem of the human condition—an impossible ask prior to solving the human condition.

Therefore, the primary task facing humanity was to find the knowledge that would make it possible to explain the human condition—of course the difficulty with this problem was how were you to find knowledge when you could not face the truth of integrative meaning and thus think truthfully and effectively? It was a catch-22.

In the words of the Encarta summary of the cave allegory, Plato emphasised that ‘the proper object of knowledge’ was to achieve ‘the transition to the real world’; that is, end the alienated state of denial that humans have had to live in, get out of the cave, solve the human condition. Historian Jacob Bronowski stressed this objective of having to find understanding of ourselves, in his 1973 television series and book, The Ascent of Man, saying, ‘We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex [instinct]. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us’ (p.437 of 448).

While religions played a crucial role in sustaining humans who were living under the duress of the human condition, they could not lift the burden of guilt from humanity, find the dignifying biological understanding of human nature. The poet Alexander Pope said in Page 133 of
Print Edition his 1733 Essay on Man, ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of Mankind is Man’. Pope’s admonition that we should not leave it to ‘God to scan’ made the point that faith was not going to be sufficient. While religious assurances such as ‘God loves you’ could comfort us, ultimately we had to understand why we were lovable. There had to be a biological explanation for humans’ divisive behaviour and our responsibility as conscious animals was to find that explanation. The ancients were right to have emblazoned across their temples the phrase, ‘Man, know thyself’. The biologist, Edward O. Wilson, was more specific when he said, ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’ (Consilience, 1998, p.298 of 374), and ‘Biology is the key to human nature’ (On Human Nature, ch.1, 1978).

Humanity’s overriding responsibility and task was to liberate itself from the human condition, find the dignifying biological explanation for humans’ divisive nature and by doing so end the historic state of denial—leave the cave. Solving the human condition was the objective; however, the difficulty to be overcome was how to go about achieving that objective while almost the entire human race was unable to confront the sun/ fire, unable to confront the condemning truth of integrative meaning, which was what gave rise to the issue of the human condition in the first place.

Clearly, what was required was a way of investigating reality without confronting the truth of integrative meaning and the suicidally depressing issue of the human condition that followed. As is fully explained in Beyond in the chapter ‘Science and Religion’, the means humanity developed for this purpose was mechanistic science. Science has been mechanistic, not holistic, in its approach to inquiry. It has focused on the details and mechanisms of the workings of our world while all the time carefully avoiding the holistic view of the confronting truth of the cooperative or integrative meaning of existence.

Science had to comply with humans’ need to live in denial of the fundamental truth of integrative meaning, it had to be mechanistic in its approach to inquiry, because humans could not be exposed to the potentially suicidally depressing truth of integrative meaning until the compassionate, dignifying, ameliorating understanding of the human condition was found.

It has been pointed out that having to investigate reality without confronting the human reality—the human condition—was an extremely difficult task, and a loathsome one because you could not admit and talk about your plan. You had to live a life of lying, never Page 134 of
Print Edition able to explain why you were lying. You were living as if there were no meaning to life or to your endeavour, when in fact there was a crucially important direction to life and to everything both scientists and humanity in general were doing.

The final episode of Evolution, a television series produced in 2001, examined the controversy in American schools and universities over the teaching of ‘natural selection’ as a godless, meaningless, blind process. The program’s title, What about God?, questioned why ‘God’ is left out of science’s interpretation of existence? The answer is that integrative meaning was left out for humans’ own good, it saved them from suicidal depression. Leaving the concept of God abstract, and undefined in scientific terms, saved humans from direct confrontation with the truth of integrative meaning, a confrontation they could not survive until understanding of humans’ divisive nature was found. Now this understanding has been found, science can acknowledge that ‘natural selection’ is in fact dedicated to ordering matter into larger and more stable wholes, that ‘evolution’ is an integrative, directed, meaningful, Godly process. The French scientist-prophet Pierre Teilhard de Chardin anticipated the time when science could stop practicing denial, when writing in 1938: ‘I can see a direction and a line of progress for life, a line and a direction which are in fact so well marked that I am convinced their reality will be universally admitted by the science of tomorrow’ (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955; tr. Bernard Wall, 1959, p.142 of 320).

In recent times the concept of ‘Intelligent Design’ in the universe has been introduced by those attempting to combat mechanistic science’s godless, meaningless view of the universe. Again, until the dilemma of the human condition was solved, it was dangerous and irresponsible to demystify ‘God’, as the Intelligent Design movement has been attempting to do. The immense value of mechanistic science was that it allowed humanity to approach the issue of the human condition without confronting the dangerous truth of the integrative, cooperative meaning/ design/ purpose/ theme/ direction in existence. It allowed humanity to find all the details and mechanisms about the workings of our world without confronting humans with the unbearably depressing truth of integrative meaning. Once we had enough knowledge about the details of existence, clarifying explanation for humans’ divisive behaviour could be synthesised and the dilemma of the human condition eliminated from human life—the ‘fire’ could be extinguished and humans could leave their ‘cave’ world of denial.

Page 135 of
Print Edition Of course the difficulty in that final task of assembling the truth about the human condition from all of mechanistic science’s hard-won insights into the workings of our world, was that all this knowledge was presented in a manner that avoided any condemnation of humans. It was all evasive and denial-compliant in its orientation.

The following examples illustrate just some of the evasions or denials that humanity developed during this mechanistic process: Psychiatrists acknowledged that psychosis was a part of the human make-up but avoided acknowledging the human condition as the source of the psychosis. Mathematicians and scientists identified many of the laws of physics but avoided acknowledging that there was any purpose or theme to the physics of the universe. Biologists acknowledged that there was natural selection of organisms but avoided acknowledging that there was an integrative purpose behind the emergence of the variety of life on Earth. Anthropologists postulated that the prime mover in the emergence of humans from our ape ancestor was, variously, the advent of language, or upright walking, or tool use, or the mastery of fire, etc, etc, when the real prime mover was nurturing or loving of our infants, a truth they had to evade because it confronted humans with their inability to nurture their infants, an inability that arose from their necessary preoccupation with the battle with the human condition. (The extent of humans’ insecurity about their inability to nurture their offspring is evident in this quote, ‘The biggest crime you can commit in our society is to be a failure as a parent…people would rather admit to being an axe murderer than being a bad father or mother’ [Sun-Herald, Sunday Life mag. 7 July 2002].) Primatologists emphasised an aggressive past for humans and evaded the truth of our cooperative, loving and selfless past because of its unjust condemnation of humans’ competitive, aggressive and selfish present. Society avoided acknowledging the immense differences in alienation between individuals, sexes, generations, races and cultures—because it would have led to prejudice—and instead maintained the ‘politically correct’ lie that there were no significant differences in alienation between people. Individual humans lived in denial of their corrupted state because they could not face the truth of it.

Humanity accumulated a great deal of knowledge but all in a way that was safely considerate of humans’ delicate state of insecurity. It constructed a sophisticated world of artful denial, a cave-like existence where humans were only able to see shadows of the real world.

Page 136 of
Print Edition B2: Soul—the synthesiser

The strategy of investigating reality while avoiding the truth of integrative meaning was all very necessary but at some stage that truth would have to be confronted if understanding of the human condition was to be found.

Mechanistic science, as the prime vehicle for humanity’s inquiry into reality, complied with humans’ need to live in denial of the issue of the human condition and all the truths associated with it. While it portrayed itself as rigorously objective and free of personal, subjective bias, mechanistic science was in truth an extremely subjective discipline. The real ‘discipline’ of mechanistic science was at all times to maintain the ‘great lie’ or denial. Investigating in this evasive manner, mechanistic science gradually found all the necessary details and mechanisms of the workings of our world, and subsequently presented them all in a safely evasive way. The problem then was, how could the truth about the human condition be synthesised from all this evasively presented information? Humanity was faced with another impasse, which was that you cannot assemble the truth from lies.

What was required was someone who could collect all the hard-won but evasively presented insights and while defying the evasive components, take the truthful components and from them synthesise the truth about the human condition, find the biological explanation for humans’ divisive nature.

As was mentioned in the Introduction, in Homer’s Greek legend, The Odyssey, the prophet Teiresias predicted that on returning home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, Odysseus (or ‘Ulysses’ in the later Roman version) would have to undertake one final journey, this time into a desperately barren land. Odysseus told his wife Penelope, ‘Teiresias bade me travel far and wide, carrying an oar, till I came to a country where the people have never heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food’. The sea is a metaphor for humans’ innocent instinctive self or soul that became repressed because of its unjust condemnation of humans’ divisive state. The sea’s salt is our innocent instinctive self or soul’s immense sensitivity, its access to all the beauty and magic of life—unlike the numb, seared, flavourless, ‘saltless’, alienated state. Therefore this ‘country where the people have never Page 137 of
Print Edition heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food’ is the soul-destroyed, alienated world of denial where humans currently reside. In Plato’s terms it is humans’ dark, imprisoned cave existence. The ‘oar’, Teiresias explained to Odysseus, is actually a ‘winnowing shovel’. This other journey then, that Teiresias was predicting humanity would eventually have to undertake, was into the centre of this alienated cave world humans now live in, in order to winnow from its evasive, mechanistic scientific insights the unevasive, holistic scientific truth about the human condition.

While mechanistic science had to arduously find all the details and mechanisms of the workings of our world experiment by experiment, clue by clue—all the while making sure not to confront humans with unjust condemnation—at the very end of that process someone living unevasively in the presence of the illuminating sunlight, had to appear and ‘winnow’ out the truth about the human condition.

Mechanistic science had to do all the ground work—find, as it were, all the pieces of the jigsaw of explanation—but because it could not look at those pieces picture-side-up or truthfully, it could not put the jigsaw together to reveal the true picture or story about ourselves. Only someone sufficiently innocent not to need to be living in denial—a denial-free, unevasive thinker or prophet—could look at the jigsaw pieces picture-side-up and thus be in a position to assemble the jigsaw, explain the human condition, and by so doing break free of, expose and end the historic denial. In Plato’s cave allegory, you could not assemble the truth about the human condition in the dark cave, that had to be achieved outside the cave in the illuminating sunlight. While for most people the heat of the sun and the fire was searing (ie the truth of integrative meaning was unbearably condemning), the light from the sun/fire was required if you were to illuminate the world and make it intelligible.

If we recall the key scientific explanations given earlier—of negative entropy being the meaning of existence; of how nurturing’s ‘love-indoctrination’ gave humans their instinctive self or soul that was orientated to behaving cooperatively; of how consciousness in humans was able to develop once love-indoctrination overcame the genetic block to thinking selflessly and thus effectively; and how the conflict between the already established instinctive orientation to behaving cooperatively and the intellect’s search for knowledge led to humans’ corrupted state—we can see that all these breakthrough Page 138 of
Print Edition ideas depended on being able to recognise truths that humans normally practice denying, in particular the truth of integrative meaning and the significance of nurturing. These key understandings could not be reached living in the cave state of denial.

It can be seen that, in terms of solving the human condition, prophets had a crucial, albeit minuscule, concluding role to play. In Beyond I describe the situation using the metaphor of a game of gridiron: ‘In many ways prophets only got in the way while we were searching for understanding because they confronted us with truths that depressed us and which we therefore had to evade. Exceptional innocence played an important but minuscule concluding role in our search for knowledge. In gridiron football the team as a whole (with one exception) does all the hard work gaining yardage down the field. Finally when the side gets within kicking distance of the goal posts, a specialist kicker, who until then has played no part, is brought onto the field. While he—in his unsoiled attire—kicks the winning goal, the win clearly belongs to the exhausted players who did all the hard work’ (p.163 of 203).

While historically honest thinkers or prophets ‘got in the way’, overly confronted and condemned humans, and as a result were repressed and even removed, or deified through the formation of religions based upon their sound world, the situation for prophets in the modern, contemporary, scientific age is very different. With the development of science, unevasive, truthful thinkers have a role, but it is the very opposite to that of condemning humans or of creating a religion. Their task now is to bring dignifying, ameliorating, rational understanding to humans, and in the process demystify religions and make the need for deferment of self to a faith obsolete. The role now for truthful thinkers is not to confront and condemn humans or lead them, but to give them understanding so they can at last understand themselves and become effective self-managers.

By definition, to have been able to grapple with the human condition and synthesise the understanding of it, I must have had the soundness required. I must be a contemporary prophet. There are many modern-day or contemporary prophets, people who think unevasively, holistically, who confront the truth of integrative meaning and bring attention to the issue of the human condition. They include in my experience such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Olive Schreiner, Page 139 of
Print Edition Sigmund Freud, Eugène Marais, Nikolai Berdyaev, Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Kahlil Gibran, D.W. Winnicott, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Louis Leakey, Joseph Campbell, Erich Neumann, Arthur Koestler, Sir Laurens van der Post, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Ilya Prigogine, Robert A. Johnson, R.D. Laing, Dian Fossey, Stuart Kauffman, and, in New Zealand’s case, the biologist and theologian John Morton. In Australia’s case, the great educator Sir James Darling and the writer A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson were able to think unevasively, holistically, while the Templeton Prize-winning Australian scientists, physicist Paul Davies and biologist Charles Birch, have both been described as, and are, prophets. Davies has been described as a ‘latter day prophet’ (ABC-TV Compass, God Only Knows, 23 Mar. 1997), and Birch as a ‘scientist-prophet’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 30 May 2000). Importantly, none of these people have been concerned with confronting and condemning humans or with creating a religion. They have been concerned only with an unevasive holistic approach to inquiry.

The human journey had arrived at the situation where mechanistic science had completed its role of finding sufficient understanding of the details and mechanisms of the workings of our world to make clarification of the human condition possible. In fact, the journey had stalled, it had achieved as much progress in inquiry as was possible from an evasive perspective. Being so fundamentally flawed in its orientation there was a limit to how much worthwhile knowledge mechanistic science could achieve. General Omar Bradley summarised the final imbalance inherent in the mechanistic approach when he said, ‘The world has achieved brilliance…without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants’ (Armistice Day Address, 10 Nov. 1948, Collected Writings of General Omar N. Bradley, Vol.1). Charles Birch also emphasised the limits of the integrative meaning-denying and soul-oppressing reductionist, mechanistic approach when he wrote that: ‘Reductionism or Mechanism…is the dominant mode of science and is particularly applicable to biology as it is taught today…[it is] A view or model of livingness that leaves out feelings and consciousness…[and] I believe it has grave consequences…In the name of scientific objectivity we have been given an emasculated vision of the world and all that is in it. The wave of anti-science…is an extreme reaction to this malaise…I believe biologists and naturalists have a special responsibility to put another image before the world that does justice to the unity of life and all its manifestations of experience—aesthetic, religious and moral as well as intellectual and rational’ (Two Ways of Interpreting Nature, Australian Natural History, Vol.21 No.2, 1983).

Page 140 of
Print Edition On the subject of inquiry having ground to a halt from its own accumulated dishonesty, Charles Birch, during his WTM 1993 Open Day address in Sydney, commented that ‘there is a problem about that [mechanism], it can’t deal with certain questions…every individual entity, be it cell or an atom, and certainly human beings…is different by virtue of the relationships that they have with the whole that they belong to. Now that is the most important thing I think that one can begin to think about, the [integrative, holistic] nature of the world, the universe…and I think this is the sort of exploratory area which could transform a lot of thinking. In other words, science can’t deal with subjectivity…This [subjective, holistic, cooperative-meaning, human-condition-confronting aspect] is something that is very difficult to get your teeth into and yet it is the most important thing in the world…what we were all taught in universities for decades is really recognised now as pretty much a dead end’ (WTM Newsletter 26, 1993).

Biologist Mary E. Clark expressed a similar sentiment in her 1989 book Ariadne’s Thread: The Search for New Modes of Thinking: ‘Formal learning has become a meaningless vaccination process, and the information transmitted is next to useless for properly understanding the world.’

Paul Davies recognised that a holistic approach to inquiry was necessary if humans were to re-integrate themselves with what Plato saw as, ‘the real world, the world of full and perfect being’, when he wrote: ‘But there is a deeper reason for the wide-spread antipathy. It is connected with the underlying philosophy of science itself. For 300 years science has been dominated by extremely mechanistic thinking. According to this view of the world all physical systems are regarded as basically machines…I have little doubt that much of the alienation and demoralisation that people feel in our so-called scientific age stems from the bleak sterility of mechanistic thought…Mechanistic thought has undoubtedly had a stifling effect on the human spirit. Liberation from this centuries-old straight jacket [ie the adoption of a holistic approach] will enable human beings to re-integrate themselves and the physical world of which they are a part’ (Living in a non-material world—the new scientific consciousness, The Australian, 9 Oct. 1991).

In his 1999 book, Biology and the Riddle of Life, Charles Birch emphasised that ‘the onus is now on biologists to demonstrate the importance of self-organisation in biological evolution’ (p.110 of 158). ‘Self-organisation’ is a reference to negative entropy’s ordering or integration of matter, to the integrative, cooperative, teleological, holistic purpose or meaning of life that mechanistic science has evaded because of its unjust criticism of humans’ divisive state. What Page 141 of
Print Edition Birch is saying is that the responsibility of biologists in recent times has been to finally face the truth of integrative meaning and, in so doing, confront the issue of the human condition—and as such it was a predicament for biologists to solve because the human condition is about the behaviour of the human animal. The title of Birch’s book, Biology and the Riddle of Life, acknowledges that a holistic, biological approach to the human condition was required.

Humanity has been stalled, waiting for the human condition to be addressed and resolved. Someone had to appear who, using the insights of mechanistic science and benefiting from the collective work of all the other unevasive, holism-acknowledging, truthful thinkers, could resolve the human condition. As has been mentioned, living in denial of its corrupted state, humanity could not acknowledge that this was what it was waiting for. It could not even acknowledge that it was waiting. Therefore it could not even cultivate the innocence required. It simply had to have ‘hope and faith’ that, sooner or later, before the destructive effects of excessive alienation destroyed our world, someone would appear sound enough to assemble the answers. The biblical story of David and Goliath is a metaphorical description of this situation. The whole of humanity’s army was, as it were, arrayed at the edge of a great battlefield, stalled, unable to venture onto it and tackle the monster Goliath, who symbolised the unconfrontable issue of the human condition. It had to wait for a boy, symbolising innocence, to appear who was capable of going out into the dangerous battlefield and solving the human condition, slaying Goliath. Elsewhere in the Bible, in Isaiah 11, this truth is more clearly spelt out where Isaiah describes how ‘a child will lead them’ to the state where the corrupt and the innocent will be reconciled; to where, he says, the ‘wolf will live with the lamb’. This same mythology occurs in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, where it takes a child (innocence) to break the spell of the denial of the human condition and disclose the truth. In Australian literature our most celebrated poem is Banjo Paterson’s 1895 poem, The Man From Snowy River. The poem describes how a ‘stripling’ boy (the embodiment of innocence) goes beyond where the alienated adults dare go, down the ‘terrible descent’ of the mountain side where ‘any slip was death’ to confront the issue of the human condition and retrieve the truth about ourselves as symbolised by the thoroughbred horse that has escaped into the impenetrable mountains.

Page 142 of
Print Edition Only an approach that was free of denial could assemble the truth from science’s hard-won but evasively presented insights and liberate humanity from the human condition. In Plato’s imagery someone had to be living outside the cave, living in the illuminating sunlit world, in order to liberate those within the cave, ‘release [them] from their bonds and cure [them] of their delusions’ (p.279), explain the human condition and break through the historic denial. To repeat the relevant section from the Encarta summary, it says that, ‘Breaking free, one of the individuals escapes from the cave into the light of day. With the aid of the sun, that person sees for the first time the real world and returns to the cave with the message that the only things they have seen heretofore are shadows and appearances and that the real world awaits them if they are willing to struggle free of their bonds.’

Some comment is required in regard to the phrase ‘breaking free’. While the person who is able to confront the human condition is not somebody who has ‘broken free’ from the cave—rather he is someone who retained his innocence and never adopted the bondage of denial, never adopted a ‘cave existence’—at some stage in his thinking he nevertheless has to ‘break free’, or ‘escape’ the influence of the denial that necessarily surrounds him. With everyone else living in denial it will be a struggle for him to decide whether the way he views the world is right or whether the view that is being presented to him is right. If he is sufficiently sound, however, and holds on to his view long enough to find reconciling understanding, or at least appreciation, of the world of denial, he will ‘break free’ of that codependent situation and learn to trust himself rather than what he is being told. Christ, for example, was an exceptionally sound thinker, and when he said ‘I have overcome the world’ (John 16:33) he was saying that he had overcome or broken free of the coercion from the dishonest world of denial, it no longer had any sway over him.

The human condition has been solved and the way it was solved was exactly as Plato predicted. The evidence that it has been solved is that the denial has been exposed, someone has ‘returned to the cave with the message that the only things they have seen heretofore are shadows and appearances and that the real world awaits them if they are willing to struggle free of their bonds.’ When you are living in denial, living in the cave, you cannot be free of it, you cannot expose the denial. Alienation cannot expose alienation, it is a contradiction in terms. As Plato foresaw, only someone outside the cave could bring ‘the message’ (the understanding that exposes the cave prisoners’ denial Page 143 of
Print Edition and makes it obsolete) into the cave.

Humanity has at last found the dignifying and thus liberating biological explanation for why humans have not been ideally behaved. The explanation was summarised early in this essay, in the section ‘A brief description of how our soul became corrupted’, and is presented in full in my earlier books, Free and Beyond. It is humanity as a whole that has found this explanation of the human condition because it is only as a result of the discoveries of science, being the peak expression of all human intellectual effort, that it has been possible for me to synthesise the biological explanation of the human condition. In fact it is ‘on the shoulders’ of eons of human effort that our species’ freedom has finally been won. As has been explained, there have always been a very small number of people in society who were sufficiently innocent to confront the issue of the human condition, but until mechanistic science had completed the hard task of finding understandings of the mechanisms and details of the workings of our world, no liberation from the human condition was possible. Innocence—uncorrupted guidance from our cooperatively orientated instinctive self or soul—was the synthesiser, but science was the liberator, the so-called ‘messiah’ of the human race.

Unevasive, holistic, subjective introspection, and evasive, mechanistic, objective science, both played crucial roles in the liberation of humanity from ignorance. Einstein was expressing this truth when he said, ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind’ (Out of My Later Years, 1950). Obviously it was not religious faith that synthesised the explanation of the human condition, but it was the denial-free aspect or orientation of the world of religions that was required.