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PDF Version 27. Summary of our journey to enlightenment

As just emphasised, science has at last made clarification of the human condition possible. By doing so our upset can now subside, all our anger and egocentric need for validation has been satisfied. Our need to live estranged and alienated from our beautiful soul, with all the horror that that destructive, dishonest and shallow existence entailed can also end. We can return to the non-upset ideal state we’ve longed for, be it termed Heaven, Paradise, Eden, Nirvana, Utopia or Shangri-La. The difference is where we were once, as it says in Genesis, ‘in the image of God’, instinctively orientated to integrative meaning, this time we’ll return in a knowing, conscious state and thus be ‘like God, knowing [understanding] good and evil’. We will be upset-free managers of the world. As T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’ (Four Quartets, from Part 5 of Little Gidding, 1942).

With understanding of the human condition found a peace and happiness, such as we have hardly dared to dream of, can now come to Earth. Indeed, as we emerge from our dark cave where we have been incarcerated to stand at last in the warm, healing sunlight of reconciling knowledge, we are going to be staggered by the beauty of this world. As William Blake famously prophesised in his appropriately titled poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern’ (1790). Buddhist scripture accurately describes how humans will be once the ameliorating understanding of the human condition arrives and is absorbed; the time, in the words of the scripture, when humans ‘will with a perfect voice preach the true Dharma, which is auspicious and removes all ill’. Of that time the scripture says, ‘Human beings are then without any blemishes, moral offences are unknown among them, and they are full of zest and joy. Their bodies are very large and their skin has a fine hue. Their strength is quite extraordinary’ (Maitreyavyakarana, tr. Edward Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, 1959, pp.238—242).

At the conclusion of Cry, the Beloved Country, author Alan Paton alluded to humanity’s dream of one day finding understanding of the human condition and, by doing so, freeing itself from our terrible ‘bondage of fear’. He wrote: ‘But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret’ (1948). Thankfully that day is now within reach when all the horror and suffering that resulted from the human condition will now end. Our hope and faith has always been that one day we would be able to explain the paradox of the human condition, and thus liberate ourselves from our sense of guilt. That great day when we will be free of the human condition is now within reach. The human journey to enlightenment can have the happy ending we always trusted it would: ‘The happy ending is our national belief’ (Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary, 1961).

Humanity’s journey thus far has been astonishing, in fact the greatest, most heroic story ever told is our own, however that journey and its need for courage and heroism is not quite over. While we at last have the means to ameliorate the human condition there remains one last great problem to overcome, and that is the difficulty of having to face the truth about ourselves. This last great hurdle can be overcome, but it is not, at least initially, going to be easy, as will now be explained.