Page 27 of
PDF Version 8. The difficulties of accepting insight into, and of reading about, the human condition

As the subject of this biological analysis of the human condition it is not difficult for humans to know the truthfulness or otherwise of the analysis—as the subjects of the analysis that is easy to know—the difficulty however lies in accepting that truthfulness. In fact, as will be described later, what emerges as the problem for most adults is the transparency of self that the truthfulness of the understandings brings. Encountering the naked truth about ourselves cannot help but be a shock. What is being introduced is the arrival of the real ‘future shock’, ‘culture shock’, ‘brave new world’, ‘tectonic paradigm shift’, ‘gestalt switch’, ‘turning point’, ‘renaissance’, ‘revolution’ or ‘sea change’ humanity has long anticipated would one day arrive.

Indeed some people intuitively believe the human species has become so alienated we no longer have the strength to cope with facing the truth about ourselves. They feel there is too much soul damage to have to look at and that the human race should remain living in denial/ alienation forever; ‘wallow’ in our predicament as Camus said. All paradigm shifts are typically resisted because they threaten our existing way of living that we have become adapted to and our egos attached to, and since there has been no greater paradigm shift in the human journey than this coming one from living in psychological denial of the issue of the human condition, very great resistance has to be expected to its arrival, and that has been the case. As part of a ruthless campaign of resistance that has been waged against my work, the two most prominent campaigners exposed their deeper motivation of their conviction that it is now impossible for humans to address the human condition when one said, ‘You know you are encroaching on the personal unspeakable in people and you won’t succeed’ (WTM records, 12 Feb. 1995), and ‘You are trying to rattle the black box inside people and you just can’t do that’ (WTM records, 18 Mar. 1995); the other similarly said, ‘You realise you are attempting the impossible, you will be fighting to have this material accepted right down to the last person on the planet’ (WTM records, Feb. 1995). The truth is humans would never have had the strength to pursue the ‘superhuman task’, as Camus referred to it, of finding knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, if we hadn’t always believed that when humanity did finally find that insight into our condition that there would be a way to cope with it. As will be described in the latter part of this book, there is in fact an easy and immensely satisfying and exciting way to cope with the arrival of the truth about ourselves. Basically, such dismissive pessimism underestimates the dignifying, ameliorating, healing power of the ‘fruit’ of understanding and as such is a betrayal of all the humans who throughout history have worked tirelessly towards the arrival of, and thus believed in, the potential power of that ‘fruit’.

Resistance to the issue of the human condition also makes it difficult to read about the subject. Having lived in committed denial of the issue of the human condition it has to be expected that our brains will resist taking in or ‘hearing’ any discussion about it. This ‘deaf effect’ is in fact very real and the reader needs to be prepared for it; as one reader initially confided, ‘When I first read your books all I saw were a lot of black marks on white paper’ (comment by WTM Supporter G. Plecko, Mar. 2000). Psychologists recognise that denials ‘fight back with a vengeance when faced with annihilation’ (Courage to Heal, L. Davis & E. Bass, 1988, p.175 of 495), but being unaware that we are living in denial of what is being written about we don’t realise that the reason we can’t take in or ‘hear’ what is being presented is that our brain is ‘fight[ing] back with a vengeance’ and so tend to blame the impenetrableness of what we are reading on other causes, such as thinking the material must be badly written or must be so wrong it is nonsensical to our brain or the concepts so complex and dense that our brain can’t Page 28 of
PDF Version understand them. The solution to the deaf effect is to patiently re-read the material because each time you do that you will discover that you can comprehend what is being said more clearly and this will confirm for you that our species’ historic denial of the issue of the human condition was in fact the problem. Re-reading the material does gradually erode the psychological resistance to analysis of the human condition. (The deaf effect is explained at some length in the ‘Introduction’ chapter of A Species In Denial.)