43. The arrival of understanding of the human condition and with it the all-exciting and all-satisfying Transformed Way of Living and new civilisation for humans

What has saved the day at this eleventh hour is the arrival of the dignifying, ameliorating, biological understanding of the human condition; that is as long as we can overcome the final hurdle described in Section 28 of there being so much disguised upset in humans now, as R.D. Laing made very clear in his above quote, that we can find it unbearably difficult facing and acknowledging its extent. Just reading this book will be unbearably confronting for many and yet discussion of the human condition has hardly begun in this book.

As was pointed out in Section 28, while the arrival of the dignifying and thus liberating biological understanding of our human condition is the ultimate breakthrough in the human journey to enlightenment there is an immense problem with its acceptance. While we humans couldn’t explain our corrupted, fallen state we sensibly coped with it by denying it and creating contrived, artificial excuses and forms of reinforcement to sustain our sense of self-worth. However with the arrival of this ameliorating truth about why we became so upset, all these artificial, fabricated denials, delusions and evasions that we have been using to cope are suddenly exposed. The truth destroys the lies, as it must, but we are now so habituated to the lies we find the truth hard to face. Honesty day, truth day, revelation day is also exposure day, transparency day, in fact the ‘judgement day’ many mythologies have long anticipated. While ‘judgement day’ is actually a day of Page 218 of
PDF Version great compassion—as an anonymous Turkish poet once said, it is ‘not the day of judgment but the day of understanding’ (National Geographic, Nov. 1987)—having the truth about our false selves revealed can feel like the foundations of our whole existence are being pulled from under us. When the all-precious reconciling, humanity-saving understanding of the human condition arrives, rather than it feeling like the long sought-after liberating fulfilment and reward for all our species’ accumulated efforts, it feels like a hurtfully exposing, vicious, even punishing attack.

As was mentioned in Section 28, our mythologies have foreseen this problem. In the Bible the prophet Isaiah spoke of a time when the truth arrives, which ‘gives you relief from suffering and turmoil and cruel bondage…[that it] will come with vengeance; with divine retribution…to save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped…Your nakedness will be exposed’ (14:3; 35:4,5; 47:3). The prophet Mohammed referred to ‘the Day of Reckoning’, describing it thus: ‘when the Trumpet is blown with a single blast and the earth and the mountains are lifted up and crushed with a single blow, Then, on that day, the Terror shall come to pass, and heaven shall be split…On that day you shall be exposed, not one secret of yours concealed’ (Koran, chpts 56, 69).

The reality is that to solve this problem of the dangerously depressing exposure that the liberating truth brings, we have two choices. We can refuse to accept the liberating knowledge—attack and try to destroy it with all the misrepresentation and vitriol we can muster while building our wall of denial up even higher to make it even more impregnable to the truth. However, since the accumulated efforts of all the humans who have ever lived have essentially been dedicated to finding the liberating knowledge that will secure the welfare of all future generations, this option is not really open to us. The second option we have is to accept and support the liberating knowledge but avoid confronting it too deeply. Clearly it is this second option that we must take up—and avoiding overly confronting the exposing information can be done. We each have to investigate the explanation of the human condition that is now available sufficiently to verify to our own satisfaction that it is the liberating explanation of the human condition and then support the information without pursuing our study of it and the truths it reveals beyond what we are personally capable of confronting.

The main concern has to be that the all-important insights into our human condition are made available to future generations so they don’t have to grow up without understanding of the human condition as we all did. With access to the reconciling explanation of the human condition they won’t have to adopt all the denials and delusions we had to adopt to cope and which now make confronting the truth about ourselves so difficult.

The task of the current generations who have grown up in the dark as it were, without the ability to understand the human condition, is to hold this key understanding aloft, support it in every way possible. By doing so the upset state of the human condition will, over only a few generations, be brought to an end. We have to see ourselves as the conduit generation connecting the old world of denial with the new denial-free world.

What is so wonderful about this transformed way of living is that whereas only yesterday there seemed to be no hope for the human race and the world appeared to be spiralling to destruction, suddenly, today, a totally psychologically rehabilitated human race is only a step away. Having struggled through so much psychological darkness for so long, we, humanity, are in sight of the lights of home. Tired to our very core as the human race is from the agony and stress of the great journey we only need one last effort Page 219 of
PDF Version now to be free of our historic upset, free of all the anger, egocentricity and alienation that has plagued humanity and in fact the whole of our planet. Indeed, throughout the universe we would be known by any other intelligence as the species living in denial, but that is all about to change. We are coming in from the cold and dark and lonely world of estrangement from our true selves and the all-sensitive, loving and knowing true state. We are coming home at last. Our terrible banishment has ended.

There is still some artificiality in this transformed way of living whereby our old egocentric, competitive, individualistic way of living is abandoned in favour of living in support of the insights into the human condition that are now available. We are not living out our upset and we are to a degree transcending our upset state, but the level of dishonesty is minimal compared to all the aforementioned artificial ways we have coped with the human condition. Overall it is infinitely less artificial than the mind-abandoning, people-controlling cυlt of denial of the all-important issue of the human condition that the human race has, up until now, been in the grip of. There is no denial of the human condition in the transformed way of living, a situation which alone removes almost all the dishonesty from the world.

Importantly this transformed way of living and the new culture and civilisation for humans that it gives rise to has no relationship to the dogma of religion. There is no deity or central figure of worship or adoration, nor is there any mysticism or religiosity or abstract metaphysic involved. The focus is entirely on knowledge, albeit knowledge we variously can’t fully confront personally. Further there is no faith involved. Faith has been replaced by first-principle-based knowledge.

This focus on knowledge, on our support being based on science’s ability to now finally explain the human condition, is all-important. There have been so many abandon-yourself-to-the-dream-of-the-human-condition-liberated ideal/ communal/ utopian/ new age/ undifferentiated/ Earth-considerate/ postmodern/ correct states that the ability to explain the human condition and by so doing actually liberate humanity from the human condition is crucial. It is this knowledge-based true start to the human-condition-free new world that clearly differentiates it from all the preceding utopia-promising false starts—including the ultra dangerous psychotically-messianically-deluded, and led, varieties of cυlts. As Bronowski anticipated, ‘Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge…awaits ahead of us’. The realm of the human condition represents an extremely muddied pool where all manner of charlatans have been operating, but it is nevertheless the most important of all realms because it is where the liberating understanding of the human condition must inevitably come from. Paradoxically the realm where the worst of delusions and madnesses occur is also the realm where the most precious of insights emerge. But because work in this realm has an almost totally blemished history the analysis of the human condition being presented here can be maliciously misrepresented as another deluded false start, or even another psychotically-messianically-deluded and ultra-dangerous movement, by individuals who hold such an extreme stake in denial of truth that they couldn’t care less about being unscrupulous. Any considered, fair analysis can however establish the knowledge-based, human-condition-confronting-and-explaining, sound nature of this presentation. It is a very muddied pool, but ‘by their fruit you will recognize [what is sound and what is deluded because]…a bad tree cannot bear good fruit’ (Matt. 7:16, 18) and the ‘fruit’ here is easy to verify as sound because it is first-principle-based explanation that can be rationally, logically followed and understood. The problem is not one of being able to know if this is sound or not, that is easy to ascertain—in fact the Page 220 of
PDF Version material is so clearly penetrating of the ‘fifty feet of solid concrete’ disguise of our condition that that is very obviously the real problem; people who have, as Nietzsche said, ‘a raging hate’ of the truth don’t want these insights to emerge and deliberately misrepresent them as unsound in order to try to destroy them. Description, analysis and insight into the human condition can’t be achieved from a position of delusion because to need to be deluded means you haven’t been able to defeat the problem of the human condition. You can’t have defeated the human condition and not have defeated it. Alienation can’t see through alienation, if it could it wouldn’t be alienated. ‘How can Satan drive out Satan?’ (Mark 3:23). Laurens van der Post was making this point when he said, ‘He who tries to go down into the labyrinthine pit of himself, to travel the swirling, misty netherlands below sea-level through which the harsh road to heaven and wholeness runs, is doomed to fail and never see the light where night joins day [find reconciling understanding of our condition] unless he goes out of love in search of love’ (The Face Beside the Fire, 1953, p.290 of 311). Nevertheless, because work in the realm of the human condition has such a chequered history the misrepresentation and dismissal of sound work in this realm as dangerously deluded is all too effective. You could be an axe murderer or a paedophile and the social stigma you would have to live with could not come close to the stigma that can be cast upon anyone who enters the realm where the issue of the human condition resides. The most important work in the world can so easily be stigmatised as the most evil by the unscrupulous, but to do so means risking committing the greatest crime in human history—denying humanity its liberation. At its very heart the democratic principle of freedom of expression—the right of ideas to be openly and fairly debated—was established to ensure the door would always be kept open to the possibility of understanding of the human condition emerging. And in this most important of all debates about the human condition, malicious lying represents the most serious form of undemocratic, door-closing censorship. It is ice-cold pure hate—of the human race, of everything that is beautiful, of life itself; it is pure bloody-minded revenge upon all things of value, but, as this book explains, it is that degree of exhausted upset that some of the human race have reached. Democracy will be put to the test. (Note, a more detailed account of the great danger of extreme prejudice stopping the emergence of the all-important understanding of the human condition is given in my essay Crisis Point in the Human Journey, which is available at <www.worldtransformation.com/crisis>.)

Another crucial difference about the departure now to the new human-condition-free world and its transformed way of living is that the ‘weakness’ aspect of giving up the battle has gone because the battle to ‘fly off course’ and find knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, has been won. There is no longer any justification for anyone pursuing the upsetting, corrupting search for knowledge. The search for more knowledge continues of course, but from here on it has to be conducted as much as possible from a secure, unevasive, denial-free basis, rather than from the insecure, evasive, denial-complying position from which it has been carried out in the past. The priority for the immediate future is not to attain more knowledge, but to expeditiously bring the human race, and indeed the world, back from the brink of destruction.

Giving up the battle is an extremely discredited strategy because it has for so long been perceived as weak and that misperception does take time to overcome. The truth is however that this transformed way of living has virtually no negative aspects to it and as that fact dawns on people—that they can go to work for humanity now in a most extraordinarily effective way without there being any tainted aspect to doing so—it is going to lead to an almost unbearably excited state of being for humans. While we are not Page 221 of
PDF Version yet free of the human condition we are as good as free of it because the excitement of just being able to participate in this final great charge to freedom will carry all before it. The great exodus from the horror and darkness of the human condition is on. Soon an army in its millions will appear from horizon to horizon to do battle with human suffering and its weapon will be understanding. In St Paul’s measures, if imposed discipline was considered ‘glorious’ yet had ‘no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory’ of religion, where we participated in idealism through our support of the embodiment of the ideals, then this transformed way of living, where we live in support of the understandings of the ideals, is the beyond-comparison, culminating glory of all glories.

Many mythologies have anticipated this time when everyone is finally able to, and indeed now has the responsibility to go to work for humanity and not for themselves. In the Bible the prophet Joel provides this description: ‘Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come…Before them the land is like the garden of Eden, behind them, a desert waste—nothing escapes them. They have the appearance of horses; they gallop along like cavalry…They charge like warriors; they scale walls like soldiers. They all march in line, not swerving from their course. They do not jostle each other’ (Joel 2). There are similar portrayals elsewhere in the Bible, for instance in Isaiah 2 where Isaiah says, ‘They will beat their swords into ploughshears and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore’, and that ‘the earth will be full of the knowledge of the’ truth and, as a result, ‘the wolf will live with the lamb’ (11:6,9). Other entries can be found in Isaiah Chapters 5, 11 and 40; in Daniel Chapters 8 to 12; in Hosea Chapters 5 and 14; and in Hosea Chapter 6 where Hosea says the relieving truth ‘will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth’.

In recent times other equally prophetic descriptions have appeared in popular culture, such as in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s songs When The Ship Comes In (1964) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964); Jim Morrison’s Break on Through (1966); Aquarius (1966, written by James Rado & Gerome Ragni) from the rock musical Hair; Elvis Presley’s If I Can Dream (1968, written by Earl Brown); Cat Stevens’ Peace Train (1971) and Changes IV (1971); John Lennon’s Imagine (1971); Tracy Chapman’s Why? (1986); U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (1987); and Hunters & Collectors’ Holy Grail (1993, written by Mark Seymour). In a similar vein, while The Rolling Stone’s I Can’t Get No Satisfaction (1965), Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone (1965) and Supertramp’s The Logical Song (1979, written by Richard Davies & Roger Hodgson) don’t anticipate the new human-condition-ameliorated world, they fully see through the existing one. (Note, the lyrics of most of these songs with interpretations appear in A Species In Denial on pages 75—77, 164, 218 and 490—492.)

It should be observed at this point that while the left wing attitude of idealism appeared to have been defeated in the end by the individualistic right wing attitude of realism, it is in fact the ideal attitude of serving humanity rather than self that finally prevails. As alluded to earlier, the whole political duality of the left and right wings is now reconciled and thus obsoleted. In the new human-condition-reconciled world there will be no politics. Indeed all the manifestations of the historic poles of human life of idealism and realism, or of ‘good and evil’—such as of instinct and intellect, soul and mind, conscience and conscious, subjectivity and objectivity, ignorance and knowledge, dogma and logic, mysticism and rationalism, religion and science, faith and reason, holism and mechanism, Yin and Yang, socialism and capitalism, the impoverished and the wealthy, women and men, young and old, black and white, soundness and alienation, innocence and upset, the ‘lamb’ and the ‘wolf’, the soft and the toughened, spiritualism and materialism, Page 222 of
PDF Version country and city, the natural world and alien environments, Abel and Cain, honesty and falseness, instinctualism and intellectualism, altruism and egotism, sensitivity and insensitivity, the innocent non-sexual and the upset sexual, peace and war, love and hate, selflessness and selfishness, etc—have now been reconciled, to the extent that the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’, of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, and of ‘Godly’ and ‘sinful’/ ‘evil’/ ‘guilty’/ ‘unGodly’, are now entirely removed from our conceptualisation of ourselves and our predicament. John Lennon wasn’t dreaming when he imagined such a world because it has now arrived.

In conclusion, it can now be seen that there were three great steps in managing our upset state during our species’ awesomely heroic journey to enlightenment: firstly, living in fear of punishment; secondly, living in support of the embodiment of the ideals through religion; and now, finally, living in support of the understanding of the ideals. In 10th century Flora, Italy, an abbot named Joachim famously proposed that human history unfolds in three stages. He expressed his concepts in terms of the Christian Trinity, with God the Father being the first stage of authority where humans obeyed the disciplining Ten Commandments of Moses. This was followed by God the Son, the stage where humans supported the embodiment of the ideals, such as in Christ. The third stage, he said, would be the age of the Holy Ghost or Spirit, which we can now understand is the stage where humans support the understanding of the ideals. He predicted this final stage would occur at the end of the first millennium, much to everyone’s disappointment when that didn’t eventuate. It turns out Joachim was a millennium short in his prediction of when we would be able to live the ultimate life of value.

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