The following blog post was received from Olof, a member in Sweden.

Meeting this information, it made so much sense to me but I was instantly thrown into the Mexican Standoff. That for me meant that I was dedicated and helplessly habituated to living out my resigned life and behaviour. But I had the information, and I knew it had the potential to put me on the opposite road, and therefore I etched myself to the understandings as the strategy for not acting out my resigned life which was destructive for me. That was my inspiration initially. If I think about that position I can see now that I was not willing yet to embrace a change of heart, and therefore related to the information only through avoiding my destructiveness—that was the positiveness for me and I allowed that to be enough initially. The explanation of the human condition and the discussions about the freedom it makes possible, was the safe haven which had promised to lead me out of the resigned darkness and provide a refuge from it. But as Tony (Miall) says about the Mexican Standoff in his Affirmation; ‘it’s just no place to stay’, so after a while we will want to make the change, and then it’s important to know about what that entails. It’s a bit like the quote from the film, The Matrix that says ‘I can show you the door, but you have to walk through it.’ That might seem a bit of a cliché, but it’s actually true because taking the freedom now available is based on both knowledge (showing the door) and a heartfelt decision (walking through it).

The thing for me, which enabled me to act on my wish to make that change, was to realize that this safe haven from the resigned destructive and dysfunctional behaviour which I so longed for, and had found in reading the information and listening to the talks, can be permanently established in myself through using, and thus responding to the information rightly. Through allowing oneself to defer to this information as true (which requires enough of an appreciation of it to validate if it’s true or not), it follows that it’s no longer legitimate to act out our upset, simply because we can acknowledge now that the human condition has been solved, that the theme of existence is selflessness in which divisiveness has no part. Divisiveness destroys, and thus it’s not functional or responsible to continue to act out our destructive behaviour once we can understand the human condition. This is all logical, and as I’m resigned I can’t really express very well the emotional and sensitive aspect of this resolve and it might thus appear despite my wish, technical. Therefore I’d like to include an extract from Olive Schreiner’s essay Somewhere, Some Time, Some Place (quoted more fully in A Species in Denial—Resignation) which for me is a wonderful articulation of the divinity of the resolve in that simple heartfelt decision to no longer act out our upset.

‘And then, as I sat on there, another thought came to me; and in some form or other it has remained with me ever since, all my life. It was like this: You cannot by willing it alter the vast world outside of you; you cannot, perhaps, cut the lash from one whip; you cannot stop the march of even one armed man going out to kill; you cannot, perhaps, strike the handcuff from one chained hand; you cannot even remake your own soul so that there shall be no tendency to evil in it; the great world rolls on, and you cannot reshape it; but this one thing only you can do—in that one, small, minute, almost infinitesimal spot in the Universe, where your will rules, there where alone you are as God, strive to make that you hunger for real! No man can prevent you there. In your own heart strive to kill out all hate, all desire to see evil come even to those who have injured you or another; what is weaker than yourself try to help; whatever is in pain or unjustly treated and cries out, say, “I am here! I, little, weak, feeble, but I will do what I can for you.” This is all you can do; but do it; it is not nothing! And then this feeling came to me, a feeling it is not easy to put into words, but it was like this: You also are a part of the great Universe; what you strive for something strives for; and nothing in the Universe is quite alone; you are moving on towards something.’

As Jeremy describes in A Species in Denial, despite having no answers Schreiner as a young girl seemed to ‘be able to arrive at some awareness of a meaningfulness to human life’ and how she could live within that and she was obviously a person of ‘exceptional moral courage’. The beauty of her words connects me with what the world of our soul faces and grapples with at Resignation and communicates the right response to having the world-saving answer to that dilemma in our hands, and that our freedom lies in that simple heartfelt decision of supporting that all-powerful solution over the upset within us.

It’s not a stretch of my imagination at all, to know that darkness with its ‘hatred and desire to see evil come to others’ exists inside of me, it’s always there for me to see and I’m sure we can all see this in ourselves. And as the theme of existence is selflessness, and we now have the means to legitimately and knowingly return to that existence, it really is a stalled position continuing to engage in those thoughts as though we aren’t able to cap them off. But that is what the Transformed State solution allows us to do.

As Jeremy explains in FREEDOM chap 9:4, we can’t hope to heal our upset in our lifetime but ‘we can immediately know that we are all fundamentally good and not bad, and this knowledge puts each of us in a very powerful position because it means we can legitimately decide not to think about and live in accordance with the upset within us.’ As a result, I can ‘leave that way of feeling and thinking behind me and adopt the new way of feeling and thinking that is now available where I live in support of a reconciled, non-aggressive, non-competitive, truth-based new world for humans!’ We can understand the reason for other’s selfishness, and that they are victims of the human condition and not ‘bad’, and even though we can’t go around turning the other cheek all the time, we can own up to the logic that there is no longer any rationale or future in allowing ‘hatred and desire to see evil come to others’. We can see the logic supporting that.

The thing is though, we don’t respond in this way naturally and immediately, and the reason is because we are resigned and haven’t had understanding of that until now. But in knowing that our resigned minds have been necessarily but fiercely dedicated to denying and escaping the human and protecting ‘self’, we can understand the enormous resistance we encounter, and why it does come down to a change of heart ‘decision’ to be committed to the freedom that has arrived. This awareness allows us to persist with the simplicity of the transformed state focus and to fight and break free from our resigned ‘wishes’, rather than be a victim to our inclination to abandon the logic and run the other way. In my experience, when we use this information to admit that our selfishness is purely psychological and not rational in the context of having the human condition explained, we can see that all that’s left is to have a change of heart to not act out the upset which is how we live in support of this truth and free from everything else.

Now I know what the Transformed State is about, and I’m quite excited about it and to a small degree afraid I will lose this state of freedom but in knowing now where the freedom lies and how it works makes me think I will not. With understanding of our resigned state we can overcome it’s irrational resistance and easily stay on track and live this way. It’s just about keeping with this simple, sincere, and in fact divine ‘attitude’ to be free of the darkness inside of us so that we can bring on the new world now together. It is this divine, loving and natural way to be which is at the core of our deep longing, and is now allowed for us again through this knowledge. That is the incredible freedom and beauty on offer now.

This Blog Post was written by Olof on May 6, 2016