Step 4
Rehabilitation of Humanity

Step 4 is to introduce us to life on the homeward journey.

It will be, relative to the two million year outward journey, a very quick trip lasting possibly only ten generations and thePage 33 of
Print Edition progress each generation makes will be immense. Even today’s generation will take great strides simply by experiencing the relief of turning around and facing in the right direction for the journey following generations will make.

Nevertheless, this journey will have its own particular problems. The main one will be that while we are exonerated we are also exposed to the extent of our exhaustions. While at the broad level, humanity is incredibly battle-fatigued, individually we are each at different stages of exhaustion. Some of us are just going into battle; some are in the midst of it, some are retiring exhausted and some are recuperating making ready to go back. While all these different stages of exhaustion can now be relieved, this process will take time during which we will remain exhausted, to varying degrees. The problem is living with our exhaustion while we are still exhausted.

During the generations it will take to heal our ego, anger, alienation and superficiality, the extent of these upsets in us will be exposed. When we can see how we could be we will not like being exhausted and will not like others knowing the extent of our exhaustion. This is in spite of the fact that our fatigue is now totally justified — completely defensible. While we are truthfully defended now it will take time to let go our old false defences and adopt the new truthful defence. In short we will remain insecure during the time it takes us to become secure.

For some time to come we will continue to misunderstand and consider those who are innocent or unexhausted as being ‘good’ and those who are no longer innocent and now exhausted as being ‘bad’. Similarly we will find it hard to adjust to the fact that our own personal exhaustions are not bad. It will take time to learn to love ourselves and others. It will take time to overcome our insecurity and take the freedom that is now available to us. It will take time to realise the door of our jail is now open. Further, we will discover that it is one thing to understand and still another to know and trust with our whole being. We will discover that knowledge follows many months behind understanding.

Page 34 of
Print Edition On the outward journey we were able to evade or block out the extent of our battle-fatigue or corruption; on the return journey we won’t need to and won’t be able to but we will still be inclined to want to hide. We will procrastinate and cling to our old evasions but they will no longer work. Adopting the new truthful defence for ourselves will be a radical re-adjustment we will find difficult to make even though our old defences are now transparent. To some extent we will be stranded between the old and the new world. The novelist Gertrude Stein coined the phrase ‘the lost generation’ and the reason the phrase caught on was that we knew it had significance. As can now be seen there will be a stranded lost generation or two, however even this is nothing to despair about as there will be many compensations for these generations — such as the euphoria of the homeward bound journey (as will shortly be mentioned).

Up until now we have survived by hiding. Our whole existence has been built upon developing artificial defences, evasions, props and disguises for ourselves. These are now destroyed and replaced with the true defence for ourselves but the problem is we need time to adopt this new defence. It is a shock. This is the real ‘future shock’¹ that we have suspected lay ahead of us. Our biblical term for it was ‘judgement day’. Judgement day is exposure or revelation day. We have finished with the age of guilt and we now pass through a brief age of exposure before entering the age of freedom. The best way to get through the age of exposure is not to procrastinate but to get on with it and get it over with.

To illustrate the problem: when it is explained that nurture not nature is all important in bringing up our children many parents will still feel they are being unfairly criticised and will go back to our old false evasive defences and say: ‘No, we are not guilty because it was nature (our genetic makeup) rather than our nurturing that was all important’. Similarly we will go on trying to deny integrative meaning to falsely justify our divisive Page 35 of
Print Edition competitive ways and, continuing to believe our exhaustion is bad, we will go on refusing to accept it, denying it, pretending it does not exist. We will try to maintain our old ways of coping. We will continue to be evasive or false even though we no longer have to be false and are aware that by continuing to be false we are perpetuating falseness and the upset on earth. We will procrastinate. However, we can and will gradually learn to adopt the new truthful defence for ourselves and say: ‘My children are upset because I was not able to nurture them — in the same way I was upset because my parents could not nurture me — but the good reason for this is that I and my ancestors have been heavily involved with humanity’s necessary battle to find understanding’, or ‘I am alienated and superficial because I have been battling to find understanding for humanity’. As soon as we say this, as well as ending the criticism from others who were upset by our evasion, we have also taken a giant step towards ending our ‘inability to love our children’ or towards ending our ‘alienation and superficiality’ — towards ending our upset with the criticism we were receiving from those who had yet to go to battle. The full truth is the oil we needed and, now that we have it, must pour on the troubled waters of our time to still them.

We have to learn to explain that there are no such things as good and bad people only people who are living with different degrees of exhaustion from fighting for humanity. We have to remind any who persist with the notion of ‘badness’ that at the end of a football match the battered and bruised heroes who are carried off the field high on the shoulders of their team mates are the players who did all the work in the thickest part of the match. Our exhaustion, like that of the football players’, is admirable, not despicable. The boy who had the courage to search for understanding, to take the cake and battle the unfair criticism, was the hero not the villain at the birthday party. For two million years our soul/innocence has misunderstood this but now we can clear up its misunderstanding and our upset with it.

Abandoning our old false defences for the true ones will be difficult at first but once underway not as difficult as initially
Page 36 of
Print Edition thought. Proof of this is that humanity has been ‘coming out of the closet’ — owning up already to such behaviours as ‘sex’, incest and the extent of child neglect — even without the safeguard of the true defence for these upsets. If we could confront our upsets when it was so threatening to do so how much easier will it be now that it is safe. However — a note of caution. While sooner or later it will be necessary for each of us to bravely make the first awkward effort to adopt the new defence for ourselves ultimately we will require the help and guidance of specially trained people. Until humanity has mastered the skills that will be necessary we should limit our efforts to self-expose and psychologically analyse others to what comes naturally to us as our minds absorb understanding. There are many, many completely new understandings (the dismantled ‘mountain of evasion’) to become familiar with before we can claim any degree of skill in understanding and explaining away our evasions, confusions and upsets. The door to the new world has only just been unlocked which means there is a lot to discover, learn and adjust to. We are now at the foot of a very steep learning curve.

These then are some of the problems of life on the homeward journey. However, there are many exciting positive aspects to compensate for these negatives. The greatest is the fellowship that is now possible on earth. While we will still be upset or battle-weary during our rehabilitation we can at last see the lights of home and the joy and excitement of this sight will bring us together in spite of ourselves. For instance, now that we can see how extremely upset we really are and how safety is at last within our reach we will want to call a moratorium on our now baseless personal and international angers. All we have to do now is buy time to absorb understanding. We will want to call a moratorium on humanity’s capacity for nuclear, chemical, genetic and technical destruction. To be acting like God while we could not even confront God was extremely dangerous. What was even more dangerous was that our upset could become greater than our capacity to care with the consequent indifference to the future of humanity. This can change now. Our hopesPage 37 of
Print Edition are now realities. Enthusiasm is going to come thundering through and cynicism is going to die. Everywhere people are going to come climbing out of their trenches and start hugging each other. We have won our two-million-year battle to get the truth up.

With the answers we can free ourselves from upset. Freedom is not here yet but it is in sight — it is at last possible. We can know that we can make it where before the situation looked all but hopeless. After our long and terrible journey through the darkness and wilderness we are necessarily all in tatters and utterly exhausted but seeing the lights of home at last we will find the energy to help each other through the final few miles of entanglements. Nothing can stop us now. The gate is open to lush pastures, streams and fields of flowers and there is no point staying on in the barren desert trying to make the most of the few paltry sticks we had to play with out there. There is a world that is so huge in its magnificence — in its excitement — in its happiness — in its wonder, that all our sophistications developed to the utmost to keep us going through the agony of our adolescence (such as ‘one dozen oysters natural’ and ‘the enjoyment of a cup of coffee in a fine china cup after a lovely evening meal’) rate as nothing beside it. (Shortly in Step 5 it will be explained that we have had to repress our memory of paradise because its beauty only reflected critically on our battle-weary state that we were unable to defend. We could not afford to show feeling and the more embattled we were the more this was so — the stronger we had to be. To quote John Lennon from his song Nobody Told Me: ‘everyone is crying but no one makes a sound’. For the first time in two million years it is safe to show emotion and to recall the beauty and happiness of our lost pure world and it is important to do so to inspire our homeward journey.) Everything is now possible. There is a lot to do but what is so wonderful is it is all now possible. Soon from one end of the horizon to the other will appear an army in its millions to do battle with human suffering and its weapon will be explanation which is understanding.

Page 38 of
Print Edition Thinking can now begin in earnest. We can start back down the dark corridors in our brain unlocking all the doors, dismantling all the blocks in our minds. The unravelling process can begin. We can think ourselves back together. We have to go back to all the things that went wrong in our lives and replace our misunderstandings, upsets and evasions with understanding, compassion and honesty. With understanding upset goes.

We can come out of the caves we have had to live in to hide from the glare of the many partial truths that used to hurt us and sit in the sunshine of understanding and start thawing out. Instead of hiding and repressing we can now start seeing and revealing. We no longer have to suffer further upset and we can begin to unravel and heal the upset that has occurred. In the past the only way we could cope was by repression, escape and attack, which led to further exhaustion. Now at last we can cope by understanding.

We have to appreciate that at the beginning of the homeward journey all that will be different in terms of what has happened to us is that we will be facing towards home instead of away from home. We have, finally, changed direction. Rehabilitation of our upset is now possible whereas before it was not. Yesterday we were exhausted and becoming more so. Today we are still exhausted but becoming less so. While initially all we have done is change direction it will make a big difference to our lives. Instead of deteriorating our situation will begin to improve. Our mind will take time to absorb the answers, unravel the confusions and upsets and heal itself. This cannot happen suddenly but great changes will take place, even in one lifetime. Our personalities are the expression of our various confusions and upsets; they won’t change overnight. However one day after about a year of living with the explanations each of us will look back and suddenly see that we have changed a great deal. A lot of upsets will have died down and even vanished. We will see how we have been rehabilitating or healing. This process is not an abandonment of our mind’s worries, our upset self, but anPage 39 of
Print Edition acknowledgement and understanding of the pain that we incurred and the reasons for it, which dissolves the pain/upset.

In contrast, religious conversions, where we abandoned our mental upset self in favour of living through Christ (or one of the other prophets the world has known) — and in so doing be ‘born again’ as a force for integrativeness — brought instant relief from our upset but did not resolve it. Religions offered ‘salvation from sin’, they offered a way out or escape from our upset but they were not able to liberate us from upset by resolving it. Ultimately humans had to learn to master thinking, confront our exhaustions, and in so doing resolve the upset. Our true freedom lay back through our blocks not further away from them. As an illustration of the instant and even miraculous relief religions offered, Pat Robertson, one of the leading television preachers in the U.S.A. described his conversion experience thus: ‘At my desk in my office, I leaned back in my chair and burst out laughing . . . I had passed from death into life.’² This relief — this ‘salvation from sin’ — achieved through such rejection or abandonment of our upset self to a faith is no longer necessary, instead we can think ourselves back together, become genuinely whole again. However, religions had an important role to play in the past and undoubtedly will still play a large part in supporting many of us for some time to come. We are immensely insecure and many will need the help of our religions until we become stronger in our ability to defend ourselves truthfully — to think without encountering criticism/pain. The thing is, thinking is now possible whereas before it was all too often hurtful and dangerous.

Everything will become positive now where before it was negative and draining. In truth we were not living we were dying. While we remained physically alive our soul died because we blocked it out because it criticised us and our mind or spirit died because thinking became too dangerous and its effects too destructive. With understanding now available this can all Page 40 of
Print Edition change. The most dramatic result will be with our children. Children come into the world with relatively pure souls, instinctively expecting an innocent world, a world without upset. In the past this meant that when they encountered our upset adult behaviour they found it extremely distressing. To their innocent consciences adult behaviour was all so terribly wrong. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said in his famous book, The Little Prince (1945), ‘Grown-ups are certainly very, very odd’. This very, very odd world that children found themselves in would not have mattered so much to them if parents had been able to tell them why it was so odd. It was not what happened in our lives that was the problem so much as our inability to understand why it was happening and so cope with it honestly. It wasn’t the taking of the cake but our inability to explain why we took it that was the problem. Without explanation to defend their various adult upsets parents could only deny them, give false explanations for them or simply be silent about them. Kept in the dark about what was going on children were left with no alternative but to block out the pain the adults’ upsets and strange world caused them. In this way, since human upset first appeared on earth, the members of each new generation have had to learn to repress their true selves and adopt the prevailing levels of evasion, denial and silence on earth. Now, suddenly, this pattern is broken. Now with explanation at last available children will no longer have to die inside themselves in a sea of silence, superficiality and what is to them lies. Children will be able to be told why we are the way we are.

This means they will stay alive inside themselves and we will soon see adults appear having all the happiness of young children. The strength they will derive from that happiness will absolutely obliterate any problems that remain. This is where that army it was said would appear on the horizon will come from. Compared to our task of struggling with an intolerable burden of unfair criticism the task of these later generations will be easy. Those who lived during humanity’s two million years of defenceless adolescence where the whole world in effectPage 41 of
Print Edition disowned them for their unavoidable divisiveness are the truly great heroes. We and those before us have been the ones who had to overthrow ignorance. The picks that demolished the granite wall that stood between humanity and heaven will be the most cherished objects in all of heaven. This earth has never seen and will never see again anything so great as us. We have been incredibly heroic and when we come home all nature will line the streets to welcome us. Weary and in tatters the victorious army of humanity has finally broken into the kingdom of heaven. We have still to realise it but we are now standing inside the gates of paradise.

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¹ Reference to the book of this name (published 1971) by Alvin Toffler.

²Time magazine, February 17, 1986.