Part 3:12 Anticipations of the arrival of our species’ liberation from the horror of the human condition and resulting TRANSFORMATION of the human race

The ability to at last explain the human condition means everything we humans have ever dreamed of is now possible. As has been emphasised in Part 3:10, and as will be explained in some detail in Part 9, the arrival of understanding of the human condition allows everyone to immediately be free of the human condition and as a result be TRANSFORMED into a state of extraordinary joyful excitement.

To illustrate the magnificence of this breakthrough in ‘enlightenment’ or understanding and resulting ‘cave-prison’-‘released’ transfiguration of the human race that Plato talked about and in truth every human who has ever lived has worked tirelessly towards, all that is required is the inclusion of a few of the anticipations of this wondrous moment of FREEDOM from the human condition and resulting TRANSFORMATION of the human race that can be found in all ancient as well as contemporary forms of human expression.

It is relevant to note the phenomenal consistency of description and imagery in all these accounts, in particular of being imprisoned and of the rising sun representing the arrival of the dreamed of liberating knowledge about our troubled condition. While the anticipation of our species’ FREEDOM was clearly something we, for the most part, had to block out of our mind because it made living with the terrible emptiness of our existing lives too unbearable, it was, nevertheless, a fabulously exciting hope and dream that we have all carried just below the surface of our conscious awareness. As such we couldn’t access it by simply deciding to try to think about it—usually it had to bubble up from underneath our much-reinforced protective, defensive, denial-dependent, superficial, everyday state of awareness. Poetry and song were marvellous vehicles for allowing this to occur because in their creation we allowed our mind to, as it were, semi-disconnect from its protective ‘cave prison’ state of ‘almost blind’ denial and simply let rhyme express thoughts and emotions it otherwise wouldn’t.

Before going on to describe these honest expressions of hope and excitement, it should also be mentioned that while the anticipation of our species’ liberation from the human condition exists in everyone just below the surface of their conscious awareness, on the occasion/s that it did bubble up and break through to the surface it usually wasn’t long before that awareness was once again repressed; it had to be, because, as I said, it made living with the terrible emptiness of our existing lives too unbearable. The result of this limited access to the truth of another human-condition-free state is that some of the composers of the songs that will be mentioned here have, in later life, denied the suggestion that there was any prophetic element to words that were written in their inspired youth and/or in an inspired state. Bob Dylan has said something to that effect about his earlier songs, while in his 2008 memoir, Thirteen Tonne Theory: Life Inside Hunters and Collectors, the Australian singer-songwriter Mark Seymour spoke about ‘kook’ responses to his (soon-to-be-described) amazingly prophetic 1993 song, The Holy Grail—citing one of my own references to the lyrics of that song as an example. Seymour dismissively said I was suggesting his lyrics were ‘somehow…connected with the dawning of a new consciousness’ (p.343 of 388). Again, the problem with any acknowledgment of another wonderful, human-condition-free world was that it made living with the terrible emptiness of our existing lives too unbearable. So while we do all carry an awareness of the potential for this fabulous other world just below the surface of our consciousness, it was only in rare, inspired moments that we could actually afford to allow that awareness to bubble to the surface before having to block out once more the real significance, context and meaning of what we revealed. Of course, what has been said here doesn’t just apply to songwriters, it applies across all forms of human expression: literature, art, poetry, etc.

Obviously some individuals are more capable than others of accessing the truths that the human race, as a whole, has had to repress, live in denial of. As is about to be described, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Bono were and are four exceptionally truth-revealing, prophetic songwriters. But well before their time we, of course, had the earliest recorded anticipations of the arrival of our species’ liberation from the horror of the human condition—those contained in religious scripture.

As already mentioned, the eternal hope, faith and trust we have all held onto of the eventual arrival of ‘peace on Earth’ is expressed in every religion, such as in the Bible in The Lord’s Prayer where it says, ‘Your [cooperative, loving, harmonious, peaceful] Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6:10 & Luke 11:2), and in Genesis where it says that we ‘will be like God, knowing [understanding] good and evil’ (3:5), and in Buddhist scripture where Buddha says, ‘every one’ ‘In domains in all directions’ will be living ‘on wisdom-thrones’ (The Lotus Sutra, ch.9; tr. W.E. Soothill, 1987, p.148 of 275).

Returning, however, to contemporary mythology, when Jim Morrison of the rock band The Doors wrote and sang of wanting to ‘break on through to the other side’ (from Break on Through, written in 1966, first released on The Doors’ 1967 album The Doors), he too was anticipating a time when humans could break through from living a human-condition-afflicted state to a TRANSFORMED human-condition-free state. And when he sang that ‘At first flash of Eden, we race down to the sea. Standing there on freedom’s shore, waiting, waiting, waiting for the sun’ (from Waiting for the Sun, written in 1968, first released on The Doors’ 1970 album Morrison Hotel), what he was ‘waiting’ for was the liberating light of the redeeming and rehabilitating understanding of the human condition to dawn across the world and take the human race back to a Garden-of-‘Eden’-like state of upset-free innocence. Similarly also, the ‘yellow brick road’ that Dorothy had to follow to reach the ‘Emerald City’ in The Wizard Of Oz (first published as the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum in 1900) was really an intuitive anticipation of the Sunshine Highway that the whole human race is now able to take to a peaceful, ‘Emerald’, Garden-of-Eden-like world bathed in the warm, healing sunshine of dignifying, uplifting, liberating and relieving self-knowledge. It is, as already mentioned, the anticipation in Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘dream’ of a harmonious world FREE of our species’ historic, immensely troubled state or condition—a fabulous time when all humans would be able to proclaim that we are ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ (‘I Have A Dream’ speech, 28 Aug. 1963) from our age-old insecure fear and doubt about our worth and the resulting psychosis that made us humans so defensive and retaliatory towards one another.

Yes, the quintessential shaking of our fist at the heavens was an affirmation by us humans that one day, one day, we would be able to explain ourselves, explain that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we are not fundamentally evil, god-defiling, meaningless and worthless blights on this Earth after all—that there is a reason we became the angry, egocentric and alienated species we have been.

In his 1971 song Peace Train, Cat Stevens (who now calls himself Yusuf Islam) also wrote and sang about the dream of a TRANSFORMED, human-condition-ameliorated world, when we could leave the terrible darkness of our cave-like prison of alienated self-estrangement and return to an untroubled, peaceful, integrated state: ‘I’ve been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one. And I believe it could be, some day it’s going to come. Cause out on the edge of darkness there rides a peace train. Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again.’ And then there are the lyrics to another of Stevens’ songs from 1971, Changes IV: ‘Don’t you feel a change a coming, from another side of time. Breaking down the walls of silence, lifting shadows from your mind…Yesterday has past, now let’s all start the living for the one that’s going to last…when the clouds have all gone…and the beauty of all things is uncovered again…Don’t you feel the day is coming, and it won’t be too soon, when the people of the world can all live in one room, when we shake off the ancient chains of our tomb.’ The words of Walter Earl Brown’s 1968 song If I Can Dream, which was performed by Elvis Presley, are equally prophetic: ‘There must be peace and understanding sometime, strong winds of promise that will blow away all the doubt and fear. If I can dream of a warmer sun where hope keeps shining on everyone…We’re trapped in a world that’s troubled with pain…Still I am sure that the answer’s gonna come somehow, out there in the dark, there’s a beckoning candle.’ The song Aquarius, from the rock musical Hair (which premiered in 1967), similarly anticipated a time of ‘Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding. No more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions…And the mind’s true liberation …We dance unto the dawn of day’ (Lyrics by James Rado & Gerome Ragni). Hair also contained the song that pleaded to ‘Let The Sunshine In’ (ibid).

As mentioned, one of the founders of the New Age Movement, the American author Marilyn Ferguson, was looking forward to a human-condition-ameliorated new world when she wrote, ‘Maybe [the French Jesuit priest, scientist and philosopher] Teilhard de Chardin was right; maybe we are moving toward an omega point [final unification of our split selves]—Maybe we can finally resolve the planet’s inner conflict between its neurotic self (which we’ve created and which is unreal) and its real self. Our real self knows how to commune, how to create…From everything I’ve seen people really urgently want the kind of new beginning…[that I am] talking about [where humans will live in] cooperation instead of competition’ (New Age mag. Aug. 1982).

Sir Bob Geldof, the Irish rock singer, songwriter and political activist who was knighted for his humanitarian initiatives in Africa, recognised how alienated from its true self or soul, and thus lost, the human race has become with his emphasis on the phrase ‘Deep in the Heart of Nowhere’ in the lyrics and title of a song from his 1986 album, also titled Deep in the Heart of Nowhere. In another song from the same album, Sir Bob pleaded the desperate plight of the world with the words, ‘What are we going to do because it can’t go on…This is the world calling. God help us’ (This is the World Calling). His lyrics to another song on the same album recognise just how desperate the human race has been for answers: ‘Searching through their sacred books for the holy grail of “why”, but the total sum of knowledge knows no more than you or I’ (August Was a Heavy Month). While religious texts have been the best reservoir of denial-free knowledge the human race has had, there was no scientific knowledge available at the time they were written to enable the denial-free thinkers or prophets involved in creating those great religious texts to answer all the ‘why’s about our human condition.

The words of many of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s early songs are deeply prophetic yearnings for, and anticipations of, an end to our lonely, cave-dwelling, self-estranged, split-off-from-our-true-self, alienated, seemingly lost and meaningless existence through the arrival at last of a human-condition-understood-and-ameliorated world of FREEDOM—notably in Like A Rolling Stone (1965), which asked, ‘How does it feel, how does it feel to be on your own with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone’; and in Mr. Tambourine Man (1964), when Dylan sang, ‘I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to…I’m branded on my feet, I have no one to meet, and the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming…Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind, down the foggy ruins of time…far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow…Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me’; and in When The Ship Comes In (1963) when Dylan sang of ‘The hour that the ship [the dignifying, reconciling understanding of humans] comes in…And the morning will be a-breaking…And the words that are used for to get the ship confused [all our false denials] / Will not be understood as they’re spoken [the denials will be seen through] / For the chains [holding the truth back] of the sea will have busted in the night and be buried on the bottom of the ocean…And like Goliath they’ll [all our denials will] be conquered’; and in The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1963) when he anticipated how ‘the [human-condition-afflicted] present now will later be past’; and in All Along the Watchtower (1968) when he demanded that ‘There must be some way out of here…There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief…There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke…So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. All along the watchtower, princes kept the view [waiting and watching for the time when understanding of the human condition would finally arrive and humans would no longer have to live in a state of sad and pathetic confusion where everyone has to depend on denial to cope and as a result talk so falsely]…Two riders were approaching [the approaching duality of the wonderfully all-liberating but at the same time dreadfully all-exposing truth about our human condition], the wind began to howl [the coming terrifying storm of the all-exposing truth—as it says in the Bible, you will know when the truth about the human condition arrives because it will be ‘like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other’ (Luke 17:24 & Matt. 24:27)]’; and, finally, in Blowin’ In The Wind (1962) he pleaded, ‘how many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?’

Expressing a similar exasperation to Dylan’s ‘I can’t get no relief’ were singer-songwriters Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones with their 1965 song I Can’t Get No Satisfaction—a track that in 2004 was voted by a panel of experts assembled by the world’s leading rock music magazine Rolling Stone as the second-greatest song of all time behind Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone: ‘I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no satisfaction, ’cause I try and I try and I try and I try…When I’m drivin’ in my car, and that man comes on the radio and he’s tellin’ me more and more about some useless [human-condition-denying, superficial] information supposed to fire my imagination…I can’t get no satisfaction, When I’m watchin’ my TV and that man comes on to tell me how white my shirts can be, well, he can’t be a man, ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me…I can’t get no satisfaction, ’cause I try and I try. When I’m ridin’ ’round the world and I’m doin’ this and I’m signin’ that and I’m tryin’ to make some girl who tells me, baby better come back later next week, ’cause you see I’m on a losing streak…I can’t get no satisfaction. That’s what I say.’ Singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman’s 1986 release Why? also contains honest descriptions of the utter hypocrisy of our human-condition-afflicted lives before anticipating a time when the underlying truth about that tragic state would finally be revealed: ‘Why do the babies starve, when there’s enough food to feed the world. Why when there’re so many of us, are there people still alone. Why are the missiles called peace keepers, when they’re aimed to kill. Why is a woman still not safe, when she’s in her home. Love is hate, war is peace, no is yes, and we’re all free. But somebody’s gonna have to answer, the time is coming soon, amidst all these questions and contradictions, there’re some who seek the truth. But somebody’s gonna have to answer, the time is coming soon, when the blind remove their blinders, and the speechless speak the truth.’ (While I Can’t Get No Satisfaction and Like A Rolling Stone have been voted the greatest songs of all time, I have both heard (in the case of Dancing Queen, Grant Denyer, Channel 7’s Sunrise, 2 Mar. 2011) and read (in the case of Crazy, accessed Mar. 2011 at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/​Patsy_Cline>) that the two most played songs on jukeboxes are ABBA’s Dancing Queen (about being ‘young and sweet, only seventeen…[and] having the time of your life…[where you] leave ’em burning’) and Patsy Cline’s Crazy (about being ‘Crazy for thinking that my love could hold you’)—yes, for reasons that will be explained in Part 7:1, young women have owned the world, their beauty has been so extraordinary, so inspiring and exciting, that there was nothing comparable to it in the dead, human-condition-afflicted world; and yes, older women therefore suffered from the loss of innocent youthfulness’ intoxicating effect.)

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1970 song Who’ll Stop the Rain, written and sung by the band’s lead vocalist John Fogerty, contains these lyrics of hunger for FREEDOM from all the confusion: ‘Long as I remember the rain’s been coming down. Clouds of mystery pouring confusion on the ground. Good men through the ages trying to find the sun, and I wonder, still I wonder who’ll stop the rain.’ As stated, it wasn’t until science had found sufficient understanding of the mechanisms and workings of our world that the human condition could be explained. As will be fully described in Part 4, until science had done its job and found sufficient knowledge to make explanation of the human condition possible, all the ‘good men’ in the world couldn’t ‘find the sun’; find the liberating understanding of the human condition and ‘stop the rain’, stop the ‘clouds of mystery pouring confusion on the ground’. And even when science had accumulated sufficient knowledge for the human condition to be explained there still remained a great deal of fearful truth to have to face to reach that liberating insight—as Billy Joel experienced and described in his 1993 song River of Dreams: ‘In the middle of the night I go walking in my sleep, from the mountains of faith…through the valley of fear…through the jungle of doubt…through the desert of truth…to the river so deep…that is runnin’ to the promised land [of our FREEDOM from our human-condition-imprisoned state]…but the river is wide and it’s too hard to cross [there are truths too terrifying to confront and try to think about]…I try to cross to the opposite side so I can finally find what I’ve been looking for…I’ve been searching for something taken out of my soul.’ We needed the reconciling understanding of the human condition that would allow us to resuscitate and re-integrate ourselves with our original, innocent, soulful state—but finding that truth meant confronting the imperfections of our more recent past. In her 1994 song New Beginning, Tracy Chapman acknowledged our species’ current decimated, corrupted, ‘fallen’, damaged, upset, hurt, dysfunctional condition and the path we had to take to a liberated and healed new beginning: ‘The world is broken into fragments and pieces that once were joined together in a unified whole…The whole world’s broke and it ain’t worth fixing. It’s time to start all over, make a new beginning…change our lives and paths; create a new world…There’s too much fighting, too little understanding…We need to…make a new [truthful] language. With these we’ll redefine the world and start all over.’

In his 1971 song Imagine, John Lennon, a member of the most famous band of the 1960s (and perhaps of all-time), the wholesome The Beatles, asked us to ‘imagine there’s no heaven…no hell below us’, a world without the condemning differentiation of good and evil, a world liberated from the insecurity of the human condition and thus the need for religion, where there is ‘Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too…all the people living life in peace…No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man…all the people sharing all the world…[when] the world will be as one.’ Absolutely exasperated with the dishonest, empty-of-any-truth, cave-dwelling world of psychotic denial and delusion we humans have had to live in, and so eager for the arrival of the truth about the human condition that would finally bring about the healed and ameliorated world that he could ‘imagine’, Lennon composed Just Gimme Some Truth (1971) in which he pleaded for honesty: ‘All I want is the truth, just gimme some truth. I’ve had enough of reading things by neurotic…politicians…I’m sick to death of seeing things from tight-lipped…chauvinists…I’ve had enough of watching scenes of schizophrenic…prima-donnas…I’m sick and tired of hearing things from uptight…hypocrites…All I want is the truth now, just gimme some truth NOW.’ The ‘truth’ is what the world has been desperate for, however, as we are going to see in all the coming descriptions and analysis of the human condition, that ‘truth’ can be terrifyingly exposing and confronting—making the solution to all that frightening exposure of the TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE STATE so immensely precious.

All these lyrics about the hunger for the liberating understanding of the human condition are reminiscent of the admonition the ancients had emblazoned across their temples: ‘Man, know thyself.’ Only through finding the relieving understanding of ourselves could we end our imprisonment in a cave-dwelling state of alienation—or, to use religious terminology, end our ‘banished’ existence ‘from the Garden of Eden’ (Gen. 3:23) state of our original innocence and by so doing return not to an innocent state, because we now have ‘the knowledge [the understanding] of good and evil’ (ibid. 2:9, 2:17, 3:5), but to a secure, integrated, peaceful state of being—and, as a result of that change in us, enable the rehabilitation of our planet to its former state of unexploited, unpolluted, unspoiled beauty.

Mark Seymour, the aforementioned lead singer and songwriter with the Australian rock band Hunters and Collectors, was prescient when, in his already cited 1993 song Holy Grail, he sang about a ‘dream’ of a time when humans would be able to rise up from their human-condition-depressed-oppressed-and-repressed state and take the all-crucial unifying, ego-freeing and Earth-healing understanding of our species that, for so long, we had been searching for across the four corners of the world: ‘Woke up this morning from the strangest dream, I was in the biggest army the world had ever seen, we were marching as one on the road to the Holy Grail [to liberating understanding]. Started out seeking fortune and glory, it’s a short song but it’s a hell of a story, when you spend your lifetime trying to get your hands, on the Holy Grail. Well have you heard about the Great Crusade? We ran into millions but nobody got paid [selfless cooperation replaced selfish greed], yeah we razed four corners of the globe for the Holy Grail. All the locals scattered, they were hiding in the snow. We were so far from home, so how were we to know there’d be nothing left to plunder when we stumbled on the Holy Grail? We were so full of beans but we were dying like flies [humans were pretending to be happy but in truth they were all but dead with alienation], and those big black birds, they were circling in the sky, and you know what they say, yeah nobody deserves to die [humanity was entering the end play state of terminal alienation]. Oh but I’ve been searching for an easy way, to escape the cold light of day [I have tried to live in denial]. I’ve been high and I’ve been low [I have lived a manic depressive, bipolar existence of oscillating between being able to block out the reality of my immensely corrupted condition enough to feel some relief, and being unable to block it out], but I’ve got nowhere else to go [trying to live through denial had run its course]. There’s nowhere else to go! I followed orders [I have tried to live through deferment to laws, rules and faith], God knows where I’ve been, but I woke up alone, all my wounds were clean [I woke up in the human-condition-reconciled, liberated, TRANSFORMED state].’ In the Bible the prophet Joel expressed the exact same anticipation: ‘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. With a noise like that of chariots…like a mighty army…They all march in line, not swerving from their course. They do not jostle each other…The day of the Lord is great [the day of the arrival of the out-of-cave, denial-free, honest words of liberating, egocentricity-ending, nature-repairing truth about our human condition is great]’ (Joel 2). After saying that ‘the day of the Lord [truth] is great’, Joel immediately goes on to warn of how frighteningly exposing of our corrupted human condition the truth about the human condition will be, saying that that day is going to be so ‘dreadful. Who can endure it?’ As to how we ‘endure’ the arrival of the wonderfully dignifying, healing, ameliorating and all-liberating—but at the same time all-exposing, ‘dreadful’—naked truth about ourselves is an immense problem for us, but thankfully there is an easy, totally effective and glorious solution. This wonderful solution that leads to the TRANSFORMED STATE where we leave all our upset behind in a ‘suitcase’ as dealt with was described in Part 3:10. In the Bible the prophet Isaiah also described the arrival of the world-changing, utterly inspired TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING when he said: ‘He [understanding] lifts up a banner for the distant nations, he whistles for those at the ends of the earth. Here they come, swiftly and speedily! Not one of them grows tired or stumbles, not one slumbers or sleeps; not a belt is loosened at the waist, not a sandal thong is broken. Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung; their horses’ hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels like a whirlwind. Their roar is like that of the lion, they roar like young lions; they growl as they seize their prey and carry it off with no-one to rescue. In that day they will roar over it like the roaring of the sea’ (Isa. 5:26–30).

The Irish rock band U2 has also made, and indeed continues to make, a great contribution to the stable of songs that convey the hunger for a human-condition-ameliorated, integrated world—as the following examples attest. For starters, their immensely popular 1987 song I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, which was written by the band’s members and sung by their lead singer Bono, contains the following powerful lyrics: ‘I have climbed the highest mountain…Only to be with you…I have kissed honey lips [I have tried to believe in and live through the inspiration of women’s beauty]…But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…I have held the hand of a devil…I was cold as a stone [I’ve experienced the dark behaviour and loneliness of a human-condition-afflicted existence] But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…I believe in the Kingdom Come when all the colours will bleed into one [the time when the human race will finally be unified through dignifying, insecurity-eliminating self-knowledge] But yes, I’m still running [still waiting desperately for that great breakthrough insight that will make that possible] You…carried the cross of my shame, you know I believe it [I have also tried to live through religious faith] But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for [but I/we still haven’t found the all-important, lynch-pin, unlocking liberating understanding of our human condition].’ In 1988 U2 recorded a version of Dylan’s aforementioned song of yearning anticipation, All Along the Watchtower, and in the same year Bono wrote and sang of his own human-condition-prison-defying, rock-and-roll-fired-up attitude to life in the band’s God Part II: ‘Don’t believe in excess, success is to give…Don’t believe in the sixties, the golden age of pop. You [only] glorify the past when the future dries up…[I’m determinedly] gonna kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight. [until it lets the truth out, because] I, I believe in love [and I, like you too, are not going to give up on that dream].’ Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a 2011 rock musical about the superhero, also features music and lyrics by U2 members Bono and The Edge. While the title’s reference to turning off the dark obviously refers to the battle against evil, it is also imbued with a powerful double meaning, namely that of the human race’s desperate need to find enlightening understanding of our human condition—which only a denial-free thinking prophet, the superhero that, in truth, all superheroes represented the hope of, could find.

This desire for enlightenment and liberty from the darkness of the human condition is also apparent in the band’s 1987 song Where The Streets Have No Name (also written and sung by Bono), which contains these exceptionally prophetic words: ‘I want to tear down the walls [of our prison of having to live in denial/​alienation] that hold me inside, I want to reach out and touch the flame [I want the truth even though it’s going to be searing], where the streets have no name [I want the human-condition-resolved world where we no longer have to own and egocentrically put our names on everything]. I want to feel sunlight [of liberating enlightenment] on my face, see that dust cloud [of all the destructive effects of our upset] disappear without a trace, I want to take shelter from the poison rain, where the streets have no name…We’re still building and burning down love, burning down love [destroying beauty and denying truth]. And when I go there, I go there with you, (it’s all I can do) [all I can do is live through the inspiration of women’s beauty]. The city’s a flood, and our love turns to rust [the romantic dream of married togetherness when we are in truth all so differently and, in almost all cases, so extremely alienated is a dream that doesn’t easily last]. We’re beaten and blown by the wind, trampled in dust. I’ll show you a place, high on a desert plain, where the streets have no name’—and on a few live recordings taken during U2’s 1997-98 ‘Popmart Tour’ Bono included these lyrics at the song’s end: ‘Then there will be no toil or sorrow, then there will be no time of pain, then there will be no time.’ Another sublime world ‘high on a desert plain, where the streets have no name’, where ‘there will be no toil or sorrow’, ‘no time of pain’, in fact ‘no’ emphasis on ‘time’ at all, is clearly a TRANSFORMED place FREE of the insecurity of the human condition where, as mentioned, no one is having to egocentrically name their particular street. It is a marvellously poetic description of the dream of a world where humans’ insecure, ‘must-somehow-prove-that-I-am-not-bad’, embattled, conscious thinking ego has finally been satisfied at the fundamental level—which is with the trustable, first-principle-based, biological understanding of why, despite all appearances to the contrary, we humans are good and not a bad, evil, meaningless, worthless, flawed, throw-away species after all.

Bono’s reference to a time when ‘there will be no toil or sorrow, then there will be no time of pain’ is exactly the same vision that is expressed in the Bible where it states that ‘Another book [will be]…opened which is the book of life [the human-condition-explaining and humanity-liberating book]…[and] a new heaven and a new earth [will appear] for the first heaven and the first earth [will have]…passed away…[and the dignifying full truth about our condition] will wipe every tear from…[our] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’ (Rev. 20:12, 21:1, 4). Buddhist scripture contains precisely the same anticipation of this fabulous time that has now at last begun when humans ‘will with a perfect voice preach the true Dharma [present the supreme wisdom, namely understanding of the human condition], which is auspicious and removes all ill’, saying, ‘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).

It should be emphasised that Bono singing of wanting ‘to reach out and touch the flame, where the streets have no name’ is an intuitive recognition that the dignifying and thus liberating truth is also going to be the all-exposing and confronting naked truth about ourselves, something searing to go near. Recall that in his cave allegory of the human condition, Plato also used the metaphor of fire to describe this problem of the exposure that the truth about our condition would unavoidably bring when he said, ‘And if he [the cave prisoner] were made to look directly at the light of the fire [look at the confronting truth about our highly imperfect, less-than-ideal human condition], it would hurt his eyes…And if he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rocky ascent and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight [into the presence of the searing truth about our immensely hurt/​damaged/​broken/​corrupted/​fallen/​imperfect human state or condition], the process would be a painful one, to which he would much object, and when he emerged into the light his eyes would be…overwhelmed by the brightness of it’. Again, thankfully there is an easy, totally effective and glorious solution to the problem of the exposure that occurs with the arrival of the naked truth about ourselves, which is the TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING described in Part 3:10.

At this point it is worth including more lyrics from two of The Doors’ songs, Waiting for the Sun and Break on Through. In Waiting for the Sun Jim Morrison (who, at 27, in essence, chose to die at the door of the new world demanding to be let through rather than have anything more to do with the effectively dead world of our current upset, all-busted-up, human-condition-afflicted existence) wrote and sang: ‘At first flash of Eden [at the first rays of the light of liberating understanding of a human-condition-ameliorated new world] we race down to the sea. Standing there on freedom’s shore, waiting for the sun [waiting for the liberating understanding of the human condition to come flooding in], waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun. Can you feel it? [feel how good it is going to be?] Now that Spring has come. That it’s time to live in the scattered sun [live with the sun/​truth everywhere]. Waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun. Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting for you to come along [‘you’ being the sun/​truth]. Waiting for you to hear my song [pleading with you/​the sun/​the truth to come and liberate us from the human condition at last]. Waiting for you to come along, waiting for you to tell me what went wrong [explain the whole confusing mess]. This is the strangest life I’ve ever known [it’s been a bewilderingly mad, devoid-of-any-truth world to have to live in]. Yeah! [scream] Can you feel? Now that Spring has come. That it’s time to live in the scattered sun. Waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun.’ And from Break on Through, also written and sung by Jim Morrison: ‘You know day destroys night [truth destroys the denial/​lies], night divides the day [our cave-dwelling, alienated denial separates us from the liberating light of truth]. Tried to run, tried to hide [tried to live in the cave state of denial, but ultimately humanity had to], break on through to the other side [cure ourselves of our human-condition-afflicted, cave-dwelling state of bondage, as Plato described it]. We chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there [tried to find satisfaction through escapist materialism], but can you still recall the time we cried, break on through to the other side. Yeah! C’mon, yeah. Everybody loves my baby, she get high. I found an island in your arms, country in your eyes. Arms that chain us, eyes that lie [as will be explained later in Part 7:1, women’s beauty, their child-like neotenous image of innocence—cute features of large eyes, snub nose, dome forehead, etc—has inspired men to dream of a pure, human-condition-FREE world but the truth is women are necessarily as psychologically corrupted as men, and thus women’s inspiration of ‘heaven’, of a human-condition-FREE, idyllic world, has only been an illusion and thus transitory], break on through to the other side. Oh, yeah! Made the scene, week to week, day to day, hour to hour [tried to go along with the escapist, deluded, artificial, superficial, effectively-dead world of denial]. The gate is straight, deep and wide [the real path to our species’ FREEDOM lay in plumbing the terrifying depths of the issue of our corrupted, fallen, less-than-ideal state or condition, which had to be done if we were to], break on through to the other side.’ Jim Morrison was certainly an extraordinarily courageous, truthful, prophetic thinker. The best documentary I have seen on Morrison is When You’re Strange: A film about The Doors (Directed by Tom DiCillo, 2009).

With the world entering unendurable, end-play levels of distress, dysfunction and ever more protective-but-deadening, ‘cave-dwelling’, escapist denial and its alienation to cope with the increasing horror of our condition, this breakthrough understanding of the human condition comes at the eleventh hour for the human race. Now, instead of the imminent threat of an endless darkness for the human race from terminal levels of the soul-less, bitterly-cold-and-lonely, self-estranged state of dishonest alienation, what we see before us is a fabulous vista of the human race transfigured by the glorification and exaltation of dignifying, liberating, uplifting, ameliorating, healing, redeeming, integrating, unifying, soul-resuscitating self-knowledge. The title of U2’s 1988 song Love Rescue Me can be read as ‘Truth Rescue Me’ because the ultimate love for humans is really the truth. Written by Bono with input from Bob Dylan (which, incidentally, is an extraordinary combination because, along with John Lennon and Jim Morrison, Bono and Dylan are possibly the most prophetic lyricists of all time—well, at least of contemporary times, because no doubt some of the ancient minstrels and bards, whose work I am not so familiar with, must have also been capable of extraordinarily prophetic compositions), this phenomenally prophetic song acknowledges the despair of our current condition but concludes with the awesome vision of our species’ FREEDOM from that state: ‘Love [truth] rescue me / Come forth and speak to me / Raise me up and don’t let me fall / No man is my enemy [I don’t want to be living with so much hate inside me anymore] / My own hands imprison me [but I’m imprisoned by the unbearable dilemma of my own flawed, imperfect, embattled, less-than-ideal human condition] / Love [truth] rescue me // Many strangers have I met / On the road to my regret / Many lost who seek to find themselves in me / They ask me to reveal / The very thoughts they would conceal [many have wanted the hidden truths about our species’ unendurable condition to be revealed and the human race to be liberated from its tortured state] / Love [truth] rescue me // And the sun in the sky / Makes a shadow of you and I [exposes the imperfection of our lives] / Stretching out as the sun sinks in the sea [we have only ever been able to cope by blocking out the glare of the issue of our deeply troubled and flawed state] / I’m here without a name [alienated] / In the palace of my shame [my dishonesty] / I said, love [truth] rescue me // In the cold mirror of a glass / I see my reflection pass / I see the dark shades of what I used to be [see the depressing contrast of what I am now with my lost state of innocence] / I see the purple of her eyes [see the false enticement of the image of attractive innocence that women’s neotenous, child-like beauty tricks men into believing is real innocence] / The scarlet of my lies [men’s deluded, massively arrogant egocentric lives]…Yeah I’m here without a name / In the palace of my shame / I said love rescue me // [At this point in the song there is a very long pause, then suddenly the song picks up again but this time describing a whole new situation and world] I’ve conquered my past / The future is here at last / I stand at the entrance to a new world I can see / The ruins to the right of me / Will soon have lost sight of me / Love rescue me [I have finally found the dignifying, uplifting, loving, TRANSFORMING truth that makes sense of our imperfect human state or condition and liberates me and the world from the darkness of that human-condition-afflicted existence, thereby introducing a new, TRANSFORMED world for humanity where we all can leave our old psychotic and neurotic baggage behind forever].’ Bono wrote a similar exciting song of anticipation of our species’ TRANSFORMATION from a human-condition-afflicted existence in 1987, which U2 performed with blues legend B.B. King. Titled When Love Comes To Town, the song features the lyrics, ‘I was a sailor, I was lost at sea / I was under the waves…But I did what I did before love [truth] came to town…I’ve seen love conquer the great divide [through all my experiences of trying to live through romance, through materialism, through religion, etc, etc, I know now that only the reconciling truth can heal our split selves]…When love comes to town I’m gonna jump that train [when the liberating, TRANSFORMING truth about the human condition finally arrives I’m ‘out of here’; leaving the old dead world behind forever—as will be everyone else because, as Cat Stevens similarly anticipated, ‘out on the edge of darkness there rides a peace train’ that has at last arrived to ‘take’ us ‘home again’].’

What was ‘rock and roll’ if not totally optimistic, all-out, rock-solid ‘defiance, determination and resilience’ to one day achieve FREEDOM from our species’ historic state of unjust condemnation—determination to, as Bono sang, ‘kick the darkness till it bleeds [the] daylight’ of the truth about us humans and end the damned condemnation of our species FOR EVER! What did Dylan famously say about Elvis Presley—‘Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.’ John Lennon famously reiterated the sentiment, saying, ‘Before Elvis there was nothing’—there was not all-out determination and optimism, there was no rock and roll, there was just endless decades and epochs and ages of resigned, lonely music—although Ludwig van Beethoven’s 1824 Ninth Symphony does contain a full chorus of human voices rising to the final height of glorious anticipation of resolution and freedom from the human condition with the words ‘Joy’, ‘Joyful, as a hero to victory!’, ‘Join in our jubilation!’, ‘We enter, drunk with fire, into your sanctuary…Your magic reunites…All men become brothers…All good, all bad…Be embraced, millions! This kiss for the whole world!’ (Lyrics from Friedrich von Schiller’s 1785 poem Ode to Joy, Accessed 31 Jan. 2011 at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/​Symphony_No._9_(Beethoven)>).

Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard were also locked onto the immensely excited driving beat that lay at the heart of rock and roll of anticipation of our species’ liberation from the horror of the human condition—especially that belt-it-out, blast-out-of-here, boiling-with-excitement, completely-raging supernova from Ferriday, Louisiana, Jerry Lee Lewis—who was rightly the first performer inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the 1992 documentary Mojo Working: The Making of Modern Music, which contains a wonderful collection of footage and commentary about Jerry Lee Lewis, writer Charles ‘Dr Rock’ White reported that ‘John Lennon came into Jerry Lee Lewis’ dressing room…and he walked over to Jerry Lee and…bent down and kissed Jerry Lee’s feet…[and then he] walked out speechless’. I wholeheartedly agree with Lennon’s gesture. To me no one’s music channelled the excitement of the anticipation of the liberation of the human race from the human condition as purely as Jerry Lee Lewis’ did. If you listen to the live recording of Jerry Lee’s April 5, 1964 performance at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, especially the tracks Hound Dog, Long Tall Sally and Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, you will hear what ‘is regarded by many music journalists as one of the wildest and greatest rock and roll concert albums ever’ (Wikipedia 2011). The Allmusic database said about that performance that Jerry Lee ‘sounds possessed’ and as ‘rocking harder than anybody had before or since…words can’t describe the music’ (<https://www.allmusic.com/album/​live-at-the-star-club-hamburg-mw0000678925>). Jerry Lee’s performances were just drenched in the excitement of breaking free from the dungeon of our species’ tortured condition. In fact, my vision is of a hysteria of millions and millions and millions of excited people with Jerry Lee’s piano being held aloft out in front and Jerry Lee standing on top of it, flicking his hair back and hitching his pants up, as he used to do—and filling the air is the musical build-up to humanity’s great breakthrough to its FREEDOM in Prologue/​Crunchy Granola Suite, from Neil Diamond’s 1972 Hot August Night album. But then, to actually take us through the door to the new world that understanding of the human condition now makes possible, instead of Diamond’s Crunchy Granola Suite vocals coming in, Jerry Lee would start singing ‘Great Balls of Fire, Let’s get out of here, LET’S GO!’, to an immense roar of unbelievable relief and excitement from the flood of humanity bursting through that doorway to its FREEDOM. One of our WTM members, Tony Gowing, has actually written a song titled LET’S GO that he sings with our WTM band, The Denialators—you can watch a rendition of this song at <www.humancondition.com/denialators>.

Maybe to be fair we should have all our rock and roll stars (and they were ‘stars’, beacons of light in the terrible darkness of our human-condition-afflicted world) up on that piano with Jerry Lee taking us through that great doorway to our FREEDOM—Big Joe Turner, Bill Haley, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Bono, Johnny O’Keefe, etc, etc. Bugger it, we all deserve to be up on that fucking piano, the whole seven billion of us because, as we can now at last understand, we is all such incredible legends—we can all just yell our bloody heads off, even those like me who can’t sing a note. What a party we are gonna have now!!

I can’t sing at all, however, in about 1969 (when I was 23 years old) I did write the following poem that powerfully anticipates our species’ liberation from the human condition—note the coincidence of using the analogy of horses with Joel’s and Isaiah’s descriptions of the TRANSFORMED STATE: ‘This is a story you see, just a story—but for you / Um—I remember a long time ago in the distant future a timeless day / a sunlit cloudless day when all things were fine / when we all slow-danced our way to breakfast in the sun // You see the day awoke with music / Can you imagine one thousand horses slow galloping towards you across a vast plain / and we loved that day so much / We all danced like Isadora Duncan through the morning light // We skipped and twirled and spun about / Fairies were there like dragonflies over a pool / Little girls with wings they hovered and flew about / their small voices you could hear / You see it was that kind of morning // When the afternoon arrived it was big and bold and beautiful / In worn out jeans and bouncing breasts we began / to fight—our way—into another day / into something new—to jive our way into the night / from sunshine into a thunderstorm // We all took our place, rank upon rank we came / as an army with Hendrix out in front / and the music busted the horizon into shreds / By God we broke the world apart / The pieces were of different colours and there were so many people / We danced in coloured dust, we left in sweat no room at all / We had a ball in gowns of grey and red / There were things that happened that nobody knew / Bigger and better, I had written on my sweater / Where there was sky there was music, huge clouds of it / and there were storms of gold with coloured lights / It was so good we cried tears into our eyes / In a tug of war of love we had no strength left at all / Dear God we cried but he only sighed and / whispered strength through leaves of laughter // On and on we came in bold ranks of silvered gold / to lead a world that didn’t know to somewhere it didn’t care / It couldn’t last, it had to end and yet it had an endless end / We were so happy in balloons of coloured bubbles that wouldn’t bust / and we couldn’t, couldn’t quench our lust / There we were all together for ever and ever / and tomorrow had better beware because / when we’ve wept and slept we will be there to shake its bloody neck.’ As I talk about later in Part 10:4, this poem is an indication of how strong my vision has always been of being able to solve the human condition.

The poster I drew (above) for the WTM’s December 2010 1960s theme party to celebrate our project-saving-and-thus-world-saving victory in court also captures something of the excitement of the human race set free from the human condition. (Our legal victory came after a 15-year struggle against a defamatory 1995 Australian Broadcasting Corporation television program and Sydney Morning Herald newspaper feature article that sought to stigmatise our organisation as a dangerous anti-social organisation and me as its deluded megalomanic leader. Ultimately both publications were completely discredited by a series of official rulings and public apologies culminating in a 2010 judgment that found my work was real science rather than the mindless dogma that characterises mind-controlling sects, which was how the defamatory publications sought to portray my work. As the full-page advertisement we ran in The Australian newspaper after our victory (see <www.humancondition.com/vindication>) explains, it was an incredibly hard-won and an incalculably precious victory against the inevitable ferocious backlash of persecution that we had to endure since the early 1990s for daring to address the historically forbidden issue of the human condition.) Our excitement over our victory for our world-saving project is also evident in footage from our party, which can be viewed at <www.humancondition.com/denialators>. This is the video I mentioned earlier, in which Tony Gowing sings his song, LET’S GO.

I should explain more fully that the significance of the musical build-up in Diamond’s Prologue/​Crunchy Granola Suite is that it—like the build-up to the chorus of voices in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and in the progression from quietness to blasting-with-excitement in my poem above—charts the whole of humanity’s two million year journey of conscious thought and inquiry: from its beginnings in the lonely, cold, dark wilderness of complete ignorance and bewilderment, to gradually accumulating more and more knowledge, but at the same time having to fight harder and harder against ever increasing levels of upset but all the time knowing we are getting closer to finding the liberating understanding of our upset, corrupted, fallen condition—until, finally, we reach the crescendo of humanity’s breakthrough of achieving that all-liberating and TRANSFORMING dignifying, reconciling, ameliorating understanding of ourselves. There is the same gradual build-up from our beginnings in a lonely dark wilderness to a great crescendo of excitement when we finally find liberating understanding in the sensationally exciting Irish stepdancing phenomenon Riverdance that swept the world in the mid-1990s. YouTube has various clips of Riverdance, with some performances charting better than others humanity’s immensely heroic river of progress from lonely ignorance to TRANSFORMING enlightenment.

It is a bit long but I should include here Sir Laurens van der Post’s wonderful description of humanity’s incredibly heroic journey all the way from the emergence of life to full consciousness to finally, at ‘the end of the road’, ‘awaken’ ‘pure and complete’. Sir Laurens wrote, ‘I was allowed to attend a victory parade, as it were, of all the life that has ever been. I saw all that has ever been come streaming through the long lanes and corridors of my blood, through their arch of admiralty, round the inner-square and then straight down past my own white lighted Hall. Out of the darkness that preceded Genesis and flood, it began with a glimmer and a worm of the unformed earth in love with the light to come. Yes! a worm with a lantern, a glow-worm with phosphorescent uniform, marched proudly at the head, and behind came great streams of being protozoic and pre-historic. Nothing was excluded and everything included, their small fires of being clearly lit, tended and well beloved. This, it was said, is the true, the noble heroic and unique crusade of the love of life. For look, among them not a brain but only matter tentatively and awkwardly assembled. Yet remark on their bearing and the trust with which they hurl themselves into the uncomprehended battle. Ah! tears of love and gratitude burned in my eyes at so urgently moving and life confiding a sight. To feel, at last, the burden that they carry for me in my own blood, to know at every second several of these reflected in white corpuscle and scarlet cell are dying unflinchingly in battle for my all, to know that giant lizard and lion as well as unicorn came after, and were hurled too into similar struggle and defence of the totality of all. I was allowed, too, to see the first man and registered the seismographic thrill of the marching column at the appearance of so skilled and complex a champion. I was allowed to speak to him and I touched his skin riddled with snake bite, his shoulder pierced by mastodon’s spike, his skull deep-scarred with sabre-tooth’s claw. And as reverently and tenderly I took his hand shaking with marshy malarial fever, I was moved to pity him by the evidence of such dread and unending war. But he would have none of it. He looked me fearless in the eye and in a voice that boomed like a drum in his stomach said: “Brother, it was worth it. Whatever they tell you, add this, it was worth it.”

I spoke to a Bushman half-eaten by a lion in the Kalahari, his only vessel a brittle ostrich egg with red and black triangles painted neatly on it, now broken and sand scattered. He looked in my grey eyes with the brown eyes of a people at dusk, slanted to bridge a chasm behind the face of a dying member of a dying and vanishing race. He too, my dying nomad brother, said: “Add, add quick before I go, ‘it was worth it’.” I spoke to an aborigine in the bight of the great gulf Tattooed with dung he said: “I vanish, but it was worth it.” In New Guinea, I met a stone-age Papuan, his black skin sheened with green after centuries in the jungle between basin and fall of water and spurting volcano, and he too said: “Doubt it not, it was worth it.” Everyone said, “Lovely gift of a life that we blindly trust burns with such loving fire in the dark that at any price, no matter how great, it is worth it.”

Yes, they all agreed and utterly convinced me, so that I can never doubt again. I wept when the great procession came to an end, for one and all, great and small—I loved them all. Yes, even to the worm that brought up the rear, with shaded night light and a nurse’s white, in its dress concealing a phial of the drug of the greater sleep made with a touch of the hand of God’s great, good night. Yes…I love them all; I believe them; I am ready for battle; and to continue at their head the journey of them all to the end of the road in my blood. At last, purified and complete, I am ready to awaken and defend my love’ (The Face Beside the Fire, 1953, pp.292-294 of 312).

Interestingly, rock and roll music almost died in the late 1950s, and it never fully regained the raging raw power and excitement of its first few years.

For a start, its visionaries were all taken out one way or another. In May 1958, 22-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis was publicly condemned when it was revealed that he had married his 13-year-old third cousin (which wasn’t illegal or all that unusual in Louisiana at that time), a controversy his career never truly recovered from. In January 1958, 25-year-old Little Richard enrolled in Bible College and denounced rock and roll—and almost everywhere else rock and roll was being slammed by the establishment as sexually depraved ‘devil’s music’. In December 1959, 33-year-old Chuck Berry was sentenced to five years in jail, of which he was eventually forced to serve three, from 1961 to 1963; a former employee of his had been arrested on a prostitution charge and, following a trial that was fuelled by racism, Chuck himself ended up in jail. On 3 February 1959, 22-year-old Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. Having been inducted into the army, 23-year-old Elvis Presley entered the ranks in March 1958 and as John Lennon famously said ‘Elvis died in the army’, because after he was discharged in 1960 his songs, like It’s Now Or Never and Are You Lonesome Tonight?, lacked the raw energy and power of his earlier songs.

As is often the case with visionary inspirations, their clarity is at a maximum when they are initially conceived and from thereon they become confused, diluted and polluted with other less relevant and clear-sighted influences. In the case of the core vision behind rock and roll of its incredibly exciting anticipation of the liberation of the human race (as all the rock and roll lyrics that have been included testify), the 1950s music of its visionaries, in particular the music of Jerry Lee, Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, was full of that pulsing, wild energetic excitement. The music of the 1960s was still full of excited optimism that humanity was going to break through to the sunrise of its FREEDOM from the human condition, but the raw energy from the excitement of that vision that was so apparent in the initial 1950s rock and roll music was gradually muted and eventually changed into angry, aggressive, upset music—progressing from funk, to punk and on to the head-banging, totally hurt, alienated, mind-numbing, vibrating-with-distress ‘death’ music of today. Accurately representing the rapid generational increase in alienation that has occurred in the last 60 years—which, in the last 35 years, has gone from the 1970s-born ‘X generation’ to the 1980s-born ‘Y generation’ to the terminally alienated 1990s-born ‘Z’ generation—music has also regressed from celebration to retaliation, from happiness and joy to anger and hate, from innocence and fun to upset and distress in only a few decades.

Epitomising this head-banging, totally hurt, alienated, mind-numbing, vibrating-with-distress ‘death’ music of today is the music and lyrics of the American heavy metal band With Life In Mind. Their music is a terrifyingly honest reflection of the terminal level of alienation that the human race as a whole has now arrived at, but they are certainly not unique. At the time of writing this inclusion about the band With Life In Mind, which was February 2012, the online store Relapse, which specialises in the heavy, ‘death’ metal music so popular amongst young people today, listed the following bands as their top selling artists: Death, Repulsion, Toxic Holocaust/​Midnight, Neurosis, Spawn of Possession and Brutal Truth. These band names alone reveal this end play state of alienation that the human race has arrived at.

The pain and honesty of the music of With Life In Mind is apparent in the lyrics of one of their songs, which is actually titled The Human Condition: ‘We’re staring through the eyes of a bitter soul. Constantly surrounded by this empty feeling…Never good enough for those ideals that seem to mean the most…Driven into madness, I see no end in sight, and inadequacy seems like the only means to pass through this life. And I sit and ask myself when will it end? The art of contention is an uphill battle I’m not ready to fight.’ Yes, if we didn’t resign ourselves to giving up trying to ‘conten[d]’ with it, confront it, stop trying to live ‘with’ the issue of ‘life in mind’, we certainly would be ‘driven into madness’ with ‘no end in sight’ to the unbearably depressing ‘empty feeling’ caused by the terrible ‘inadequacy’ of our seemingly horrifically imperfect ‘human condition’! Denial of the human condition has been the only way we have been able to cope with the human condition while we couldn’t explain it! More of the terrifyingly honest lyrics of With Life In Mind will be included later in Part 7:5, but the following provides a further sample of their deadly accurate thoughts on the human condition: ‘It scares me to death to think of what I have become…This self loathing can only get me so far’; ‘Our innocence is lost’; ‘I can’t express all the hate that’s led me here and all the filth that swallows us whole…A world shrouded in darkness…Fear is driven into our minds everywhere we look’; ‘We’ve been lying to ourselves for so long, we truly forgot what it means to be alive…How could we ever recover? Lost in oblivion…Shackled in chains, bound and held down…We could never face our own reflections in the mirror’; ‘We’ve all been asleep since the beginning of time. Why are we so scared to use our minds?’; ‘You’re the king of a world you built for yourself, but nothing more than a fraud in reality’; ‘How do we save ourselves from this misery…So desperate for the answers…We’re straining on the last bit of hope we have left. No one hears our cries. And no one sees us screaming’; ‘Our fight is the struggle of man…This is the end.’

So the incredible innocence, excitement and idealism of the post-war 1960s generation that was so apparent in so many of the young people who attended the Woodstock Festival in the state of New York in August 1969 didn’t last long. As the commentary in the My Generation episode of the 2007 BBC documentary Seven Ages of Rock recognised, ‘after the 1967 climax of the summer of love…the innocent optimism of the 1960s gave way to more volatile, uncertain times…A utopia like 1967 couldn’t possibly last…no longer could you be an innocent flower child…The 1969 Woodstock Festival would see the sun set on the hippie dream…[After The Rolling Stones’ December 1969 Altamont Festival where a man was murdered in the audience] the innocence of the 1960s was lost forever’—but the ‘sun’ HAD NOT ‘set’ ‘forever’ on the ‘optimism’ of the 1950s and ‘1960s’ ‘dream’ of a human-condition-reconciled ‘utopia’ BECAUSE IT HAS RE-EMERGED AS THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE FINDING OF THE HUMAN-RACE-TRANSFORMING UNDERSTANDING OF THE HUMAN CONDITION THAT IS BEING PRESENTED HERE. The vision behind rock and roll has been realised. Although John Lennon is not here to see the fulfilment of all his imaginings, he did at least know what was coming for humanity, and was ‘around’ for its beginnings—as footage from a 2010 documentary about him indicates: ‘This 1960s bit was just a sniff, it was just waking up in the morning and we haven’t even got to dinner time yet, and I just can’t wait, I just can’t wait, I’m so glad to be around.’ (Discovering Lennon, 3DD Productions).

Overall, the story of how rock and roll was nearly silenced provides a good example of how fragile any visionary undertaking is in its infancy. New ideas have to fight so hard to survive their inauguration, as we in the WTM know only too well.

The reason for the relative innocence of the post-war 1960s generation and the inspirational part it played in my capacity to find these insights into the human condition will be talked about in Part 5:1, however, I should mention here that the innocence of that era was mainly due to the immense relief that followed the ending of the Second World War. After such terrible bloodletting, which amounts to a valving off of upset, there is always a period of enormous relief and freshness, especially among those on the side of victory against tyranny. In fact, there can’t have been any other period in modern history where there was as much innocent idealism and optimism as the ‘flower power’, ‘Age of Aquarius’ era of the 1960s when the post-war ‘baby boom’ generation was growing up. Science, the organised and systemised pursuit of knowledge, was sufficiently developed for the biological explanation of the human condition to be found, and there also seemed to be—and, as it turned out, was—enough sound innocence in the population for that explanation to be truthfully and thus effectively assembled by someone exceptionally innocent and thus exceptionally free of denial. Much more will be said about how this understanding of the human condition was found in upcoming Parts of this presentation.

In conclusion, while upset humans normally couldn’t and wouldn’t allow themselves to admit the existence of another TRANSFORMED, human-condition-FREE world—because it made living with their tortured, empty human-condition-afflicted existence unbearable—nearly all the rock and roll songs that have been included in this Part were ‘top of the chart’ hit songs, songs that a great number of people gave their enthusiastic support to as being meaningful and relevant. In fact, these songs represent the most powerful of affirmations that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we humans are NOT fundamentally evil, bad, worthless creatures and ONE DAY, ONE DAY, we were going to explain in undeniable, trustable, first principle, biological terms why that is true and, by so doing, end our tortured, human-condition-afflicted, condemned existence forever—and it is that wonderful day of humankind’s understanding-based, self-knowledge-achieved, ‘enlightenment’-found-of-‘our-human-condition’, ‘delusions’-‘cured’, ‘blind[ness]’-ending, ‘cave-prison’-‘released’ FREEDOM from the human condition and resulting TRANSFORMATION of the human race that has now, at last, finally, at the end of a long, long, cold night in the wilderness, ARRIVED—the time, as the 1960s rock musical Hair anticipated, of our ‘mind’s true liberation’. That great influential American folksinger and songwriter Woody Guthrie was right when he anticipated that the human race was ‘Bound for Glory’ (the title of Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography).