Part 10

The Nature and Role
of Denial-Free Thinking

 

Part 10:1 Abraham, Moses, Plato and Christ

I would like to talk about Abraham, Moses, Plato and Christ because a better understanding of them will help the reader appreciate just how impossible it has been to address and then explain the human condition from a position of denial. An understanding of the minds of denial-free thinkers or prophets will greatly help appreciate how differently they view the world, in particular how they are able to see where the real threats to humankind are and how well focused they are on solving those problems, and how their denial-free thinking minds are able to solve them.

I have at times described Christ as ‘that cleanest of thinkers’, which is true in the sense that he obviously had an absolutely exceptional denial-free thinking mind, however in terms of being the cleanest of all thinkers that description is not true because Moses and Plato both had absolutely exceptional denial-free thinking minds.

We have seen how extraordinarily sound Plato was in his thinking, throwing as much light as was possible in his pre-scientific times upon every aspect of the human condition. As this book has progressed through issue after issue about the human condition, at virtually every stage it has been possible and appropriate to include an extremely insightful quote from Plato to illustrate the point being made, such as his deeply penetrating charioteer and pair of winged horses analysis of the human condition mentioned in Part 4:6.

A look at the work of Moses will show that he was equally sound and thus insightful in his thinking. Moses is without doubt the author of the first five books of the Bible, which in volume represents approximately one-sixth of the Bible. I have said ‘without doubt’ because some scholars have argued that Moses couldn’t have written the fifth book, Deuteronomy, because it reports his own death, however when it is understood what Moses was doing in writing the five books it becomes obvious that he would have organised for the report of his death to be added to what he had already written to ensure those books provided a complete history-of-the-world-and-of-humanity and tradition-establishing account of events up to the end of his life. Christ would have understood that in writing the first five books of the Old Testament Moses was setting out an ordering and contexting denial-free history of humanity for lost, alienated humans; he certainly made comments to that effect, such as ‘have you not read in the book of Moses’ (Mark 12:24—see similar references: Matt. 19:7-8, 22:24; Mark 7:10; Luke 24:44).

To explain Moses’ absolutely extraordinary undertaking and achievement it is necessary, at first, to briefly look at the whole history of humanity since we humans became fully conscious, self-managing beings.

Humanity’s journey from its original state of innocence some two million years ago to its current state of extreme upset was explained in Part 3:11. However, to provide a brief summary, what happened was that as humanity’s corrupting search for knowledge progressed different strategies needed to be developed to contain humans’ ever-increasing levels of upset. To use the Adam Stork analogy, the more Adam defied his instincts in order to search for knowledge the more upset he became and the more he needed to find ways to contain his ever-increasing levels of upset behaviour if he was to maintain a semblance of order and functionality.

We humans developed four main ways or strategies to help contain our ever increasing levels of upset. The first strategy we developed was SELF DISCIPLINE, in response to the realisation that we had to try to contain our upset anger, egocentricity and alienation—curb its expression. This first management mechanism for upset started so long ago in our species’ past that we now take our capacity for self-constraint for granted as being a natural part of our adult behaviour, nevertheless there was a time in our distant past when we had to learn the rudiments of being, as we say, ‘civilised’. Humans now don’t normally attack someone the moment they become angry. There is a great deal of self-control in adult humans now. The upset angers and frustrations are in us but for the most part we don’t let them show.

But as upset increased and self discipline could no longer contain the levels of upset in our society, we were forced to develop the strategy of IMPOSED DISCIPLINE, which involved everyone agreeing to abide by certain laws or rules about what was acceptable behaviour under threat of punishment.

As upset continued to develop the next strategy devised to contain it was RELIGION. With religion, instead of living through yourself with all the associated overly upset angers, egocentricities and denials, you decide to defer to someone exceptionally free of upset, namely one of the denial-free thinking, integrative-ideals-or-God-recognising, innocent prophets that the great religions have been founded around. You decided to live through supporting the soundness and truth of their life and words rather than adhering to what your overly upset self wanted to do and say.

As upset reached a crescendo during the last 200 years a problem with religion arose, which was that the truthful lives and thoughts of their founding prophets became unbearably confronting and condemning of those who are extremely upset, at which point GUILT-FREE EXPRESSIONS OF IDEALISM needed to be found to support and defer to. These expressions took two forms. Firstly, you could defer to less guilt emphasising forms of religion where, say within Christianity, rather than following a denomination that focused on the study and acknowledgment of the integrity of the words and life of the founding prophet, you selected one that emphasised worship, adoration and ceremony, such as Catholicism, or even euphoric Evangelical varieties of Christianity. Or you could associate yourself with religious groups that focused on simple dogmatic obedience to the teachings of one of the religions, becoming a more fundamentalist and literalist interpreter and practitioner of a faith. Or you could find a religion that avoided focusing on acknowledging your corrupted condition and instead focused on practices such as meditative extinction of the trauma of the human condition. Buddhism in particular was, as one Buddhist convert said, ‘non-judgemental, there’s no notion of sin, there’s no notion of good and evil, you don’t embrace negativity’ (from Light at Edge of the World: Science of the Mind of Buddhism, National Geographic Channel, 2006).

The second form of more guilt-free expressions of idealism to support and live through were religion-avoiding and in some cases atheistic, God-denying pseudo idealistic causes like communism or socialism, politically correct postmodernism, environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, aboriginalism, etc, etc—basically any idealistic cause you could find that allowed you to avoid having to think about and deal with the real issue behind all the destruction and imperfection in the world, namely your own and everyone else’s corrupted condition. Real idealism involved confronting not escaping the issue of the human condition, an escapism that this aforementioned quote about environmentalism recognised, ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue.’

Since these management devices could never fully contain the ever-increasing levels of upset in the world, there was clearly going to come a time when upset would destroy the human race, the terminal level of alienation that has been described previously in this book. Only the arrival of the dignifying and thus liberating understanding of the human condition could end the plunge towards destruction—as Richard Neville summarised earlier: ‘We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery.’

With this overview we can return to looking at the contribution of Moses, and that of both Christ and Plato. What we will see is that Moses gave humanity the most effective form of Imposed Discipline with his Ten Commandments, that Christ gave humanity the strongest possible corruption-and-denial-countering Religion, and that Plato provided humans with the best possible orientation and assistance on the main task of actually explaining the human condition—as Whitehead was quoted earlier as saying, the history of philosophy is merely ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’, with ‘philosophy’ being ‘the study of the truths underlying all reality’. Between these three men the human race was given the best possible chance of eventually freeing itself from the human condition. Without these three key influences of a well thought out and effective form of Imposed Discipline, a strong corruption-and-denial-countering Religion, and a profound, denial-free, penetrating orientation for the main task of finding understanding of the human condition, civilisations eventually foundered; they lost their way—in particular, their people became excessively corruption-adapted, cynical and alienated. Civilisations invariably followed this path to decadence but these three influences slowed down the progression, at least long enough for other fresh, still-relatively-innocent peoples and their civilisations to take what knowledge they had been able to find and, employing the same three containing and orientating influences, add to the knowledge until understanding of the human condition was finally found. In this way, wave after wave of groups of humans and their civilisations threw themselves heroically at that wall of ignorance that is the human condition until finally the human race crashed through to the liberating enlightenment of our condition, which has now finally occurred. In fact it is on the shoulders of all the efforts of all the humans who have ever lived that our species’ liberation has been achieved.

With the human condition now safely understood and the upset state of humans no longer condemned as bad or evil, we can afford to recognise Moses, Christ and Plato as the three men who led humanity out of the wilderness of death-like alienation to its freedom from the human condition, and that the essential characteristic of each was that they had absolutely exceptional denial-free thinking minds.

Denial-free thinkers have played an all-important role in human history and yet virtually nothing has been known of the kind of people they were: how they thought, which was so very different to the way everyone else was thinking, the significance of having a fully nurtured infancy and childhood and, as a result, not having become resigned to a life of denial in their adolescence, etc, etc. Appropriately, one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, Bruce Barton’s 1925 book about Christ, was titled The Man Nobody Knows. Virtually all we have known of the great denial-free thinkers is that some of them became recognised as ‘prophets’, said to be inspired by God and able to perform miracles—some were even called deities, all of which makes them seem like they weren’t human when of course they were. Now at last we can learn about these key people in history, and we obviously need to if we are to properly understand humanity’s history. As initially mentioned, the life and work of prophets needs to be demystified. There have been mountains and mountains of books written, and zillions and zillions of words said in pulpits, in seminaries, in schools and universities, on the street and in homes about prophets and their words, but now, finally, for the first time, here in these pages, they and their work will be fully explained.

To commence, now that we can acknowledge the extent of the corruption of humans under the duress of the human condition it becomes possible to understand what the few, extremely rare, denial-free thinkers or prophets who have existed in recorded history would have encountered as they grew up. Firstly, each had to survive the agonising mystery of the extremely upset behaviour of all the humans around them—an agony made so much worse by the denial, the total silence, of the upset about being upset, indeed their deluded and arrogant pretence of being totally secure, confident masters of life. The denial-free thinkers or prophets also had to survive the persecution that their confronting truthful words and life would have attracted—as demonstrated by this rhetorical question from the Bible: ‘was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute?’ (Acts 7:52). And even if they did manage to survive these difficulties, and many wouldn’t have, they would have been left in a position of extreme distress by the plight of their society. To someone not upset and not living in denial of the human condition everyone else appears to be running around very much like chickens with their heads cut off, behaving in an extremely corrupt, destructive, chaotic, mad way. Able to clearly see all the madness and fully feel all the suffering the human condition was causing, denial-free thinkers would have become deeply concerned and focused upon thinking about how to, if not stop, at least contain the horrifically destructive behaviour and the terrible suffering it was bringing about. The rest of the human race, who are deeply mentally preoccupied with all manner of upset as a result of their encounters with humanity’s heroic but upsetting battle against ignorance (in particular encountering insufficient nurturing and love in their infancy and childhood) and having to employ a great deal of denial to cope, can no longer see how corrupt their and others’ behaviour is, or feel how much suffering it is causing. However, for someone not so preoccupied and not living in denial they can clearly see the full extent of all the corruption and feel the full extent of all the suffering. The innocent of upset are not immune like everyone else is to the truth of the extent of the horror of the human condition, and being so aware they become extremely concerned for the deeply traumatised society they find themselves in.

When extreme upset develops in a society an endless series of outbursts of upset anger and selfish egocentricity and resulting retaliatory anger and selfish egocentricity occurs. What the extremely concerned, clear seeing, fully feeling and clear thinking denial-free thinkers or prophets eventually realise is that for a semblance of peace to occur they have to find a way to bring an end to these endless rounds of payback warfare, or so-called ‘blood feuds’. They then realise that the only way to do that (short of explaining the human condition which, prior to the development of science, they couldn’t do) is to introduce strongly enforced laws or rules to contain the behaviour. They realise Discipline needs to be Imposed and throughout history that is exactly what prophets have done, and none better than Moses.

For example, by the time Europeans arrived in North America a grand union of American Indian tribes, known as the Iroquois Confederacy, had been established by two Indian denial-free thinkers or prophets who had emerged from within the tribes. Recognised and described by their people as ‘prophets’, these two American Indians, named Hiawatha and ‘The Great Peacemaker’, with all their sensitive feeling and clarity of thought, were able to realise that the endless rounds of payback warfare between and within the tribes could only be prevented by everyone agreeing to a set of restraining rules that were enforced by punishment. The resulting Imposed Discipline proved so effective that the Confederacy quickly emerged as one of the strongest forces in north-eastern North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This quote is included to confirm what has just been said: ‘The Iroquois Confederacy was established before European contact, complete with a constitution known as the…“Great Law of Peace”…The two prophets, Ayonwentah [Hiawatha]…and Dekanawidah, The Great Peacemaker, brought a message of peace to squabbling tribes…Once they ceased infighting, they rapidly became one of the strongest forces in seventeenth and eighteenth century north eastern North America’ (The Iroquois Confederacy and the Founding Fathers, Accessed Sept. 2009: see <www.wtmsources.com/113>). Exactly the same scenario had played out some 3,000 years earlier when Moses brought order to the Israelite Nation through the Ten Commandments that he had etched on stones.

As mentioned, Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. The first ten chapters of the first book, Genesis, are very important but before looking at those opening chapters an appreciation of Moses’ life and ancestors from Abraham onwards will help reveal the greater history-of-the-world-and-of-humanity and tradition-establishing significance of those chapters.

Abraham, who lived some 4,000 years ago, was a very great denial-free thinker or prophet. He was a ‘Hebrew’ (Gen. 14:13), one of the tribes of the Semitic race of people who were originally herders and who colonised parts of the Middle East from their homeland somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula or possibly North Africa. He is regarded as the founder of monotheism, the belief in one God. The pharaoh and great denial-free thinking prophet Akhenaton, who ruled Egypt from approximately 3,350 to 3,335 years ago, also recognised that there was only one God but it was through Abraham and the prophets who followed him that monotheism became firmly established in the world.

Abraham is also regarded as the common denominator in the establishment of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. His eldest son Ishmael is considered the father of the Arabs who produced the exceptional denial-free thinker or prophet Muhammad who founded the religion of Islam around 1,400 years ago. Abraham’s second son Isaac is considered the father of the Israelites, amongst whom came the denial-free thinkers or prophets Jacob, Joseph, Moses, the other prophets of the Old Testament of the Bible, and Jesus Christ. Moses, who lived some 3,500 years ago, is the central prophet in the Jewish religion of Judaism, while Jesus Christ created the religion of Christianity just over 2,000 years ago.

The significance of Abraham’s recognition of monotheism or belief in one God and his ability to ‘walk before me [God] and be blameless’ (Gen. 17:1) and to be ‘blessed’ ‘in every way’ by God (Gen. 24:1) and to accept God as his ‘shield’ (Gen. 15:1) needs to be explained. Put simply, Abraham was secure enough to not have to resign himself to a life of living in denial of the issue of the human condition and any truths that bring that issue into focus—in particular the truth of integrative meaning which, as will now be explained, is what the concept of ‘God’ means. It was explained in Part 8:1 that biological processes are not random and directionless as we have been evasively taught, but are in fact concerned with the Negative Entropy driven development of the order or integration of matter. Of all the truths about our world this truth of integrative meaning is the most confronting for corrupted humans because the development and maintenance of the order of matter requires that the parts of developing wholes cooperate not compete. An integrative direction or meaning confronts upset, corrupted humans squarely with their angry, competitive and selfish divisive human condition. For the upset and corrupted to accept the truth of integrative meaning without the explanation for their and our species’ lack of integrative behaviour meant facing suicidal depression. It could not be done. Only the fully loved and nurtured and thus secure could face integrative meaning with impunity. Before we had the understandings that science has given us of the physical laws of the universe, in particular the law of Negative Entropy, it wasn’t possible to explain what or who ‘God’ is, but now, with the advances of science we can explain that the all-pervading, omnipotent (all-powerful), omnipresent (all-present) and omniscient (all-knowing), and-seemingly-all-condemning-of-us-humans force in the world is Negative Entropy. We can also explain what the real meaning of the word ‘love’ is. Unconditional selflessness, the capacity to consider the welfare of the whole above our own welfare, is the glue that holds wholes together, and it is the real meaning behind the word ‘love’. Indeed the old Christian word for love is ‘caritas’, meaning charity or giving or selflessness (see Col. 3:14, 1 Cor. 13:1-13, 10:24 & John 15:13), therefore it is true that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8, 16), or selflessness—in fact not just selflessness but unconditional selflessness, the capacity to, if required, make a full, self-sacrificing commitment to the maintenance of the larger whole. Christ articulated the unconditionally selfless significance of the word ‘love’ when he said, ‘Greater love has no-one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). Of the biblical references to love given above, Colossians 3:14 perfectly summarises the integrative significance of love: ‘And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.’ ‘God’ then is the personification of the negative-entropy-driven integrative, cooperative, loving, unconditionally selfless, order-bringing ideals, purpose, meaning and theme of life.

Again the problem is that to admit to integrative meaning and the importance of unconditional selflessness is to leave all but the exceptionally sound unbearably condemned. We can now understand that Abraham needed to be ‘blameless’, ‘blessed’ ‘in every way’ to be able to confront or ‘walk before’ God. He had to be free of upset to confront the truth of integrative meaning. Further, we can understand that living in a world so apparently blameful and unblessed and practicing so much denial, Abraham would have had to struggle to overcome his codependent attachment to all the dishonesty and pretence he found himself surrounded by. Still living in the upset-free, all-loving, all-giving and all-trustable authentic world of our species’ original integratively-orientated instinctive self or soul means that relatively innocent people are so very trusting, so when everyone else is so silent about their corruption, so determinedly refusing to admit it, it is incredibly hard for an innocent to believe that what they are thinking is right and what the rest of the world is saying and doing is not. It is self-evident to the alienated that they are being dishonest but it is a complete mystery to an innocent person. It is hard for the corrupted and alienated to appreciate how difficult it is for someone free of upset, someone innocent, to stand up against all their dishonesty and still trust in what they are thinking, namely that what everyone else is doing is corrupted and what everyone else is saying is in effect a lie. How do you believe yourself when everyone around you whom you trust so much is saying the opposite? What Abraham did that was so difficult was that he defied all this intimidation and learnt to trust his truthful self that was recognising the integrative, cooperative, loving, unconditionally selfless ideals, purpose and meaning of life; he learnt to accept God, the integrative ideals, as his ‘shield’ against all the lies and falsehoods that were trying to seduce him—but his journey to do so, to defy the whole world around him, would not have been easy. As it says in Genesis, the integrative ideals or ‘God tested Abraham’ (Gen. 22:1); he had to be able to put his love for the truth of another integrative ideal world before all his innocent, codependent trust in the world that he was falsely being presented with as true and authentic. Metaphorically he had to be prepared to ‘sacrifice’ his own ‘son’ (Gen. 22:2), ‘son’ being the ultimate expression imaginable of his attachment or codependency to the world around him, and in Genesis 22 it describes how he passed this test; how he put the truth/​God first; ‘not withheld’ (Gen. 22:12) anything from the truth/​God; not allowed himself to be seduced at all. Thankfully the test didn’t end up requiring he actually kill his son.

In essence, Abraham’s access to and love of the true, integrative world of our soul had to be stronger than his codependent love of the resigned, false, integrative-meaning-and-soul-denying world around him. Because of their familiarity with them, a prophet’s family were the least able to recognise the extraordinary, denial-free-thinking person they were. The greater the distance in time and space we have from any exceptionally gifted person the easier it is to acknowledge their gifts. Our egos don’t feel as oppressed and threatened by their ability and success, and we have the benefit of perspective to appreciate their extraordinariness. The more extraordinary and exceptional the gift the truer this is and the most extraordinary and exceptional of all gifts is that of the unresigned prophetic mind. When Christ for example said he would ‘rise again’ after he died (see Matt. 20:19, 27:63; Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:34; Luke 18:33, 24:7, 46; John 11:24, 20:9) he was recognising that the wider public acknowledgment of his extraordinary soundness would occur after his death. While everyone found it very difficult acknowledging Christ’s extraordinariness during his lifetime, none found it harder than members of his own family and town, for reasons just mentioned. As the Bible records: ‘Jesus left there and went to his home town, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed. “Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles! Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. Jesus said to them, “Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honour.” He could not do any miracles there…And he was amazed at their lack of faith’ (Mark 6:1-6).

It should briefly be explained that the difference between the appreciation displayed by Christ’s family compared with his disciples, who were also very familiar with him, was that his disciples were open to his teaching whereas his family and townsfolk who had known him since childhood were not. The disciples were with Christ specifically because they had been attracted by the truth of what he said. Their access to his extraordinariness was not prejudiced by any history of familiarity. They were open and receptive to learning from him from the beginnings of their encounters with him, and from there the more time they spent with Christ the greater their appreciation of his denial-free thinking grew. Nevertheless, even Christ’s disciples would have had their ability to appreciate him limited to some extent by their familiarity with him. It is no coincidence that of all Christ’s immediate followers, St Paul, who never met Christ, was the most able to recognise and acknowledge Christ’s extraordinariness, for it was he, more than anyone else, who sold Christianity to the world.

‘Amazed at their [his family’s] lack of faith’, as Christ was, he had to be strong enough to defy their cynicism; moreover, because he would have naturally loved his own family more than anyone else in the world it would have been the most difficult test of all to stand by the integrative true world of his soul against their dismissive treatment of his extraordinary powers of thought that came from his alignment to the integrative true world. He had to be strong enough to carry on his work without his family’s support. David, another very great prophet in the Bible, also had to pass this test of being stronger than the scornful cynicism he experienced during his lifetime, especially from his own family. David complained and then rallied himself thus: ‘Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head; many are my enemies without cause, those who seek to destroy me…O God of Israel [the integrative ideal truth]. For I endure scorn for your sake, and shame covers my face. I am a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my own mother’s sons; for zeal for your house consumes me, and the insults of those who insult you fall on me’ (Psa. 69:4-9).

We can see that the story of Abraham having to metaphorically sacrifice his son—be stronger than his love for those closest to him—was a very great test of his soulful strength and because he was able to pass the test he was clearly an exceptional denial-free thinker or prophet. And when it is appreciated that there was no legacy or history for him to draw on or take inspiration from the recognition of a single all-important and all-pervading truth or God, as all those around him were instead worshipping a multitude of gods, Abraham must have been absolutely extraordinarily sound to be able to recognise on his own and champion the existence of the one great truth or God.

Abraham was born in Ur in Babylonia around 4,000 years ago and migrated to Canaan, a region encompassing modern-day Israel, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, plus adjoining coastal lands and parts of Jordan, Syria and north-eastern Egypt. He was sound and clear-sighted enough to not only recognise the existence of monotheism but to stand by, defend and uphold the truth and importance of that one great integrative truth or God that everyone else was not living in accordance with and was trying to deny. And he not only defended the existence of God or integrative meaning he also advocated people defer to and live in support of that one true God. He began a Religion based around the acknowledgment of God. His other extraordinary achievement was to recognise the importance of establishing a tradition that his descendants could identify with, hold on to and draw inspiration from. As part of establishing that all-important identifying and bonding tradition based securely around recognition of, and obedience to, one true God, Abraham introduced the practice of circumcision (see Gen. 17:10) of his male offspring and the notion that Canaan was a chosen land for his descendants (see Gen. 12); and that his followers would be a people with a great destiny if they abided by his instructions (see Gen. 12). In short, Abraham gave his progeny a Religion, an identity, a home and a vision. These initiatives by Abraham were so brilliant in fact that they, as we will see, created the foundations for a successful future for humanity. As Moses predicted, ‘all peoples on earth will be blessed through you [Abraham]’ (Gen 12:3).

Thus, while Moses strongly reinforced these traditions that Abraham established of a Religion, an identity, a home and a vision, he also added the laws, the rules, the Imposed Discipline, that would ensure the structure that Abraham had so ably established would endure. Very importantly, Moses also gave the Israelites (and humanity) a denial-free, honest, soul-relieving account of the history of the world and of humanity that they/​we could see themselves/​ourselves as being part of. He gave them/​us if not a meaning (which he couldn’t give because, apart from the meaning of having to serve God, he couldn’t explain that the actual meaning of existence is to develop the cooperative, loving order of matter), then at least a contexting truthful history for their/​our lives.

As mentioned, one of the descendants of Abraham’s eldest son Ishmael was the prophet Muhammad who founded the religion of Islam around 1,400 years ago. Abraham’s second son Isaac was the father of Jacob who in turn was the father of Joseph. It was Joseph who brought his father Jacob and his eleven brothers and their families to Egypt, ‘seventy [people] in all’ (Exod. 1:5). Then, ‘430 years’ (Exod. 12:40) later (approximately 3,500 years ago), Moses, the descendent of one of Joseph’s brothers, led the (by then much multiplied) descendants of Jacob out of Egypt back to the promised land of Canaan, a journey through the desert country of the Sinai and Arabian Peninsulas that lasted ‘forty years’ (Exod. 16:35).

In contrast to the situation today where society does not recognise its denial-free thinking prophets and instead evasive, denial-complying intellectualism holds sway everywhere, the ancient Hebrews collected only the words of their prophets. Humanity does not have any records of the great authors or poets or playwrights or composers or artists or singers or astronomers or academics or legal minds or politicians from the 4,000-year-history of the Israelites. Instead what we have is the collection of the words of the few prophets who appeared amongst them during those millennia. That collection is the Bible.

The more corrupted and alienated people became as humanity’s corrupting search for knowledge progressed, the more insecure they became and thus the more evasive they became of any condemning idealism. While prophets have been persecuted throughout history for being so exposing of the evasive world of denial—as has been mentioned, the Bible asked rhetorically, ‘was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute?’ (Acts 7:52)—in earlier, more innocent times, people were secure enough to at least acknowledge their prophets, even if they did often subject them to persecution during their lifetime. These early, more innocent, secure and thus less evasive civilisations even sought out their prophets to lead their societies. The Old Testament of the Bible is the documentation of the search for prophets to lead the Israelite nation. Moses upheld this tradition when he said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him’ (Deut. 18:15). Even the ancient Athenian society in Greece elected only natural-living, untainted-by-encounters-with-human-society, uncorrupted, upset-free, unembattled, ego-less, relatively innocent shepherds to run their society. To quote Sir Laurens van der Post, ‘He [Pericles] urged the Athenians therefore to go back to their ancient rule of choosing men who lived on and off the land and were reluctant to spend their lives in towns, and prepared to serve them purely out of sense of public duty and not like their present rulers who did so uniquely for personal power and advancement.’ Sir Laurens continued, ‘Significantly in The Bacchae, the harbinger of the great catastrophe to come is “a city slicker with a smooth tongue”’ (in his foreword to Theodor Abt’s book Progress Without Loss of Soul, 1983, p.xii of 389). When deputising his authority Moses took the advice of his father-in-law to ‘select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands’ (Exod. 18:21). (Note the ‘fear’ of God mentioned here refers to respecting God, not the fear of integrative meaning that another biblical prophet, Isaiah, for example was referring to when he said prophets, unlike everyone else, ‘delight in the fear of the Lord’ [Isa. 11:3].)

To take up the story of Abraham’s son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob, as it was their descendants who gave rise to Moses whose contribution to humanity is, in particular, being considered here. In Genesis Moses states that ‘the Lord appeared to Isaac’ and said to him, ‘I will be with you and will bless you. For you and your descendants I will give all these lands [in Canaan] and will confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham. I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because Abraham obeyed me’ (Gen. 26:2-5). For God or integrative meaning to be able to ‘appear’ before Isaac, Isaac must have been an exceptionally sound person, like his father was, because, as has been explained, integrative meaning or God is unconfrontable for all but the exceptionally sound. Also we see how the traditions of obeying God, self-belief and destiny that Abraham began were being reinforced and added to by Isaac.

In Genesis Moses then went on to describe how Isaac’s son Jacob, who ‘God’ had also ‘blessed’ (Gen. 35:9), ‘struggled with God and with men’, a struggle which he was able to ‘overcome’ (Gen. 32:28), and how Jacob then said, ‘I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared’ (Gen. 32:30). Clearly Jacob, like his father and grandfather, was sound enough to be able to confront the normally unconfrontable truth of integrative meaning—as it says further on in Genesis, Jacob ‘talked with’ ‘God’ (35:14). Further, in the wrestling match for innocence between codependency to the false world of ‘men’ and trust in the ‘God[ly]’, integrative truths that his uncorrupted soulful self was telling him to believe in, Jacob was able to ‘overcome’ his codependency. In short Jacob was an exceptional denial-free thinker or prophet. As a result of Jacob’s wrestling match with God his name was changed to ‘Israel’, which the Bible subtext says means ‘he struggles with God’, which we can now interpret as ‘he struggles with God when no one else can’.

Jacob’s eleventh of twelve sons was Joseph, another exceptional denial-free thinker or prophet. Even as a child Joseph would have known that he was sound enough to be able to avoid having to resign to a life of denial when he reached adolescence and therefore that as an adult he would be able to think truthfully while others couldn’t. In the future when we humans become free of the insecurity of the human condition and are able to look back in denial-free clarity upon life as it existed under the duress of the human condition we are going to realise how extremely sensitive our instinctive self or soul was to the imperfections of the world we were born into. We will learn that even in our mother’s womb we were aware of how perfect or imperfect the world we were entering. We were, for example, able to sense if our mother was at all neurotic. The truth of the extraordinary sensitivity of our instinctive self or soul is something that the insecure upset world has understandably been unable to cope with and thus admit, but, as will be explained later, that extraordinary sensitivity does exist in us all. It follows that if a baby does happen to have an exceptionally secure mother whose world is also exceptionally secure then that baby would know that.

At this point I should interrupt to give a more detailed explanation of why it requires an exceptionally secure mother to produce a prophet. The description of Christ’s mother as a ‘virgin’ (Matt. 1:23, Luke 1:27,34) is actually a recognition of this truth. A few pages further on it will be explained that when men became upset they perverted the act of procreation; they turned sex into a way of attacking the innocence of women, which means ‘virgin’ is the perfect metaphor for an innocent mother, a mother who has not had her innocence destroyed and thus not had to adopt denial of the ideal, soulful true world. Of course, Christ’s mother wasn’t a virgin but she was an exceptionally innocent, psychologically sound, upset-and-denial-free mother because that is what is required to produce a fully-loved, psychologically sound, upset-and-denial-free prophet. Laing’s comment included earlier that ‘Each child is a new beginning, a potential prophet’ contains the inference that if a child was to receive sufficient nurturing and love they would be a prophet; that it took love to produce a prophet. We will see in a few pages time how Moses’ mother so loved him as a baby that she hid him for three months from the Pharaoh’s henchmen who were killing all Israelite boys, and how she then devised an extraordinarily clever plan to keep him and raise him in a secure and peaceful realm in the Pharaoh’s household. The stable realm was significant because for a mother to be able to give her son pure love she not only needs to be exceptionally secure, she requires a loving and secure realm around her. She needs to be an exceptionally sound person and she needs ideal nursery conditions.

It should be noted that for there to have been four successive generations of prophets from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph is almost beyond belief because it would require four successive exceptionally sound mothers and under the duress of the human condition such women are extraordinarily rare. Either there has been some exaggeration to bolster the prophetic tradition that was so important to the Israelite nation, or the overall innocence of the Israelite people at that time, which was some 3,800 years ago, was so very great that a series of exceptionally innocent mothers could occur. Certainly genetic adaption to corruption happens very rapidly—as genetic adaption does in response to any strong selection pressure—and all people in the world would have been significantly more innocent 4,000 years ago than they are today—and possibly the Israelite people were still exceptionally innocent having not long ago departed from their Semitic race’s original lifestyle as nomadic herdsmen where they lived naturally isolated from encounters with more upset people—but it still seems improbable even back then for the degree of innocent soul strength needed in a mother to produce a prophet to occur in four successive generations. Given how extraordinarily sound a mother has to be to produce a prophet, I favour the exaggeration possibility. Possibly there were more generations between Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (it seems Jacob was definitely the father of Joseph because there is so much recorded of their relationship), and/​or perhaps some of the four, possibly Isaac, wasn’t a fully nurtured, denial-free thinking prophet.

The question does arise that if Joseph’s mother was secure and loving enough to nurture and preserve Joseph’s soundness, why wasn’t she able to do that for her other sons, Joseph’s brothers? The answer lies in the delicacy of our original instinctive self or soul. The truth is our soul is so delicate and sensitive, so expecting of encountering an idyllic world of perfect love, happiness and sound, integrative behaviour that it doesn’t take much corrupt behaviour to distress it. In the case of the mothers of prophets they are necessarily so imbued with awareness of the soul’s true world and so naive about, and thus unbending towards and unsympathetic towards the upset, corrupt, alienated, dishonest, devious, false world that they live above that false world; they live as if the false world has no relevance or meaning, which can leave people who are not so strongly orientated and secure feeling as if they don’t exist—even their own sons if they are at all fragile. Soul-strong mothers are not intentionally cruel at all, there is no anger or embitterness in them, they are simply strong in what they know is true and authentic, and strong in what they know is dishonest and false. They are simply perfectly centred on what is consistent with the integratively-orientated true world and because a child’s soul is so delicate any sense of deficiency on the part of the child implied by this centredness of the mother on what is authentic to the world of our species’ original instinctive self or soul can be psychologically crippling for the child. It is a soul-strong mother’s total awareness of and belief in another true world, and total dismissal of the false world as having no meaning or relevance, that enables them to give a sound and secure son unerring alignment with the true world of our soul. While soundness is reinforced by such soul-strong mothers, lack of soundness is not. Soul-centred mothers have perfect love for what is authentic in the integrative, soulful true world but, in effect, no love for what is not; they lack compassion for corruption, about which they are naive. To them corruption in any form is irrelevant, a meaningless weakness and failing. An innocent mother is innocent—she doesn’t know about the human condition. As will be explained in a few paragraphs further on, women aren’t as aware of the whole subject and issue of the human condition as men, so an innocent woman can be extremely innocent, extremely unaware of, and thus extremely unsympathetic towards, the corrupted state of the human condition. We will see shortly when the story of Noah’s Ark is explained that God, the personification of the integrative ideals, had to learn compassion for the corrupted state of the human condition, that ‘He’ initially made a mistake and drowned everyone because ‘He’ thought they were all cursed, but then ‘He’ relented and saw that ‘even though every inclination of his [upset humans’] heart is evil from childhood’, ‘never again will I curse the ground because of man…never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done’ (Gen. 8:21). When viewed without any compassion, without any sense that there might be a good reason why humans became corrupted, the corrupted state of humans is a corrupted state—is a bad, evil, God-inconsistent, God-defying, God-defiling, worthless, irrelevant, meaningless, out-of-step-with-all-that-is-good state. The fact is wholly innocent women are wholly innocent.

Thus, soul-strong mothers can produce denial-free thinking prophets, but such offspring are rare. Exceptionally secure mothers, mothers who have virtually no core experience of, and thus empathy towards the upset hurt world—mothers who are metaphorically ‘virgin[s]’ in their purity of soul—are rare enough, but it is even rarer for them to have a son who represents all that they know of as ideal and who can therefore grow up fully immersed in their mother’s strong alignment to that ideal state and, as a result, be able to take on the world of denial without bending. In an account about Moses’ mother that will be given shortly it says that when she ‘gave birth to a son [Moses, she]…saw that he was a fine child, [and] she hid him for three months’ from Pharaoh’s henchmen, later saving him by placing him in a basket amongst the reeds of the Nile. There is a suggestion here of there being some significance in Moses’ mother viewing him as a ‘fine child’, an inference that he didn’t disappoint her. To not bend to alienation is the alignment given to prophets by their soul-unbent-and-soul-unbending mother. A mother capable of nurturing a prophet knows of another true world and that is where she lives, aligned to that world and believing in it. Such mothers are not sentimental, fussing or doting, they are simply strong and secure, but few offspring can fully meet the expectations of such centred integrity.

To return to the explanation of Joseph’s extraordinary soundness. The knowledge that Joseph had of being an exceptionally nurtured and thus secure person made him extraordinarily inspired and authoritative in his thinking. Joseph’s father Jacob, being exceptionally sound himself, recognised and loved Joseph’s extraordinarily inspired enthusiasm for life, his ‘zeal for your house [soulful true world]’ (Psa. 69:8) as the great prophet David said about prophets. However, while ‘Israel [Jacob] loved Joseph more than any of his other sons’ (Gen. 37:3) Joseph’s inspired authoritativeness and self-belief was not appreciated by the rest of his family—again as Christ said about the reception prophets received by those who were too close to them to recognise their extraordinariness, ‘Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honour’ (Mark 6:1-6). Somewhat naive at the young age of ‘seventeen’ (Gen. 37:2) about the effects on others of being so inspired, Joseph told his brothers of dreams he had about how he would be able to achieve marvellous things while they wouldn’t (see Gen. 37:6-9). As a result his authoritative self-belief and of his father’s preferential love, Joseph was treated dismissively and even ‘hated’ (Gen. 37:8) by his brothers to the point where they sold him as a slave to passing ‘merchants’ (Gen. 37:28) who took him to Egypt where he was sold on to ‘one of Pharaoh’s officials’ (Gen. 37:36). Incidentally this same scenario of a prophet being ‘without honour’ ‘in his own house’ had occurred in Joseph’s father’s inspired life where his brother had similarly held ‘a grudge against Jacob’ (Gen. 27:41).

It should be explained that should a mother be secure enough to nurture a prophet it doesn’t mean that she will be able to recognise him as a prophet. She can recognise and love his immense enthusiasm for life, and recognise that he has integrity, but being the closest of all to him she is in the worst position in terms of familiarity to be able to have the perspective needed to recognise him as an exceptional denial-free thinker or prophet. Being a woman she is also limited in her ability to recognise the significance of a prophet’s work of grappling with the issue of the human condition. Shortly it will be explained that because males were the group protectors during our species’ ape ancestry—it was the males for example who had to protect the group from marauding leopards—when the search for knowledge began and humanity had to defeat the threat to the group/​humanity of ignorance coming from our original instinctive self it was men who had to take up that task. Women have been the nurturers and men the group protectors and when the threat of ignorance by our instinctive self of our species’ fundamental goodness emerged it was men who had to take up that task of trying to defeat that threat. As a result women are less aware than men of this battle to defy the world of our soul, defeat its ignorance and ultimately explain the human condition. Women have not been as aware as men of the battle that men are engaged in with the issue of the human condition, and, since that is the issue that prophets become focused upon, women aren’t as easily able to identify with a prophet’s work as men. This is why it is men not women who became prophets—defiers of denial of the issue of the human condition—and partly why prophets’ mothers find it hard to recognise the immense significance of the work that their prophet son is engaged in. As a result of this situation, not only did Christ’s brothers not empathise with Christ’s work, his own mother didn’t either. When Christ began his ministry and his brothers and mother heard about it, they accused him of having gone mad and, acting on that belief, tried to take charge of him—but again Christ had to be strong enough to carry on his work without his brothers’ or his mother’s appreciation of the work he was undertaking. As is recorded in the Bible, ‘When his family heard about this [Christ’s ministry], they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind”’ (Mark 3:21); ‘his own did not receive him’ (John 1:11); and ‘Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother”’ (Mark 3:31-35).

To now return to the story of Joseph’s enslavement in Egypt. Not surprisingly given his extraordinary soundness, Joseph was so capable that eventually his Egyptian owner ‘put him in charge of his household’ (Gen. 39:4). When his owner’s wife tried unsuccessfully to seduce him she fabricated accusations against him which resulted in Joseph being thrown into prison, but again he was so able that eventually he was put ‘in charge’ (Gen. 39:22) of the prison. Some time later two of the Pharaoh’s officials happened to be put in the same prison where they both had dreams that Joseph was able to ‘interpret’ (Gen. 40:8). Dreams are basically awarenesses that our species’ all-sensitive original instinctive self or soul has about the world it finds itself in. As Carl Jung so insightfully said, ‘The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche [soul], opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness’ (Civilization in Transition, from The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol.10, 1945). Our psyche or soul (‘psyche’ in the dictionary means ‘soul’) has immense sensitivity, coming as it does from our species’ fully cooperative, loving and alienation-free past. It has access to all the beauty and magic enthrallment of an alienation-free life and when it encounters the immensely upset world of the human condition it is deeply shocked. While an upset human’s conscious overlying self normally represses their hurtfully exposing and condemning instinctive self or soul, when they are asleep and the conscious self is resting the instinctive self or soul comes to the surface and expresses its immense anxieties about the horror of the world it has found itself in. This is why so many dreams are in fact nightmares—it is that innocent child within us, our instinctive self or soul being shocked by the horrific imperfections of the world in which it lives. For someone who is not living in conscious denial of the human condition their all-sensitive instinctive self or soul is closer to the surface in their mind and they can access all the truth about the imperfections of the world that our instinctive self is acutely aware of. This access enables denial-free thinkers or prophets to interpret people’s dreams—in fact interpret everything about the upset state of the human condition that everyone else is living in denial of; as a woman said about a meeting she had with Christ, ‘come, see a man who told me everything I ever did’ (John 4:29). Prophets are not in denial of all the truth about our world that our instinctive self can recognise. They know what the soul is trying to ‘say’. When someone is not in denial of all the horrors of this world and can access the extremely sensitive knowingness of our instinctive self or soul there is so much about our world that they know about. So, Joseph being an alienation-free, denial-free thinker could interpret dreams, could ‘hear’ what people’s distressed souls were trying to ‘say’, and that’s what he did for the Pharaoh’s officials. As will be explained later in this book when Christ is explained in some detail (presently available in A Species In Denial in the chapter titled ‘Christ’s miracles and resurrection demystified’), Christ’s ability to heal people was not ‘miraculous’ but simply due to his ability to connect with, empathise with, understand and thus bring great relief to their troubled souls—most sicknesses being psychosomatic or soul-distressed in origin. Prophets have the room in themselves to immerse themselves in people’s lives, share and know their pain when the rest of the world can’t. As Christ said, ‘I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light’ (Matt. 11:29).

Later when the Pharaoh was being troubled by certain dreams, one of the jailed officials who had been reinstated recalled Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams. Joseph duly did so, telling the Pharaoh that his dreams meant that there was going to be periods of good rainfall and then periods of terrible drought and that the Pharaoh should store the harvest from the good times to ensure there would be food in the bad. The Pharaoh was so impressed that he placed Joseph ‘in charge of my palace, and all my people are to submit to your orders’ (Gen. 41:40).

When, in due course, a terrible drought occurred and there was no food apart from what Joseph had stored in Egypt, Joseph’s father Jacob sent his other sons down to Egypt where they met Joseph who recognised them. When he learned of this, the Pharaoh invited Joseph’s family to come and live in Egypt, which they did. In fact the Israelites were so successful and multiplied in such numbers that when ‘a new king who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt’ (Exod. 1:8) he became threatened by them and ‘put slave masters over them’ (Exod. 1:11). In fact, the Israelites were so capable and had so ‘multiplied’ (Exod. 1:12) that the new Pharaoh felt sufficiently threatened to order that ‘Every [Israelite] boy that is born you must throw into the river’ (Exod. 1:22). When one Israelite mother ‘gave birth to a son…[and] saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer…[she put him in] a papyrus basket…coated with tar…and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him…[When the] Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe’ (Exod. 2:3-5) she found the baby and decided to keep him. Seeing this, the baby’s sister asked the Pharaoh’s daughter if she would like a ‘Hebrew woman to nurse the baby for you?’ (Exod. 2:7) and when she answered yes, the sister ‘got the baby’s mother’ (Exod. 2:8) who then raised her son in the Pharaoh’s household. The Pharaoh’s daughter named the baby ‘Moses, saying I drew him out of the water’ (Exod. 2:10).

‘One day after Moses had grown up…he killed…[an] Egyptian’ who was ‘beating a Hebrew, one of his own people’ (Exod. 2:11-13). Realising he would be found out, Moses fled into the Arabian desert where he lived for many years with shepherds, ‘tending…flock[s]’ (Exod. 3:1) and marrying the daughter of one their priests.

Growing up in the Pharaoh’s palace, Moses, like Plato who was educated by Socrates during the golden age of Athens, would have received the best education then available in the world, given Egypt was the most advanced civilisation at that time. Having the good fortune of being so well looked after and so well educated it is understandable that Moses would have felt a sense of responsibility to his persecuted people back in Egypt. He was also not an insecure, embattled, no-room-left-in-himself, just-have-to-survive, cowardly, selfish upset person but, as it turns out, an exceptionally sound, denial-free thinker or prophet. Moses was able to confront the truth of integrative meaning. Speaking from the perspective of the third person (that is, from the position of someone not directly involved)—because either Moses himself wanted the record to appear entirely objective, or because those after him changed Moses’ record because they wanted it to appear entirely objective—Moses described how he was able to survive confrontation with the integrative truths and meaning of life, which in his day, as has been explained, was described as ‘God’. Again the fire analogy, which, as explained in Part 6:2, is often used to represent the searing truth about integrative meaning and the human condition that almost all humans couldn’t face, is used. Moses said ‘the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush…[from within which] God called to him’ (Exod. 3:2-4), saying ‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt…and I’m concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them…and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the land of the Canaanites [and others]’ (Exod. 3:7-8). At first Moses said he ‘hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God’ (Exod. 3:6) and tried to escape his responsibility saying, ‘Who am I, that I should go to the Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt’ (Exod. 3:11), but his all-loving, truthful, secure, strong, integrative-meaning-inspired, soulful self assured him that ‘I will be with you’ (Exod. 3:12).

As has been explained earlier, exceptional mental cleverness or IQ is very often a limitation in being able to stay sound and Moses was not apparently exceptionally clever and, knowing how intellectually devious clever people can be, was anxious as to whether he would be able to stand up to the intimidating world of the ruling intellectuals back in Egypt. He complained to himself, ‘O Lord [the unerring inspiration coming from Moses’ all-sensitive, truthful soul], I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant, I am slow of speech and tongue’ (Exod. 4:10). But Moses rallied himself and knew that if he stood by his truthful, true self and let it say what it wanted to say he would be effective—as Moses said of this time of anxiety, ‘I [my immensely inspired happy, loving true self] will help you speak and will teach you what to say’ (Exod. 4:11).

So Moses accepted that he had to return to Egypt and liberate his people from bondage and take them back to the promised land of Canaan and continue the world saving traditions that Abraham had begun. He went to Egypt and said to the Pharaoh ‘Let my people go’ (Exod. 5:1). Obviously the Pharaoh was getting such good service from the Israelites he didn’t want to let them go, however drawing on all his extremely clean access to his all-sensitive soul Moses was able to know where destructive forces were fermenting in the world of the Egyptians as a result of their greed and uncaring treatment of their environment and he used this insight to predict coming devastations, a series of ten ‘plagues’ (see Exod. 7-11). When these predictions came true the Pharaoh became so afraid that he agreed to let the Israelites go, and after ‘430 years’ (Exod. 12:40) in Egypt the Israelites began their exodus through the desert wilderness of the Sinai and Arabian Peninsulas which was to last ‘for forty years…until they reached the border of Canaan’ (Exod. 16:35).

However ‘the Pharaoh’s heart’ became ‘hardened’ (Exod. 14:4) and he changed his mind, sending an army to ‘pursue the Israelites’ (Exod. 14:8). The account then says Moses parted the Red Sea so that the Israelites could escape and when the Egyptians followed they were drowned (see Exod. 14:26-30). As a result the Israelites then ‘feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant’ (Exod. 14:31).

At this point it is relevant to explain the concept of miracles in the life of prophets. Essentially the supposed miracles attributed to prophets protected people from having to admit the prophet’s soundness and by inference their lack of it. Describing the often extraordinary events in the life of prophets as miracles was a way of recognising that something remarkable had happened while avoiding the unbearably confronting issue of the human condition. As has repeatedly been illustrated, the denial-free state of prophets meant they could access all the truth and sensitivity of our species’ original instinctive self or soul and as a result know things and be able to make sense of situations and therefore know an effective path to follow. So much of what denial-free thinking prophets said and did could seem miraculous to the resigned, denial-practicing mind, but in truth prophets were only thinking truthfully and thus effectively.

The concept of miracles is the resigned, denial-practicing person’s way of acknowledging that an event in the life of a prophet was extraordinary without having to acknowledge its real significance, which is that they were living in an effectively dead, alienated state while prophets weren’t. It is so much easier to talk of Moses having miraculously parted the waters of the Red Sea than to talk about Moses being so sound and therefore ingenious and innovative in his thinking that he could find a way to defeat virtually every problem that arose, even the problem of the powerful Egyptian army chasing them. What actually happened we don’t know but the idea of a person literally parting an ocean is ridiculous. The more astonishing the fabricated miracle obviously the more amazing and impressive was the means by which the prophet managed to solve the problem that the miracle describes, so Moses must have come up with a very ingenious means to escape the pursuing Egyptians, but it wasn’t by an outlandish miracle. Possibly he had everyone strip off and tie their clothes into a bundle and wrap it in an animal skin so that it would float and then had everyone hold on to their floats and swim across the sea when the tide was lowest and at the narrowest place he was able to find—perhaps the islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez were higher then and they were able to swim from island to island. Mt Sinai, where the Israelites went after crossing the Red Sea, isn’t far from this point. The account in Exodus says that ‘God led the people around by the desert road towards the Red Sea’ (Exod. 13:18), then ‘the Lord said to Moses, “Tell the Israelites to turn back and encamp near Hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea. They are to encamp by the sea, directly opposite Baal Zephon”’ (Exod. 14:2). This does suggest Moses might have been searching for the narrowest crossing. After doing a quick search on the internet for where it is thought the Israelites crossed there is a view that the escaping throng came down the eastern side of the Gulf of Suez and then crossed to an island at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba at its narrowest point, so this idea of swimming across the narrowest point of the long barrier of water that is the Red Sea and through which the Egyptian chariots couldn’t follow may be the ingenious way that Moses thought to escape those forces. (Since writing the above I have seen a documentary that presents a plausible non-religious interpretation of Moses’s exodus from Egypt and journey to Canaan. It appears in the 2009 Battles BC documentary series in episode S1, Ep5 ‘Moses: Death Chase’. Of course what’s missing from that presentation is the explanation of how ruthless Moses had to be to implement his vision of establishing his world-saving religion.)

Other ‘miracles’, such as causing ‘water’ to ‘come out’ of a ‘rock’ (Exod. 17:6), followed, which to the city dwelling Israelites would have seemed amazing but Moses, a former shepherd who was familiar with desert life, would have known how to find springs by watching the flight of birds and the paths of animals.

As always amongst upset, human-condition-afflicted people there would have been many social upheavals that Moses in all his soundness would have had to mediate—as is recorded: ‘Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening’ (Exod. 18:13). There was also much ‘grumbling’ (see Exod. 15:24, 16:2,7,8,9,12, 17:3; Deut. 1:27) to Moses by the people, saying for example ‘you have brought us out into the desert to starve’ (Exod. 16:3), which Moses had to continually counter with the inspiration of his vision. It was a stressful life and when ‘Moses’ father-in-law’, the desert nomad priest with whom Moses had lived before his return to Egypt, visited him, he said, ‘What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you’ (Exod. 18:17-18) and advised Moses to ‘select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials…[to help] serve as judges [so] you will be able to stand the strain’ (Exod. 18:21-23). It is a very great problem for denial-free thinkers or prophets who can see so clearly where there are threats from people’s extreme upset and blindness to the all-important project they are undertaking and they do wear themselves right out trying to contain the threats, and it is true that they do have to try to find individuals who are relatively secure in self and/or properly orientated to the project to whom they can delegate, risky as that is.

There are limits however to the extent to which supervision can contain upset behaviour and ‘In the third month after the Israelites left Egypt’ (Exod. 19:1), when camped at the foot of Mt Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula, Moses became deeply distressed about the almost self-destructive behaviour of his people. Needing all the access he could muster to his truthful self or soul for guidance as to what to do, he climbed up to the cool, fresh air of the ‘cloud covered’ (Exod. 24:15) peak of Mt Sinai where he spent ‘forty days and forty nights’ (Exod. 24:18) alone fasting, eating ‘no bread [or]…water’ (Deut. 9:9). Fasting, where the brain is starved of nourishment, is a means of shutting down the conscious mind and allowing the truthful, all-sensitive world of the soul to come to the surface. There on the mountain top ‘Moses…[was able] to approach the Lord [the truth of integrative meaning]’ (Exod. 24:2) and with that denial-free clarity Moses realised that what he would have to do is establish strict rules or laws enforced by punishment to contain the upset, destructive behaviour of his people. He composed ten key laws, the now famous ‘Ten Commandments’ (see Exod. 20 & 34:28) that begin with emphasis on obedience and deferment to the one true God, which, as has been explained, is the integrative, cooperative, loving meaning of existence. He also realised he would have to establish ceremonies around these laws to reinforce their importance to the people. When he came down from the mountain, ‘his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord [he had been living close to the authentic world of our soul]’ (Exod. 34:29) and he had with him the Ten crucial Commandments which he had scratched on two stone tablets. These, he instructed, were to be housed in a beautiful ‘chest’ (Exod. 24:10) or ‘ark’ (Exod. 24:16) that because of its sacredness was to be hidden within ‘the tabernacle [tent] with ten curtains’ (Exod. 26:1). He then gave instructions about an altar for burnt offerings or sacrifices, and about priestly garments and other items of ritual. He also followed up the Ten key Commandments with a series of instructions about not having idols, about personal injuries, protection of property, social responsibility, laws of justice and mercy, the Sabbath day of rest and three annual festivals, and many, many other directives on how to live (see Exod. 20-23). Leviticus, the third book of the Bible, is entirely dedicated to outlining these further instructions to the Israelites.

The fourth book of the Bible, called Numbers, documents the living arrangements for the twelve Israelite tribes during their wanderings through the wilderness to the promised land of ‘milk and honey’ (Exod. 3:8) in Canaan, which, incidentally, is symbolic of humanity’s overall journey through the terrible wilderness of alienation to the promised state of fabulous freedom from the human condition. Numbers also records how Moses had to contend with more complaints from the Israelites—‘wailing’ about ‘why did we ever leave Egypt?’ (Num. 11:20), they ‘grumbled against Moses’ (Num. 14:2) saying ‘we should choose a leader and go back to Egypt’ (Num. 14:4) and that ‘there was no water for the community, and the people gathered in opposition to Moses’ (Num. 20:2). Certainly, if there wasn’t any exaggeration to the depiction, there were a lot of people to be provided for as the Bible says that by this stage ‘the total number of men of Israel was 601,730’ (Num. 26:51), and that was only the number of ‘men’! Clearly some exaggeration exists where numbers of years is concerned, as Moses regularly describes individuals living to impossibly old ages, such as Abraham having ‘lived a hundred and seventy-five years’ (Gen. 25:7), so perhaps the number of people is also inflated. The remainder of Numbers documents the stages the Israelites’ journey takes through the wilderness and the battles they had to fight against other tribes along the way.

The deeper significance of the continual complaints made by the Israelites to Moses needs to be explained. As is mentioned in the paragraph below, Moses instructed the Israelites ‘to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul’. The essence of Religion is that instead of living through your upset, divisive, competitive, selfish, and aggressive self you lived through, or deferred to, or subordinated yourself to, or obeyed the integrative, cooperative, selfless and loving ideals embodied in the prophet and in his one true God of integrative meaning. Basically you had to do the opposite of what your upset self wanted to do. This was hard teaching and in fact, as will be explained much more fully later on, being too obedient to the cooperative ideals was not the right response because, as the Adam Stork story makes clear, the conscious search for knowledge unavoidably resulted in upset, divisive, competitive, selfish and aggressive non-ideal behaviour, so to not be allowed to become upset and non-ideally behaved at all was to not be allowed to search for knowledge. Obviously a balance had to be struck between participating in the upsetting, corrupting search for knowledge and obedience to the cooperative, loving ideals. Abraham’s and Moses’ instructions to obey God was both hard to do and not entirely the right thing to do, so it wasn’t just the physical hardship of desert life that the Israelites were railing against, it was also the wrestling match they were having with their Religion. The introduction of Religions in the world was a fabulous, corruption-and-denial-correcting and thus humanity-saving influence, but Religions were also a difficult discipline to firstly be able to abide by, and secondly to know to what extent to abide by. Worshipping a ‘gold…calf’ (Exod. 32:2-4), which, in defiance of Moses, the Israelites tried to do at one stage of their journey through the desert, was much easier than worshipping God. Significantly one of the big differences between Religion and the new TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE STATE that understanding of the human condition now makes possible for humans is that since understanding of the human condition was the key understanding we were in search of, now that it is found there is no longer any justification for continuing the upsetting search for knowledge—at least until all the excessive upset in the world is repaired. In the situation that has existed with a Religion there was justification for not completely deferring to the cooperative ideals of the Religion and to a degree continuing your participation in the corrupting search for knowledge, however now that the ultimate knowledge that we were in search of, namely understanding of the human condition, is found that situation no longer exists. Religion-defying ‘Homer Simpson’ of cartoon fame had a justification for not doing what his religion-loving, ideals-obeying cartoon neighbour ‘Ned Flanders’ was doing but that situation changes now. With understanding of the human condition found everyone, including ‘Homer’, fully takes up the new upset-self-deferring, abandon-living-out-your-upset-and-instead-take-up-support-of-the-understanding-of-the-human-condition TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE STATE. There is no excuse not to stop living out your upset now as there was with Religion. This extremely important point was emphasised earlier when the new TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE STATE was looked at in Part 9.

In his fifth and last book, Deuteronomy, Moses reiterates all that he has taught his people, summarising, ‘what other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us…and…to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you’ (Deut. 4:7-8); ‘Has any other people heard the voice of God speak out of fire, as you have, and lived?’ (Deut. 4:33); ‘I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord because you were afraid of the fire’ (Deut. 5:5); ‘obey the commands…to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul’ (Deut. 11:13). Continuing the tradition of taking leadership from prophets, Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him’ (Deut. 18:15). Deuteronomy also states that ‘Moses wrote down this law’ (Deut. 31:9), and that ‘Moses finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end’ (Deut. 31:24). (Incidentally, writing appeared almost simultaneously some 5,000-6,000 years ago in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley.) Deuteronomy concludes with Moses dying at the foothills of the promised land of Canaan. It says he was very old, ‘yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone’ (Deut. 34:7), and that ‘Since then no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face’ (Deut. 34:10). Moses was sound enough to confront the truth of integrative meaning and the issue of the human condition with impunity: he was an absolutely exceptional denial-free thinker.

We can see that Moses was focused on establishing a structure that would allow upset, embattled humans to live with some degree of functionality and peace. He used all his soundness to give the world of upset humans a template for living. He brought order to chaos.

A world that is living in an alienated, dark, cave-like state of denial of the truth of integrative meaning and many other important truths is a directionless, lost, desperately lonely, meaningless existence. Unresigned, denial-free thinking prophets have the great good fortune of not living in such a horribly lost, alienated state. Living as they are with the truth of integrative meaning and with a denial-free awareness of another wonderful cooperative, loving world, their lives are meaningful, full of enthrallment and excitement; they have reassuring and comforting order and direction. Realising how bereft of such orientation the world of all the people around them is, the one great driving force that a denial-free thinker or prophet has is to somehow share, communicate and recreate that order, direction and orientation for those who are so lost, bewildered and unhappy. While denial or alienation protected humans from unbearable self-confrontation it also left them horribly disorientated and alone, which prophets can see and want to help overcome. Being very great prophets, Abraham and Moses drew on all their soundness to realign their people, give them an infallible true vision and a structure that they could live in and which would bring to themselves and their society some peace. By so doing they also gave all of humanity the opportunity to adopt such a stabilising, peace-bringing structure—and through doing that they bought the time needed for humanity to complete its heroic search for knowledge, ultimately for self-knowledge, understanding of the human condition.

To help create that order, direction and orientation for all those suffering from the disorientation of alienation, prophets very much wanted to provide a contexting history of humanity, a denial-free account of where we humans came from and are heading, with all the major events that took place along the way truthfully acknowledged. Obviously with understanding of the human condition now found this can at last be done in clear, first principle, scientific and denial-free terms, as can be seen in this book. In Part 8:2, a denial-free step-by-step description of the development of order of matter on Earth was given. This description traces the history of the development of matter from the underpinning physical laws of existence, to the effects those laws have on the building-block elements of matter, to the emergence of life, to the appearance of our cooperatively orientated ape ancestors, to the emergence of fully conscious humans and with it the horror of the upset state of the human condition, to the development of the various strategies to manage that upset, to finally finding the liberating and TRANSFORMING understanding of the human condition. Despite living in pre-scientific times, Abraham and Moses did their very best to present that all-important orientating and contexting, denial-free history of humanity that people could see themselves as being part of and belonging to, and, given the knowledge available at the time, what they were able to assemble was truly extraordinarily insightful and accurate—as we will now see.

Although their initial society was small in numbers, the rhetoric of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses shows that they knew that if, within that small society, they could create the ideal structure it could and would keep expanding and ultimately be able to influence the whole world—as Moses said of their initiatives, ‘all nations on earth will be blessed’ (Gen. 26:5). In the case of the influence of the Ten Commandments, for example, they have become ‘the moral basis for two thirds of the world’s population’ (from Moses, BBC/TLC co-production in assoc. with Jerusalem Productions, 2002).

While Abraham’s contribution of both monotheism and tradition were critically important in creating a successful path for the human race to follow, Moses was the one who firmly established what Abraham had initiated. As well as emphasising the need to defer, or subordinate yourself to one all-pervading truth or God and maintaining traditions, Moses added the laws, the Imposed Discipline, the society required, and the all-important contexting history that people could feel themselves a part of. Finally, he wrote all this down and put the resulting book, along with the Ten key Commandments etched on two stone tablets, in a box to be treasured.

This brings us back to the important first ten chapters of Genesis that were so crucial in establishing the contexting history of life and of humans, up to where we began the story of Abraham.

Genesis begins with the words, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ With these completely unevasive, denial-free words monotheism—the awareness that there is only one great cooperative, integrative truth or meaning or theme to existence—was established. Moses went on to say how God then created the ‘light’, the ‘sky’, the ‘seas’ and the ‘land’ (Gen. 1:3-9) and then ‘plants’ (Gen. 1:11) and ‘living creatures’ (Gen. 1:20). He then said ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God…male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:27). Since we can now understand that God is the negative-entropy-driven, integrative process, for our ancestors to be created in ‘the image of God’ we had to be living in an integrative, cooperative, loving ideal state that, as Moses said, ‘was very good’ (Gen. 1:31). He then said God ‘planted a garden…in Eden; and there he put the man…[with] all kinds of trees…that were pleasing to the eye and good for food’ (Gen. 2:8-9). We now know that our original arboreal-living ape ancestors did live in a Garden-of-Eden-like verdant world full of plants, especially fruits, that they lived on, much as bonobos do today. Moses continued, ‘God commanded the man…not [to] eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die’ (Gen. 2:16-17). If we go to Moses’ fifth book, Deuteronomy, Chapter 1:39, where it refers to ‘your children who do not yet know good and bad’, we can understand the phrase ‘knowledge of good and evil’ means ‘to know or to suffer from or experience good and evil’, although the use of the term ‘knowledge’ instead of ‘know’ does hint at the conscious search for knowledge as being the cause of the human-condition-afflicted state of good and evil. Moses confirms the involvement of a conscious search for understanding/​knowledge as the cause of our good-and-evil-afflicted state when he says, ‘the fruit of the tree was…desirable for gaining wisdom’ (Gen. 3:6). We can also now understand that when Moses said that if ‘you eat of it [the forbidden fruit] you will surely die’ he was recognising and acknowledging that searching for knowledge was so corrupting you would eventually become so alienated that you would effectively be dead.

Through his integratively-orientated, denial-free, truthful self or, if we like to personify it, ‘God’, Moses then said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him…Then the Lord God made a woman…and he brought her to the man…[to] be united to his wife…The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame’ (Gen. 2:18-25). Moses then said that the woman ‘gave some [of the forbidden fruit] to her husband…Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they…made coverings for themselves’ (Gen. 3:6-7). Moses then said as penance for what she had done ‘the woman’ would have her ‘pains in childbearing’ ‘greatly increased’ and ‘Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’ (Gen. 3:16). To the man, Moses said that because he ate the forbidden fruit, ‘Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life’ (Gen. 3:17). Moses went on to say that the integrative ideals or ‘God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life’ (Gen. 3:22-24).

The different roles that men and women had to take up during humanity’s heroic, human-condition-afflicted, search for knowledge was explained in Part 7:1. A very brief summary here of those different roles will help explain the significance and meaning of what Moses said.

Part 8:4 explained how humans developed a cooperatively orientated instinctive self or soul through nurturing, through the ‘love-indoctrination’ process in our primate past. This time of nurturing of our integratively-orientated soul was a matriarchal (or female-role-dominated) phase in our species’ development that the bonobos currently demonstrate. The males’ role during this nurturing stage was to act as group protectors against any threats, such as marauding leopards for example. When our species became fully conscious and we had to set out in search of knowledge and defy the threat from our integratively-orientated instinctive self that was ignorant of our need to search for knowledge and was in effect trying to stop that search, men, in keeping with their traditional role as group protectors, had to take up the all-important and thus dominating role of defying the threat of ignorance from our instinctive self. As a result of this development, our society changed from being a matriarchal, female-role-dominated society to a patriarchal, male-role-dominated one. The effect of men carrying out this role was that they especially became unavoidably angry, egocentric and alienated. In response, women, not being as involved in this battle against ignorance, tended to be unsympathetic towards men’s especially upset angry, egocentric and alienated state. Unable to explain why they were so unavoidably upset and embattled, men then had no choice other than to contain and even oppress women for their lack of sympathy for the critical work that they were doing. One form of oppression was the perversion of the act of sex. While sex was originally for procreation (and, in the case of some species, such as the bonobos, a means of pacification), men began to use it as a form of retaliation against women for their unjust condemnation of them for being so angry, egocentric and alienated. Sex became used as a means of attacking—‘fucking’—the naive innocence of women. It became rape. The feminist Andrea Dworkin recognised this underlying truth in her 1987 book Intercourse, when she said, ‘All sex is abuse’. Overall a battle emerged between men and women, however they still had to live together to raise children.

We can now interpret what Moses said above. In our pre-conscious state our human ancestors lived in a Garden-of-Eden-like world, free of upset, innocent and without ‘shame’. Then, with the emergence of consciousness the terrible upset state appeared. Men in particular had to take on the horribly upsetting job of defying the ignorance of our beautiful instinctive self or soul while they patiently and painfully toiled away at the job of searching for knowledge—as Moses unerringly said, ‘Cursed is the ground because of you [men]; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.’ As a result, women, not understanding why men had become so upset, became unsympathetic towards men and the original ‘united’ state of men and women ended, sex became perverted and ‘the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked’, the consequence being that the naked body that attracted sex had to be ‘cover[ed]’ up to quell lust. Overall society changed from matriarchal to patriarchal, where a woman’s ‘desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’. The blame put upon women for tempting men to seek knowledge is an acknowledgment of just how attractive women became for sex. The appeal of women’s beauty became an inspiration for the search for knowledge. Thus, as well as an attack on the naivety of women, sex became, at a more noble level, an act of love. The reason the ‘pains in childbearing’ ‘greatly increased’ is because by the time our ancestors became fully conscious and the upset state of the human condition appeared, the size of the human brain had become so big it was difficult for the head to fit through the pelvis at birth. The characteristic swivel of women’s hips when walking is a result of their pelvis widening as much as is functionally possible to accommodate the large head of infants at birth. Again it has to be emphasised that the situation that emerged between men and women under the duress of the human condition will all be explained more fully later.

Moses stating that ‘God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil”’ refers to the fact that where other animals are ignorant or unaware of the difference between good and evil we fully conscious humans are, like the all-pervading, all-powerful, all-present and all-knowing truth of integrative meaning or ‘God’, aware or knowing of what is consistent with that truth and what isn’t. We became creatures capable of insight. Again we see the metaphor of ‘flam[es]’ for the unconfrontable truth of the human condition which our inability to explain ‘guard[s] the way [back] to the tree of life’. The ‘tree of life’ that we weren’t allowed to ‘eat’ and therefore were unable to ‘live for ever’ is a reference to the fact that once we became insecure and alienated we lost our sense of universality and immortality; we lost the sense of our eternal alignment to integrativeness that we had before we became corrupted and alienated.

In all, what Moses has put forward here is an astonishingly accurate overview of the human condition, an incredibly penetrating unevasive, denial-free analysis.

The main point, which has already been emphasised, is that the all-important dignifying understanding of the human condition was not possible in Moses’ pre-scientific times so he was only able to say that we were ‘banish[ment]’-deserving evil beings when we became fully conscious. He recognised that we humans once lived in an upset-free, Garden-of-Eden-like innocent state and then conscious searchers for knowledge and, as a result, corrupted, but it wasn’t possible for him to explain HOW and WHY that search for knowledge was so corrupting.

We don’t know if Moses was the originator of this ‘Adam and Eve’ overview analysis of the human condition (Adam and Eve being the names Moses gave to the first two people in the story of the Garden of Eden), but if not he was able to recognise its immense significance to the extent that he began the Bible with it. If Moses wasn’t the originator of the story and it was part of a tradition that was passed down to him, whoever did originally conceive it had to have been an exceptionally sound, denial-free, honest thinker to have been so immensely insightful. Certainly, as was mentioned earlier, people were more innocent, much sounder, less alienated, in earlier times so there would have been more prophets then to create such insightful stories.

Continuing the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, Moses wrote that Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain, and then Abel, and that ‘Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil…[and] The Lord looked with favour on Abel…[but] on Cain…he did not look with favour. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry…[and] your face downcast?…if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door…but you must master it”…[but] Cain attacked his brother and killed him…[and for doing this God said to Cain] “You will be a restless wanderer on the earth”…[to which] Cain said…“my punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” But the Lord said to him, “Not so; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went from the Lord’s presence…[and] was then building a city…[and had offspring some of whom] lived in tents and raised livestock…[while another was] the father of all who play the harp and flute…[while another] forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron’ (Gen. 4:1-22).

As has been mentioned, later in this book the science-based, denial-free account of the history of the Earth and of humanity will be presented. There we will see how extraordinarily penetrating, accurate and denial-free Moses’ story of Cain and Abel is when it comes to explaining what happened to humans after they became fully conscious and set out in search of knowledge. Essentially, as has already been mentioned, humans became increasingly upset: angry, egocentric and alienated, to the extent that we began murdering each other. It will be explained that the domestication of animals, and following that the advent of agriculture, allowed humans to live more sedentary lives in towns and then cities where greater proximity and interaction between people caused upset to rapidly spread and increase. It will be explained how those races who remained closer to nature, removed from the congested, human-condition-spreading town and city situations, stayed innocent longer. The differences in upset between individuals, generations and races caused conflict, even murder and genocide, because without reconciling understanding that upset was a heroic state, not an evil state, the more innocent could only view the more upset as bad or evil, while the more upset and corrupt couldn’t help but feel unappreciated and unjustly condemned by the more innocent. Since the more upset were the most angry they were typically the ones to repress and even kill the more innocent because of their unjust condemnation of them; even if the more innocent didn’t actually condemn the more upset their presence alone was enough to make the more upset feel unjustly condemned. Innocence has often been oblivious to its impact upon those more corrupted, as the following quote demonstrates: ‘In the small fenced-in waiting area outside the departure hall an African woman sits with her wares spread out upon the grass. On the way to the plane I notice a framed piece of needle point she has hung on the fence that reads: “I love those who hate me for nothing”’ (River of Second Chances by Eric Ransdell, Outside mag. Dec. 1990). This reaction was also evident in the words of the innocent, denial-free thinking prophet David when he referred to ‘those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head; many are my enemies without cause’ (Psa. 69:4; see also Psa. 35:19), a view which Christ also held when he repeated David’s words, ‘They hated me without reason’ (John 15:25). As has been and will be repeatedly emphasised in this book, while it hasn’t been safe to admit to different levels of innocence and upset amongst people, generations, races and cultures because any such acknowledgment only led to unjust condemnation of the more upset, now that the dignifying understanding of all humans has been found it is not only safe but necessary to acknowledge and talk about these differences because it is only with such honesty, acknowledgment and discourse that the upset in the world can be understood and ameliorated.

What has just been presented is a very brief description of the explanation that will be given later of why humans began to attack each other, however, it is enough to demonstrate just how extraordinarily insightful and accurate Moses’ account of the story of Cain and Abel is. ‘Abel kept flocks, [he lived the nomadic life of a shepherd, staying close to nature and innocence] and Cain worked the soil [he cultivated crops and domesticated animals and as a result was able to become settled and develop towns and cities and through greater interaction with other humans became increasingly upset]…Cain was [became] very angry, and his face was downcast [he became depressed about his corrupted/​upset state and]…Cain attacked his [relatively innocent and thus unwittingly confronting and condemning] brother Abel and killed him’ (Genesis 4:2,5,8).

When Moses said ‘but you must master’ ‘sin’ he was describing the emergence of the need to control and contain excessive upset. Cain described the punishment he was having to endure as ‘more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth’—an accurate depiction of the terrible, blind, deathly dark cave-like state of alienation that humans had to endure when they became resigned to living a life of denial of their corrupted condition. Once upset developed humans had no choice other than to live ‘hidden from’ the ‘presence’ of the condemning truth of integrative meaning as guilt-afflicted, distressed, ‘restless wanderer[s] on the earth’. The account of Cain being worried that he had been so destructive that ‘whoever finds me will kill me’ and of ‘the Lord’ countering with ‘Not so; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance’ and ‘put[ting] a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him’ is a deeply insightful account of the emergence of compassion for the upset state of the human condition. Cain saying ‘whoever finds me will kill me’ is an accurate summary of the fact that if there was no compassion towards upset then upset humans would be totally condemnable, deserving of death. The fact that upset humans are not condemned to death, that in fact such condemnation was, as Moses so pointedly said, forbidden, is a recognition of the eventual emergence of compassion for upset in the lives and world of humans. The ‘mark on Cain’, that would identify him as an upset person who should be treated with compassion, is the depression that the upset, corrupted, guilt-ridden state has caused humans. While upset, human-condition-afflicted humans learnt to live in denial of their corrupted state and find as many ways as possible to think positively about themselves, all the denial and efforts to do so was designed to keep at bay an underlying depression that the truth of their upset state caused them. Although upset, human-condition-afflicted humans went to great lengths to present a positive representation of themselves to themselves and to the world, the fact is depression has been the dominant characteristic—the ‘mark on Cain’—of the lives of humans living under the duress of the human condition.

Moses’ account of the descendants of Adam and Eve building cities and turning to all kinds of occupations and trades is an accurate account of the emergence of division of labour and occupation in society.

The final section of the first chapters of Genesis before the emergence of Abraham describes the story of Noah and his ark. While the story of Cain and Abel provides an overview summation of what happened to humans in their two million-year-long journey from innocence to extreme upset, the story of Noah’s Ark focuses on the most significant yet least acknowledged event in that journey, namely humans’ resignation to living in denial of the issue of the human condition as the only means of coping with it. Resignation was explained in Part 3:8.

The great flood in the story of Noah’s Ark is a metaphorical description of the most cataclysmic event that occurred in humanity’s corrupting search for knowledge, the time when Resignation became an almost universal phenomenon amongst humans. There was a time when all humans were sufficiently free of corruption and innocent, to be able to go through life without ever having to resign themselves to blocking out the issue of the human condition and any truths that brought that issue into focus, which, as we have seen, was nearly every truth—a time in fact when all humans were innocent, denial-free, truthful thinking prophets. However, as the search for knowledge developed and corruption increased, more and more people needed to resign themselves to a life of denial to cope with their suicidally depressing corrupted condition. Eventually there came a time when almost every adolescent was growing up sufficiently corrupted in soul to have to adopt the strategy of Resignation to a life of denial to avoid the depression that their upset, corrupted, divisive condition would have otherwise caused them—a time when Resignation and the extremely competitive, aggressive, must-prove-that-I-am-not-bad, egocentric way of living became a normal part of adult human life.

The Noah’s Ark metaphor describes this time in our species’ past when Resignation and its denial of any truths that bring the issue of the human condition into focus—including oppression and repression of our cooperation-and-loving-behaviour-demanding instinctive self or soul—became almost universal amongst humans. It describes the time when Resignation ‘flooded’ (Gen. 7:24) the world and our soul and all its truths went under, were drowned, ‘wiped out’ (Gen. 7:23). It describes the time when the innocent, truthful world of our soul was pushed into our subconscious, out of conscious awareness, and in its place the highly competitive, egocentric, ‘give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death’, ‘I-am-never-going-to-accept-that-I-am-bad’ way of living emerged.

The only ones to escape the horror of humanity’s Resignation—the great ‘drowning’ of humans—were the very few exceptionally innocent people or prophets, symbolised by Noah, and the few innocent animals that Noah’s upset-free, loving state protected from all the extremely upset, brutal, innocence-hating, nature-attacking, I-hate-criticism, anger in the rest of humanity. As Moses said, ‘Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God [he did not have to deny integrative meaning]…God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, “…make yourself an ark…I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth…Everything on earth will perish [the innocent, soulful, natural world and all the denial-free truths will perish when people resign to a life of angry, egocentric denial]. But I will establish my covenant with you [but from here on I will depend on prophets to preserve the truth of integrative meaning and all the other great truths that relate to it], and you will enter the ark…Go into the ark [stay free of the cave-like dead, drowned state of denial], you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. Take with you…[representations] of every kind of…animal…to keep the various kinds alive throughout the earth”’ (Gen. 6:9,12,14,17,18; 7:1-3).

The Bushmen people of southern Africa have a word for prophets that employs a similar analogy to the story of Noah’s Ark: ‘Samutchoso’, which means ‘he who is left after the harvest’, a reference to the few stalks of wheat that are left standing upright after a harvest. Only an exceptionally innocent few don’t have to resign to living a dishonest life of denial of the issue of the human condition and of any truths that bring that issue into focus, which is nearly all truths. I learnt of this description the Bushmen have for prophets from Sir Laurens van der Post’s 1958 book The Lost World of the Kalahari. In that book Sir Laurens describes meeting a Bushman ‘prophet and healer’ named ‘Samutchoso’, which the Bushmen told him meant ‘He who was left after the reaping’ (pp.159,129 of 253). Christ too was referred to as ‘the firstborn from among the dead’ (Col. 1:18), the only one left psychologically alive when alienation spread across the Earth. In Ecclesiastics in the Bible it says, ‘God made mankind upright [uncorrupted], but men have gone in search of many schemes [understandings]’ (7:29)—we went in search of understanding and then had to resign to a life of deadening, drowned, ‘upright[less]’ denial.

Moses then said that God relented, saying, ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done’ (Gen. 8:21). ‘Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall upon…every creature that moves…they are given into your hands…I now give you everything…But…I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man…I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you”’ (Gen. 9:1-10). We can understand what Moses means: after Resignation, the great ‘drowning’, humans rapidly became more and more upset such that ‘fear and dread of you [the now extremely upset human race] will fall upon…every creature that moves’. In this situation where upset was becoming extreme, ever stronger forms of restraint had to be developed to maintain order and functionality and prevent upset from getting out of hand—if ‘an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too… for the life of his fellow man’ was to be maintained. Upset had to be contained, a ‘covenant’ or agreement had to be reached and maintained between behaving in an extremely upset way and behaving ideally. Basically upset was no longer seen as being entirely evil. God, as it were, had relented on that view. Compassion and tolerance had emerged for upset humans ‘even though every inclination of…[their] heart is evil from childhood.’ ‘But’ there was also a limit to the compassion and tolerance; upset humans had to stay ‘account[able]’ or responsible for their actions. With this structure in place, upset was able to be contained and a semblance of functionality and order achieved allowing upset humans to build great cities with heroic, egocentric, we-are-absolute-legends-not-villains skyscrapers—‘a city, with a tower that reached to the heavens’, the tower of ‘Babel’. Different ‘language[s]’ developed and humans ‘scattered…over the face of the whole earth’ (Gen. 11:4-9).

The story of Cain and Abel recognised the overall principle that once humans became variously upset and at odds with each other, they had to learn to contain or ‘master’ their upset. The story of Noah’s Ark focused on Resignation and the need to contain the extreme upset that developed after Resignation, namely the need for Imposed Discipline and for Religion. Of the three most functional ways of ‘master[ing]’ or containing or ‘civilising’ upset of Self Discipline, Imposed Discipline and Religion, the Self Discipline stage happened well before the Resignation stage that the flood in the story of Noah’s Ark describes. As was explained in Part 3:11A, in the life of an individual corrupted human today they become frustrated with the imperfection of their lives when they are around nine years of age—the so-called ‘naughty nines’—and as a result have to quickly learn to restrain their upset, learn Self Discipline. As mentioned in Part 3:11D, this Self Disciplined state became a normal part of adult human behaviour long ago in our species’ past, long before the resigned state of denial became universal amongst adult humans. What the end of the story of Noah focuses on therefore is those forms of functional restraint that had to be developed after Resignation when upset became so great that self-restraint could no longer manage it, namely Imposed Discipline and Religion. It was only through these two strong containment devices that the ‘covenant’ of ‘account[ability]’ could be maintained. The difficulty was that the development of Imposed Discipline and Religion required the involvement of exceptionally sound, denial-free thinkers or prophets, which the story of Noah’s Ark recognised with its focus on the importance of Noah as the only human left uncorrupted and not resigned to a life of blind, dishonest denial and who could therefore lead humanity.

After establishing in the story of Noah’s Ark the need to maintain restraint of the extreme upset that developed after Resignation, Moses went on to describe the development of the functional methods of restraint that the Noah’s Ark story recognised as necessary. He went on to describe how he developed the Religion that Abraham had initiated of deferring to one true God, and how he introduced the Imposed Discipline of the Ten Commandments. We can see then that in his stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and Noah’s Ark, together with his account of Abraham’s and his own journey, Moses perfectly described all the major events in the development and management of the upset state of the human condition. It was an absolutely extraordinary achievement.

Again, even if the story of Noah’s Ark was an Israelite tradition passed down to Moses, as it and the stories of Adam and Eve and of Cain and Abel most likely were, since such memorable tales with their strong central characters seem steeped in oral tradition, Moses had to be able to recognise its significance to incorporate it so prominently and sequentially in his extraordinarily accurate, contexting, denial-free history of the main events in humanity’s journey to find liberating understanding of our species’ upset human condition.

It should be mentioned that the description of Noah as being ‘a righteous man, blameless among the people’ is an accurate description and acknowledgment of the innocent state of prophets. There is a similar description for Moses in Numbers 12:3: ‘Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.’ And, as was mentioned earlier, in Matthew 11:29, Christ similarly said ‘I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ As has been mentioned before, Sir Laurens van der Post was an exceptional denial-free thinker or prophet—indeed, in his 20 December 1996 full-page obituary in the London Times he was described as ‘a prophet’ (view van der Post’s obituary that was reproduced in The Australian at <www.humancondition.com/​vanderpost-obituary>). The former Prime Minister of England, Baroness Thatcher, described him as being ‘the most perfect man I have ever met’ (interview with J.D.F. Jones, ABC Radio, Late Night Live, 25 Feb. 2002). Charles Darwin is not normally recognised as a prophet but the penetrating truthfulness of his work reveals that he was and while some of his many enemies tried to suggest he was egocentric the very opposite was true, he was soul-centric, as this quote points out: ‘In vain was Darwin’s life scrutinized for the moral weakness that his enemies were sure must underlie his free thinking. All they could discover was a gentle old fellow who passed his days amid flowers and with children—his two greatest delights. Never by any word of his was God denied, nor the soul of man’ (Great Lives, Great Deeds, Reader’s Digest, 1966, p.335-336).

The gentleness of real prophets should not be confused with the artificial gentleness that new-age-guru-and-eastern-mystic type false prophets present to the world from having manufactured happiness by transcending the whole issue of their upset self, or from artificially attaining inner peace by meditative extinction of thought. As was mentioned earlier, pseudo-idealistic, false prophets were merchants of delusion: they promoted ways to escape confrontation with the underlying issue of the human condition whereas true prophets addressed that issue ‘face to face’ (Deut. 34:10). True prophets were immensely courageous in their resistance to denial and as a result were exceptionally capable of defying and penetrating all the lies on Earth. Basically they were extraordinarily strong in the amount of soul they had guiding and supporting them. The denial-free-thinking Lebanese prophet Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) spoke the truth about the real strength of prophets—that their immense gentleness and sensitivity could seem, to proponents of pseudo gentleness and sensitivity, to be inconsistent with—when he said about Christ: ‘Humanity looks upon Jesus the Nazarene as a poor-born who suffered misery and humiliation with all of the weak. And He is pitied, for Humanity believes He was crucified painfully…And all that Humanity offers to Him is crying and wailing and lamentation. For centuries Humanity has been worshipping weakness in the person of the saviour. The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of strength. Jesus never lived a life of fear, nor did He die suffering or complaining…He lived as a leader; He was crucified as a crusader; He died with a heroism that frightened His killers and tormentors. Jesus was not a bird with broken wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked wings. He feared not His persecutors nor His enemies. He suffered not before His killers. Free and brave and daring He was. He defied all despots and oppressors. He saw the contagious pustules and amputated them…He muted evil and He crushed Falsehood and He choked Treachery’ (The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran, 1951, pp.231–232 of 902).

It has to be emphasised again what an absolutely exceptional prophet Moses was and what an incredibly important role he has played for humanity. Moses presented the complete denial-free history of humanity—all the major stages that humankind has progressed through. The story of Adam and Eve described how the human race once lived in an uncorrupted, innocent state and then, when we became fully conscious, our upset angry, egocentric and alienated state appeared. Included in this story of the appearance of upset is the acknowledgment that humanity became patriarchal, or male-role led, and the acknowledgment that sex became perverted, with all the consequences of that. Then, in the story of Cain and Abel, Moses acknowledged the emergence of the different degrees of upset, of innocence and alienation, amongst humans, and how the development of upset became so great that the more upset turned on the more innocent and began to oppress, attack and even kill them for their unjust condemnation of the more upset state. The story of Cain and Abel also described how compassion appeared, and how the rapidly developing upset had to be contained or ‘master[ed]’. Then, in the story of Noah, Moses recognised the advent of that most significant of all events in human life under the duress of the human condition of Resignation to a life of denial of the issue of the human condition. The story of Noah also recognised that after Resignation upset intensified to the point where we had to learn stronger forms of restraint and how only prophets with their ability to think truthfully were left to lead humanity in the development of such restraints. Moses then described the first two of the three stages of the prophet-led journey to the liberation of humanity, which was his contribution of the Imposed Discipline of the Ten Commandments and the development of the Religion of deferring to a one true God that Abraham had begun. (Plato contributed the third stage, namely of initiating and orientating the actual search for understanding of the human condition.) With these developments sufficient order and functionality in society could be maintained so as to allow humanity to spread across the world, progress depicted by Moses’ story of the Tower of Babel. In describing the work of the great prophets who preceded him, Moses also provided humanity with a truthful account of their lives. With the ability now to understand Moses’ stories and descriptions of the extraordinary nature and work of prophets we can understand what an absolutely incredible achievement Moses’ contribution to humanity was.

With regard to Resignation it should be pointed out that while Resignation was obviously a critically significant event in the history of humanity, until the human condition and with it Resignation was able to be explained, as has now finally been done, this metaphorical description of Resignation by Moses some 3,500 years ago is, to my knowledge, the only fully developed account ever given of it. Such has been the extent of the great black-out of denial and its alienation on Earth.

It should also be pointed out that while the meanings of Moses’ stories and metaphorical descriptions may not have been clear to denial-practicing, alienated humans, the fact is the truthful, subconscious, soulful self within all humans could recognise their truth and, as a result, find great comfort from their insightful honesty, a psychological comfort that was another of Moses’ awesome contributions to humanity. Evidence that upset humans did have a way of recognising the immense truth contained in his stories and accounts is the reverence accorded to him in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For example, ‘Moses is mentioned by name more than any other person…[in] the Koran [the holy book of Islam]’ (The Koran, by S. Murata & W. Chittick, Accessed Sept 2009: see <www.wtmsources.com/195>).

With the human condition now compassionately explained, all the great truths in all of the Bible, such as the important events in the human journey that Moses described in his stories, can be explained in clear, non-metaphorical, non-abstract, first principle, scientific, denial-free terms, which means the psychological comforting effect of knowing about our lives and humanity’s history will be infinitely better than the psychological comforting effect Moses’ extremely abstract and metaphorical descriptions were able to supply. We can fully emerge from Plato’s dark, death-like cave state now.

As has been pointed out, not only did Moses establish a system of laws or Imposed Discipline, and a denial-free contexting and orientating history of humanity that humans could see themselves as part of, he also furthered the initiative of Abraham of establishing a Religion that would counter the extremely corrupt behaviour of people. Abraham and Moses established the Religion of deferring to, or obeying, or subordinating your upset self to the one true God of integrative meaning. To live out your angry, egocentric and alienated self was to behave in defiance of the integrative ideals. God, the integrative ideals was very confronting and oppressive, but to live in total defiance of the integrative ideals led to social disintegration.

Earlier it was mentioned that Christ gave humanity the strongest possible corruption-and-denial-countering Religion. This now needs to be explained. Unlike Christ, Abraham and Moses didn’t go as far as to say that they were themselves uncorrupted representations of God. Christ said he was the Son of God, the uncorrupted denial and alienation-free expression of our integratively-orientated, cooperative, loving, all-sensitive original instinctive self or soul: ‘I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does [Christ is saying there is nothing—no alienation—standing between his conscious self and his integratively-orientated instinctive self]…I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life [If you defer to Christ rather than live through your upset self you will be a force for good instead of bad in the world and that will bring you such relief you will feel like you have been reborn]. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead [the alienated] will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man [because he is not alienated from our truthful, integratively-orientated, all-sensitive soul]…By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me [I am not an upset angry, egocentric and alienated resigned person]’ (John 5:19-30). Christ also said, ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10:30), ‘The Father is in me, and I in him’ (John 14:10, 10:38), and ‘I am the way and the truth and the life [through me you can come back to life from your resigned, alienated, effectively dead state]’ (John 14:6). Christ has clearly said here that he was the embodiment of the ideal state that God or integrativeness represents; that he was an uncorrupted expression of the innocent, cooperative, loving, soulful, ideal state, and that corrupted humans could live through him, could trust in and safely defer to and subordinate themselves to him when they become overly corrupted.

In his 1989 book What Am I Doing Here, the aforementioned English explorer and philosopher Bruce Chatwin acknowledged this truth that Christ was the innocent, uncorrupted expression of our species’ integratively-orientated, original instinctive self: ‘There is no contradiction between the Theory of Evolution and belief in God and His Son on earth. If Christ were the perfect instinctual specimen—and we have every reason to believe He was—He must be the Son of God. By the same token, the First Man was also Christ’ (p.65 of 367). As was mentioned earlier, and as Chatwin has acknowledged here, before upset (and with it Resignation) became universal, all humans were innocent denial-free thinking prophets.

By putting himself forward as the embodiment of the ideal state Christ was ‘humanising’ the ideal state. It was far more tangible to relate to a human representation of the ideal state than to a remote, abstract representation of the ideal state in the form of the concept of God, as Abraham and Moses advocated. A human representation of the ideal state reminded humans that humans could be ideal. This was far more confronting than having to relate to a remote, abstract concept of the ideal state but it was also far more honest and thus denial-defying and denial-correcting. Christ was in effect saying that an uncorrupted human state exists because he was the personification of that human example—God, the integrative, ideal state has, does and can exist on Earth. Through Christ, corrupted humans could have the most direct access possible to the ideal state because like them he was another human, but an ideal version. Christ, as it were, brought the ideal human state right into the reality of the living rooms of people’s lives, brought them into contact with another human just like themselves but one who was free of denial and alienation. Ideality was made human, real and tangible through Christ. As such, Christ gave humanity the strongest possible corruption-and-denial-countering Religion.

Abraham and Moses said they were servants of God, and Muhammad acknowledged he was a prophet of God, his messenger, but none of them said that they were the Son of God, a human representation of God, as Christ did. Christ knew how extraordinarily sound he was, and he knew how corrupted and lost people were, and he could see that being so sound his responsibility was to put himself forward as a living, human representation of the ideal state that humans could most directly recognise, relate to, trust in and live through. Of course offering people such a denial-countering, honest, ideal-human-revealing religion made the Christian religion an exceptionally corruption-exposing and confronting religion, which for some could prove too exposing and confronting.

Overall, Christ stood as witness to the existence of another soulful, uncorrupted, all-loving human state. His was the ultimate denial-defying and corruption-correcting act—and the denial and corruption on Earth had become so great that such an extreme denial-countering and corruption-correcting representation of the ideal human state was necessary if the human race was to maintain any semblance of alignment to the ideal human state while it was completing its heroic but immensely corrupting search for the liberating understanding of its human condition. As Christ described his denial-and-corruption-countering strategy: ‘If I had not come and spoken to them [spoken the truth about the integrative, cooperative, loving ideal state to the extremely upset human race], they would not be guilty of sin. Now, however, they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates me hates my Father [hates the integrative truth] as well. If I had not done among them what no-one else did [if I had not been a witness for the existence of the uncorrupted human state], they would not be guilty of sin [they would not have been sufficiently re-aligned to the integrative state]’ (John 15:21-24). What Christ did was so clear-sighted and so courageous it is almost beyond belief. It is no wonder he is ‘the most famous man in the world’ (Jesus Revealed, produced by Creative Differences for National Geographic Channel, 2009) and that most of the world dates its existence around his life, as either BC or AD—‘Before Christ’ or ‘Anno Domini’, which translates as ‘in the year of our Lord’, referring to the year of Christ’s birth. Sir James Darling, the aforementioned great Australian educator and denial-free thinker or prophet (in his full-page obituary in The Australian newspaper on 3 November 1995 he was described as ‘a prophet in the true biblical sense’ [view Darling’s obituary at <www.humancondition.com/darling-obituary>]), rightly considered that Christ’s life ‘was incalculably the most important event in human history, as we understand it, up to the present’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, 1962, p.206 of 223).

It can be seen then that Moses gave humanity the most effective form of Imposed Discipline, Christ gave humanity the strongest possible corruption-and-denial-countering Religion, and Plato gave philosophy—the actual business of studying the truths underlying all reality, in particular studying and finding the all-important understanding of the human condition—the best possible orientation and assistance. We can now understand why, for example, ‘It has been said that after the Bible [which features the teachings of Moses and Christ], Plato’s dialogues are the most influential books in Western culture’ (From the inside flap of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, published by Everyman’s Library in 2001).

The great eastern Religions, in particular Hinduism and Buddhism, were also founded around exceptional denial-free thinking prophets and these great Religions and their prophets played a similar role in civilising the great civilisations in their parts of the world, as must the great prophets of the Americas and other regions of the world. These other great civilisations contributed greatly to the advancement of knowledge in the Western world, just as advances in the West assisted them. Just where the leading edge in the advancement of knowledge was occurring at any one time depended on what stage in the human journey from innocence to exhaustion or decadence the various civilisations were at, so it is in truth meaningless passing out accolades to any particular individual, race or civilisation.

With understanding of the human condition we can now appreciate that every human who has ever lived and therefore every civilisation that has ever existed contributed fully to the journey to our species’ final liberation from the horror of the human condition. Some individuals, generations, races and civilisations were more innocent than others and could make exceptional contributions from that position, but being more innocent only meant that they had not yet participated in the great battle to defeat ignorance which humanity as a whole was waging. With understanding of the human condition we can know that no one is inferior or superior, only differently exhausted from their different position in the great battle that humanity as a whole has been waging. In fact the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ disappear from the conceptualisation of ourselves and therefore from our languages.

With understanding of the human condition we can know that all humans are equally wonderful beings—and since we all, humanity as a whole, won the great battle against ignorance and finally championed nature’s greatest invention, the fully conscious mind, it follows that humanity as a whole is the absolute hero of the story of life on Earth. Humanity achieved the greatest success imaginable. This is the end of all doubt and uncertainty about our species’ worthiness, in fact this is the time for the most wonderful celebration the world has ever seen!

(Note: religious concepts are further demystified later in the chapter titled ‘The Demystification of Religion’ in my book A Species In Denial.)