Part 5:2 Descriptions of our lost state of innocence and the extent of our denial of it

I would like now to read some passages from Sir Laurens van der Post’s books that illustrate how important his writing about our species’ lost state of innocence has been in confirming the truths my instinctive self or soul was telling me. As has been mentioned, the Adam Stork analogy presents a very exposing and confronting truth because it says that humans started out innocent and then became upset. Even though what we were taught in school was that humans’ aggressive nature comes from our animal instincts, the truth is we are now in our most upset, brutal, savage, barbaric state. Our animal instincts were just heavenly, for if heaven is the cooperative, gentle, harmonious, unconditionally selfless, loving ideal state then we have been there once already. In a world that is practicing so much denial of this past state of innocence, you can imagine how Sir Laurens’ writings about it helped me—and how they would help someone like Ken here in the audience, an adolescent boy who still plays all day with his pet ferrets and other animals. I know that when I questioned his father Tony about the suitability of Ken coming to this talk when his final school exam is in a fortnight’s time, Tony said, ‘Don’t worry, when there is an exam coming Ken goes down to the dam and catches yabbies (small crayfish).’ This made so much sense to me because exams were truly terrifying for me; I am almost 64 (as at 2009) and yet I still have nightmares about them. I had no idea what the relevance was of the subjects we were being taught at school—they certainly weren’t talking about the issues my mind was thinking about and interested in. I’d love to be able to talk to children about the upset-free, true world and why it became corrupted, and in time we will make videos here in this theatre about exactly that. I will present to children the compassionate truth about this world which will enable them to stay alive inside themselves—boys, like Ken, and young girls will stay alive inside themselves, their souls will never have to die again in a sea of silent denial.

Sir Laurens wrote about the Bushmen or San people of southern Africa, the most ancient race of humans living in the world today according to recent DNA studies, using them to resurrect the truth that humans once did live in an upset-free, innocent state before the emergence of the human condition some two million years ago. For example, he wrote that ‘He [the Bushman] and his needs were committed to the nature of Africa and the swing of its wide seasons as a fish to the sea. He and they all participated so deeply of one another’s being that the experience could almost be called mystical. For instance, he seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantis, baobab tree, yellow-crested cobra, or starry-eyed amaryllis, to mention only a few of the brilliant multitudes through which he so nimbly moved’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.21 of 253). The Bushmen were so free of preoccupation with upset that they could sense what it felt like to be a baobab tree or an antelope. Members of the WTM know that this is what I can do; I can walk a mile in people’s shoes as it were, I can put myself in their situation and empathise with where they are living, because I’m not preoccupied with pain. The Bushmen had the freedom within themselves to empathise with each other’s situations and with the lives of the birds, animals and plants in their world. Humans were a mystery to me until through empathising with them (because they wouldn’t tell me what was going on inside them) I finally worked them out, but I never found the behaviour of animals and birds strange. I can tell you all about the birds out there, what they are doing. I can whistle their calls. What the animals and birds are doing, and why, is what interests me, as it did the Bushmen.

Sir Laurens wrote, ‘Even as a child it seemed to me that his [the Bushman’s] world was one without secrets between one form of being and another’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.21 of 253). Reading Sir Laurens’ books it becomes clear that it was the Bushmen who kept his truthful soul alive. As a boy growing up in South Africa he listened to his parents talk about the Bushmen, who by then had been eradicated from their area. Sir Laurens wrote, ‘He [the Bushman] built no home of any durable kind, did not cultivate the land, and did not even keep cattle or other domestic chattel’ (ibid. p.25). ‘You know I once saw a little Bushman imprisoned in one of our gaols because he killed a giant bustard which according to the police, was a crime…He was dying because he couldn’t bear being shut up and having his freedom of movement stopped…Physically the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him but he died none the less!’ (ibid. p.236). The Bushman died of a broken heart, because he wasn’t sufficiently toughened to the human condition to cope with the wrongness of the world in which he found himself (which, incidentally, is why, while a Bushman would be innocent enough and thus sound enough to look into the human condition, he wouldn’t be toughened enough to stand up to all the denial and dishonesty in the world and by so doing find understanding of the human condition). Children spiritually die today for the same reason. The Bushmen are just like we all were when we were young and vulnerable, as Sir Laurens recognised: ‘There was indeed a cruelly denied and neglected first child of life, a Bushman in each of us’ (The Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.126 of 233).

As mentioned before, Sir Laurens also wrote these extraordinarily honest words: ‘This shrill, brittle, self-important life of today is by comparison a graveyard where the living are dead and the dead are alive and talking [through our soul] in the still, small, clear voice of a love and trust in life that we have for the moment lost…[there was a time when] All on earth and in the universe were still members and family of the early race seeking comfort and warmth through the long, cold night before the dawning of individual consciousness in a togetherness which still gnaws like an unappeasable homesickness at the base of the human heart’ (Testament to the Bushmen, 1984, pp.127-128 of 176). And: ‘Perhaps this life of ours, which begins as a quest of the child for the man, and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child, needs a clear image of some child-man, like the Bushman, wherein the two are firmly and lovingly joined in order that our confused hearts may stay at the centre of their brief round of departure and return’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.13 of 253). Yes, to find the liberating understanding of the human condition the truth of the innocent, soulful state had to be resurrected from its denied state, which was precisely Sir Laurens’ contribution to the world.

To write so honestly about humanity’s collective loss of innocence was Sir Laurens’ great inspiration and vision. It was an incalculably important contribution to the world because it brought light to an area of denial that was crippling the human race. I can’t write very well, it has taken me years to learn to write with some degree of competence (and that is even with the help of WTM founding member Fiona Cullen-Ward’s editing skills—Fiona is actually related to Banjo Paterson whose writing skills we have already encountered), but Sir Laurens was a most beautiful writer, and what he did was a great trick. He wrote these wonderful books about the Bushmen and even made a documentary about them that, at the time, attracted the biggest television audience next to the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (see The Heart of the Hunter, p.117). People were fascinated by the beautifully written descriptions of his ventures into the Kalahari Desert to find the remnants of the lost Bushmen, but through his books Sir Laurens also managed to thread in the truth about the relative innocence of the Bushmen and for someone like me those truths were pure gold. However, not everyone failed to see the truth that Sir Laurens discreetly weaved through his books. For some people, hearing about the magic world of our soul was unbearable, and just as determined deniers of truth tried to destroy me for my honesty, so they tried to crucify Sir Laurens. After Sir Laurens’ death, the British journalist J.D.F. Jones (1939-2009) wrote a book that set out to denigrate Sir Laurens as a charlatan—which is a ridiculous accusation when it could not be more clear from his writings how sound and secure he was. Nevertheless, the attack was so incredibly vicious and completely unrestrained in its dishonesty and bias (as attacks on innocents have always been because upset people have feared exposure of their alienated state almost more than they feared death itself) that some people were persuaded by it. For example, a review of Jones’ book in Australia, titled ‘Charming Charlatan’, concluded with the assumption that ‘you might…be inclined to offer a wheelbarrow of his books to the nearest second-hand shop, or to junk them all’ (Luke Slattery, The Weekend Australian, 19-20 Jan. 2002). Jones’ deep allegiance to the world of denial is apparent in this emotionally charged comment he made in an interview: ‘the academic experts on the Kalahari [Bushmen] are absolutely berserk with rage about the things he [Sir Laurens] said, because, if you read The Lost World of the Kalahari, you must not believe that this is the truth about the Bushmen; it’s not’ (ABC Radio, Late Night Live, 25 Feb. 2002). In his book, Jones said that academics accused Sir Laurens of ‘a romantic and no doubt inaccurate portrait of this dying social group’ (J.D.F. Jones, Teller of Many Tales, 2002, p.230 of 528). What it was that Sir Laurens was saying about the Bushmen that made academic experts—and Jones—‘berserk with rage’ was that the Bushmen were a relatively innocent race. This was heresy for two reasons: firstly, what Sir Laurens was saying destroyed the contrived excuse that our ancestors were brutal savages; secondly, it defied one of the main strategies of denial of not acknowledging the absolutely obvious truth of there being differences in alienation between individuals, genders, generations, races, civilisations and even cultures.

The academic experts in universities were the custodians of denial—we were not going to get any truth from them. In fact, Sir Laurens once complained about the refusal by ‘academic experts’ to study the life of the Bushmen: ‘It seemed a strange paradox that everywhere men and women were busy digging up old ruins and buried cities in order to discover more about ancient man, when all the time the ignored Bushman was living with this early spirit still intact. I found men willing enough to come with me to measure his head, or his behind, or his sexual organs, or his teeth. But when I pleaded with the head of a university in my own country to send a qualified young man to live with the Bushman for two or three years, to learn about him and his ancient way he exclaimed, surprised: “But what would be the use of that?”’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, p.67). Mechanistic science has not been able to deal with the subjective, human condition dimension to life, as Professor Charles Birch acknowledged when he said, ‘Science can’t deal with subjectivity…what we were all taught in universities is pretty much a dead end’ (From recording of Birch’s 1993 FHA/WTM Open Day address).

Not only did mechanistic scientists seek to escape the unbearably confronting implications of the Bushmen’s innocence by reducing the focus of their studies to ‘measur[ing] his head’ etc, they also went further and sought to denigrate them as ‘savages’ by highlighting their violence and aggression. For example, in his 1978 book On Human Nature, E.O. Wilson wrote that ‘their homicide rate per capita equalled that of Detroit and Houston’ (p.100 of 260). In contrast, Lorna Marshall, regarded as ‘the doyenne of American anthropology’ (Sandy Gall, The Bushmen of Southern Africa, 2001, ch.10) and one of the only Westerners to live with the Bushmen before they became contaminated through contact with more modern races, described honestly, like Sir Laurens, ‘their [the Bushmen’s] predominantly peaceful, well-adjusted human relations’ (The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, 1976, p.286 of 433). Her daughter, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who accompanied her on her expeditions in the 1950s, was the author of the classic 1959 book about the Bushmen, The Harmless People. In direct response to E.O. Wilson, Marshall Thomas wrote (in a 1989 addition to her book), ‘To my knowledge Wilson has never visited the Ju/wasi [Bushmen]. His book [On Human Nature] never mentions how important it was to them to keep their social balance, how carefully they treated this balance, and how successful they were. That he discusses them at all is perhaps due to the fact that in the 1970s they were selected by academics as a sort of living laboratory in which studies could be made on attributes of human nature, the most intriguing of which at the time seemed to be aggression’ (p.283 of 303). Indeed, summarising both her and her mother’s observations about the Bushmen, Marshall Thomas wrote that ‘we both emphasized the absence of violence and competition. Indeed, we were struck by it…The relatively few outbreaks of violence seemed isolated and were discussed over and over, since they caused such distress’ (The Harmless People, 1989. p.286 of 303).

As was explained in Part 4:4E, the acknowledgement of the existence of relative innocence in one race would unfairly condemn the more upset, less innocent races as ‘bad’, unworthy and inferior, so such reports of the relative innocence of the Bushmen could not be tolerated. And just as Sir Laurens pointed out the superficial, mechanistic studies anthropologists were making of the Bushmen, Marshall Thomas pointed out the urgent attempts to misportray the Bushmen as violent: ‘In the ten to twenty years after we started our work, many academics developed an enormous interest in the Bushmen. Many of them went to Botswana to visit groups of Kung Bushmen, and for a time in Botswana, the anthropologist/​Bushman ratio seemed almost one to one. Yet although the investigators were numerous, the range of some of their investigations seemed narrowed to an emphasis on questions of violence and aggression’ (ibid p.284). Yes, to escape the agony of the human condition, some excuse had to be found—some evidence of aggression had to be identified and then gone all out to stress! As has been repeatedly pointed out, when the need for denial is critical any excuse will do, and the art of denial is to then stick like glue to that excuse because doing so saves you from suicidal depression; just keep banging on about it, no matter how transparently false it really is!

One of the more prominent anthropologists whose ‘investigations [into the Bushmen] seemed narrowed to an emphasis on questions of violence and aggression’ was Melvin Konner, who stressed ‘findings that seemed to confirm what might be called the darker side of !Kung life’ (Melvin Konner & Marjorie Shostak, ‘Ethnographic Romanticism and the Idea of Human Nature’, The Past and Future of !Kung Ethnography, eds. Megan Biesele with Robert Gordon & Richard Lee, 1986, p.73 of 423). When Konner wrote a clearly biased review of Marshall Thomas’s 2007 book The Old Way: A Story of the First People, Marshall Thomas felt compelled to respond, writing that ‘the moment I saw Konner as the reviewer, I knew we were back where we started. I measured the length of his review—141 inches or 11¾ feet in all—and saw he was averaging four attacks per foot of column. And in the barrage, I’d say only one criticism had substance. Even then he distorted what I’d said’ (‘Response to Dim Beginnings’, The New York Review of Books, 29 Mar. 2007). Another who ‘attack[ed]’ Marshall Thomas was the primatologist Richard Wrangham (who as described in Part 8:5E put forward the Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis), who accused Marshall Thomas as having ‘conjured’ the idea of ‘Peaceful primitives’ (Demonic Males, 1997, p.76 of 350). So Marshall Thomas’ reports of the relative innocence of the Bushmen were attacked, as were Sir Laurens’.

Again, as has been explained throughout this book, while there is violence in primitive peoples, the true explanation for the aggression apparent in their societies is that while they are undoubtedly more innocent than the majority of humans in the world today, they are, as mentioned above, still members of the extremely upset stage of humanity, H. sapiens sapiens, and are, therefore, nowhere near as innocent as humans were some two million years ago when the battle of the human condition first emerged. Moreover, while basic levels of restraint are instinctive in primitive hunter-forager people such as the Bushmen, as was explained in Part 3:11G, they do not possess the more sophisticated levels of self-discipline that more upset races adopted following the advent of agriculture and herding some 11,000 years ago, and which has subsequently become, to a degree, instinctive. As a result, to draw upon data on homicide rates, as academics such as E.O. Wilson do, and use that comparison to argue that more primitive peoples are not more innocent than more modern races, is to totally ignore the effect increasing levels of restraint have on upset behaviour. As any mother will attest, a nine-year-old child is more innocent than an adult, and yet during the ‘naughty nines’ phase, as was described earlier (in Part 3:11A), they will lash out at the world in a way that a more restrained or ‘civilised’ adult would not.

The effect of restraining violence was well demonstrated by the successful ‘Iroquois Confederacy’ of the North American Indians. As was described in Part 3:11G, by the time Europeans arrived in North America, a grand league of American Indian tribes had been established to prevent, through adherence to certain restraining rules that were enforceable through punishment, the endless rounds of payback warfare that had been occurring between and within the tribes. The absurdity of evaluating a peoples’ level of innocence through their display of violence is apparent if we were to imagine anthropologists measuring homicide levels the month before and after the Confederacy was established. While homicide rates would have dropped dramatically, the only difference or reason for that change would be that the levels of restraint had increased dramatically, not the degree of innocence, which would have, of course, remained unchanged. The fear of punishment was simply preventing each member from expressing or living out their upset.

The whole story of the human journey during the last two million years that was described in Part 3:11, has really the story of the emergence of ever-increasing levels of upset, and the development of ever more sophisticated ways to restrain and contain those new levels of upset. The recognition in all our mythologies and in the work of our most profound thinkers of a wonderful, all-loving, innocent past for the human race wasn’t some romantic, fanciful dream of some impossible, unrealistic, idyllic, utopian existence, as mechanistic science has tried to dismiss it as, but a completely real time in our species’ distant past that recently discovered fossil evidence is now confirming, and that bonobos provide ample living evidence of. The true story of human life over the last two million years is that of the loss of innocence—our ‘fall from grace’, our departure from the ‘Garden of Eden’, the corruption of our soul, our ever-increasing levels of anger, egocentricity and alienation! Everyone does, in truth, know that under the duress of the human condition we each, and our species as a whole, started life in an innocent state and ended up in a variously psychologically upset, embattled, soul-corrupted state. Innocence is associated with youth, not old age.

So yes, tribal warfare and outbreaks of individual violence have been occurring for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that the relative innocence of hunter-forager tribes still living, like the Bushmen of South Africa, the Australian Aborigines and the Yanomamö of South America, don’t reveal a great deal about how extremely upset the great majority of the human race has become, and how much civility, and other pseudo idealistic means of restraint, humans now rely upon to mask and contain that extreme upset. But again, the psychological agony of our human condition has been so great that while we humans couldn’t truthfully explain our condition all we had to protect ourselves from the vicious, unbearable self-confrontation of such relative innocence were equally vicious, retaliatory, denial-based lies.

So the ‘academic experts’ were ‘berserk with rage’ with what Sir Laurens revealed about the Bushmen. The truth is Sir Laurens was persecuted because he was an extraordinarily honest, denial-free thinker or prophet—indeed, as was mentioned in Part 3:11H, in his full-page obituary in the London’s The Times he was described as ‘a prophet out of Africa’ (20 Dec. 1996) (view Sir Laurens’ obituary that was reproduced in The Australian at <www.humancondition.com/vanderpost-obituary>). The former Prime Minister of Britain, Baroness Margaret Thatcher, recognised Sir Laurens’ extraordinary soundness when she described him as ‘the most perfect man I have ever met’ (mentioned in the J.D.F. Jones interview on Late Night Live, ABC Radio, 25 Feb. 2002). Throughout history denial-free thinkers like John the Baptist and his protégé Christ were often brutally persecuted, or, as in these instances, even killed for telling the truth. The great danger of such persecution was that while it protected upset humans from unbearable condemnation it also thwarted the expression of truths needed to explain the human condition. In fact, as was made very clear in Part 3:11H about the danger of pseudo idealism, and in Part 4 about the danger of excessive dishonesty in science, the real threat facing the human race was terminal levels of denial/​alienation—a world where humans were walking around in such terrible truthless and meaningless darkness that they could never hope to find their way back to a world of liberating and relieving light/​knowledge.

With the human condition now explained and defended the truth about our species’ immensely angry, egocentric and alienated upset state can and must, if we are to heal our species’ world-destroying psychoses and neuroses, be revealed. We can and now need to admit what our mythologies have long recognised, the truth of our species’ original innocence—again, as Richard Heinberg summarised in his book Memories & Visions of Paradise: ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…has been lost…everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…innocence’ (Memories & Visions of Paradise, 1990, pp.81-82 of 282).

Africa: Our soul’s home – the Garden of Eden

Seeking permission to reproduce this photograph of natural Africa in my 1991 book Beyond The Human Condition, I corresponded with Mary Smith, who was then Senior Editor Assistant of National Geographic magazine. The photograph was taken by Gilbert M. Grosvenor, who at the time of my correspondence with Smith was President of National Geographic. Smith said that despite an official policy to never permit the use of Grosvenor’s photographs outside of National Geographic they were so moved by my letter that they made the first ever exception and allowed me to use the image. In that letter I told National Geographic that the photograph was so important to me because it evoked the memory of our species’ original instinctive self or soul’s time in Africa. In the 1950s, when I was a young boy at Tudor House boarding school, I saw a film called Where No Vultures Fly that had an amazing impact on me, as evidenced by the fact that I still remember the film’s name. It was a simple story filmed in Africa with people running around shooting each other, but the background was teeming with all the wonderful wildlife of Africa. Africa is in our psyche, it is in our ancient memory: it is our soul’s home. We once lived in the scene in this photograph. Our Homo sapiens sapiens ancestors only left Africa some 60,000 years ago so the great majority of our instinctive memory is of living in this landscape where all the animals were our companions. Our species grew up in Africa—we know this place. If you go to natural Africa it is like a time warp, you feel like you have been hit with a stick, it is mind-exploding. Tim Macartney-Snape grew up in Tanzania, and Annie and I have been there, and I want the founding members of the WTM to visit natural Africa next year if possible so they can personally experience how moving it is.

In her 1967 book, the appropriately titled A Glimpse of Eden, Evelyn Ames, a poet and novelist, recorded the experiences of a month-long safari undertaken in East Africa: ‘We thought we knew what to expect. Several friends had been there and told us about it; some, even, had made the same trip we were…going to make, but we discovered that nothing, really, prepares you for life on the East African Highlands. It is life (I want to say), making our usual existences seem oddly unreal and other landscapes dead; that country in the sky is another world…It is a world, and a life, from which one comes back changed. Long afterwards, gazelles still galloped through my dreams or stood gazing at me out of their soft and watchful eyes, and as I returned each daybreak, unbelieving, to my familiar room, I realized increasingly that this world would never again be the same for having visited that one. Nor does it leave you when you go away. Knowing its landscapes and sounds (even more in silence), how it feels and smells—just knowing it is there—sets it forever, in its own special light, somewhere in the mind’s sky’ (pp.1-2 of 224). ‘Each day in Africa my heart had almost burst with Walt Whitman’s outcry: “As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles”’ (p.204). In Henry IV, William Shakespeare wrote of ‘A foutra for the world and worldlings base! I speak of Africa and golden joys’ (Part 2, Act V, Scene iii, c.1597). A sign at the entrance to the Serengeti National Park reads: ‘This is the world as it was in the beginning.’ Sir Laurens wrote that ‘We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water…I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p 151 of 253). Natural Africa is the ‘cradle of the human race’, it is our species’ spiritual home; it is the most sacred place on Earth.

Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom
with Seated Lion (detail) 1833-1834

This painting by the American folk painter Edward Hicks represents a bubbling up from our subconscious psyche or soul of this memory of our innocent time in Africa, a time when we lived harmoniously with all animals, even lions. Did you know that the relatively innocent Bushmen talk to the lions? They say, ‘Don’t, no, hey, woo, no’ and the lions obey them. Lions have learnt instinctively to respect the Bushmen because they have poison arrows, but the Bushmen do know lions so well that they can communicate with them. As Sir Laurens said, the Bushmen actually know all the creatures’ personalities. They walk around asking, ‘How are you going mate? What are you doing? I know what you do, you’re always scampering around there aren’t you?’ That is their world. They are fascinated with nature and can relate to it and so they do have these serious out-loud talks with lions, in which they can get very stern but the lions do actually back off. Bushmen can, like our ancient forebears could, talk lions out of a kill.

I want to include again this marvellous description of our original innocent state by the eighth century BC Greek poet Hesiod, from his poem Works and Days: ‘When gods alike and mortals rose to birth / A golden race the immortals formed on earth…Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die / Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil / Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil / They with abundant goods ’midst quiet lands / All willing shared the gathering of their hands.’ We once lived in this idyllic state.

In his 1989 book What Am I Doing Here, Bruce Chatwin acknowledged that Christ was the innocent, uncorrupted expression of our species’ integratively-orientated, original instinctive self when he wrote that ‘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). This reference to ‘the First Man’ being ‘also Christ’ makes sense of this comment by Sir Laurens about a missionary who sought to convert the Bushmen to Christianity: ‘The pastor, Dominee Ferdie Weich, though much loved by the Bushmen, could report no permanent conversion to Christ in 21 years’ (Testament to the Bushmen, 1984, text accompanying photograph 91). The Bushmen, being Christ-like themselves in their relative innocence, weren’t in need of Christianity. They didn’t need a sound person to defer to, to live through, to be ‘born-again’ through, to be ‘resurrected’ from their upset state through, because they were not so upset themselves that they could no longer afford to trust in and live through themselves. In his 1985 book Black Robe, the Northern Irish novelist Brian Moore recorded this revealing comment made by an American Indian to Jesuit missionaries in Canada about the comparative innocence of native people: ‘It is because you Normans are deaf and blind that you think this world is a world of darkness and the world of the dead is a world of light’ (p.184 of 256). I should mention that as a member of the Jewish race, Christ would have benefited from the genetic toughness of that race because it would have allowed his exceptionally well nurtured innocence to survive contact with the upset world where someone less genetically toughened may have not. As my headmaster at Geelong Grammar School, Sir James Darling (who in his full-page obituary in The Australian newspaper was described as ‘a prophet in the true biblical sense’ (3 Nov. 1995)), said in one of his famous speeches about sensitive, innocent soundness not being enough for someone to be able to defy the alienated, dishonest world of denial and find the explanation of the human condition, ‘he must be sensitive and tough’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, 1962, p.34 of 223)—which is why a member of the Bushman race, which is a genetically relatively innocent race, could not have found the explanation of the human condition. (Note, later in Part 10:5 I cite more of Sir James Darling’s speech, in which he spoke about needing to ‘be sensitive and tough’—and much more can be read there about his incredibly visionary education program at Geelong Grammar School, where he deliberately set out to cultivate the innocence needed to solve the human condition.) Sir Laurens van der Post also recognised that the Bushmen, although relatively innocent, did not have sufficient instinctive toughness to withstand the upset world when he described how ‘mere contact with twentieth-century life seemed lethal to the Bushman. He was essentially so innocent and natural a person that he had only to come near us for a sort of radioactive fall-out from our unnatural world to produce a fatal leukaemia in his spirit’ (The Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.111 of 233). A further difference between Christ and the more innocent so-called ‘primitive’ races such as the Bushman is the greater level of self restraint that accompanies toughness, which Christ, being a member of the more upset adapted Jewish race, would have possessed. The story of how restraint has accompanied the rise in upset during the human journey was described throughout Part 3:11.

So while they are still bouncing around, relatively secure and happy inside themselves, even the Bushmen are to a degree upset, and that upset can be expressed in physical violence. You have to go back a lot further in time to get truly innocent humans. Even so, the Bushmen are the most innocent variety of humans living today. What upset that does develop in the Bushmen is able to be exorcised or valved off by performing trance dances in which the individual uses exhaustion to shut down their troubled conscious mind and let their soul rise to the surface of their awareness and by so doing become realigned to the true world. I mean the Bushmen just wander around with nature all day, talking to the lions, talking to lizards and mucking around here and getting a bit of food there, that’s just all they do and that’s what we always did—and yet when the Bushmen make, for example, a good arrow, they quickly give it to another to avoid jealousy, because there is still some upset in them.

Indeed, to find what original innocent man was like you have to go back two million years. If an original innocent person walked in this room, honestly we’d all die, because we wouldn’t be able to cope with their purity—they would be so free of any sign of corruption; they would be so unaware of anything to do with upset. You would see in their eyes such pure innocence and complete trust, such freedom, such joy and happiness, it would be unbearable.

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) acknowledged the innocence of our original instinctive state when he wrote that ‘nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state’ (The Social Contract and Discourses, 1755; tr. G.D.H. Cole, pub. 1913, Book IV, The Origin of Inequality, p.198 of 269) and ‘Man is born free but is everywhere in chains’ (Le Contrat Social, 1762 [published in English as The Social Contract, 1791]).

Recall in Part 4:12, how E.O. Wilson, the Harvard professor of biology developed the extremely dishonest theory of Sociobiology/​Evolutionary Psychology to dismiss our moral nature as nothing more than reciprocity, a subtle form of selfishness—and then, when that proved too unsavoury, put forward the extremely dishonest theory of Eusociality to misrepresent our moral soul as being derived from warring between groups of humans. With the theory of Eusociality, Wilson even sought to trivialise the human condition as nothing more than a conflict between selfish and selfless instincts within us! Wilson has been the leading biologist at Harvard University, one of the leading universities in the world. He has been frequently described as one ‘of the 20th century’s greatest biologists’ and is ‘among the most decorated and celebrated biologists of…[his] generation’ (‘Wilson, Watson reflect on past trials, future directions’, Harvard Gazette, 10 Sept. 2009). He has been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, the U.S. National Medal of Science and in 1995 was named one of TIME magazine’s 25 Most Influential People in America. The key question that had to be answered for there to be a future for the human race was the issue of the human condition, and that is a question for biologists, and Wilson is, by all these accounts, the leader of the world in the field of biology, so in his lap lay the greatest of all responsibilities and yet, instead of seeking an honest answer to the issue of the human condition, he was intent on trivialising the issue, basically subverting humanity from finding the desperately needed, real explanation of our psychologically troubled condition! The captain of the world, as it were, was leading humanity to destruction! I once described Wilson as the ‘Antichrist’ because if Christ was the most innocent, denial-free, honest thinker in recorded history, which he was, then Wilson was the opposite. While Christ was the Lord of Truth, Wilson was the Lord of Lying, the Archdeacon of Denial! Biology has been spreading some diabolical lies around the world. Darwin tried to avoid lying but Wilson had no compunction about doing so. That this has happened is an expression of how upset the human race has become and thus how desperate humans have been to contrive an excuse for their extremely upset behaviour, but, as I have emphasised, the great danger of such extreme lying was that it risked burying the truth forever and thus condemning humanity to extinction! The amount of lying that has been going on, and the eulogising of it, has been a very serious matter indeed. The world of humans has become completely mad. Alienation had all but seduced the world.

As was described in Part 4:12, in his 1998 book Consilience, which claimed that Evolutionary Psychology’s reciprocity-explanation-for-social-behaviour explained humans’ moral nature, Wilson, the ‘captain of the world’, said that ‘Rousseau claimed [that humanity] was originally a race of noble savages in a peaceful state of nature, who were later corrupted…[but what] Rousseau invented [was] a stunningly inaccurate form of anthropology’ (p.37). This statement is as outrageously dishonest as J.D.F. Jones’ accusation that ‘the academic experts on the Kalahari [Bushmen] are absolutely berserk with rage about the things he [Sir Laurens] said’ about the Bushmen.

You may wonder why the WTM is out here, stuck under a few gum trees, promoting these ideas. As I described in Part 4:14, these human-condition-confronting explanations have not been embraced by the human-condition-denying scientific establishment. I once presented a lecture to the psychology department at Sydney University. Well, they hated and rejected what I had to say—they did go ‘berserk with rage’. There was uproar and people walked out—basically I was spat out the door because I started to put forward all these ideas that are based on such truths as the original innocence of humans. I mean I can keep going on like this, talking the truth about the world of innocence and our corrupted state and from that truthful basis explain all manner of phenomena for hours on end. But those in the psychology department didn’t want to know about it, their whole edifice of denial was being dismantled brick by brick and they hated it. I mean how dare they? They are supposedly the masters of a field of study that deals with human psychosis—as was explained in Part 3:8, ‘psychosis’ literally means ‘soul-illness’, derived as it is from psyche meaning ‘soul’, and osis which means ‘abnormal state or condition’; thus we can understand that ‘psychology’ means the ‘study of the soul’, while the associated field of ‘psychiatry’, as practiced by medical specialists, literally means ‘soul-healing’, derived as it is from psyche meaning ‘soul’ and iatreia which means ‘healing’. Well, let’s talk about the ‘soul’ and why it became ‘ill’ or corrupted from an obviously innocent state and therefore has to be ‘healed’. Why aren’t these ‘specialists of the soul’ talking about that? What was our ‘soul’’s original state and how and why did it become ‘abnormal’, corrupted? They are not even asking those fundamental questions and yet they are the supposed authorities on the subject. Very often people who are the least secure want to become psychiatrists and psychologists, not because they have the greatest need for what it has to offer, but because they either want to find what all the denials are that they can use to hide behind, or because by becoming a psychologist they have somehow disproved the possibility that they suffer from psychosis, in which case denial ends up fostering denial. Such is the end play state of terminal levels of alienation at which the human race has arrived.

As the custodians of denial mechanistic science can’t tolerate the ideas I present. It is not about to publish these ideas in its literature or have the ideas debated there, which is why they have had to be promoted by an independent organisation that I and the supporters of these ideas have had to establish, fund and run ourselves.

So Wilson said Rousseau was ‘stunningly inaccurate’, and Jones said the ‘academic experts’ were ‘berserk with rage’ with Sir Laurens. You ought to hear what the captains of denial tried to do to me, it would make your ears curl—how I’m still on my feet I don’t know. This is the first public talk I’ve given in 15 years because the enemies of all the truth I’m daring to present made a program that was televised throughout Australia by our national broadcaster, the ABC, would you believe, that portrayed me as such a monster that I’ve had to fight to survive let alone do any work (and Sir James Darling was a former Chairman of the ABC! How they have lost their way, become bankrupt of any relevance to the human journey). In fact I had to fight so hard to survive that I came down with Chronic Fatigue, from which I’ve only just recovered after my partner Annie Williams nursed me through it for 10 years. I once gave lots of public talks and the last time I did one I was a vital, radiantly excited young man. I’m now an old man but thank God I fought hard enough to survive and I’m still alive to give this presentation. Not only do I need to thank Annie for all her support through the last 20 years of horrible persecution, I also need to thank my brother Simon, the other directors and patrons of the WTM, and all the founding members of the WTM for their unwavering courage.

The English poet laureate William Wordsworth was, like Rousseau, extraordinarily honest. As was described in Part 4:6, he wrote this wonderful poem in 1807, probably the greatest poem ever written, titled Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Even the title Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood contains exceptional honesty. If you bore down into that title, unpack it, dismantle it, Wordsworth is saying that humans were once so innocent that it didn’t matter to us if we lived or died—which echoes Hesiod, who said, ‘A golden race the immortals formed on earth…Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die.’ When we were innocent we were so in tune with everything around us and so happy inside and so alive that death was not an issue. Death is only an issue when we live a wretched life, where we become so selfish that it matters if we die or not. Fear of death is a product of selfishness, which in turn is a product of alienation, which in turn is the loss of the generosity and meaning we once had before we became upset. In our ‘Early Childhood’ we have ‘Intimations of Immortality’—when we are innocent and free of upset we are not concerned with the issue of mortality. For secure people mortality is not an issue because their love for this world is universal and everything is saturated and full of that love. So how much truth is in that title alone! In this marvellous poem Wordsworth wrote, ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and streams / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light / The glory and the freshness of a dream / It is not now as it hath been of yore / Turn wheresoe’er I may / By night or day / The things which I have seen I now can see no more [because I’ve become alienated, I have had to block out all truth of another true world because it has become too condemning] // The Rainbow comes and goes / And lovely is the Rose / The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare / Waters on a starry night / Are beautiful and fair / The sunshine is a glorious birth / But yet I know, where’er I go / That there hath past away a glory from the earth…something that is gone / …Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream? [Where is my memory of that magic time I lived in?] // Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting [alienation] / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar / Not in entire forgetfulness / And not in utter nakedness [and the following words are the most beautiful I’ve ever read] / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home [God is the integrative, cooperative, selfless, loving ideals and since we once lived in the cooperative ideal state, ‘trailing clouds of glory do we come’. We come from an uncorrupted, cooperative, innocent, loving state—‘From God, who is our home’] / Heaven lies about us in our infancy! / Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy / …And by the vision splendid / Is on his way attended / At length the Man perceives it die away / And fade into the light of common day / …Forget the glories he hath known / And that imperial palace whence he came.’

Wordsworth goes on to say that it is only a denial-free thinker or ‘prophet’ who hasn’t become resigned to living in denial and had to ‘Forget’ the true world who, from that honest basis, can plumb the depths of humanity’s estranged state: ‘Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep / Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind / That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep / Haunted for ever by the eternal mind / Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! / On whom those truths do rest / Which we are toiling all our lives to find / In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave.’

So in all these quotes about the innocence of our original instinctive state we can gain an appreciation of how dishonest mechanistic science has been to have denied so many truths related to this magic world of our soul. These quotes and the truth they resurrect of the existence of our lost state of innocence also raise the serious question of how are we supposed to cope with the exposure of having the truth of how corrupted the human race has become revealed? It is this very important question that will be looked at next.