Section 3:20 Connor Fitzgerald (recorded February 2015)

G’day, my name is Connor FitzGerald, I’m 35 [at the time of filming] and I’ve been around these understandings as put forward by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith for about 10 or 11 years—just over a decade. Today I just want to have a chat about what this information means for the world, obviously, but also just talk personally about how this information has impacted my life and hopefully portray just what that means to me and maybe that’ll help people watching.

I just wanted to start with this quote by Jeremy which I just absolutely love, ‘The point of all this is to stop the suffering’. People that are watching this video online and are wondering what the WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT (WTM) is all about—that’s it. That’s basically the end goal here and there’s a lot of content on the website that you can look up about the understandings that Jeremy has put forward that you will discover makes this end to suffering possible. [See Video/​F. Essay 3 for an introduction to the explanation of the human condition.]

This particular talk that I’m going to try and give today is about the Transformation process, which is how you go from living a totally preoccupied, shut down, deeply numb state to a transformed, preoccupation-free state, effectively free, of the human condition. So, it’s pretty exciting. I’ve got a few things to talk about, it might be a bit of a dog’s breakfast but we’ll see how it goes!!

I just want to emphasise that there’s a lot of content on the WTM website, have a look at it, it’s very, very good.

In a speech made in 1950, Geelong Grammar School Headmaster Sir James Darling said, ‘selfishness is, as it has ever been, the ultimately destructive force in a society, and there are only two cures for selfishness—the regimented state which we all profess to dislike, and the change of heart, which we refuse to make. That is the choice, believe me, for each one of us, and we have not much time in which to make it. The need for decision [to have a ‘change of heart’ and live selflessly] is serious and urgent, and the sands [of time] are running out’ [GGS Speech Day address in 1950, Light Blue Down Under, by Weston Bate, 1990, p.219 of 386]. So, that’s just a good summation of the situation in the world at the moment and Jeremy talks a lot about how it’s been our inability to be selfless, up until now, which has been a fairly major handbrake on humanity eventually rehabilitating, and you don’t have to go far to see the madness that’s out there—turn on the television, watch the news—it’s all pretty awful and it’s been humans’ inability to live selflessly in a universal context that’s been the problem. What’s so amazing about this information and this Transformation process is that it does allow us to live selflessly.

So, I suppose I should explain a little bit about myself. As I say, I’ve been around these understanding for about 10 years and I first came across them through a very good friend of mine, Will Salter. We were both working in the bush [Australian countryside] at the time and we would drive around and he’d talk to me about this information and it was just incredible, particularly when you first come across it; it is just amazing in that it explains absolutely everything about us—men and women [see F. Essay 26], religion [see F. Essays 35 & 39]—all the topics that are just seemingly inexplicable are explained by this—What is love [see F. Essay 27]? What is our soul [see F. Essay 21]? How did we become conscious [see F. Essay 24]?—so, it’s incredibly exciting when you first come across it. It’s just as WTM member Genevieve Salter said in her Affirmation [see Transformation Affirmation 4], it’s like being drunk on knowledge. All of sudden there’s all these things that you didn’t understand and you can now explain—it’s really amazing.

To quickly summarise my journey. So I come across the information, it’s amazing, it stacks up, it makes a lot of sense, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I didn’t fully realise the implications of at the time—for example, Resignation [when in our teenage years we tried mightily to understand the human condition—tried to reconcile upset behaviour with the ideals of life—but we couldn’t, so to cope we took up a strategy of simply denying the human condition existed; see F. Essay 30]. This resigned strategy is something that is completely at odds with the information so when you come across it you can enter what’s called the ‘Mexican Standoff’ where you can’t deny the logic but you are fearful of letting go of your resigned strategy [see F. Essay 33] but eventually there comes a point in the journey with this information where you can see through your strategy enough, realise enough is enough and that it is safe to put your strategy aside and just live the way this information says you actually can. Then the real, truthful world opens up, which is all about honesty about our corrupted selves, but this information also loves and explains us like our strategies never could. Letting the information take care of my resigned upset self is the most therapeutic, natural and rational thing to do.

So, that’s what this is really all about.

So, just to provide a bit more context. You’ve probably heard in other videos, and seen on the website, that there’s a lot of talk about Resignation. This is pretty important because it’s the most significant psychological event in anyone’s life and yet up until 1983 when Jeremy’s first book was published it went completely unacknowledged. That’s the problem, it’s the silence of the adult world that makes it incredibly difficult and incredibly confusing for children. And children blame themselves, that’s sort of where this psychosis that we develop, that the following picture illustrates, starts.

Detail from Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, 1537–1541

A picture tells a thousand words so that’s sort of what Resignation is like. I can’t really connect with what it was like day to day during my teenage years but I certainly found it a very confusing and disorienting time; I can’t remember what went on in my head but I do remember becoming increasingly distressed and estranged from myself and everyone around me. It’s the most distressing, confusing, sort of maddening situation, however, I can now understand what I was struggling with. Basically, what was happening at that time was that I was struggling mightily with trying to reconcile all the imperfections and wrongness in myself with all my natural childhood expectations of a peaceful, happy world [see F. Essay 21 for the origin of our all-loving instinctive soul]. The bottom line was that life simply wasn’t turning out like it was supposed to. I certainly wasn’t peaceful and happy, I was becomingly increasingly selfish and angry as I tried to reconcile my reality with ideality and with no explanation at my disposal at that time I had no choice but to resign myself to a life of denial of the human condition and consequently take up a strategy to make myself feel good, to prove my self worth by simply being nothing but ‘good’ or ideal and burying my ‘bad’ or upset self so deep that it no longer existed. We all take up a strategy, everyone’s got their different colour of it—in my case it was to be a nice guy, be a good person, save the environment, you know and this was all driven by my high IQ. I’ve got a massive pride in my intellect, my ability to think (or rather not think about the human condition), so I really cranked that up to the point where I believed my born-again-to-idealism strategy was actually my authentic real self [see F. Essays 14, 34, 35 & 36 for the complete exposé of ‘pseudo idealism’]. At this point, I’ll read out a quote that I think relates to what I was saying earlier about how having a strategy which is based on misreadings and misunderstandings and then coming across the whole truth about humans can be a bit turbulent. Particularly in my journey, having a born-again, ‘nice guy’ strategy has added an extra layer of fog or dissociation from my real self that I have always struggled with massively because the honesty of this information just absolutely smashed my belief that I was ideal to pieces. Of course, I then tried harder to be ‘nicer’ which doesn’t work because I’m still being dishonest about my resigned psychosis, and the whole thing gets into a vicious cycle and I get stuck in the ‘Mexican Standoff’. [In chapter 8 of FREEDOM, when talking about the 40-year-old pseudo idealistic equivalent stage of the human race, Jeremy explains that:

‘…so desperate were they [the born-again] for relief from the horror and guilt of their situation that their mind decided to focus so completely on the positive that they were good when they behaved in a cooperative, civilised, ideal, loving way that they deluded themselves that they weren’t actually corrupted, that they weren’t massively upset human-condition-afflicted people. They convinced themselves that the mask or facade of civility was not actually a mask or facade at all, but a true representation of their real self: ‘I am behaving in a cooperative, loving way, therefore, I am an upset-free, guilt-free, human-condition-eliminated, thoroughly good, cooperative, loving, sound human.’ It was an extraordinarily false/​dishonest/​‘phony’/​‘fake’/​deluded interpretation, but the depression from feeling guilty/​bad/​worthless about being so upset was so great that their mind was well and truly capable of making such a grand delusion.’ (par. 881)

‘…while being civilised—that is, using self discipline to restrain and contain your upset so it didn’t show—did help contain destructive behaviour and provide its practitioners immense relief from doing so, what happened during the 40-year-old stage, for both humanity and humans individually, was that this relieving, ‘feel good’, ‘warm inner glow’, ‘blissed out’ positive of having restrained your upset and behaved in a ‘good’/​ideal/​cooperative way became the entire focus of existence. In the end, as we will see, when humans became extremely upset–saturated with the problem of the corrupted state of the human condition–their whole mental preoccupation became one of searching for situations and opportunities where, through doing ‘good’, they could derive ‘the rush’ of relief from the condemning issue and truth of their corrupted state.’ (par. 883)].

The point is it doesn’t matter, we’ve all got strategies that we had to develop in light of not having any understanding when we were little and that was just my particular one.

Jeremy refers to this quote in one of the earlier chapters of FREEDOM [chapter 2:3] by a Danish philosopher called Søren Kierkegaard and he says, ‘…​there is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there doesn’t dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something, or a something he doesn’t even dare strike up acquaintance with…​he goes about with a sickness, goes about weighed down with a sickness of the spirit, which only now and then reveals its presence within, in glimpses, and with what is for him an inexplicable anxiety’ (Sickness Unto Death tr. A. Hannay, 1989).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s all a bit heavy but the beauty of this information is that the whole human story is explained and I just absolutely love the following picture because in here is the whole human story from start to finish, and this is any of your particular stories from start to finish.

This is my story from start to finish and the reason that’s so wonderful is because there’s a reason for all these stages. There’s context, we’ve never had the full truth about humans from start to finish so naturally we’re not used to it—but this is it.

The best part, as WTM member Doug Lobban said in his affirmation [see Transformation Affirmation 10], is that you just don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re a corrupted, resigned human. This information will take care of it, you hang in there with its logic and eventually you reach a stage where you realise that enough is enough of your strategy and you see it for what it is. For me particularly, that stage felt really important, being able to break my denial and blow the lid on my resigned upset state and the strategy that I was using to cope with that and once I was able to see that it was quite incredible. I could see that I’ve got this strategy that I developed when I was a kid and it’s been with me the whole time and it’s been absolutely necessary and it kept me safe and all these things. Then you come into contact with this information which is this whole truthful story about humans and it makes our strategies transparent and redundant and it makes us feel very uncomfortable about the way we’re promenading and posturing and trying to just get by. Basically, all that I was doing from Resignation onwards was just making myself feel good, whatever that was, the way I dressed, the way I talked, ‘be smart, be good’, whatever it was, it was just all about me trying to make myself feel better. Again, when I was a kid I didn’t have any understandings and in a world without that you adopt a psychosis and away you go.

Then this information comes along and there’s a bit of an upheaval but the beauty is that at some point you do realise that you don’t need to use your strategy to cope with all that pain and upset and hurt anymore. I just don’t have to, because this information, which I happen to have been supporting for a long time, completely, explains that, it’s got that totally covered and actually seeing what’s been driving me all this time, getting some transparency on that resigned madness and then letting the information, this truthful framework, completely look after me so that I don’t have to be preoccupied with my pain, with my hurt, with my upset anymore, was the most amazing moment. It does get to a point where we do have to have a ‘change of heart’, that’s been the problem, we haven’t been able to have a ‘change of heart’ up until now because we were yet to understand ourselves, but now we can.

Tony Gowing wrote a really good blog post about this feeling because it is such a relieving change. You are going from a negative to a massive positive and it’s just so relieving to not have to pretend all the time or worry about your divisive behaviour, trying to prove all the time that, ‘No, I’m not that, I’m not that, I’m not that’. There’s so much time, energy and preoccupation that goes into trying to prove to yourself and everyone else that you’re a good person and this information actually does it and it’s logical and makes sense so it’s completely legitimate to allow the information to just cover all that and that’s the relief. I just don’t have to worry about that ever again. Of course, I’m still an upset person—the fact that I’m upset is not the problem, it was the preoccupation with the upset that was the issue and now I just don’t have to worry about it. It’s just the most life-changing transformation, I literally went from being totally preoccupied, I was so preoccupied I didn’t even know I was preoccupied, to the whole world opening up, it’s sort of like you can breathe again. So, Tony wrote this which I really like: ‘…​this is my best attempt at explaining it: It’s like winning the World Cup after scoring the winning points right on the final buzzer; it’s like falling into the deepest and most enthralling first love imaginable; it’s like being eight years old again and being an hour or two into a fully fledged adventure to catch frogs in your local creek with your best mate; it’s like coming home after some massive natural disaster and finding all your family alive and well; it’s like being drunk for the first time in your life and your favourite song comes on and you dance with the most carefree and excited freedom that you have ever felt; it’s like waking up from that dream where everything has gone completely and utterly wrong and finding out that none of it actually happened and everything is okay–YES! It’s like all of those tiny moments in your life combined!!!’ (Feb. 2014, www.worldtransformation.com/​the-excitement-is-here-waiting-for-us-right-now) [See Transformation Affirmation 7 for Tony’s affirmation.]

So, the point is, I’m not free of upset, I’m still a massively upset person, I just don’t have to worry about covering that because the honesty of this information does and that’s what’s so good.

I was just going to read out something I wrote a little while ago:

‘Now that the human condition is solved and human upset has been totally explained and exonerated the Truth is that I am still massively upset but I am good—which means I don’t have to pretend and delude myself that I am not—this is very relieving and honest and real and it’s the truth anyway! Everything else has been just resigned falseness to survive—which is incredibly heroic but now totally useless. All that has happened is that I have seen my upset state for what it is and totally let the information deal with all of it.’

That’s the thing about this transformation—just the realness of it, you can be sceptical about it and think, ‘Well, are you sure about all that?’, but the amazing thing is that it is real because this information is true. I mean, I’ve tested and applied it in my life and it’s completely made sense of my life and everything that I am about and that everyone else I know is about and everything else that I see in the world. So this Transformation process is just the logical, rational, natural way that humanity can go from living selfishly to selflessly. That’s why it’s incredible because the human condition is a universal problem [see Video/​F. Essay 10] and this transformation is also the universal solution, it means that this applies to every single person regardless of race, creed, colour, this applies to you. The human condition applies to everyone, therefore, this amazing Transformed State that is on offer now is also available for everyone and that means the world and that means a world which can start to rehabilitate from the God-awful stuff going on at the moment [see F. Essay 55 about the ‘endgame’ state the human race has now reached].

I’d just like to read a couple of things. One is from Jeremy’s latest work, FREEDOM, in chapter 9, and it’s just a really good summation of this transformation process:

‘Yes, we can all now know that our insecure, egocentric need to validate ourselves through winning power, fame, fortune and glory is obsoleted. We can understand that it is no longer necessary to prove that we are good and not bad through demonstrations of our worth because our goodness has now been established at the most fundamental level through first-principle-based, biological explanation. We can know that with the arrival of understanding of the human condition our whole competitive, self-preoccupied, selfish, must-win-power-fame-fortune-and-glory way of living has been made redundant. In fact, the fundamental situation we are now in is that the resigned, competitive way of living has become pointless, meaningless, because it doesn’t progress the human race to greater knowledge as it once did because the key piece of knowledge that we needed to find of understanding of the human condition has been found. Furthermore, living out that self-preoccupied, competitive, selfish existence is now unnecessarily destructive of our relationships with our fellow humans, and of our world in general. We can now know that the resigned, egocentric, competitive, selfish and aggressive way of living is finished with, which means we can, and, in fact, should, simply cast aside that way of living, and take up, in its place, a new way of living that is available to humans now where we live in support of a reconciled, non-competitive, selfless, loving existence.’ (par. 1163)

‘And, most wonderfully, what happens when we give up our old way of living and take up the new way of living that understanding of the human condition has made possible is we become transformed from a competitive and selfishly behaved human to a cooperative and selflessly behaved one. Yes, even though we are not yet free of the upset state of our own personal human condition, we can immediately have a change of attitude and decide not to live out that upset state that remains within us. The overall effect in our lives is that, despite our retention of the upset state of the human condition, we are effectively free from its hold and its influence, which is an absolutely fabulous transformation to have made in an instant–in one simple decision!’ (par. 1164)

Secondly, Jeremy talks a lot about Australia. He refers to Australia quite a bit in his books [see also F. Essay 50: Australia’s role]. Jeremy grew up in Australia and this is just a really nice poem called Song of the Future by Banjo Paterson and I’ll just include throughout the reading of this poem some of Jeremy explanations:

‘Tis strange that in a land [Australia] so strong, so strong and bold in mighty youth [innocence], we have [in 1889] no poet’s voice of truth to sing for us a wondrous song [explain the human condition]…​[However,] we yet may find achievements grand within the bushman’s quiet life. Lift ye your faces to the sky, ye far blue mountains of the west…​Tis hard to feel that years went by before the pioneers broke through your rocky heights and walls of stone, and made your secrets all their own [broke through the wall of denial blocking access to the truth about the human condition]. For years the fertile western plains were hid behind your sullen [alienated] walls, your cliffs and crags…​Between the mountains and the sea, like Israelites with staff in hand, the people waited restlessly: They looked towards the mountains old and saw the sunsets come and go with gorgeous golden afterglow that made the west a fairyland, and marvelled what that west might be of which such wondrous tales were told…​At length the hardy pioneers by rock and crag found out the way, and woke with voices of today, a silence kept for years and years [brought an end to the silence of the resigned world of denial]…​The way is won! The way is won! And straightway from the barren coast there came a westward-marching host, that aye and ever onward prest with eager faces to the west along the pathway of the sun…​Could braver histories unfold than this bush story, yet untold–the story of their westward march [liberation from the human condition]…​And it may be that we who live in this new land apart, beyond the hard old world grown fierce and fond and bound by precedent and bond [bound up in sophisticated, intellectual denial], may read the riddle [of the human condition] right [synthesise the liberating truth from science’s hard won insights into our world] and give new hope to those who dimly see [those who are embedded in blind denial/​alienation], that all things may be yet for good and teach the world at length to be one vast united brotherhood.’ [Section 4:1, Freedom Expanded: Book 2]

And that’s it.

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[After Connor’s presentation, the following discussion took place between WTM members]

Doug Lobban: It’s just so amazing that we don’t have to live through those strategies anymore, you can just let it all go as Connor says, you just let the information take care of that because we’ve spent our whole time since resigning, preoccupied with that strategy and keeping everything in place with it. It’s 100% pre-occupation every day, every minute, every second and that’s where the relief and the time aspect comes into it because all of a sudden, you let your resigned way of living go and you realise, ‘God, that’s what I was doing the whole time’, and all of sudden you have all this time on your hands and you have all this mental space and it’s amazing this freedom, it’s incredible. It always blows my mind—holy cow we can just let that go, you know! We don’t have to face it, we don’t have to deal with it, we don’t have to go through it, we don’t have to confront it, we don’t have to spend years trying to pick through and explain it all and you can, just as one big bundle, let it go and move away from it and the freedom and excitement from that is incredible just as you’ve talked about, Con. [See Transformation Affirmation 10 for Doug Lobban’s affirmation.]

Connor: And just how legitimate that is too, to do. I wanted to say that at the end of my Affirmation, that this is such a legitimate change, it’s just so far from being dogma-based or a leap of faith or anything—it’s nothing to do with any of that because it’s all based on understanding. It’s all based on this incredible story of the human journey, our story—why we behave the way we do, how we got here, if you like, that’s what so incredible. It’s actually 100% real and the old way of living and coping with life is now redundant, it’s done its job.

Doug Lobban: It is unreal.

Connor: Yeah, it now becomes unreal, that’s actually not real that way of behaving in light of this whole truthful framework that’s laid out for us. That way of behaving is now an unreality. That’s what I just love about it—just the realness of it. Nick Shaw talks a lot about the logic of it [see Transformation Affirmation 17 for Nick’s affirmation]. It does explain us, that’s not a throwaway line, it does. I also just love what Jeremy says about this being a change that any species would have had to go through from an instinct controlled state to an intellect controlled state—this same wrestle, if you like. Until we found the full story about it there was this horrific battle and the psychosis and neurosis that resulted from that was unavoidable. So, it’s just an adjustment, it’s all fine, everything’s fine, nothing is out of place.

Everything has got a place in this journey. This [pointing to the figure sitting on the hill in Jeremy’s Humanity’s Journey to Enlightenment picture] is a 12 year old, you know, just thinking so deeply in light of not having understanding and the world around him is crazy and he doesn’t have any explanation and so he just retreats and that’s the beginning of the end for that little fella. But Jeremy is saying that this is us as a species, as the line from The Man of La Mancha says, we had to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’. [Connor reads the following text from the Humanity’s Journey to Enlightenment picture] ‘Adolescence: a dying world of ever increasing and accumulating anger, egocentricity and alienation’. That’s certainly my adolescence and certainly humanity’s adolescence but then, booyahh! We go up into here [pointing to the last part of the picture where humanity enters adulthood]!

But what’s so good about this is that it is underpinned by all that logic. As Nick said, if the resigned, upset state or world wants to debate this it can go crazy doing that because it’s all over! The old world doesn’t hold any sway because of this logic. So it is just an adjustment period, I suppose, for the world, for us and once the human condition is explained it’s just a numbers game.

James West: As Jeremy says in in chapter 9 of FREEDOM, humans are ultimately rational creatures and when the rationale is that the human condition is explained, humans will go that way [The actual quote from FREEDOM, par. 1206, reads: ‘It is this fact that there is no longer any reason to keep living out the battle to champion the ego that has the potential now to change the world so rapidly from one of conflict and suffering to a world of peace and happiness. The explanations being presented in this book are all rational, there is no dogma or mysticism or abstract concept involved. As such, we can know if what is being presented is accountable and true or not, and since this information does explain the human condition there is no longer any justification for continuing the upsetting battle to champion the ego, so it follows that no one can argue against taking up the Transformed Way of Living, so when everyone does take up that way of living our world will be completely transformed. We are rational creatures, and so when all the logic says there is only one response we can make, namely the Transformed State, then that is the response the human race will take.’]. That is the new situation, it’s just the size of the change of paradigm that’s hard to get your head around and takes adjustment but it encapsulates the strength of the underpinning of the whole thing which Nick [Shaw] keeps coming back to. The whole game has just fundamentally changed for all of humanity at its deepest level. You can’t get a more solid base to come off. And to think that these incredible, wonderful positives are opened up because of that fundamental change. It’s just too much to believe, it’s just too good to be true but it is true. So we’ve just got this banquet of positives waiting for us to just adjust to [see Transformation Affirmation 2 for James West’s affirmation].

Connor: A negative to a positive. [Again, pointing to the Humanity’s Journey to Enlightenment picture and reading the text] ‘Once over the shock of change.’

Nick Shaw: Good summary.

Doug Lobban: Yeah, we’ve already done the hard bit. We’re onto the easy bit.

Connor: That’s right, that’s right—this [the horror of humanity’s adolescence, drawn as a wasteland in the above picture] is all done and now we’re here [the new world/​Adulthood at the right of the above picture].