Section 1
8-minute Introduction, followed
by Questions & Answers
by Jeremy Griffith
Section 1:1 8-minute Introduction — how the World Transformation Movement transforms the world
Welcome to the World Transformation Movement (WTM). My name is Jeremy Griffith. I’m an Australian biologist.
How, you may well ask, is the World Transformation Movement going to TRANSFORM your life, and not only your life but the lives of every human on Earth—and in so doing TRANSFORM the world? The answer is by solving the underlying, real, core problem in all of human life of the human condition.
Very briefly, the human condition arises from our species’ capacity for what has been called ‘good and evil’. Humans are capable of great kindness, empathy and love, but we are also capable of horrific atrocities like rape, murder and torture. Our human predicament or ‘condition’ has been that because we have never before been able to explain and thus understand where our species’ capacity for acts of shocking inhumanity comes from we each carry a deep, now almost subconscious, insecurity and sense of guilt about our value and worth as humans. Are we good or are we bad? Even in our everyday behaviour, why are we humans competitive, aggressive and selfish when clearly the ideals of life are to be the complete opposite, namely cooperative, loving and selfless?
I know we are sometimes told that humans are wired this way—that we are competitive, aggressive and selfish because of our animal heritage; that we have savage animal instincts that make us fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate. But that’s just the excuse we have had to use until we found the real reason for our divisive behaviour. For a start, it conveniently overlooks the fact that our human behaviour involves our unique fully conscious thinking mind. Descriptions of our behaviour, such as egocentric, arrogant, deluded, optimistic, pessimistic, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, guilty, evil, depressed, inspired, psychotic, alienated, all imply a consciousness-derived psychological dimension to our behaviour. And, secondly, it overlooks the fact that we humans have altruistic, cooperative, loving moral instincts—what we recognise as our ‘conscience’—and these moral instincts in us are not derived from reciprocity, from situations where you only do something for others in return for a benefit from them, as evolutionary psychologists would have us believe. And nor are they derived from warring with other groups of humans as advocates of E.O. Wilson’s theory of Eusociality would argue. No, we have an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, universally-considerate-of-others-not-competitive-with-other-groups, genuinely moral conscience. So yes, the real issue—the psychological problem in our thinking minds that we have suffered from—is the dilemma of our human condition, the issue of our species’ good-and-evil-afflicted, less-than-ideal, imperfect, even ‘fallen’ or corrupted, state. We humans suffer from a consciousness-derived, psychological HUMAN CONDITION, not an instinct-controlled animal condition—it is unique to us fully conscious humans.
And the truth is, we humans have always intuitively known that the real problem we have to address and understand about ourselves is the human condition—the difficulty, however, has been that unable to explain the dark side of ourselves we have coped by living in almost complete denial of the issue, by blocking it out of our mind, because to think about it was too depressing and, until now, an answerless and thus futile exercise. Indeed, I have heard the human condition described as ‘the personal unspeakable’ and ‘the black box inside of humans that they can’t go near’, which gives you some indication of just how traumatic a subject it has been for us.
What has occurred to completely change this situation is that through the advances that have been made in science, specifically about the different ways the gene and nerve based learning systems process information, it is now possible for this fearful, historically unbearable, deepest and darkest, previously off-limits issue of the human condition to finally be explained and understood. We can now at last explain WHY we humans have not been ideally behaved; to use religious terms, we can finally explain the origin of ‘sin’. And what is so wonderful—in fact, SO wonderful it will TRANSFORM your life and the lives of all humans—is that the explanation is compassionate. It explains that there has been a very good reason for why we humans have not been ideally behaved. It is an explanation that completely dignifies and redeems us. It reconciles the opposites of good and evil in our natures and, by doing so, makes us whole. The great psychoanalyst Carl Jung was forever saying that ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’ because he recognised that ONLY by finding understanding of the dark side of ourselves could we be made ‘whole’—and, as incredible a claim as it is, it is that all-liberating and all-reconciling and all-redeeming and all-healing—and thus all-TRANSFORMING—biological understanding of our imperfect human condition that is presented here. (Note, an abridged version of this biological explanation of the human condition is presented here in Section 1:7; the full explanation appears in Freedom Expanded: Book 1.)
Yes, that greatest of all days in our human journey of conscious thought and enquiry—in fact, the day we have lived in ‘hope and faith and trust’ would one day come—when biology would finally be able to explain the psychological origins of our species’ deeply troubled predicament or condition has now arrived. And it is in the nick of time, for there can be no doubt that our world is in desperate straits, and, as a result, all manner of superficial treatments of our distressed human situation now proliferate, but superficial treatments won’t solve the problem. Socialist, politically-correct, left-wing dogmatic insistence on ideal behaviour—or one of those think-positive, motivational ‘New Age’ courses; or stop-your-mind-thinking meditation; or even one of the more recent just-transcend-your-ego fads—were never going to bring real and lasting peace and happiness to humans. Only ameliorating understanding of the human condition could, and now does, achieve that.
In fact, solving the underlying problem in all of human life of the human condition brings about such an incredible TRANSFORMATION in humans that you, and everyone else in the world, will be taken from an effectively dead existence—and in truth, as we are going to see, all humans’ lives have been so horribly oppressed by the agony of the human condition that they have been effectively dead—to an existence that is utterly alive, enthralled with all of life and drenched with excitement about what is going to occur now; actually, what is already occurring, because if you read the Affirmations in Section 3 of this presentation (or watch them at <www.humancondition.com/affirmations>) you will hear from people whose lives have been TRANSFORMED by understanding of the human condition, like Neil Duns, who says, ‘The freedom this brings is like nothing humans have ever experienced’; and Stacy Rodger, who says, ‘This is all that we have ever, ever wanted’; and Doug Lobban, who says, ‘I am just so excited, I can’t sleep, I am about to burst’; and Tony Gowing, who says, ‘This is like seeing the world for the first time, it’s like waking up from a nightmare, it’s like 100 tonnes being lifted off your shoulders’; and John Biggs, who says, ‘The relief and through-the-roof excitement that flows through your veins is incredible…It is beyond comprehension how much wonder and fun and excitement and happiness the human race has coming.’
Yes, this is the most exciting moment in human history when humanity is finally liberated from the agony of the human condition and TRANSFORMED to an utterly magnificent, human-condition-free existence.
Indeed, to introduce the next Q&A Introductory Video to the World Transformation Movement I will play the most esteemed, the most highly regarded piece of music ever written, because I think it provides the most powerful illustration possible of how fabulously TRANSFORMING of your life—and of everyone’s life—the finding of understanding of the human condition is. (At this point in the video presentation, a brief extract from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is played.)
