Section 3:2 James West (recorded December 2009)

Hi, my name is James, I’m 37 years old [at the time of filming], I’ve been involved with the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood (FHA), now the WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT (WTM), since 1990. I’m going to give my testimony for the truth of this information and what I say is really only going to make sense after seeing the Main Introductory Video to The Biology by Jeremy Griffith. [Since James gave his affirmation, this video has been superseded by the Introductory Video Series at the top of the WTM homepage, with the biology being covered by Video/​F. Essay 3: THE EXPLANATION of the human condition, and Video/​F. Essay 12: One hour summarising talk.] I would like to start by reading out the claims of this information because that is really the starting point for what I’ve got to say.

In Part 2:5 of Freedom Expanded: Book 1 propositions were put forward that we were going to introduce an understanding that will transform the world for its complete betterment; we will bring complete hope to what can seem hopeless; give rise to a movement that will sweep the world; will introduce a new paradigm of understanding around which all knowledge can be integrated; and we will reconcile all the opposites in the human situation. These opposites are ‘good’ and ‘evil’, idealism and realism, soul and mind, religion and science, women and men, etc. This is big stuff we are talking about here and the information is there and you’ve all had a chance to evaluate it. All I’m going to do is testify to its soundness and truth in my experience and vouch for how good it is when you see how this product works. That involves sharing some personal experience, which is also up for your evaluation as to whether it is honest or not, whether it rings true or not. That is how testimony works.

When we start discussing this material as part of the movement that follows the arrival of this understanding about the human condition, it is the ultimate reality TV. You get to see real people grappling with these most real of issues. Anyway I’m trying to remind myself that it’s the realness in the end that is more important than delivering a polished presentation here because I am certainly not going to do that.

Basically this is knowledge about humans which in generations to come will allow humans to grow up free of insecurity and hurt and every other kind of suffering of the human condition. For my generation it boils down to an unbelievably exciting and fulfilling way of living, totally liberated from our ‘prove yourself’ preoccupied state and being transformed from a state of paralysis to exploding empowerment. We get to participate in the last great glory to cap off all conscious endeavour to this point in time. We are the ones who bring about the transformation of the world. We become the WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT. We are not going to wind back the clock on our own experience of the human condition but we get to be a force for good, or a force for life, now that good and bad are reconciled and thus obsolete. We become Lifeforces. We get to champion something that is so wonderful—the culmination of all humans’ hopes and dreams and endeavours—liberating knowledge about ourselves. We get to live in support of something so powerful and effective that no force on the planet that has ever existed can come close to it. This understanding, if you live through it, will do the rest for you. It solves every problem in your life, it fixes every problem in the world and it is so strong and so empowering to be on the side of it. This knowledge is that good and it’s here and the march to bring it forth is on. No one is excluded from this WTM, it’s going to be, as Jeremy Griffith has said in every one of his publications, an army to do battle with suffering and its weapon is understanding and it will sweep all before it.

That is a summary of what I’ve got to say from start to finish.

We are putting forward this information for evaluation. It is amazing stuff, it cuts through things that have been puzzling scholars and academics for centuries but since we are the subject of this information, it’s not a fully intellectual ride, because we can evaluate it ourselves, from our own life experience. It’s ourselves that come into the picture, it’s our own lives that come into focus. It’s our own authority as a human living with the human condition that can duly access the validity of the insights. It leads to a new way of living, the Transformed Lifeforce State. To a certain degree it’s going to be destabilising. When the truth about us arrives and the lights come on it’s a bit of a shock, but I am still here after the shock, as are others and we are saying the shock is passing and in the end it’s a blindingly brilliant place where you end up.

I’m now going to go through that a couple more times in a bit more personal detail. Hopefully I will get the balance right because my personal journey is really nothing in this story. I’m so nothing it’s not funny, I pale into absolute insignificance compared to the responsibility entrusted to me and others, by humanity, to be pioneers for these ideas.

I was nearly 18 when I first came across this information after doing a year of an engineering degree at the University of Queensland. Initially I was attracted by the claims of this information. Those putting forward these ideas have always been up front about these claims and honest about them. I guess the boldness of these claims can either make you suspicious of some kind of dogma or you can take them at face value and investigate. I talked to some of my friends about it, and a couple of them shared my enthusiasm: WTM members Jοhn and Richard Bіggs, God love them, they are still with me, we are still together and we are still best friends.

I remember my late adolescence as a bit of a destabilised time for me. My friends would describe me as competitive. I once came out with the phrase ‘don’t underestimate me’, of which the unsaid words are ‘or I will blow you out of the water’. And that was regarded as a good summary of my under-the-surface character. I think I was on a highway to madness actually, but I don’t want to write myself off as being unable to discern sense from nonsense because that wouldn’t be fair to say, so I would probably say I was only as crazy as everyone else out there. Anyway, I was a capable student and sports person. For example, in the year I came across this information I represented Queensland in junior rugby union. I became in regular contact with the FHA and Jοhn and Rick and I started to organise discussions about these ideas with other friends and asked Jeremy to present talks about them and thus a wider group of support gathered around these ideas. Through these times Jeremy was incredibly generous with his time. We responded to the plausibility of his ideas but we also came to have some appreciation of and were impressed and inspired by Jeremy’s unique selfless, vital, humble character. In as much as we questioned our own capacity to swim against the current of denial in the world and ourselves, we soon learnt from Jeremy’s sheer courage in standing by an almost incomprehensibly glorious vision of a world free of ignorance about the human condition. Jeremy’s ability to stand by the truth against a world committed to so much denial has been truly amazing. As Jeremy once said about his undertaking, ‘I’m like a sparrow trying to turn around trucks screaming down a highway.’ But then again what’s helped Jeremy is the magnificence of his vision of a world free of the human condition.

I’d have to say that I enjoyed being a student of this information and there is a considerable amount of selfishness in that, in the sense that who the hell was I to pontificate on this stuff when it enables the clean-up of the world. I remember in the early days Jeremy said to me, ‘this information will never disappoint you’ and it never has and I have been at close quarters with it for a long time. It goes right to the bottom, right to the heart of what it is to be human, it makes it safe to be honest about anything. There is nothing it won’t context compassionately, but it’s not weak. It doesn’t condone destructive behaviour—it disarms it, it disarms the root cause of destructive behaviour. The deal is this: that humans’ corrupt state is now defended, so now we must be responsible and ‘put down the sword’ (cease our insecure, prove-our-self-at-all-cost strategies to life), the game is up and the horror is over. This is an assault on dishonesty but it is done gently. This is judgment day but as an anonymous Turkish poet once said judgment day is ‘Not the day of judgment but the day of understanding’ (National Geographic, Nov. 1987; quoted in Freedom Expanded: Book 2, for example in Section 1:13). The arrival of the full truth about humans is not something we need to fear, because it is compassionate. [See F. Essay 40 on the true meaning and significance of the term ‘Judgment Day’.]

Anyway, since explanation of the human condition exposes our behaviour for what it is, with my version of the human condition I have had plenty of exposure to deal with. I’ve been guilty of obscenities in the extreme—shocking indifference and ripping off the power of this information for the cause of James West. Initially with this information there is a period where you need to verify it. If it doesn’t stack up you should reject it, but there is another reason you might want to reject it and that is, ironically, not because it doesn’t stack up but because it stacks up so well. I spent a long time trying to compete with the information in a Mexican standoff with it, in a position we actually call the ‘Mexican Standoff’—‘I have found something so good it fixes all the problems in the world, but wait a minute, I was planning on being king of the world so where does that leave me?’ It would be massively irresponsible to abandon this information once you know the truth of it yet it seems to demand so much. It destroys your egocentric way of living and for that you want to hate it [see F. Essay 33 for an explanation of the Mexican Standoff]. Eventually I came out of that struggle by having a change of heart, having taken the lead from other WTM members. I flipped sides from wanting to compete with the information to just living in support of it. That’s when I really discovered a liberation you could just never imagine. You think the world only exists in as much as you can fight for your space in it, but let me tell you, that is only a tiny little portion of the world. It’s a tiny little bubble that we live in, as heroic as it is, but when we trust this information we discover the real world.

You discover that a change of heart is possible and it fixes you and it is possible for the world and it fixes the world. You actually see how this works, how it rids the world of the destructiveness of selfish preoccupation with our upset. That is what is on offer for the world and that is what is so amazing that we want to try to communicate to everyone. We want to help everyone through that doorway to the sunlit new world.

So the WTM will have meetings where we will discuss the transformation process and help people negotiate that change. It’s going to take some steadiness and there’s going to be a lot of nervousness created when this takes off because it is going to put people on the spot when they see people becoming so enthusiastic about it, there will be nowhere to hide from the truth when it arrives.

I’m just going to describe that journey once more. So that’s my personal encounter with it. I discovered it and I got excited about the explanation’s ability to make sense of the world. It brought me into competition with it where I was in the Mexican Standoff and then I flipped sides. I didn’t want to compete with it anymore, I wanted to live through it and I discovered, ‘Wow, this is special, this is amazing stuff.’ For the first time I could see this in its true perspective where the masses of confronting honesty, anchored in first principle biology, represented something of extraordinary beauty and specialness, the end of the need for denial about the human condition, rather than a threat to my self image which couldn’t be dismissed. The interesting thing with regard to the issue of evaluation of this information or the journey that it takes you on, is that this is knowledge not dogma, so why isn’t full appreciation of this information a smooth journey of intellectual digestion? Jeremy explains all this in Freedom Expanded: Book 1 [see also chapters 2.2–2.3 of FREEDOM] and I gave my personal example but to summarise, it’s because it’s about the subject of us and about that subject we humans are only rational to a point. We’ve had to live in denial of truths like Integrative Meaning [see F. Essay 23]. Of course you can deny that statement as well if you want to, but I would like to offer the following on the issue, possibly as some reassurance. This goes to the accusation of mindlessness being ultimately involved in fully appreciating this information and what it can do. I’m one human with limitations to my intellect and capacity for rationale as all humans have. So all I can give is the testimony of a human with those limitations, but in as much as a human can know something is true and sound, then I was able to know and I do know that this information is true and sound, including the claims that it makes. The evidence for me is the extent and commitment with which I tried to compete with this information but failed to find fault in it. I would go so far as to say that I spent myself, my intellect, my ego, trying to be better than this information. Albert Einstein said ‘truth is what stands the test of experience’ (Out of My Later Years, 1950; quoted in Freedom Expanded: Book 2, for example in Section 1:7), and the test of experience of this theory is one’s life. Every fibre of my being put these ideas to the test before I decided to commit every fibre of my being to supporting them. You can’t commend anything higher than that and you can’t derive any deeper resolve than that. Historically there is this conversion experience with regard to appreciation of denial-exposing work where you hate it before you love it. So what you will witness from Liberated and Transformed Lifeforces is massive commitment and massive enthusiasm coming off a base of deep love of the power of this information to free the world of suffering under the human condition.

Okay, so the truth is I am preoccupied with a wholly different world now. The only thing relevant to me is the welfare of this project, which is ensuring these ideas get to the next generation because I know that is what looks after everything. I am knowingly fostering the new human-condition-explained world and leaving behind the ego-preoccupied, cynical, competitive world and I’m 100 percent justified in doing so. I know I am not sound, I am a mess and I know that is there for everyone to see, but I couldn’t care less and I don’t preoccupy myself with presenting anything different to the world. My corruption is a result of my heroic encounter with the human condition, and as such it is a badge of honour if anything. I’m just participating in this incredibly glorious march out of hell, part of an army to do battle with suffering using understanding as its weapon, part of an unstoppable and untouchable force. That is a window into what I am doing and how I live which hopefully can illustrate to some degree what generally happens to you when you truly appreciate the magnificence of this information, and thus can be of some reassurance. The world in my view is going to need some reassurance on this but to cut a long story short I want to say to the world, ‘Look into this, discover the truth of it, then give it your support, all your support, it is worthy of that and it won’t disappoint.’

That is basically it.

I was inspired to refer to the words of the song Holy Grail by the Australian rock band Hunters and Collectors. I love the image of the army, this is the last battle and it’s a battle to end suffering and it’s incredibly glorious, that’s where I lose myself and that’s what I just want to be part of. Everybody knows about it intuitively or else someone couldn’t have written this song [see F. Essay 45 for more examples of prophetic songs from our greatest singers/​songwriters]. I don’t know if I’ll put you through reading all of it, but here are just some of the words: ‘Woke up this morning from the strangest dream / I was in the biggest army the world had ever seen / We were marching as one on the road to the Holy Grail // Started out seeking fortune and glory / It’s a short song but it’s a hell of a story…’ ‘We started out seeking fortune and glory’: the heroism of our journey is unspeakable. Our egocentric state, as destructive as it is, for it to be able to come to an end is just a testament to the specialness of this information and this achievement for all of humanity. It’s too much to really comprehend that the whole thing ends now. Prior to the arrival of this information the best humans could do was to put the anticipation of it in a song where you can dismiss it—even Mark Seymour, who wrote the song, dismisses the meaning of this song. ‘All the locals scattered, they were hiding in the snow / We were so far from home, so how were we to know? / There’d be nothing left to plunder / When we stumbled on the Holy Grail // We were so full of beans but we were dying like flies / And those big black birds, they were circling in the sky / And you know what they say, yeah nobody deserves to die…’ ‘Those big black birds circling in the sky’ are all the vultures, it’s the image of all these meaningless movements—not meaningless, but these things posing to be the real thing, that aren’t going to make any difference to the plight of the world because they don’t deal with the human situation, they prey on our need to escape from the human condition, they don’t actually end it. ‘Oh but I’ve been searching for an easy way / To escape the cold light of day / I’ve been high and I’ve been low / But I’ve got nowhere else to go…’ ‘Searching for an easy way’: there is no easy way out of here—we have to confront ourselves. Well, in fact there is an easy way out of here now but there is no dishonest way—we live by supporting these ideas and it does the rest. It defends us, but initially, in our insecure state, the truth of these ideas is a threat because it exposes the extent of our corruption, our imperfection. So we are searching for an easy way to escape the cold light of day. ‘I followed orders, God knows where I’ve been / but I woke up alone, all my wounds were clean…’ That’s what this information does it defends us. ‘I’m still here, I’m still a fool for the Holy Grail…’ So thanks for taking the time to consider my affirmation of the importance of this information and the exciting time in history that is upon us.