Freedom Expanded: Book 2—Affirmations of the Transformed Lifeforce State
Section 3:5 Sam Belfield (recorded November 2017)
My name is Sam Belfield. I’m 44 years of age [at the time of filming] and I’ve been supporting the explanation of the human condition put forward by Jeremy Griffith for nearly 25 years, having read one of his earlier books, Beyond the Human Condition, when I was studying at university. As most people would be aware there’s an immense amount of contexting information in all the books that have been produced by Jeremy and the WTM to date. There are also the other affirmations on the website so I’m going to try and pick an aspect of this information and talk about something that’s relevant to me. And that is what I’ve experienced in terms of the magnitude of the implications of this change and the transformative effect of the information on me; and through understanding that transformative effect, seeing the potential for humanity. I’m trying to convey my experience of its truth, its accountability and in particular something of what I call the power of knowledge or the power of logic and of having a conscious mind. And through processing information and knowledge how that can dramatically change your perspective about yourself and about the world and where it’s up to. In particular, how this information, this knowledge, can change the direction of humanity and the planet at present [see Video/F. Essay 3 for an introduction to the explanation of the human condition].
I wanted to start with this quote from Part 3, page 79 of the print edition of Jeremy’s book Transform Your Life And Save The World (TYL): ‘I kid you not, what you’re soon going to see appear, from one end of that horizon to the other, is an army in its millions coming to do battle with human suffering and its weapon will be understanding!’ [See p. 65 of First Edition of TYL, pub. 2016.] If you let your mind access this information you can be a part of that. If you let your mind process this information and follow the logic through, it will completely transform your life. It will transform how you see yourself and how you see humanity. Your perception of yourself and the world will totally change.
There are heaps of benefits at a personal level with this information and processing it but something I particularly want to talk about or highlight is a recognition that it’s our self-interest and selfishness that is fundamentally destroying humanity and the planet. At one level we sort of know that. If we boil it all down that’s an aspect or a manifestation of the human condition. This information has the ability to end that self-interest, selfishness and egocentricity at a fundamental level in you and the world, and that’s what will produce this ‘army in its millions to do battle with human suffering’ on the planet and bring it to an end. That is the magnitude of this information. It ends our self-interest and we all take up a life of living cooperatively and selflessly. That’s what we have coming. That’s how good it is. That’s how special it is. And best of all it’s available right now and for everyone.
So, as I said, that’s the outcome of this information. It’s not make-believe. It is not a function of religion, it is not a function of left-wing dogma or discipline. It’s actually a function of having a conscious mind and processing this knowledge or information and responding to it, following the implications of it through to how it changes your perspective. That process can be challenging but there is a path mapped out, a new way of living is here and it’s on right now and soon everyone will be living it.
Where are we all going?
Recently I was flying back into Sydney on a plane at night. I was looking down on the sprawling city, the mass of cars, the lights, all these people driving home. I had this reflection in my mind, a rhetorical question of, ‘Where is this all going, where does this all end up, what’s the meaning of all this?’ We live in a schizophrenic state. In one sense we live in a massive amount of denial about the human condition but on another level we sort of peek around the corner of life from time to time and we ask these questions of ‘where are we going?’ If you’re going to have children or you’ve had children surely you’ve got to look into that crystal ball and ask, where is humanity going? And I’d suggest that behind the smiles and behind the confidence to carry on there is a deep anxiety about the direction humanity is going [see F. Essay 55: Endgame for the human race].
What I really want to hasten to add is that the insights in this book change all that, that book being, amongst others written by Jeremy, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition. On the front of FREEDOM is the statement by Professor Harry Prosen, ‘THE BOOK THAT SAVES THE WORLD’. I have experienced that statement to be true—this book has saved the world. In fact, I’d go a step further and say that in my view this is the only book that can save the world, that’s how fundamental it is. I’ve got a perspective on how the information in this book brings the human condition to an end and introduces a whole new paradigm, a whole new way of life for us all. It’s not about modifying the existing paradigm. It’s not about trying to tweak that or improve it in some way, it’s about a whole new model, a whole new state of mind for humanity. These are big statements but if you genuinely let your mind understand this information and follow the implications through your mind will validate this.
Imagine
I want to read the lyrics from John Lennon’s 1971 song Imagine from Part 3, page 81 of the print edition of TYL: ‘Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too…all the people living life in peace…No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man…all the people sharing all the world’. [See p. 67 of First Edition of TYL.]
Every now and again I hear the full version of that song and it’s unbelievable. If you try and stop and really get your brain to engage those particular lyrics, just to read them again: ‘Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too…all the people living life in peace…No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man…all the people sharing all the world’. It really is hard to get your brain to actually engage with what that’s all about, it’s hard to take seriously. Very quickly your mind can bring forth defences and reasons and excuses and arguments for why that’s just not going to be possible; for example, ‘our deeper nature is one of selfishness’, ‘we’re brutal’, ‘animals are competitive, red in tooth and claw, therefore we are’, ‘what about survival of the fittest?’ [See Video/F. Essay 14 for a debunking of the ‘savage instincts’ excuse for human behaviour.] When someone talks about the concept of a ‘a brotherhood of man’, a new cooperative, caring, peaceful paradigm, it’s very difficult to take seriously; we are blind to another potential. It’s like looking at a void, a vacuum—we see nothing.
At another level we’re also aware of our immense habituation to living through self-interest, living egocentrically, proving our sense of self worth and we’re aware that we and the whole world we live in day-to-day is geared towards that. We can’t entertain the possibility that it could be otherwise. There is so much momentum behind the current human state of mind of operating from a basis of self-interest. From there you can think, well this is never going to happen, talk of a new world is just a flight of fancy, but I want to contrast that view with the proposition that if you actually engage this information in a genuine way your mind will take you on a journey that completely reverses your view and you’ll arrive at a point where, not only can you let go of and move beyond self-interest and egocentricity being the focus of your life but also see that our deeper, true nature is actually all about being cooperative, loving and selfless and not all these other things like being competitive, aggressive and selfish. In fact, you can understand that that self-interest has been like a temporary veneer, a means to an ends while we’ve been trying to find knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, to understand our real nature. As you start to put those realisations together—that we can actually change our perspective and move to a position where we can let go of competitiveness, selfishness and all this craziness and that our deeper nature is actually one of being selfless and cooperative and there being this deeper law of physics on Earth of Integrative Meaning—then you start to see how this ‘army in its millions’ that I talked about earlier can actually become a reality. [See F. Essay 23 for explanation of Integrative Meaning.]
My psychological baseline
My psychological equation in and of itself is not particularly relevant, it’s not relevant at all. I describe it only to demonstrate my transformation and what I’ve transformed from, how my state of mind changed from one position to something very different indeed, and I think talking a bit about who I am and how the human condition has manifested in me can be a vehicle for understanding the power of this information.
Jeremy describes in detail the process of Resignation that happens in mid-adolescence [see F. Essay 30]. The psychology of that event in your life is fundamental. I know I am resigned well and truly. I’m not going to go into the detail of that process, that can be understood by reading Jeremy’s books and some of the other Affirmations. What I want to talk about is how the human condition manifests in me on the other side of Resignation. For me, my state of mind is characterised by two basic elements which are competing to prove my sense of self worth and denial of the upset of the human condition within me.
Following Resignation we all develop a strategy to validate ourselves in some way. I took up a strategy of trying to be civilised and projecting a persona of security about my sense of self worth, that my strategy is working and giving me a sense of relief, that I have got it all together, that I am upset-free and I don’t have this human condition brewing up in me. But in reality I’m actually lying through teeth. I’m putting this persona forward, manufacturing a view of myself that I want other people to see and reinforce as good and valid. But if you scratch the surface, and this is not unique to me at all, I have a deep insecurity about my sense of self worth and in compensation for that I’ve become consumed and addicted to power, success and achievement as a way of filling that void. Your sense of self-worth is totally conditional on how you think others are perceiving you. This state of mind defines my behaviour. And that’s really important to understand—this state of mind defines your behaviour; it dictates everything you do, how you go to work, how you dress, how you walk down the street. It’s fundamental.
As you get older you become more punch-drunk and more in need of that win and relief. You become more defensive and retaliatory toward criticism. You feel immense frustration that no matter what you achieve, no matter how much success you get the sense of relief is fleeting. It’s never enough, it’s always thin. It’s like the game is loaded against you and as a result of that you become even more frustrated. As you get older still you see in yourself and other people this murderous rage, a capacity for brutality and a capacity to kick the shit out of innocence. To try and make the point, Jeremy includes these images and paintings in FREEDOM and I wanted to say I can relate to what they’re about.
Here is a detail (above) from Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment (1537-41) and William Blake’s Cringing In Terror (1794-96) [see par. 98 of FREEDOM].
This is a detail (above) from Francis Bacon’s Study for self-portrait (1976) [see par. 124 of FREEDOM].
And this little depiction by Jeremy (above) illustrates ‘Hollow Adolescentman’, the 50 plus year old terminally alienated hero of the story of life on Earth [see par. 894 of FREEDOM].
What I’m trying to talk about is that the human condition is real, it’s in me. I’ve experienced seeing in yourself a capacity to value nothing and it’s all a product of the human condition, this egocentric necessity to become a wrecking ball as you try and validate that you’re good notwithstanding the fact that there are so many implications that you’re bad, you’re evil. That state is bloody lonely and bleak because it’s nigh on impossible to share with anyone else. That is the duress of living saturated with the human condition.
So that is my base psychological state post Resignation. So I’ve grown up with the human condition and that’s how it’s manifested in me. It is not unique to me. The human condition manifests in different ways in all of us to various degrees, different people take up different strategies but fundamentally the human condition creates an undeserved sense of guilt or insecurity about our self worth and we take up a strategy to try and prove that implication wrong.
When you look at what I’ve just described and how real it is in you and how it basically consumes and preoccupies you and dictates your state of mind all day, when someone comes along, if we go back to that concept of ‘imagin[ing]’ a new paradigm, you think ‘Well how the hell do I resolve or undo that?’ Well, the good news is that it’s actually really simple and it’s also honest. I can vouch for that I’ve been around this information for a long time and I’ve looked at that dilemma for a long time and I’ve understood that there’s a path through that and it is simple. It’s not about trying to restrain all of that or explain it all out of existence, as I’ll talk about in a second. It’s about actually moving on from it.
Moving on from the commitment to self-interest
To try and recap a little bit, your start position is that you are in complete denial of the human condition and of how you live with it, how it’s manifested in yourself. I used to describe myself as a ‘believer’, as in, ‘you are a total believer in the ability of your strategy to give you relief’. Mentally, you are wrapped up in this competitive model, this thing that permeates what we call ‘the real world’, the world that we go out into every day. It defines everything we do. We convince ourselves that the meaning of life is to be competitive and that success means that we are worthwhile.
But then, as you start reading this information it makes sense in your mind, it starts to break down your denial and you start to see your superficiality, artificiality, self-deception and state of insecurity. In some ways the information is like a lens, it’s a process of bringing focus on how you are living, how the human condition is manifesting in you. When you come across this information you’ve got no awareness of the human condition in you, the picture is out of focus and blurry and you can’t make anything out. But as you start to read the information it’s a process of increasing focus and clarity on how you’re living and it becomes more and more stark.
At the same time you’ve got the knowledge, the logic of this information working away in your mind. More particularly how it provides the first principle-based, biological explanation for why we are fundamentally good despite our upset. In so doing it ends the need for us to apply our strategy to feel good about ourselves and get relief. You start to see, as I mentioned before, that all that self-interest and egocentricity was only a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The meaning of life isn’t to be egocentric, alienated and angry—that’s just been a symptom in response to the human condition. It was a necessary means of sustaining ourselves until we found self-knowledge. However, with our worth established that way of living is redundant. The battle is over and we put the sword down. So you’ve got these two things going on: you’ve got the information working on producing greater transparency around the human condition in you and how you’re living, and you’ve also got the logic of the information bringing into focus that that way of living is no longer necessary, it’s actually redundant because we’ve got first principle explanation of why we are good. We don’t need to prove that in any number of artificial ways.
So then you reach a point where you get a clean take, a simple view of the way you are living. It’s like you’re outside looking down on yourself and there are a couple of things that come together. In essence you see that applying your strategy is not working, that it is destructive of you and of the relationships around you, that it is not giving you a lasting sense of meaning, security and wholeness. In fact, the longer you go on it’s actually the reverse of that. And at the same time you start to appreciate that that way of living is no longer necessary because the human condition has been explained. At the point of that clean take you’re then able to, if you like, look across at the information. You’ve been focused on yourself and how the information makes sense of the human condition in you but then you look across at the information and you think, well what if I live through this information all day, every day? What if I use it as the framework for making decisions and managing my life? The contrast hits you like a bolt of lightning and you make a profound realisation: if I live through this information, hold it out in front of me, if I use it as my basis for managing my life, I can transform my life, and, as it says on the front of TYL, I help save the world. That’s how fundamental that clean take is in your mind.
At a personal level you see this opportunity where you get to step off that escalator of increasing upset right now. All your problems are solved. But more importantly, you see clearly that applying your strategy is now redundant and that’s not just for you individually but for humanity. Humanity has been on a two million journey and our self-interest and egocentricity is a product of that journey. We’ve now found understanding so all the behaviour that goes with that phase in our evolution can subside: it’s actually irresponsible to keep living that out. You make a threshold decision to abandon your fundament commitment to this competitive frame of reference.
At this point the information sweeps in under you. You access and feel the compassionate message of the information at a whole other level. You actually get to feel this concept that we are the heroes of the story. You get to reflect on how unbelievably hard it has been for us to persevere in the face of the ignorant implication that we’re evil because if you look inside, you’re aware of this punch-drunk reality of who you are and what you’re capable of doing. Everything is suggesting that you are an evil monster and yet it turns out through this information that the complete opposite is true, that we’re the heroes of the story. Yes, we’re massively upset but we’re actually heroic. You get to see our collective story and again, it’s one of the things you understand more on the other side of transformation. It’s not the story of this race or that race, we’re all human and there’s a collective story of all of humanity. As Jeremy describes in FREEDOM, that story is the greatest story ever told and you start to feel that in your bones and that is really quite special.
You start to see that ‘self is rested’ to quote Prue Westbrook from her Transformation Affirmation [see Transformation Affirmation 1]. You see that you can stop having to prove yourself. You see how in an instant that need can stop in you and therefore how it can also stop in the world right now. I think one of the things that really struck at a personal level for me was reaching a point of psychological peace and relief from being able to stop the cycle of ever-escalating madness. I could see by virtue of having this clean take on who I am and seeing the redundancy of my resigned behaviour that I can actually move on to a point where there’s an immense, a profound amount of peace and relief. That of itself is an unbelievable contrast to where you have been living. You work out that the information can bring all humans that same peace.
You arrive at a point where you’ve let go of that commitment to self-interest and you see how you are really living, and that it’s redundant. This is all a product of your mind acting on the logic which goes back to what I was trying to say earlier. If I look at where I was at the start of that journey, as someone who reads the lyrics from Imagine I can’t take them in, I’m aware of my commitment, my habituation to self-interest and the momentum behind it and I think, well how is that ever going to be overcome? And yet what is absolutely mind-bending for me is that through processing this knowledge you arrive at a point in your mind which isn’t pressured, it’s not being compelled on you from without, it’s actually your own mind moving your whole perspective through to a point where that’s what you want to do, you need to—your old way of living is redundant and all you want to do is let go of living through that competitive, self-interested framework.
Moving on from the fear of confrontation
When we start reading this information our mind has an awareness of where the subject matter is leading and, it sounds sort of funny, but our mind takes defensive or pre-emptive action to prevent it from having to engage the logic that is being put forward. Your mind has a preconceived view of where the information is taking you and that is to a subject matter that’s going to be too hurtful or confronting or will leave you depressed, so it starts throwing up deflections and defences and roadblocks to you processing it. That results in what we call the ‘deaf effect’ [see Video/F. Essay 11 for more on the deaf effect].
To try and tease that out at a deeper level. For example, people close to me have said about this examination of the human condition that it is ‘rattling the black box in people and you can’t do that’ and that the information is ‘encroaching on the personal unspeakable’ because it’s not possible or sensible to go there. That ‘black box’ or ‘personal unspeakable’ is not make-believe. I’ve experienced that as actually something very real and it is in every single one of us. I know where this fear is coming from but what I want to say is that it is an unfounded fear. That ‘black box’ is all the stuff I’ve been talking about in terms of the human condition manifesting in you. It’s all the shame and guilt about deeds and actions you’ve done in your life, your corruptions and perversions, it’s all in that ‘black box’ and you spend a lot of time denying that’s in existence at all and any time something encroaches on that you’re very quick to want to cover it up and block it from happening.
I want to emphasise that you can have a misreading that the information is reaching up inside us and forcing us to confront those hurtful truths that will leave us dangling over an edge but with a bit of time your mind makes the realisation that the information is safe and you actually hand that ‘box’ over to the information to look after. That part of yourself is not left out in the cold or stranded. You leave it with the information and you move on [see Video/F. Essay 33 in which Jeremy explains this aspect of the transformation process]. There is nothing in that ‘box’ that does not have a home with this information. That was a very profound realisation for me—that it is actually safe and I don’t have to continue to live in denial and cover up that aspect of myself. There’s no dark thought or deed or any aspect of our upset that doesn’t have a home in this new framework. I don’t need to face that down. I’m not denying it, I’m not despising it out of existence. I’m owning it but I’m not engaging in it and I’m not focusing on it because there’s no need to do that. But there’s an honesty and an integrity about it because you’re not deluding yourself that it doesn’t exist.
So I really want to emphasise that this fear is unfounded in the context of this information and if you find yourself feeling this way then you’re not actually hearing the information. As the promotional material for Jeremy’s book A Species In Denial says, it contains the ‘naked but dignifying truth about humans’. It is the confronting but compassionate full truth. It doesn’t just naïvely or dangerously dig up all these truths and then leave us there stranded half-way. It provides a comprehensive framework of knowledge and lays out beautifully a way for us to assimilate and live with the information and takes us right the way through to safe ground. It also explicitly says we don’t need to overly confronting the details of our upset. It does not involve facing down the contents of our individual ‘black box’. Our job, if you like is to support the information not confront it.
I wanted to read a section which is highly relevant from Part 3, page 89 of the print edition of TYL:
“You and every other human can, as it were, put the issue of all our upsets/corruptions in a ‘suitcase’, attach a label to it saying, ‘Everything in here is now explained and defended’, and simply leave that suitcase behind at the entrance to what we in the World Transformation Movement (WTM) call the Sunshine Highway and set out unencumbered by all those upset behaviours into a new world that is effectively free of the human condition.” [See p. 74 of First Edition of TYL.]
I couldn’t agree more with that and I’ve experienced the good sense of that and the need for it and the logic behind it. We put that whole ‘box’ in that suitcase.
To recap, at the start you can think this information is never going to cover this dark side of yourself but again, by virtue of letting your mind access the logic and actually reading what’s talked about and becoming aware of the fact that this isn’t naïve, that there is actually a pathway laid out, you realise that there is a new way of living that looks after all of that and you leave that damaged, broken part of yourself with the information. It looks after you and you’re safe when you do that. And as I said, it doesn’t miraculously disappear but it’s not living itself out. It’s so safe and it’s so authentic.
Visualise the future
A key thing that you work out as part of the solution to dealing with these aspects of yourself that historically you’ve never been able to live with is this concept of visualising the future and focusing forward. And that applies to both your commitment/habituation to self-interest and also your denial about your upset state. It’s this concept of ‘we get the truth up and then we move on’ [see par. 1049 of FREEDOM]. It’s about focusing your mind outward and on the future, to visualise the potential for humanity now that the human condition is solved. Rather than focus on what you have let go of and the relief you focus on the future.
There is nothing supernatural about that. It’s quite practical. You’ve got a conscious mind. You can actually take it/transport it to the future, we can take ourselves to a new state of mind and wrap ourselves up in that. By really focusing forward you are able to be operational despite that habituation and mess. It is such an effective solution. You can choose what you want to think about, what you fill your head space with and as a result of this information we’ve got the ability to take our head space forward and think about what the human state is going to be like now that we’ve got understanding of the human condition and you can think about how good that is and immerse yourself in that. You can think about how good it is that our habituation to self-interest can end and what that’s going to make possible.
We transcend, we live high and wide of our upset but we are not being dishonest and deluded about our mess. We are not pretending it doesn’t exist. We are not despising it out of existence. We are owning it but are moving on, not living with our face right up against it. We are wrapping ourselves up in the future and that dwarfs or moves into the background any of that desire to live out our habituation or to feel a sense of confrontation about our upset. That possibility is mind-bending. Your upset doesn’t have to drive your behaviour. Your mind is not living here thinking about this mess all day. Your mind moves forward, way forward and you work at that.
Another journey starts
You sit here for a bit and you can’t believe your lucky stars. You are focused on this sense of relief and you can’t believe you can abandon that competition and live honestly but free of that state of upset. But then you start to lift your head and this is something pretty new for me. You’ve got this room in your head, you’re no longer preoccupied with this need to prove that you’re worthwhile all day, every day. So there is space in your mind, a lack of noise.
What that enables is for you to start to get even greater perspective on the wasteland you’ve been in and you start to engage with the pain and suffering that is all around you, you engage in how quickly humanity is spiralling out of control and you’re also looking forward to the future and you can see that all of that can stop right now. The world really starts to open up. Empathy, compassion, access to other people and the real world. And that contrast becomes more and more stark. It’s actually a mind-bending frame of reference in that the human condition, the suffering, all the manifestations of that can all stop right now. Not in ten years, but right now. All that is required is dissemination and appreciation of this information. When you see that the priority and focus becomes stunningly clear and self-evident—I have got to help progress this project. There’s nothing else I want to do. You get the accurate perspective on what is in front of you and you start to see that focussing on self is irrelevant. That’s why I love this image by WTM member Genevieve Salter [see Genevieve’s Transformation Affirmation 4].
It’s of a rising sun depicting the information and the outcome that it brings about. And then the depiction of herself with her arms in the air in front of that sun. It so accurately reflects the true perspective, the scale of the information, as compared to us as individuals, and the situation we are now in. When you get a group of individuals living with this as their frame of reference then it starts to bring into reality the lifeforce that is possible. I’ve gone from seeing myself as being the centre of my universe and unable to see any other potential to now where, with the benefit of transformation and following through the logic in my mind, I’m living in a place where I can see what this is all about and I’m so relieved that that’s the scale of it. Its importance and power just dwarfs any of my habituation. All this artificial, superficial, self-focused crap that you thought there was absolutely no way you could live without, you can walk past. Living through and for the information is not something you are being obligated to do, or compelled to. It is what you want do more than anything else in the world. You don’t want to do anything else. That person standing in front of the sun is me and that’s the scale of this information and if I can just tune into that then it looks after me. As I said before, it’s about transforming your life and helping to save the world.
So how about that! I know the extent of my belief and commitment down that egocentric road: ‘Bring on whatever challenge and I will overcome it!’ However it is now possible to move past that because that self-interest is defeated, made obsolete by this information. It’s defeated from within by my own mind following the logic of this information through to the outcomes. I’ve gone from this position of massive self-interest and I’ve arrived at a position where I don’t want the focus to be on me. It’s a case of, sign me up, what do I need to do? I can see the potential of what this information can achieve, it’s here, it’s right now, I don’t want to be focused on me. So that contrast just gets starker and starker and it just gets better and better and evaporates all that old stuff that you thought would be impossible to let go of. I just turned around the flow of the Amazon River in myself. You go from thinking about some aspect of your upset that you thought utterly irresistible to feed but it can be resisted. Your mind’s digestion of the information conquers that in yourself and brings the realisation that can happen in everyone else.
I suppose it’s just about seeing the logical implications of this information. It’s about taking up selflessness. In Part 3, page 68 of the print edition of TYL Jeremy quotes the lyrics from the band U2, ‘I will show you a place, high on a [uncorrupted] desert plain’—an egocentricity-free existence where ‘the streets [will] have no name’. [See p. 65 of First Edition of TYL.] It’s all about realising and living those implications and seeing that selflessness is consistent with our deeper nature and, as I said before, understanding that selflessness is the integrative meaning of life on Earth. Our mind and instinct start to come together to give a fulfilment unknown. [We recommend you read F. Essay 45 which is a collection of prophetic song lyrics describing our species’ liberation from the human condition.]
The battle to champion our goodness is won so we can legitimately do this now. That’s what translates that ‘army’ into a reality. For the next few generations it’s about supporting this information. That’s what selflessness translates into. We prioritise our life to that end. It’s so simple and beautiful. I just become a tool to help bring in the new world. I just want to be a speck in the mass of that ‘army in its millions’.
Imagine
Surely, if we could dream of a different world it would be along the lines of John Lennon’s Imagine. Surely, it would be an ego-less rather than egocentric, cooperative rather than competitive, selfless rather than selfish world. Imagine you could help change the world to peace right now. Try to engage that potential for one second then imagine the motivation and excitement to help realise that. Think of the collective energy and what that can achieve. This allows your mind to see how we can change the world and change it practically overnight. See how it will totally overcome the force of self-interest and egocentricity on the planet. When that force is aligned competition can’t come close.
I have experienced how that can happen right now. I can vouch for the proposition that if your mind consumes this information you will arrive at that realisation and know it to be true and as a by-product there will be peace, fulfilment, wholeness, meaning for you that you never thought was possible.
This is not about self-improvement to make you more effective or to achieve more. This is not about becoming a more virtuous or a better person. It is about ending egocentricity, competition and selfishness. It’s about a new way of living where we serve the whole and not ourselves. That is how fundamental it is. It’s actually not about us, the individual, and the fact that it’s not about us paradoxically results in this sense of fulfilment and meaning that is a glorious by-product.
Out of love in search of love
I wanted to read this quote from Sir Laurens van der Post. ‘He who tries to go down into the labyrinthine pit of himself, to travel the swirling, misty netherlands below sea-level through which the harsh road to heaven and wholeness runs, is doomed to fail and never see the light where night joins day unless he goes out of love in search of love’ [The Face Beside the Fire, 1953, p.290 of 311].
As an extension to the focus not being on self, I did want to say the following.
Early on, one of the deflections your mind can throw up when trying to engage this information is to focus on the messenger rather than the message and to question Jeremy Griffith’s character and motivations. I want to say that I’ve known him for 25 years and every waking hour he is about ending the suffering on the planet through synthesising explanation of the human condition. He lives the example of the outcomes of the information and that is to serve the whole, not self. It’s not about him, it’s the information and what it can achieve. He is living outside Plato’s metaphorical cave [see Video/F. Essay 11 for an explanation of Plato’s cave allegory], he is what we’ve traditionally termed a prophet or what the WTM calls an unevasive thinker. He’s defined by an integrity of character and an amazing mind that’s unlocked an avalanche of insights that are seemingly insoluble and inexplicable. Again, if you genuinely let your mind consider this information it will validate this proposition. [We recommend you read Professor Harry Prosen’s biography of Jeremy in F. Essay 49.]
Jeremy has weathered an immense amount of lies, persecution and character assassination. [See F. Essay 56 for an explanation of the attacks on Jeremy and the WTM.] It’s been a modern-day stoning. It was as Plato said, when a person tries to come back into the cave with the light, with the explanation of the human condition, ‘they would say that his visit to the upper world had ruined his sight [they would treat him as if he was mad], and that the ascent [out of the cave] was not worth even attempting. And if anyone tried to release them and lead them up, they would kill him if they could lay hands on him’ [see Video/F. Essay 11]. He has shown a staggering resilience and courage. He’s not superior, not of intrinsic greater worth but is unresigned and his mind has a unique capacity. It was a combination of circumstances that has enabled that mind and allowed him to go to the bottom of the well. I wanted to say that but hasten to emphasise that the focus is not on self, it’s about the future that is possible in light of this insight.
In truth you only need to read a page or two of Jeremy’s work to validate what I have said about the messenger. I wanted to take a couple of extracts from my favourite pages of TYL. This is from Part 2, page 56 of the print edition:
“[referring to Don Quixote of la Mancha and his companion Sancho]…gloriously doomed battle after gloriously doomed battle; feeble beings charging at and trying to vanquish the ‘outrageous giant’ ignorance-of-the-fact-of-our-species’-fundamental-goodness! But that has been the lot of every human for some 2 million years! Wave after wave of quixotic humans have thrown themselves at that ‘outrageous giant’ of ignorance for eons and eons, as bit by tiny bit they accumulated the knowledge that would finally make the redeeming explanation of our human condition possible!” [See p. 44 of First Edition of TYL.] [Don Quixote is also the subject of par. 67 of FREEDOM]
And Jeremy has drawn this little depiction of Don Quixote and Sancho with the title ‘THE HUMAN SPIRIT’. When you start winding into just how special that human spirit is it’s unbelievable. I just love the words ‘gloriously doomed battle after gloriously doomed battle…Wave after wave of quixotic humans have thrown themselves at that “outrageous giant”’.
Also in Part 2 of TYL is Jeremy’s analogy of The Story of Adam Stork [see also, par. 250 of FREEDOM] and in particular the fist Jeremy has drawn on ‘Baddie’ Adam Stork shows the extraordinary courage of the human spirit. [TYL contains two further images of Adam Stork following the one below, one with the ‘Goodie’ and ‘Baddie’ labels reversed now that the reconciling understanding of the human condition has arrived, which leads to the third image depicting both storks reconciled and transformed].
And in relation to that fist, Jeremy says further on in Part 2:
“And so every day as we got out of bed we took on the world of ignorance that was condemning us. We shook our fist at the heavens in defiance of the implication that we are bad. In essence, we said, ‘One day, one day, we are going to prove our worth, explain that we are not bad after all, and until that day arrives we are not going to ‘back down’, we are not going to take the ignorant, naive, stupid, unjustified criticism from our instincts. No, we are going to fight back with all our might.”
The relief and compassion that runs through your body when you start to tune in to what that little analogy is about is really quite amazing. Jeremy once said something to the effect that if you fill all the valleys with all the books written about the human condition twice over you still won’t come close to the majesty of that little diagram of Adam Stork because it defends and saves humanity, and it’s actually true. It is just SO special and brilliant.
I wanted to highlight that because it is the core insight AND because when you wade into this book it is important to keep sight of it.
Nourishment
While the future is the focus, this information is so relieving and nourishing along the way. There’s so much confusion, there’s so much we don’t understand growing up and this information explains all manner of apparent mysteries: Why are men and women so psychologically different? [See F. Essays 26 & 27.] How did highly social insects like bees and ants evolve? [See F. Essay 25.] Why do men shoot animals for sport? [See F. Essay 27.] Why rock-n-roll? [See chapter 9:11 of FREEDOM.] Why beauty? [See F. Essay 27.] Why are we so moved by the beauty of nature? [See for example, F. Essay 21 on the formation of our all-loving moral soul.] You name it. While the focus is on the future there’s just so much reward in the short term. That’s something I really want to highlight. There’s a lifetime of nourishment, so much brain food in terms of actually understanding what the hell has been going on in the world and that’s reward enough.
What I live for now
There’s so many good things to think about now: stop destroying the planet; bridge the gap with more innocent races. A particular one for me is how different it’s going to be for young men to grow up in the future. I see groups of young adolescent boys huddled together down at the shops so unsure of where they fit in in the world. Being a male, masculinity is increasingly without virtue. On the other hand there is still this pressure from within and without to kick the crap out of the innocent and sensitive part of yourself, to bury it, to kill it off, to die inside, to grow up, to toughen up, to become a man and take up this ‘gloriously doomed’ competitive existence. All of that has been unavoidable until this point in time, it’s been part of the human condition but it’s been psychologically and emotionally very painful. I am so glad that can stop now.
Freedom
I was sitting on a plane recently and across the aisle was a businessman dressed in a suit and he was watching the 2007 movie Freedom Writers. It’s about a teacher in middle America helping young adolescents and it’s a pretty moving and inspiring story. I realised as he was watching the movie that he was actually crying and he was trying to pull himself together. It was a small insight into how much we all want selfishness to stop and selflessness to reign supreme. We are all desperate to go. Now humans have been exonerated and redeemed through this information, we can. Let’s go, all forward, all together.