Section 3:8 Susan Armstrong (recorded February 2015)

 

 

My name is Susan Armstrong and I am 42 years old [at the time of recording]. It is simply thrilling to be alive at this time when understanding of the human condition has arrived, as put forward by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith [see Video/​F. Essay 3]. And it’s so exciting to talk about my experience with this information.

 

 

I’d like to start with reading the title and subtitle of Jeremy’s latest book, FREEDOM: ‘FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition. At last, the redeeming, reconciling and rehabilitating biological explanation of the human condition that brings about the dreamed of dawn of understanding and ends all the suffering and conflict on Earth’. And that says it all. This really is it! This is, to quote Professor Harry Prosen in his Introduction to FREEDOM, ‘the holy grail of insight we humans have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of our species’. The human condition is solved. Jeremy has provided the answer to this fundamental question of why we are the way we are—divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, and all the problems we worry about in ourselves and in the world are solved from this point and it looks after absolutely everything you love or care about! It really does transform your life from being an utterly preoccupied and selfish victim of the human condition to a person effectively free of the human condition, saturated in relief and excitement about myself, all humans, and the absolutely fabulous future before us.

My experience with this information began when I was 19, nearly 20. I stumbled across these ideas and I found them very interesting and accountable and from there my interest grew. The ‘deaf effect’ was very real to begin with [the ‘deaf effect’ is explained in Video/​F. Essay 11, and in chapter 1:4 of FREEDOM] but I just kept responding to the logic, re-listening to talks and re-reading the text and this does erode our historical fear of the subject of the human condition and you finally can ‘hear’ what is being logically put forward. This really does explain and solve our condition!

Life becomes very exciting as you ‘test’ this information on life around you and you start making sense of everything you look at. Walking around in your daily life you are able to understand and see through all the behaviour around you and in front of you. Everything becomes transparent. You see that the human condition is driving all our behaviour: individuals, cultures, countries and civilisations, religion, politics, men and women, absolutely anything you look at or think about! As WTM member Genevieve Salter says in her Transformation Affirmation [see Transformation Affirmation 4], it really is like you are drunk on knowledge and it’s an incredibly exciting time. For me particularly, understanding the differences between men and women was a very profound moment. To find out that men have actually been carrying out the most meaningful and important job on the planet, this battle to find knowledge—ultimately understanding of our good-and-evil-afflicted human condition—was an absolute revelation. [See F. Essays 26 & 27 for explanation of the different roles men and women have taken up under the duress of the human condition.]

So this was all very exciting. However, obviously you do then begin to see through the human condition in yourself, and to start with this is a very fearful and terrifying prospect. I began to see all the upset within me that the human condition had caused and the strategy of denial I had taken up, and of course this was incredibly confronting. It leads to what we in the WTM call the ‘Mexican Standoff’, ‘where you intellectually know the information is true and that it explains and defends the upset state, but find actually confronting it all excruciating’ [see Video/​F. Essay 33 and also Part 6:1 of Freedom Expanded: Book 1]. For a time you can’t move forward because the truth is exposing your denial, strategy and the lies that you took up at Resignation [see F. Essay 30 for an explanation of Resignation], but you are still trying to maintain this strategy to defend yourself. You also can’t move back, because this information is logical and true and you know it solves all the world’s problems.

The next stage in my journey with this information that I want to talk about is the most exciting because it solves this impasse, and in fact it solves all our problems and all the world’s problems, and that is the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living. There seemed to be three main building blocks for me in accessing this new way to live which I’ll go through briefly now but they are in no particular order.

The first one is Resignation. As I mentioned before, and as is explained in F. Essay 30, we all have an historical fear of the human condition. Jeremy has explained that for two million years we have been living without understanding, without the manual for life. And in our individual lives, we discover that in a very profound way at around the age of 15. We start off wondering about the world as children and why it is the way it is, but at around 15 you start to wonder about yourself and about ‘why I am the way I am’. Jeremy terms this incredibly deep time as Resignation. And I will now read a couple of extracts from chapter 2 of FREEDOM about Resignation [underlinings are as they appear in FREEDOM]:

 

“Delving deeper into how the journey toward ‘Resignation’ unfolds will reveal just how terrifying the issue of the human condition has been, which is precisely what the reader needs to become aware of in order to appreciate why it has, until now, been impossible to truthfully and thus effectively explain human behaviour. Yes, describing what occurs at ‘Resignation’ makes it abundantly clear why resigned humans have become so superficial and artificial in their thinking, incapable of plumbing the great depths of the human condition and thus incapable of finding the now desperately needed understanding of human existence.

So what happened at around 14 or 15 years of age for virtually all humans growing up under the duress of ‘the imperfections’ of ‘our human condition’ was that to avoid the suicidal depression that accompanied any thinking about the issue of our species’, and our own, seemingly extremely imperfect condition, there was simply no choice but to stop grappling with the answerless question. And so despite the human condition being the all-important issue of the meaningfulness or otherwise of our existence, there came a time (and, although it varies according to each individual’s circumstances, it typically occurred at about 14 or 15 years of age) when adolescents were forced to put the whole depressing subject aside once and for all and just hope that one day in the future the explanation and defence for our species’ apparently horrifically flawed, seemingly utterly disappointing, sad state would be found, because then, and only then, would it be psychologically safe to even broach the subject...” (pars 107 and 108)

 

And just a small extract, again from chapter 2 of FREEDOM:

 

“...​adolescents going through the excruciating process of Resignation, of resigning themselves to having to block out the seemingly inexplicable question of their worth and meaning and live, from that time on, in denial of the unbearable issue of the human condition...” (par. 109)

 

So for the rest of our adult lives we all take up strategies to cope with life, a life of denial of the human condition. As Jeremy says, while we became adults in a physical sense, without the explanation of the human condition we were all still psychologically stranded in adolescence, the ‘who am I?’ stage. We constantly fight off this implication that we are bad.

The second building block is the following all-important picture. Again I’m referring to FREEDOM here and it’s the Story of Adam Stork.

 

 

This story of Adam Stork is at the heart of Jeremy Griffith’s explanation [see Video/​F. Essay 3 or read chapter 1:3 of FREEDOM]. It really is an astonishing analogy, because it explains the seemingly unexplainable, how we could be good when we appear to be bad. For me it has more diamonds and gold around it than anything else. Because when you absorb this truth, when you try using this logical explanation to defend you—the full truth about humans, that you are upset but you are good, that you are fundamentally worthwhile and heroic—instead of using the strategy you took up to defend you at resignation, your life is transformed. All I had to do was try this defence and move on from, or let go of, my old obsolete way of living/​my strategy to life because it is simply not needed now.

The next picture I want to show is Jeremy’s drawing of our human journey. I am referring to FREEDOM again, it’s at the beginning of chapter 8.

 

 

Absorbing this wonderful story was also a very important building block for me because it summarises the human journey over the last four million years from childhood, to the human condition beginning two million years ago, to the adulthood stage of ‘I know who I am’ that has finally arrived. I can see where I fit in as part of this amazing journey.

Putting these three building blocks together you really do see that our old way of living was just where we had to live before understanding arrived, we had to live with lies and in denial of our upset selves and we had to have strategies to protect ourselves from any criticism. But now, a whole new framework is available/​on offer to humans where the truth is up, the full, dignifying truth about humans. It is a new landscape, a solution- based paradigm. The old way is just gone now, it is superseded by knowing/​understanding our ‘goodness’ and having the defence for our ‘badness’, we are upset but we are good. That old way of living has done its job and is just over, it is a ‘museum piece’ as Jeremy describes it in FREEDOM, we can view it now as a way of living that once was in the human journey archives. The human condition has been solved and the full truth about humans has arrived. I can, we all can, live accepting our upset selves, the full, beautiful truth about me and all humans and I am no longer a victim of my resigned upset state. It is amazing that we/​the world can admit our alienation (that we have previously done everything we can to hide), and that we can show people how you can live with these confronting truths, how we can be honest about our upset—we can be honest now, there is nothing to be afraid of or procrastinate about.

I anchor myself here, to this change in attitude towards my upset self, to the truth about me and the strategy I had to develop to cope without understanding which naturally resulted in a lot of damage as it does in all humans: upset, warring within myself, huge insecurity about my goodness, compensating for any supposed ‘weakness’ or ‘frailty’, anger, frustration, deep preoccupation and selfishness, competitiveness to prove I was good, and codependency. There was just so much torture and confusion. On the surface I was maintaining a ‘I’ve got it all together, happy’ front but underneath I was a very high- achieving and over-applied, driven and competitive person and I had a lot of fear of ever living without that. I kept away from feeling vulnerable at all costs, the fear of that was enormous and it completely owned me and ran my life. Our strategies are protecting us from this depression, this uncertainty about our worth and they are like spitting cats in the way they protect us from ever going near the issue of the human condition again. They were born out of a time when if we looked at the issue of the human condition we knew we weren’t going to survive because we had no answers and so we just had to resign. From that point we were stuck in that necessarily egocentric mindset but now we can actually see that it was just an habituated way of living that is simply obsolete and redundant now.

The other thing I was thinking about is something Jeremy points out regarding the ‘Dog Whisperer’, Cesar Millan and his work with super aggressive dogs. [Jeremy mentions Millan’s work with dogs in FREEDOM, par. 557.] Dogs obviously aren’t conscious but the analogy is there, when you see him, he allows them to come out of their mad aggression to a super calm and happy state just in an instant. And that’s what the Transformed State is like. When you actually use this information to defend yourself, you are suddenly not owned by all that fear and anger and preoccupation. You are suddenly enveloped in the full truth that you are upset but you are good. Boom! It’s all calm and the mist clears.

We are all just little boys and girls who did the best we could under the duress of

the human condition. I am upset but I am good, it is actually all logically understandable and beautiful in the full human story. The old framework is all around me and it is in me, but I can live in the new one. The Transformed State is the way for upset humans to participate so fully in this new framework, by supporting the information which is the full truth about humans and not your old way or your old habit any more.

As Jeremy writes in FREEDOM, par. 1161, “We can reason that, ‘Yes, I do have all these angry, egocentric and alienated feelings and thoughts, and I know that without undergoing a great deal of psychological therapy I can’t hope to heal all the underlying upset that is producing these feelings and thoughts. But I also know that way of feeling and thinking is now obsoleted, so I’m simply going to leave that way of feeling and thinking behind me and adopt the new way of feeling and thinking that is now available where I live in support of a reconciled, non-aggressive, non-competitive, truth-based new world for humans!’”

And to bring up my last visual, this is a poster that is available on our website of humanity climbing out of the cave to freedom:

 

 

This cave here is based on Plato’s cave allegory, that Jeremy has depicted here in the poster, and written about in FREEDOM [see also Video/​F. Essay 11]. And it really is the perfect analogy for our situation. Because without understanding, living in this cave of denial was just the way it had to be in humanity’s journey to enlightenment, but it is dark and it’s full of worry and doubt and insecurity about your worth. It is just the worst condition to be so insecure in your fundamental worth, to be forever fighting that off. Now, with understanding there is a shock of change process involved in coming out of the cave to the sunlit plains of freedom, but the thing is we can! Jeremy has opened the cave door with this information. We are actually free as a species of the human condition. We are all free right now and it’s just a simple realisation to make. The Transformed State allows you to uncurl from the foetal position in the cave just trying to survive life, you get up and simply walk out the cave door. And despite the fear of the human condition being so great in the cave when you are still relying on your coping strategy to protect you, once you drop your strategy at the cave door, leave it all behind and you are out of the cave there is just no fear at all. It just is so obvious, logical and natural how we live now that understanding of the human condition has been found. The cave life is just over in the natural evolving way of us humans growing up into adulthood. And for the first time ever this is a universal position for all humans. Everyone abandons the battle now and lives this way because the battle to find understanding of the human condition has been won. It’s actually the only sensible and strong thing to do and it’s actually just madness not to. We no longer have to prove our worth. Our worth is proven. Never again do we have to worry about that, or our goodness or our purpose.

We now live forever in this new landscape, sunlit, happy, with not just hope but a deep reassuring knowingness of why everything is okay forever more. You can actually boot hope and faith right out the window! It is honestly amazing! You are not free of your upset, but you are free from worrying about it and you know this freedom is for everyone and we fight for the future now and it is so thrilling! Despite being so damaged from the battle we can all still participate. Life begins afresh in terms of what you feel and see and want to happen and put your weight behind. It’s just so exciting, your mind just buzzes with the feeling of freedom and what is possible now.

On this sunlit plain in Jeremy’s picture, everything is glorious. I am glorious in the whole truthful story of humans. My upset/​scars are understood and defended. There is a rational explanation for it all. I fit into that story, the greatest story ever told of the first species ever to become conscious [see F. Essay 24] and have to go into battle with its own perfectly-orientated-to-love instincts [see F. Essay 21 for the origin of our moral instincts]. My instincts and intellect are gloriously reconciled. We are ALL glorious here. It’s not a fleeting thought or inspiration, that is with you forever. You are standing in this new landscape of knowledge where we all belong.

The full truth, with all its confronting truths, must come out for humanity to be free. But it’s only confronting from the perspective of the cave, in that no-solution paradigm. It is okay. We can do this. There is a way to cope. The way we live now is to take up the full defence available to us and leave our strategies behind. This is our truth and we have every right to use it! We live a new way and the truths don’t condemn us here because we are secure in our upset. It just doesn’t matter how upset we are, that is what we are meant to be after two million years.

And then you really, really see how we all, the whole of humanity, gets out of here, out of the cave. We finally, as the psychoanalyst Carl Jung said, can ‘own [our] own shadow’. And from here we can get this information to future generations and no child will ever have to resign again. As WTM member Annie Williams always says, the pain stops with us [see Annie’s Transformation Affirmation 6]. We can stop the silence and finally be honest with children, answer all their questions, which we have historically found so difficult, about why the world is so un-ideal. We are all free of the old way here and we are living in the new landscape where the future is our focus and all humans are free and the sun is rising so highly and brightly. There is no reason ever to look back, just always to the horizon. Everything is covered here and everything is saved and I can be centred and calm and strong and sensible with the truth about humans in my life. All you have to do is support this information and IT will do all the work for you, it will look after everything you love, humanity is coming home, the Earth and all its creatures are saved. It’s the most beautiful thing that has ever been seen on this planet.

And finally, what bursts out of every cell in your body, is the roaring cry of ‘LET’S GO!!! LET’S GO!!!’ And so to finish, I just have to read some short sections from Freedom Expanded: Book 2, Section 4:1: ‘It’s on, humanity is coming home—our real self is going to come thundering through to the forefront now and the world will open up for everyone, and everyone will help everyone else. We CAN leave our old ego-embattled lives behind now and metamorphose into free, empowered lifeforce beings.’

The following are a couple of quotes from the Bible [that also appear in Section 4:1 of Freedom Expanded: Book 2]. We can understand and decipher all manner of things now with this information, and the Bible provides such an incredibly powerful and truthful account of life under the duress of the human condition. These quotes are from two prophets, firstly from Joel. As Jeremy says, the prophet Joel perfectly articulated the vision of our species’ liberation from the human condition when he said, ‘Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come...Before them the land is like the garden of Eden, behind them, a desert waste—nothing escapes them. They have the appearance of horses; they gallop along like cavalry. With a noise like that of chariots...like a mighty army...They all march in line, not swerving from their course. They do not jostle each other’ (Joel 2). And the second quote is from the prophet Isaiah: ‘He lifts up a banner [that is, the human race finds understanding] for the distant nations, he whistles for those at the ends of the earth. Here they come, swiftly and speedily! Not one of them grows tired or stumbles, not one slumbers or sleeps; not a belt is loosened at the waist, not a sandal thong is broken. Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung; their horses’ hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels like a whirlwind. Their roar is like that of the lion, they roar like young lions; they growl as they seize their prey and carry it off with no-one to rescue. In that day they will roar over it like the roaring of the sea [there will be immense excitement, enthusiasm and commitment]’ (Isa. 5:26–30).

And this concluding extract from Section 1:5 of Freedom Expanded: Book 2, in which Jeremy writes:

 

“WE ARE OUT OF HERE, leaving this spent, exhausted, dead world behind FOREVER! LET’S GO is the great battle cry that will begin as a tiny voice among a few and then catch on and spread to become a roar of excitement that will be heard across the world—like a hundred thousand horses appearing from horizon to horizon galloping to a fabulous future...

And all of nature will be absolutely cheering for us because this is that greatest of greatest victories for all of life on Earth—because we humans were the ones who were given the task of championing nature’s greatest invention, the fully conscious, thinking, self-adjusting brain. We humans were given this amazing computer, but we weren’t given the program for it and instead were left to wander in a terrible wilderness of ignorance in search of understanding of our meaning and worth as a species—an understanding we have NOW FINALLY FOUND.

Everywhere there is going to be joy, more joy and excitement than we tired, worn out and weary human warriors are capable of imagining—again, as Beethoven’s symphony anticipated, ‘Joy’, ‘Joyful, as a hero to victory!’, ‘Join in our jubilation!’, ‘We enter, drunk with fire, into your sanctuary...​Your magic reunites...​All men become brothers...​All good, all bad...​Be embraced, millions! This kiss for the whole world!’

We are out of here, the great breakout is on. The human race is breaking free of the shackles of our tomb that we have been forced to live in for so long we hardly know of another existence—but we do know of another existence, another fabulous place ‘high on a desert plain where the streets have no name’, that Bono [of the band U2] sang of, otherwise why would we have fought so hard and for so long. For two million long years we have fought for the arrival of this day.”