Section 3:13 Tony Miall (recorded December 2009)

My name is Tony Miall and I’m a founding member of the WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT (WTM).

This wasn’t part of what I had originally prepared but I just wanted to first talk about something that happened a couple of days ago which was a testament, for me anyway, of just how important it is that we get this information out to the world. In the 2009 Introductory Video Jeremy presented the most moving thing I’ve ever seen. It was a description of a boy who is 15 or 16 and who has shut himself in his room as teenagers do and Jeremy acted out that teenager holding his head in his hands with a look of utter despair, with the music blaring, asking those deeper questions to himself at that age that no one can provide any answers for. And that was true, that certainly happened to me when I was 16, to the extent that I can still actually remember being in my room and going through that and sort of yelling out loud, ‘I know I’m good!’ Unfortunately for me and my generation I couldn’t explain or understand what was going on which, before I knew was Resignation [as is explained in F. Essay 30 and chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM by Jeremy Griffith] led me down roads of looking at Buddhism or Christianity and all sorts of things to try and get some answers, until I basically just gave up.

I have three children of my own now and I love them all very much. My youngest son, who is 17 [at time of filming], said to me the other night when we were watching television, ‘Dad, I just can’t watch TV because of what you see on the news, there’s paedophiles and there’s rape and murder and everything else, and this might sound weird but I sit here thinking to myself, what if I’m like that?’ And that is the same question that we have all asked ourselves and I asked myself at that same age, ‘What are we capable of, are we good or are we bad?’ Basically that’s what he was saying too, ‘Am I good or am I bad?’ And thank—I was going to say thank Christ but thank Jeremy for this information—because I could sit down with my son and we talked about it for half an hour and he went to bed that night not tormented but happy. He got the answers to the questions that all of us have asked ourselves at that age that really do force us into this terrible state—force us into the human condition, which is a pretty ordinary place to be most of the time. [The explanation of the human condition is presented in Video/​F. Essay 3.]

So I didn’t intend to talk about that, but for me that summed up why the information Jeremy is presenting is so important. If we can stop the torment children go through and give children the answers when they’re asking those questions it will be such a relief for them. You could give them a billion dollars and it’s just nothing compared to what this understanding of the human condition brings to their lives.

The following is what I prepared for this testimonial. I’ve been around this information for about 10 years [at the time of filming] and I suppose up until a few months ago I really didn’t appreciate it for what it was. I wanted to talk for a minute about what I see in these pictures that Jeremy has drawn.

It sums everything up for me. You can be around the information for a long time and fool yourself that you’re supporting it, but really there is only one way to support it and that’s free of the old world and free of all the strategies that you’ve dragged around since you resigned. After Resignation, you give up asking questions and you end up in the first diagram, effectively inside a bubble. In that world everything is so insular, you don’t see anything, all you care about is yourself and you’re always tormented by that original question of ‘am I good or am I bad?’ You spend your entire life—well up until now that is—living in this bubble and being owned by all the grievances you’ve got, for example, ‘No one gave me any answers’ or whatever it might be.

Basically everyone’s life, if they thought about it for a minute, consists of this total preoccupation with proving that you’re good and not bad. This information is just so beautiful because it doesn’t judge or condemn, it explains and dignifies the human condition.

So you spend all your life after Resignation and I certainly did, trying to prove myself. As a teenager it’s pretty disconcerting because I can remember I was pretty good at golf and I was asking those deeper questions and wanting to understand what the meaning of life was, but all people cared about was the fact that I could hit a golf ball well. So you’d just basically give up on ever getting those answers and now that this has come along it’s a second chance for that little boy in his room to finally get the answers that he was asking for.

How I understand the second bubble in the diagram is that it shows what happens after you come across the information. In my mind you understand the information, you do work out that you can get out of this state of living in a bubble. You can start to recognise it and see it for what it is and it’s a little bit unnerving in one respect. First of all you get very excited because you can understand what’s going on in the world around you. But then you start thinking, ‘wait a minute, this is becoming a little bit confronting, it’s cutting a bit too close to the bone (so to speak)’, because the honesty of these understandings start to reveal the human condition within yourself.

It’s at this stage you know the information is true but you try and use it within your resigned selfish framework to satisfy your ego, but it can’t work because the information makes the ego redundant. What you’re really trying to do is pick the information up and bring it back into the first bubble and manufacture it to suit your own strategy that you adopted at Resignation. This is what we call the Mexican Standoff. But it’s just no way to live once you understand this information, you can’t! [Jeremy explains the ‘Mexican Standoff’ in F. Essay 33.]

So you reach a point where you decide to fully support the information without trying to get a ‘win’ out of it. When you do that you can see clearly the real potential of this information and really appreciate it for what it is. For example, I haven’t prepared this, but I will randomly pick a page in A Species In Denial [Jeremy’s 2003 bestseller] and read an extract to demonstrate how profound this information is: ‘This acceptance and subsequent honesty fractures the hold the resigned ‘highway’ of denial has on your mind. It releases you from being a total victim of your old resigned strategy, where you cannot think any other way than from a base of denial’ [p.303 printed edition/​p.199 online version]. Honestly, I didn’t think I would pick one so relevant, I didn’t prepare that, I just opened the book! Anyway, you can do that all day long, find truth after truth. I mean there’s not one word in that book that’s not true, and there’s not one sentence that anyone could have written coming from that first bubble in the diagram, it’s just impossible. So your appreciation grows for really how big this information is, that it really does end the human condition. It really does solve all the problems, it really will stop kids from dying inside themselves, it will just create bliss beyond our comprehension. We can’t really imagine or know what it’s going to be like for humans free of the human condition but in the meantime what we can do is let our resigned state go and accept that this information explains everything and just support it. That leads us to the third picture in the diagram, where you are truly liberated. You can finally, legitimately leave behind all the baggage you were forced to take up at Resignation in order to cope with the human condition. Not through some hollow form of escapism, but through true understanding and seeing the ultimate freedom available for all humanity.

I was trying to think of a way to describe the relief that comes with that and it’s just impossible but the nearest thing I could come up with was like having a raging bushfire chasing you and you are running out of water and you’re running and running and running and running and finally, you know this goes on for hours, and you’re covered in dirt and sweat, and you finally come over a little hill and here’s a nice lagoon with green grass and you just have to jump in and the fire goes around you and you just sit there and go ‘Phew, thank Christ that’s over’.

So, I’ve got really not much more but as far as I’m concerned it’s just the only thing on the planet worth talking about and it’s certainly the only thing worth being involved in and that’s it.