Chapter 9:9 How the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living will quickly repair the world

The Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living not only has the power to immediately transform every human’s life from one that is tortured by the human condition to one that is characterised by a fabulously-radiant state of freedom from that condition—and thus the power to bring the whole human race back to life from its effectively dead state of alienation—it also has the capacity to repair the world we live in, to resuscitate planet Earth from all the brutal anger, selfish egocentricity and mindless alienated behaviour we have inflicted upon it.

In par. 1104 I briefly mentioned that I and others in the World Transformation Movement, including my brother Simon and fellow Patron of the WTM, Tim Macartney-Snape, are beneficiaries of Sir James Darling’s extraordinary soul-rather-than-intellect-emphasising, Platonic education system, having attended Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, Australia. This is the school HRH King Charles III was sent halfway around the world to attend for part of his education. (While referring to the inspiring, soul-reinforcing influences on my life, and that of King Charles’, I should also mention the exceptionally sound, soul-preserving inspiration of Sir Laurens van der Post, whose books about humanity’s lost state of innocence helped me to hold onto the truth of the existence of another true world; he is the author most often quoted in this book. Sir Laurens was also so important a person to King Charles that he was chosen to be godfather to King Charles’ eldest son, and the future king, Prince William, and there is ‘A bronze bust of van der Post…​in Prince Charles’ garden at Highgrove’ (Christopher Booker, ‘Post, Sir Laurens Jan van der (1906-1996)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004). A former British Prime Minister, Baroness Thatcher, no less, once described Sir Laurens as ‘the most perfect man I have ever met’ (mentioned in J.D.F. Jones interview on Late Night Live, ABC Radio, 25 Feb. 2002), and Sir James Darling wrote that ‘In the world of books there are, for me, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, or Laurens van der Post’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, ed. Michael Persse, 1962, p.36 of 223). For those interested, more can be read about the visions of Sir James Darling [who was described as ‘a prophet in the true biblical sense’ in his 3 November 1995 full-page obituary in The Australian newspaper], and Sir Laurens van der Post [who was similarly described as ‘a prophet out of Africa’ in his 20 December 1996 full-page obituary in London’s The Times], at <www.humancondition.com/darling> and <www.humancondition.com/​vanderpost>.) With regard to the inspired teaching of Sir James Darling, in one of his many extraordinary speeches, he said, ‘selfishness is, as it has ever been, the ultimately destructive force in a society, and there are only two cures for selfishness—the regimented state which we all profess to dislike, and the change of heart, which we refuse to make. That is the choice, believe me, for each one of us, and we have not much time in which to make it. The need for decision [to have a ‘change of heart’ and live selflessly] is serious and urgent, and the sands [of time] are running out’ (1950 GGS Speech Day address; Weston Bate, Light Blue Down Under, 1990, p.219 of 386).

In this extract, Sir James has identified selfishness as ‘the ultimately destructive force’ and that, historically, there have only ever been ‘two cures for selfishness—the regimented state which we all profess to dislike, and the change of heart, which we refuse to make’. The ‘regimented state’ is obviously a reference to the dogmatically imposed and strictly enforced selfless, cooperative, communal, social state of communism/​socialism, a state ‘which we all profess to dislike’, because, as has been emphasised, being fully conscious, self-managing beings, having to subordinate our thinking, questioning mind to dogma was never going to work. De-braining ourselves was no real solution to our problems; ultimately we needed brain food, not brain anaesthetic. Our thinking mind needed understanding—specifically, understanding of why humans are fundamentally good and not bad, evil, worthless beings. In short, we needed the psychologically dignifying, redeeming and transforming understanding of the human condition. But what Sir James has, in effect, done in this passage is recognise that, despite the urgency, until humanity achieved that breakthrough we would ‘refuse to make’ or embrace the alternative, that of having a ‘change of heart’ and deciding to live selflessly instead of selfishly. And he was right—until the liberating understanding of why humans are fundamentally good and not bad was found, humans had no choice but to keep on trying to achieve some relief from the insecurity of our condition by finding superficial ways to prove we were good and not bad, such as through winning power, fame, fortune and glory. We had no choice but to be ‘ego-centric’—we had no choice but for our conscious thinking self (which again is how the dictionary defines ‘ego’) to be focused or ‘centred’ on trying to prove it/​we were not bad, worthless and meaningless. It is only now with the fundamental, trustable, knowable, first-principle-based, dogma-free biological understanding of why humans are not bad that we can afford to stop trying to prove ourselves all the time—that we can stop being egocentric; that we can let go of being so self-worth-preoccupied, and start living for the human-condition-understood world free of that old insecure existence. It is only now that we can transform from being selfish to selfless—that we can have the ‘change of heart’ that Sir James recognised was so ‘serious and urgent’.

In his acclaimed 1969 BBC television documentary series Civilisation, the eminent historian Kenneth Clark mentioned that ‘People who hold forth about the modern world often say that what we need is a new religion. It may be true but it isn’t easy to establish’ (episode ‘The Fallacies of Hope’). Saying ‘that what we need is a new religion’ is really another acknowledgment of the fundamental need for the human race to have that ‘change of heart’, that change from living selfishly to selflessly, if we are to solve the world’s problems. And, saying ‘but it isn’t easy to establish’ ‘a new religion’ is really, deep down, a recognition that what is needed for this change of heart to occur is for the daunting issue of the human condition to be confronted and solved. As has been explained, the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living is not a religion, but, like a religion, it does bring about a change from living selfishly for yourself to living selflessly for something beyond self—so Clark’s acknowledgment that we need a new religion was about as close as the old denial-based world could come to saying we needed to solve the human condition. In this regard, comments made by the Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, in the following newspaper report show that he was getting closer to the truth of the need to solve the human condition in order to produce a universally acceptable ‘God and man reconciled’ new potential for humanity: ‘The Dalai Lama believes secular ethics, not religion, is best placed to assist the “moral crisis” facing the world’s people…​[because it] respected all traditional faiths as well as non-believers. “Some people—some my friends—believe moral ethics must be based on religious faith,” he said. [But] “No matter how wonderful a religion, (it will) never be universal. The crisis is universal—now the remedy must also be universal”’ (The Australian, 14 Jun. 2013).

And when Plato posed the rhetorical question, ‘Will our released [cave] prisoner hanker after these prizes or envy this power or honour? Won’t he be more likely to feel, as Homer says, that he would far rather be “a serf in the house of some landless man”, or indeed anything else in the world, than live and think as they [the power and glory hungry] do?’ (The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, 516), he too was recognising the great transformation that occurs when we go from living in the cave of denial, where we are each self-preoccupied trying to prove we are good and not bad all the time, to living free from all of that insecure ‘baggage’ in selfless support of the liberating understanding of why humans are fundamentally good and not bad.

And as to why we have ‘hanker[ed] after these prizes or envy this power or honour’, it has been explained that since materialistic luxuries, like glittering dresses, sparkling diamonds, bubbling Champagne, huge chandeliers, silver tea sets, big houses, swimming pools and pretentious cars, gave us (if we were lucky enough to afford them) the fanfare and glory we knew was due us, but which the world in its ignorance of our true goodness would not give us, materialism was one of the important means by which we could sustain our sense of self-worth while the upsetting search for the liberating understanding of why we are good and not bad was being carried out. In fact, when we only had our ability to win power, fame, glory and fortune (and, with that fortune/​money/​wealth/​capital, acquire materialistic luxuries) to sustain our sense of self-worth during that upsetting search, those relieving artificial forms of reinforcement were the only engines driving the human-condition-afflicted, insecure world—the only rewards sustaining the all-important search for self-understanding. This is why socialism, which sought to replace the engine of greed with the idealism of selfless cooperativeness before we had found self-understanding, couldn’t and didn’t work. So, while the egocentric, self-centred, individualistic, selfish, greedy, competitive, power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking existence was the inequality-producing, human-suffering-causing, Earth-destroying, ‘destructive force’ that Sir James described it as, it was also a ‘constructive force’. Yes, there was truth indeed in the saying ‘Greed is good.’ The public demonstrations against greed and capitalism that occurred in 2011 and 2012 were actually naive, pseudo idealistic, make-yourself-feel-good-but-don’t-solve-anything protests against the reality of the insecurity of life under the duress of the human condition. (Of course, this destructive and constructive, ‘bad and good’ aspect of our behaviour is the core paradox of the human condition that we are now at last able to explain and understand and thus bring to an end.)

Nevertheless, while the ‘selfishness’ of the old egocentric, self-centred, individualistic, selfish, greedy, capitalistic, competitive, materialistic way of living was the driving force that kept the all-important search for the relieving understanding of why humans are good and not bad going, and was thus a necessary and ‘constructive force’, it is at base, as Sir James said, the ‘ultimate’ ‘destructive force in a society’ because in the end only a selfless way of living is sustainable. Ultimately selfishness is destructive. No matter how much you try to control and regulate it, a society operating from a basis of selfishness will ultimately become dysfunctional. There was a limit to how long we could keep going under the drive of selfish greed. For human civilisation to survive, selflessness had to become the driving force in the world; ultimately, there had to be, Sir James’ ‘change of heart’. Yes, as many people have pointed out over the years, ‘it’s not that humans lack the ability to fix the world, it’s that they lack the will’, the ‘change of heart’, the preparedness to live selflessly.

So despite its precious contribution to the human race’s progress towards finding understanding of ourselves, the ultimate truth is that selfishness, especially insatiable materialistic, capitalistic greed, was poised to destroy the world. It was ‘insatiable’ because, as was explained in par. 896, as an artificial form of reinforcement, materialism was never going to genuinely make us feel we were good and not bad—only understanding of our fundamental goodness could and now does achieve that. The celebrated leader of Indian nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi, was making this point about the insatiability of trying to make ourselves feel good by surrounding ourselves with material luxury when he famously said, ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.’ And that often-repeated phrase that ‘Living well is the best revenge’ (attributed to the seventeenth century poet George Herbert) also recognises that while we lacked the real ‘revenge’ for the injustice of the human condition, namely reconciling understanding, materialism was ‘the best revenge’ we had. So, it is going to come as an enormous relief for the planet and for humankind—in fact, it is going to make all the difference—that, through the finding of understanding of why humans are good and not bad, we can finally let go of our selfish, egocentric, have-to-prove-our-worth, materialistic, power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking way of living and take up the transformed, human-condition-liberated, selfless existence.

Just to illustrate the change that is going to come to our materialistic way of living, in front of me is a teaspoon—well, the monetary value of all the human-glorifying, egocentric content and effort that has gone into its ornate, embellished design, extravagant silver plating and competitive salesmanship and marketing to sell it to me, etc, etc, could feed a starving person for a week! Almost everything I see in front of me—my elaborate watch, my fancy shirt, my sophisticated pen—is, in truth, obscenely extravagant in a human-condition-free world. All these items should really be re-designed so they are not so extravagant, and it won’t be long before I and everyone else in the world will be doing just that. In fact, I idealistically once designed and manufactured a full range of wooden furniture that was free of embellishment and artificial content before realising that for such integrity to be tolerated the human condition needed to be explained. Imagine if all the car makers in the world were to sit down together to design one extremely simple, embellishment-free, functional car that was made from the most environmentally-sustainable materials, how cheap to buy and humanity-and-Earth-considerate that vehicle would be. And imagine all the money that would be saved by not having different car makers duplicating their efforts, competing and trying to out-sell each other, and overall how much time that would liberate for all those people involved in the car industry to help those less fortunate and suffering in the world. Similarly, when each house is no longer designed to make an individualised, ego-reinforcing, status-symbol statement for its owners and all houses are constructed in a functionally satisfactory, simple way, imagine how much creative energy, labour, time and expense that will free up to care for the wellbeing of the less fortunate and the planet.

Again, while we needed the individualistic, materialistic world to sustain our sense of self-worth while we couldn’t establish it through understanding, now that we have established it that insecure way of living is obsoleted. If you watch Doug Lobban’s affirmation of the Transformed State, which can be viewed at <www.humancondition.com/​affirmations>, you will see how he let go of his egocentric mindset when he became transformed and that his only desire now is to fix the world, starting with his dysfunctional shower curtain! The finding of understanding of the human condition naturally brings about a whole new way of living. And there’s no dogma involved, like there was in socialism; as has been emphasised, this is about the end of dogma and also of faith, and the beginning of understanding.

It also has to be remembered that our species’ original, natural, instinctive way of behaving is in an unconditionally selfless, consider-the-larger-whole-above-yourself manner—as Rousseau famously said, ‘Mankind is naturally good’—so when we no longer have to behave inconsistently with that, then that original, natural inclination comes thundering through. Our whole natural, excited, the-world-is-as-it-should-be self bursts forth, as you can see occurring in Doug Lobban, and in others who have provided affirmations. And all you have to do to experience this amazing human-condition-free state is let your unnatural, false way of living go, remembering also that letting it go is no longer an act of weakness, but a strong, fully responsible way to behave.

The story of Lei Feng, a hero during China’s cultural revolution, provides an example of the satisfaction and excitement and meaning that can be gained from selflessly serving the larger whole. As has been emphasised, communism was an extremely dangerous false start to the human-condition-free world but, nevertheless, we can learn from Feng’s actions. During Mao Tse-tung’s cultural revolution (which took place between 1966 and 1976), a Chinese newspaper published the posthumous diary of one of its readers, Feng, a young communist soldier whose job it was to sweep one of the city’s streets. The diary proved so powerful it was printed as a small book that was eventually circulated throughout China and the rest of the world. The gist of the diary was that Feng was happy doing his job because he saw himself as a cog in a giant machine, instrumental in helping the whole machine to work. He wrote, ‘A man’s usefulness to the revolutionary cause is like a cog in a machine. Though a cog is small, its use is beyond estimation. I am willing to be a cog’ (The Australian, 7 Mar. 1987). In essence, Feng wrote to tell of the satisfaction he felt at being able to serve. Serving is our original, natural way of behaving, and now that it has become the legitimate and responsible way to behave, it can again become the great joy in everyone’s life.

So while it will take time, in fact, a few generations, for humans to sufficiently absorb the understanding of the human condition to the degree needed for our underlying insecurity to be fully ameliorated—and thus the need for some artificial reinforcement from materialism, and some artificial relief through escapism, self-distraction and sexual adventure, etc, etc, to completely disappear—once you adopt the Transformed State, while you haven’t eliminated the insecure state of the human condition within yourself, you have completely changed your mind’s focus from living an ego-embattled, selfish life to living selflessly; you have had the ‘change of heart’, the fundamental change of direction, that is so urgently needed to fix the world.

Importantly, the more this understanding and associated transformation catches on, the easier it will be for people to move from the old insecure, ego-centric way of living to the new, secure, ego-less way of living. The egocentric way of living has had such a powerful hold on humans because without understanding of the human condition all that we had was the superficial reinforcement we gained from seeking power, fame, fortune and glory, but now that relieving understanding has been found then that old egocentric way of living will quickly lose its power—so quickly, in fact, that everyone will be amazed by how swiftly their need for and attachment to the old artificial forms of reinforcement falls away.

So, what I have been talking about is the transformation that the current, transitional generations can take up, from living a selfish, egocentric, have-to-prove-that-I-am-good-and-not-bad existence to embracing the new, selfless, egocentricity-obsoleted, don’t-have-to-prove-that-I-am-good, liberated, exhilarated and empowered, Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living. Of course, in the future when human-condition-extinct generations appear who are fully integrated, harmonious, upset-free, all-sensitive and all-loving towards each other, the world and, indeed, the whole universe, they will be properly termed ‘Universal Beings’, at which point even greater relief will course through our planet. But the point is, the great ‘change of heart’ is on—the power of love is finally able to replace the love of power! The human race is on its way home, back to soundness, security of self and real love of one another. Imagine when we no longer have to dress to impress, deceive and disguise—especially when women no longer have to be preoccupied with being sex objects—how much freedom that is going to unleash, and how much time, energy and resources it will save? Imagine when communication technology is used only to spread reconciling truth rather than truthless, alienated, escapist, superficial drivel, as it is currently doing—how much relief that is going to bring to humans and thus our world? End the human condition and we end all the big problems of the world—and thus all the little problems too.

So there are degrees of selflessness that we will now be capable of as we move from the old egocentric world to the new egocentricity-obsoleted, Transformed Lifeforce State, before our species eventually arrives at the future human-condition-extinct, Universal Beings State—however, it is the fundamental shift in direction, and the rapid changes that accompany it, that is all-important. The point is the immense power and potential that cooperative selflessness has to solve all of our problems. Consider, for instance, if we were all selfless the AIDS epidemic could be solved overnight, because all it would take would be for everyone to agree to be tested for the AIDS virus and those who tested positive to agree to not have sex with anyone who didn’t also have the virus. When everyone is selfless we will be able to solve the global warming problem almost overnight by everyone agreeing to hold every third breath or something—that’s obviously not going to work, but the point is we will be able to work together selflessly to do whatever it takes! In fact, the most effective mechanism we have available to control our environmental impact is our ability to curb our numbers by not reproducing as much, at least until we have stabilised all the threats to the world that our exploding population is causing. Under the duress of the human condition, we often had children for selfish reasons—to egocentrically perpetuate our family name; or to distract ourselves from our own psychologically distressed lives; or, if we live in a dysfunctional society that isn’t able to care for its elderly, to ensure we have someone to look after and provide for us in our old age—the result of which is that there is a plague of humans on Earth, in the sense that a ‘plague’ is ‘a widespread affliction or calamity’ (The Free Dictionary; see <www.wtmsources.com/164>). With the control the contraceptive pill and other measures allow us to have over our reproduction it is obviously very irresponsible to have children if it means the destruction of our world. We have the means now, both practically and, with these understandings, psychologically, to love our world, so it’s madness to choose self-destruction. The world needs—and we are now in a position to supply—love, not selfishness. Controlling our numbers will certainly be important in rehabilitating both humans and our environment. In fact, we in the WTM have already employed this device to help establish these understandings and the new world they can bring about. As mentioned in par. 608, we decided not to have children so that we would have all the resources we could possibly muster to ensure these precious understandings of the human condition would survive the initial onslaught of vilification, persecution and attempted repression for daring to address the issue of the human condition. Certainly our tiny band of 50 people would not have been able to undertake the legal actions we had to take against two of the biggest media organisations in Australia to redress their ferociously vilifying publications about us if we had children to nurture and support. It is the capacity to be selfless that has been missing from the human situation. Basically, as soon as humans no longer have to be selfishly preoccupied with having to artificially try to relieve themselves of the insecurity caused by their human condition through winning as much power, fame, fortune and glory as they possibly can, and are thus at last able to be fully concerned about the well-being of others, all the suffering in the world will be able to be brought to an end. The key rehabilitating effect for humanity and our planet is our ability now to fulfil Sir James Darling’s instruction to transition from living selfishly to living selflessly, to have that ‘change of heart’.

Understandably, this power of selflessness has not been something humans wanted to acknowledge or think about because it has been too confronting of our present massively embattled, ego-hungry, desperately-needing-self-gratification-and-glorification, selfish, greedy, materialistic existence. We have had to live an alienated, escapist, materialistic life because we haven’t been able to live a secure, honest, spiritualistic life, but now, with the human condition explained, we can. And now that we can afford to think about it, all manner of insights into the power of selfless cooperation become accessible, including those provided through observing the dynamics of ant, bee and termite colonies; truly, as King Solomon advised, ‘Go to the ant…​consider its ways and be wise’ (Bible, Prov. 6:6). The 2004 award-winning documentary Ants—Nature’s Secret Power admitted the power of selfless cooperation when it concluded that ‘The secret of ant societies is their cooperation…​[it’s what has enabled them to] act as a superorganism…[and become] nature’s true world power’ (produced by Adi Mayer Films and ORF). In his book The Soul of the White Ant, Eugène Marais wrote that ‘the termite…​never rests or sleeps’ (1937, p.61 of 154). The extreme selflessness of bees was also made apparent in a documentary that reported that ‘when bees become sick they sacrifice themselves and leave the hive to die to prevent infecting the rest of the colony’, and how ‘in the summer, the workers only live around 30 days because they literally work themselves to death’ (Silence of the Bees, National Geographic Channel, 2007). I’m certainly not suggesting that we go beyond self-sacrifice to self-elimination as a strategy for solving problems, but these examples do make it clear how powerful a force selflessness is. Our ability now to leave behind the insecure, self-preoccupied, ego-centric, selfish state of the human condition makes possible the true reparation of our whole world; it is us self-adjusting, conscious humans who—now that we no longer have to live an insecure, selfish existence and can live a selfless, cooperative existence—can now become ‘nature’s true world power’.

Although this new world for humans, which the World Transformation Movement has been established to facilitate, will, as has been stated, have a slow beginning because humans initially find it difficult even taking in or ‘hearing’ discussion about the human condition, once the WTM is discovered, word of it and what it offers every human and the world will spread like wildfire—as the exceptional denial-free thinking prophet Teilhard de Chardin wrote, ‘The Truth has to only appear once…​for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze’ (Let Me Explain, 1966; tr. René Hague et al., 1970, p.159 of 189). Indeed, all the quotes from prophets, songwriters and poets included in par. 218 testify to the nature and consequences of this information finally appearing in the world. Yes, before long we will be taking this information to the world—marketing our own human-condition-free, world-saving products, providing our own all-exciting and meaningful, denial-free, honest, human-condition-understood films, documentaries and books, launching our own TV station—and our website will be the biggest in the world, bigger than Google or any other existing site. And this is not deluded hubris, or wild exaggeration, it is simply the logical truth of what is able to happen when the dignifying, redeeming and healing understanding of the human condition is finally found.

Sir Laurens van der Post once said that ‘The carrier of new life, the carrier of renewal in societies, has always started with a lone voice, with one lonely individual somewhere taking upon himself in terms of his own life wherever it’s challenged, the start of renewal and living the “being” with which he has been charged in a world of “having”; and it always starts like that before it becomes a group…​[and then] a community—which is not yet, but which is coming’ (presentation by Laurens van der Post at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 9 Dec. 1982; see <www.wtmsources.com/163>). Yes, the bottom line truth is that only the finding of the reconciling understanding of the human condition, and the ‘change of heart’ from living by the doctrine of ‘having’ to living by the transformed doctrine of ‘being’ that the understanding finally makes possible, can save the human race. The World Transformation Movement provides the only path forward for humankind—anything else represents ever-increasing, excruciating, unthinkable suffering and ultimately doom for our species.

So, what everyone can now do and should now do is become a member of the World Transformation Movement and adopt the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living—because when this fabulously empowering breakthrough explanation spreads like de Chardin anticipated it would, the transformation it allows will become the main objective of all nations. Then, with everyone’s help, we will each be able to rehabilitate and make environmentally sustainable our realm—our home, our community, our region, our country, and then our world. For 2 million years humanity has strained with every fibre of its being to achieve this great breakthrough from ignorance to enlightenment, and for those of us living now our wonderful opportunity is to implement the rewards of that achievement. Here comes the golden sunshine revolution!

And as I have previously said, when I speak of rewards, the main personal ‘reward’ for humans now is the anticipation and the excitement of being effectively free of the human condition—the joy and happiness of being liberated from the burden of your insecurities, self-preoccupations and devious strategising; the awesome meaning and power of finally being genuinely aligned with the truth and actually participating in the magic true world; the wonderful empathy and equality of goodness and fellowship that understanding of the human condition now allows you to feel for your fellow humans; the freedom now to effectively focus on repairing the world; and, above all, the radiant aliveness from the optimism that comes with knowing our species’ march through hell has finally ended. Yes, this information will empty all our jails; redeem, reform and transform everyone. Better than that, it will transfigure all humans, make them glow with pure joy. Our species’ redemption is so fabulous it will make humans fly through the air—well, almost! These all-loving-of-ourselves understandings are just pure wonderfulness, joy beyond description!