Chapter 9:11 The ‘pathway of the sun’

The other aspect of The Emperor’s New Clothes fable that needs explaining is the significance of the ‘innocent’ ‘child’ breaking the spell of all the denial and delusion in the Emperor’s court. The overall situation is that humans have been practising denial for some 2 million years, ever since we as a species became fully conscious and had to defend ourselves without understanding of why we are good and not bad. This means that this practice of denial has been refined and added to for so long now that it has achieved a state of near complete block-out of any truths that bring the issue of the human condition into focus, which, as has been revealed in this book, is a phenomenal amount of truth. It was as though our planet had become enclosed in a solid steel casing through which no light, no truth, could enter. Every time some light crept through a crack, the great welding machines of denial would come out and weld a slab of steel over the offending fracture. In the end it was a truly massive edifice of denial, so strongly reinforced that it seemed no one would ever be able to break through it, leaving the human race to perish inside its terrible darkness. The great fortress of denial did seem impenetrable, unassailable, BUT NOT SO TO OUR SOUL, which an ‘innocent’ ‘child’ is the perfect representation of, for it has always had so much love that it was able to lie in wait for the time when science would find sufficient understanding of the mechanisms of the workings of our world for it, that little innocent child of loving, denial-free soundness, to rise up and break through that steel case and liberate the human race from its incarceration.

The imagery of a child one day liberating the human race appears in many mythologies. The biblical story of David and Goliath is actually a metaphorical description of this situation where the whole army of humanity is besieged by the monstrous, all-pervading and all-powerful hold that denial has on the world, which the ‘nine feet tall’ giant Goliath represents, when David, who is ‘only a boy’, ‘come[s] against you [Goliath] in the name of the Lord Almighty [in the form of Integrative Meaning-accepting, denial-free, unresigned thinking]’ ‘and kill[s] him’, allowing everyone to celebrate their liberation ‘with singing and dancing’ (1 Sam. 17-18). Yes, in the mythology of Don Quixote (in par. 67), a human-condition-avoiding, resigned human was always going to be ‘unhorsed’ when it came to slaying the ‘outrageous giant’ of ignorance-of-the-fact-of-our-species’-fundamental-goodness, which in that story is symbolised by a huge windmill. The truth is that in the end, strength of soul, not strength of body, has always been the best killer of giants. Of course, in addition to the story of David and Goliath, the Bible contains Isaiah’s description of how ‘a little child will lead them [humanity]’ to the state where the concepts of ‘evil’ and ‘good’—and, in the process, where the more corrupted and the more innocent—will be reconciled; to where, he says, the ‘wolf will live with the lamb’ (Isa. 11:6).

In the great European legend of King Arthur, the wounded (alienated) king whose realm was devastated (humans unavoidably made their world an expression of their own madnesses) could only have his wound healed, and his realm restored, by the arrival in his kingdom of a simple, naive boy. The boy’s name is Parsifal, which, depending on which of the numerous sources you refer to, means either ‘guileless fool’ or ‘pure fool’. To the alienated, only a naive ‘fool’ would dare approach and grapple with the confronting truths about our divisive condition. The Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson offered this rendition of the legend, saying firstly that ‘Alienation is the current term for it [the wounded state of humans today]. We are an alienated people, an existentially lonely people; we have the Fisher King wound’ (He, Understanding Masculine Psychology, 1974, p.12 of 97). He then described how ‘The court fool had prophesied that the Fisher King would be healed when a wholly innocent fool arrives in the court. In an isolated country a boy lives with his widowed mother [since the male ego can be especially oppressive of the innocent souls of children, saying that the mother is widowed provides recognition that the child wasn’t oppressed by an especially egocentric father]…​His mother had taken him to this faraway country and raised him in primitive [isolated, innocent, unconditionally-loving, alienation-free, sound, soulful] circumstances. He wears homespun clothes, has no schooling, asks no questions. He is a simple, naive youth’ (p.90). Johnson went on to recount that in the myth it is this boy, Parsifal, who, when he becomes an adult, is able to heal the Fisher King’s wound of alienation, so that ‘the land and all its people can live in peace and joy’ (p.94).

In contemporary mythology, the 1984 film The NeverEnding Story, which was based on the novel of the same name by Michael Ende, describes how a world called ‘Fantasia’ is under threat from a force called ‘The Nothing’—a void of darkness that engulfs everything in its path, which is, of course, a perfect description for the current alienated condition of humanity. The people of Fantasia end up enlisting a ‘boy’ to help put an end to ‘The Nothing’. During the great saga that ensues, the boy’s companion, a warrior named Atreyu, must pass through a ‘Magic Mirror Gate’ in which he ‘has to face his true self’. While ‘everyone thinks’ ‘that [self-confrontation] won’t be too hard’, it is pointed out that, to the contrary, ‘kind people find out that they are cruel. Brave men discover that they are really cowards! Confronted by their true selves, most men run away screaming!’ In the end, when ‘The Nothing’ has consumed all but one grain of Fantasia’s sand (indicating the human race has entered the end play stage of terminal alienation), it is the boy’s wishes and imagination that is able to restore Fantasia to its former glory; in the final hour, our fantastic world is saved. So in this tale the crux problem of the human condition and the exposure that comes with the truth about ourselves, as well as the innocence required to resolve these issues, are fully identified.

In his astonishingly prophetic 1940 essay titled The Almond Trees, the literature Nobel Laureate Albert Camus also recognised this truth that the task of finding the understanding of the human condition that would ‘heal’ humanity’s ‘Fisher King wound’ of ‘alienation’, restore ‘Fantasia’ from ‘The Nothing’ to its former glory, was going to require an ‘innocent’ person, symbolised by a ‘boy’ or ‘youth’ from ‘an isolated’ ‘faraway country’ that had not been overly exposed to the horrifically upset, ‘alienated’, ‘existentially lonely’ almost universal state of humans now. Camus wrote that, despite all the corrupted upset in the world, there are still ‘those shining [innocent] lands where so much strength is still untouched’ that can produce the innocent and sound ‘whiteness and its sap’ ‘strength of character’ needed to ‘stand up to’ all ‘The Nothing’, alienated, fraudulent evasion and denial and last ‘just long enough to prepare the fruit’—find the world-saving liberating understanding of the human condition. The following is an extract from what Camus wrote (underlinings are my emphasis): ‘All we then need to know is what we want. And what indeed we want is never again to bow down before the sword, never more to declare force to be in the right when it is not serving the mind. This, it is true, is an endless task. But we are here to pursue it. I do not have enough faith in reason to subscribe to a belief in progress, or to any philosophy of History. But I do at least believe that men have never ceased to grow in the knowledge of their destiny. We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as men is to find those few first principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.

Let us then know our aims, standing steadfast on the mind, even if force dons the mask of ideas or of comfort to lure us from our task. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is ending. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if this world were to collapse, it will not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. “Tragedy”, Lawrence said, “ought to be a great kick at misery.” This is a healthy and immediately applicable idea. There are many things today deserving of that kick.

When I lived in Algiers, I would wait patiently all winter because I knew that in the course of one night, one cold, pure February night, the almond trees of the Vallée des Consuls would be covered with white flowers. I was then filled with delight as I saw this fragile snow stand up to all the rain and resist the wind from the sea. Yet every year it lasted, just long enough to prepare the fruit.

This is not a symbol. We shall not win our happiness with symbols. We shall need something more weighty. All I mean is that sometimes, when life weighs too heavily in this Europe still overflowing with its misery, I turn towards those shining lands where so much strength is still untouched. I know them too well not to realize that they are the chosen lands where courage and contemplation can live in harmony. The contemplation of their example then teaches me that if we would save the mind we must pass over its power to groan and exalt its strength and wonder. This world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow in it. It has utterly surrendered to that evil which Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness. Let us not contribute to it. It is vain to weep over the mind, it is enough to labour for it.

But where are the conquering virtues of the mind? This same Nietzsche listed them as the mortal enemies of the spirit of heaviness. For him they are the strength of character, taste, the “world”, classical happiness, severe pride, the cold frugality of the wise. These virtues, more than ever, are necessary today, and each can choose the one that suits him best. Before the vastness of the undertaking, let no one in any case forget strength of character. I do not mean the one accompanied on electoral platforms by frowns and threats. But the one that, through the virtue of its whiteness and its sap, stands up to all the winds from the sea. It is that which, in the winter for the world, will prepare the fruit’ (Summer, 1954, pp.33-35 of 87).

To examine what Camus has so beautifully articulated, he began by stating that the fundamental priority and responsibility of humanity is to solve our human condition, liberate the human mind from its underlying upset and, by so doing, replace the need for ‘force’ to control our upset, troubled natures with the ability to explain, understand and thus pacify that upset. He acknowledged the human condition—that ‘we live in contradiction’—and that we have to live in denial of this condition—that ‘we must refuse this contradiction’. He also acknowledged the reality of the current extremely upset, alienated, soul-disconnected, depressed human state—of ‘nations poisoned by the misery of this century…[a world] utterly surrendered to that evil which Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness’—and went on to emphasise the need for the clarifying, first principle reconciling biological explanation to ‘overcome our condition’, saying we need ‘to find those first few principles’ that will ‘stitch up what has been torn apart’.

Again, of special significance here is Camus’ acknowledgment that these answers were not going to come from the ivory towers of intellectualdom (as Professor Prosen put it in his Introduction), but from outlying realms where there is still sufficient innocence, ‘strength still untouched’, ‘whiteness and its sap’, to overcome all the evasion, denial and dishonesty, to ‘stand up to all the winds from the sea’, and find the reconciling understanding of the human condition, ‘prepare the fruit’. And, about where the answers about ourselves would emerge, Camus wrote, ‘I turn towards those shining lands where so much strength is still untouched. I know them too well not to realize that they are the chosen lands where courage [to defy all the dishonest denial in the world] and contemplation [denial-free, honest thought] can live in harmony.’

Australia has been—at least up until very recent times when communication technology especially, but also immigration and multiculturalism, have ended our isolation and spread ‘alienation’ everywhere here as well—just such a ‘shining land…​where so much strength is still untouched’. As the renowned English author D.H. Lawrence said in his 1923 novel Kangaroo, ‘You feel free in Australia…​There is a great relief in the atmosphere, a relief from tension, from pressure. An absence of control or will or form. The sky is open above you, and the air is open around you’ (p.15 of 428). And, in fact, ‘courage and contemplation’ have been able to ‘live in harmony’ here ‘just long enough to prepare the fruit’, to find the understanding of the human condition that liberates the human race! And, moreover, the anticipation of this fantastic breakthrough occurring here has been very strong in Australian mythology.

 

 

While Australia has an ancient mythology that is grounded in the Dreamtime stories of the Aborigines, we also have a powerful contemporary mythology—at the heart of which is ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s 1895 poem The Man From Snowy River; in fact, in recognition of the poem’s significance to our nation, Australia’s $10 note features Paterson’s image and, in microprint, all the many words to The Man From Snowy River. Ostensibly, the poem is about a great and potentially dangerous ride undertaken by mountain horsemen to recapture an escaped thoroughbred that had joined the brumbies (wild horses) in the mountain ranges, but what the poem is really recognising is that in Australia’s isolation and relative innocence there would emerge sufficient soundness to defeat denial and put together the liberating explanation of the human condition. In the poem, an inspired stockman called Clancy persuades the station owner, Harrison, to let a ‘stripling’ ‘lad’—a boy—on his ‘hardy mountain pony’ join their expedition to retrieve the escaped thoroughbred; Clancy argues, ‘I warrant he’ll be with us when he’s wanted at the end.’ Again, a boy is the embodiment of the innocence that is needed ‘at the end’ of humanity’s heroic journey of accumulating sufficient scientific understandings of the mechanisms of our world to assemble the denial-free explanation of the human condition. The poem describes how the boy rides beyond where the rest of the horsemen (the resigned, alienated adults) dare to go, and follows the brumbies down the ‘terrible descent’ of a steep mountain where (if you weren’t sound) ‘any slip was death’ (to confront the unconfrontable issue of the human condition) and recaptures the thoroughbred from the impenetrable mountains (retrieves the escaped truth from the depths of denial). As the poem says, the boy ‘ran them [the brumbies]…​till their sides were white with foam / He followed like a bloodhound on their track / Till they halted, cowed and beaten—then he turned their heads for home’ (he fought all the alienation and its denial that has been enslaving this world to a standstill until it finally gave up the truth).

Paterson was even more explicit in his anticipation of the liberating understanding of the human condition emerging from the Australian bush (innocent countryside) in another of his works from 1889, his aptly titled poem Song of the Future. Using the analogy of the pioneers who finally forged the path through our eastern coastal mountain range (appropriately enough called ‘The Great Dividing Range’) that had barred the way to Australia’s interior during the early days of European settlement, Paterson envisaged ‘the future’ heroic, Australian-led expedition humanity would take from the alienated bondage of the human condition to the fertile, sun/​understanding-drenched freedom of a human-condition-resolved new world. These are the poem’s key verses: ‘Tis strange that in a land [Australia] so strong, so strong and bold in mighty youth [innocence], we have [in 1889] no poet’s voice of truth to sing for us a wondrous song [explain the human condition]…​[However,] we yet may find achievements grand within the bushman’s quiet life. Lift ye your faces to the sky, ye far blue mountains of the west…​Tis hard to feel that years went by before the pioneers broke through your rocky heights and walls of stone, and made your secrets all their own [broke through the wall of denial blocking access to the truth about the human condition]. For years the fertile western plains were hid behind your sullen [alienated] walls, your cliffs and crags…​Between the mountains and the sea, like Israelites with staff in hand, the people waited restlessly: They looked towards the mountains old and saw the sunsets come and go with gorgeous golden afterglow that made the west a fairyland, and marvelled what that west might be of which such wondrous tales were told…​At length the hardy pioneers by rock and crag found out the way, and woke with voices of today, a silence kept for years and years [brought an end to the silence of the resigned world of denial]…The way is won! The way is won! And straightway from the barren coast there came a westward-marching host, that aye and ever onward prest with eager faces to the west along the pathway of the sun…Could braver histories unfold than this bush story, yet untold—the story of their westward march [liberation from the human condition]…And it may be that we who live in this new land apart, beyond the hard old world grown fierce and fond and bound by precedent and bond [bound up in sophisticated, intellectual denial], may read the riddle [of the human condition] right [synthesise the liberating truth from science’s hard won insights into our world] and give new hope to those who dimly see [those who are embedded in blind denial/​alienation], that all things may be yet for good and teach the world at length to be one vast united brotherhood.’ ‘Banjo’ Paterson was certainly an extraordinarily prophetic and gifted writer! (I might mention that the gifted editor of my writing, World Transformation Movement [WTM] Founding Member Fiona Cullen-Ward, is related to ‘Banjo’.)

Henry Lawson, who was introduced in par. 110 when his poem about Resignation, The Voice from Over Yonder, was included, is another of Australia’s greatest poets, and he too anticipated that the answer to the human condition would be found here. Making the same insights, employing the same comparisons and using the same imagery as Paterson’s poems, Lawson wrote in his 1892 poem, the also aptly titled When the Bush Begins to Speak, that ‘They know us not in England yet, their pens are overbold. We’re seen in fancy pictures that are fifty years too old. They think we are a careless race—a childish race, and weak. They’ll know us yet in England, when the bush begins to speak [when innocence makes its contribution]…​“The leaders that will be”, the men of southern destiny, are not all found in cities that are builded by the sea. They learn to love Australia by many a western creek [while Australia as a whole has been relatively sheltered and thus innocent, it is from the Australian inland countryside or ‘bush’, rather than from the cities, that exceptional innocence will appear]. They’ll know them yet in England, when the bush begins to speak…All ready for the struggle, and waiting for the change, the army of our future lies encamped beyond the [coastal] range. Australia, for her patriots, will not have far to seek, they’ll know her yet in England when the bush begins to speak…We’ll find the peace and comfort that our fathers could not find, or some shall strike the good old blow that leaves a mark behind. We’ll find the Truth and Liberty [the truth about the human condition that brings liberating understanding to humanity] our fathers came to seek, or let them know in England when the bush [innocence] begins to speak.’

And in yet another extraordinarily prescient work (which again has the same insights, comparisons and imagery), the Australian poet A.D. Hope also wrote of the role of the relatively innocent continent of Australia in delivering the liberating understanding of the human condition. In his 1931 poem, actually titled Australia, Hope wrote of ‘A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey…​Without songs, architecture, history…​And her five cities, like five teeming sores, each drains her, a vast parasite robber-state, where second-hand Europeans pullulate timidly on the edge of alien shores. Yet there are some like me turn gladly home from the lush jungle of [alienated, dishonest, intellectual] modern thought, to find the Arabian desert of the human mind, hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets [innocent, unresigned, denial-free, truthful, profound, effective thinkers] come. Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare, springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes the learned doubt, the [dishonest, intellectual as opposed to the honest, instinctual] chatter of cultured apes which is called civilization over there [in England].’ In his award-winning 1979 book, A Woman of the Future, the Australian author David Ireland expressed the same awareness as Hope as to where these all-important answers would originate and he used the same metaphor of the desert, recognising that Australians hide along the coast, distanced from the truth that exists in the centre of their being/​country: ‘The future is somehow…​somewhere in the despised and neglected desert, the belly of the country, not the coastal rind. The secret is in the emptiness. The message is the thing we have feared, the thing we have avoided, that we have looked at and skirted. The secret will transform us, and give us the heart to transform emptiness. If we go there, if we go there and listen, we will hear the voice of the eternal. The eternal says that we are at the beginning of [real, non-alienated] time’ (p.349). The prophet Isaiah was another who used the metaphor of the desert for that neglected part of ourselves from which the healing answers would come, saying, ‘A voice of one calling: “In the desert prepare the way of the Lord [truth]; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it”’ (Isa. 40:3–5).

In more recent Australian mythology, the Australian-made animated film Babe: Pig in the City (1998) tells the story of a little pig who, in order to save his farm, which symbolises the true world, has to take his innocence into the very heart of alienation, the city, and defy and defeat the alienation to release the captured soul of humanity, represented by the innocent animals being held captive there. To symbolise that the hazardous undertaking will require toughness as well as innocence, the pig wears a spiked collar into battle, the collar being donated by the bulldog who recognises he hasn’t got the sufficient innocence/​soundness to do the job himself. Interestingly, the Australian production company that made the Babe movies, Kennedy Miller, also produced the late 1970s and early 1980s Mad Max trilogy, which features the same theme of unrecognised (because the world practises evading and denying truthful unevasiveness) innocence taking on the alienated world and leading humanity out of bondage from the darkness of that blind, alienated world. To quote a review of the film Mad Max (or The Road Warrior as the film was titled in the USA), Max is ‘a hero in the classical tradition—a figure whose origins lie in the ancient myths; his role, in common with classical heroes, is of a man from nowhere destined to lead society into the next generation’ (Sunday Telegraph, 21 Mar. 1982). Yes, these liberating answers were not going to come from the ivory towers of the truth-avoiding mechanistic scientific establishment, but from, again as Professor Prosen put it, the deepest of deep left field, from way out on the periphery of the great battle humanity has been waging against ignorance.

Sir Laurens van der Post, that exceptional denial-free-thinking prophet of our time, clearly recognised the truth of innocence lying in wait for science to do its job so that it could lead humanity home when he wrote that ‘Whatever happens, I shall be there in the end, for I, child that I am, am mother of your future self’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.167 of 275). Yes, it is guidance from the long-repressed innocent, soulful, conscience-infused clarity that humans had before the upset, denial-based, alienated human condition developed that was needed to synthesise the liberating truth from science’s hard won insights into the workings of our world. As was explained in chapter 2:4, evasive, whole-view-avoiding, reductionist, mechanistic science had to complete the difficult task of finding all the ‘pieces of the jigsaw’ of the explanation of the human condition before soul-guided, whole-view-confronting, denial-free thinking could come along ‘in the end’ (or, as Paterson wrote, ‘at the end’) and piece the ‘jigsaw’ together. As emphasised in pars 296 and 1147, science is the real ‘messiah’ or liberator of humanity—it made the explanation of the human condition that is presented in chapter 3 possible. Historically, people have talked about a ‘second coming’ of innocence, but in the vast spectrum of alienation that inevitably developed in humanity’s heroic battle to defeat the ignorance of our instinctive self or soul and establish that humans are good and not bad, there have always been an extremely rare few individuals who have been sufficiently nurtured with alienation-free, unconditional love in their infancy and childhood to be sound and secure enough in self to confront and think truthfully about the human condition, but until the discipline of science found understanding of the difference in the way genes and nerves process information, such upset-free, innocent individuals could not make their final contribution and assemble the explanation of the human condition from those understandings. Science was tasked with the tedious, hard work of finding the clues that make explanation of the human condition possible—and it has to be remembered that science is only the peak expression of the courageous effort that every human has exerted to defeat ignorance. In reality, it is ‘on the shoulders’ of 2 million years of human struggle against our soul’s oppression that understanding of our species’ fundamental goodness has finally been found—but our soul was needed ‘in the end’ to assemble the actual explanation of the human condition from those clues. It is like a game of gridiron football where the team as a whole, with one exception, does all the hard work, gaining yardage down the field. Finally, when the side gets within kicking distance of the goal posts, a specialist kicker, who until then has played no part, is brought onto the field. While he—in his unsoiled attire—kicks the winning goal, the win clearly belongs to the team of exhausted players who did all the ground work. It is science, backed up by humanity as a whole, that is the real liberator of the human race from ignorance as to our species’ fundamental goodness.

The point here is that it is true that exceptional innocence has had a crucial concluding role to play in humanity’s journey but, most importantly, such an innocent is no more special or worthy or wonderful than any other human. If anything, they are less worthy because they haven’t been involved in humanity’s heroic battle as much as everyone else; but, in any case, viewing those who have been more involved in the battle as more worthy is not accurate either, because no one could choose where they were going to be born/​positioned on that battlefield. Yes, the fundamental insight that understanding of the human condition gives us is that in the epic battle to defeat ignorance that the human race has been waging for some 2 million years, there was going to be a vast spectrum of exhaustion/​alienation but in this great army of warriors ALL HUMANS ARE EQUALLY GOOD, SPECIAL AND WONDERFUL. Since upset resulted from fighting humanity’s battle against ignorance, upset, exhausted alienation is a heroic state, not a bad, inferior or lesser state, and, by the same logic, relatively alienation-free innocence that resulted from having escaped encounter with all the upset on that battlefield is not in any way better, or in some way more special or more deserving or more wonderful than the overly upset, embattled, alienated state. The differentiation where some people are viewed as bad and others as good has gone forever from our discourse; it doesn’t exist anymore; it has no basis of truth or fact. Understanding of the human condition completely and permanently eliminates the concept of ‘good and evil’. Again, while instinct and intellect had particular concluding roles to play (the soul/​instinct had to synthesise the explanation of the human condition from the insights into the workings of our world that science/​knowledge/​intellect had to first find), the truth is that it is the human race as a whole, all the efforts of every human who has ever lived, that has liberated our species from the horror of the human condition. Understanding the human condition allows us to know that we are all absolutely wonderful, utterly sublime, completely lovable, and that having all fully contributed to humanity’s successful battle against ignorance we are all fabulous heroes of the story of life on Earth. So now we, THE HUMAN RACE AS A WHOLE, should give ourselves the biggest party ever. Everyone everywhere is going to be hoppin’ and boppin’, rompin’ and stompin’, hollerin’ and howlin’, movin’ and groovin’, rollickin’ and rollin’, hootin’ and tootin’, jumping and jiving, jolting and somersaulting, skipping and skating, shaking and shimmering, hugging and laughing, embracing and gyrating, twisting and shouting, dancing and singing, slipping and sliding, jamming and slamming, ripping and roaring, whirling and twirling and reelin’ and rockin’. Yes, ‘allow freedom to ring…from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city’ because ‘all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics’, the more innocent and the more upset, the short and the tall, the big and the small, those who are left-handed and those who are right-handed, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker, EVERYONE, can ‘join hands and sing’, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last [from unjust condemnation]!’ (Martin Luther King Jr, ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, 28 Aug. 1963).

 

 

In about 1969 (when I was around 23 years old) I wrote a poem that clearly anticipated the excitement of this time of humanity’s liberation. The poem indicates just how strong my vision has always been of one day being able to find the liberating understanding of the human condition (and note how similar these words are to those of Joel, Hosea and Isaiah in pars 1257-1260): ‘This is a story you see, just a story—but for you / Um—I remember a long time ago in the distant future a timeless day / a sunlit cloudless day when all things were fine / when we all slow-danced our way to breakfast in the sun // You see the day awoke with music / Can you imagine one thousand horses slow galloping towards you across a vast plain / and we loved that day so much / We all danced like Isadora Duncan through the morning light // We skipped and twirled and spun about / Fairies were there like dragonflies over a pool / Little girls with wings they hovered and flew about / their small voices you could hear / You see it was that kind of morning // When the afternoon arrived it was big and bold and beautiful / In worn out jeans and bouncing breasts we began / to fight—our way—into another day / into something new—to jive our way into the night / from sunshine into a thunderstorm // We all took our place, rank upon rank we came / as an army with Hendrix out in front / and the music busted the horizon into shreds / By God we broke the world apart / The pieces were of different colours and there were so many people / We danced in coloured dust, we left in sweat no room at all / We had a ball in gowns of grey and red / There were things that happened that nobody knew / Bigger and better, I had written on my sweater / Where there was sky there was music, huge clouds of it / and there were storms of gold with coloured lights / It was so good we cried tears into our eyes / In a tug of war of love we had no strength left at all / Dear God we cried but he only sighed and / whispered strength through leaves of laughter // On and on we came in bold ranks of silvered gold / to lead a world that didn’t know to somewhere it didn’t care / It couldn’t last, it had to end and yet it had an endless end / We were so happy in balloons of coloured bubbles that wouldn’t bust / and we couldn’t, couldn’t quench our lust / There we were all together for ever and ever / and tomorrow had better beware because / when we’ve wept and slept we will be there to shake its bloody neck.’

Regarding this vision, I should explain how, when we were young children and still thinking completely honestly and thus effectively, we knew the truth about our destiny; we didn’t know exactly what would happen in our adult lives, but we did know the general course our future would take as a result of how hurt our original instinctive self or soul was in our infancy and early childhood. As children we have a clear awareness of the imperfections or otherwise of our circumstances and can think truthfully about the consequences of those circumstances. If they were not ideal, as was the case in nearly everyone’s lives, then we rapidly began to stop thinking about those unhappy consequences, but the point is there was a time in everyone’s life during early childhood when we knew the basic path our life was going to take, and in that brief time of total honesty and thus insightfulness we all knew of the immense problem facing humanity of the dilemma of the human condition, the issue of the extreme imperfection of human life, and knowing that crux problem we made an assessment of the extent and nature of our contribution to its solution. For the very rare exceptionally fortunate, those exceptionally loved and nurtured in their infancy and early childhood, they knew they could make an exceptional contribution and the precise nature of it. When we spoke of people being driven by a ‘vision’ this is essentially what we were recognising—an awareness in someone of them having the opportunity to make a critical contribution to the underlying battle humanity has been engaged in of bringing understanding to the human condition. And because people with such guiding visions were carrying such a strong awareness of what they could and must do from such a young age, it was as if they were owned or possessed by their vision and were thus very difficult to deter from their path. This is why, despite extreme resistance to the point of almost unbearable persecution, I have so tenaciously held on to my vision of being able to deliver understanding of the human condition. Yes, everyone is born a truthful, denial-free thinking and thus insightful prophet—as mentioned in par. 680, R.D. Laing recognised this when he said, ‘Each child is a new beginning, a potential prophet’—but few could afford to stay thinking so truthfully and insightfully; most had to forget what they could see because it was too confronting and depressing and just get on with their life as best they could. So while the main resignation to the imperfections of life typically occurred when people were about 15 years of age, there were many mini-resignations prior to that major one as people variously adjusted and eventually acquiesced to life under the duress of the human condition.

Sir Laurens van der Post recognised the, in truth, least heroic and special, but critical, concluding role soul/​conscience-led innocence had to play when he wrote these beautiful words: ‘One of the most moving aspects of life is how long the deepest memories stay with us. It is as if individual memory is enclosed in a greater which even in the night of our forgetfulness stands like an angel with folded wings ready, at the moment of acknowledged need, to guide us back to the lost spoor of our meanings’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.62 of 253). Sir Laurens’ writings about the relatively innocent Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Africa were so incredibly precious to me as a young man trying to stand up to all the dishonesty in the world because what he wrote about the Bushmen confirmed for me that there is another alienation-free, true world—and Sir Laurens’ great vision was that he knew exactly that this is what all his beautiful descriptions of the relatively innocent life of the Bushmen could achieve, writing that ‘I had a private hope of the utmost importance to me. The Bushman’s physical shape combined those of a child and a man: I surmised that examination of his inner life might reveal a pattern [of child-like innocence, soundness and truth] which reconciled the spiritual opposites in the human being and made him whole…it might start the first movement towards a reconciliation’ (The Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.135 of 233). And again he referred to his vision of the human condition being solved, writing, ‘The division, of course, is deep and of eternal importance. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, settler and Bushman, peasant and hunter, face one another in each of us, an abyss of deceit and murder in between. Who and what can bridge it? There was no answer ready in my heart…​I knew only that the meaning of life for me is in the search for the answer’ (ibid. p.86).Yes, what Sir Laurens wrote did ‘start the first movement towards a reconciliation’, toward finding ‘the answer’; it gave me the support I needed to synthesise the explanation of the human condition. In short, his writings prepared the way for this book and our species’ freedom.

 

The author (left), and fellow World Transformation Movement Patron Tim Macartney-Snape AM OAM,
with Sir Laurens van der Post in London in 1993, a few years before Sir Laurens’ death in 1996

 

Interestingly, in a 2006 interview with the Australian television presenter Andrew Denton, Bono, the prophetic lead singer of the rock band U2, said, ‘You do get the feeling in Australia that there’s…something going on down here, a new society being dreamt up…[that in Australia there is] the opportunity to lead the world’ (Enough Rope, ABC-TV, episode 97, 13 Mar. 2006). The Australian academic David Tacey also anticipated Australia’s pivotal role in lifting the siege humanity has been under of the dilemma of the human condition, writing in his 1995 book, Edge of the Sacred, that ‘Australia is uniquely placed not only to demonstrate this world-wide experience but also to act as a guiding example to the rest of the world. Although traditionally at the edge of the world, Australia may well become the centre of attention as our transformational changes are realised in the future. Because the descent of spirit has been accelerated here by so many regional factors, and because nature here is so deep, archaic, and primordial, what will arise from this archetypal fusion may well be awesome and spectacular. In this regard, I have recently been encouraged by Max Charlesworth’s essay “Terra Australis and The Holy Spirit”. In a surprisingly direct—and unguarded?—moment, Charlesworth says: “I have a feeling in my bones that there is a possibility of a creative religious explosion occurring early in the next millennium with the ancient land of Australia at the centre of it, and that the Holy Spirit may come home at last to Terra Australis”. I am pleased that this has already been said, because if Charlesworth had not said it, I would have been forced to find within myself exactly the same prophetic utterance’ (p.204 of 224). (Again, while the arrival of understanding of the human condition brings about an incredible spiritual awakening in humans—as if rising from the dead—it doesn’t bring a ‘religious explosion’ as this explanation represents the end of faith and dogma and the beginning of knowing.) This ‘awesome and spectacular’ ‘transformation’ was also anticipated by Mark Seymour of the Australian rock band Hunters and Collectors when, in the lyrics to their 1993 hit song Holy Grail, he wrote (and again, how similar are these words to those of Joel, Hosea and Isaiah in pars 1257-1260!): ‘Woke up this morning from the strangest dream / I was in the biggest army the world had ever seen / We were marching as one on the road to the Holy Grail // Started out seeking fortune and glory / It’s a short song but it’s a hell of a story / When you spend your lifetime trying to get your hands on the Holy Grail // Well have you heard about the Great Crusade? / We ran into millions but nobody got paid / Yeah we razed four corners of the globe for the Holy Grail // All the locals scattered, they were hiding in the snow / We were so far from home, so how were we to know / There’d be nothing left to plunder when we stumbled on the Holy Grail? // We were so full of beans but we were dying like flies / And those big black birds, they were circling in the sky / And you know what they say, yeah nobody deserves to die // Oh but I’ve been searching for an easy way / To escape the cold light of day / I’ve been high and I’ve been low / But I’ve got nowhere else to go / There’s nowhere else to go! // I followed orders, God knows where I’ve been / but I woke up alone, all my wounds were clean [by the reconciling understanding of the human condition] / I’m still here, I’m still a fool for the Holy Grail.’

The most important point overall, of course, is that the truth about humans now exists, the spell has been broken, the proverbial ‘elephant in our living rooms’ has finally been acknowledged and exposed. Denial no longer works—its hold has been released. The great citadel of lies has been stormed. The steel casing of denial enveloping Earth has been wrenched apart. Yes, the truth is out, and thank goodness it is because the suffering simply cannot go on. This is no exaggeration: humans currently live in a place of such horrendous pain and suffering (which can be measured by the degree we block it out; by our astronomical levels of alienation) that it is as though we are living in a smouldering, toxic, sulphurous cauldron. BUT, there is now a path out of there to a world of soothing, healing sunshine, and amazing freedom, tranquility and beauty. All we have to do is cross the ‘SUNSHINE HIGHWAY’ bridge: adopt the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living. There is nothing stopping every human now from escaping the horror of the human condition, except their now completely obsoleted habituation to living in what is literally HELL ON EARTH. So while our freedom comes as such a ‘future shock’ that we initially won’t quite know how to take it up, the truth is there is absolutely nothing that justifies not taking it up—there really is no impediment to taking it up, none at all. The gateway to freedom is now WIDE open to everyone.

Sir Laurens—who, again, wrote so beautifully—gave us this wonderful description of how, in ‘the midnight hour of the crashing darkness’ of the time we are living in, we had to build ‘a bridge’ to ‘cross from one side to the other’ of ‘that split between night and day in ourselves’. He wrote: ‘We must shut our eyes and turn them inwards, we must look far down into that split between night and day in ourselves until our head reels with the depth of it, and then we must ask: “How can I bridge this self? How cross from one side to the other?” If we then allow that question to become the desire for its own answer, and that desire to become a bridge across the chasm, then, and only then, from high above on this far peak of our conscious self, on this summit so far above the snow-line of time, in this cold, sharp, selected moment, clearly and distinctly we shall see a cross. A gulf bridged makes a cross; a split defeated is a cross. A longing for wholeness presupposes a cross, at the foundations of our being, in the heart of our quivering, throbbing, tender, lovely, lovelorn flesh and blood, and we carry it with us wherever we journey on, on unto all the dimensions of space, time, unfulfilled love, and Being-to-be. That is sign enough. After that the drum can cease from drumming, the beating and troubled heart have rest. In the midnight hour of the crashing darkness, on the other side of the night behind the cross of stars, noon is being born’ (Venture to the Interior, 1952, p.229 of 239). It could be that Sir Laurens was intuitively envisaging Australia as the place where the human condition would be solved when he talked of ‘noon’ being ‘born’ beneath the Southern Cross, which is the constellation that hangs over our night skies and forms the centrepiece of our Australian flag. I know Sir Laurens was very impressed with the soundness of the Australians he was held alongside as a prisoner of war, and that he knew of the exceptional isolation of Australia from all the upset in the world, ‘the bushman’s quiet life’ that Paterson referred to, and that he also appreciated Australia’s natural soulfulness—that Australia is like Africa where our species grew up—writing that ‘When I first went to Australia…my senses told me at once that here, beyond rational explanation, was a land physically akin to Africa’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955, p.35 of 159). His emphasis on ‘a cross’ being ‘sign enough’ also invokes the involvement of Christ in ‘saving the day’, and there is truth in that, in the sense that Christ was exceptionally sound and, as has been explained, such innocent soundness is necessarily what was required to be able to ‘turn…​inwards’ and ‘look far down into that split between night and day in ourselves until our head reels with the depth of it’, namely look into the human condition. As Sir Laurens has also written, ‘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).

Yes, as Billy Joel wrote and sang in his 1993 song River of Dreams about the overwhelming difficulty virtually all humans have of crossing the metaphorical ‘river so deep’ to find the human-race-liberating-and-rehabilitating understanding of the human condition, ‘In the middle of the night I go walking in my sleep, from the mountains of faith…​through the valley of fear…​through the jungle of doubt…through the desert of truth…to the river so deep…​that is runnin’ to the promised land…​but the river is wide and it’s too hard to cross…I try to cross to the opposite side so I can finally find what I’ve been looking for…​I’ve been searching for something taken out of my soul.’ While only understanding of our devastated condition could rehabilitate the human race—as Tracy Chapman wrote and sang in her 1994 song New Beginning, ‘The world is broken into fragments and pieces that once were joined together in a unified whole…​The whole world’s broke and it ain’t worth fixing. It’s time to start all over, make a new beginning…​Change our lives and paths, create a new world…​There’s too much fighting, too little understanding…​We need to…make a new [truthful] language, with these we’ll define [explain] the world and start all over’—to ‘start all over’ and ‘create a new world’ required uncorrupted, alienation-free, sound, soul-full ‘love’ because only it could ‘cross’ ‘the river so deep’; ‘travel the swirling, misty netherlands below sea-level through which the harsh road to heaven and wholeness runs’.

Indeed, for U2’s wonderfully named and aforementioned song, When Love Comes To Town, Bono wrote these exciting lyrics that anticipated humanity’s liberation from the human condition: ‘I was a sailor, I was lost at sea / I was under the waves…​But I did what I did before love [the ultimate expression of which is truth] came to town…​I’ve seen love conquer the great divide [between ‘good and evil’, yin and yang, idealism and realism, instinct and intellect, conscience and conscious, altruism and egotism, spiritualism and materialism, young and old, women and men, blacks and whites, religion and science, the left-wing and the right-wing, socialism and capitalism, country and city—and, most especially, between the ‘split between night and day in ourselves’]…​When love comes to town I’m gonna jump that train’ (1987). Yes, yes, yes—when the reconciling understanding of the human condition arrives we should all ‘jump that train’, get on board, choose transformation NOT terminal alienation for the human race.

To include more anticipations of our species’ liberation—from Bono and the other prophets of our time—consider these lyrics from U2’s song Love Rescue Me, which Bono wrote: ‘I’ve conquered my past, the future is here at last, I stand at the entrance to a new world I can see. The ruins to the right of me, will soon have lost sight of me’ (1988). Yes, ‘The ruins to the right of’ us ‘will soon have lost sight of’ us because we have ‘conquered’ our ‘past’, found the reconciling understanding of our corrupted condition, which means ‘the future is here at last’ and we can leave that old, now dealt with and thus obsoleted, upset existence behind us forever. And what did Bob Dylan say? ‘The present now will later be past…For the times they are a-changin’’ (The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964). Yusuf Islam (the aforementioned singer/​songwriter previously known as Cat Stevens) similarly foresaw that ‘a change is coming from another side of time, breaking down the walls of silence, lifting shadows from your mind…​Yesterday has past, now let’s all start the living for the one that’s going to last…​the day is coming that will stay and remain when your children see the answers…​when the clouds have all gone…​and the beauty of all things is uncovered again…​the day is coming…​when the people of the world can all live in one room, when we shake off the ancient chains of our tomb’ (Changes IV, 1971), and that ‘out on the edge of darkness there rides a peace train…​[to] take me home again…​everyone jump upon the peace train…​come and join the living’ (Peace Train, 1971). And since it has such similar symbolism, I just have to include the words of Walter Earl Brown’s 1968 song If I Can Dream, which was performed by Elvis Presley: ‘There must be peace and understanding sometime, strong winds of promise that will blow away all the doubt and fear. If I can dream of a warmer sun where hope keeps shining on everyone…​We’re trapped in a world that’s troubled with pain…​Still I am sure that the answer’s gonna come somehow, out there in the dark, there’s a beckoning candle.’ So, yes, let’s go, let’s ‘jump upon the peace train’, let’s get out of this dead, ‘dark’ ‘tomb’ we have all been ‘trapped in’ for far too long—join the Sunshine Army on the Sunshine Highway to the World in Sunshine; and, as Paterson, Lawson and Seymour foresaw, become part of the ‘westward-marching host’, ‘the army of our future’; in fact, ‘the biggest army the world had ever seen’!

I might mention that not only did I have the good fortune to be born in Australia, I also grew up in the post-war 1960s period of relative innocence and idealism. As was mentioned in par. 782, after a terrible bloodletting like the Second World War, which amounts to an immense valving off of upset, there always emerges a period of enormous relief and freshness, and it was all this innocence and its soundness that made the 1960s such a ‘golden age’ (Bono, God Part II, 1988), for not only did our generation conquer outer space by sending man to the moon, we have now conquered inner space by finding the truth about the human condition. The best account I have come across of the halcyon days and extraordinary optimism of the 1960s—indeed that generation’s intuition that it was going to achieve ‘victory over the forces of Old and Evil’—was given by the writer Hunter S. Thompson in his 1971 masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This is what he wrote (the italics and dots are his, with slashes indicating his paragraph breaks): ‘the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . . / History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. / My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . . / There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . . / And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . .’ (pp.66-68 of 204).

While Thompson’s comment that ‘no…music…can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world’ is probably true for those who weren’t there, the music of the mid-1960s can still connect everyone to the optimism of that time. Consider the music and words of the 1967 rock musical Hair, especially the lyrics of Aquarius (the underlinings are my emphasis): ‘When the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the age of Aquarius. Aquarius! Aquarius! Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding. No more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions, mystic crystal revelation and the mind’s true liberation. Aquarius!…​As our hearts go beating through the night, we dance unto the dawn of day, to be the bearers of the water, our light will lead the way’ (lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni). Of course, in terms of the music of those times signalling the coming breakthrough in understanding ourselves, it was around that time that ‘rock and roll’ music was created, for what is ‘rock and roll’ if not totally optimistic, all-out, rock-solid ‘determination and resilience’ to achieve freedom from our species’ historical state of unjust condemnation—determination to, as Bono sang, ‘kick the darkness till it bleeds [the] daylight’ (God Part II, 1988) of the truth about us humans and end the damned condemnation of our species FOREVER! What did Bob Dylan famously say about Elvis Presley—‘Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.’ John Lennon famously reiterated the sentiment, saying, ‘Before Elvis there was nothing’; there was not all-out determination and optimism, there was no ‘rock and roll’, there was just endless decades and epochs and ages of resigned, lonely music—which, sadly, we have now returned to, but in an even more lonely state, with today’s terminally alienated, head-banging, autistic, soul-screaming-in-agony, psychotic music.

Those phenomenal singers who emerged in the late 1950s, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, were also locked onto the immensely excited driving beat that lay at the heart of rock and roll of anticipation of our species’ liberation from the horror of the human condition—especially that belt-it-out, blast-out-of-here, boiling-with-excitement, completely-raging supernova from Ferriday, Louisiana, Jerry Lee Lewis who was rightly the first performer inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the documentary Mojo Working: The Making of Modern Music, which contains a wonderful collection of footage and commentary about Jerry Lee Lewis, the writer Charles ‘Dr Rock’ White reported that ‘John Lennon came into Jerry Lee Lewis’ dressing room…​and he walked over to Jerry Lee and…​bent down and kissed Jerry Lee’s feet…​[and then he] walked out speechless’ (directed by Mark Neal, 1992). I wholeheartedly agree with Lennon’s gesture; to me no one’s music channelled the excitement of the anticipation of the liberation of the human race from the human condition as purely as Jerry Lee’s did. If you listen to a live recording of Jerry Lee’s April 5, 1964 performance at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, especially the tracks Long Tall Sally and Hound Dog, you will hear what ‘is regarded by many music journalists as one of the wildest and greatest rock and roll concert albums ever’ and that Jerry Lee ‘sounds possessed’ and was ‘rocking harder than anybody had before or since…​words can’t describe the music’ (Wikipedia; see <www.wtmsources.com/125>). Jerry Lee’s performances were just drenched in the excitement of breaking free from the dungeon of our species’ tortured condition. In fact, my vision is of a hysteria of millions and millions and millions of excited people with Jerry Lee’s piano being held aloft out in front and Jerry Lee standing on top of it, flicking his hair back and hitching his pants up, as he used to do—and filling the air is the musical build-up to humanity’s great breakthrough to its freedom in Prologue/​Crunchy Granola Suite, from Neil Diamond’s 1972 Hot August Night album. But then, to actually take us through the portals of the new world that understanding of the human condition now makes possible, instead of Diamond’s Crunchy Granola Suite vocals coming in, Jerry Lee would start singing ‘Great Balls of Fire’, Let’s get out of here, LET’S GO!, to an immense roar of unbelievable relief and excitement from the flood of humanity bursting through that doorway to its freedom. The aforementioned WTM Founding Member, Tony Gowing, has actually written a song titled LET’S GO that he sings with our WTM band, The Denialators—you can watch a performance of this song at <www.humancondition.com/​denialators>.

(Many more excited anticipations of the human-condition-reconciled new world, especially from 1950s and 1960s music, can be found in Freedom Expanded at <www.humancondition.com/freedom-expanded-anticipations>.)

 

 

This picture of a tiny figure standing with upraised arms in front of an immense sun as it rises over the horizon represents the arrival of understanding and the dawn of humanity’s all-magnificent freedom from the darkness and horror of the human condition. Created by WTM Founding Member Genevieve Salter in January 1998, this image has become the emblem of the World Transformation Movement and the inspiration for the cover of this book.

Finally, bringing these understandings to the world has been an enormous effort for the tiny band that is the 50 Founding Members of the WTM. It has been such a struggle and such a team effort that in the more than 20 years that most of us have been involved there has hardly been a week go by when one of us hasn’t been prompted to say ‘we couldn’t have survived that attack on us’, or ‘we couldn’t have accomplished that critical task’, ‘if we were even one less in number’. We have fought so hard and for so long and been through so much together it really is like we are one organism—and, given all that we have managed to achieve together based on our love of this information and what it can do for the world, it is a superorganism, with each member—Annabel Armstrong, Susan Armstrong, Sam Belfield, Jοhn Bіggs, Richard Biggs, Anthony Clarke, Lyn Collins, Steve Collins, Lachlan Colquhoun, Εrіc Cοοke, Εmmα Cullen-Ward, Fiona Cullen-Ward, Anthony Cummins, Neil Duns, Sally Edgar, Anna Fitzgerald, Brony FitzGerald, Connor FitzGerald, Tony Gowing, Jeremy Griffith, Simon Griffith, Damon Isherwood, Felicity Jackson, Charlotte James, Lee Jones, Monica Kodet, Anthony Landahl, Doug Lobban, Tim Macartney-Snape, Manus McFadyen, Ken Miall, Tony Miall, Rachel O’Brien, James Press, Stacy Rodger, Marcus Rowell, Genevieve Salter, Will Salter, Nick Shaw, Wendy Skelton, Pete Storey, Ali Watson, Polly Watson, Prue Watson, Tess Watson, Tim Watson, James West, Stirling West, Prue Westbrook, Annie Williams—acting as beacons in ‘the crashing darkness’ in this ‘winter for the world’, lining ‘the pathway of the sun’ to humanity’s freedom for everyone.

 

 

So please visit our World Transformation Movement website and join us—because be assured that this book epitomises what the whole human journey has come down to: this book represents the final great battle, the war of the worlds, the battle of Armageddon, between ‘the Christ’ and ‘the anti-Christ’; between the truth and the lies; between what I offer and what E.O. Wilson offers; between the responsibility of our conscious mind to deliver knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge, the honest explanation of the human condition, and the abrogation of that responsibility, which is Wilson’s dishonest explanation of the human condition—basically between transformation and terminal alienation for the human race. We, the human race, everyone, must make sure transformation wins.

(Video presentations where I and others in the WTM answer questions about and describe the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living can be viewed at <www.humancondition.com/​affirmations>. And a more complete description of all aspects of the transformation can be found in Freedom Expanded at <www.humancondition.com/​freedom-expanded-book2>.)

In conclusion, the image below is a still frame from a documentary about the artist Paul Gauguin (Gauguin: The Full Story, directed by Waldemar Januszczak, 2003). The beauty and happiness of the dancing girl captures something of the joy and excitement that these understandings now bring to the whole world. What a celebration it is going to be! More of this girl’s dancing and some other wonderful footage of excited, transformed-new-world-like Pacific Island dancing from another documentary about Gauguin (Palette Collection – Gauguin, directed by Alain Jaubert, 2003) can be seen in this YouTube clip at <www.wtmsources.com/108>.

 

 

As a tribute to the pure, unconditional, selfless love I received from my parents, Norman and Jill Griffith, which created the determined and excited inspiration in this book, I include the following photograph of them. It was taken under the wisteria beside our home on our sheep station, ‘Totnes’, near the town of Mumbil in the central west of New South Wales in 1959 when I was 13 years old. You can see something of the unresigned, human-condition-defying, unaccepting-of-even-contemptuous-of-corrupted-reality, no-alienated-nonsense, belief-in-another-true-world, relatively innocent, sound, secure, upright, core strength in my mother that nurtured in me the love of, and belief in, the authentic, instinctive, soulful, true world and defiance of the alienated world of dishonest denial. (The origin of innocent women’s lack of empathy, even contempt, for non-ideal behaviour was explained in par. 810.) Of course, while there had to be a causation for events in the world, all that really matters now is that everyone’s life is celebrated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A biography of Jeremy is provided by Professor Harry Prosen
in his Introduction in paragraphs 20-27.