It’s empowering to know what is going on around and inside me

It’s without expression really how empowering it is to have this understanding of the human condition in my life, to know what is going on around and inside me—as I walk down the street, watch a film, talk to friends, read the news, think of the future. Wanting to bring that understanding to a world that so desperately needs it really makes for the most meaningful of lives.

I’ve been reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book Infidel, an autobiographical account of a young Muslim Somali woman and her journey of escape to the West.

Some parts of the book are truly horrific and it’s hard to contemplate that humans are capable of, and can withstand, such shocking and torturous behaviour. But being able to understand humans’ deeper psychological predicament—that millions of years ago all humans were innocent, free of upset, living in a peaceful, Garden-of-Eden like state before our encounter with the human condition left modern humans today extremely ‘upset’, mastering varying degrees of civility to contain that upset—is absolutely so relieving it’s impossible to adequately describe. Through understanding life in this truthful way we finally bring about the real and lasting change, stop the pain in our brains and heal our planet. Our real therapy can begin. The world is on the cusp of so much excitement when this understanding reaches everyone.

I’ve been living with this information about the human condition for many years now but it’s amazing that my brain is on a continuous journey of ‘waking up’ and seeing things with clarity, a brain that’s revelling in understanding our psychological reality rather than maintaining a constant habitual denial of it. The information in FREEDOM explains why we’ve lived with so much horror, artificiality, egocentricity, selfishness—our ‘dark’ side and it makes complete sense. That knowledge, once it’s digested, opens the door to the most amazing potential which, when I’m despairing about the state of the world, transports, inspires and charges me with so much energy.

I love the passages from FREEDOM that talk about our incredible future. For me, thinking of and living for the potential of a human-condition-free world is where I want to be. It’s where I want everybody to be—living with rational, biological understanding of our predicament in our heads and in our hearts.

Jeremy talks about the power of selflessness that will be unlocked once this information takes hold in Section 4:6 of Freedom: Expanded Book 2:

“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. Likewise, imagine 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, how much energy, labour, time and expense will be freed up to care for the wellbeing of the less fortunate and the planet. These TRANSFORMATIONS are all going to occur. 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 old way of living is obsoleted…The great ‘change of heart’ is on! 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 you end all the big problems of the world—and thus all the little problems too. The overall point I’m making is of the immense power of cooperative selflessness to solve all our problems…It is the capacity to be selfless that has been missing from the human situation. Understandably, this power of selflessness has not been something we 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.”

There’s so much to do to repair ourselves and our planet and SO MUCH to live for now.

This Blog Post was written by Genevieve on December 18, 2012