Video & Transcript of Jack Soden,
WTM Bolton Centre

 

(To learn more about Jack Soden, see www.wtmbolton.com)

 

 

My name’s Jack Soden and I’m excited to be opening another WTM Centre in the UK. I hold a master’s degree in biological sciences and currently work in molecular biology research. I’m opening this WTM Centre because Jeremy Griffith’s book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition has completely transformed my perspective on life and has given me the peace of mind of knowing that I’m fundamentally a good and worthwhile person. And since this understanding applies equally to all human beings, this information can have the same effect on anybody who reads it, no matter who they are. So it is the most important book on the planet and it has the potential to transform our world. Although this sounds like hyperbole, it is actually completely true. And in this video I’ll make clear why this is the case.

I first read Jeremy Griffith’s book FREEDOM about a year ago [at time of filming] and I found out about it through the online advertisements on YouTube. I’d been searching for answers about human existence for quite a while beforehand because I was unhappy and unsatisfied and knew that there was something wrong with me and also with the world at large. I also had a strong desire to understand myself, and the world, completely. So, yeah, in this video I just want to talk about what I understand to be the significance of Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition and to give my testament to the truth and explanatory power of the information in Jeremy Griffith’s book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition.

There are many people in the world today claiming to have the magic solution to the world’s problems. But almost none of these get to the root cause of the issue, which is a psychosis within us, the human condition. Only Jeremy Griffith’s explanations actually get to the root cause of the issue and solve it with holistic first principle biological explanation. To illustrate this with an analogy: if the human condition was a hole in the roof of a building, then the many problems in the world today, such as the devastation to our environment, polarised politics, family breakdown, drug addiction, and rampant crime and homelessness, all these problems are the damage to the interior of the building caused by the rainwater leaking in. Every other solution to the world’s problems that I’ve investigated are like placing buckets under the hole in the roof to catch the rainwater. In other words, they’re stop gap solutions and can’t prevent the inevitable disaster indefinitely, because they eventually just start overflowing and before long the hole in the roof has doubled in size. Eventually the damage becomes too great to contain and the building will just collapse. On the other hand, the solution offered by Jeremy Griffith in his book FREEDOM is the same as repairing the hole in the roof at its source. It’s the permanent and lasting solution to the human condition that we desperately need to become a psychologically healthy and happy species again.

Again, this is a bold claim, but it’s absolutely true and that is the general message that I want to convey in this video. Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition is the grand unifying solution to all the world’s problems. This is because all the problems in the world today are symptoms of our troubled psychology. Only through understanding the reason for our psychologically troubled human condition could we alleviate that condition from human life and become psychologically secure, sane and happy.

The human condition emerged as a direct result of us having become a fully conscious species, which fossil evidence indicates was around two million years ago. As I understand it, there are two main reasons why it has taken us this long to solve the human condition. Firstly, we needed to develop the discipline of science to accumulate insights into the workings of our world necessary to assemble a holistic explanation of the human condition. Here a paradox emerged, because for science to be developed we needed to become more intelligent. However, the more intelligent we became, the more psychologically upset we became because, as Jeremy explains in FREEDOM, the human condition is a direct result of us having developed conscious intelligence. Therefore, by the time we were intelligent enough to practice science we had become so psychologically upset by the human condition that we had to block the whole depressing subject out of our minds, as well as any truths about the universe associated with the human condition that brought the issue into focus. So science has necessarily been compliant to the practice of denial of the human condition and has therefore been mechanistic in its approach to solving problems. So this means science could only investigate the mechanisms of the workings of our world without allowing a holistic picture to emerge that would enable the human condition to be explained.

And this is where the second main reason why it has taken until now to explain the human condition arises, because once science had found the key insights into the mechanisms of the workings of our world that would allow a holistic explanation of the human condition to be assembled, a scientist who was not living in denial of the human condition or any of the key truths associated with it then had to emerge and put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together in the correct places to produce the complete picture. And in the present day with psychological upset reaching terminal levels almost everywhere in the world, such denial-free thinkers are extraordinarily rare. However, one such thinker did emerge and that is who Jeremy Griffith is. He’s somebody who was fortunate to be both sheltered from the upset world of the human condition and also nurtured with unconditional love during his upbringing. And as such, he never lost the childlike honesty and freedom of thought that most people had to block out when they were adolescents and grappling with the depressing dilemma of the imperfections of human life and being unable to reach a bridging understanding. This process of resignation to a life of denial of the issue of the human condition, which is fully explained in chapter 2.2 of FREEDOM [and summarised in Freedom Essay 30], is the reason science has been mechanistic in its approach since almost all of its practitioners have been living in this state of denial.

So what Jeremy has done then did not require an extraordinarily high IQ but the ability to think honestly and therefore effectively enough about the human condition to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together to produce the complete picture of who we are, where we came from, why we are the way we are and ultimately what the meaning of our lives are, what the meaning of our lives is.

As such the explanations contained in his book FREEDOM are not highly complicated and difficult to grasp but very simple, straightforward, reconciling and clarifying. Initially, however, there can be strong psychological resistance to the ideas being presented due to the fact that we are all living in denial of the issue of the human condition, having resigned in our adolescent years to avoid becoming too depressed by the subject. This is referred to as the ‘Deaf Effect’ [see Video/​Freedom Essay 11 for explanation of the ‘Deaf Effect’]. Without the clarifying explanation presented in chapters 1 and 3 of FREEDOM [and summarised in THE Interview], the human condition has been a very depressing and therefore psychologically destabilising subject to think about. But it is no longer this way, because with the explanation presented by Jeremy in FREEDOM it’s not only psychologically safe to read and learn about the human condition, but actually more than that, it’s extremely psychologically relieving, healing and ultimately transforming to do so now. And the best evidence for this is the fact that I’m talking so openly about the human condition right now. So the way to overcome the ‘Deaf effect’ is to persevere by patiently reading and rereading the text as well as listening to the introductory videos on the World Transformation Movement’s homepage. This approach works for me and it has worked for countless other people who are now overwhelmingly relieved to be able to understand themselves and the world completely with complete clarity and confidence.

When you break through the ‘Deaf Effect’ and access these understandings of the human condition they become very clear, and you quickly realise how truthful and accountable they are. They’re so truthful and accountable that all human behaviour, including your own, becomes transparent. And you find that all the great mysteries in human life are now demystified and explained. While all the great polarities of human life, such as science and religion, the left and right wing in politics, men and women, young and old, yin and yang, etc., are all reconciled by this information. And again, I know these are very bold claims to make but they are absolutely true and verifiable. I don’t want you to just believe me, I want you to be sceptical and to investigate the information in the book for yourself. The only advice I want you to follow on faith is the advice to persevere with re-reading the text long enough to overcome the initial ‘Deaf Effect’. Once you’ve broken through this initial resistance, you will find that the explanations make such complete sense of your own life and experiences that it’s not a matter of believing that they are true but a matter of knowing in your bones that they are true.

And when you access these ideas, a whole new world of happiness, peace, self-acceptance, possibility, meaning and purpose will open up for you. When you get to that place, I encourage you to reach out to the WTM by joining the Facebook Group and writing a post to introduce yourself.

So once you’ve investigated the information in FREEDOM enough to verify that it is true and you’re also overwhelmingly relieved from being able to understand yourself and the world completely, the next step is to adopt the Transformed Way of Living. The human condition has fundamentally been a deep psychological insecurity of self resulting from an uncertainty about our goodness and worthiness as a species, which arose when we developed a fully conscious mind around two million years ago. The full biological explanation of the human condition is presented in chapter 3 of FREEDOM, but it will be useful to summarise it here in this video to explain why it makes this new transformed way of living possible.

So before we developed conscious intelligence, our behaviour was governed by naturally selected instincts, just like all other animals are today. Our instinctive orientation to the world was actually to behave unconditionally, selflessly towards others. And we recognise this today as our moral conscience [see Freedom Essay 21]. When our conscious thinking mind emerged, it challenged our pre-existing moral instincts for the role of managing our lives. And unlike naturally selected instincts, a conscious mind is insightful and requires understanding to operate effectively. This means it was not enough for it to be simply guided by instincts. It had to understand why those instincts were correct. However, in the beginning, we had no understanding. So inevitably, we had to search for understanding. But many of the conscious decisions that we made along the way contradicted our instincts, which meant we essentially had to live with an influx of criticism from our instincts while we searched for knowledge, ultimately, the self-knowledge that’s been presented in Jeremy Griffith’s book, FREEDOM, which would alleviate that criticism. In other words, we had to learn from our mistakes and feel guilty in the process. Therefore, becoming conscious inevitably resulted in a psychologically upsetting clash between our instincts and our conscious intellect.

This upsetting clash could only end by finding the understanding of the difference in the way genes and nerves process information: that one can orient a species; but the other, the nerve-based learning system, is insightful and requires understanding to manage life. Until we had this understanding, we had no other option than to defy the criticism from our instincts artificially by defensively retaliating against it; becoming preoccupied with seeking positive reinforcement to counter the negative implications of it, so to prove that we were good and not bad; and by blocking it out of our minds. So we became angry, egocentric and alienated, which is the way we’ve had to live under the duress of the human condition.

So we’re angry, egocentric and alienated, but now that we have understanding of the human condition, the understanding that we’ve always needed, we no longer have to live in this angry, egocentric and alienated way. So in other words, we no longer have to feel criticised and therefore insecure about our worth, because this instinct versus intellect explanation of the human condition establishes our worth at the most fundamental level. This means that we can let go of that deadening way of living and adopt a transformed, selfless way of living by living in support of this information and the project to get this information out into the world. This ability to let go of our insecure way of living and adopt a transformed human-condition-free, selfless way of living is how this information can both transform your life and save the world in practice.

Being able to let go of the human condition, the preoccupation with proving our worth and become transformed, brings peace and happiness to our minds and that in turn brings peace and happiness to the world. And by restoring our capacity for selfless cooperation, this transformation will enable us to solve all of the more surface level problems in the world with ease.

Importantly, this is not a dogmatic imposition of selfless behaviour, but an understanding-based transformation. It’s based on brain food, not brain anaesthetic. Once you understand the information in FREEDOM, the transformation actually becomes the only logical thing to do. Because by explaining the fundamental reason why we’ve needed to be selfish, egocentric and individualistic, this information actually obsoletes those malaises and genuinely transforms the human race, because our brains respond to logic. Therefore, this information is the most powerful to have ever emerged on planet Earth.

And I should also add that this transformation does not involve literal self-deprivation. It simply involves a change of mindset from living in constant preoccupation with insecure concern for yourself to letting that preoccupation go, and instead focusing on this amazing information which completely loves and defends you and all other humans and focusing on what it can do for the future of humanity. So letting that preoccupation go and living for this instead is the most liberating feeling ever. And there are no downsides whatsoever to making that decision.

So ultimately the information in Jeremy Griffith’s book FREEDOM has the power to bring about a whole new world for humanity. One in which everyone is happy, loving, caring and cooperative because they’re no longer insecure about their goodness and worthiness. The human race has been immensely heroic to have lived under the duress of the human condition for two million years. And the necessary denials that we’ve adopted to cope with this oppressed existence mean that what I’m currently saying will likely be both very hard to believe and even offensive to hear. There have been many false starts to a world free of the human condition in which we return to a loving ideal world. But these never worked and so the cold, selfish world of reality always retained its grip on humanity. The reason for this is because none of those false starts were based on the fully accountable, first principle-based, biological understanding of the human condition. And nothing less than this understanding would justify such transformation. However, this information is not a dogmatic false start to a new world for humans but the real rational biological understanding based liberation of our species.

It might sound too good to be true but it is true. So I sincerely hope that you take the time to investigate this information for yourself and persevere with it until you’ve accessed the truth of it for yourself, and by doing so will have verified all the claims that I’ve made about it here in this video. If you do that, your life will also be transformed and a whole new world of happiness, meaning and purpose will open up.