Therapy For The
Human Condition

 

 

 

 

Back Cover

 

 

 

 

 

Contents (as of Aug. 2023)

 

Commendations

 

Background

 

Chapter 1  The structure of this book

 

1.1  Overview

 

1.2  Readers will need to be familiar with the main concepts in FREEDOM

 

1.3  Why did this book need to be written, and how is it structured?

 

1.4  Summarising the Main Therapy that understanding of the human condition makes possible

 

1.5  Summary of the Therapy For Childhood Hurts that plague our adult lives

 

1.6  Summary of the Transformed Way Of Living

 

Chapter 2  Summary of the contents of Therapy For The Human Condition

 

2.1  The desperate need for therapy for the human condition

 

2.2  What exactly is the human condition? And why have humans been so fearful of it? And why do most people suffer from a ‘Deaf Effect’ when they try to read or listen to discussion of the human condition? And why can analysis of the human condition cause an extremely angry response?

 

2.3  While denial of our corrupted condition has been necessary, the practice is threatening to trap humanity in a state of human-race-destroying permanent darkness

 

2.4  The honest and dishonest paths of thinking

 

2.5  The truthful, ‘look under the bonnet’, not-hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, effective therapy path

 

2.6  Since the human race once lived in an innocent, loving state, children are born instinctively expecting to encounter such a world, which means the psychological consequences of not encountering it are immense

 

To be continued…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

The structure of this book

 

Please Note (Aug. 2023): Since the WTM mentioned Jeremy Griffith is writing a book about the therapy for the human condition there have been so many people asking for it that we decided to make available on our website this draft of chapter 1 and the first half of chapter 2, as they are virtually completed. As more of the book is finished, more is being added.

 

1.1  Overview

As emphasised in my book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, and in all my other publications, with the finding of the redeeming, reconciling and healing understanding of the human condition the whole human race now sets out as one united organism on a journey of rehabilitation of ourselves and of our world! What this book, Therapy For The Human Condition, presents is a detailed description of how this great psychological rehabilitation of the human race is now, finally, able to take place!

Like the William Blake images on the cover of this book, these Adam Stork illustrations from paragraph 43 of THE Interview summarise this fabulous transformation from a human-condition-stricken state to a human-condition-free state.

 

 

 

1.2  Readers will need to be familiar with the main concepts in FREEDOM

The focus of this book is on the therapy that is desperately needed to rehabilitate the human race from our psychologically upset state or condition. While it does contain summaries of the key explanations that make this therapy possible, it is recommended that readers have already at least watched/​read THE Interview I did with Craig Conway, and ideally have also read my book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition (both of which are freely available at www.HumanCondition.com), so that you have a grounding of understanding of those key explanations.

Those key explanations you need to be familiar with, and where summaries of them appear in this book, are as follows (because this book is still in development, cross references to chapters and paragraph numbers are not yet specified):

1) the ‘instinct v intellect’ explanation of the human condition (summary in paragraphs XX-XX);

2) the Negative Entropy-driven integrative, unconditionally selfless and loving meaning of existence (summary in pars XX-XX);

3) the nurtured origins of our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive self or soul (summary in pars XX-XX);

4) how truthful, selflessness-is-meaningful, effective thinking allowed us humans to become fully conscious (summary in pars XX-XX).

 

 

1.3  Why did this book need to be written, and how is it structured?

It might be asked why this book, Therapy For The Human Condition, is needed since what is contained in my main book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition has supposedly, according to its title, presented what is needed for the human race to become psychologically free of the human condition.

FREEDOM does present the main explanations needed for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race, however there are aspects of the explanations and their therapeutic effects that warrant elaboration. Further, given the rapidly increasing levels of psychological distress everywhere that are plunging the human race headlong towards terminal psychosis and extinction, there is a particular need for this book that focuses on how understanding the human condition therapises psychosis and neurosis.

FREEDOM does present the all-important human-condition-unlocking explanation of all the psychologically upset anger, egocentricity and alienation that has been building throughout humanity’s 2-million-year-long, immensely heroic journey from ignorance to enlightenment—that is, from a situation of not understanding why we corrupted our species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul, to finally now having the psychologically redeeming, reconciling and healing explanation for why that corruption occurred. So, there is sufficient explanation in FREEDOM for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race to occur, however, it is clear that an elaboration would be beneficial that focuses on how understanding the human condition is able to bring therapeutic relief to the now extreme levels of psychosis and neurosis in the world. Indeed, as mentioned, there are some aspects of the explanation and their therapeutic effects that would particularly benefit from elaboration.

As to what those aspects are that would particularly benefit from elaboration, having had to live in determined denial of the truth that our species once lived an innocent, cooperative, selfless and loving state, it hasn’t been recognised that infants are born instinctively expecting to encounter a cooperative, selfless and loving world. If our ancestors were brutal savages, as we have been taught, then our instinctive expectations would be of encountering a brutal and aggressive world, but our instinctive expectations are actually of encountering a loving and gentle world. And since we can now admit that truth, we are suddenly in a position to see how incredibly psychologically damaging it is for infants to be born into a world that is horrifically angry, egocentric and alienated! It is this aspect of how shocking it is for children to encounter our soul-dead, mad and crazed world that particularly needs elaboration.

What will be explained is how that initial shock and hurt to children has often been so damaging that its effects have been negatively affecting our whole lives—and how those negative effects can be very effectively managed. Basically, the honesty that understanding of the human condition makes possible finally allows for the real therapy of the human race to occur!

So if someone was to fully digest what is presented in FREEDOM there is enough redeeming explanation of all the main aspects of our corrupted human condition for that person to achieve the complete psychological rehabilitation of their version of that corrupted state. However, as will be talked more about later, such complete therapy would take so much study and digestion of how those explanations dismantle all the psychological upsets that occurred during that person’s life, that such complete therapy would not be realistic. A person would be in deep therapy for years, and in any case, given the immense amount of psychological relief everyone can gain relatively quickly and easily from understanding the main upsets in human life, and given the urgent need now to spread this understanding of the human condition and bring the human race back from the brink of destruction everywhere we look, such complete therapy would be an obscene indulgence. The reality is that the complete psychological rehabilitation of the human race will take a number of generations, but present generations can gain sufficient therapy for their corrupted condition from what is presented in FREEDOM and in this book to become operational enough to be effective participants in the all-exciting, transformed new world that has opened up for the human race now that we have the redeeming understanding of the human condition.

Yes, as will be briefly summarised shortly, and in more detail later in chapter XX (and as is fully explained in chapter 9 of FREEDOM and on the Transformation page of the WTM’s website), what especially contributes to this potential for everyone to joyously participate in this all-exciting, human-condition-understood, psychologically-relieved-although-not-completely-psychologically-healed new world is the adoption of the Transformed Way of Living where you live in support of the redeeming understanding of our corrupted condition. As will be explained, this Transformed Way of Living or State is a critical part of how the human race is now transformed from having to live with the agony of the human condition to living a life that is effectively free of that agony.

In summary, there are three important aspects to this Therapy For The Human Condition book.

First, there is how being able to understand all the important aspects of our troubled human condition that are presented in FREEDOM is the main therapy that the human race has needed. This will be referred to as ‘The Main Therapy’. (See a summary next in chapter 1.4.)

Secondly, there are the effects upon innocent children of being born into a massively upset world, and how to manage those effects in our adult lives. This will be referred to as ‘The Therapy For Childhood Hurts’. (See a summary shortly in chapter 1.5.)

And thirdly, there is how the Transformed Way of Living enables everyone to fully participate in a human-condition-free world even though their psychologically upset condition is not fully ameliorated. This will be referred to as ‘The Transformed Way Of Living’. (See a summary shortly in chapter 1.6.)

There are other important components of this book, such as a description of the limitations of the existing human-condition-denying, superficial therapies, and how they fit into the truthful, human-condition-confronting, real therapy that is now finally possible, however these are the three main aspects of this book.

 

 

1.4  Summarising The Main Therapy that understanding of the human condition makes possible

Firstly, of the four key explanations in FREEDOM that were listed in chapter 1.2, it is the first and third explanations—of the redeeming ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of our corrupted human condition, and the nurturing explanation of our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive self or soul—that particularly enable the human race to be rehabilitated or healed or therapised from its psychologically upset angry, egocentric and alienated condition. In fact, as this book will endeavour to make very clear, these two insights are so explanatory and relieving for our corrupted condition that they make the process of psychologically rehabilitating the human race reasonably straightforward, obvious and easy. Once a person overcomes the subconscious fear that almost everyone initially suffers from when confronted with the previously unexplained, and thus previously unbearably depressing, issue of our species’ and of their own corrupted condition, the explanations in FREEDOM bring such rapid healing relief to every aspect of human existence that, as Darlene, a member of our WTM Facebook Group, excitedly put it, ‘this information has catapulted us into warp speed! LOL! Woohoo!’ (3 Feb. 2023)!

Basically, with these two insights, the whole psychological journey of our species, which we are individually the products of, can finally be fully understood—it can all be made compassionate, loving, healing sense of! With the redeeming understanding of what actually happened to our species and to us individually, all the misunderstandings and grievances and heartaches and hurts and feelings of doubt about the human race’s and our own worth and meaning can end. In particular, having found the redeeming explanation for why we humans corrupted our species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving existence, all the upset angry, egocentric and alienated defensive behaviours that resulted from not having that explanation can be let go. Compassionate, psychologically relieving understanding of our species’ corrupted condition, and, as a result of that, of our own corrupted condition, comes to the human race. As Professor Harry Prosen, a psychiatrist with almost 60 years’ experience (including chairing two departments of psychiatry and serving as president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association), said about FREEDOM in his Introduction to it: ‘I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’ So yes, with the psychosis-addressing-and-solving, instinct vs intellect, fully accountable and understandable, biological explanation of our corrupted human condition, together with the truth of the nurtured origins of our moral instincts, that are presented in FREEDOM, the ‘psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ can now at last take place.

Once someone breaks through the great steel-like casing of denial that has been imprisoning the human race, then that person is finally free to plunder the truth of every aspect of human existence, which is what I do in FREEDOM. I’m not clever to find all these answers about human existence, just sheltered enough from all the upset in the world during my infancy and childhood to be able to get inside the human condition and from there tell everyone all the reasonably obvious truths that can be found there.

There were many earlier versions of FREEDOM, going right back to my first book in 1988, Free: The End of the Human Condition, and in each version I fleshed out the explanation of the human condition more until I produced the version that all my honest thinking tells me covers all the main aspects of our distressed condition, which is my definitive 2016 treatise in FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition (which is a similar title to my first book).

So FREEDOM is where the all-important, human-race-redeeming-and-healing, truthful, makes-sense-of-everything, description of our species’ journey from ignorance to enlightenment is presented. While the concepts in FREEDOM that particularly relate to our psychologically distressed lives are summarised in subsequent chapters of this book, the following is a stripped-down summary of the sequence of FREEDOM’s main insights.

We can now understand that our distant ape ancestors were able to develop a completely cooperative and loving existence through nurturing, as the bonobo species of ape (pan paniscus) are currently in the process of doing—and then, some 2 million years ago, this nurtured selflessness allowed us to develop a truthful, selflessness-recognising, effective-thinking conscious brain—then this nerve-based conscious brain’s ability to understand the relationship of events that occur through time meant it could take over management of our lives from our gene-based, naturally-selected, orientating-but-not-understanding instincts—a take-over that our dictatorial instincts in effect resisted and condemned—condemnation we, our conscious thinking mind, didn’t feel was deserved, but lacking the explanation for why it wasn’t deserved, all we could do was retaliate against the condemnation, find ways to demonstrate that we were good and not bad, and mentally block out or repress the condemnation—we became upset sufferers of the angry, egocentric and alienated ‘human condition’—which was a psychologically upset state we have had to endure while we searched for the redeeming ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of that corrupted condition—which we have now found, the result of which is that all our defensive, upset, angry egocentric and alienated ways of coping are no longer needed and can subside, and, over a few generations, disappear—the immense insecure shame and guilt we humans have felt for having become corrupted can end and the whole human race can be psychologically rehabilitated and become secure, sane and happy! So the effect overall of finding the redeeming, reconciling and healing understanding of the human condition is that the whole human race now sets out as one united organism on a journey of transforming rehabilitation of ourselves and of our world! This book begins this journey of rehabilitation of ourselves, and I discuss the journey of the rehabilitation of our environment as part of my booklet titled Our Meaning.

And the following is an outline of the actual subjects that FREEDOM presents the redeeming, reconciling and healing biological explanation of. It explains the human condition, the reason humans are competitive, aggressive and selfish when the ideals are to be cooperative, loving and selfless; it also explains and ends the need for humans’ alienated state; explains and makes possible the end of loneliness and depression; explains and ends the need for egocentricity; explains the origin of war and aggression amongst humans and brings an end to the cause of war and aggression; explains and ends the need for materialism; explains and ends the need for a superficial, artificial, self-distracting way of living; explains biologically how humans acquired our altruistic ‘soul’ and its cooperation-demanding ‘conscience’; describes and explains the psychological act of Resignation; explains the stages of maturation of infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood that both humanity and humans individually go through; explains the importance of nurturing in our species’ development and in our individual lives; explains the consequences on children of mothers’ inability to nurture; explains the impact of egocentric fathers on children; explains the Negative Entropy-driven integrative meaning of life; explains why ‘evolution’ is in fact the purposeful process of ordering matter; explains the reasons for the limitations of mechanistic science; relates all the disciplines of the sciences and the humanities; explains in biological terms how humans became fully conscious and why other animals have not; explains why and when humans learnt to walk upright, lost their body hair, developed language, left Africa, began tool use, began hunting and meat-eating; reconciles science with religion; explains religion and renders it fulfilled and obsolete, in the process explaining all manner of religious metaphysics, including the concepts of God, the Trinity, prophets, the Virgin Mary, the resurrection, miracles, Judgment Day, the Battle of Armageddon, the story of Noah’s Ark, after-life, heaven and hell, good and evil; deciphers humanity’s legends and myths; explains and reconciles the left and right wings of politics; ends the reason for prejudice and the cause of inequality between individuals, sexes, ages, generations, races and cultures, in the process reconciling the worlds of men and women, the young and the old, the innocent and the corrupted; explains the pseudo idealism of the New Age, Peace, Green, Feminist, Indigenous, Animal Rights, Multicultural, Politically Correct, Postmodern, Critical Theory, ‘Woke’ Movements; explains sex, heterosexuality, homosexuality, love, beauty, the attraction of youth, romance, rape, envy and lust; explains humour; explains human sensitivity and creativity, especially art and music; explains away the main underlying cause for human sickness; explains away the psychological basis of all psychological disorders; explains near-death experiences; provides the means for the psychological repair of the human race; saves the human race from self-destruction; brings peace to the human situation, and so on. So that is comprehensive demystification, clarification and redeeming, reconciling and healing therapy for all the main aspects of our deeply troubled human condition!

This ability to gain therapeutic relief from understanding the main aspects of our species’, and, as a result of it, our own, corrupted condition that are presented in FREEDOM is marvellously illustrated by the immense amount of psychological therapy that many, many people are gaining. If you look at the ‘daily ecstatic responses’ slider under THE Interview at the top of www.humancondition.com you will see the endless comments the WTM receives about how relieving and healing being able to understand the human condition is. As I write this, the following are three comments from a few days ago: ‘The more I’m watching and reading, the more understanding I’m gaining’, and ‘Love this, learning more and more’, and ‘Understanding the human condition makes me feel free and happy’. And these are some more from today, 3 February 2023: ‘My attitude has changed, I’m not upset with myself anymore, I’m free of guilt and full of love’, and ‘So wonderful to understand yourself and the whole world’, and ‘Once you get your head around it, it’s light bulb time!’, and ‘I always knew that one day understanding of ourselves would save us from ourselves’. The Akritidis family from WTM Melbourne provide a marvellous example of how much therapeutic relief can be derived from the understandings that are presented in FREEDOM and elaborated upon in my other presentations. You can view videos of the Akritidis family talking incredibly honestly and freely about their various versions of the human condition, and about the fabulous healing effects they have gained from all the explanations, at www.humancondition.com/transformation.

 

 

1.5  Summary of The Therapy For Childhood Hurts that plague our adult lives

While there is sufficient explanation of the human condition in FREEDOM for the therapy of the human race to occur, as has been mentioned, the aspect that can particularly benefit from further explanation is of how the hurts, terrors and anxieties that we can experience when we are young can plague our adult lives, and how even though they can be extremely stubborn, there are therapeutic practices that can enable adults to be relieved of them.

This Therapy For Childhood Hurts that plague our adult lives will be looked at in detail later in chapter XX, but just to give some initial insight into what will be explained there, the third key explanation that readers are asked to be familiar with in chapter 1.2 is of the nurtured origins of our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive self or soul. This insight—that the redeeming explanation of our corrupted human condition finally allows us to admit—is all-important in being able to understand how what happened in our childhood has had such an immense influence on our lives. In fact, our childhood hurts have been so immensely influential that they basically form our personality. As the great South African author Olive Schreiner wrote, ‘The souls of little children are marvellously delicate and tender things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on them…​The first six years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer’ (The Story of an African Farm, 1883, p.193 of 300). Along with the overall explanation of our corrupted human condition, understanding how damaging that corrupted world has been for the innocence of children is the key insight that makes the real therapy of our psychologically distressed lives possible.

Now able to admit that nurturing created our species’ moral all-loving and all-sensitive instinctive self or soul, we can realise and appreciate that we are born instinctively expecting to encounter an unconditionally loving, happy and reassuring world. Having only lived in an extreme psychologically upset state for a few hundred thousand years, which is a very short amount of time for natural selection to produce any significant change in our genetic makeup, we humans are born with very little instinctive expectation of encountering an immensely psychologically upset existence. It follows that it has been such an incredible shock for our innocent instinctive soul to encounter an almost completely unloving, unhappy and traumatised world that it is no wonder the human race has now become so extremely soul-hurt or psychotic and mind-distressed or neurotic!

In fact, as will be emphasised when this is all explained more fully later, in the absence of understanding children have been so prone to misunderstand the 2-million-year psychologically upset, loveless, soul-obliterated situation they find themselves in that they almost always blame themselves for the shortfall in love. Indeed, children have more often than not concluded that the reason they are not encountering a loving world is because they are an unlovable, bad person! Their souls are so trusting that they are in a world where everyone is loving that they find themselves unable to avoid the conclusion that for some reason they must be the aberration; they must be the ones causing the world to not love them!

So devastating have these pains been that almost without exception children have been left with no choice but to split themselves off from the terrible thoughts and feelings and create an entirely false place to live in their minds!

The consequence of all this repression of hurt that occurred in our early formative years when we were so sensitive to hurt, and so prone to misunderstanding hurt, is that a whole world of pain has been pushed down into our subconscious mind and body, cut off from our everyday conscious mind’s awareness.

Then, since this blocking out or repressing or burying of childhood hurt is never completely successful for most people, especially with the levels of upset that generations are experiencing today, the distressed, anxious, negative feelings and thoughts keep bubbling up from our subconscious and expressing themselves throughout our lives.

Having not admitted how nurturing created our species’ moral instinctive expectations of being unconditionally loved and how corrupted the human race now is, there has been no real insight into, and thus understanding of, this source of the main mental health issues troubling our species, and thus no effective therapy has been possible of those mental health issues.

To give one quick illustration, having no understanding at all of what was happening to cause her to suffer extreme anxiety attacks, the actress Jean Seberg ended up suiciding, only able to say in her tragic suicide note, ‘Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves.’ As will be explained in chapter XX, the difference now with this full understanding of the vulnerability of children, and where so much of the distress in our adult lives is actually coming from, is that real, effective therapy and management of those childhood upwellings can be achieved.

 

 

1.6  Summary of The Transformed Way Of Living

More will be explained about the Transformed Way of Living in chapter XX, but, as has been mentioned, while we now have the psychologically relieving understanding of our corrupted human condition that has been needed to rehabilitate the human race, the complete psychological rehabilitation of the human race will naturally take a number of generations. However, what is of immense importance, and is so spectacularly wonderful, is that every human can immediately know that he or she is fundamentally good and not bad, and that this knowledge puts each of us in a very powerful position because it means we can legitimately decide not to live in accordance with whatever psychological upset remains unhealed within us.

The logic behind making this decision is irrefutable: now that the great goal of the whole human journey of conscious thought and enquiry is achieved and we have found the redeeming understanding of our conflicted and distressed human condition, all the old retaliatory, defensive and insecure behaviours of anger, egocentricity and alienation that we had to employ to cope while we couldn’t defend ourselves with understanding are no longer needed. They are obsoleted, brought to an end. In fact, with this knowledge of the human condition now found, it would be an act of total irresponsibility, indeed madness, to continue down that old, insecure, defensive and destructive road. The truth is, there is nothing in the way now of every human taking up a magnificent, unburdened, human-condition-free, transformed life!

And, gloriously, what happens when we give up our old way of living and take up the new way of living that understanding of the human condition has made possible, is we transition from a competitive and selfishly behaved individual to a cooperative and selflessly behaved person, a truly integrative part of humanity. Even though we are not yet free of the psychologically upset state of our own personal human condition, we can immediately have a change of attitude and decide not to live out that upset state that remains within us. The overall effect in our lives is that, despite our retention of some of the upset state of the human condition, we are effectively free from its hold and its influence, which is an absolutely fabulous transformation to have made in an instant—in one simple decision!

You and every other human can, as it were, put the issue of all your upsets/​corruptions in a ‘suitcase’, attach a label to it saying ‘Everything in here is now explained and defended’, and simply leave that suitcase behind at the entrance to what we in the WTM call the Sunshine Highway, and set out unencumbered by all those upset behaviours into a new world that is effectively free of the human condition. (I explain how the Transformed Way of Living is adopted on the Transformation page of the WTM’s website, and in Video/​Freedom Essay 33.)

It should be emphasised that this is the real transformation of the human race, not the pseudo idealistic, false start to a transformed world that the completely dishonest, human-condition-avoiding, no-relieving-understanding-at-all-of-our-corrupted-condition New Age, Politically Correct, Woke, Critical Theory, Great Reset advocates have so dangerously been promoting—an extreme threat to our species’ survival that is fully explained in my booklet Death by Dogma.

As I wrote in paragraph 1166 of FREEDOM about this fabulous real transformation of the human race that understanding of the human condition makes possible: “The excitement and relief of being effectively free of the human condition—the joy and happiness of being liberated from the burden of our 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 us to feel for our 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 and that a human-condition-free new world is coming—CAN NOW TRANSFORM EVERY HUMAN AND THUS THE WORLD.”

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

That completes a brief description of the three main aspects of this book about the Therapy For The Human Condition. As I have mentioned, there are other important components in this book, such as the explanations and descriptions that will be given of the main human-condition-avoiding, superficial therapies that humans have been practising, and how these practices fit into the truthful, human-condition-confronting real therapy that is now possible. This will be similar to the clarifying description I gave in FREEDOM of all the main false, human-condition-avoiding biological theories, however, unlike those human-condition-avoiding biological theories, some of the techniques associated with the superficial, human-condition-avoiding therapies do have an application in the real therapy that is now possible in the human-condition-confronted-and-explained new world for humankind.

What follows is a summary of the contents of Therapy For The Human Condition.

 

 

Chapter 2

Summary of the contents of
Therapy For The Human Condition

 

2.1  The desperate need for therapy for the human condition

What has been presented so far is a brief description of the structure of this book. From here on, a summary of the contents of Therapy For The Human Condition commences.

Our species’ psychologically distressed, ‘good and evil’-conflicted, so-called ‘human condition’ is the underlying issue in all human affairs that had to be explained, understood and healed for there to be a future for the human race. With every day bringing more evidence of unbearable amounts of distress in human life, and of the devastation of our planet from the effects of the now extreme levels of psychosis and neurosis in us humans, finding the redeeming, reconciling and rehabilitating understanding of our psychologically upset condition had become a matter of very great urgency.

Conflict between individuals, genders, ages, races, cultures and countries abounds. There are wars, genocide, terrorism, mass displacement of peoples, starvation, environmental devastation, unbridled greed, gross inequality, racial and gender oppression, polarised politics, rampant corruption and other crimes, runaway diseases, family breakdown, drug abuse, homelessness, and epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, unhappiness and loneliness—all of which are being exacerbated by the immense, ever-growing world population. Improved forms of management of our societies, such as better laws, politics and economics—and better self-management, such as new ways of disciplining and motivating ourselves, or improved ways of trying to at least superficially therapise and even transcend our psychologically troubled human condition—have all failed to end the march towards ever greater levels of distress, unhappiness, conflict, devastation and destruction.

As the American psychotherapist Arthur Janov said about the dire straits of our species’ predicament in the revised 1990 version of The Primal Scream, his famous book therapising human psychosis and neurosis, ‘The world is having a nervous breakdown. People are irritable, aggressive, tense, and anxious. Neurosis is on the march. It is galloping ahead at full speed and no one seems to know what is going on or why. Above all, no one seems to know how to stop this inexorable march to destruction. Year after year there is more illness, more suicide, more violence, more alcoholism and drug addiction. The world is coming apart at the seams’ (The New Primal Scream, 1990, p.3 of 396). (Please note, the underlining throughout this book, including within quotes, is my emphasis.) And since that frightening passage was written over 30 years ago, the situation now is that ‘the world is coming apart at the seams’ to such an extent that there is a growing concern around the world that we are facing the end of human civilisation—that the human race is in its death throws!

It is therefore of incalculable significance and beyond-all-imaginings relief that the efforts of every human who has lived, but in particular of scientists, to make sense of our existence, has finally, at the eleventh hour, led to the finding of the redeeming, reconciling and psychologically healing ‘instinct vs intellect’, biological explanation of our species’ ‘good and evil’-conflicted human condition that saves the human race from extinction! As is explained in paragraphs XX-XX, science has explained how the gene-based and nerve-based learning systems work, which has made it possible to understand that when we humans developed an understanding-based, self-adjusting conscious mind some 2 million years ago, a battle unavoidably developed between it and our already established non-understanding, dictatorial instincts. Basically, gene-based natural selection can orientate a species, but the nerve-based conscious mind needs to understand the world to operate, and therein lay the basis of a great clash. And the result of this conflict between our intolerant, condemning, dictatorial instincts and our necessarily defiant intellect was that we unavoidably became psychologically defensive, angry, alienated and egocentric—which is the upset state we refer to as the human condition. But now that we can explain and understand this conflict, all those insecure, defensive behaviours are obsoleted, brought to an end, and we free ourselves from the human condition. Again, as Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, said about this biological synthesis presented in FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, ‘I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’

So this ability to understand ourselves is the ‘holy grail of insight’, the ultimate breakthrough of breakthroughs! In Janov’s terms, FREEDOM finally enables us to explain and understand ‘what is going on’ and ‘why’, and to ‘know how to stop this inexorable march to destruction’, stop ‘the world…​coming apart at the seams’!!

Yes, without this redeeming insight into our psychologically insecure and upset condition we were never going to be able to start loving ourselves, but with it found we now can. As the following picture intimates, understanding of the human condition is the key to our ‘psychological rehabilitation’—without it our mind was forever falling into deep whirlpools of confusion, bewilderment, self-doubt, anxiety and depression.

 

 

I believe there is no better place to go to describe the courage of the whole human race in accumulating the knowledge that would finally make the redeeming understanding of our corrupted human condition possible than the words of that song of songs, The Impossible Dream from the 1965 musical, Man of La Mancha. The human race has completed its ‘glorious quest’; with our ‘last ounce of courage’ and ‘scorned and covered with scars’ we have achieved the seemingly ‘impossible dream’ and reached the seemingly ‘unreachable star’ of beating the seemingly ‘unbeatable foe’ by righting the seemingly ‘unrightable wrong’ of having to ‘bear the unbearable sorrow’ (Joe Darion) of the condemnation that we psychologically upset, angry, egocentric and alienated humans are dreadful, worthless, evil monsters—by finding the ‘holy grail’ of the redeeming, reconciling and psychologically rehabilitating explanation of our seemingly, but, as we are now finally able to explain, not actually, despicable human condition!

 

 

Since we have finally, at the death knell, found the human race liberating and saving redeeming understanding of our species’ seemingly deplorable, corrupted or ‘fallen’ human condition, it is appropriately therapeutic to consider why Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 novel Don Quixote, upon which the musical Man of La Mancha is based, has been voted ‘The Greatest Book of All Time’ by the world’s most acclaimed writers in a poll arranged by the Nobel Institute. Well, Don Quixote is the story of an elderly man who gets out of bed, re-names himself ‘Don Quixote of la Mancha’, dons an old suit of armour, takes up an ancient shield and lance, mounts his skinny old horse, and calls on his loyal but world-weary companion Sancho to join him on the most spectacular of adventures. As I have depicted above, coming across a field of large windmills, the noble knight says, ‘Look yonder, friend Sancho, there are…​outrageous giants whom I intend to…​deprive…​of life…​and the expiration of that cursed brood will be an acceptable service to Heaven’. And so the crazed and hopeless adventure goes on, gloriously doomed battle after gloriously doomed battle. But that has been the lot of every human for some 2 million years: hopeless battle after hopeless battle, feeble beings charging at and trying to vanquish the ‘outrageous giant’ ignorance-of-the-fact-of-our-species’-fundamental-goodness! Wave after wave of quixotic humans have thrown themselves at that ‘outrageous giant’ of ignorance for eons and eons, as bit by tiny bit we accumulated the knowledge that finally made possible the redeeming explanation of our seemingly destructive and evil human condition! Surely the most amazing and heroic story ever told is our species’ story!

So we humans, the bravest of brave species, have had to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (The Impossible Dream), suffer having to become psychologically upset, seemingly evil, corrupted in soul and ‘fallen from grace’ until we found sufficient knowledge to explain why we developed such a soul-destroyed, corrupted condition. We had to find the answer to the greatest of all paradoxes and riddles of how could we humans possibly be considered good when all the evidence seems to unequivocally indicate we are a deeply flawed, bad species.

The magnificence of having finally lifted the proverbial ‘burden of guilt’ from the human race, found the explanation for why we humans are good and not bad after all, is that we can not only know that the whole human race is good and not bad, but that while we each suffer from different amounts of this psychological upset as a result of our particular encounter with the great battle humanity has been waging against ignorance, each human is also fundamentally good, special and wonderful. The whole human race is immensely, immensely good and heroic, and every human is an equally good, special and wonderful hero. That is the truth that we can now understand from scientific, biological first principles. As the title of FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition proclaims, the whole human race is now free from the excruciating agony of our seemingly evil human condition.

And most wonderful of all, what that redeeming breakthrough understanding means is that everyone can now ‘march’ straight out of the ‘hell’ of the insecure, not-sure-if-we-are-good-or-bad, human-condition-stricken state into a fabulously psychologically relieved and transformed existence. And what is presented in FREEDOM and on our Transformation page, and is elaborated upon in this book, explains how everyone can make this deeply, deeply longed-for glorious transformation!

 

 

2.2  What exactly is the human condition? And why have humans been so fearful of it? And why do most people suffer from a ‘Deaf Effect’ when they try to read or listen to discussion of the human condition? And why can analysis of the human condition cause an extremely angry response?

 

What exactly is the human condition?

It is not uncommon for people to think that the term ‘human condition’ refers to the state of poverty and inequality and other practical hardships and imperfections in human life, but such problems are only superficial manifestations and aspects of the human condition. Much less superficial interpretations of what the term human condition means are that it refers to ‘the riddle of why we humans are competitive and selfish not cooperative and loving’, and ‘the issue of good and evil in our make-up’, and even ‘the issue of why we are the way we are’. However, the human condition is actually a much, much deeper issue than even these last interpretations.

As I explained in THE Interview and in all my other presentations, we humans once lived in a nurtured-with-unconditional-love, cooperative, selfless and loving innocent state, which bonobos are presently on the threshold of achieving. If we stand back and think about this original cooperative, selfless and loving state and then think about how competitive, selfish and aggressive we humans now are, the contrast between the two states couldn’t be greater. And if we think about that extreme contrast and then think about the situation we have been stuck in for some 2 million years where we haven’t been able to explain our so-called ‘fall from grace’, the corruption of our original all-sensitive and all-loving, innocent instinctive self or soul, then how deeply traumatised with guilt and shame must we humans have been all that time! Certainly, as I will write much more about, we learnt to block the horror of this situation out of our mind, but that has been the underlying psychological predicament we humans have been enduring. So having had to live with this insufferable, unbearably depressing guilt and shame for having destroyed the magic world of our soul is what the human condition really is!

 

And why have humans been so fearful of it?

As I said about this horror situation in paragraphs 110–111 of THE Interview—to appreciate how much upset exists in us humans now, imagine living for just one day with the injustice of being condemned as bad, even evil, when you intuitively knew but were unable to explain that you were actually the complete opposite of evil, namely truly wonderful, good and meaningful—in fact not just good but the hero of the story of life on Earth! You would be hurt to the core and furious, wouldn’t you! Now extrapolate that experience over 2 million years and we can begin to appreciate just how much volcanic frustration and anger must now exist within us humans! While we have learnt to significantly restrain and conceal—‘civilise’ as we refer to it—the phenomenal amount of upset within us, under the surface we all must be boiling with rage, and sometimes, when our restraint can no longer find a way to contain it, that anger must express itself—hence our capacity for shocking acts of cruelty, sadism, hate, murder and war. And no wonder we have led such an evasive, denial-practising, lying, avoid-any-criticism, escapist, alienated, superficial and artificial, greedy, egocentric, power, fame, fortune and glory-seeking existence. We have had to smother ourselves with material glory while we lacked the spiritual glory of compassionate understanding of ourselves.

The following are some examples of how excruciatingly depressing the issue of our corrupted condition has been while we couldn’t explain it, and therefore why, generation after generation, almost everyone during their early adolescence had no choice but to resign themselves to living in determined denial of the unbearably depressing issue. (This process of Resignation to living in denial of the human condition that almost all adolescents have had to go through is summarised later in XX, and fully explained in Freedom Essay 30, and also in chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM.)

This is a description of how the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes felt when he confronted the horror of his, and the human race’s, corrupted condition: ‘So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown…​that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top’ (Second Meditation, 1641; tr. J. Cottingham, 1984).

And this is another person’s description of what he experienced when he tried to confront the human condition: ‘I felt the worst fear I have ever known. Fear doesn’t even go close to expressing it. What do you suppose you do when you find the most fearful thing you’ll ever encounter is yourself’ (see par. 1185 of FREEDOM). Yes, when in a rare moment of perfect clarity a person sees the contrast between how all-sensitive and all-loving our species once was, which our instinctive soul has the memory of, and how horrifically soul-destroyed virtually everyone now is, the contrast is so great that, without the redeeming explanation for our corrupted condition, its revelation has been ‘fearful[ly]’, unbearably, even suicidally depressing.

And this is the deadly accurate description psychoanalyst Carl Jung (who will be talked more about shortly) gave of the ‘rare and shattering experience’ that can occur in moments of clarity about a person’s seemingly ‘absolute evil’ condition while it wasn’t yet explained: ‘When it [the shadow of our corrupted condition] appears…​it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil’ (Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1959; tr. R. Hull, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9/2, p.10).

This next honest description, from the great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, recognises not only how difficult confronting the human condition has been, but also how finding knowledge depends on confronting not avoiding the human condition: ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror…​it must also be said of knowledge that it is bitter, and there is no escaping that bitterness…​Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world…​There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless’ (The Destiny of Man, 1931; tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.14-15 of 310). Yes, trying to confront the issue of our corrupted or ‘fallen’ condition without the explanation for it only left us with the ‘bitter’ ‘ancient, primeval terror’ that we humans have had to endure for some 2 million years of thinking we must be ‘evil’, ‘worthless’ monsters—and yet confronting it is what was ‘require[d]’ to find ‘knowledge’, ultimately self-knowledge, understanding of our ‘good and evil’-stricken human condition.

So Berdyaev made the point that while virtually everyone has lived in fearful terror of the human condition, ultimately it had to be confronted to be solved. And to do that was going to require very rare individuals who were fortunate enough to have sufficiently escaped encountering all the upset in the world during their upbringing to be uncorrupted in soul enough to not be terrified by the issue of the human condition. As will be described later in this summary, it is this ability to confront and think truthfully and thus effectively about the human condition that the South African philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post and I possessed, and so were able to find ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ explanation of the human condition.

Yes, for virtually everyone, trying to confront the issue of our corrupted human condition has been such an ‘ancient, primeval terror’ that, as the comedian Rod Quantock said, ‘Thinking can get you into terrible downwards spirals of doubt’ (‘Sayings of the Week’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Jul. 1986). The Nobel Laureate Albert Camus wasn’t overstating the ‘deadly pain’ either when he wrote that ‘Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined’ (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942); nor was another Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Bertrand Russell, when he said, ‘Many people would sooner die than think’ (Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking, 1975, p.5 of 127). And nor was the equally acclaimed poet T.S. Eliot when he wrote that ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’ (Burnt Norton, 1936). The truth is the human race has been living in such deep fear of the issue of our corrupted condition that virtually everyone has been living on just the meniscus of existence, too afraid to look very deeply at all into the real nature of human existence! Recognising this underlying fear of the human condition enables you to see through our behaviour, see what is behind it, what is causing it—to such an extent, in fact, that our behaviour becomes transparent! (Watch or read more about the terrible fear humanity has been living with in my video/​booklet The Great Guilt.)

 

And why do most people suffer from a ‘Deaf Effect’ when they try to read or listen to discussion of the human condition? And why can analysis of the human condition cause an extremely angry response?

What now needs to be pointed out, and this follows from what has been explained about humans’ historic fear of the human condition, is that when the understanding of our corrupted condition is finally found, as it now has been, even though it is redeeming, trying to read about or listen to discussion of that corrupted state is going to trigger extreme subconscious fear in virtually everyone, and this fear will express itself by their mind not allowing what is being talked about to be tolerated. The blocks they have been employing to protect themselves from confronting the human condition will come into play and their mind won’t allow what is being talked about to be taken in and absorbed. Then, not aware that their mind is blocking out what is being discussed (we can’t block something out and know we’re blocking it out or we wouldn’t be blocking it out), they will blame the quality of the presentation for the difficulty they are having reading or listening to the presentation. And that is what happens: people typically say that what is being presented is ‘impenetrably dense’, ‘confusingly worded and long-winded’, ‘unnecessarily repetitive’, ‘desperately needs editing’, and that it is ‘exceedingly boring and tedious’, and even that it is ‘completely lacking in any substance or meaning’. Quite often people even request ‘an executive summary so I have some idea of what it is that you’re trying to say’! This is the well-known ‘Deaf Effect’ that many people experience—at least initially, because with perseverance the redeeming nature of the explanation gradually reassures a person’s mind that it is finally safe to look into the human condition—and from there they become extremely excited to be able to understand the human condition, and from there every aspect of human existence!

Of course this fear of the human condition can also cause some to try to put the blocks to confronting the human condition back in place by contriving all manner of false arguments against the fully accountable, biological explanations of the human condition that are being put forward. Indeed, what is being presented can cause such an angry response that those supporting the fully accountable, genuinely redeeming, human-race-saving, biological explanation of the human condition are viciously attacked and persecuted!

Amazingly, everything that has been said about how fearful the human race has been of the human condition and about all the defensive responses that the arrival of its explanation initially causes, was fully anticipated by that exceptionally truthful and effective thinking Greek philosopher, Plato. Plato was such a magnificent philosopher (philosophy being the study of ‘the truths underlying all reality’ (Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edn, 1998)) that Alfred North (A.N.) Whitehead, himself one of the most highly regarded philosophers of the twentieth century, described the history of philosophy as being merely ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’ (Process and Reality [Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–28], 1979, p.39 of 413). So, way back in the Golden Age of Greece, some 360 years BC, this is what Plato wrote: ‘I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human conditions somewhat as follows. Imagine an underground chamber, like a cave with an entrance open to the daylight and running a long way underground. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners there’ (The Republic, c.360 BC; tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, 514; or see all these quotes in The Republic highlighted at www.wtmsources.com/227). Plato described how the cave’s exit is blocked by a ‘fire’ that ‘corresponds…​to the power of the sun’, which the cave prisoners have to hide from because its searing, ‘painful’ ‘light’ would make ‘visible’ the unbearably depressing issue of ‘the imperfections of human life’ (516–517). Fearing such self-confrontation, the cave prisoners have to ‘take refuge’ ‘a long way underground’ in the dark ‘cave’ where there are only some ‘shadows thrown by the fire’ that represent a ‘mere illusion’ of the ‘real’ world outside the cave (515). The allegory makes clear that while ‘the sun…​makes the things we see visible’ (509), such that without it we can only ‘see dimly and appear to be almost blind’ (508), having to hide in the ‘cave’ of ‘illusion’ and endure ‘almost blind’ alienation has been infinitely preferable to facing the ‘painful’ issue of ‘our [seemingly imperfect] human condition’.

 

 

And, with regard to the problem of the ‘Deaf Effect’ response the ‘cave’ ‘prisoners’ would have to reading or hearing about the human condition, Plato then described what occurs when, as summarised in the Encarta Encyclopedia, someone ‘escapes from the cave into the light of day’ and ‘sees for the first time the real world and returns to the cave’ to help the cave prisoners ‘Escape into the sun-filled setting outside the cave [which] symbolizes the transition to the real world…​which is the proper object of knowledge’ (written by Prof. Robert M. Baird, ‘Plato’; see www.wtmsources.com/101). Plato wrote that ‘it would hurt his [the cave’s prisoner’s] eyes and he would turn back and take refuge in the things which he could see [take refuge in all the dishonest, illusionary explanations for human behaviour that we have become accustomed to from human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic science], which he would think really far clearer than the things being shown him. And if he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rocky ascent [out of the cave of denial] and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight [shown the truthful, real description of our human condition], the process would be a painful one, to which he would much object, and when he emerged into the light his eyes would be so overwhelmed by the brightness of it that he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.’ Significantly, Plato then added, ‘Certainly not at first. Because he would need to grow accustomed to the light before he could see things in the world outside the cave’ (The Republic, 515–516). Yes, reading and listening to discussion of the human condition can ‘at first’ cause an extreme deaf effect, but that can be overcome by patiently becoming ‘accustomed to the light’.

 

 

Plato went on to also warn that when understanding of the human condition eventually arrives it will not only cause a ‘Deaf Effect’, it will also cause an extremely defensive and angry response in some—writing that some of the ‘cave’ ‘prisoners’ ‘would say that his [the person who attempts to bring understanding to the human condition] visit to the upper world had ruined his sight [they would treat him as mad], and that the ascent [out of the cave] was not worth even attempting. And if anyone tried to release them and lead them up, they would kill him if they could lay hands on him’ (ibid. 517)! Thankfully, we live in more civilised times, but we in the WTM have endured years of this vicious, try-to-‘kill him’-type persecution (as documented in the Persecution of the WTM section on our website, and in chapter 6:12 of FREEDOM and F. Essay 56).

Since it is well known by psychologists that ‘denials fight back with a vengeance when faced with annihilation’, it is not surprising that this most denied and repressed of all truths of the issue of our corrupted human condition was going to meet extreme resistance when the real and true analysis of it appeared. Additionally, being a scientific insight, this understanding of the human condition has to endure the initial resistance new ideas in science have typically encountered—as playwright George Bernard Shaw pointed out about important breakthrough insights into the nature of our existence, ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (Annajanska, 1919). And since there is no greater ‘blasphemy’ to mechanistic science’s established way of thinking (which I will talk more about next) than confronting the human condition, it is not surprising that appreciation and support for this most needed of all scientific breakthroughs was going to take time to build—nevertheless, the scientific establishment, and the establishment in general, needs to support this breakthrough SOON or the human race will very soon become so exhausted with unbearable, excruciating, suicidal psychosis and depression that it will become extinct!

The arrival of the all-redeeming but at the same time inevitably all-exposing understanding of the human condition is actually the long-feared ‘judgment day’. When the understanding of the human condition is finally found and the ‘curtains are drawn open at last’, or ‘when the lights are finally turned on’, revealing our 2-million-year corrupted human condition, it can’t help but be a great shock. However, because this exposure day, or truth day, or honesty day, or transparency day, or revelation day, or come-clean day is actually a day when compassionate understanding comes to the human race, it is actually a day of universal relief from excruciating bondage and suffering. Yes, as an anonymous Turkish poet once recognised, judgment day is ‘Not the day of judgment but the day of understanding’ (Merle Severy, ‘The World of Süleyman the Magnificent’, National Geographic, Nov. 1987).

 

 

2.3  While denial of our corrupted condition has been necessary, the practice is threatening to trap humanity in a state of human-race-destroying permanent darkness

What now has to be emphasised is that while the human race was still searching for the fully accountable, true ‘instinct vs intellect’ redeeming explanation of our corrupted human condition, the only way we could cope with the unbearably depressing truth of our psychologically upset, soul-corrupted, seemingly evil condition was to deny it. In fact, we have been so deeply committed to living in denial of the truth of our species’ 2-million-year corrupted state or condition, and of our own personal corrupted condition as a result of our encounters with it when we are young, that even referring to the issue of ‘the human condition’ has been avoided, with the term ‘human condition’ only rarely mentioned in moments of profound thought. And when pressed to say what the human condition is, I have heard it loathsomely described as ‘the personal unspeakable’, and as ‘the black box inside of people they can’t go near’! (personal conversations, WTM records, Feb. 1995).

So while the human condition is the one issue that had to be addressed and solved for there to be a future for the human race, it has been the one issue that has been totally ignored. It is the real unacknowledged, proverbial enormous elephant that has been standing right in the middle of the living room of our lives.

 

 

The result of this situation where the only way we could cope with the truth of our corrupted condition while we couldn’t explain it was to deny it, is that a whole world of human-condition-avoiding, dishonest thinking has developed, which has culminated in the vast superstructure of whole-view-of-our-corrupted-condition-avoiding, details-and-mechanisms-only-focused, so-called ‘mechanistic’ or ‘reductionist’ science—‘science’ being society’s designated vehicle for searching for knowledge; in fact, ‘science’ literally means ‘knowledge’, derived as it is from the Latin word for knowledge, scientia.

It should be said that this is an absolutely extraordinary situation where our search for knowledge has been denying the issue that we have been searching for, which is understanding of our corrupted condition—the effect being that we have been searching but didn’t know why we were searching, or what we were searching for—a paradox that left us completely bewildered, feeling like we were meaningless, purposeless, aimlessly wandering, lost souls—when we weren’t, since we have actually been determinedly participating in humanity’s immensely heroic search for the explanation of our corrupted condition. Living in denial saved us from unbearable self-confrontation, but it left us stupid!

So yes, as will be evident again and again throughout this book, virtually every question about humans has been ‘answered’ with human-condition-avoiding, hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, truthless, non-explaining, non-answers—all of which have made any real healing understanding and thus therapy of our corrupted human condition impossible!

To help the reader become familiar with this truth-avoiding strategy of denying the issue of our corrupted human condition, paragraphs that describe this evasion will have the word ‘CAVE’ (meaning ‘belonging to Plato’s dark cave world of dishonest denial’) inserted at the beginning of them—which means this paragraph and the previous three should have ‘CAVE’ at the beginning of them. I originally tried putting a grey background on paragraphs that mention all this evasive denial, or ‘bullshit’ as it has long been intuitively and appropriately referred to, as the greyness would reflect the deadness that such truthlessness led to, but printers would sometimes make the grey too dark or too light, so I had to abandon that idea. Yes, all information can now be classified as either cave-speak or out-of-cave-speak.

CAVE  Yes, since you can’t find the truth with lies, that being a contradiction in objectives, living in denial of our corrupted condition and of our meaning and purpose, has meant that truth is nowhere to be found. As one of those rarest of rare, exceptionally denial-free, honest thinking prophets, Isaiah, said: ‘justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows. Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like men without eyes…​Truth is nowhere to be found’ (Bible, Isa. 59).

CAVE  As Plato said, having to hide in a metaphorical dark cave of denial of the ‘painful’ issue of ‘our [seemingly imperfect] human condition’ meant that everyone living in the ‘cave’—which is almost the entire human race, including mechanistic, reductionist scientists—can only ‘see dimly and appear to be almost blind’!

CAVE  As Charles Birch, my very honest, Templeton-Prize-winning professor of biology when I was a student at Sydney University, admitted, ‘[mechanistic] science can’t deal with subjectivity [the issue of our corrupted human condition]…​what we were all taught in universities is pretty much a dead end’ (from recording of Birch’s 1993 World Transformation Movement Open Day address).

CAVE  The physicist Paul Davies, who is another winner of the prestigious Templeton Prize (which is awarded for ‘increasing man’s understanding of God’, basically for thinkers who are trying to be holistic rather than mechanistic), similarly observed that ‘For 300 years science has been dominated by extremely mechanistic thinking. According to this [whole-view-evading, human-condition-psychosis-avoiding, mechanisms-only-focused] view of the world all physical systems are regarded as basically [robotic] machines…​I have little doubt that much of the alienation and demoralisation that people feel in our so-called scientific age stems from the bleak sterility of mechanistic thought’ (‘Living in a non-material world—the new scientific consciousness’, The Australian, 9 Oct. 1991). (By the way, ‘holism’ means ‘the tendency in nature to form wholes’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 5th edn, 1964), so it recognises the wholes-forming, Negative-Entropy-driven, integrative meaning of existence, which, as is explained in chapter 4 of FREEDOM and in F. Essay 23, is an honest, human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding truth.)

CAVE  The great Hungarian-English polymath and remarkably denial-free-effective-thinker Arthur Koestler was another who was frustrated by mechanistic, reductionist science’s avoidance of our species’ conscious-mind-induced, soul-corrupted, psychotic human condition, writing that ‘symptoms of the mental disorder which appears to be endemic in our species…​are specifically and uniquely human, and not found in any other species. Thus it seems only logical that our search for explanations [of human behaviour] should also concentrate primarily on those attributes of homo sapiens which are exclusively human and not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom. But however obvious this conclusion may seem, it runs counter to the prevailing reductionist trend. “Reductionism” is the philosophical belief that all human activities can be “reduced” to – i.e., explained by – the [no-psychosis involved] behavioural responses of lower animals – Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats and pigeons, Lorenz’s greylag geese, Morris’s hairless apes [and, as will be described in the next paragraph, the false excuse of blaming our divisive condition on the savage, competitive, selfish and aggressive, must-reproduce-their-genes situation that other animals operate under]…​That is why the scientific establishment has so pitifully failed to define the predicament of man’ (Janus: A Summing Up, 1978, p.19 of 354). Like Davies, Koestler complained too of ‘the sterile deserts of reductionist philosophy’, making the fundamental point that ‘a correct diagnosis of the condition of man [had to be] based on a new approach to the sciences of life’ (ibid. pp.19–20), concluding that ‘the citadel they [mechanistic scientists] are defending lies in ruins’ (p.192).

CAVE  Yes, the main device employed by this immense, ‘blind’, ‘dead end’, ‘sterile desert’, ‘bleak’, ‘dark’, truth-nowhere-to-be-found, cave-dwelling academic superstructure that has been dedicated to keeping the truth of our species’ 2-million-year corrupted condition hidden, was to deny that our ape ancestors lived a nurtured-with-unconditional-love, cooperative, selfless and loving existence. This denial was achieved by using the outrageously false claim that our ancestors were competitive, selfish and aggressive savages preoccupied trying to reproduce their genes like other animals. Instead of the truth that our divisive, selfish and aggressive condition is a psychologically derived state that developed when we became conscious, it was asserted that our divisive behaviour is just our savage animal instincts expressing themselves. This ‘savage instincts’ excuse is so important in understanding the foundations of all the dishonest thinking that’s been going on everywhere in the ivory towers of academia, that I focus on this great lie at the very beginning of THE Interview that exposes all the terrible denial that has been imprisoning the human race in a dark dungeon, Plato’s dark cave.

CAVE  Again, as a result of all this denial/​lying, especially of our cooperative and loving heritage, all manner of ultimately ineffective therapies based on human-condition-avoiding, false biological theories, and even on dogmatic forms of non-thinking, and on non-understanding spiritual and religious practices like meditation and prayer, have been attempted—which is why we have had thousands of years of therapeutic practices and the human race has only become more psychotic. How can you heal psychosis if you have no idea what is causing it? Obviously you can’t. Trying to heal our corrupted human condition while committed to living in denial of it has been like trying to understand how a car works while refusing to look under the bonnet! As Berdyaev wrote, ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror…​of [the issue of] good and evil’, which is the human condition.

CAVE  So science’s practice of searching for knowledge while denying the truth of our corrupted condition has led to all manner of false and misleading and ultimately ineffectual ‘answers’. However, on the positive side—and this is a world-saving positive—it did lead to the finding of how genes are able to orientate behaviour and nerves are able to understand the relationship between cause and effect, which finally made the instinct vs intellect explanation of our corrupted human condition possible.

CAVE  The problem is that science’s practice of determinedly denying our corrupted condition has become so entrenched that the scientific establishment is refusing to recognise and support this most needed and precious of all scientific breakthroughs. Science is actually the great liberator or saviour or messiah of the human race (as I explain in paragraph 296 of FREEDOM), but its entrenched practice of denial could end up making it the great imprisoner of the human race in darkness, a darkness that will very soon, if it’s not ended, lead to the extinction of our species from unbearable levels of psychosis!

CAVE  So while denial has been necessary, denial-practicing mechanistic science is now in danger of trapping humanity in a tortured-by-the-scorching-fire-of-the-human-condition, crawling-hardly-can-move, psychotic state of living death, when it could be supporting the human-race-liberating, breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition that it made possible. Yes, all human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic, reductionist scientists can become human-condition-confronting, truthful-thinking, holistic scientists. Dishonest scientists can become honest scientists. The ivory towers of academia can change from being ivory towers of lies to ivory towers of truth. Insecure humans can become secure humans. This is our species’ freedom, it is the end of the human condition. Living in Plato’s dark, bat-filled cave of denial is no longer necessary; everyone can come out into the warm healing sunshine of understanding, and that includes scientists. The arrival of understanding of the human condition does bring immense change, but no one needs to feel obsoleted, left out, or bypassed. There are infinite opportunities for everyone to now help with the great transformation of the human race where humans live in a state of radiant, exhilarated, unimaginably excited aliveness—a transformation that these two illustrations by William Blake perfectly depict, which is why they were chosen to decorate the cover of this book.

 

 

 

2.4  The honest and dishonest paths of thinking

To now look at the history of trying to therapise our corrupted, 2-million-year-developed, psychologically upset human condition. There have been two paths of thinking, the path of honest, truthful, human-condition-confronting, look-under-the-bonnet, not-hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave thinking that a rare few thinkers in history have taken, and the path almost all thinkers have taken, which is the dishonest, human-condition-avoiding, don’t-look-under-the-bonnet, hide-in-Plato’s-dark-cave path. As we will see, the latter dishonest, human-condition-avoiding path could only ever provide extremely superficial and thus ineffective forms of therapy for the now horrifically psychologically upset human race.

Chapters 2.5 to XX will look at the truthful, effective therapy path, and chapter XX will look at the dishonest, superficial, ineffective therapy path.

 

 

2.5  The truthful, ‘look under the bonnet’, not-hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, effective therapy path

To firstly look at the truthful path to effective therapy for the human condition, and, as mentioned, this will be covered from this chapter 2.5 through to XX.

The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud is regarded as the father of modern psychoanalysis. He began this terrifying journey into the issue of our seemingly indefensible, angry, egocentric and alienated, soul-corrupted, we-must-be-‘evil’–‘worthless’-monsters human condition, when, after great personal difficulty, he was sufficiently able to penetrate the terrifying depths where the issue of the human condition resides to discover the truth that everyone has a ‘personal unconscious’, a personal repressed psychologically distressed condition or psychosis. As the British psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott wrote, ‘The word “unconscious”…​has been used for a very long time to describe unawareness…​there are depths to our natures which we cannot easily plumb…​a special variety of unconscious, which he [Freud] named the repressed unconscious…​what is unconscious cannot be remembered because of its being associated with painful feeling or some other intolerable emotion’ (Thinking About Children, 1996 posthumous publication of his writings, p.9 of 343). The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing described how difficult the journey into this ‘repressed unconscious’ world was for Freud when he wrote that: ‘The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended to the “Underworld” and met there stark terrors…​We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him’ (The Divided Self, 1960, p.25 of 218).

CAVE  Having heroically dug up the truth of a personal repressed unconscious, Freud then however veered off that path of truthful thinking and reverted to the escape-from-the-human-condition ‘savage instincts’ excuse. Freud believed that the ‘ID’, our unconscious, instinctive mind, contained primitive selfish ‘savage’ urges that the conscious mind or ‘ego’ has to control, writing, for example, that ‘men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment (Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, tr. Joan Riviere, ch. V, p.85 of 144), and ‘Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of men’ (ibid. p.86). The truth is that our instinctive self is completely cooperative, selfless and loving and comes from a time when our ape ancestors lived in that state; and further, our aggressive and selfish behaviour is psychological in origin, the result of a clash between our instincts and intellect. Freud also falsely maintained that our morals are learnt and held by the ‘superego’ as a way of restraining our ‘instinctual’ ‘aggression’, when the truth is our morals are the expression of our loving, cooperative instincts or soul. Freud even directly denied that our species once lived in a ‘golden age’ of cooperative and loving innocence by claiming that this idea of a ‘golden age’ in our species’ past was nothing more than nostalgia for the protected bliss of infancy. As the author Richard Heinberg noted, this ‘Paradise myth as an unconscious projection of memories of infancy…​is what Freud proposed in his theory of the development of the personality—that infancy is a Paradise lost’ (Memories & Visions of Paradise, 1990, pp.193–194).

 

Freud’s protégé, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, was an honest, actually partially honest, thinker who took the next step towards achieving real therapy for humans by trying to recognise and bring understanding to our psychotic and neurotic human condition. Jung added to Freud’s acknowledgement that we have a personal unconscious the recognition that we also have a ‘collective unconscious’, a collective, shared-by-all part of ourselves that we have also repressed. In his 2000 book, Life of Jung, Ronald Hayman gave this summary of Jung’s ‘heroic’ journey into the ‘unconscious counterposition’ in us humans, and how the confronting truths that exist there nearly destroyed Jung, but also how facing those truths allowed him to think truthfully and thus effectively enough to come up with the important insights about human existence he found. Hayman wrote: ‘He [Jung] claimed to have acquired the knack of catching unconscious material “in flagrante”, and his [1962] book Memories, Dreams, Reflections suggests his behaviour was heroic—that he was making a dangerous expedition into the unconscious for the sake of scientific discovery…​In December 1913, he says, he decided to drop downwards. “I let myself fall, it was as if the floor literally gave way underneath me and I plummeted into dark depths”…​It took about three years to recover from the [resulting psychological] breakdown…​It was during Jung’s breakdown that he arrived at some of his most important concepts’ (‘An edited extract from Life of Jung’, Good Weekend mag. Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Feb. 2000; see www.wtmsources.com/265).

For a description of the most important of the ‘important concepts’ Jung found on his heroic journey into the unconscious, Jung’s friend, Sir Laurens van der Post, reported that firstly, Jung was heroically motivated by concern that ‘Man everywhere is dangerously unaware of himself. We really know nothing about the nature of man, and unless we hurry to get to know ourselves we are in dangerous trouble’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.239 of 275); in fact, Jung is renowned for emphasising the truth that ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own our own shadow’. Van der Post then went on to describe how Jung achieved a ‘breakthrough into this great new world within. It was as momentous as the breakthrough into the nature of the atom’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, p.61), ‘he was the very first great explorer in the twentieth-century’ (p.63), the result of which was that ‘Jung went deeper [than Freud’s ‘personal unconscious’], to uncover below what one might call a racial or historical unconscious, leading finally to the greatest area of all which he called the “collective unconscious”’ (p.145).

CAVE  However, while Jung managed to recognise that we have a ‘collective unconscious’, he was not able to go beyond that with his courageous-but-ultimately-afraid thinking and admit that our instinctive, shared-by-all, ‘collective unconscious’ is our species’ instinctive memory of once living in a cooperative and loving state. In fact, like Freud, Jung veered off from his brave truthful thinking and reverted to the escape-from-the-human-condition, hide-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, ‘savage instincts’ excuse for our divisive behaviour. For example, Jung wrote that ‘The shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors’ (Aion, p.266), and that ‘Man has developed consciousness slowly and laboriously, in a process that took untold ages to reach the civilized state. And this evolution is far from complete, for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness’ (Man and His Symbols, 1964, Part 1, p.6 of 415). Indeed, like Freud, Jung directly denied the truth of our species’ cooperative and loving instinctive past by dismissing the idea of a ‘golden age’ in our species’ collective memory as nothing more than, as Richard Heinberg noted, ‘an analogy for the mother-infant relationship…​Carl Jung went on to incorporate the Paradise-as-infancy concept into his theory of the archetypes. For Jung, Paradise is the positive aspect of the archetypal mother, the infant’s source of security and nourishment…​[subscribing to the view] that the Garden of Eden was not a geographical place, but a metaphor for the womb’ (Memories & Visions of Paradise, pp.193–194).

 

CAVE  So, while Freud and Jung bravely revealed that we humans are living in denial of a great deal of truth—that, as they described it, we suffer from a ‘personal’ and ‘collective’ psychosis—neither attempted to confront what it was that we were particularly repressing or living in unconscious denial of, which is our species’ cooperative and loving past. They talked a lot about our psychosis and how it wrecks our lives and how we need to do something about that if we are to become ‘whole’ or sane, but they weren’t able to confront what our psychosis actually is, which is denial or repression of our cooperative and loving instinctive self or soul. Freud had people lying on his iconic couch opening up about their insecurities and psychological pain, which was a big step in honesty from the resigned strategy of every moment determinedly denying that there was anything particularly wrong in our lives and that everything was basically fine; and Jung spoke of archetypes and encouraged people to analyse the expressions of their subconscious in their dreams, and emphasised the need to ‘individuate’ or unify our split selves. But the ‘elephant in the living room’ of human life of how we had almost completely corrupted our species’ original instinctive self or soul was being avoided. Basically, Freud and Jung didn’t take people outside of Plato’s metaphorical dark cave where they were living in fearful denial of the issue of the human condition. And what is significant about them not taking people outside Plato’s cave of denial where they would have to actually confront the human condition, the truth of our species’ 2-million-years corrupted state, is that everyone could relatively easily relate to Freud and Jung, which is why they became such famous therapists. As the human race has become increasingly upset, people have found the superficial honesty of talking about psychosis and neurosis, of discussing how much they are suffering psychologically, of admitting to being ‘damaged’, and of referring to the ‘hurt child within’, to be quite cathartic. Indeed, such superficial honesty where you pretend to be talking about the human condition when you actually aren’t could be very relieving—which is why dishonest, non-human-condition-confronting, superficial ‘pop psychology’ and pseudo therapy is now immensely popular; however, because it is only superficial it is ultimately ineffective, and as a result the human race has continued to plunge to terminal levels of psychosis!

 

The next step in the all-important, if the human race is to be saved from extinction, journey of honest thinking about our species’ psychologically upset condition was by someone who was not psychologically insecure like Freud and Jung were, and virtually every human is. Rather, the next step was taken by someone who must have largely escaped encountering the horrors of the human condition during his upbringing and as a result was exceptionally uncorrupted in soul and thus exceptionally sound and secure in himself, because he was able to think sufficiently truthfully about the human condition to admit that our much denied and repressed shared-by-all ‘collective unconscious’ is our species’ instinctive memory of having once lived cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly. That person was the just mentioned friend of Jung, the very great South African philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post, because it was he, in his many books, especially in his books about the relatively innocent Bushman or San people of southern Africa, who acknowledged the truth of our species’ original state of innocence. For instance, Sir Laurens wrote about the Bushman that ‘mere contact with twentieth-century life seemed lethal to the Bushman. He was essentially so innocent and natural a person that he had only to come near us for a sort of radioactive fall-out from our unnatural world to produce a fatal leukaemia in his spirit’ (The Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.111 of 233). Even more explicitly, he wrote that ‘This shrill, brittle, self-important life of today is by comparison a graveyard where the living are dead and the dead are alive and talking [through our soul] in the still, small, clear voice of a love and trust in life that we have for the moment lost…​[There was a time when] All on earth and in the universe were still members and family of the early race seeking comfort and warmth through the long, cold night before the dawning of individual consciousness in a togetherness which still gnaws like an unappeasable homesickness at the base of the human heart’ (Testament to the Bushmen, 1984, pp.127–128 of 176).

However, while Sir Laurens was able to resurrect the truth of our species’ original state of innocence, there still remained the task of finding the testable, verifiable, understandable, science-based, reconciling explanation for why we corrupted such a wonderful, cooperative and loving existence. As Sir Laurens wrote: ‘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 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, p.135).

 

It was this final step in the honest journey of addressing-not-avoiding the human condition that I was able to contribute, presenting the fully accountable, instinct vs intellect biology ‘which reconciled the spiritual opposites’ of our lost state of innocence with our present corrupted, seemingly evil human condition and makes us ‘whole’. Greatly assisted by the honesty of Sir Laurens’s writings about the relatively innocent Bushman, I was able to hold onto all the truthful thoughts I had as a young man, especially about the original innocence of the human race, and from there go on to find the biological defence for our corrupted condition that makes the effective therapy of our corrupted condition possible.

 

Showing how precious Sir Laurens’s writings have been to me, this is my present set
—my original set being so tattered I could no longer use them—of Sir Laurens’s two main
books about the Bushman, The Lost World of the Kalahari and The Heart of the Hunter.

 

 

 

2.6  Since the human race once lived in an innocent, loving state, children are born instinctively expecting to encounter such a world, which means the psychological consequences of not encountering it are immense

What follows is a summary of the explanation, that is extra to what is presented in FREEDOM, of how and why the hurts and misreadings that we adopt during our formative childhood years plague our adults lives, and why these hurts and misreadings are so difficult to overcome. Shortly after this, in chapter XX, I will provide a summary of how we can effectively manage the anxieties and terrors caused by the upwellings of these childhood hurts and misreadings.

 

Now that we have found the redeeming explanation for our corrupted condition and can admit that nurturing created our moral all-loving and all-sensitive instinctive self or soul, we can realise and appreciate that we are born instinctively expecting to encounter an unconditionally loving, happy and reassuring world. Having only lived in an extreme psychologically upset state for a few hundred thousand years, which is a very short amount of time for natural selection to produce any significant change in our genetic makeup, we humans are born with very little instinctive expectation of encountering an immensely psychologically upset existence. It follows that it has been such an incredible shock for our innocent instinctive soul to encounter an almost completely unloving, unhappy and traumatised world that it is no wonder the human race has now become so extremely soul-hurt or psychotic and mind-distressed or neurotic!

At this point it is helpful to look at what is actually meant by the terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘neurosis’, and by the terms relating to the therapy of them, because if we do that we will see that all the aspects of our corrupted condition, and what is required to heal that condition, are actually recognised in those terms. Since we didn’t want to confront what the human condition really is, namely our soul-corrupted lives, we have bandied around the terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘neurosis’ without ever stopping to think about what the terms actually mean. We humans live on the surface, afraid to look deeply, even into what we are saying! The dictionary entry for psyche reads: ‘The oldest and most general use of this term is by the early Greeks, who envisioned the psyche as the soul or the very essence of life’ (Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, 1985 edn), and ‘soul’ is defined as the ‘moral and emotional part of man’, and as the ‘animating or essential part’ of us (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 5th edn, 1964). Therefore, since osis is defined as ‘abnormal state or condition’ (Dictionary.com), ‘psychosis’ means ‘the abnormal state or condition of our soul’, or ‘soul-illness’; and ‘neurosis’ means ‘the abnormal state or condition of our neurons or nerves’, or ‘mind-illness’. So, the preoccupation of our nerve or neuron-based conscious intellect with repressing our condemning gene-based, instinctive, loving, ‘moral’, ‘emotional’, ‘animating’, ‘essence of life’ ‘soul’, such that we suffer from an ‘abnormal state or condition’, means we humans have been experiencing both a ‘psychosis’ and a ‘neurosis’. Also, the word ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’, since iatreia means ‘healing’ (The Encyclopedic World Dictionary); and ‘psychology’ literally means the ‘study of the soul’, since the Greek word logia means ‘study of’. But again, the situation we have been in is that we couldn’t effectively practice psychiatry and ‘heal our soul’, or effectively practice psychology and ‘study our soul’, until we could explain why our conscious thinking, self-adjusting self had to destroy the wonderful world of our cooperative and loving instinctive self or soul; understand why our conscious thinking self is actually good and not bad, and, by so doing, reconcile and heal our instinct vs intellect split selves.

To now look at how this psychosis and neurosis from encountering such a corrupted world developed.

In creating our cooperative and loving moral instincts through the nurturing ‘love-indoctrination’ process (which will be explained later in chapter 4), natural selection would have acted on all aspects of our physiology or physical make-up—such as the nervous, hormonal, circulatory, digestive, immune, muscular and skeletal systems—to ensure we received that unconditional love. So the distress we feel when we don’t receive unconditional love and don’t encounter a loving world are those naturally selected instincts expressing themselves. When we cut our finger we feel pain, and that pain response was naturally selected to alert us to the threat that cutting ourself poses to our wellbeing, to make us avoid cutting ourself. If you felt good when you cut yourself then everyone would cut themselves, which would not be beneficial for our lives. In a similar way, instincts were selected to make us feel distress, hurt and pain if we don’t encounter an unconditionally loving world.

CAVE  By the way, chapter 4:2 of FREEDOM and F. Essay 23 explain that the actual meaning of the word ‘love’ is the unconditional selfless consideration of the larger whole above the individual, which is what is required to bind wholes of matter together in the Negative Entropy-driven process of integrating matter. It is also explained there that while we couldn’t explain our divisive competitive, selfish and aggressive human condition, the truth of the integrative meaning of existence, and therefore the truth of what ‘love’ actually is, was denied. The linguist Robin Allott summed up human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic science’s attitude to love succinctly when he wrote that ‘Love has been described as a taboo subject, not serious, not appropriate for scientific study’ (‘Evolutionary Aspects of Love and Empathy’, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 1992, Vol.15, No.4). The amount of lying that has been going on in Plato’s cave has been incredible!

This extract from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s extraordinarily honest 1970 paper, ‘A Scientist Looks at Love’ acknowledges the depth of the pain we feel when we don’t receive love: ‘love is, without question, the most important experience in the life of a human being…​One of the most frequently used words in our vocabulary…​[yet] love is something about which most of us are still extremely vague…There is a widespread belief that a newborn baby is a selfish, disorganized wild creature who would grow into a violently intractable savage if it were not properly disciplined. [However,] The newborn baby is organized in an extraordinarily sensitive manner…​He does not want discipline…​he wants love. He behaves as if he expected to be loved, and when his expectation is thwarted, he reacts in a grievously disappointed manner…the mother-infant relationship perhaps more than any other defines the very essence of love…​survival alone is not enough—human beings need and should receive much more…​We now know that babies which are physically well nurtured may nevertheless waste away and die unless they are also loved’ (The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol.51, No.9). And, as mentioned earlier, Olive Schreiner summarised how children are so vulnerable to being hurt by our loveless world that our personalities are basically formed by that soul-destroying experience in childhood when she wrote: ‘The souls of little children are marvellously delicate and tender things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on them…​The first six years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer.’

With regard to ‘the mother-infant relationship’ being ‘the very essence of love’, for the nurturing love-indoctrination process to have been so successful in creating our loving instincts, there has obviously been selection for very strong instincts for parents, especially mothers, to nurture their offspring with unconditional love. As the author Jean Liedloff wrote, ‘We have had exquisitely precise instincts, expert in every detail of child care, since long before we became anything resembling Homo sapiens’ (The Continuum Concept, 1975, p.34 of 168). As I’ll talk more about shortly, with these nurturing instincts being so strong, parents have felt immense distress and guilt when, because of the imposition of the corrupting battle of the human condition, it has been impossible to comply with their ‘precise instincts’ for ‘child care’.

So all aspects of our physical make-up have been acted on by natural selection to make us feel distress, hurt and pain when we don’t encounter the unconditional love our instincts expect during the early stages of our life. These hurtful feelings from not receiving or encountering love when we are young can be described as our ‘PRIMARY HURT’.

To make matters worse, as a result of being a fully conscious thinking species we humans also suffer from ‘SECONDARY HURT’. These secondary hurts are those that we experience from our conscious mind dwelling on, trying to understand and make sense of, primary hurts. Animals who are not fully conscious, like dogs, don’t dwell on traumatic events in their lives, they don’t wonder or worry or try to understand hurtful events; their orientation is to just move on from past experiences to dealing with their present situation. As the ‘dog whisperer’ Cesar Millan says, ‘Dogs do not worry about the future or dwell on the past. They exist in the moment’ (Cesar Millan’s Short Guide to a Happy Dog, 2013, p.60 of 208).

So, being born with instinctive expectations of encountering an unconditionally loving world, it is obviously a very great shock to find ourselves in an almost completely, soul-destroyed, unloving world. Our sensitive instinctive self or soul has to feel like it’s been thrown into a brutal, toxic cesspit, with the hurt and pain from that traumatic experience being our primary hurt. And when our conscious thinking mind becomes sufficiently developed in understanding the relationship between events that occur through time and able to make sense of experience enough to try to understand that primary hurt, in particular try to understand why we are not encountering a loving world, it has been left completely bewildered. It is only now that we can explain the human condition that we are in a position to admit and talk openly about the corrupted state of the world to anybody, including children.

In fact, as was mentioned in chapter 1.5 and will be emphasised when this is all explained more fully later, in the absence of understanding children have been so prone to misunderstand the loveless situation they find themselves in that they almost always blame themselves for the shortfall in love. As the earlier mentioned psychotherapist Arthur Janov wrote, ‘I must emphasize that whatever goes wrong, the child, with no other frame of reference, whose parents are the world to him, thinks it is his fault’ (The New Primal Scream, 1990, p.8 of 396). In fact, children have more often than not concluded that the reason they are not encountering a loving world is because they are an unlovable, bad person! Their souls are so trusting that they are in a world where everyone is loving that they find themselves unable to avoid the conclusion that for some reason they must be the aberration; they must be the ones causing the world to not love them!

 

 

Thankfully, as I said, with the redeeming explanation of our species’ corrupted condition now available, children can have our corrupted world admitted and explained to them, and so will not have to suffer from such horrific misreadings as blaming themselves for our ‘horrendous’ loveless world.

In fact, as will also be explained much more fully later, the ‘codependency’ of children to our soul-corrupted adult world has been made so much worse by adults being ‘resigned’ to living in total denial of their and the world’s corrupted condition and, as a result, pretending there is nothing wrong with them or the world. They have maintained what is in effect a deafening silence about all the soul-corruption that surrounds new arrivals to our world. (As I mentioned earlier, the process where young adolescents have had to resign to living in denial of the, until now, unexplained and thus unbearably depressing issue of their and the world’s corrupted condition that has produced this situation where almost all adults have been living in complete denial of our corrupted human condition, is briefly explained later in XX, and more fully explained in chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM and in F. Essay 30.)

The effects on the minds of vulnerable, impressionable, formative young humans from resigned adults’ total lack of any real honesty—their deadly silence about the real darkness and horror of the world we are living in, and their outrageously dishonest pretence that everything is fine and wonderful—has been to greatly compound the young’s already trusting tendency to decide they must be at fault for not being loved. It is a further reason why the young have often so misread their situation that they have concluded that it can’t be the fault of the adult, especially their ‘font of all goodness and warmth’, ‘above reproach’, ‘wonderful mother’ who they ‘think the world of’, but rather it is ‘all my fault’, ‘it’s my problem’, because ‘I’m so stupid’, ‘a fool’ and ‘such a bore’, in fact a ‘I must be…​repulsive’, an evil monster, such that ‘I hate myself for this. I’m angry at myself’, and will ‘get myself back for this’, ‘I’ll punish myself’ and ‘serves me right too’!

What immediately needs emphasising, and this is stressed later in chapter XX, is that while these are some of the devastating effects on infants and children of parents’ inability to provide the unconditional love their child expects, it is not something parents are fundamentally at fault for, or should feel guilt-stricken about—because after 2 million years of humanity’s heroic but immensely upsetting battle to solve the human condition, all humans are variously immensely soul-destroyed. Parents have felt excruciating guilt from not being able to nurture their offspring as much as both their instinctive self and conscious thinking self would like to—as the bestselling children’s author John Marsden said, ‘The biggest crime you can commit in our society is to be a failure as a parent and people would rather admit to being an axe murderer than being a bad father or mother’ (‘A Single Mum’s Guide to Raising Boys’, Sunday Life, The Sun-Herald, 7 Jul. 2002)—but we have the greater understanding now that brings compassion and love to every aspect of human dysfunction.

So, in summary, when we are young, our all-loving and all-sensitive instinctive self or soul has inevitably suffered primary hurts from not receiving love or encountering a loving world, and secondary hurts from our conscious mind worrying about and trying to understand why primary hurts are happening, with one of the most damaging of all secondary hurts being self-blame, the erroneous conclusion a child’s mind so readily comes to that they are an unworthy, bad person.

 

The question to look at now is how does an infant or child try to cope with these primary and secondary hurts?

Basically the only means available has been repression or block-out of these overwhelming hurts. As Arthur Janov wrote, ‘Without those gates [blocks] there would be no way to get through life. One would be in excruciating pain all the time’ (The New Primal Scream, p.37).

So as we have grown up we have had to try to repress any awareness of pain coming from the primary hurt to our soul of not encountering love, and we have also had to try to block out any excruciating secondary hurt, especially maintain block-out of unbearable misreadings by our mind that we must be unlovable, evil monsters. So devastating have these pains been that almost without exception children have been left with no choice but to split themselves off from the terrible thoughts and feelings and create an entirely false place to live in their minds!

The consequence of all this repression of primary and secondary hurts that occurred in our early formative years when we were so sensitive to hurt, and so prone to misunderstanding hurt, is that a whole world of pain has been pushed down into our subconscious mind and body, cut off from our everyday conscious mind’s awareness.

Janov gave these descriptions of a person’s coping mechanism of repression of painful experiences: ‘He puts away the pain, or rather it is automatically put away from him by our miraculous system of repression. This repression effectively produces two selves at war with each other: the real self, loaded with needs and pain, and the unreal self, the self out of touch with the other self that was still able to deal with the outside world. The function of the unreal self is to keep the real self from showing its face. Its role is to make the body perform despite the turmoil going on below’ (The New Primal Scream, p.xix). And, ‘The gating system [repression] allows us to feel one way and act another. It allows us to be in contradiction with ourselves. It allows us to remember the times tables we learned at the age six in school, while having no memory of the emotions we had at the time’ (ibid. p.36).

As to how ‘our miraculous system of repression’ works, basically the whole organism, both our body and mind, goes into defence mode to cope with the extremely hurtful assault on, or offence to, our instincts; we use all the mechanisms of repression at our disposal to try to contain and limit the overwhelming effects of the hurt. When we experience overwhelming physical or psychological pain, our whole organism blocks the perception of that pain. As Janov wrote, ‘Any pain which threatens the threshold of tolerance sets in motion a built-in anti-suffering mechanism which ensures that we do not suffer inordinately’ (ibid. p.32). And he gave an extreme example from hypnosis to demonstrate how strong our powers of repression are, writing that ‘Blocked communication, or repression, is well demonstrated in hypnosis, where psychological techniques can shut off the experience of pain and its memory. It is possible in hypnosis to achieve gating [repression] so profound that a person becomes rigid, can be stretched between two chairs (with the head on one chair and the ankles on another) and not feel a two hundred pound weight on his stomach’ (ibid. p.34).

So our body automatically responds in ways that contain and limit the effects of the hurts on its ability to function, which our bodies are highly trained to be able to do in response to any threat to its integrity. For example, if it can’t heal an injury fully, it will departmentalise it off in our body and focus on maintaining the body’s essential functions. In the case of extreme psychological hurts, our body can hold the effects of them in various parts of our body throughout our life. For example, it is recognised that the fascia, which is the connective tissue around our organs, muscles, joints, bones, and nerve fibres (it’s a bit like a second skin), is where we store a lot of our trauma. As this helpful summary from a health professional explains, ‘Our bodies are able to “remember” or “store” emotions. Because our fascia makes up such a large part of our physical being, it is also the primary source for storing our emotions. Our bodies hold this information below the conscious level as a protective mechanism and become state or position-dependent. Although the information is stored in our fascia, we are not consciously aware of it. However, the body’s own protective mechanism steers us away from the position that our mind/body awareness considers painful or traumatic. The images of trauma and injuries held by our fascia battle the forces of our body’s every day movement, creating holding or bracing patterns to avoid the original pain; e.g. a stiff neck, tight upper back and constricted shoulders’ (Dr Amy M. O’Donnell, ‘How stress influences fascia’, 12 May 2021).

Yes, ‘we are not consciously aware of’ the protective repressions that our body has adopted, but nevertheless, once someone has experienced early hurts, their body is in full-time repression mode, and these repressions can manifest themselves in such ways as increased bodily tension, elevated blood pressure, increased body heat, and a flurry of hormonal activity. Thus, as Janov wrote, ‘A person is certain he is relaxed, while repressed rage elevates his blood pressure. He sees no connection between his blood pressure and feelings. If someone were to ask, “What’s making you tense?” he wouldn’t know what the person was talking about. “I’m not at all tense,” he would reply. Gating [repression] has sealed off awareness’ (The New Primal Scream, p.36).

In the case of our conscious mind, it uses its tremendous ability to block painful feelings and avoid confrontation with any painful thoughts; as Janov has written, we use our ‘cerebral’ mind ‘to use ideas to block feelings, to rationalize to keep from hurting, to deny a reality that is right in front of him or her’ (ibid. p.37).

CAVE  Of course, not only have we had ‘to deny a reality that is right in front of’ us of our own pain and misreadings from encountering a loveless world, we’ve also, and much more importantly, had to deny the real issue before us of why the human race isn’t cooperative, sensitive and loving, which is the issue of the human condition. Janov does acknowledge that there is the evasive view that all the pain and suffering in human life ‘is everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault. It seems to be [just] part of the human condition’ (ibid. p.5), and adds that he doesn’t agree, saying ‘I think we need to understand more about…​[our] pervasive need to be loved…​and the pain it leads to when it is not fulfilled’ (ibid). So he was exceptionally honest about the need for a deeper analysis, but he still didn’t actually try to confront the underlying issue of the human condition. Janov was certainly remarkably honest about the devastating effects of lack of love during our formative years, and he also pioneered his brilliant PRIMAL THERAPY techniques that help ‘patients go back and relive the original overwhelming scene, feeling or need [such as being rejected by their mother, or ignored by their father], bit by bit over time until it is finally resolved and out of the system’ (ibid. p.xix)—which is an excruciating connection that can cause a ‘primal scream’ in the patient, as he titled his first book. But, again, as helpful as his therapeutic insights are, Janov didn’t confront and explain our corrupted human condition, and thus he wasn’t able to provide the all-important, redeeming, therapising explanation of our psychologically distressed human condition that allows us to understand the origin and good reason for all the pain he was witnessing every day in his therapy rooms—nor did he know why we are born with ‘a pervasive need to be loved’; he didn’t know how nurturing created our species’ loving instinctive soul. He even had a totally false theory for how we became a conscious species, writing that ‘Pain may be one of the prime reasons for the development of the thinking brain. Adversity “demanded” a higher brain to handle overwhelming input. In the same way that we flee to our cortex and its thoughts to handle upcoming pain, the lower brain cells seemed to have migrated upwards in evolution to form a cortex in the face of adversity’ (ibid. p.40). (The fully accountable, truthful biological explanation for how we humans actually became fully conscious when other species’ haven’t is described later in paragraphs XX–XX.) So for all of Janov’s honesty and helpful therapy, he was still not looking into the real issue of the human condition.

CAVE  Later, in chapter XX, I summarise other even more human-condition-avoiding, superficial therapies that health practitioners have been teaching, and describe how some of their techniques fit into the new human-condition-explained, real therapy. These will include the ‘just think positive and you’ll be well’ practitioners like Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza, the ‘just focus on the present’ teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, and mindfulness meditation practices.

An important aspect of having been a conscious human living in a human condition-stricken world, and this will be explained more fully later in chapter XX when the ‘stages with ages’ are presented, is that through a person’s own experiences they gain some appreciation and defeated acceptance that the world of humans isn’t ideal. As a child they gradually become less naive, and more deeply thoughtful, until eventually at about the age of 12 they became sufficiently able to think constructively about the deeper issue of the imperfections of human life, which is the issue of the human condition. And since there hasn’t been, until now, truthful explanation of the human condition they eventually, at around the age of 14 or 15, had no choice but to resign themselves to never trying to wrestle with the unbearably depressing issue of the human condition again. This ‘Resignation’ during early adolescence is actually only the ‘main’ resignation or reluctant acceptance of the imperfection of the world, because there are many ‘mini’ resignations that occur from infancy onwards—many mini defeated acceptances that the world isn’t an ideal place and that you just have to cope with it as best you can, mostly by denying or blocking out the issue of the hurtful imperfections of life. For example, the so-called ‘terrible twos’ is actually a stage of feeling distressed by, and being forced to accept, the imperfect world at large. The ‘naughty nines’ is a similar stage of distressed protesting against the world, which also ends in a mini defeated acceptance.

In the following descriptions from Janov of the progressions in the way we respond to hurts as we grow up, you can see how the conscious mind becomes more involved and more capable of thinking effectively, albeit futilely. He describes how we have a mainly ‘visceral’ response to and ‘imprint’ of hurt during our womb life, birth and early infancy; to a more ‘feeling’, ‘emotional’ response to and ‘memory’ of hurt during our later infancy and childhood; to a more ‘logic’-preoccupied, ‘cortical, thinking’ response from ‘around the age of twelve’, where we ‘attempt to make sense out of the hurt’, become concerned about ‘trying to explain the inexplicable [of why we weren’t loved]’ (The New Primal Scream, pp.58-59 & 55).

So it can be seen from the summary that has been given so far in this chapter 2 that while we humans have been living under the threat of unbearable depression if we tried to confront the issue of our corrupted human condition, block-out or denial has been a life-saver. While Janov didn’t recognise the source reason for our soul-repression or psychosis and our mind-distress or neurosis, he witnessed how important repression has been, saying it has had ‘an important reason for its existence: nothing less than survival’ (ibid. p.36).

 

What now needs to be explained about our repression, and this will be described much more fully in chapter XX, is that while we have used all manner of repression to try to block out both the pain we feel from our primary hurt and our exacerbating secondary hurt of worrying about and misinterpreting our primary hurt, this blocking out or repressing or burying is never completely successful, which means the distressed, negative feelings and thoughts keep bubbling up from our subconscious and expressing themselves throughout our lives.

As Janov wrote, ‘When pains are massive and continuous, and repression is equal to the task, there is global repression with little chances for major act-outs. But more often there is some repression with leakages of the feeling upwards towards conscious-awareness. What the person does with that leakage is employ secondary defences…​But the modes of defence are as diverse as there are people. Some defend by fleeing to their head, with ideas, philosophies and belief systems. Others defend by a flurry of activity which keeps the feeling away. Still others talk incessantly…​The function of the secondary defences is to take up the slack where repression leaves off…​So we have one defence, repression, and then secondary defences which are the idiosyncratic ways each of us find to avoid pain and fulfil our unmet needs, while binding or releasing the energy of the [painful] feeling’ (The New Primal Scream, p.41).

Thus, while everyone tries valiantly throughout their life to block out and repress the often extreme primary and secondary hurts they experienced in their formative years when they were so innocent in soul and so naive in their ability to understand all the upset in the world, how successful they are at doing this varies. Some people are so successful at repressing primary and secondary hurts that they aren’t consciously aware that they suffer from them—in fact, Janov even makes the point that ‘the strong, well-encased neurotic is often highly functional in this society’ (ibid. p.xxiv). Others struggle to keep their hurts down and as a result suffer immeasurably. With the levels of upset in the world now so great, a rapidly increasing proportion of the population fall into this second category of finding it near impossible keeping hurts repressed. For many people now these early hurts are being so easily triggered by life’s stresses back into their everyday conscious mind’s awareness that they suffer from incapacitating symptoms like anxiety, depression, incessant negative thinking and extreme feelings of worthlessness. To use evasive, human-condition-avoiding CAVE language, they suffer from debilitating ‘mental health issues’. In truth, the whole human race suffers from one big mental health issue, which is our species’ immensely psychologically upset human condition—which has become so extreme in younger generations now that the human race is rapidly heading to extinction from unbearable levels of soul-numb psychosis and mind-disconnected neurosis. Hopefully the rehabilitating understanding of the human condition has arrived in time to save our species from this end game nightmare—which means all these understandings of the human condition in my books and essays and on the WTM’s www.HumanConditon.com website need to receive wide recognition and support soon!

A very important summary of how to manage the anxiety, unremitting negative thoughts and general overwhelm that these bubblings up from our subconscious childhood terrors can cause us will be described next in chapter XX.

But before doing that, the following is a collection of clearly unresigned, denial-free, honest lyrics from the young American heavy metal band With Life In Mind’s 2010 album Grievances. These lyrics make very clear the end game situation of the just mentioned threat of terminal psychosis facing the human race; they also reveal how traumatising our world is for young minds that haven’t yet resigned to blocking out the issue of our corrupted human condition; and they also make very clear how desperate the human race has been for the answers we now have of why our corrupted condition occurred and how that redeeming understanding allows us to heal that tortured condition: ‘It scares me to death to think of what I have become…​I feel so lost in this world’, ‘Our innocence is lost’, ‘I scream to the sky but my words get lost along the way. I can’t express all the hate that’s led me here and all the filth that swallows us whole. I don’t want to be part of all this insanity. Famine and death. Pestilence and war. A world shrouded in darkness…​Fear is driven into our minds everywhere we look’, ‘Trying so hard for a life with such little purpose…​Lost in oblivion’, ‘Everything you’ve been told has been a lie…​We’ve all been asleep since the beginning of time. Why are we so scared to use our minds?’, ‘Keep pretending; soon enough things will crumble to the ground…​If they could only see the truth they would coil in disgust’, ‘How do we save ourselves from this misery…​So desperate for the answers…​We’re straining on the last bit of hope we have left. No one hears our cries. And no one sees us screaming’, ‘This is the end.’

And these extracts from the writings of the fearlessly honest, great Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing make it clear how extremely alienated, separated from our true self, we humans have become; and how determinedly we have been practising denial of this corrupted condition; and also how it was only by confronting and solving the human condition that we could end our species’ extreme madness and sickness: ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life…​We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [p.12 of 156] …​the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …​The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] …​between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded [p.118] …​The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [p.116] …We are all murderers and prostitutes…​We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another’ [pp.11–12] (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). ‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness]’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192). ‘We are so out of touch with this realm [where the issue of our corrupted human condition lies] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist [that we are not corrupted, that everything is fine!]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, p.105).

 

So a summary will now be given of the real therapy that is at last possible now that we have the redeeming understanding of our ‘alienated’, ‘shrivelled’, ‘bemused’, ‘crazed’, ‘dark’, ‘dead’, ‘sick’, ‘unconscious’, ‘ill’, ‘mad’ state or condition—especially the therapy techniques to manage early childhood hurts and misreadings that can cause so much anxiety and suffering throughout our lives.

Following that will be chapter XX which summarises the dishonest, ‘refuse to look under the bonnet’, hide-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, ‘argue seriously that it [the human condition] does not exist’, ineffective therapy path that virtually all therapists have been practising.

 

Note: This is merely the beginning of this book. As more of the book is
finished, more is being added here……so this is to be continued.